The UK’s Demographic Future

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.

“internal and external security challenges … our demographic evolution will be addressed largely through strategies merely of hope, rather than anything more precise, or new approaches based on better knowledge and understanding of the phenomenon”.

So I think he identifies the things which we need to look at if resilience, national defence and national security play into the debate about demography.

In a sense, the Government have acknowledged that that is an issue. If we go back to the strategic defence review from 2025, we see that it includes “home defence and resilience” and explicitly calls for a “whole-of-society approach”. In that whole-of-society approach, it calls on the Government to “Build national resilience” and “Increase national warfighting readiness”. It makes it clear that:

“The Government must promote unity of effort across society, leading a national conversation to raise public awareness of the threats to the UK, how Defence deters and protects against them, and why Defence requires support to strengthen the nation’s resilience”.

It states what ought to be obvious but is often forgotten:

“The connection between the UK Armed Forces and wider society is the longstanding and necessary foundation for the defence of the country”.

All that requires cohesion of society and for that to happen requires certain other elements. This may be the moment to declare that I am an honorary captain in the Royal Navy’s reserve force. On top of that, I am what would be called an immigrant; I came here in the early 1970s.

I would challenge the report when it says that we must not stop thinking about tomorrow, as we probably have not even started to think about tomorrow. If I were to open today’s newspapers or listen to the news, it would ask, “Will residential doctors strike again or is the offer to provide extra places for early-career doctors sufficient?” As the noble Lord reminded us, in demographic terms, 2000 is yesterday. I am now talking about something called yesterday, because it was 25 years ago when we published the Black Country strategy. It identified the needs of the region in terms of doctors. It made connections between doctors’ and nurses’ propensity to remain in the region in which they had trained. It therefore said that, because the region required those extra doctors, who require three, seven or 15 years to be fully trained, Birmingham University required 100 extra places. There was logic in that approach: it took the regional needs and its demography to decide what should happen, so it is not that we do not know how to do it but that, somehow, curiously, we seem to keep forgetting and pull back from the decisions that we have made, which at one stage were long term. When the places at Birmingham University medical school were cut, I literally could not find out who had made that decision. We are seeing the consequences of that in 2025.

We are talking about an ageing population, pension contributions, inheritance tax and, as the noble Lord said, higher education. The system has ended up creating an extraordinary dependency on international students for the funding of our higher education students without having thought through the consequences.

I will not go on with those examples, but I am always taken back to 2008, when Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth went to the London Stock Exchange in the wake of the financial crisis. In essence, she said to them, “Why did nobody notice this? Why did nobody see this coming?” Their answer, roughly speaking, was that at every stage someone was relying on somebody else and everybody thought that they were doing the right thing individually. What they did not do was see either how these individual decisions were hanging together or the consequences of a very complex system.

I fear that with a lot of these debates. I raised this problem with a Minister recently, who looked at me rather surprised and said, “Gisela, the facts are known”. I felt like saying, “Yes, I know the facts are known, but what are we doing with them?” A lot of the facts in this report are known, but we need to pull them together so that they become a meaningful basis for future decision-making.

The noble Lord mentioned an office for demographic change. I can see the logic of that but would like to add an extra dimension because this is a report by the Common Good Foundation and it would therefore be wrong of me not to mention that in all this is a need for identity, community and belonging. These things are too easily overlooked; whether cohesion or resilience, it is a feeling of belonging to a community and having a sense of identity. That is why the national debate should also have a very local dimension.

I would not hasten to ever try to go back to Victorian values, but there is one Victorian value that I would like to recommend to the House: the civic audacity of Joe Chamberlain in Birmingham. It was a kind of confidence in place, where cities would compete with one another to be better. Their competition was not based on having to fight for a central pot of money which was coming out of Whitehall, because that does not lead to good decision-making. Similarly, on the debate on demography, we need national figures, but we also need some very granular regional figures and data which take account of the needs of those communities. I think they will be best met by those local communities themselves; they have to take ownership of those.

This whole-of-society approach, together with a bit of civic audacity, will allow us to have a national view but regional implementation, or we will not be able to face the problems coming our way, whether those are islands and pockets of ageing populations or, in other areas, a shortage of schools or medical facilities. We can see them coming, and we can plan, but only if we are willing to face up to it, have the data and implement it in a much more granular way than we do at the moment. If we do not start to think about the future, it is going to happen whether we like it or not, and we cannot go on just being surprised by things.

