Edited extract from “A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier”
University students are currently being taken for a ride over the rents they have to pay. When I was a student in the 1980s in Newcastle I paid £9 a week in rent. Inflation does not explain the rise, the rise was because of greed. And it has been the rising greed that began in that decade which has lead to falling welfare spending, greater profit taking and the risk to future generations. Not only that they might spend all their lives in debt, but they will find it harder to have children of their own than many generations before them did.
Britain has one of the lowest levels of welfare spending in the rich world because its taxes are very low. Rather than being unfair to taxpayers, the current situation is unfair to most children, and to the majority of adults. It benefits the richest, who avoid paying the tax they would pay if they lived elsewhere in Europe. For decades people in the UK and in every other country in Europe have been having families that are, on average, so small that our population would quickly decline were it not for immigration. There is no need to curtail the opportunity to become a parent in the UK unless you hold strange eugenic ideas.
It is harder for people to become parents in Britain today than at any time in the country’s history. The cost of housing has accelerated since the economic crash, helped in part by government policies, such as ‘Help to Buy’, that were introduced in the immediate aftermath of the crash. It is not just poorer potential parents who cannot now afford children – it is the vast majority of young adults. Most can no longer countenance becoming parents before their thirties.
Britain does not have a surplus of children. Since 2011 the mean age of first becoming a parent has risen each year, accelerating to the point that by 2014 it had passed thirty for women and was even older for men. The number of babies born each year began to fall more rapidly after 2013 as a result. There is no longer anywhere in Europe where fertility is at ‘replacement level’. Every country in Europe requires immigration to sustain its population level, its economy, its public services and its pension system. Policies to aid parenthood need not be altered that significantly, but we should avoid polices that make it harder for those who want to have children.
Some 54,000 women are forced out of their jobs each year in the UK as a result of becoming a parent. Maternity pay and paternity leave have been improved in recent years, but many people now work on short term or zero-hours contracts and so they do not benefit from these provisions. The greatest rise in employment is in self-employment, and there is no access to security such as parental leave for most people in this rapidly growing group of workers.
To feel able to have children, people need stability. We need to not be forced to work every hour we can just to get by – or, conversely, to feel under pressure to put a career first and earn as much as possible before having a child. We need to be able to imagine cutting down on the amount of paid work we do for a few years when a child is very small, and to have affordable childcare nearby, but most of all we need to know that it is OK to become a parent, and that it is not some selfish act we should engage in only if we can afford it. None of us would be here now if some of our forebears who ‘could not afford it’ had not become parents despite the odds. Every one of us has ancestors who were poor. And when others around us have children, and take parental leave, we need to recognize that they are not disadvantaging us by doing so, just as we are not disadvantaged by having to collectively fund the education of their children. To be able to become parents with less fear, young adults also need to have truly affordable housing available in which they can start families. This is much more important than access to childcare, as are stable jobs; but an extension of affordable childcare is vital too, starting before the age of five, when children begin primary school.
Housing matters in this context; if housing is made cheaper, then having a family, among other things, becomes easier. That rare thing, a secure tenancy, should be obtainable by all, including would-be parents. The government would simply need to change the law on assured short-hold tenancies so that any new ones issued must be for at least three years, or five years if a family has children. As the tenancies are currently renewed each year, such a law change would not need to be retrospective. Throughout the rest of Europe housing is cheaper, the quality of housing is often higher, rooms are larger, landlords make smaller profits, and the highest-income tenth own a smaller proportion of the housing stock.
If employment is more secure and stable too, then parenthood is also easier to countenance earlier. Employment can be made more secure by using legislation to ensure that redundancy payments and out-of-work benefits are on a level similar to those in other countries in Northwest Europe, not lower, as is the case today. That reduces the chances of infertility, as people do not delay pregnancy when they have more secure employment earlier on, or when they fear the consequences of unemployment less. And both the human and financial costs of attempts to overcome infertility, and the heartache it causes, are then reduced.
Just a few decades from now, people without children may well be labelled as burdens on the state. Setting aside the use of such a charged term, taking care of older people who do not have family support costs the state more than supporting young families would now. Having children saves money on mental health costs in the long run. This is because people with kids are less lonely and depressed. Beyond the workplace, a significant part of the social networks of many adults comes through friendships with the parents of other children in nurseries and schools, through shared celebrations and shared caring. Children are among the most effective socializing agents for both younger adults and the elderly.
How many people will there be a few decades from now living in their old age, unhappy? Some will be those who were so busy trying to keep up with the materialist society we live in that they had little time for anything else. How many will have put off, or have been forced to put off, something that was nagging in the back of their mind because most of their friends were also putting it off? And then, one by one, many of their friends and siblings found a way to become a parent while they did not. And how many suffer in silence because ‘austerity’ means that their local NHS literally decides it is too expensive to help them to have a child. Children should not be consumer commodities you cannot have if you cannot afford them. Children are not a cost. They are a benefit. We should appreciate life for the miracle that it is.
This blog is an edited extract from “A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier” which contains all the references to the quotations and statistical claims made above – a free low resolution copy can be found here: http://www.dannydorling.org/books/betterpolitics/
