The UK’s Demographic Future

Debate between Lord Horam and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

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.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Horam and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 30th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

This is about the resident labour market test and I find it quite astonishing, like my noble friends who have spoken to the amendment, that this should be removed at the point when we are entering a period of huge unemployment, as predicted by the Chancellor in his Statement only a few days ago. It is completely astonishing that that should be the case at the moment.

It is also amazing that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has so far not supported such an amendment: it beggars belief, frankly, that the Labour Party spokesman is willing to give this up in such circumstances. I hate to attack—rather, argue—with the noble Lord but he did take me on in our last debate. I will not take long over this but he did ask, “Who is this think tank, Onward?” It is a perfectly reputable, charitable think tank. The point it was making, as am I, is that Australia has had a cap on immigration for years. We have imported half the Australian points-based system but are refusing to import the rest, which is the cap. They say in Australia, “no cap, no control”, and that is why they have a cap.

It is the same in Canada, where they have the same system and it is debated in Parliament. It is all perfectly transparent and its Parliament has a role. It is the same in New Zealand. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, also said that he was worried about the economy, but Australia and Canada have successful economies and caps on immigration; New Zealand has a successful economy. They are all rather more successful than we are, in many respects. I advise the noble Lord, as a true friend—we served together on the Electoral Commission and I really appreciate him as a stalwart Labour man—to think again about this and reposition his party. Believe you me, if the Labour Party does not reposition itself on immigration, I can tell him, it is in real trouble.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment, as the House would expect, but before I get there, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, threw down a challenge and I had better get to that first. I am pleased to be able to tell him that I paid for every single bit of that pamphlet. Every single envelope, stamp, and bit of printing was paid for by me and I am happy to share the receipts and information with him if he wishes. The only time that I used any of the facilities of the House was to distribute the pamphlet, a copy of which went to every Member of your Lordships’ House and every Member of the House of Commons.

I support the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Green, and my noble friends Lady Neville-Rolfe and Lord Horam. I do not want to go over all that again now. In my remarks on Amendment 6, which we have just dealt with, I explained how employers have become addicted to cheap labour from overseas because it is in their commercial interests to do so. As a result, we have become thoughtless and careless about the employment opportunities for our settled population. We have young people locked into zero-hours contracts. We have members of minority communities locked into low-paid, low-prospect jobs. Increasingly, and really seriously because they are a larger part of our population, the over-50s find it hard to get jobs even as we raise the retirement age. A 2018 House of Commons report revealed that 1 million people over 50 would like to work or work more; 14% of 50 year-olds are out of work and 35% of 60 year-olds are out of work. Removing the resident labour market test opens them up to an even greater degree of unemployment risk.

As many noble Lords have said, as the impact of the pandemic makes itself felt, all these problems will get worse. How do we protect and look after our settled population in these circumstances, particularly since these same economic pressures will make employers ever keener to game the system and access cheaper labour from overseas? The first line of protection would have been a cap but we are not going to have it because my noble friend the Minister has told us so. This amendment is a second line of protection, as explained by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, since the resident labour market test prevents the grosser excesses of undercutting wages by recruiting from overseas.

I apologise to the House for not having been present in Committee, but I have read the debates and, following a point made by my noble friend Lord Horam, I was really astonished by a comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, at col. 843 of Hansard, about the trade unions. Why every union at the Trades Union Congress is not down here supporting this amendment as a way of helping and protecting the working man they seek to represent, absolutely astonishes me. Now, that is for the party opposite to sort out.

The strains that our society will face do not just come from the pandemic. They will come also from the impact of the fourth industrial revolution—from artificial intelligence and robotics, not often mentioned in our debate so far. In those circumstances, policies that will likely result in close to 1,200 people arriving on an average day cannot be sensible.

A key determinant of a person’s self-confidence and sense of self-worth is, undoubtedly, purposeful and secure work. Professor David Blanchflower said in his book Not Working, published last year:

“Unemployment hurts and it hurts a lot.”


The amendment, if the Government accepted it, would help reduce but, sadly, not eliminate that level of hurt, which is why I support it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Horam (Con)]

The contributions to this debate are getting shorter and shorter, and I intend to adhere to that pattern. The simple point I want to make is that this is part of a loosening of the arrangements—I would not call them controls—which were put in place at the beginning of this year and then amplified in July. Of course, since then we have had the coronavirus pandemic. We have the prospect now of an additional two million unemployed, and young people coming into the job market face a very bleak situation. These are not normal times.

