The UK’s Demographic Future

Baroness Morris of Bolton Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

That this House takes note of the Common Good Foundation and Centre for Policy Studies report Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, published in July 2025, and of the implications of projected population growth for the UK’s demographic future.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)]

In introducing this debate, I give all best wishes to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, for his valedictory speech.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con) (Valedictory Speech)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her good wishes; I hope she will still feel the same at the end of my speech.

The issue of population change and its consequences has long been an interest of mine, because I believe that successive Governments have failed to give the topic sufficient strategic analysis and attention. In a country where we appear to want to plan for almost everything, we conspicuously fail to plan for one of the essential building blocks of our society: the number of people living in this country.

Over the past 10 years, I have published three reports trying to analyse this issue in as transparent and evidence-based a way as I could manage. The report before your Lordships’ House today is the third of them and provides an appropriate bookend to my time here. I put on record my sincere thanks to the Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms—the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy—and my own Chief Whip, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, for enabling the scheduling of this debate.

I have not so far had the pleasure of debating with the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson. I hope she will forgive me for saying that as this is a valedictory debate, I hope that when she comes to reply she will not confine herself to a speaking note that might just say, “We inherited a broken system from the party opposite; give us three years and we will have fixed it”. I hope that she will instead spend some time genuinely considering the issues and concerns that I and others will raise.

We all know that this issue is not susceptible to piecemeal, short-term solutions, which are often produced to meet a particular crisis. By contrast, it requires careful strategic analysis conducted in a transparent, evidence-based way, which should lead to discussions in Parliament. This, in turn, will reassure the many concerned members of our population. In short, we need to create space for what can best be described as the wisdom of the crowd to make itself felt, and so marginalise the unrealistic and often unpleasant views at either end of the spectrum.

The impacts of demographic change are very long term. In the world of demography, yesterday is 2000 and so we are today living with the consequences of the decisions made by the Blair Government in the early 2000s. Similarly, tomorrow will be 2045, when our successors will have to assess the results of what was called the Boris wave, when they have become fully apparent. That is why my report is called Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.

Since this is a topic where every word counts, let me define two of them. First, the “settled population” means people who have a legal right to be in the UK and expect to spend all, or substantially all, of the rest of their lives here. It is not, as some will immediately allege, another word for “white”, since close to 20% of the UK’s population is now made up of minority communities, many of whom are not white. But whatever their colour, this is a group that polling shows has a high level of concern that their interests and the interests of their children are being overlooked and too often sacrificed to short-term political expediency.

Secondly, the word “immigrant” has become a loaded term, as in, “I’m an immigrant and I’m proud”, as opposed to, “Those immigrants down the road”—not so proud. So I prefer to use the phrase “new arrivals”. Of course, I understand and appreciate the moral imperative that drives those new arrivals, many of whom have been here a long time and have benefited from a life in the UK, to be concerned about our trying to close the door on those seeking to follow them. While I recognise that moral imperative, it is unarguable that numbers and scale matter. However sensitive and painful it is, the key point of numbers has to be recognised and taken into account in our discussions.

That takes us to the heart of the demographic challenge we face. As a result of a series of events from which none of the major political parties can escape responsibility—some being deliberate policy decisions and others being forced on us by outside events, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine—over the 30 years since 1995 the population of this country has risen from 58 million to 69.5 million, an increase of 20% or about 11.5 million people. What do 11.5 million people look like? The population of Greater Manchester is 2.8 million, so we have added over four Manchesters in that time.

Drilling into the issue of housing, since we live 2.4 people per dwelling, we have to have built 4.8 million homes to house these new arrivals before we tackle any of the shortages of housing for our settled population. If noble Lords want a snapshot of how the country is changing, 31% of all children born in this country last year were born to mothers who were not born here; 25 years ago, that figure was 10% or 11%.

Where do we go from here, and what does the future look like? The ONS suggests that, between now and 2036, we will have a 10% increase in our population—that is, 6.6 million people. The growth is then expected to slow over the period to 2045. But by 2045, we will have 76 to 77 million people, and we will have overtaken Germany as the most populous country in Europe.

Where will these people have come from? Of course, there is the natural increase—the excess of births over deaths. Leaving that aside, because of the level of press publicity, the man in the street will likely point to refugees and asylum seekers. In this, he would be wrong, because, historically, the main components have come from two sources we have always controlled. First, UK higher education has built a business model based on recruiting an increasing number of foreign students, of whom 30% to 40% morph into our workforce at the end of their studies. Secondly, British industry uses overseas recruitment—the Migration Advisory Committee described it as the “default option”—and has ruthlessly exploited the shortage occupation list, which enables you to recruit from overseas with lower wages. As I speak, there are 61 categories on that shortage occupation list. Many will be familiar, but not all—how many Members of your Lordships’ House realise that we have a shortage of dancers and choreographers?

