UK: Population

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Green, has done the House, and, indeed, the country, a service in continuing to raise this issue. In my view, the current and projected increase in the UK population represents if not the greatest, certainly one of the greatest, threats to our country, environment and society and to the cohesion of our entire settled population.

Historically, there has been an emphasis on growing the population because people have felt that an increasing population means economic strength and power. At a more atavistic level, it means larger military power because you have a greater number of people to enforce your will. Psychologically, it is a sign of national confidence if your birth rate is rising and people wish to come to your country. It shows that you are, as a nation, on the rise. Vestiges of those beliefs still affect our thinking on this issue today. But now, as the noble Lord, Lord Green, pointed out, we are faced with new challenges. He talked about population density. England has just overtaken the Netherlands as the most densely populated country in Europe. We always think of the Netherlands as quite a small country that is pretty densely populated but England is now more densely populated. As the noble Lord has just told us, the population of this country is increasing by 1,200 people a day, adding a large village or small town to the map of Britain every single week, 52 weeks a year.

As my noble friend Lord Bates has heard me say before, if we are to house those people to the same standard as we currently house ourselves—that must be right—which is 2.3 people per dwelling, we have to build 500 new dwellings a day. Noble Lords can do the mathematics—that is a new dwelling every three minutes, night and day. That is without improving the housing stock, which we all agree needs to happen, and before you consider the additional infrastructure demands of health, education, roads, fire services, police support and so forth. However, as the noble Lord pointed out, that is not the end of the story but just the beginning. As he said, the ONS projection for our population 20 years from now is an increase of at least 8 million. That is not the high or low projection but the mid projection. As he pointed out very graphically, 8 million people represent three times the entire population of Greater Manchester, which is 2.5 million people. That will mean 3.4 million new dwellings. We are going to have to build a dwelling every three minutes for 20 years. I hope that my noble friend will tell us when he comes to wind up where these three Greater Manchesters, or 3.4 million homes, are going to be built. This is not theory according to Malthus or expectation: these projections affect us and our country today.

This is not just about the physical impact of housing and other infrastructure. Equally important, perhaps more important, are the consequent challenges to our social cohesion and the impact of what sociologists are increasingly calling “crowding out”. Crowding out will affect all parts of our society. Above all, it will affect those who have most recently arrived, so the less well integrated sections of our community will suffer most.

My noble friend has heard me talk about our Premier League footballers, of whom 21% are born in this country. Does that matter? It is an exceptionally successful economic export which earns much for this country, but that statistic means that several hundred young British males do not realise their dreams. Among those several hundred young British males will be an unusually high proportion of young black members of the minority community—people we wish to see integrate, have role models and succeed.

At a lower level, in my home counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire, local people find it hard to get jobs as fruit pickers because the fruit farmers prefer to hire 200 at a time from eastern Europe than engage people in this part of the world on an individual basis. It is not just at that level. I invite my noble friend to go and look at the number of secondary degree MA students enrolled over the last 10 years, and he will find that in our settled population, of whatever colour, creed or racial origin, the numbers have gone up by about 10% to 20%. But the numbers from overseas have doubled. That means that, to some extent, we are educating people from abroad at the expense of our own people, and we are doing so in part because it is beneficial for our universities to do that, because they pay more. Then you go to the property prices. The influx into London and the ripple effect of property prices has meant that large numbers of our own settled population are unable to buy a house or flat in their own capital city. More and more of them are being asked to live at home.

Those who continue to argue that, in the face of all these facts, we need to continue with high levels of immigration use two arguments. The first is the economic prosperity argument. The Select Committee in your Lordships’ House, which is referred to in the back of the briefing pack, has done some excellent work on this, but its report summarises that it has,

“found no evidence for the argument, made by the Government, business and many others, that net immigration—immigration minus emigration—generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population … Overall GDP, which the Government has persistently emphasised, is an irrelevant and misleading criterion for assessing the economic impacts of immigration on the UK. The total size of an economy is not an index of prosperity. The focus of analysis should rather be on the effects of immigration on income per head of the resident population. Both theory and the available empirical evidence indicate that these effects are small”.

We need much better data on population flows and the consequent impact on the country as a whole. We certainly need some restriction on the free movement of labour within the EU to form part of the Prime Minister’s renegotiation package.

The second argument that is much used, and the noble Lord, Lord Green, referred to it, is what is known as the dependency ratio, expressed as the number of people in work for every person in retirement. It shows the extent to which a country is exposed as an ageing population. As the ratio falls, those in work will have to pay more, either directly by paying tax, or by taking responsibility for their relatives. So some of our huge increase in population is essential to offset those impacts, but that ignores the fact, pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Green, that today’s young people are tomorrow’s old people. While you may have deferred the problem, you have compounded it, because they will in turn require a still larger number of people to support them in their old age. Indeed, people have pointed out that if we wish to maintain the present dependency ratio in the UK’s population, we will have to approach 100 million towards the end of this century, 50% more than we are today. The answer must lie elsewhere. Noble Lords have pointed out that if people are going to live for longer they will have to work for longer, and that will adjust the dependency ratio—and technology wars have to help. Modern monitoring devices will enable people to stay in their own homes without direct supervision for longer—and many of them wish to do that.

Why is it so hard to get the Government to focus on this issue? First, population increase is made up of two parts—the natural increase, in excess of births and deaths, and net immigration. Both are highly sensitive issues. Well-meaning people avoid discussing immigration for fear of being called racist, so let me make it clear that I am not talking about racial or religious make-up; I am talking on behalf of every member of the settled population in the United Kingdom, irrespective of age, sex, creed or racial origin. Secondly, family size is seen as a highly personal matter—and quite right, too. It is one that the Government steer clear of. When Sir Keith Joseph 35 years ago made a speech about it, it was more or less the end of his political career.

