The UK’s Demographic Future

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

I think we can all agree, my Lords, that if anyone deserves a debate on a subject of their choice, it is my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. This is not simply because of this particular report, with its brilliant title asking us to look to the future, but because of his body of work, which includes two other major reports of a similar kind, on the demographic future of this country; his persistent demands for a Select Committee to work in this area, as my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe pointed out; his persistent demands for debates on this subject; and, as my noble friend Lord Blencathra pointed out, his authoritative work on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which is so important to this House.

My noble friend Lady Buscombe pointed out all my noble friend Lord Hodgson’s work in the Conservative Party, in significant roles such as chairman of the National Conservative Convention, and all the rest of it. That does not begin to tackle all the other things that my noble friend has done. We have been celebrating what he has done in the House of Lords, but he was a Member of Parliament too.

Leaving aside politics, my noble friend was a hugely successful businessman, with a 40-year career in the private equity business. Not only was he an entrepreneur—my God, we need those these days—but he was a regulator, putting his own skills and knowledge at the service of the public. On top of that, he has a family and three children. It is amazing, frankly, what my noble friend has done. I am still in awe of that, and we will greatly miss his presence, I can tell him firmly.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

It was not just me.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

He is pointing at my noble friend Lady Hodgson of Abinger, his wife.

I am eternally grateful to my noble friend for all that he has done. As for this report, there are a number of reasons why we should adopt an authority looking at population. First, population and migration are huge issues. Alongside the National Health Service and the economy, they are one of the top three issues. My noble friend Lady Buscombe spoke with heartfelt feeling on this subject. It fires people up; I am absolutely certain.

Secondly, we are a small island. When American soldiers were told to come over here in the Second World War and were briefed, they were told, “England—think North Carolina”. We are the same size as North Carolina. It has a population of 10 million; we have nearly 70 million. That is the comparison we should make. We are a small island; we have to be careful about the number of people we allow here.

People want a control on population and migration. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, made the point, and the report makes it clear. It is not an expensive policy to set up. The Government should be looking for less expensive policies, given their fiscal problems. Other countries, such as Canada, Australia, Norway and Denmark, are doing precisely what he is asking for.

This rational, objective approach would reduce toxicity, the need to do so the right reverend Prelate spoke about. It is our responsibility to future generations. We always think we should leave the country in the same sort of situation as we found it. This approach also has vision and a plan. People are constantly asking of the present Government: where is the vision, where is the plan? This is a plan and this has a vision.

Also, as my noble friend said, if we do not do it, other extremist policies will take advantage. The Minister should be particularly knowledgeable about that because in the recent elections in Staffordshire, Reform got 49 seats; the Conservatives were reduced to 10 and the Labour Party was reduced to one. If you look at the electoral calculus and present polling, the seats in Stoke, for which the Minister was the MP some time ago, are all thought likely to go Reform in the next general election. She has an understanding, I think, of what is at stake here.

The future of democracy is at stake here, because if we cannot plan long-term, autocratic societies such as China will say, “We’re better because we can plan long-term. The democracies are far too short-term to deliver sensible results”. For all those reasons, this sort of authority and instrument for policy is desirable.

My personal view is this. The thing that I fear and hate most is the overcrowding of this country: the shortage of housing and the need to put up more housing, and therefore the demolition and destruction of the open countryside. I was born in 1939 in the little village of Grimsargh, just outside Preston, at the entrance to the Ribble Valley. You go up the M6 and turn off at Pudding Pie Nook Lane—or the M55, if you prefer modern terminology—and there you are in Grimsargh. During the war time, despite the fact my father was away on war work, it was a wonderful place to be brought up, because my little pebbledashed terraced house was surrounded by fields, woods, streams and trees to climb—it was absolutely idyllic. It was wonderful. There was rationing, and so no obesity or malnutrition. There was, I am afraid to say, with the rather boring food we had in those days, a great deal of what the official report on the Second World War called an epidemic of flatulence because of the poor diet we had.

Then the population of the UK was 40 million, so it was possible to have that sort of life. Now it is 70 million. The village next to my little village is called Longridge. As a result of what has happened over the last few years, the locals call the villages “Grimridge”—Grimsargh and Longridge—because the fields between them have disappeared. It is now one village, with executive houses everywhere. There are no fields or woods—nothing—unless you get in the car and go for a long distance. It is ridiculous. I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s marvellous poem, “Going, Going”; I do not know whether the House is familiar with it. It says:

“And that will be England gone,


The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres”.

He wrote that in 1972—and how much more visible that is today than it was in 1972.

As has been pointed out, it is going to get worse. The driver is immigration. I think of immigration like water. Your doctor will tell you that the sensible thing to do, especially if you are my age, is to have some water every day. My GP says, “Keep taking the water. It’s good for you”. But if you binge on water, it really is bad for you, and you become extremely ill. The fact is that we have binged on immigration over the last 20 years, instead of taking a sensible amount every day, which we could naturally accommodate and would be an advantage to the nation. So if you slow down immigration—personally I am in favour of doing that, because that would mean a slowdown in population growth—you would probably have an overall decline in or stabilisation of population. We need not fear that.

