Land Use in England Committee Report

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I am tail-end Charlie and also an interloper, so I need to begin by drawing the House’s attention to my entry on the register. I congratulate the committee, as others have, on producing such a clear and informative report and on having done so without losing itself in impenetrable jargon and the alphabet soup referred to by the noble Earl, Lord Devon. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, on his magisterial introduction.

If I had been a member of the committee, I would have been pretty disappointed with the Government’s response to the central recommendation to create a land use commission. I found the case pretty strongly made. For me, the coup de grâce was given in paragraph 225, which lists the five separate government departments that will have responsibility in this area.

Governments, constrained by the demands of the five-year electoral cycle, find it awfully hard to enter into the long-term commitments that provide the bedrock on which so much of our long-term planning depends. In a previous life, I chaired another committee of your Lordships’ House on citizenship and civic engagement. The House will understand from its title that it was cross-departmental and dealt with a very long tail. We learned some lessons from that, because the then Government were also reluctant to consider a co-ordinating body. We discovered two particular problems, which I offer now to my noble friend the Minister on the Front Bench and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, as chairman of the committee. The first is what we call “initiativitis”. Ministers would arrive keen to do a job and to show that they were doing something quickly, so they would set a hare running. Then, because it takes time for that hare to prove that it is worth having or not, by the time it was so proved or not proved, the Minister was gone—up or down the greasy ministerial pole—and, as a result, the initiative then mouldered in decent obscurity.

Linked to this was the absence that we found of any institutional memory—some body, somewhere, responsible for learning from and sharing success and failure, for co-ordinating different policies in different departments and along the way ensuring value for money for the taxpayer. I hope that the Minister can find a way to think further about that issue.

I have two points to make about the report itself. On the first, my fox was largely shot by my noble friend Lord Lucas, because he talked about the issue of water. I was disappointed that chapter 2 did not refer to water security but dealt only with food security, as water security is, in my view, an even more important point. The Environment Agency will tell us that by 2075 we will have run out of water in London and the south-east. We may be able to move water around the country, using our canal network, as has been talked about, but if we are going to build reservoirs, there will be a very substantial use of space, and it would have been helpful if the committee had spent a moment or two on that issue.

My second and absolutely fundamental issue—the elephant in the room for me—is people. It is our population, the likely rate of growth and the consequent impact, good or bad, including particularly on the many areas that are the subject of this report. I shall give noble Lords a couple of numbers. In the past 25 years, since 1997, our population has increased every year by 365,000 people, of which 100,000 is the natural increase and about 250,000 or 275,000 are arrivals from overseas. That means that our population has, over the period, increased by 9.2 million people. What do 9.2 million people look like? They look like three cities the size of Greater Manchester, which has a population of about 2.8 million or 2.9 million.

Since we are talking about a committee report on land use, I should mention that Greater Manchester has an area of about 1,276 square kilometres—so we have three of those, which is going to be about 3,800 square kilometres, which in turn is 1.5 times the size of Berkshire, which has an area of about 2,400 or 2,500 square kilometres. So over the past 25 years, we are likely to have built over an area 1.5 times the size of Berkshire.

Many believed that Brexit would bring that all to an end, but in fact the reverse has been the case. In 2021, we gave rights to remain here permanently to 500,000 people; in 2022, that number went up to 606,000 people. Allowing for some natural increases, we have probably given rights to remain here to between 1.25 million and 1.5 million people in the past two years. The Migration Observatory at Oxford University, a well-regarded think tank, thinks that the UK population is likely to increase by between 8 million and 9 million people by 2045. That means having to build over yet another 1.5 Berkshires to house them and look after them.

How is this happening? It is happening because the discussion about this has become strangely unbalanced. There are two views, both in favour of higher levels of population growth, dominating the discussion. The first is what I call the moral case—that we owe it to people less fortunate than ourselves to welcome them here—and the second is the business case—that we need people to do jobs that Brits cannot or will not do. Both those have their points of view. It is not so much about the fact that we should not have any new arrivals, as we need the economic and cultural dynamic that some new arrivals give. But it is an issue about scale, particularly in relation to the business case, because British industry and commerce are now treating migration as the default option, with consequent very serious long-term consequences for our settled population. But along the way, away from those two cases, there remain the 67.3 million people who live in this country, the settled population, whose views are rarely heard.

Their worries and concerns range widely. They do not ignore the moral or the economic case but they are about overcrowding, about damage to our environment and ecology, about our ability to meet our climate change goals and about threats to our social cohesion. In short, they are the people who would agree with Robert Kennedy when he said that GDP

“measures everything … except that which makes life worthwhile”.

What can we do about this? There is an answer, and it could be to have some sort of overarching body, perhaps called the office for democratic change, or the office for population sustainability if you prefer, perhaps created along the lines of the Office for Budget Responsibility, to provide authoritative, transparent and evidenced-based reports on the inevitable trade-offs as our population grows fast. Importantly, it would report to Parliament, thus ensuring that the concerns of the unheard, the 67.3 million unheard, including committees such as the one whose report we are discussing today, have been registered at a supra-departmental level.

What will my noble friend say? He will say nothing, if he can possibly get away with it. If he is pressed, he will say, “Nothing to do with me, guv”, and that of course means that this issue, like so many of the issues referred to in this report, will fall between the cracks of various government departments.

Let me conclude. Some Members of your Lordships’ House may read Caitlin Moran in the Times. She is a Wolverhampton born and bred journalist, and therefore an urban soul. She wrote in the Times a couple of weeks ago

“For, really, what victory has been gained if our country is one of the wealthiest in the world but our rivers are too sewage-riddled to swim in, our dawns stripped of the dawn chorus, and our children can reach university age without having heard a spring cuckoo, seen a swallow in flight or a hedgehog trundle across the lawn?”


That seems to be the challenge that this committee sought to address, a challenge that in my view will be much more difficult to meet if we continue to increase our population as we have over the recent past, but it is surely a challenge we have to continue to address, because at root it is about the sort of country we want to leave to future generations, and what could be more important than that?