Yes, the Government should pay attention to how new migrants can be supported to become active participants in our communities—I would give one example as restoring the funding for ESOL programmes to its previous level; it is almost impossible for somebody to navigate British society, let alone appreciate our history and values, if they cannot understand English.

However, that by itself will not heal our fractures. We need to wrestle honestly with the toll taken by poverty, deindustrialisation, decades of increasing individualism, institutional distrust and inequality. We must take seriously the fact that the media and social media do best, commercially speaking, when they drive us further apart; and we know that there are global actors who use social media, and who have no shortage of funding, to sow discord and fear.

In one of the letters of the Bible, St Paul describes the Church as a body with many members, all different and each indispensable. That is the image which, I believe, should ground a social cohesion strategy. How can we all be supported and encouraged to use our gifts to serve the common good and feel a sense of belonging, even of obligation, to one another?

Our debate today will naturally focus on what the Government should do. When it comes to social cohesion, Governments certainly have an important role. They can and should invest in community infrastructure, enforce laws against discrimination and create the conditions in which trust can grow; but for that to be sustainable and fruitful, everyone has to feel a sense of responsibility for our common life. I would like to see every institution—from schools to universities, businesses, public services, sports, arts and cultural organisations—recognising that bringing people together across difference is part of their social responsibility. Does the Minister agree with such a whole-society approach, and can she share how the Government plan to achieve it?

The report rightly insists that we must think beyond the next election and plan for the demographic, economic and infrastructural realities that will shape our country for decades to come. My noble friend’s work sets out a clear, evidence-based case: population growth, driven in part by migration, creates sustained pressures on housing, water, transport and public services, and there is public concern about the pace of change. That concern is real and politically consequential, and we ignore it at our peril, as other noble Lords have pointed out. Without long-term planning and honest public engagement, we risk undermining social cohesion and democratic trust. These are not abstract academic points; they are practical governance challenges that demand cross-government thinking and durable policy responses.

However, I suggest that there is an additional, closely related concern, which my noble friend has raised elsewhere, that should be folded into our thinking about tomorrow. Here I want to amalgamate the theme of his report Government by Diktat, in which he warned that the increasing use of secondary legislation, regulations and orders, subject to far lower parliamentary scrutiny than primary Acts, has the effect of imposing hundreds of laws with minimal effective oversight. As he put it, government by diktat must not become the norm.

That warning matters for the demographic debate we are having today, for two reasons. First, many of the levers that shape population concerns—immigration settings, planning rules, environmental pyramids, infrastructure, and approvals—are exercised through secondary legislation, guidance and administrative practice. If those levers are adjusted without robust parliamentary scrutiny, we risk making long-term structural choices by stealth rather than by democratic consideration. Secondly, when major social changes are managed through low-scrutiny routes, public confidence in institutions can erode, feeding the very polarisation and distrust that the demographic report warns against.

For those reasons, I urge the House to treat my noble friend’s two reports as complementary parts of the same argument. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow asks us to plan for demographic futures, while Government by Diktat reminds us that how we make those plans matters, as well as what we decide. Long-term strategy requires not only sound analysis and investment but transparent, accountable lawmaking and genuine parliamentary oversight.

What, then, should we do? I suggest three practical steps that respond to both reports together. First, we should adopt a cross-government demographic strategy with a long-term horizon, 20 to 30 years ahead. That strategy should align immigration policy, housing supply, water and energy planning, transport investment and local government capacity. It should be published, updated regularly and stress-tested against higher-population and lower-population scenarios so that Ministers, local authorities and the public can see the trade-offs involved.

Secondly, we should restore and strengthen parliamentary scrutiny over the instruments that implement that strategy. Where secondary legislation is used, Parliament should receive clearer explanatory material, longer scrutiny windows and, where appropriate, affirmative procedures rather than the negative ones that we get on almost every Bill these days. Major changes to planning, migration and infrastructure rules that have long-term consequences should be debated openly and honestly and, where necessary, enacted through primary legislation so that our full democratic mandate is explicit.