The Treasury has responded rapidly and comprehensively to this situation with a major package earlier in the year and the less pronounced package of the last 10 days. What I hope and expect is that the Home Office reacts similarly and recalibrates the ideas it had before the world changed when the coronavirus set in. We really do need it to respond. I do not believe that the Home Office is unfit for purpose, as was once said by a Labour Minister. It has many able civil servants who are perfectly capable of responding to a changing situation, but they need to show it now; otherwise, people will lose faith in the Government.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, one of the weaknesses of the whole Bill is the extent to which the detailed implications are contained in regulations which are only now beginning to emerge. Every Member of your Lordships’ House will be aware that the scrutiny of regulations is much less effective than that of primary legislation; the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, raised that issue in the debate on one of the previous amendments. I should perhaps, just for the record, declare that I am the chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, but I am speaking for myself, not for the committee.

As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, the regulations are unamendable, so the House is left with what I call the “nuclear option” of complete rejection. Unsurprisingly, the House has veered away from that course of action, except on the rarest of occasions. That is one of the reasons why I support the noble Lord, Lord Green, in this case, because he is actually trying to wrest back a bit of control by having some more specific plans built into the Bill. They are necessary for the reasons that he, and indeed my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, laid out. In its way, this amendment is the third and last line of protection in regulating the extent to which the employment opportunities of our settled population can be undermined.

We already know that there is no cap and that we will have no resident labour market test. Therefore, if my noble friend the Minister refuses to accept this amendment—and I fear that if I could glance over her shoulder at her speaking notes, I would see that she might just be going to do that—it is extremely likely that our future levels of immigration will continue, probably in excess of a quarter of a million each year. It may be slightly below what we have now, at 320,000, but it will be well over a quarter of a million each year.

In Committee I chided the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, who has been coming back at me this afternoon, when he refused to back my proposal to establish an office for demographic change, which was a planned idea, independent and transparent, to look at the complexities of these issues in the round—environmental, ecological, societal. It is easy to laugh—the noble Lord is already grinning—but the reality is that there are serious issues around water, land quality and species loss which are all related to how our population is growing. They are not entirely due to it, but they are very largely related.

I said to the noble Lord, I hope, gently, because I do not want to upset him—he is a sensitive soul—that his party had to decide where it stood on demographic growth, of which immigration is a part, because it is an issue that really resonates in the country. We have heard the percentages; 60% to 70% of people are concerned about it. In particular, his party must decide where it stands, or all the possibilities of recovering the red wall, now blue wall, seats will be vanishingly small.

However, it is perfectly fair to say that this is not without dangers for my party. We will face quite significant challenges. If those of us who are concerned about what happens if our population grows by 6 million or 8 million are right, and the package of policies before us continues to allow rapid growth—it is not about whether they are foreigners, black or white, or what their colour is; it is about the number of people—we will have two big challenges. First, a lot of the people who turned the red wall seats into blue wall seats did so because we promised a sustained reduction in the level of immigration. If we do not deliver that, they will feel betrayed and let down.

In parallel with that, every year we will have to build 100,000 houses to accommodate the quarter of a million people likely to arrive. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, says that they pay more in tax than they draw in benefits, but there is a much more complicated issue, with which I will not bore the House this evening, about the capital investment to maintain and extend our roads and structures. They are not covered just by taxes; a much bigger level of capital expenditure is required. He and I can discuss this over a socially distanced cup of coffee, but I will not bore the House with it now.

We will build 100,000 houses a year, and they will be built in our shire counties. These people will not be delighted about it. We know that; housebuilding is intensely unpopular. The coming storm about the planning algorithm, which is now doing the rounds, is just the beginnings of the trouble there will be if we continue down this road. My noble friends Lord Horam and Lady Neville-Rolfe are right. The Government are wrong in believing they have the situation under control.

My noble friend the Minister nobly and loyally marches to the beat of the Home Office drum, which essentially says, “Don’t worry; it will be all right on the night”. I wish I shared the department’s confidence.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Horam and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 8th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, if my noble friend has ever studied the history of the most successful political party in Britain, as I am sure he has—I refer, of course, to the Conservative Party—he will know very well that for many periods in its long history it was supported financially by the brewers. The brewing industry played a very large part in supporting the Conservative Party in times gone by. They obtained some recompense for that support. My noble friend will recall that there was a period in history when the peerage was known as the “Beerage” because of the amount of compensation received by individuals who had supported the Conservative Party. Those people would turn in their grave if they thought that the Conservative Party of modern times was in any way against public houses which, as has been said eloquently by many noble Lords and noble Baronesses, perform an important role in not only our urban but our rural life.