It is worth noting also that our demographic challenge is made more acute by the fact of our being a relatively small island. For example, France has 120 people per square kilometre. The UK has 279, which is more than double. England has 438, so it is nearly four times as densely populated as France.

For my third report, I concluded that, to increase credibility, I should not write alone. I was lucky to get support from the Common Good Foundation and the Centre for Policy Studies, respectively, a centre-left and a centre-right think tank, to support me. I asked a number of experts in the world of demography to discuss the demographic challenge as seen through their eyes. It is, of course, impossible to summarise nine detailed chapters in this debate. But the overall conclusion of them all was that, as a country, we have not been taking a sufficiently coherent strategic approach to this particular problem.

Further, since this demographic challenge is one faced by all countries, I made contact with three countries overseas: the Netherlands; Japan, which is facing the opposite problem of a rapidly declining population; and Denmark, which has now become the poster boy for immigration policy.

Many interesting ideas emerged. Denmark, perhaps slightly sadly, enforces very strict conditions on new arrivals and moves them on if they are not complied with. Rather depressingly, when I asked the Danish, where those people go to, they said that they nearly all go to the UK, because the word on the street is that, once you get to the UK, no one will check anything and you are free to do what you like.

I believed that there was interest among the public, so I asked YouGov to do some polling. The results were that 70% thought that the Government have no plan to manage population growth, and 56% support the idea of creating some official body. An important message for the three parties in your Lordships’ House is that only 10% thought that the Labour Party had the best answers, only 8% thought that the Conservative Party had the best answers and only 5% thought that the Liberal Democrats had the best answers. By contrast, 22% supported Reform.

So, what can be done? We have to have the courage to recognise that the irrevocable nature of demographic change means that departmentally based solutions will never provide a coherent response. We have to cut through what I call the “firewalls”, which suggest that the issues raised by demographic change are not appropriate subjects for discussion. We have to call out cases where any proper discussion is closed down as a result of what Dame Sara Khan called in her government-commissioned review on social cohesion, “freedom-restricting harassment”. Thus, as an example, while it is perfectly acceptable to discuss policies to help achieve net zero, it is not acceptable to suggest that adding 6 million people to this country might impede achieving that objective.

There is a strong argument for creating a new strategic body to be called the office for demographic change, or perhaps the office for population sustainability, which would subsume within it the existing Migration Advisory Committee. It would be tasked with learning from the past to collect evidence about and analyse the consequences of past policies, looking to the future impacts of likely population changes—economic, environmental, ecological and societal—and, finally, undertaking research into demographic developments and learn from best practice around the world. It would not, however, be a policy-making body. This new authority would be a stand-alone body but would report to the Cabinet Office. It would report, at least annually, to Parliament.

The new body would help create conditions for a broader, better and more balanced discussion about demography. For example, is there a maximum level of annual population increase we can absorb without prejudicing the position of our settled population? What can be done to improve the data sources, which are clearly inadequate? Is there an argument for seeking to increase the birth rate among our existing population? And so on.

To conclude, Governments may choose to continue to muddle along, but recent events have shown a rising public temperature, and these pressures seem set to increase. It is not just individual events such as those at Crowborough or Epping but about the public mood. So the issue seems set to become a major driver of political change. Writing in the Times on 15 September, Trevor Phillips’ article was headlined, “Dismiss Unite the Kingdom march at your peril”, and was subtitled:

“Calling this movement the product of extremist rabble-rousers will no longer do. Mainstream politicians must wake up”.


Successive Governments have tried ignoring the problem, insinuating that those who are concerned about it are closet racists, suggesting that nothing can be done about it, and that if only everyone would stop talking about it the problem would go away, or, finally, making aspirational statements with no measurable follow-through.

The mainstream parties here in your Lordships’ House now need to step up with a comprehensive, measurable response to public concerns. My report suggests one such approach. But if we fail to respond, events will likely become increasingly ugly as wilder spirits make the running. I can think of no more pressing internal threat to the long-term prosperity and harmony of the society of this country than our future population levels. So I am proud and pleased to be able to hold my valedictory debate on this topic, and I beg to move.