King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the debutants on the Front and Back Benches on the series of very impressive maiden speeches we have heard today. I also do not want to fail to congratulate the Labour Party on its victory in the general election. In so far as the quality of the decisions the Government make will determine the success of this country, for good or ill, over the next five years, I wish them well as they seek to navigate an extremely tricky world and the extremely difficult circumstances of the country at present.

The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has successfully delivered the Ming vase to 10 Downing Street. He did not trip or fall over as he got there and the Labour Party is now in full operation. But the scale of the victory gives him and the Labour Party the opportunity to do some radical things that would, if successfully carried out, transform the long-term position of this country.

How should he be brave? I will offer three suggestions for him to consider. First, we need to be prepared to tell the people of this country that you cannot have US levels of taxation and European levels of social security. The numbers do not work. As my noble friend Lord Bridges said earlier, we are living beyond our means. We may be teeming and lading for a bit, but in the long term it will not work. That means we have to face up to some very serious issues, including the future of the triple—or is it quadruple?—lock and the position of local government financing where, as I said in Questions earlier, we have not reformed the bandings for 34 years. That is the first place where the Prime Minister can be brave.

The second place—this point was made by my noble friend Lord Sherbourne—is in supporting Mr Streeting and the work to reform the health and social care system. It will require a stupendous amount of his personal capital and of the political capital of the party as a whole. My party cannot ever touch the health service in that way because we are immediately accused of wishing to privatise it and therefore all reforms are stillborn. But we have an opportunity now to do something about it. We should do something about it, but we should not underestimate the severe vested interests that lie in the way. Some Members of your Lordships’ House may have seen “Nye” at the National Theatre, with Michael Sheen playing Aneurin Bevan. In that play you see the enormous concessions and changes he had to make to launch the NHS in the first place—and I do not think the situation has changed.

That takes me to my last point, one that I have mentioned many times in your Lordships’ House—the demographic future of this country and the trade-offs, up and down, resulting from the very rapid increase in population that the UK has been experiencing over the past quarter of a century. Let us face the facts. You cannot expect to increase your population by between a quarter of a million and three-quarters of a million people every year without some profound consequences. The downsides are felt most by the least advantaged members of our society, of whom over 20% are now from minority communities, in the provision of worthwhile economic activity, housing and public services, the necessary level of food and water security, the prevention of ecological and environmental degradation and the maintenance of social cohesion. The future levels of population play a vital and critical role.

There is no forecast suggesting that we will not have a population more than 5 million above where it is today—which is equivalent to two cities the size of Manchester—by the end of this century. We need to find a way to address this matter in an open and transparent way that reassures people that we are listening to their concerns. I have suggested a thing called the office of demographic change, or maybe the office of population sustainability. The important thing is that we set in train a methodology to reassure the public that their concerns have been recognised and are being addressed. Given the very far-reaching and irrevocable nature of the results of demographic change, this is in essence a discussion about the sort of country that we want to leave for future generations. If we fail to start that discussion, wilder spirits may well seek to exploit the vacuum that we have left behind.