The UK’s Demographic Future

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

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[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

That this House takes note of the Common Good Foundation and Centre for Policy Studies report Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, published in July 2025, and of the implications of projected population growth for the UK’s demographic future.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)]

In introducing this debate, I give all best wishes to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, for his valedictory speech.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con) (Valedictory Speech)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her good wishes; I hope she will still feel the same at the end of my speech.

The issue of population change and its consequences has long been an interest of mine, because I believe that successive Governments have failed to give the topic sufficient strategic analysis and attention. In a country where we appear to want to plan for almost everything, we conspicuously fail to plan for one of the essential building blocks of our society: the number of people living in this country.

Over the past 10 years, I have published three reports trying to analyse this issue in as transparent and evidence-based a way as I could manage. The report before your Lordships’ House today is the third of them and provides an appropriate bookend to my time here. I put on record my sincere thanks to the Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms—the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy—and my own Chief Whip, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, for enabling the scheduling of this debate.

I have not so far had the pleasure of debating with the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson. I hope she will forgive me for saying that as this is a valedictory debate, I hope that when she comes to reply she will not confine herself to a speaking note that might just say, “We inherited a broken system from the party opposite; give us three years and we will have fixed it”. I hope that she will instead spend some time genuinely considering the issues and concerns that I and others will raise.

We all know that this issue is not susceptible to piecemeal, short-term solutions, which are often produced to meet a particular crisis. By contrast, it requires careful strategic analysis conducted in a transparent, evidence-based way, which should lead to discussions in Parliament. This, in turn, will reassure the many concerned members of our population. In short, we need to create space for what can best be described as the wisdom of the crowd to make itself felt, and so marginalise the unrealistic and often unpleasant views at either end of the spectrum.

The impacts of demographic change are very long term. In the world of demography, yesterday is 2000 and so we are today living with the consequences of the decisions made by the Blair Government in the early 2000s. Similarly, tomorrow will be 2045, when our successors will have to assess the results of what was called the Boris wave, when they have become fully apparent. That is why my report is called Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.

Since this is a topic where every word counts, let me define two of them. First, the “settled population” means people who have a legal right to be in the UK and expect to spend all, or substantially all, of the rest of their lives here. It is not, as some will immediately allege, another word for “white”, since close to 20% of the UK’s population is now made up of minority communities, many of whom are not white. But whatever their colour, this is a group that polling shows has a high level of concern that their interests and the interests of their children are being overlooked and too often sacrificed to short-term political expediency.

Secondly, the word “immigrant” has become a loaded term, as in, “I’m an immigrant and I’m proud”, as opposed to, “Those immigrants down the road”—not so proud. So I prefer to use the phrase “new arrivals”. Of course, I understand and appreciate the moral imperative that drives those new arrivals, many of whom have been here a long time and have benefited from a life in the UK, to be concerned about our trying to close the door on those seeking to follow them. While I recognise that moral imperative, it is unarguable that numbers and scale matter. However sensitive and painful it is, the key point of numbers has to be recognised and taken into account in our discussions.

That takes us to the heart of the demographic challenge we face. As a result of a series of events from which none of the major political parties can escape responsibility—some being deliberate policy decisions and others being forced on us by outside events, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine—over the 30 years since 1995 the population of this country has risen from 58 million to 69.5 million, an increase of 20% or about 11.5 million people. What do 11.5 million people look like? The population of Greater Manchester is 2.8 million, so we have added over four Manchesters in that time.

Drilling into the issue of housing, since we live 2.4 people per dwelling, we have to have built 4.8 million homes to house these new arrivals before we tackle any of the shortages of housing for our settled population. If noble Lords want a snapshot of how the country is changing, 31% of all children born in this country last year were born to mothers who were not born here; 25 years ago, that figure was 10% or 11%.

Where do we go from here, and what does the future look like? The ONS suggests that, between now and 2036, we will have a 10% increase in our population—that is, 6.6 million people. The growth is then expected to slow over the period to 2045. But by 2045, we will have 76 to 77 million people, and we will have overtaken Germany as the most populous country in Europe.

