The UK’s Demographic Future

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, it is an honour and a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbott, opening this debate, and I add my admiration for his work over the years. Although in those years when I was a party-political politician we were “on the other side” in many ways, I was a West Midlands politician, so I would have come across a great many of the people who have played a role in his political life.

I am particularly glad that we are having this debate, because it is on a subject which is so important but which, for reasons I do not entirely understand, we are extremely reluctant to debate. The noble Lord started by hinting at some of the problems we appear to be having. I sometimes wonder whether it goes back to the 1970s, when you had countries such as China and India trying to address this, either with a one-child policy or in India a particularly aggressive population control policy; perhaps that started our shying away from this as a subject which we should not address. However, we would be wrong to do so, and for a number of reasons.

The aspect I want to focus on, which is in the report, is national security. In the report Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, the chapter by Professor Michael Clarke is headed, “‘Ask not what your country can do for you’—The implications for national security of demographic change”. Very accurately and importantly, he focuses on what is national cohesion. He takes us through the various arguments but essentially says:

“The UK’s demographic development and the way it interprets its own deep and erstwhile pluralism can be either a strength or a weakness in these circumstances – on the one hand, a source of deeper resilience; on the other, a series of fault-lines capable of exploitation by the country’s adversaries”.


It is this danger that could be a strength; we must not allow it to become a weakness by not addressing some of the issues and having some open discussions. Professor Clarke essentially concludes that, as long as we do not face these,

“internal and external security challenges … our demographic evolution will be addressed largely through strategies merely of hope, rather than anything more precise, or new approaches based on better knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon”.

So I think he identifies the things which we need to look at if resilience, national defence and national security play into the debate about demography.

In a sense, the Government have acknowledged that that is an issue. If we go back to the strategic defence review from 2025, we see that it includes “home defence and resilience” and explicitly calls for a “whole-of-society approach”. In that whole-of-society approach, it calls on the Government to “Build national resilience” and “Increase national warfighting readiness”. It makes it clear that:

“The Government must promote unity of effort across society, leading a national conversation to raise public awareness of the threats to the UK, how Defence deters and protects against them, and why Defence requires support to strengthen the nation’s resilience”.


It states what ought to be obvious but is often forgotten:

“The connection between the UK Armed Forces and wider society is the longstanding and necessary foundation for the defence of the country”.


All that requires cohesion of society and for that to happen requires certain other elements. This may be the moment to declare that I am an honorary captain in the Royal Navy’s reserve force. On top of that, I am what would be called an immigrant; I came here in the early 1970s.

I would challenge the report when it says that we must not stop thinking about tomorrow, as we probably have not even started to think about tomorrow. If I were to open today’s newspapers or listen to the news, it would ask, “Will residential doctors strike again or is the offer to provide extra places for early-career doctors sufficient?” As the noble Lord reminded us, in demographic terms, 2000 is yesterday. I am now talking about something called yesterday, because it was 25 years ago when we published the Black Country strategy. It identified the needs of the region in terms of doctors. It made connections between doctors’ and nurses’ propensity to remain in the region in which they had trained. It therefore said that, because the region required those extra doctors, who require three, seven or 15 years to be fully trained, Birmingham University required 100 extra places. There was logic in that approach: it took the regional needs and its demography to decide what should happen, so it is not that we do not know how to do it but that, somehow, curiously, we seem to keep forgetting and pull back from the decisions that we have made, which at one stage were long term. When the places at Birmingham University medical school were cut, I literally could not find out who had made that decision. We are seeing the consequences of that in 2025.

We are talking about an ageing population, pension contributions, inheritance tax and, as the noble Lord said, higher education. The system has ended up creating an extraordinary dependency on international students for the funding of our higher education students without having thought through the consequences.

I will not go on with those examples, but I am always taken back to 2008, when Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth went to the London Stock Exchange in the wake of the financial crisis. In essence, she said to them, “Why did nobody notice this? Why did nobody see this coming?” Their answer, roughly speaking, was that at every stage someone was relying on somebody else and everybody thought that they were doing the right thing individually. What they did not do was see either how these individual decisions were hanging together or the consequences of a very complex system.

I fear that with a lot of these debates. I raised this problem with a Minister recently, who looked at me rather surprised and said, “Gisela, the facts are known”. I felt like saying, “Yes, I know the facts are known, but what are we doing with them?” A lot of the facts in this report are known, but we need to pull them together so that they become a meaningful basis for future decision-making.

The noble Lord mentioned an office for demographic change. I can see the logic of that but would like to add an extra dimension because this is a report by the Common Good Foundation and it would therefore be wrong of me not to mention that in all this is a need for identity, community and belonging. These things are too easily overlooked; whether cohesion or resilience, it is a feeling of belonging to a community and having a sense of identity. That is why the national debate should also have a very local dimension.

I would not hasten to ever try to go back to Victorian values, but there is one Victorian value that I would like to recommend to the House: the civic audacity of Joe Chamberlain in Birmingham. It was a kind of confidence in place, where cities would compete with one another to be better. Their competition was not based on having to fight for a central pot of money which was coming out of Whitehall, because that does not lead to good decision-making. Similarly, on the debate on demography, we need national figures, but we also need some very granular regional figures and data which take account of the needs of those communities. I think they will be best met by those local communities themselves; they have to take ownership of those.

This whole-of-society approach, together with a bit of civic audacity, will allow us to have a national view but regional implementation, or we will not be able to face the problems coming our way, whether those are islands and pockets of ageing populations or, in other areas, a shortage of schools or medical facilities. We can see them coming, and we can plan, but only if we are willing to face up to it, have the data and implement it in a much more granular way than we do at the moment. If we do not start to think about the future, it is going to happen whether we like it or not, and we cannot go on just being surprised by things.