A ten-year UK strategy costing millions of pounds to cut the “shameful” number of teenage pregnancies in Britain has failed to make any serious impact. 
Labour Ministers accept that they cannot meet Tony Blair’s target, set in 1999, of halving pregnancies among under-18s by 2012. Figures today will show that Britain still has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe.
About 40,000 such girls, or 40 per 1,000, become pregnant each year — a fall from the 1998 tally of 46.6 per 1,000. At the time, Mr Blair called Britain’s record shameful.
The North East had the highest under-18 conception rate at 49 per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 17.
The East of England had the lowest rate, at 31.4 per 1,000.
On Wednesday, Schools Secretary Ed Balls defended the Government’s record on teenage pregnancies, but admitted it was going to be ”really hard” to achieve the 50 per cent reduction.
”It was a really ambitious target – it was 50 per cent fall. I think it was right to set an ambitious target and it is going to be really hard to make that amount of fall.”
Now the Labour Government has promised a ‘new’ plan, Teenage Pregnancy Strategy: Beyond 2010, which involves piloting one-on-one sexual health and contraception consultations.
The Government also believes its controversial proposal to make sex education compulsory for all primary and secondary schools will help.
However, critics have blasted the approach.
Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust, said: “With all its emphasis on sex education and handing out contraceptives to schoolchildren under the age of consent, it is giving them the green light to experiment sexually”.
Last year a university professor warned a gathering of parliamentarians and political officials that the Government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy had been “absolutely disastrous”.
David Paton, Professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School, pointed to statistical evidence showing that since the strategy began diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections have increased, while the rate of decline in pregnancy rates has slowed.