That is one reason why there is an anxiety about raising this issue. The second is that all demographic policies have very long lead times—15, 20, 25 years. It is the Government after the Government after this Government that may benefit from changes that we make today. There is an ineluctable temptation to keep kicking the can down the road and do nothing now, but continuing to kick the can down the road could lead to the one sure way of stopping our population growth. If, as a result of population growth, this country becomes too overcrowded or too expensive or if our traditional values of tolerance, sense of humour and, above all, a high regard for a sense of fairness—those shared values that were the subject of an earlier debate today—are threatened, then people will vote with their feet, either by leaving the country or by not coming here in the first place. This seems to me to be a high price to pay for continued inattention to this vital issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Bates) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Green, for tabling the debate on this important subject. I declare an interest: immigration is a subject which is dear to my heart, on account of a certain young lady who came to this country 25 years ago from China. Therefore, I will also commence my remarks by recognising the incredible contribution that the immigrant population has made to the UK, both to our culture and our economy.

However, the Government recognise that uncontrolled immigration makes it difficult to maintain social cohesion —a point to which my noble friend Lord Hodgson referred—puts pressure on the UK population and public services, and can drive down wages for people on low incomes. I will therefore take this opportunity to update the Committee on the actions the Government are taking across the system to bring net migration down to sustainable levels while ensuring that we continue to attract the brightest and the best migrants to the UK.

As all noble Lords referred to, the UK population increased by almost half a million—the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, put it in more precise terms of 1,200 per day—or 491,100 between mid-2013 and mid-2014, with 53% of the growth in the UK population accounted for by net migration. Net migration currently stands at 318,000. These figures show how far the Government have to go to reach our goal of reducing net migration to the tens of thousands—but also why it is important that we continue to do so.

As we have said for some time, we have been blown off course by net migration from within the EU, which has more than doubled since 2010. The figures show that by focusing on key areas we can make a big difference to net migration. In 2014, 86,000 EU migrants came to the UK looking for work as opposed to having employment to come to. There was a gap of 91,000 between non-EU students who came to the UK and those who left. Some will have stayed legally; many will have not. These two factors alone added nearly 200,000 to net migration. This is why the Government are determined to deliver the manifesto commitments on reform in Europe and tackling abuse and overstaying by students.

The immigration system today is very different from the one we inherited in 2010. Over the past 5 years, we have taken steps to control immigration and have fundamentally changed the approach taken by the previous Labour Government. Our reforms are geared towards an immigration system which works in the national interest, attracting skilled migrants for occupations where we need them instead of unskilled workers who drive down wages, and genuine students for our world-class universities instead of bogus colleges, almost 900 of whose licences we have revoked.

The Immigration Act 2014 is making it much tougher for illegal migrants to remain in the UK by restricting access to work. In this regard I note the comments on housing, benefits, healthcare, bank accounts and driving licences. Since July 2014, under the Act we have revoked the driving licences of more than 10,000 illegal migrants and deported almost 1,100 foreign criminals who would have had a right of appeal. The immigration health surcharge has stopped people from outside the EU using the NHS for free healthcare and has generated more than £20 million in net income. We have also clamped down on fake brides and grooms entering into sham marriages to stay in the UK. The Government will go further. The new immigration Bill will create a new offence of illegal working and extend our “deport first, appeal later” approach to ensure even more illegal migrants are removed from the UK.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked what the thinking was within government and what research was being done on the issue. We have commissioned the independent Migration Advisory Committee to reduce economic migration from outside the EU. We will form our labour market rules to crack down on the exploitation of low-skilled workers. As the Prime Minister has set out, we will address the incentives for migration from the EU—which has led to mass immigration from Europe—in informed negotiations. We will deliver these proposals and our commitments in the manifesto with a new immigration task force, chaired by the Prime Minister, which will ensure that every part of the Government plays its part in helping to control immigration. That is not ducking the issue, nor is it not taking the issue seriously. The Prime Minister is committed to addressing this important matter.

While the Government are committed to controlling immigration, that desire is in no way at odds with how proud we are of our diversity and we will continue to welcome the brightest and best migrants to the UK. All those talented workers who have come to work hard and the brilliant students who have come to study at our world-class universities will help Britain to succeed and add enormously to our economy. The Government have been clear that there is no cap on the number of overseas students who come to study at our world-class universities and since 2010 there has been a 16% increase in the number of visa applications for UK universities and a 30% increase in the number of visa applications for our world-class Russell Group universities, underscoring that the policy is working.

I noticed today that Portland Communications had published its soft power index. It measures soft power—cultural power, diplomatic power, media, digital, education, which is a key part of it, architecture, buildings, attitude and the respect in which the country is held in the world—and I was delighted to see that the United Kingdom is number one in the world. We beat Germany into second place and the United States is now in third place. That shows that it is possible to make the tough decisions necessary to bring immigration to the UK down to sustainable levels.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, could my noble friend write and give the Committee an estimate of how many students have overstayed their visas? There is clearly a major concern that while a great deal has been done—he has told us about that—nevertheless there is still a great deal of overstaying going on and morphing into the workforce.

[Lord Bates]

I mentioned early in my speech that the figure was 91,000 for the coming year for non-EU students. Overstaying is a significant problem that we face. The accuracy of that figure will increase significantly now that we have introduced exit checks at our borders. People who come here to study should study. If they want to come here to work, they should go back and then apply to come back to work here. In fact, from a technical point of view, tier 4 applicants, people who are studying here at bone fide universities, are able to transfer to a tier 2 status, which is graduate-level employment, so that they can continue to contribute to the economy. They can do that directly and there is no limit on the number who can progress on that route. We want to get that message out.