CREDIT where it’s due: the Institute of Economic Affairs is finally treating the birth dearth as something a pro-market outfit must confront. Clara Piano’s discussion paper Mind the Fertility Gap argues that liberalising labour, childcare and housing rules can help Britons achieve the families they say they want, but too often do not have. That diagnosis matters. The latest ONS release puts the total fertility rate for England and Wales at 1.41 for 2024, the lowest level in modern times. Piano’s thesis is that cash‑heavy baby bonuses are costly and short lived, whereas supply‑side reforms improve work‑family compatibility, especially for younger adults.
That’s the useful part. The problem is the gap between the report’s diagnosis and its cure. Marriage appears in the analysis, then disappears when it counts. For a conservative audience that actually wants more babies, that omission is not cosmetic. It is fatal.
Starting with what the IEA gets right, there is plainly a persistent wedge between intended and achieved family size; its Figure 1 shows intentions hovering around replacement rate (2.1 children), while realised fertility falls. The paper is candid that the intentions series ends in 2011 and is interpolated for missing years. That’s a limitation which should have been front and centre before policy conclusions were drawn. The case against big‑ticket transfer schemes is also well made. Countries have paid billions for short‑run bumps that fade with time. And on housing, the IEA is right to emphasise that land‑use rules depress childbearing among the very cohort that needs lower barriers most. Shoag and Russell find a significant negative link between zoning restrictions and fertility, strongest for women in their twenties.
Where the paper flinches is on marriage. Piano explicitly acknowledges that falling marriage explains much of the fall in births in some settings, and that married couples tend to reach their fertility goals more often. Yet the recommendations swerve away from marriage towards deregulation and the clever idea of parents casting proxy votes for their children. In Britain that is skating around the central question. The reality is stark. Most births in England and Wales are now outside marriage or civil partnership, with ONS reporting 51.4 per cent in 2022, though the majority of these are jointly registered by parents at the same address.What distinguishes marriage is not a romantic halo but stability. The Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of the UK Millennium Cohort Study shows that by a child’s third birthday, 26 per cent of cohabiting parents had separated for at least a month compared with 7 per cent of married parents. By age five it was 27 per cent compared with 9 per cent. That is a yawning gap in family durability that is fundamental for completed fertility as well as for child wellbeing. Add the steady rise in the median age at first opposite‑sex marriage to 31.2 for women and 32.7 for men, the highest on record, and you have a simple mechanical drag on first births and then on higher‑order births.
If you want more babies, you need more earlier and stable marriages. Deregulating without rebuilding marriage is like funding roads while letting driving tests lapse. The IEA knows this in its bones yet stops short of saying it in the prescriptions.
The paper is also too sanguine about mapping American cross‑state associations to UK reality. Piano draws on US economic‑freedom indices to argue that flexible labour markets compress the fertility gap. Perhaps. It is still correlation. The more immediate British headwind is not that mums cannot rearrange shifts, it is that Whitehall treats mothers as GDP units to be returned to the workplace as swiftly as possible, and designs childcare policy accordingly. The National Audit Office says the Department for Education’s expansion of ‘free’ early years hours is aimed at increasing labour market participation by helping mothers to return to work. The Treasury sells the policy as a ‘Budget for growth’. Meanwhile, Coram finds that a part‑time nursery place for an under‑two averages £158 a week with availability tight, so the so‑called free hours often do not exist on the ground or do not cover actual costs. This is not neutral support for family formation. It is a subsidy to get mothers out of the home. If the goal is births rather than quarterly GDP, government should help fund mother care itself, as Finland does through a universal home‑care allowance for under‑threes, sometimes topped up by municipalities such as Helsinki.
Tax policy is another blind spot. Britain’s system is aggressively individualised and penalises single‑earner married households. The High Income Child Benefit Charge is clawed back based on the income of the top earner rather than household income, so a married one‑earner family on £60,001 loses benefit that a dual‑earner couple on £59,999 each will keep. Parliament’s briefing explains the thresholds and taper and is clear about the design choice. HMRC guidance shows how the charge bites. This is the opposite of a pro-family tax code. France’s family quotient reduces the tax burden by splitting taxable income across spouses and children, easing pressure on single‑earner and larger families.
Housing is where the IEA is closest to the mark, yet still too thin. It is not only supply in the round but the mix. Young families need space, safety and bedrooms. The Institute for Family Studies documents that family‑sized units with three bedrooms are missing from new supply and that more bedrooms are associated with greater openness to children. London’s own design guidance urges family‑sized homes with access to play space; that logic should be extended nationally. If planning reform merely churns out micro‑flats, do not expect a baby boom.
And of course, there’s no mention of the cultural elephant in the room that British government now ducks. After the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 the state no longer distinguishes husband‑and‑wife marriage (the type that actually produces life) in public messaging, and the Public Sector Equality Duty hardwires caution in official institutions from doing so. Like it or not, that means civil society has to carry more of the cultural load that says marriage and children are goods to be honoured. The IEA flirts with this when it cites research on religious leadership and fertility, including work exploiting Pope John Paul II’s visits across Latin America, which found subsequent rises in first births and marriages in visited regions. The point is not to import a papal tour, it is to recognise that norms move numbers; the state should stop undermining those who wish to uphold them. For another UK‑specific cultural headwind, the Centre for Social Justice’s Lost Boys report lays out the collapse in male education and work among young men. Fewer marriageable men means fewer marriages and fewer babies.
Put all this together and a conservative policy programme writes itself. Keep the IEA’s deregulatory instinct where it lowers the real price of family life. Then fix the marriage blind spot. Make the tax system at least neutral between one‑earner and two‑earner couples raising children by assessing child benefit withdrawal on household income or abolishing the charge entirely. Move toward income splitting or a family quotient so the tax code recognises dependents rather than punishing the caregiver. Reform early years funding so support follows parental preference, including a time‑limited home‑care allowance alongside nursery provision. Tie planning reform to delivering family homes with gardens and play space, not just unit counts. Back relationship preparation, fatherhood initiatives and marriage mentoring through civil society rather than quangos. Say out loud, without embarrassment, that earlier, stable marriage remains the normal and best context for childbearing and childrearing. The Millennium Cohort evidence on stability justifies the priority. The ONS ages at marriage and the collapsing fertility levels make the urgency plain.
Piano has usefully reframed the debate away from chequebook pronatalism. That matters. But Britain will not deregulate its way to babies while it taxes the breadwinner‑with‑caregiver household, subsidises nurseries in the name of GDP, starves the market of family‑sized homes, and refuses to affirm the man‑woman marriage norm that turns love into new life at scale. A genuinely conservative settlement would fix the price signals, widen the choice set for mothers, build homes where children can flourish, and put marriage back at the centre of the story. If we do that, the fertility ‘gap’ that so worries the IEA will begin to close for the simplest possible reason. Couples will again be free and able to live out what they already say they want.
