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

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

Three-minute speeches require one to cut corners, which is always a dangerous thing to do and no more dangerous than when on is talking about immigration, an area where every phrase is liable to misinterpretation.

In the mid-1990s, before the Blair Government opened the gates to and encouraged large-scale immigration, the population of the country was 58.1 million. It is now 66.4 million, some 8 million higher. The ONS projection for the numbers for 2040 is another 6 million on top of that. It means that, in half a century, we will have added a quarter to our population. Today, as I speak, the population is going up by just under 1,100 a day, or just under 400,000 a year, with a third, roughly, from the natural increase—the excess of births over deaths—and roughly two-thirds from immigration.

Members of your Lordships’ House may regard all this with equanimity, but let me tell them that, outside, our fellow citizens do not regard it with equanimity; they are very concerned about it indeed. Recent polling says that no fewer than 74% of those polled believe the Government should introduce policies to deal with the challenges of rapid population growth. Of course, it is important, as my noble friend Lord Lilley said, not to demonise new arrivals; they bring a degree of economic and cultural dynamic without which we would be a much poorer country. But it is about scale, and it is important to recognise that, under the system of the past few years, there have been losers.

Who are the losers? They are the poorest in our society, as the wages for the bottom decile are now 12% lower in real terms than they were in 2008; they are older people, as it is increasingly difficult for people over 50 to get a job, and at a time when we are raising the retirement age from 65 to 68. Another loser is the British economy, whose Achilles heel is a poor productivity record, which is linked to the free availability of labour, meaning that no investment has been made in machinery; it is the developing world, because we, along with the rest of western society seem to see no moral fault in draining the developing world of its scarce trained resources. Lastly, it is our environment and ecology, because of the damage caused by rapid population growth.

In this Bill, we will be resetting the dial on this critical issue. In Committee, I will want to probe my noble friend on the Front Bench to reassure us, first, that those who have lost out in the years so far will not lose out in the next set of years and, secondly, that proper weight will be given to the quality of aspects of population growth, since they will have such an important and vital consequence for the country we leave our children and grandchildren.