Thirdly, we should commit to transparent public engagement and local empowerment. Citizens must be given accessible information about population projections, the assumptions behind them and the likely impacts on services and communities. Local authorities need resources and statutory powers to manage integration and deliver infrastructure at the pace required. National strategy without local delivery is a recipe for frustration and failure.

I suggest that these steps are practical, not partisan. They are about restoring the balance between the Executive and Parliament and ensuring that long-term policy is made openly and responsibly. They also respond directly to my noble friend’s plea that we should not allow emergency modes of lawmaking to become the default. In times of crisis, speed is necessary; in terms of planning, scrutiny is essential.

In concluding, I return to the character of my noble friend’s contribution. He has done us a great service by refusing to treat demographic change as a purely technical problem or by allowing the mechanics of lawmaking to remain invisible. He has connected statistics to lived experience and legal process to democratic legitimacy. That combination—data, democratic principle and practical policy—is exactly what we need if we are to govern well for the next generation and succeeding generations.

I commend my noble friend’s Government by Diktat report and this current one, Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, to the House. Let us take their combined message seriously, plan for tomorrow with courage and clarity and make those plans through processes that Parliament can scrutinise and the public can understand and trust. If we do that, not only will we manage population pressures more effectively but we will strengthen the institutions that make democratic government possible.

My noble friend is a deep thinker, a committed parliamentarian and quite simply a great man. I shall miss him immensely.

Will our country be happier for the vast increase in population in recent years, almost entirely due to immigration? We have an economy that stubbornly refuses to grow, and a widespread sense that we simply cannot afford the additional cost of immigration. It is by no means the only cause of the problems we have, but it has contributed to a general malaise that reminds me of the late 1970s, when I was starting my career. Jim Callaghan announced that, if he were a young man, he would think of leaving the country. I was tempted. I may be wrong, but I think the majority of the population thinks that we should be able to control migration. The Brexit vote was very much influenced by the sense that, with freedom of movement, we were unable to determine who was allowed to come quite legally to live in our country. Since Brexit, we have had a different sort of migration, much of it in response to particular crises. But the emphasis politically has been on illegal migration. Legal migration, at least in theory, is something that a country should be capable of controlling, although there are huge practical challenges in doing so.

I accept that illegal migration is an imprecise term, in that many asylum applications succeed, and thus the asylum seeker can become a legal migrant. However, asylum seekers, with the departure of those seeking more friendly economic pastures, are now increasing in both absolute numbers and as a proportion of immigration as a whole. This Government and the last simply cannot escape the images of boats crossing the channel and our inability to stop them.

The failure to reduce numbers is significantly attributable to international law and our approach to it. We have a dualist system in this country, whereby international law is not binding on us at a domestic level unless we specifically incorporate it into our law. We generally do not do that, with the exception of the European Convention on Human Rights, which was incorporated in the Human Rights Act 1998. The debate about asylum seekers has focused very much on our international obligations, whether they emanate from the ECHR or the refugee convention, or even the rather elusive concept of customary international law.

The Home Secretary has recently made some quite pugnacious remarks about tackling illegal migration and ruled nothing off the table. How well this is going down with the Prime Minister and that human rights zealot the Attorney-General I do not know, but in my view, unless she tackles the primacy of our national law, as opposed to what are often international obligations fashioned in an entirely different context, she will never get control of illegal migration. The recent efforts to engage with the European Court of Human Rights are unlikely, I fear, to produce significant change—certainly not in the near future.

I return to my fundamental question: is Parliament sovereign? Can Governments say no? This report is a pertinent and sophisticated analysis of the consequences of mass migration, but I fear that much of the population may take the view that they are looking for rather less sophistication and that the next election will be characterised by some ugly exchanges. This will largely be the fault of centre parties for ignoring the reasonable concerns of the population. If that scenario eventuates, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, in what I hope will be a long and happy retirement, could be forgiven for saying to himself ruefully, “I told you so”.

I hope nobody will deny the proposition that demography is a very important subject. It is especially important when populations are changing rapidly, as we have seen in recent years. Indeed, demography, in the form of one of its components—namely, immigration—has for many years been at the top, or near the top, of the subjects that voters deem to be the most important political issues of the day. So UK citizens were fully seized of its importance. They judge correctly. After all, immigration policy—an aspect of demography—was plausibly a principal cause of Brexit and of the rise of Reform, which now leads in the polls, as we have heard. “Take back control” was largely a political response to what was then regarded as large waves of immigration for which nobody had voted or, indeed, been asked to vote.