I am familiar with a pub in the West End of London off the Edgware Road which dedicated itself to members of the Royal Air Force during the war and had pictures of all the great names from The Few, and so forth. The chap who ran the pub had a handlebar moustache; the pub was an object of great interest to tourists and others and was a great business. However, that pub has gone because the value of the property as a residential building was much greater than it was as a pub. Frankly, that is a tragedy for the tourist industry and for London. The closure of pubs affects the personality of our country not only in London but also in rural areas. I plead with my noble friend as a Conservative Peer to look at this issue most sympathetically. I hope that he will do so when it comes back on Report.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I have not participated in proceedings on the Bill before, so I apologise to the Committee for coming late in the day. In the light of what I am going to say, I also owe an apology to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and other noble Lords who have put their names to the amendments in this group as I am going to urge my noble friend to resist them. They are perfectly well meaning, but they are the statutory equivalent of trying to make water flow uphill. They can only inhibit, or slow, pub closures. The brutal truth is that there are too many pubs for modern Britain, too often they are in the wrong place and the whole sector is insufficiently profitable. In cases on the margin, where they could, perhaps, be profitable under other ownership, the opportunity to list as an ACV exists, as several noble Lords have said. Pubs are perfectly adequately protected.

This is an issue which arouses strong emotions. Until February 2014—more than three years ago, and therefore outside the time during which I have to declare a past interest—I was a non-executive director of a major integrated brewery and pub operator. It had five breweries from Cockermouth in Cumbria down to Ringwood in Hampshire and operated more than 2,000 pubs. Some were managed—there was an employee running the pub—and some had tenants and were tied, as was the case in those days. It is often overlooked, but that is a very easy way for people to set up their own business because you have a business offered to you, which you can operate, and you can begin straightaway without having to put up much, if any, capital. While under the old system, you had to buy your beer and soft drinks from the owner, food was down to you. I declare that interest because it is important as this is an issue which arouses strong emotions. The last time we got into this discussion, which was last summer, I managed to obtain a starring role in Private Eye as a result of CAMRA’s intervention. My speech was described as “the high point in an otherwise undistinguished political career”, which I thought was fair dues. So are you listening, Private Eye, as I want to get that on the record?

Why does this issue arouse such strong emotions? The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, touched on it. It is because of how people view a community. A community has three aspects that people think are important. They think there should be a shop or post office, some place of worship—a church—and a pub. They do not necessarily want to use them a lot. They will go to the shop or the post office when they have forgotten to buy bread and milk at Tesco. They will not go to church very often. They will go at Christmas and Easter, if they are Christians. They may want to get married there, they may want to have their children christened there and to be buried there—hatches, matches and dispatches—but they will not go much apart from that. They will go to the pub occasionally, but not regularly. The reality is that if you do not use it, you lose it. Most of the pubs that are under pressure are not attracting sufficient custom to be a profitable operation, but because of what is in people’s view of a community, if any of those three pillars is going to close down, people will get exceptionally excited about it and believe that somehow, something must be done—hence the emergence of the ACV procedures.

The second reason people feel so strongly about it is the belief which CAMRA has assiduously fostered—I pay tribute to its campaigning capability because it has been the most enormously successful pressure group—that somewhere in this operation there is a pot of money, that someone is making a lot of money somewhere, and if only it got down to the pub and the pub owner all would be right and the pubs would be happy and we would be in the sunlit uplands once again. The reality is that the sector is under enormous economic and societal pressures. There is not a lot of money in the sector and the idea that somehow pub owners or brewers are making huge profits at the expense of landlords does not tie in with reality. The reality is very different. It is a sector under stupendous strain—and I shall give the Committee three or four quick reasons for that. First, there is exceptionally cheap supermarket alcohol. If noble Lords go to a supermarket on the weekend before a bank holiday weekend, when things are on offer, they can probably buy lager for 60p or 70p a pint. If they go to a pub, they will pay £3 for it. So a lot of people are increasingly buying alcohol in the supermarket and drinking it at home.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Horam and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Wednesday 15th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, after the fireworks, we return to the meat and potatoes. This amendment returns us to an issue we discussed in Committee: how to ensure that the work of the two relevant regulators—the Electoral Commission and the Charity Commission—is truly joined up.

As I explained in Committee, both commissions have produced guidance. Both sets are clearly written and well signposted but they are not yet joined up. As I also explained, CC9—the Charity Commission guidance—is 35 pages long. There is a section titled “Campaigning: getting it right”, in which the Electoral Commission’s role and purpose are not mentioned at all, although the Advertising Standards Authority is. Meanwhile, in the Electoral Commission’s guidance, no reference is made to charity law; it confines itself to the two tests of the purpose test and the publicity test.

