Few Britons will have heard the phrase ‘apocalyptic winter’, but that may soon change. It’s how Italian politicians describe the season when deaths in the country outstrip births. In Italy, the total fertility rate (TFR), the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime, is now 1.24, far below the 2.1 required to sustain population growth. Other European nations are faring worse: in Malta, it’s barely over 1; in Spain, just 1.19. In the UK, meanwhile, the TFR decreased to 1.49 children per woman in 2022 from 1.55 in 2021.

According to a new study in the Lancet, this trend will get much worse, on a global scale, and fast. The world population, researchers suggest, will fall, within decades, for the first time since the Black Death. By 2100, it is projected that just six countries out of 204 will have birth rates higher than the replacement level. There are fears that population decline in the 21st century will be catastrophic. Elon Musk, who had 11 children at the last count, has described it as ‘a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming’.

Expensive housing is leading people to delay having kids, or to have fewer

Many economists worry that the declining worker to pensioner ratio in Britain will result in stagnating living standards and economic decay. That the welfare system and NHS will buckle, taxes will soar, and asset prices will tumble.

There is a fallacious belief that this can only be solved through high levels of net migration, but immigrant birth rates quickly come to bear resemblance to those of the native population. And while some migrants return home after a stint living and working in Britain, many won’t, becoming a burden as they age despite the insistence by politicians that they will boost the public purse.

The trouble is, there are few alternatives. Pro-natalist policies have failed almost everywhere they’ve been tried. South Korea, where the fertility rate plunged to 0.7 in the third quarter of 2023, has spent more than 360 trillion won (£213 billion) in areas such as childcare subsidies since 2006. The Japanese government has offered lump sum payments to women who have babies, provided generous parental leave, and covered the cost of fertility treatments – yet deaths were double the number of births in 2023. Hungary, meanwhile, spends 5 per cent of GDP on pro-birth measures, but its TFR is still only 1.5.

One nation has bucked the trend. Until the 1990s, Israel had all the features normally associated with a low fertility rate – high levels of female workforce participation, high incomes, high levels of education and urbanisation – yet women are now having, on average, 2.9 children. But this is down to strong cultural forces which cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. Family is at the centre of Israeli life: surveys have shown they believe the ideal family size is five, compared with three or four in most Western countries.

If anything, successive UK governments seem to have done all they can to drag down our fertility rate. Expensive housing – a direct consequence of our restrictive planning system – is leading people to delay having kids, or to have fewer. Expensive childcare – a direct consequence of government intervention in the sector, which has driven up prices and forced lower-cost alternatives out of the market – also acts as a deterrent. We should correct these dismal policy failures, even if they only impact the birth rate at the margins.

But there may be a case for adaptation rather than mitigation. Some £124 billion will be spent on state pensions in 2023-24 because, with life expectancy at around 80, many people are retiring decades before they die. Increasing the state pension age would be a straightforward way for the Treasury to save tens of billions. As would ending the triple lock, which saw the state pension increase by 10.1 per cent in 2023 (in line with inflation) – far outstripping the growth in wages. With over 7 million people in the backlog, the NHS is in desperate need of reform. With 9.25 million working age adults now economically inactive, our benefits system requires a major overhaul. These are big challenges, and they won’t be popular, but they are not beyond the wit of man.

Most importantly, we need to boost productivity substantially: an hour’s work in Germany produces 19 per cent more than an hour’s work in Britain. An American worker produces 25 per cent more than their British counterpart. How can we be getting so little out for what we put in? The planning system, again, is choking growth by blocking the construction of houses, offices, factories and laboratories across the country. Taxes and regulation are discouraging work and investment.

Perhaps there will be some upsides to the reduction in population size. Less environmental damage and lower carbon emissions – without needing to impoverish the nation with unachievable and costly Net Zero policies. Higher pay resulting from scarce labour supply. Reduced expenditure on schools; already data suggest primary and secondary schools are seeing fewer pupils apply for spaces that were once coveted. Economic historians believe that the population decline in Medieval Britain raised wages, increased labour mobility and led to productivity increases and economic growth. We’ve been wrong on the implications of changing demographics in the past – just ask the Malthusians. Maybe we’ll be wrong again.