‘I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin’ to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.’
Cormac McCarthy, ‘No Country for Old Men’
An article on the BBC website reporting the disappearance of young people from an Italian village called Fregona focused attention on Italy’s falling birth rate: it's particularly acute there — on average, Italian women are now having just 1.18 babies, the lowest level ever recorded. That's under the EU average fertility rate of 1.38 and far below the 2.1 needed to sustain populations. However, falling birth rates are also evident in the United Kingdom: the equivalent figure for England and Wales is 1.44, albeit counterbalanced to a degree by the scale of immigration.
The Labour Government's intention to reduce the voting age to 16 caught the attention of the media last week, but they haven't done much yet to improve prospects for young people. Rachel Reeves’ plans to allow larger mortgages are reviewed in this week’s ‘This is Money’, but this will only push up house prices still further, doing nothing to reduce the age at which young people can set up a home of their own.
This is particularly the case for country villages, which should be offering one of the best environments for young families. As the youthful vitality of villages has been eroded, they have lost so much: first shops, then post offices, then those pubs which have found it difficult to move upmarket. In so many rural settings, it's only parish churches that still provides a community gathering point, and these are mainly populated by a falling number of old people alongside their host of memorials to the past.
Meanwhile the IHT challenge to family farms will increasingly play its part as well in denuding the countryside of its livelihoods. Who will speak up for the countryside when everyone has gone?
There are, of course, quite a few constituent factors behind plunging birth rates. The general availability of contraception has allowed much more choice on whether or not to have children, and that's to be welcomed. But the breakdown in family formation, which has resulted in more than half of children being born out of wedlock and the economic necessity for both parents to work have also been major factors.
It seems bizarre that, at a time when work opportunities are being significantly eroded by automation and artificial intelligence, we cannot structure society so that parents can afford to share the opportunity for just one of them to be at a workplace — and that's no reflection of which gender should take that role. But the current approach to welfare has the objective of driving everyone into employment, and it acts directly against enabling parental childcare. Meanwhile, the messaging which accompanies the ‘two-child welfare cap’ issue further discourages recovery in the birth rate.
There's a real challenge to see the big picture here: we need much more focus on young adults from the economic and fiscal perspectives. The only politician who has really tackled this issue is David Willetts in his book, ‘The Pinch’ and with his work in The Resolution Foundation, but no action was taken by his Conservative colleagues to enable a generational shift in tax treatment. Fifty years ago, young adults could take advantage from mortgage interest tax relief when buying their first home: now they not only receive no such encouragement towards independent living but are also saddled with student loan debt averaging c. £50,000.
Meanwhile, for older generations we have all sorts of benefits: the triple lock system on pensions, free bus passes and free NHS health care for wealthy old folk, while all the time these costs are mounting up for future generations to repay.
Even with initiatives such as the objective for net zero, older, wealthier people who can afford countryside living are able to charge their electric vehicles at one tenth of the cost of the 35% of people who cannot afford off-road access and who have to use commercial charging points, at which the VAT rate is set at four times the level of domestic energy supply.
There is a major review ongoing of the measures needed to tackle child poverty at present — but perhaps this should be extended to cover young families as well, in order to make sure that all Government departments are encouraged not to place handicaps on family formation for young adults.
This is all part of inter-generational rebalancing. At The Share Foundation, we put a lot of focus on empowering young people from disadvantaged backgrounds with the resources and life skills needed to achieve their potential. In our work, we see the consequences of a broken society — the insecurity and isolation that result from childhood and adolescence in care.
But we also know that all young people are born with the same mix of potential; they just need the encouragement to get started, together with the sense of being treated fairly as they begin adult life.
Will lowering the voting age to 16 help to tackle these problems? It might, in some respects. But it will only really have an effect if politicians of all parties concentrate harder on these younger generations. In other words, not just treating them as fodder for the workplace, but as the foundations for the future generations which will follow them.
We’ll know if it's working if the countryside starts to welcome young families again, and when people feel able to start family formation in their twenties; plus, when young people can afford to live independently without being saddled with the current raft of economic challenges.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio