Call to increase birth rate

MAKING babies is the key to the pensions crisis and economic growth over the next 50 years, the Tories claimed yesterday.

The shadow work and pensions secretary, David Willetts, was launching a pamphlet on the "birth dearth" he believes threatens to see Europe left behind the United States.

And he was urging British people to go forth and multiply, or risk seeing "disastrous implications" for the economy.

In Old Europe? Demographic Change and Pensions Reform, written for the Centre for European Reform, Mr Willetts also claims we are having fewer babies than we want.

In a speech in London, he said: "It is good news that life expectancy is improving. These are not extra years of miserable incapacity; if anything, we die fitter than before. The problem is not longevity. The problem is that there are not enough young workers coming behind.

"After the baby boom of the 1950s, we have had the baby bust. Europe’s real demographic crisis is birth rates."

The baby boom had left the population "bunched in the middle like a rabbit in a python", making economic success easier.

But, at current rates over the next 50 years, the EU would have an extra 40 million people aged over 60 and an absolute reduction of 40 million in the number of people aged 15-60.

"By 2050, Europe will have a shrinking population, a low underlying growth and a falling share of world output."

Either everyone had to work more, immigrant workers brought in, or more babies had to be produced.

"Nobody wants to force women to have more children than they wish, but we have created an environment in which people are having fewer children than they aspire to.

"This is not - emphatically not - a statement that a woman’s place is in the home. It would be absolutely wrong to take away from women the opportunities which are at last opening up for them."

There had to be genuinely family-friendly policies that could help families to have the number of children they wanted.