The New Statesman.

What is the UK doing about falling birth rates?

And is Labour targeting the wrong voters?

I'm Anusha Kellyan and this is the listener questions edition of the New Statesman podcast.

I'm joined by my colleagues Rachel Cunliff and George Eaton to answer

your questions. Hello, both of you. Hello. Thanks to our audience for some great questions

this week, so let's get into them. This question is from Josh Mellett 8013, who says, due to Britain's

falling birth rates and the government's desire for lower immigration levels, does the government have

any plan to financially encourage

and support couples to have children? This is really interesting and important because the UK's

current birth rate is 1.44 births per woman, which is a record low. Rachel, what, if

anything, is the government doing to address this? So firstly, I say this is like such an

interesting question and it's a question that Western countries around the world are grappling with sort of falling birthright.

One of the really interesting things is that like it's happening in Britain, it's happening in

Japan, in the US, across Europe, it's happening in Scandinavia, like all these countries that have

really quite different political and social trends, are all seeing a decline in the birthright.

And actually, like, it's happening in developing countries as well, just not on the same scale yet.

And all of those countries have, to greater or, lesser extent, used immigration sort of temporarily as a kind of, what we don't have the workers that we need.

It's fine.

We can import them and are in different ways dealing with the challenges of that, whether it's financial

challenges, integration, the fact that those workers are going back.

Like this is not a specifically British issue.

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