Teenage pregnancy rates are a barometer of Britain’s progress. The tale they now tell is not reassuring | Polly Toynbee

Years of austerity have destroyed the web of services that tackled this complex problem. Compared to our European neighbours, we are failingIt takes the passing of time to fully grasp the scale of the previous government’s vandalism. Think where we would be now had the Tories not dismantled the social programmes they inherited from New Labour, with so many showing rapid progress. Those watching the statistics had a jolt last week when figures from the Office for National Statistics for 2022 seemed to show the second annual rise in teenage pregnancies in England and Wales, after a decade of falling rates.This may turn out to be the result of pandemic distortions in the previous year, when numbers dropped due to teens not meeting. The next figures may return to the previous trajectory, but that’s still a sluggish rate of falling teenage conceptions and it throws into stark perspective how far Britain lags behind similar countries. The UK now has the 22nd-lowest teenage pregnancy rate out of the 27 EU countries and us. Many of these countries’ rates are falling faster, while ours lags, largely due to our exceptionally high level of inequality. Had New Labour’s remarkable programmes around social exclusion been doing their work through these wasted Tory years, we may no longer be such a social laggard of the western world.Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

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