Make babies – that's the new message from the Conservative party, which was famous in the early nineties for its crusade for family values.

Shadow Work and Pensions secretary David Willets fears the UK's ageing population will affect economic growth in the next 50 years.

Following the baby boom of the 1950s, there has now been a baby bust, Willets says and urged people to find ways to have more children.

But he told the BBC: "This is emphatically not a statement that a woman's place is in the home. Societies where women and men combine work with children have higher birth rates.

Last year there were 596,122 births, a slight increase compared with 2001 and the first increase since 1996.