Of course, as both commissions have pointed out to me—and, indeed, in guidance to Members of your Lordships’ House—both have their individual, separate procedures for updating their guidance from time to time as the months go by. Therefore, any and all joining up has to be done by the individual charity and this is quite a challenge for a charity, especially smaller ones with limited financial and operational resources. Indeed, there must be, as some noble Lords have said, a real danger that many smaller charities will merely throw up their hands in horror and give up.

I explained to my noble and learned friend that without some ministerial pressure I was convinced that the two organisations would likely continue to plough their own individual furrows. My noble and learned friend gave the Committee some pretty honeyed words, I thought, when he said:

“I have no doubt that today’s debate, and the amendments tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, and by my noble friend will have reinforced that message … I hope that the fact that the Electoral Commission and the Charity Commission have indicated an awareness of the need for clear and comprehensive guidance is of some reassurance to the Committee. However, the Government are also keen to reassure campaigners and charities that the provisions of the Bill and the PPERA rules will, and should, be clearly communicated to them. It is our view that the Electoral Commission should produce guidance in consultation with the Charity Commission, and provide specific consideration of charities”.—[Official Report, 18/12/13; cols. 1348-9.]

However, he could not quite bring himself to commit specifically to joining up the two sets of guidance. I have retabled this amendment tonight because I remain convinced that without this statutory pressure the two regulatory silos will remain intact.

The two commissions were very kind and courteous and they agreed to meet to discuss how to address this issue. Following that meeting, I have retabled my Committee stage amendments, but I have made two significant wording changes. I have replaced the phrase that I originally used, “joint guidance”, with the phrase, “co-ordinated guidance” and replaced “Commission” with “Commissions”. It was explained to me, of course, that the Charity Commission does not regulate charities in Scotland and Northern Ireland. OSCR, the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, and a new body recently set up in Northern Ireland will do that. By contrast, of course, the Electoral Commission regulates the whole of the United Kingdom.

So the vision I have and the vision I shared with them of co-ordinated guidance, which we discussed and they felt was a possibility, was for a homepage, prepared and signed up by the commissions, with links to policy issues or subjects that might be of more specific and important concern. This will offer two great advantages. The first is simplicity. Any charity of any size has just one place to go to look for guidance on this quite complex topic. We know it is complex because of the discussions we have been having over these past few hours. The second advantage is consistency. No regulator can introduce new policies or approaches without the other regulatory bodies knowing about it and being able to have their own specialist input. This avoids charities being caught in the crossfire of the regulators acting independently and quickly—maybe too hastily—in the heat of an election campaign.

To conclude, this amendment has, at least in principle, the support of the Electoral Commission and the Charity Commission. It certainly has the support of the NCVO and the commission of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. I believe that it will be warmly welcomed by the sector as it grapples with the undoubted challenges of the Bill, so I hope that on this occasion my noble and learned friend can go further than honeyed words and accept this amendment. I beg to move.

[Lord Horam]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, certainly raises a very important point, which I am glad we are discussing, even though it is rather a late hour to do so. We should have some reassurance from the horse’s mouth: he mentioned that the Government have made various points, he has made various points and he has talked to the Charity Commission—presumably the Charity Commission for England and Wales—and the Electoral Commission. However, I remind the House and read into the record that our briefing from the Electoral Commission says specifically, under the heading, “A joint introductory guide for charities”:

“We are committed to working with the UK’s three charity regulators”—

that is, the one for England and Wales, the one for Scotland and the one for Northern Ireland—

“to ensure that charities have clear and reliable guidance about how to comply with the rules. The Electoral Commission and Charity Commission for England and Wales will produce a joint introductory guide for charities that need to understand if their activities are covered by non-party campaigning rules”.

It goes on to make various sensible points about testing its guidance, about taking campaigners’ views into account and about supporting and advising campaigners. That is all part of a process of being available in a sensible and practical way to charities and to campaigners who are not charities—which is equally important.

Given that the Electoral Commission and the Charity Commission are, I believe, working along the same lines and intend to produce joint guidance for charities and non-charity campaigners, and given the clear commitments being made, I think that it would be unnecessary to put this provision in the Bill. Neither the Charity Commission nor the Electoral Commission has the slightest doubt that it has to produce something sensible in this area. As a result of the amendments that have now been made by my noble and learned friend, there is time to do that before September, before the new arrangements kick in. While I support the spirit of my noble friend’s amendment, I think that it is unnecessary in the light of the clear commitments which have been made.