Don't be fooled by Nigel Farage's promise to help families have more children
Unlike many of the Reform leader's obsessions – falling birth rates are real. But his solutions fail to engage with complexity of the issue.
Nigel Farage has a habit of telling his growing audience of prospective Reform voters that he, and he alone, has found a simple answer to a very complicated problem. Last week, he was at it again: the UK’s plummeting birth rate can be solved, he suggests, with a few tweaks to taxes and benefit payments.
Farage is right to name and confront this problem because, unlike many of his obsessions, it is real: women today are having fewer babies in their lifetimes than at any time since records began in the 1930s. This poses an inevitable future economic problem, when (without a massive increase in immigration) we will not have a sufficient younger workforce to support retiring Millennials. This particular demographic will need careful support in retirement, too; on current trajectories they are far more likely to be living in a private rented home in their last chapter than today’s Baby Boomer pensioners, and likely claiming housing benefit as well as a state pension.
But Farage has tapped into something else here, this issue represents the politics of hope.
Women are not just having fewer children, they are having fewer children than they want to have. When asked how many children women would like to have once barriers are removed, only one in 10 women (13 per cent of 18-24 and 12 per cent of 25-35) said that they would ideally have no children, yet 88 per cent and 49 per cent respectively in each age group still do not have any children - a huge aspiration gap. In fact, the desire for large families is just as common as the desire to stay child free: 11 per cent of 18-24 year olds and 12 per cent of 23-25 year olds would like four children.
This is an economic and a social conundrum, and an issue that is affecting our national wellbeing. Stability and growth are not built on a population of miserable people.
Farage has suggested two policies that could encourage procreation: removing the two-child benefit cap, and tax breaks for married couples.
“These proposals are expensive but we believe we can pay for it,” he said, adding that his party wanted to go “much further to encourage people to have children, to make it easier for them to have children.”
He’s quite right that it would be possible to pay for the removal of the two-child benefit limit through higher taxation, and it would also be morally right to do that; the cap currently traps one in 10 children in poverty. But although the cost of raising children is one of the barriers cited by Gen Z to starting a family, Reform’s solutions fail to engage with the complexity of the issue.
First, let’s look at why people aren’t having children. A large reason for the drop in live births is because the UK now has historically low rates of teenage pregnancy. According to the Office for National Statistics [ONS], the conception rate for women aged under 18 was just 13 per 1,000 women in 2021, down from 30 per 1,000 women in 2011 – a fantastic achievement in public policy. There is endless evidence to demonstrate that teen motherhood is bad for both mother and child, from infant mortality rates being 60 per cent higher than the average, to a higher risk of the child growing up in poverty and underperforming compared to their peers in school. Higher aspirations around both young womanhood and successful motherhood is patently a good thing. We can’t – and shouldn’t wish to – turn the clock back on that.
Farage admits that the cost of living is putting young people off starting a family but then fails to provide any policy to address the shortage of affordable and social housing, and the high cost and instability of private renting, which together create the primary hurdle for most lower income families. Having children is expensive, but it is the cost of finding somewhere suitable for them to grow and flourish that costs parents the most, not the expense of nappies and outgrown shoes that child benefit is designed to support.
Most young people now live either with their own parents, where there is no room for additional family members, or in the private rented sector. The leading reason for a family to become homeless in England today is because a private sector tenancy has to come to an end.
When children are in school, the constant moves and desperate hustle to find a new property that characterises private renting does not provide the stable home in which children can thrive, focus on education and build their own friendships. It makes sense not to have children in this environment – yet Farage provides no answer to the housing crisis.
As a result of the crisis, the cost of private renting is astronomical and constantly rising, up again by almost 9 per cent in just the last year. Most couples require two incomes to sustain a tenancy, but for low-income families the cost of childcare, even with the 30 free term-time hours pledge being delivered by the current government, wipes out the majority of one person’s take-home pay. Child benefit isn’t going to replace that wage.
Child benefit for each additional child is £17.25 a week. In the most expensive parts of the country, including London and the south-east, a full-time nursery place can still cost more than £1,000 a month after the 30 free term time hours are discounted.
Farage makes no mention of the universal free childcare that would not only level up life and family chances for low income families but benefit the whole economy. I won’t hold my breath for Reform to understand that childcare is a form of infrastructure as essential to UK growth as road and rail networks.
There are deeper reasons to be concerned about Farage’s surface-level engagement with this issue. A week ago, as a shadow to his encouragement to hopeful young parents, he made a chilling statement about abortion, claiming that it was “utterly ludicrous”, “irrational” and “out of date” that the law allows termination of a pregnancy up to 24 weeks of gestation. Farage, despite having four children of his own, seems remarkably unaware that the majority of terminations that take place after 20 weeks are on the recommendation of a doctor following the 20-week anomaly scan, most often because the fetus would be incompatible with life.
When a far-right politician starts talking about family life, the spectres of pro-natalism and paternalism hover close behind. Don’t be fooled by Farage’s upbeat promises to young people. He wants control of women’s lives. ■
About the author: Hannah Fearn is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs. She was comment editor of The Independent for seven years, and has previously worked for The Guardian, Times Higher Education and Inside Housing. She has a special interest in inequality, poverty, housing, education and life chances.
The Lead Says brings you insightful writing on people, place and policy. Last week, our senior editor Natalie Morris railed against the slow implementation of a supposedly urgent law designed to protect social housing tenants after another defenceless baby died in a damp, mould-ridden home. Ella Glover criticised the PM for giving Farage too much credit and not paying enough attention to his own policies. In features, sticking with the housing crisis, we brought you an in-depth view of the out-of-area placements for London’s homeless families that are tearing communities apart. Oh, and don’t forget our ReformWatch every Saturday keeping an eye on all things Reform are up to (and regularly debunking their ‘promises’).
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