Let’s Rethink Population Growth

Quick question.

Did you know that population growth in the UK is basically flat?

You can see the effect in the bluntest possible way:

Births: about 600,000 a year
Deaths: about 600,000 a year

Some years deaths are higher.

Not slowing.
Not tapering.
Pretty much static.

That alone feels like something we don’t talk about enough.

Why does that matter?

Because for most of our history, population growth happened the boring way.

More births than deaths.
Year after year.

If we wind the clock back:

In 1801, the UK had about 16 million people.
By 1901, that was roughly 38 million.
By the early 1960s, we’d passed 50 million.
By 2000, we were close to 60 million.
And by 2024, we’re hovering around 68 million.

For most of that journey, nothing dramatic was going on. People were born. People died. Births stayed comfortably ahead.

In fact, through much of the 19th century Britain was exporting people by the million — to the Americas and the Empire — and the population still surged anyway.

So population growth wasn’t something we argued about. It just… happened.

So when did that change?

Quietly. That’s the odd bit.

In the early 1960s, women in the UK had around 2.5 children on average, and population grew.

Today it’s closer to 1.4, but to maintain the population it needs to be about 2.1 – roughly 50% higher than it is.

Which means that at current rates each generation is roughly 30% smaller than the one before it — while also living about ten years longer than the one before it did.

So natural population growth hasn’t slowed.

It’s basically stopped.

But isn’t migration the problem?

This is usually where the conversation goes next.

And… no. Not really.

Migration didn’t create the gap.
It’s been used to fill the gap.

Once births stopped outpacing deaths, someone had to keep the working-age population up, keep the tax base functioning, and keep services staffed.

We – the UK – did what we do best: we outsourced it, migration stepped into that space after natural growth faded.

Which is why migration becomes loud and controversial precisely when population growth stalls — not before.

OK… so why did natural growth stall?

Right. This is the uncomfortable bit.

Not vibes. Not culture. Not “people just don’t want kids”.

Specific things happened.

And yes — they happened through policy choices, yep they happened because we voted for them.

**So… what actually caused it? I mean specifically.**

Start with this:

People started living longer.

Which is obviously good.

But it has knock-on effects we don’t really talk about.

Living longer means:

people hold onto housing wealth for much longer
inheritance arrives much later in life
and it often arrives after family-formation decisions have already been made

The average age of receiving an inheritance is now late 50s or early 60s.

For people born in or before the 1940’s, it was roughly 10 years earlier -often in their late 40’s to early 50’s – when their children were hitting their late teens and early twenties and starting to think about families. Crucially, they were still working, so could use the money to help their children get established.

Now, when the inheritance arrives, the kids have careers, a partner and have decided they can’t afford children. The money is used to top up pensions and pay for late life social care.

So it’s not that housing “skips” a generation.

It’s that it no longer arrives when it matters.

So inheritance got later.. anything else change?

Yes .. at the same time, housing has quietly been repurposed.

That shift didn’t happen because anyone woke up one morning and decided to break the system. It happened because the old one stopped working.

Final salary pensions made sense when people retired at 65, lived another ten years, and were supported by a large working population. Once people started living into their 80s and 90s, those guarantees became unaffordable — especially in the private sector.

So they were closed,

Replaced by defined contribution schemes, and the risk quietly moved from institutions onto individuals.

In practice, that means retirement is now something you have to self-insure. And for most people, the only asset big enough to do that job is their home – if they own one.

Add in long-term care — which is increasingly needed for longer, and is still largely means-tested — and housing stops being something you pass on when you’re done with it. It becomes something you hold onto, draw down, and sometimes sell, just to stay afloat.

Housing changed from looking like “Bricks and Mortar” and started having large holes taken out of it and became “a safety net.”.

Means-tested social care pulls property wealth into funding:

long retirements
residential and nursing care
end-of-life support

So wealth that might once have underwritten family stability and helped the next generation feel secure is now being used to self-insure against living longer.

It doesn’t vanish — but a lot of it leaves the family balance sheet altogether.

Was that all?.. Err.. no there’s more.

Since the 1970s:

UK house prices rose 8–10× in cash terms, and 3–4× even after inflation
Real wages grew by only 1.5–2×

Which means housing now costs about twice as much relative to wages — bigger deposits, bigger mortgages, higher rents. You know the drill.

Across the UK — and across other rich countries — birth rates are lowest where housing is:

most expensive
most insecure
hardest to plan around

Children need space.
They need stability.
And they need parents who can think in decades, not twelve-month tenancy cycles.

Ok.. anything else?

Alas — yes.

At the same time as all this was happening, governments were trying to balance the books. An ageing population costs more — in pensions, healthcare, and social care — and rather than deal with that openly, a series of quieter decisions were taken that ended up landing hardest on families.

Support was tightened. Eligibility was narrowed. Thresholds were frozen so that costs crept up year by year without ever needing a headline. Childcare became more expensive, more fragmented, and harder to plan around. And policies like the two-child cap quietly turned the marginal cost of an extra child from “challenging” into “unmanageable” for many households.

None of this was presented as anti-family. Most of it was framed as sensible, temporary, or unavoidable. But taken together, it steadily raised the cost and risk of having children — right at the point in life when people are already dealing with insecure housing, later inheritance, and weaker pensions.

So… have I got this right?

Let me check:

People live longer (good)
Housing wealth is held longer
It arrives later, if at all
Pensions were weakened as they have to support longer retirements.
Much of it is used to fund retirement and care
Housing costs pull away from wages
Starting a Family feels riskier
Birth rates fall
Natural population growth stalls
Migration fills the gap

That’s not a mystery.
That’s a system doing exactly, what successive politicians have set it up to do.

OK. OK. So can we turn this around?

In principle? Yes.

But not by shouting about borders.

If we want natural population growth to recover, people who already live here need to feel secure enough to start families. Rather than politicians telling them to blame migrants – we need politicians who will improve the feeling of security in society.

That means:

affordable, stable housing
predictable long-term costs
policies that don’t quietly penalise people for having children

Until that changes, natural growth will stay weak — and migration will keep acting as the pressure valve.

Britain didn’t lose control of population growth.

It priced it out of the next generation.