Time off work for IVF could ease Britain’s fertility crisis

As the government urges women to just have more children, some of the biggest barriers to starting a family have yet to be lifted. Helen Coffey asks why legislation still hasn’t caught up

- Helen Coffey

Bridget Phillipson wants you to have more kids. Well, maybe not you specifically – it’s more of a general, collective “you”. The French “vous”, if you will. The education secretary has said that too many of us are put off having families by the crippling financial costs associated with procreation.

“A generation of young people have been thinking twice about starting a family; worried not only about rising mortgage and rent repayments, wary not only of the price of fuel and food but also put off by a childcare system simultaneously lacking in places and ruinously expensive,” she said, writing in The Telegraph.

“I have always believed that politics is about giving everyone, particularly the most disadvantaged in our country, the freedom to choose their own path in life. It’s why I want more young people to have children, if they so choose; to realise the ordinary aspiration so many share, to create the moments and memories that make our lives fulfilling.”

Phillipson’s words come amid a global birthrate decline, including in England and Wales, where the rate has fallen to 1.49 babies per woman - well below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. She said the trend “has worrying repercussions for society in the future” and that it “tells a story, heartbreakingly, about the dashed dreams of many families”.

Any policy enabling people to have children, should they so choose, by easing the astronomical financial burden is hugely welcome at this stage; more than half of people said that economic issues were a barrier to having as many children as they wanted in the UN’s 2025 report on falling birthrates. But there are still massive hurdles to jump before one even gets to the childcare stage: namely, getting pregnant in the first place.