Where will these people have come from? Of course, there is the natural increase—the excess of births over deaths. Leaving that aside, because of the level of press publicity, the man in the street will likely point to refugees and asylum seekers. In this, he would be wrong, because, historically, the main components have come from two sources we have always controlled. First, UK higher education has built a business model based on recruiting an increasing number of foreign students, of whom 30% to 40% morph into our workforce at the end of their studies. Secondly, British industry uses overseas recruitment—the Migration Advisory Committee described it as the “default option”—and has ruthlessly exploited the shortage occupation list, which enables you to recruit from overseas with lower wages. As I speak, there are 61 categories on that shortage occupation list. Many will be familiar, but not all—how many Members of your Lordships’ House realise that we have a shortage of dancers and choreographers?

It is worth noting also that our demographic challenge is made more acute by the fact of our being a relatively small island. For example, France has 120 people per square kilometre. The UK has 279, which is more than double. England has 438, so it is nearly four times as densely populated as France.

For my third report, I concluded that, to increase credibility, I should not write alone. I was lucky to get support from the Common Good Foundation and the Centre for Policy Studies, respectively, a centre-left and a centre-right think tank, to support me. I asked a number of experts in the world of demography to discuss the demographic challenge as seen through their eyes. It is, of course, impossible to summarise nine detailed chapters in this debate. But the overall conclusion of them all was that, as a country, we have not been taking a sufficiently coherent strategic approach to this particular problem.

Further, since this demographic challenge is one faced by all countries, I made contact with three countries overseas: the Netherlands; Japan, which is facing the opposite problem of a rapidly declining population; and Denmark, which has now become the poster boy for immigration policy.

Many interesting ideas emerged. Denmark, perhaps slightly sadly, enforces very strict conditions on new arrivals and moves them on if they are not complied with. Rather depressingly, when I asked the Danish, where those people go to, they said that they nearly all go to the UK, because the word on the street is that, once you get to the UK, no one will check anything and you are free to do what you like.

I believed that there was interest among the public, so I asked YouGov to do some polling. The results were that 70% thought that the Government have no plan to manage population growth, and 56% support the idea of creating some official body. An important message for the three parties in your Lordships’ House is that only 10% thought that the Labour Party had the best answers, only 8% thought that the Conservative Party had the best answers and only 5% thought that the Liberal Democrats had the best answers. By contrast, 22% supported Reform.

So, what can be done? We have to have the courage to recognise that the irrevocable nature of demographic change means that departmentally based solutions will never provide a coherent response. We have to cut through what I call the “firewalls”, which suggest that the issues raised by demographic change are not appropriate subjects for discussion. We have to call out cases where any proper discussion is closed down as a result of what Dame Sara Khan called in her government-commissioned review on social cohesion, “freedom-restricting harassment”. Thus, as an example, while it is perfectly acceptable to discuss policies to help achieve net zero, it is not acceptable to suggest that adding 6 million people to this country might impede achieving that objective.

There is a strong argument for creating a new strategic body to be called the office for demographic change, or perhaps the office for population sustainability, which would subsume within it the existing Migration Advisory Committee. It would be tasked with learning from the past to collect evidence about and analyse the consequences of past policies, looking to the future impacts of likely population changes—economic, environmental, ecological and societal—and, finally, undertaking research into demographic developments and learn from best practice around the world. It would not, however, be a policy-making body. This new authority would be a stand-alone body but would report to the Cabinet Office. It would report, at least annually, to Parliament.

The new body would help create conditions for a broader, better and more balanced discussion about demography. For example, is there a maximum level of annual population increase we can absorb without prejudicing the position of our settled population? What can be done to improve the data sources, which are clearly inadequate? Is there an argument for seeking to increase the birth rate among our existing population? And so on.