As is pointed out in the report, the present situation of constantly getting economic growth and extra GDP through persistently increased immigration is unsustainable. Other countries that do not have our levels of immigration have exceeded our economic performance: for example, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. South Korea has a declining population, but its economic growth and GDP per head are now greater than the UK’s. Citizens of South Korea are more affluent than people in this country. Taiwanese citizens are even more affluent than people in the UK, and Japan is not far behind. So, you can do this without an economic penalty. In fact, it may be better economically in many ways.

Other people raise issues such as, “Well, if we have less immigration, what about all these elderly people? Who will be the young people to look after them?” I say, read the section by Professor Harper, who is an expert in this field. We can raise the retirement age: look at all of us. How many of us over the age of 65 are still working, at least part-time, if you can call this part-time? All that could be done and is being done by other countries, quite apart from technology and so forth. All these issues need to be discussed in an open way, and the authority and the way it is constituted would enable us to do that.

I have been in these debates before with my noble friend, and we usually get the same argument from the ministerial Bench. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, sitting on this side when we were in power. I cannot remember who the Government Minister at the time was, but both major parties said, “Oh, we can’t do this, we should not do this”—the noble Lord, Lord Empey, has a point here.

The arguments will be familiar to Members: first, “We’re doing it anyway; we’re collecting all these figures anyway”. This is not true. I went to the APPG on social sciences the day before yesterday and the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford pointed out that the figures are not being collected in a serious way. Of course, departments are picking up figures here and there for their own purposes, but not in the holistic way that we need. So, that argument does not stand up.

The second argument, which is usually put forward by the Minister, is that we do not want another quango or another body. But, as my noble friend Lord Hodgson pointed out, he proposes to change the Migration Advisory Committee into this body, so there would not be another body but a replacement body.

The third argument is sometimes dismissed as the least appetising or favourable on the grounds that it somehow has a whiff of eugenics about it and is about something rather unpleasant. This is nonsense. It is not at all unpleasant; it is just simple common sense.

This is an eminently rational, straightforward, common-sense proposal and we have a responsibility to future generations to fight for it.

I say to my noble friend, whose work in this area, as noble Lords can see, I warmly applaud: we will not give it up. He may leave, but we will not give it up. He is a determined man. I am determined, too, and many others are determined, not just here but in the Commons. It is a brilliant idea, and all brilliant ideas such as this are worth fighting for.

Economic Growth

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Swire finished on an optimistic note. I share his optimism—this is a great country in which it is very good to do business. I know this because I started an economic consultancy many years ago, which still flourishes.

One of the great advantages of this country, which my noble friend did not mention, is the ubiquity of the English language. Bismarck said that the most important fact of the 19th century was that America elected to speak English rather than German. Heaven knows what would have happened if they elected to speak German; it was a narrow call, but they speak English. We should not underestimate our natural advantages.

None the less, we are struggling, and have been for some time, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said. The responsibility of a Government in these circumstances, particularly a new one with a large majority, is to bring forward a coherent plan for economic growth and to push it with all the strength, effectiveness and vigour that Trump is showing at the moment. Nothing less will do if we are to overcome the problems we have.

In that respect, I will point out a couple of things that the Government are doing wrong. First, they said in their campaign that they would concentrate on housebuilding as a force for economic growth. We need more housebuilding, as we all know, for good social reasons, but to make it a main factor in economic growth is not a good idea. It is very difficult to ramp up the building industry just like that, and it is only 8% of our GDP. Surely we should concentrate on the 80% of our GDP that is the service sector, which is huge.

It is about not only our normal professional services in finance, law, insurance and so forth but the creative industries. For example, in Shepperton and Pinewood we now have studios equivalent in size to the whole of Hollywood. We are that sort of creative force in the world. I welcome the Government’s response to the recent report on AI. Trump says that he will put £500 billion behind AI and supercomputers. We certainly cannot match that, but we ought not to be cancelling the Edinburgh supercomputer, as we did recently. We should be putting more money into supercomputing, as something of the future.

Secondly, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, that skills are essential. We must give more status to those who are skilled. We have a wonderful pathway for people to go to university, but, over 30 years, and through numerous different Governments, we have not developed a similar pathway for people who are not academic. We need to do that. We are now seeing examples of how we are desperately short of people of that calibre to make the economy grow.

In a speech the other day on the national insurance increases, the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, made the point that we have low productivity. That is almost exclusively in the public sector. Private sector productivity has been growing by an average of 2.9% a year for the last 20-odd years. In the public sector it has been going down by 0.3% for the last 20 years. Those are ONS figures—the ONS is subject to some criticism at the moment, but I am relying on its figures. The Government recognise this problem, and I think the Chief Secretary to the Treasury has said that they intend to improve productivity in the public sector by about 5%, if they can. That will not work. They need to bring into the public sector some private expertise of the McKinsey kind. You will not get the public sector to reduce its workforce without some input and experience from the private sector. The Government ought to add that to their agenda. I repeat that we need a coherent, clear plan for economic growth. We have not yet got it.