Bridget Phillipson has come up with a canny idea to get Britain’s “worrying” birth rate back up – have more kids.
As official data showed fertility rates in England and Wales dropped to 1.44 children per woman in 2023, the education secretary warned of the “worrying repercussions” posed by a decline in birth rates, saying she wants “more young people to have children, if they so choose”.
To which we can only say: if only it were that simple, minister.
“Have more children” may have a nice ring to it (though it does smack a little of the weird pro-natalist couple Simone and Malcolm Collins, responsible for telling Donald Trump how to up the birth rate) – but who can afford to start or expand a family, in this economy?
Phillipson did admit that she realises people are having fewer children as a consequence of higher costs of living, but her sentimental platitudes – she told The Telegraph falling birth rates were not only a concerning trend but one which “tells a story, heartbreakingly, about the dashed dreams of many families” – ring hollow to the pragmatists amongst us.
Where Phillipson falls down is in stopping short of providing a real and actionable solution – like slashing the cost of childcare for all children, whenever parents need it.
At the moment, working parents can access 15 hours of free childcare for children aged nine months to two years old (this is increasing to 30 hours from September 2025). Meanwhile, all three and four-year-olds get 15 hours of free childcare per week – with some families eligible for 30 hours if both parents are working.
Single parents, meanwhile, should be able to claim 30 hours – but it can be a nightmare to find a childcare setting that receives enough funding to offer it. Plus, single parents on universal credit using the Tax-Free Childcare scheme run into even greater difficulty, as you cannot claim both at the same time.
Complicated? I’d say – and it’s clear to see how the UK is letting parents down when you compare it to the Swedish model, which is, simply: a universal, publicly funded, municipally run preschool system for children aged one to five. Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce paid parental leave for fathers, and last year it launched a ground-breaking new law that allows grandparents to step in and get paid parental leave.
If only it were the same in Britain. Rather than being simple and clear-cut, Phillipson’s solution of “just have more babies” is achingly idealistic – and naive. And going full The Handmaid’s Tale and putting the burden on women to breed isn’t helpful; it’s actively damaging.
It plays right into the hands of the burgeoning “trad wife” lifestyle that has started to seep over from the US – with worrying backing from the far right, including the anti-abortion lobby who were responsible (along with Trump) for overturning Roe v Wade.
We already know that it is women who are expected to bear the literal and metaphorical weight of having a child, but we also have to take the hit with our careers. Some 74,000 women lose their jobs every year for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, a marked increase from a decade ago; plus, women are two-thirds less likely than men to get promoted at work after having children.
Then there’s the additional domestic and emotional labour associated with motherhood: research from the University of Alberta, investigating the split of duties in the home for heterosexual couples, found that women not only do the lion’s share of the housework at the start of their relationships – but for years onwards. In fact, women's domestic workload “only increased during the child-rearing years”.
Meanwhile, childcare costs in the UK are still “crippling” working parents, with tens of thousands of people in the UK left feeling strapped, trapped and desperate, despite the rollout of free school meals for half a million children, free school breakfast clubs (part of a trial that’s only running until July) and the expansion of government-funded childcare (if your child is aged between nine months and four years old and you live in England).
The cost of having kids has never been more real – over on Mumsnet, one commenter recently revealed her entire £45,000 annual salary was “wiped out” by the soaring sums of childcare for two children. The Family and Childcare Trust found in 2015 that it simply “does not pay to work”. Has anything really changed?
I am out of the immediate disaster years when it comes to paying for all-day childcare, as both of mine are at school – but I do still pay for wraparound care, by way of breakfast clubs and after-school pick-ups, which comes to more than £500 a month.
Before that, my family was just one of those shelling out £8,400 a year for three days per week of childcare at a London nursery. And I was one of the “lucky” ones – I know parents who pay as much as £30,000 a year to a nanny who’s “on call” whenever they need her. Over the summer holidays, some of my peers spend £4,000 on ad-hoc care.
And while it might be inconveniently pricey for some parents, it is devastating for others. Research shows that parents and carers on the lowest incomes – single parents, those on universal credit, those with disabilities or with a Black ethnic background – are most impacted by childcare costs. One in three households with an income of less than £20,000 have to cut back on essential food or housing as a direct result of bills relating to childcare.
“Have more kids” is a lazy solution that can’t work in a broken system. Perhaps Bridget Phillipson should be paying more attention to why more and more people are choosing to be child-free?