Unfortunately, Governments, political parties and legislatures have not shown the same clear-headedness as our voters. Indeed, they frequently acted like the proverbial ostrich, determined to see nothing and to direct attention elsewhere. This went on for many years before the very recent reluctant tacit acceptance by all parties, including the party currently in government, that the subject deserved more attention and more action.

I am afraid that, in this process, we in this House have not covered ourselves in glory. When presented by my noble friend Lord Hodgson with the opportunity to consider what was known to be of major importance to many voters, we have instead been content to pretend that much lesser issues deserved more attention. We did not support his proposal for a new office, and we repeatedly turned down his request for a special committee of inquiry on this subject. So, to our shame, we join the ostriches in that.

Today we have the opportunity to set this right by properly and fairly examining the noble Lord’s report, and we should do so. In reading it, I was immediately struck by the stark simplicity of his statistics and the quality of the different contributors. The population grew from 55.9 million in 1971 to 67.6 million in 2022, and of course that has accelerated. The fertility rate, however, has fallen rapidly, from 2.44 in 1970, as the report shows. The most recent figures from the ONS are 1.41 per woman in 2024 in England and Wales—the lowest on record—and 1.25 per woman in Scotland. Unfortunately, as Professor Sefton points out, pro-natal policies do not seem very effective. The most pragmatic response is to reinforce the trend of older workers retiring later. So we need to make that easier and improve the incentives for employers, who tend to discriminate against older workers, as I found when I conducted the review of the state pension age in 2022.

Another worrying statistic, highlighted by Professor Sarah Harper, is that the UK population over 65 is predicted to reach some 25% by the middle of the century, with 2% over 85. That is some 1.5 million people, and it is likely to double within two decades. This means smaller numbers of productive people paying for the non-productive in a country where productivity has already been flatlining since the financial crisis during the last Labour Government.

We know from the work of the OBR how disastrous the increase in the proportion of the elderly will be for the nation’s finances—one reason why I proposed a GDP-related growth cap on pension expenditure in my review. As the report says, we can also learn from Japan, which has a more open attitude to employing older workers. This could have a dramatic effect on the dependency ratio, the UK’s future finances and, indeed, the nation’s health. As those of us who are lucky enough to work in this House know, working has a generally positive effect on health.

Some little-known and puzzling statistics on page 21 of my noble friend’s report are those on national insurance numbers in 2024. It is difficult to see how the 940,000 national insurance numbers—60% for Asian nationals—can be reconciled with the much lower number of work visas that have been issued. My noble friend Lord Hodgson and I quizzed Home Office Ministers on the defects of immigration statistics during the passage of past legislation, but they appeared to have a surprising degree of faith in their statistics and a resistance to looking forward at the future implications. It took several precious years for the establishment to accept that reality. Other important statistics have been mentioned. For example, England has a population of 438 people per square mile and will have a larger population than Germany on current trends. This is highlighted by Professor Michael Clarke in a very interesting contribution on national security, which the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart of Edgbaston, rightly mentioned.

This all leads to the report’s conclusion that there is a problem finding properly based and appropriately focused data to tell us what is going on. It means that there is a strong case for a new body following the precedent of the independent Dutch state commission on demography 2050, as advocated for so eloquently and frequently by my noble friend.

We have a problem, as the report makes clear, in the widely differing levels of acceptability of discussing big strategic decisions. Climate change and net zero have been the subject of extensive debate and have their own well-resourced Climate Change Committee, yet adding 6 million to 10 million more people to our population will not only hasten climate change but will have a major effect on our country, our children and our grandchildren—and, of course, our schools, hospitals, housing and infrastructure.

We also need to get under the skin of net migration. As we discussed in the Budget debate last week, we are now losing many entrepreneurs and more of the young and ambitious because of the weight of taxation and the growing burdens on business ushered in by this Government. Net migration has reduced significantly from its record levels, but in the year to June 2025, we were still seeing 898,000 new arrivals, many of them hard to accommodate here and creating a drain on public expenditure and pressure on benefits. We need to understand this and the social and regional ramifications much better.

