United Kingdom: Future Demographic Trends

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

I rise in the gap to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, on introducing the Motion for debate. I will briefly make a general point and a specific point about the United Kingdom.

The general point is that we should be careful of joining in any chorus of Malthusian despair. Malthus was wrong 200 years ago and is still wrong today. My specific point about the UK is that there is a serious problem with the demographic balance of our population. As the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, has said, we should welcome longevity. However, it will impose a huge cost on our society. Some estimates are that the cost is as great in terms of its fiscal weight as the cost of the fiscal consolidation that we are currently undergoing, if you take into account the impact on pensions, health and social care.

That public spending cost will, if we are not careful, eat into our nation’s capacity to tackle the other big problems we face: global competition, where we have to invest in education, innovation and skills; climate change, which requires a huge programme of infrastructure investment and change; and inequality, in order to raise the life chances of children being brought up in disadvantaged circumstances. If we do not tackle the fiscal problem of ageing, we will find that other problems are very difficult to tackle.

We need in Britain a new inter-generational compact between grandparents and their grandchildren. This is extremely difficult for the political parties to achieve in terms of the normal discourse of political debate. We must try to find a new cross-party consensus about how we cope with the public spending challenges of the ageing society. The report from the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, which has been published today, on which I hope we will have a much longer and more thorough debate in future, is of great significance. This is a real challenge for whoever forms the next Government of Britain. There is a role for the House of Lords as a body which can bring together different political points of view and try to establish a much-needed consensus on this fundamental challenge.