How Tony Blair Killed Britain’s Birth Rate

With Britain’s cratering birth rate threatening a demographic crisis as more pensioners rely on fewer workers, it turns out Tony Blair and his push to get everyone going to university may be largely to blame. The Telegraph has more.

In 1999, Sir Tony Blair, the former Labour Prime Minister, stood up and declared that 50% of young people should go into higher education. Less than two decades later, he got his wish.

The policy sparked a seismic demographic shift, with more graduates from a variety of backgrounds, and transferred university funding from state to student, with huge financial ramifications. But one area less talked about is its impact on the country’s the fertility rate.

The maternity wards of England and Wales are quieter than they have ever been.

In 2024, the fertility rate fell to just 1.41 children per woman – the lowest figure since records began in 1938, and the third consecutive year of new lows, according to the Office for National Statistics.

It’s a line of usual suspects that are pointed to as key drivers of the trend: changing attitudes, soaring house prices, costly childcare and general economic insecurity. These are real pressures that make it more difficult for young people to start families.

But some experts suggest that more young people choosing to go into higher education is also a key factor.

Paul Morland, a demographer and author, says: “If we fixed housing tomorrow – if we went back to the affordable three-bedroom semi – I think the fertility rate wouldn’t budge much.

“The deeper driver is education.”

Now, almost three decades since Blair’s speech, the economic consequences of a sustained baby bust and ageing population are raising concerns.

Experts warn fewer workers will be supporting more pensioners, with more NHS demand and greater social care needs all funded from a shrinking tax base.

The Lords’ Economic Affairs Committee said last year that Britain is “strikingly unprepared” for what is coming.

In 1980, only one in eight school leavers went into higher education of any kind, and just 7.5% of 18 year-olds went to university, according to figures cited in Parliament at the time. The average mother had her first child in her mid-20s.

Today, more than half of young people spend three or more years in higher education before entering the workforce at 21 or 22, often carrying tens of thousands of pounds of debt and no tangible work experience.

The pipeline that should be giving young people an alternative to university is also shrinking.

Apprenticeship starts have fallen by a third since their peak in 2011, according to Government figures, and every month of the current academic year has so far seen the lowest number of apprenticeship vacancies posted for that month since records began in 2018.

What often follows university is a decade of career-building, saving for a house deposit and trying to work out whether life has stabilised enough to accommodate a child into the picture.

Morland argues that education should be rethought as something that happens throughout an entire lifetime, rather than in a condensed period of time at a crucial stage of life.

“The order in which we do things is definitely an issue,” he says. “We have this very old-fashioned idea that you do your education upfront – finish your degree, maybe travel, maybe do a master’s degree, then start a job.

“That pipeline effectively removes [people] from the fertility pool for most of their 20s. By the time they think seriously about a partner, a career and a house, [many of them] are in their early 30s. Maybe they will have one child.”

Professor Alison Wolf, an economist at King’s College London specialising in the relationship between education and the economy, says there has always been a gap between the ages at which graduates and non-graduates have children.

“Graduates have fewer children. That was almost bound to be the case anyway, because they have been delayed until the end of their education,” she says.

But nuances within the established trend also paint an interesting picture about the possible impact of widening access to university.

A University College London (UCL) study published last September tracked 8,000 women born in 1970 to the age of 46.

It found that female graduates who were the first in their family to attend university – exactly the social group Blair’s policy was designed to help – were 40% more likely to be childless at 46 than non-graduates or graduates with at least one university-educated parent.

The study also found that first-in-family graduates were less likely to report wanting to have more children at the age of 30.

Worth reading in full.

Of course, the record low birth rates in the last three years in particular may be connected to the pills-by-post abortion regime introduced during Covid. Abortions have spiked since the lockdowns, now hitting one in three pregnancies (up from one in four before Covid), with almost all of them medically induced, i.e., using pills, which since Covid have been permitted to be taken at home and without seeing a doctor face-to-face. It’s not the main driver of the low birth rate – that’s related to why and when women choose to have children or not – but making it ever easier to terminate unplanned pregnancies appears to be part of the picture.