The UK’s Demographic Future

Lord Empey Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, like others, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for securing this debate but also for bringing forward what I think is his third major report. Of course, there have been numerous contributions in between. I guess that over the years, he has become somewhat discouraged, perhaps, that the Governments of the day have not seized the opportunities provided by him and his reports, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, rightly said, all of us in Parliament are to blame and have been for a long time.

None of what is occurring now is a surprise. Perhaps the scale of it in recent years has been, but the trend has been there for quite a long time and there has not really been a proper, meaningful debate. No political party has put anything meaningful in its manifesto other than vague targets, none of which has ever been met, and we now see the outworkings of that, with the changing political landscape. If anybody thinks that this is simply a flash in the pan, they would be very unwise to harbour those thoughts. It is fair to say, I suppose, that it goes back to the Blair Government, when mass migration became a feature of our life, when decisions were taken on the accession countries in the European Union. We took people from those countries—some great people, there is no doubt—but we were not under any legal obligation to do so. It was a decision of that Government to start that process and it led ultimately to the erosion of support in this country for our membership of the European Union. Ironically, our departure from the European Union ended up with an acceleration of mass immigration to this country.

The report has produced a number of statistics. I will drill down a wee bit into some of the figures, as most people do not grasp what 7 million or 12 million people means. In the year to June 2023, the net figure of people coming into this country legally per week was 23,000. Imagine what 23,000 people looks like. All of them require accommodation, water and associated services. We have no possibility whatever of being able to integrate 23,000 people a week. The number went down in 2023-24 to about 17,500 people per week and has gone down further since, but the net figures are deceiving unless you know the requirements of the people coming in versus the requirements of those leaving, and the differences between them. Those figures dramatically underestimate the implications of what we are facing.

There is not a day when you do not pick up a newspaper containing something about illegal or irregular immigration, the boats and the gangsters who are making a fortune out of this misery, but in numerical terms that is not the issue. I think we are running at about 184,000 boat people since 2018. That is a mere few weeks of legal immigration.

There is no doubt that, collectively, all of us in this Parliament and our predecessors have been negligent. You cannot allow change to take place on that scale and not expect consequences. It is utterly impossible to imagine there being no consequences from that. The scale is so large—numbers matter. My view for some time has been that we need to institute a pause, slow this down and try to get cross-party consensus on what the future of our country should look like. I do not want to see it become the stone-throwing match that it might very well be over the next few years coming up to another election.

If there is a consensus in Parliament, we have to pause this mad rush of people. Let us face it: we are issuing the visas. We understand that there is an illegal side as well, but we are issuing the visas. There is a machine somewhere printing them. We need to think things through and work out how we integrate and maximise the benefits for our population and what contributions we can make. We need thoughts along those lines. The right reverend Prelate talked about what would effectively be a new contract. We must look at all these things, but we cannot look at them rationally unless we slow down this mad rush.

Two areas of our life are, in part, responsible. Our further and higher education sector, which is very expensive, is living on a business model that is making matters worse. It is failing to provide the trained people this country needs, and do not forget that we have a growing number of economically inactive people. We are also allowing businesses to bring people in on work visas at lower wages, and we see that all over the country. Those businesses do not have to pick up the social security and other matters arising from the folk who come in. It is not only those who are on work visas but their dependants and families, and it goes on and on.

Whether we like it or not, we are regarded as the soft touch of Europe. As referred to already, it is the place where nobody checks; we do not know who is here. We are losing young people—hundreds of them have gone missing, and I have no doubt that many of them are being exploited and abused. We do not know where or who they are. The people coming in destroy their identification, so how do we know who they are? There are no checks on them—it is impossible—yet they will be in centrally heated hotels this Christmas while up the street people will be lying in doorways.

This country has got itself completely divorced from reality, and this Parliament is a leading example of that. In her response, perhaps the Minister will give some consideration to taking to her right honourable colleague the idea that we have a period of calm to pause this. We have to look at the further and higher education model, and the idea that companies can bring people into this country on lower wages, because that is what has been happening. To be perfectly political about it, for a Labour Government to be presiding over that is the very antithesis of what I always understood the movement to stand for.

We have not even touched on the costs. I have been battling with the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, to try to get some information about the costs of non-hotel accommodation. We have the costs of hotel accommodation; we know that it is between £5.7 million and £6.7 million a day. But that figure is for 32,000 occupants and it is now 36,000. We have 111,000 people who are not in hotels but in other forms of accommodation. The audit office produced a report the other day, and part of the reason why I do not have an answer to my questions is that the audit office concluded that the Home Office does not know the costs because money comes from different pots. Some comes from our overseas development budget, which is being fed into this, and other costs are under different headings.

The Library very kindly did some research; the Home Office’s figures for the last financial year were running at about £4.5 billion, but that does not touch the sides. We do not take into account the cost of the Border Force, the huge cost of the legal and other services, the tribunal service that has to wade through all this stuff and the policing costs when individuals misbehave and have to be dealt with through the courts. The costs could be £6 billion, £7 billion or £8 billion a year. Earlier in the debate we said that this is one issue on which we have ignored things and buried our heads in the sand; we are pretty good at that. We have not built a frigate in this country for 15 years, and we wonder why they are clapped out and we have only seven that are operational, which is half what we had in 2010.

Can the Minister please bring to her colleagues’ attention the serious implications of ignoring the problems that we now face? We can all work together. We want to avoid extremism triumphing, but it will if we continue to sit and do nothing. This is primarily the responsibility of the Opposition, but I believe that other parties in this Chamber would be very happy to work with the Government to create a strategy that has some possibility of achieving public support.