The UK’s Demographic Future

Lord Sarfraz Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sarfraz (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend on this report, on the debate and on a lifetime of public service. The report makes it absolutely clear that we will continue to need high-quality, highly skilled individuals who, above all, can contribute directly to economic growth, but every country in the world is now aggressively competing for that same group of global talent. Some are doing so with golden visas, others with citizenship by investment, and today we have heard about the launch of the “Trump card” in the US. Yet contributing to Britain’s economy no longer requires you to be physically present in this country. In fact, many highly productive people could easily live somewhere else while still contributing meaningfully to our economy.

The Government should therefore perhaps consider establishing a British digital residency programme. A digital resident would not need to come to the UK physically but could incorporate a British company, open a British bank account, benefit from British commercial courts, bid on British contracts, hire local professional service providers, transact in pounds and pay tax on UK-based income without placing any strain whatever on our public services. This is not a silver bullet for immigration policy, but it allows us to think differently about immigration. Other nations have experimented with digital residency, Estonia being the clearest example. Estonian digital residents have built some amazing companies without ever stepping foot in Estonia. The UK could offer a far more powerful, globally attractive version and the highest-performing digital residents could even be offered pathways to physical residency.

Alongside this, we should recognise the value of short-term digital nomads. Many countries now offer one-year visas that allow people to live and work temporarily without being eligible for any public services, and those countries are attracting talent and entrepreneurship. We do not offer this visa category at all; we are leaving the opportunity on the table, whereas Portugal, Spain and Germany are embracing it.

Finally, as robotics accelerates, it is absolutely true and a very good thing that we will see robots deployed at scale in industries across the country, including in agriculture and manufacturing. Sooner or later, harvesting robots will be picking strawberries in Kent and robots will be making cars in the West Midlands. We are witnessing a wave of inward investment into manufacturing across Europe and the US, much of which is possible only because factories are now highly automated. This shows that robotics does not kill manufacturing; it saves it, and it attracts global capital even in high-wage countries.

I urge noble Lords not to be suspicious of robots. Robots are nice. They do not require GP appointments. They do not need housing. They do not need visas for dependants and, so far, they have not willingly committed any crimes, yet they will unquestionably create local jobs, local industries and new opportunities for British entrepreneurs. Maintaining these machines, operating them and renting them out are all components of hyper local economic growth.

This report is called Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow. In doing so, we must recognise that tomorrow’s economic contribution will come in new and exciting forms—some human, some digital and some robotic. In thinking about tomorrow, we must be ready for what is inevitably coming.

Online Communication Offence Arrests

Lord Sarfraz Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Sarfraz (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, on securing this timely debate. I know that he has been a great champion of the media and free speech for many years.

At the heart of this debate lies the matter of ensuring that the police have the resources, tools and training to arrest the right people, without compromising freedom of speech or privacy online. We cannot expect the 45 territorial police forces in this country suddenly to get it right. There are more than 33 social platforms with over 100 million monthly active users. Each is very different, with different interfaces, community rules and approaches to content monitoring. To expect police officers to do their offline jobs while monitoring online non-threatening communication is very difficult. To meet the challenges of the future, the police need the tools of the future. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that.

What might it look like? First, we need to get the basic tech right. The police national database has not been upgraded since 2019. That is a lifetime in tech; their systems are pretty much obsolete. That is the database that records data on arrests that have not led to conviction, which goes to the very heart of the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev. If the police are not able to efficiently collect and manage data, they can hardly use it in a useful way.

One promising area is predictive policing. A number of trials are happening around the country, and the focus is on crime prevention—for example, trying to predict where a discussion in a group is heading before it escalates. Like all tech, it has great potential but must be deployed ethically to avoid overpolicing. Like all these things, the platforms have and will continue to have an important role to play.

Let us take, for example, basic content filtering. If you turn on Google’s SafeSearch, there is a pretty decent chance that you will not receive harmful content when you do a search, but that is really difficult to do on a messaging platform, for example. There is no setting on WhatsApp to block explicit unwanted photographs from coming in. The tech exists and is being trialled on a number of platforms, but these tools are still optional and require users to opt in. Perhaps they should be the defaults, requiring users to opt out instead of using opt-in filters.

One other big area of potential is AI-powered content moderation. This is real-time monitoring of content, analysing text, images and videos to identify non-threatening but potentially very harmful content. Several platforms are trialling this but we do not yet have the standards for deployment around transparency, accuracy and bias mitigation. Just as we are putting technology at the heart of our defence and national security strategy, we must facilitate innovation across all forces, not just within specialist units. Only then will we have arrests that lead to conviction and only then can we do a better job of ensuring a free and open internet.