Spain has appointed its first Minister of Sex whose job will be to get people busy between the sheets.

The government hopes to boost Spain’s falling birth rate, which is one of the lowest in the developed world.

Prime minister Mariano Rajoy appointed Edelmira Barreira as the country’s sex tsar to get Spaniards to produce more babies.

The country is faced with a population crisis, with fewer births than deaths recorded for the first time last year.

Experts say long working hours and a culture of eating late at night and going to bed after midnight are partly to blame for the nation’s sex famine.

Rafael Puyol, of the IE Business School in Madrid, said: “They do not help with making a family. Then when a child arrives it is even worse.”

Since 2008 the number of births in Spain has plunged by 18 per cent.

And the number of childless couples has nearly tripled from 1.5million in 1977 to 4.4million in 2015.

Most Spanish women say they would like two or more children but in 2015 those aged 18 to 49 had an average of 1.3 children – well below the EU figure of 1.58.