To conclude, Governments may choose to continue to muddle along, but recent events have shown a rising public temperature, and these pressures seem set to increase. It is not just individual events such as those at Crowborough or Epping but about the public mood. So the issue seems set to become a major driver of political change. Writing in the Times on 15 September, Trevor Phillips’ article was headlined, “Dismiss Unite the Kingdom march at your peril”, and was subtitled:

“Calling this movement the product of extremist rabble-rousers will no longer do. Mainstream politicians must wake up”.


Successive Governments have tried ignoring the problem, insinuating that those who are concerned about it are closet racists, suggesting that nothing can be done about it, and that if only everyone would stop talking about it the problem would go away, or, finally, making aspirational statements with no measurable follow-through.

The mainstream parties here in your Lordships’ House now need to step up with a comprehensive, measurable response to public concerns. My report suggests one such approach. But if we fail to respond, events will likely become increasingly ugly as wilder spirits make the running. I can think of no more pressing internal threat to the long-term prosperity and harmony of the society of this country than our future population levels. So I am proud and pleased to be able to hold my valedictory debate on this topic, and I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a long and very interesting debate, and I am extremely grateful to everybody who has contributed. To the people who have said very nice things about me, thank you very much; it is not deserved but it is very kind.

It was encouraging that there were lots of suggestions about how the ODC concept could be improved and made more appropriate. I am really interested in getting this conversation going so that we can get something important into the public consciousness: that we are aware of and are tackling this problem head-on. The only problem I have is with people who say there is not a problem, because there clearly is a problem and we need to face up to it.

I will just pick up a couple of points because I am aware that we have been here for some time. I thank my fellow long marchers, the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, who has been on this for a long time, my noble friend Lord Horam and the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, from whom I was hoping to hear but I know it went sideways. I had not realised that we had a hidden long marcher in the shape of the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, who has been at it for 53 years, apparently, which is very good, so I ask him to become an honorary long marcher with us.

It is important to think carefully about how this is impacting across the piece. My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe raised the impact on older people: 30% of people aged over 50 are unemployed. Can that be a good and useful way for us, as a society, to behave?

I thought that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, for the first time from those Benches, said something about which I thought “hello”. It was a question about how many people we can absorb. It was a really important and courageous point to have made because, in the past, people have said we should have safe and legal routes without ever saying where they are coming from and how many there are going to be. I really appreciate and support what the right reverend Prelate said.

My roommate, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, has kept me on the straight and narrow. Your Lordships have seen his legal expertise, which enables him to fillet a problem in no time at all.

Finally, my noble friend Lord Blencathra is a worthy guerrilla fighter, but, unfortunately, the guerillas are heading back to the hills, because we could not get colleagues in the Commons to pick up the torch and run with it. The background is that the Executive are taking part at the expense of the legislature, and they are still doing it. When we had our debates on those reports, the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury—who is a great friend—used to nod enthusiastically from the opposite Benches about how we had to do something about it. Now that he is on the Government’s side, somehow, it is “Oh dear, I’m not sure we can quite do it that way”. There is a battle to be fought, but it has to be done from the Back Benches and it has to include the Commons, without which the first thing the Government will say is that unelected Lords are trying to teach the elected Commons how to do its work. It is game over once that is said; it is a dog whistle that always resonates.

I thank everybody who has participated and will finish with one minute of a very personal nature. When I was younger, I went to a business school in America. People used to come to talk to us who were not businessmen to tell us something about the world outside business. We had a concert pianist once and so on. On one occasion, we had an agronomist talking about soil management and how it was key to maintaining outputs. He introduced us to a man called George Washington Carver, who was the first Afro-American agronomist who studied in the Mississippi Delta. He found that sharecroppers trying to scrape a living out of cotton-growing had not realised that, if they grew cotton out of the same soil all the time, it would be depleted; you need break crops, such as sweet potatoes and peanuts. But he was not just an agronomist; he was a philosopher. On that day, 60 years ago, we were told what his philosophy was, which I will use as my parting words. These are Mr Carver’s words:

“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday … you will have been all of these”.


With that, I take my leave.

Motion agreed.