In closing, I thank the Leader of the Opposition and his Chief Whip for finding time at last for this important debate and invite the Government to establish a new demography or population authority. Given the expertise in this House and its convening power, we should also tackle the issues in one of our committees. Such changes would be an appropriate legacy of my noble friend Lord Hodgson’s 50-year contribution to Parliament, to public life and to evidence-based debate.

There is not a day when you do not pick up a newspaper containing something about illegal or irregular immigration, the boats and the gangsters who are making a fortune out of this misery, but in numerical terms that is not the issue. I think we are running at about 184,000 boat people since 2018. That is a mere few weeks of legal immigration.

There is no doubt that, collectively, all of us in this Parliament and our predecessors have been negligent. You cannot allow change to take place on that scale and not expect consequences. It is utterly impossible to imagine there being no consequences from that. The scale is so large—numbers matter. My view for some time has been that we need to institute a pause, slow this down and try to get cross-party consensus on what the future of our country should look like. I do not want to see it become the stone-throwing match that it might very well be over the next few years coming up to another election.

If there is a consensus in Parliament, we have to pause this mad rush of people. Let us face it: we are issuing the visas. We understand that there is an illegal side as well, but we are issuing the visas. There is a machine somewhere printing them. We need to think things through and work out how we integrate and maximise the benefits for our population and what contributions we can make. We need thoughts along those lines. The right reverend Prelate talked about what would effectively be a new contract. We must look at all these things, but we cannot look at them rationally unless we slow down this mad rush.

Two areas of our life are, in part, responsible. Our further and higher education sector, which is very expensive, is living on a business model that is making matters worse. It is failing to provide the trained people this country needs, and do not forget that we have a growing number of economically inactive people. We are also allowing businesses to bring people in on work visas at lower wages, and we see that all over the country. Those businesses do not have to pick up the social security and other matters arising from the folk who come in. It is not only those who are on work visas but their dependants and families, and it goes on and on.

Whether we like it or not, we are regarded as the soft touch of Europe. As referred to already, it is the place where nobody checks; we do not know who is here. We are losing young people—hundreds of them have gone missing, and I have no doubt that many of them are being exploited and abused. We do not know where or who they are. The people coming in destroy their identification, so how do we know who they are? There are no checks on them—it is impossible—yet they will be in centrally heated hotels this Christmas while up the street people will be lying in doorways.

This country has got itself completely divorced from reality, and this Parliament is a leading example of that. In her response, perhaps the Minister will give some consideration to taking to her right honourable colleague the idea that we have a period of calm to pause this. We have to look at the further and higher education model, and the idea that companies can bring people into this country on lower wages, because that is what has been happening. To be perfectly political about it, for a Labour Government to be presiding over that is the very antithesis of what I always understood the movement to stand for.

We have not even touched on the costs. I have been battling with the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, to try to get some information about the costs of non-hotel accommodation. We have the costs of hotel accommodation; we know that it is between £5.7 million and £6.7 million a day. But that figure is for 32,000 occupants and it is now 36,000. We have 111,000 people who are not in hotels but in other forms of accommodation. The audit office produced a report the other day, and part of the reason why I do not have an answer to my questions is that the audit office concluded that the Home Office does not know the costs because money comes from different pots. Some comes from our overseas development budget, which is being fed into this, and other costs are under different headings.

The Library very kindly did some research; the Home Office’s figures for the last financial year were running at about £4.5 billion, but that does not touch the sides. We do not take into account the cost of the Border Force, the huge cost of the legal and other services, the tribunal service that has to wade through all this stuff and the policing costs when individuals misbehave and have to be dealt with through the courts. The costs could be £6 billion, £7 billion or £8 billion a year. Earlier in the debate we said that this is one issue on which we have ignored things and buried our heads in the sand; we are pretty good at that. We have not built a frigate in this country for 15 years, and we wonder why they are clapped out and we have only seven that are operational, which is half what we had in 2010.

Can the Minister please bring to her colleagues’ attention the serious implications of ignoring the problems that we now face? We can all work together. We want to avoid extremism triumphing, but it will if we continue to sit and do nothing. This is primarily the responsibility of the Opposition, but I believe that other parties in this Chamber would be very happy to work with the Government to create a strategy that has some possibility of achieving public support.

