I beg to move,
That this House has considered the impact of immigration on population growth.
It is a delight to speak in this Chamber on a subject which is not a delight; it everything but a delight, as I shall articulate briefly in this important debate. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley.
The greatest Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli—of course, a Conservative, but I suppose that is implicit—said that
“change is inevitable…change…is constant.”
I want to speak about the course, character and consequences of change.
Each of us encounters change in our lives. The ultimate change is death, the first change we enjoy is birth, and those between can be either joys or sorrows, but our capacity to adapt to change is not limitless. The enduring touchstones of familiarity help to give our lives certainty and assurance, and it is vital that we understand that that applies communally and collectively as well as personally. Yet the changes that this country has seen in population growth have been dramatic.
So much of the political debate that we cherish and thrive upon in this place is about change, and yet the Government have made no real measure of the effect of a rapidly growing population and have no mechanism across Government to deal with its consequences. When I first ran for Parliament in 1987—I know there are people in this Chamber thinking, “How can that be possible?” and it is true that I was all but a boy in those days—net migration was just 2,000. Up until the mid-1990s, migration was essentially balanced. We had people leaving the country and people coming, and that is what all advanced countries enjoy, for it is the inevitable consequence of being an advanced economy.
When I was first elected to this House in 1997, 10 years later, net migration was 47,000. Ten years later—10 difficult, and some would say tragic, years under the stewardship of Mr Blair—net migration was 233,000. Under the previous Labour Government, total migration was 3.6 million, and nearly 1 million British citizens emigrated, so net migration topped 2.7 million. The rate of inflow between 1997 and 2010 equated to one migrant arriving every minute. Every year since 1997 bar one—when the world was locked down—net migration was in excess of 100,000, and often by a much bigger margin than that. Indeed, net migration has averaged about 250,000 a year over the past two decades.
The most recent figures published by the Office for National Statistics last month are truly shocking: they heralded record net migration of 606,000.