Preparing for an Ageing Society (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Razzall Excerpts

Friday 4th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Razzall (LD)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords on the committee in thanking our recently departed chair, the noble Lord, Lord Wood, who was an excellent chair, as we have all agreed. I have only one tiny criticism about his chairmanship and his drafting of this report, and I speak as the one of the tenders of the Asquithian flame on these Benches. If you look at the report closely, it says that in 1909, when the old age pensions were introduced, they were introduced by Lloyd George as Prime Minister. They were not; they were introduced by Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Asquith was Prime Minister, so I want to get that on the record.

Many people may have thought that we chose to do a report on the ageing society because the majority of the members of the committee were over 80 when we decided to do this. I have to say that that was not the case. We chose to do it because, as a number of noble Lords have indicated—certainly the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, did in his wonderful opening speech—this is a serious issue facing our country.

One thing that nobody, apart from the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, touched on is that we are not the only country facing these issues. To take three of them, Italy is the worst—or best, whichever way you look at it—country in Europe for these problems, probably because, as a well-known Roman Catholic country, it has the lowest rate of fertility. Further away, Japan has a massive problem which will result in the reduction of the population of Japan. The best view about what has happened to Japan is that it is because it has had no immigration, as a result of which its population is shrinking. Then, of course, the obvious country with a problem is China, because that is what happens if you have a one-child policy—it comes back to bite you in future years.

Our committee was extremely strong on what we do not believe the solutions are. First, on fertility, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, indicated, we did not believe that doing anything about fertility would be enough to solve the problem. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Nargund, had some solutions, and I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, disagreed, but we were not saying that doing something about fertility would not have some impact, we were saying that doing anything about it would not have an impact in the timeframe to solve the problem.

The second thing that we thought would not solve the problem is immigration. As the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Turnbull, indicated, whatever we do about immigration, we do not believe that that would have an opportunity in the timeframe to do anything about it.

Thirdly, we do not think that what appears to be the Government’s approach, which is, “If only we did something about productivity, that would solve the problem”, is correct. Despite endless government attempts to do something about productivity over the last 14 to 16 years, there does not seem to be any evidence that we have done anything about it. So we do not believe that that will solve the problem.

As far as pensions are concerned, we did look at them, and we certainly looked at the question of an increase in the starting pension age. As the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Reid, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, indicated, we again thought that it was too late to have a massive impact by increasing the state pension age. The noble Lords, Lord Redwood and Lord Willetts, probably disagree, but that was our conclusion.

As readers of the report will see, we did not look at the triple lock. This debate probably indicates why we did not do so, because it is clearly a highly controversial topic. On the one hand, we had the noble Lords, Lord Reid, Lord Turnbull, Lord Tugendhat and Lord Macpherson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, all indicating that they thought keeping the triple lock was silly, while on the other hand we had the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, indicating quite the opposite point of view, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, thinks we certainly should not do anything about it without a proper debate. For that reason, we rather wisely kept off in the report the issue of the triple lock.

As noble Lords will realise, we believe that the magic bullet, to the extent that there is one, is to do something about getting people aged between 50 and 65 either to stay in work or back into work. As a number of noble Lords have indicated, there are a number of reasons why they leave work. The noble Lords, Lord Liddle, Lord Lamont and Lord Tugendhat, all indicated that people do not work because they have caring responsibilities. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was the only person to say what I think is very often the case: actually, they have made enough money so that they do not have to work. That has an impact on our society. People such as the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, have also made the obvious point that there are often health concerns. The noble Baroness had some interesting suggestions as to what might be done to help that.

The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, also drew attention to the fact that it is not only what is happening at the top end but what is happening at the bottom end that is relevant. As the Milburn report indicated, unless we do something to bring young people back into the workplace we will not help to provide the revenue necessary to support the elderly. I, and the committee, agree that requires action.

Finally, as the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Davies of Brixton, both articulated, the government response to our report is at best disappointing and at worst very disappointing. I hope that the Minister can do a bit better in reply.

UK-EU Customs Union

Lord Razzall Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Razzall (LD)]

My Lords, having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in the past, I am sure noble Lords will accept that I do not agree with much of what he said. The context in which we are discussing this is, to me, the obvious failure of the Brexit project. I take the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, about the 4% of GDP spread over a period, but I would prefer to look at the recent figures from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a well-respected American organisation, that says the cost to us of Brexit has been between 6% and 8%, which, aggregated, is something like £95 billion of our GDP.

I think the other thing that is worth commenting on, which nobody has—unfortunately the noble Lord, Lord Gove, has left the Chamber—is that one of the things that the Brexit debate entrenched in our culture is that political lying is all right. Where is the money we were promised on the side of the bus for the NHS? Where are all the Turkish immigrants we were promised in the emails that were sent to people in the last two weeks of the campaign? This, to me, has been the absolute zenith of lies and nadir of results. I take the point that has been made about some trade deals having been entered into, but most of the trade deals that were entered into by the new regime were simply Snopaking out “EU” and substituting “UK” in those trade deals. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, referred to the CPTPP, but the estimate of the impact of that on our trade deals is infinitely less than the cost of losing the opportunities that we had with the European Union.

I do not know whether our friends in the Labour Party, who were referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, include the Prime Minister, who in May 2025 clearly indicated that he wanted to reset our arrangements with the European Union. This has not been terribly successful so far. Obviously, the progress on Erasmus has been good, but we have pulled out of the attempts to participate in the €150 billion European Defence Fund, we have not been able to deal with the internal electricity market, which we thought we would be able to do, and the phytosanitary agreement, which somebody over there mentioned earlier, that we hoped that we would get has not yet happened.

We have been asked to say what we mean by a customs union. Now Al Pinkerton, the MP, ironically, for Surrey Heath—he replaced the noble Lord, Lord Gove—argued for a bespoke customs union deal with the EU, not including agriculture, with consultation on all trade deals. It should be a bespoke deal. He proposed that in a Bill in the House of Commons and it went through, with some Labour people supporting him. It will not get into legislation, but it did pass. Turkey has had that arrangement since 1995. Why can we not have it?