As New Labour Chancellor, Gordon Brown was unapologetic about his desire to eradicate child poverty, which he called “a scar on the soul of Britain.” In 1999, he proclaimed “Our historic aim will be for ours to be the first generation to end child poverty.”
A key part of his plan was to raise the amount of social security received by low-income households. But in boosting benefits, Brown inadvertently boosted something else: births.
The Working Families’ Tax Credit
In 1999, Brown introduced the Working Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC), decreasing families’ tax bills based on household income, number of children, and number of hours worked. WFTC was specifically intended to benefit low-earning families with children and was considerably more generous than its predecessor, Family Credit. WFTC’s eligibility criteria was broader than Family Credit’s, it covered a greater percentage of childcare expenses, and it was worth more per child.
Gordon Brown’s 45,000 Babies
WFTC had a number of labour market effects. It encouraged more single mothers into work and increased the hours worked by parents with dependent children. But most interestingly for me and all who believe policy can help more people have children, it caused a mini-baby boom.
In 2008, three economists published an IFS paper in which they identified that the introduction of WFTC had caused an extra 45,000 babies to be born between 1999 and 2003. The authors – Mike Brewer, Anita Ratcliffe, and Sarah Smith – found that this fertility effect had occurred in the groups most affected by Brown’s reform, and that the increase in births could not be attributed to other factors, such as pre-existing fertility trends in these groups.
Enthusiastically responding to the paper, then Lib Dem-Treasury Spokesman Vince Cable said that Brown “hasn’t just saved the world, he seems to have created an army of children to populate it”. Gordon Brown himself never appears to have commented on the finding.
Those 45,000 babies represent 1.31% of all UK babies born between 1999 and 2003: over 1 in 100 babies born over those four years was a Gordon Brown baby. Those babies – now aged 21-25 – have started their adult lives. Today they are busy studying, or taking up places on grad schemes, or handing you coffee, or starting their own families.
Conclusion
Recall that Gordon Brown’s mini-baby boom was an unintended side-effect of the goals of relieving child poverty and getting more parents into work. It was not the result of intentional pro-child policy, yet we are all still enjoying the benefits of an extra 45,000 friends, colleagues, partners, and employees directly because of it. In making families more financially stable, WFTC allowed more parents to have the children they wanted.
The 45,000 WFTC babies show us how policy can make things easier for parents and prospective parents, and so directly cause more children to be born. But they also indicate how powerful a well-targeted policy – one that explicitly wants to help parents have the children they want – could be.
Phoebe