Queen’s Speech

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness is an experienced commentator on and watcher of the BBC, and she has made a distinguished speech, one of several we have heard on the topic today, including from my noble friend Lord Fowler. I am not an experienced BBC-watcher—they will have forgotten more about the BBC than I will ever know—so if they will forgive me, I do not propose to follow them. I reassure my noble friend on the Front Bench who will wind up, and the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, that neither will I talk about pubs. That is not for today but for another day, probably in the Moses Room. Today I will focus my remarks on the sentence in the gracious Speech:

“My Government will continue to work to bring communities together and strengthen society”.

I do so because I fear that our social cohesion—the glue that binds our society together—will face some special challenges over the next few years.

The first major challenge will be the further hollowing-out of our society as the result of the widening impact of robotics and artificial intelligence on top of the information revolution we have already experienced. That first wave primarily impacted blue-collar, less- skilled jobs. Outsourcing, first to eastern Europe and then to India and the Far East, has reduced inflation but has also reduced—some would say has stopped—the rate of the rise in blue-collar living standards. The frustration and anger that this has caused has fuelled the rise of political parties espousing more unconventional policies. These include, for example, Donald Trump’s US presidential election campaign.

However, a second and potentially far more serious wave is about to hit us. Over the next five to 10 years, wide swathes of jobs in offices and administrative functions will disappear. The Future of Jobs, published earlier this year by the World Economic Forum, the McKinsey report on disruptive technologies, and Martin Ford’s book Rise of the Robots all explain this event. However, this revolution will be different from previous revolutions in one crucial sense. In the earlier phases, revolutions created more jobs than they destroyed, but this time it will be different: they will destroy far more jobs than they create. Therefore members of middle or lower middle-income families, accustomed to a reasonably secure future for themselves and their children, will see those futures disappear. We, and the Government, need to think about ways to adapt our economy and our society to face such volatility if our social cohesion is not to be imperilled.

The second area of challenge is a declining public readiness to accept compromise and is a by-product of the social media revolution. Some noble Lords may be aware that I have just completed a year-long review for the Government of the legislation covering third-party campaigning—that is, campaigning by non-political parties. This gave me some very valuable insights into the way that campaigning methods are developing.

It is well known, even by an average technophobe like me, that increasingly people—especially younger people—get their information online. Less well appreciated is the extent to which that information is delivered in short bites: single articles, blogs or tweets. Even less well appreciated is the extent to which website operators, who have a keen interest in keeping individuals on their website since average usage numbers drive advertising spend, have become very sophisticated in analysing our individual likes and dislikes by trawling through our past data usage. We all like to be told that we are right. We are all flattered to be told that our view is the one that should prevail. So what better way can there be for a website operator to keep us on his particular website than to analyse our likes and dislikes and make sure that we are fed a diet of articles and blogs that is 100% supportive of our individual points of view? Therefore, I fear that an increasing proportion of our population may hear only one side of the arguments about the many complex problems that our society faces. However, in a liberal democracy, and a country of more than 60 million people, an absolutist point of view does not offer sufficient room for the compromise, pragmatism and indeed the disappointment necessary to enable our society to function. An absolutist point of view puts at risk the web of delicate balances that lies at the heart of our democracy, and so may threaten our social cohesion. Addressing this conundrum is going to require some far-sighted, innovative thinking.

Lastly, I turn to an issue about which some Members of your Lordships’ House may have heard me talk in the past: the present and projected rate of increase in the population of the country. As always when I speak about this, I make it clear that this is not a speech about immigration under another name, and it is not about race, colour or creed. When I refer to the settled population of the country, I mean just that. My concern is about the absolute numbers, and the numbers are stark. In the year to September 2014, the population of this country increased by an average of 1,436 people a day. Roughly half of that was from a natural increase, an excess of births over deaths, with the other half from immigration. That is equivalent to a large village or a small town being put on the map of Britain every week of the year. This rate of increase must be expected to cause stresses to our society.

Let me give the House just one example of those stresses: housing, an issue that has been much in your Lordships’ minds these past few weeks. We currently live 2.4 people per dwelling. If we want to house our new arrivals to the same standard, and I assume that we do, we need 598 new dwellings per day. That is 25 per hour, or one every two and a half minutes. That is before any attempt to try to improve our existing housing stock. This is in a country, England, that has already become the most densely populated in Europe, having recently overtaken the Netherlands. The outlook for the next 25 years is no less challenging. The mid-projection for 2039 by the Office for National Statistics is that our population will grow by 15%. That is an increase of 9.7 million people. On the same housing metric that I have just given the House, we will need to build four and a quarter million more dwellings by 2039 or one every three minutes for the next 25 years. To put it another way, Greater Manchester’s population currently is 2.7 million, so we are going to have to build the equivalent of more than three Greater Manchesters over the next 25 years.

I urge the Government, all political parties and every Member of your Lordships’ House to consider the implications for social cohesion of 9 million more people and four and a quarter million more dwellings in a country that is already three times more densely populated than France. Governments and all political parties have found this issue hedged about with landmines. Given the long-term nature and impact of demographic policies, they have taken refuge in Einstein’s famous dictum:

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough”.

By 2039, at the end of the 25-year period, the best I can hope is that I will be dribbling into my cornflakes. However, our successors will be entitled to ask why, when the evidence of these growing challenges was so stark, we looked the other way.