The treatment of women by some other cultures and nationalities is still a huge problem. The rape gangs say it all. In addition, Pakistan outlawed polygamy years ago, yet here it is funded through ever more generous state handouts, while most working British couples are seriously asking themselves whether they can afford to have any children at all. As for the appalling disabilities that are caused by first-cousin marriage, which continues to have a major impact on our NHS children’s wards for the long term, what on earth were and are some of our politicians of all persuasions thinking—and why has the taxpayer been funding this barbaric and immoral practice for so long? In addition, how many prosecutions have there been for another barbaric practice, FGM, in the past two years? I have heard from midwives who have been threatened and are afraid to intervene. Successive politicians have tried to persuade me that polygamy is definitely illegal in this country—so where are the prosecutions? All these practices create division and anger, and an enormous shift in the political landscape.

In 2004, when I was shadow Justice Minister, Blair opened our borders for so-called economic migration and told us that an estimated 7,000 people a year would come to our country. We now know that legal migration has far outstripped all estimates. Where was, and is, the infrastructure to support it? Meanwhile, a net 170,000 highly skilled workers, mostly young, have left this country in the past year to work and live a different life—a life where there is an energy for growth, prosperity and a future.

Anger has been growing, heightened by not only the massive increase in legal migration but illegal migration, the latter bringing a deeply worrying force of criminal gangs to our shores. This has not happened overnight. However, politicians have for too long lacked foresight and been blinkered by their politics. A cross-party House of Commons Defence Committee report, Future Maritime Surveillance, during the Session of 2012-13, did not address any threat of illegal migration using boats. In addition, the disbandment of the Nimrod maritime force, together with the short-sighted failure to renew the final maritime patrol aircraft contract with the commercial contractor Cobham in 2015, meant an almost total loss of our surface maritime aerial surveillance around the British Isles. In response to this extraordinary lack of foresight, I had the audacity to suggest in a debate in September 2015:

“My immediate concern regards maritime security, particularly the security of our borders … I say this given the clear and present increased threats from uncontrolled migration”.—[Official Report, 15/9/15; col. GC 237.]

Again, that was in 2015; my concern was unanswered.

Recently, things have deteriorated. Now we know that serious criminals arrive and we then lose them, either from the hotels or from prisons. Is the Home Office not telling the truth to its political masters, or are the politicians afraid to tell or even learn the truth? At least the Home Office has now admitted that immigration is out of control.

Thanks to good journalism and our police and crime commissioners, we now know that illegal arrivals do not necessarily stay in the hotels, as we also know that the domestic network to manage and assist the illegal boats is to be found in those working in the absurd number of Turkish barbers, vape shops et cetera. Why are these people, who have not been vetted, not confined? Why are they given money to take the trains and disappear into illegal cash-only networks and hang out on our streets? This Monday, we learned that heroin and cocaine are being imported in the stomachs of illegal immigrants. Why have the Government withheld that information? Why are we not warning every citizen that these shops may well be, and often are, sanctuaries for criminal gangs involved in organised crime, money laundering and the grooming of our young people into dealing in and delivering drugs—gangs often run by Albanians, with Kurds and others, who may have walked out of the asylum hotels with absolutely no right to be here?

I have now learned from a Written Question that we release convicted foreign adult male criminals awaiting deportation from the category C prison, HMP Huntercombe, owing to the Home Office’s failure to provide the necessary deportation documents in time. We are not told how many and how often. In addition, it is now clear from another Written Answer I have received that the Home Office does not know how many illegal immigrants have simply walked out of asylum hotels in the past five years and are not accounted for. The Home Secretary, we are told, is speeding up removals. However, I have now asked: how can illegal migrants be removed if we do not know where they are?

Noble Lords can tell that I am angry—angry for the love of my country and for the future, for our children and our grandchildren. This is not about being far right; this is about love of country, a love that all those who come from other cultures to live here will naturally feel for their own country. We must stop bending to the absurd notion that mass uncontrolled immigration can work on our small island, nor must we keep bending to the criminal and those who take pleasure in trying to destroy or usurp our traditions and privileges. I will not talk about rights; only others who try to change us talk about their rights. I thank my noble friend Lord Hodgson for this opportunity to speak the truth.