Sometimes, as a wise editor once said to me when I was a newbie journalist, “you just have to state the bleeding obvious”. So, allow me to run with the advice in this column and say: Britain’s housing crisis is the reason that young adults are having fewer children than previous generations.
And that’s not just my opinion.
New research from the independent Westminster-based think-tank the Resolution Foundation has concluded that politicians hoping to persuade young people in Britain to have children should deal with housing affordability, before they utter another word.
That, perhaps, doesn’t make for quite such incendiary headlines as claiming the reason that Britain’s birth rate has fallen to a historic low is because young people are narcissistic, lazy, avocado-guzzling monsters. As some politicians on Britain’s right wing have. But, when you think about it, it’s an obvious case of cause and effect.
In a new report, titled “Bye Bye Baby”, the Resolution Foundation put big red flags in the ground in order to draw attention to how rapidly this change – one of the biggest societal shifts of the last 100 years – has happened.
The proportion of women who are not yet mothers aged 30 has risen from 48 per cent for those born in the late 1980s to 58 per cent for those born in the early 1990s. Today, in 2026, it is more than 50 per cent for all women.
Now, we must acknowledge that there are some very positive reasons for this. Firstly, more women than ever before are going to university and graduating with excellent grades when they do. Young women today have a wider range of career options and are employed in higher numbers than their elders, too. And, of course, they have reproductive autonomy that just simply wasn’t available before the 1960s.
So, it is not surprising or necessarily bad that the Resolution Foundation’s analysis finds that the shift away from early motherhood has been most pronounced among women with degrees for many decades. However, the think-tank warns that non-graduate women, aged 25-29 are catching up – which suggests this is not just about lifestyle choices, education or work. One in three 30-year-old women who did not go to university had no children in 2011, this number had risen to more than half (54 per cent) by 2023.
Choice is a right which women fought hard for. And yet, there is clearly a problem.
I have recently interviewed dozens of young women in their twenties and thirties who live in locations across the UK and do a wide variety of jobs. One common theme emerged in our conversations: almost every single one of them would like to be a mother but either has not met a suitable partner or is in a relationship but is worried about money.
The rise in the average age of first-time mothers and decline in Britain’s birth rate has occurred in parallel with one other major societal shift: the decline of homeownership.
The share of non-graduates in their late 20s – who are in private rented accommodation, which is often expensive and unstable, has doubled, from 16 per cent in 1998-99, to 33 per cent in 2023-24. Home ownership, for all young adults, has halved over the same period.
And, when Labour last came to power, the most common living arrangement for young people in their early 20s was in a home of their own with their partner. Today they are most likely to still live at home with their parents.
You have to wonder what the politicians were thinking as they sat back through the late 1990s to 2020s and watched house price soar by many multiples above earnings? What did they expect would happen?
How can anyone contemplate supporting a child when they can barely afford their rent and student loan repayments, let alone contemplate buying a family-sized home?
Politicians continue to lament this situation. Understandably, as I wrote in my column the other week, alarm bells are ringing about the long-term economic fallout of our falling birth rate. If today’s 20 and 30-somethings don’t have enough children, who will pay to support Britain’s ageing population?
It’s all very well and good for leaders from Keir Starmer to Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage to guarantee the triple lock on pensions, but how do they plan to pay for it if we don’t have enough young working-age people to pay the taxes that fund it?
The housing crisis is such an obvious blight on young adults’ lives. It has so obviously stifled people’s development and affected their life decisions. And, yet, politicians sit around scratching their heads.
In recent years, we’ve seen the slow and reluctant expansion of free childcare by the Tories and then primary school breakfast clubs by Labour. All well and good, but still not enough. For his part, Farage has proposed tax allowances for married people.
All of this rather misses the point. Having a secure home that you’re happy in is the foundation of an adult life. It is the basis any person needs to start a family.
It’s too soon to say whether Britain’s lack of babies is a true decline or a delay. Many of the young women I’ve spoken to told me that they would love to have kids in their 40s if they could. They thought they might be more financially stable by then.
But, of course, as any woman who had the idea that she contained a ticking biological clock drilled into her from a young age knows, fertility is not guaranteed as we get older.
France has decided to try texting young women to warn them and remind them that their fertility may not be infinite, but I seriously doubt that will work there or would work here. We all already know the deal that was made on our behalf with biology.
(Texting young men, on the other hand, who do not seem so aware that male fertility is also impacted by age is an interesting idea. I digress…. )
Very few countries have been able to successfully reverse falling birth rates. But the consequences of this shift are real and serious. Addressing the unsustainability of the pensions triple lock will only become more acute in our increasingly ageing society. And schools are already experiencing the challenges of smaller birth cohorts, with funding largely driven by pupil numbers while many high costs – like building and maintenance – remain fixed. In London, schools are closing down.
But one thing that no country has properly tried is perhaps the most obvious solution: give young people access to family-sized starter homes they can afford and want to live in, whether via government-backed loans or a new form of affordable housing specifically aimed at this demographic and, then, see whether they make different choices.
Labour’s Renters’ Rights Act may well turn out to be one of the most effective ways to address Britain’s birth rates problem because it will create longer tenancies that give young adults security. But, it is not enough.
Sometimes you really do just have to “state the bleeding obvious”.
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