THE POPULATION PROBLEM AND THE NEEDS OF YOUTH
WHAT WE NEED
By LORD EUSTACE PERCY, M.P.
UNTIL recently social policy has been focussed on the mother and the infant, on the school-child, on the sick and on the aged—on the early morning and the evening of life, and on the family primarily for the sake of its youngeSt and its feeblest members. This policy has surely missed the needs of just that element in our population on which all social health depends. It has forgotten the youth between the ages of 18 and 25, freed from school, dragging his moorings from the family home, needing for his health not medicine but activity, claiming from society not a dole but a career.
The population problem, properly regarded, is nothing but the symptom of this social disease and of this social neglect. The only real adventure in life open to the mass of mankind is to marry and bring up a family ; the ten- dency of our day is to close even this adventure to the rising generation, or to hedge it about too narrowly with fears for the future.
There is much talk today about the population problem ; let us try to bring that talk to a point. The pivot on which the whole life of a nation must necessarily swing— its main breeding stock, its main industrial and, in the last resort, its main military strength—is its population between the ages of 20 and 44 inclusive. In 1911, on the eve of the Great War, the male population of these ages in England and Wales numbered 6,670,000. The nation cannot, let us suggest, allow it at any time in the future to fall below 6,000,000.
Today the male population of these age-groups numbers about 7,600,000 ; it will rise to over 8,000,000 in 1945 ; by 1955 it will have fallen again to about its present figure. So much is certain ; any further prophecy involves a large element of conjecture. But the safest opinion appears to be that in the fifteen years 1955-70 it will fall- to about 6,350,000 and may fall below 6,000,000 ; and that by 1985, fifty years hence, unless positive steps are taken to reverse present tendencies, it will not exceed 5,600,000, and may be much less. On either assumption there will be a similar, but rather more rapid, fall in the female population of corresponding ages. That, at least, is the risk against which a prudent Government must provide. If we desire to arrest the future decline of our male population aged 20-44 and to stabilise it at about 6,000,000, we must aim at keeping the annual number of births up to a level of at least 600,000.
The number of births began to fall below that level in 1934 ; it should not be difficult to keep it up to that level during the next few years, but it will become increasingly difficult as time goes on. During the next twenty years, our breeding stock will not be seriously impaired, but the age and sex distribution within it will become steadily less favourable to fertility. So far as males are concerned, the ten-year group 20-29 will be about 14 per cent. smaller in 1955 than in 1935. The female population aged 20-44 has already reached its peak. In every year since 1927 the female stock of the nation has been failing to reproduce itself. In 1955, the females of 20-44 will hardly outnumber males. Our policy must, therefore, be launched at once, but it must take the form of a steadily intensified campaign over at least the next twenty years.
Now to consider a prOgramme. Obviously, in such a situation mere propaganda will not save us. We must address ourselves to the disease, not merely to the symptom. The disease lies chiefly in one appalling fact : that the percentage of unemployment is greater between the ages of 21 and 24 than at any earlier or later age. Unless we can wipe out this scandal we cannot claim to have a social policy fit for a civilised nation.
And it is so easy to wipe it out. The surplus to be absorbed into commerce and industry is so small in relation to the total labour force of the nation. Three things only are needed : a little more systematisation of recruitment and training ; a somewhat more regular spacing of promotion ; and, to that end, 'a little more provision for superannuation. In such a policy, it is important to improve our present arrangements for education and vocational guidance. The two improve- ments most required are a system of compulsory day continuation-schools up to the age of sixteen, and the abolition of all examinations below the age of fifteen. But this is less important than superannuation. The evil lies in the fact, not that our schools are turning out misfits for industry, but that industry has no room for the fit.
There is one obvious cure for this. Hundreds of industrial firms are deterred today from establishing proper provision for superannuation only by the cost. of providing for " back service." Let the national exchequer, claiming the degree of discretion demanded by a state of emergency, assume as much of that liability as may be necessary to establish superannuation schemes in those industries where recruitment and promotion are most blocked by the presence of elderly workers, and where a superannuation scheme can, therefore, most increase the absorptive capacity of industry. • Having thus relieved youth of the nightmare of unemployment at the very threshold of adult life, let the State direct its energies to removing the positive deterrents to marriage which are at present inherent in its own social policies. Particularly let it revise its housing policy to meet the needs of the young married couple. At present, the joint effect of the Rent Restriction and Housing Acts is undoubtedly to discriminate against the newly-married. And pro- vision for their housing needs must be accompanied by a new consideration of the needs of the growing family. Otherwise it is not too much to say that the strict enforcement of the Overcrowding Act will make it impossible for most wage-earners to bring up a family of four children. • We liaire only space for one further recommendation. The history of the unemployment assistance regulations leads to one clear conclusion : unemployment relief based in part up 3n the size of the family is inconsistent with a wage-system which wholly ignores that factor. In the light of the population problem and of unem- ployment assistance, the idea of Family Allowances assumes a quite new importance. One Conservative at least . must confess himself a convert to that idea. The subject, of course, bristles with difficulties, but surely at this moment one plea at least can be urged. If we are spared a new economic collapse, we are entering upon a period of rising wages. Let the trade unions resolve that their next demand shall be for the introduction of a family-allowance • element into the wage-system. and let the State be ready to put national machinery at the service of industry for this purpose.
These recommendations concern mainly the young weekly wage-earner. Another article would be required to deal with the equally urgent problem of " middle- class " youth. Here we can venture only one emphatic statement : that. the " professional " family can only be preserved by the offer of cheap, if possible free, secondary education, unhampered by means tests.
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