Trade Bill

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Bilimoria

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I have not participated on this subject before, but I listened to the persuasive explanation by the noble Lord, Lord Fox. I note the phrase “mobility framework”, which sounds incredibly friendly. But I will urge my noble friend to reject this amendment. This is not because I want to build a wall or because I think perceptions of immigration have been wholly erroneous—although he quite rightly drew the House’s attention to that. The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said that we need to talk about facts. I will share a couple of facts, which will take only a minute. The population of the United Kingdom is going up by 1,200 a day: that is, 400 from natural increase, 600 from immigration from outside the EU and 200 from immigration within the EU. So we are putting a small town or large village on the map of the UK every week. The ONS projections are that the country’s population will go up by 7 million to 9 million between now and 2040. Manchester currently has 2.5 million people living in it—so we will have to find homes for three cities the size of Manchester.

The UK will by that stage have overtaken Germany as the most populous country in Europe and England will have overtaken the Netherlands as the most densely populated. That is against the background of a new industrial revolution that it is believed will cause 7.5 million jobs to be either lost or radically altered. I quite understand the wishes of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and the other movers of the amendment, but this had to be looked at in the round of our demographic future. It is not about whether you arrived here recently, or about your colour, your race or your creed. It is about what will enable our society to operate cohesively and well as we see that scale of arrivals, and that scale of change to the way we live and work.

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord. How can his argument work when, at the moment, we have unemployment at almost 4% and we need the 3.5 million people from the European Union who are over here now? Given an immigration White Paper that says a minimum salary has to be £30,000, and the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, how will we manage with a slow-growing economy of just over 1% per year, let alone if it should grow faster? We will have an acute labour shortage.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

I think the noble Lord is completely wrong. I have explained that it looks as though we will lose 7.5 million jobs because of the fourth industrial revolution; that is the first thing. Secondly, there is drastic underemployment among people aged over 50 who, when they try to get a job, cannot do so. It is seen that they have only a few years left to work and so are not reliable; youth is what people look for. There are plenty of available older people, but jobs will disappear. That is why I could not support this amendment unless we had done a lot more work on what the mobility framework advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, really meant.