Though we are suffering from the worst of the heat this summer, perhaps we need to be looking more urgently at the implications of the demographic winter now clearly upon us in the UK.
It requires a rapid rethink of immigration policy in the short and long term. We need to start now.
Net migration measured year on year to December 2025 fell roughly 50 per cent according to latest revised figures. Those arriving by illegal routes were at about 44,000 in the year to March 2026, and the numbers of those arriving by small boat (which is most of them) are on track to be lower this calendar year.
Illegal immigration still figures high in the list of political grievances in most opinion polls – in May it was the country’s top priority, according to Ipsos. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, has promised tougher rules and vigilance – which has burnished her credentials with the public and her new boss, Andy Burnham.
Two initiatives have caught the eye. She has promised a new immigration appeals authority and also wants to make it harder for migrants to invoke Article 8 of the European Court of Human Rights. She is also suggesting the probationary period for care workers to be considered for permanent residence to be extended from five years, to 10 or even 15 years.
The move to penalise care workers and disadvantage immigrants in their ranks seems to fly in the face of the demographic realities facing this country.
Put simply, these are that the number of over-65s is growing steadily, while the number of births and the index of fertility falls equally steadily. In 1948, the year the NHS was launched, the over-65s made up 11 per cent of the population. Today the over-65s are 19 per cent of the population, and in 20 years this cohort will be 23 per cent of the population.
We may be growing old, proportionally, but we are not growing old that healthily. The over-85s, another rapidly expanding cohort, are disproportionate consumers of welfare services and health care. Care services are patchy and in some cases woeful – and the scale and depth of poverty and privation vary dramatically from region to region. Life expectancy in Blackpool is 18 years less than in more affluent Richmond upon Thames, according to the King’s Fund.
Besides the inexorable ageing of populations, the problem that most of the developed world faces is the steady decline in fertility. The standard measure is the Total Fertility Rate, or TFR, by which a woman would be expected to produce 2.1 children for a society or nation to maintain a stable, balanced, population without migration.
Decline in TFR rates is not linear. Sometimes birth rates seem to be on the precipice to collapse – as in South Korea. In Busan, the TFR has dropped to just 0.74. Italy and Japan are both in the depths of demographic wintering – with Italy due to drop from 59 million to 54.7 million or below by 2050. The most dramatic projection is for China, once the most numerous nation on earth. Currently the population is around 1,405 billion. For several years, registered deaths have far outstripped registered births, which were only 7.92 million for last year. By the end of this century, the UN’s central projection has China’s population at 633 million, less than half of the present.
The UK currently has a TFR of 1.40 children per woman, and the rate is going down. Italy is heading down from 1.1 to 1.00 and Ukraine is at 1.00 per fertile woman and falling. One of the more surprising developments is in the decline of the birthrate among the traditionally fecund Mormon communities of Utah in the USA. It has dropped by 37 per cent in 18 years, according to the New York Times. Mothers are having babies later in life – a marked trend in both Italy and the UK, and many are choosing to have only one child.
The cost of childcare, the difficulties of finding appropriate schools, and the expense and shortage of housing are common factors across the demographic winterscape. In London, the borough of Islington, from where I am writing, has a TFR of 0.99 – the lowest of all the boroughs except the City of London, where hardly any families reside anyway. Across the UK, the biggest TFR drops are for those between the ages of 20 and 29.
The onset of demographic decline calls for mitigation rather than remedy. Attempts to boost birthrates, reminiscent of the campaigns of Mussolini’s Italy and Third Republic France in the 1930s, seem doomed to ridicule and failure. The fact is that proportionally fewer people are entering the work force. And the proportion of productive members of the population to inactive members is worsening. This is yet a further disincentive to enter work full time.
Unless there is a rethink, Beccy Baird of the King’s Fund suggests – on prevention in health, the NHS offer, workforce planning, and the way revenue is raised, “the welfare state will continue to struggle under demographic realities it was never designed to face”.
The biggest rethink has to be on migration, perhaps. We need to get through the dog whistle and Maga-style scare mongering on racial replacement conspiracies. We need to take a smart approach. The migrant contribution to the health sector as a whole and care of the aged and long term sick is invaluable – and perhaps irreplaceable. Giorgia Meloni of Italy has pushed for a system of contract immigration for specific sectors, and subsidised countries to help.
The truth – painful to the political Right and now significant parts of the political Left – is not only that Britain needs migration, but that it needs more of it.
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