Robert Jenrick has called for British families to have more children to help fund and look after an ageing population, after criticising Boris Johnson’s government for encouraging low-skilled workers to come to the UK.
The immigration minister said the government needed to “encourage more families to have children” as he suggested there should be further cuts in the number of care visas issued to migrant workers.
He also said ministers were looking at plans to further raise the minimum salary levels for migrant workers towards the “median wage” and cuts to the number of visas offered to fill gaps in the labour market.
During a Policy Exchange fringe event at the Conservative party conference in Manchester, Prof Matthew Goodwin called for a “mature conversation about how we could encourage families to have more children” and help reduce demand for migrant workers.
Jenrick told party members: “I agree strongly with the last point about families. We do need to encourage more families to have children. And that’s why the prime minister’s intervention earlier in the year on childcare was important.
“That’s why we need to build more homes so that young people can settle down and have a family life. And there’s a lot of evidence that the lack of housing is one of the reasons people are settling down and having kids later on in life. I think the gentleman who mentioned student accommodation [taking up local housing stock] just reinforced the point that that migration does need to come down because it’s having real world implications in communities right across the country.”
After the event, Jenrick told the Guardian: “We want to have a higher birthrate as a country. With an ageing society it is critically important.
“There are lots of reasons we’re not unique as a country for that. It is across the western world. The things that government can do is improve childcare, and above all housing, because there’s a massive link between how late people eventually settle down and the ability to have kids.”
In Europe, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s populist hard-right leader, has led a push to drive up birthrates. Last month he held the fifth Budapest Demographic Summit with people including a conservative Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson; Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni; and Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, to discuss how to encourage Europeans to have more children.
The number of babies born in England and Wales in a year dropped in 2022 to the lowest level in two decades, according to official figures released last month.
It follows the recent trend of decreasing live births, which had been the case before the pandemic, the Office for National Statistics said. The number has been steadily decreasing for the past decade – returning to roughly the level seen in the early 2000s.
Jenrick said the government under Johnson had been “naive” in its approach to legal immigration since Brexit and did not rule out a future cap on the number of migrants.
“What I’m concerned about is the consequences of some of the decisions that were made immediately after we left the European Union, which turned out to be significant liberalisations of the present system, and in some cases quite naive about the consequences.
“There are reforms to be done which will unwind some of that. We are bringing in quite a large number of people who are lower skilled.”
The current salary threshold that the points-based system applies is just over £26,000.
“That is not, to most people’s definition, a high-skilled worker. So I can see a good argument for increasing that to something that is more akin to the median salary,” he said.
He said he was also considering cuts to the number of care visas and family visas being offered to overseas workers.
“I also think there are a very large number of people coming in on the care visa route – 120,000. I think that is something that needs careful consideration,” he said.
“Then there are other areas, like the ability to bring family members into the UK from around the world, even if you don’t have the resources to actually look after those people.”
