Office for Demographic Change Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2022-03-04
Topic: Immigration
John Bassam (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, it falls to me to strike a discordant note in this universe of unanimity that we have had this afternoon. I regret doing that in one way, because I find much to agree with in what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, had to say, and generally he and I tend to be on the same side of sensible, progressive arguments. However, on this occasion I find myself unconvinced As other noble Lords have commented, the arguments for this office of demographic change—or for demographic change, I am not quite sure which it is—have been aired before, when we had the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination Bill in 2020. We on the Labour Benches remained a long way from being persuaded then, and although it is traditional for this House to give Bills a Second Reading, our concerns over the general drift of this Bill have not much changed Wikipedia defines demography as "the statistical study of populations … defined by criteria such as education, nationality, religion, and ethnicity." That is a much wider range of criteria for understanding society. In a sense, my primary question for the supporters of the Bill is: what is wrong with relying on the current impartial data provided to us by the ONS to make policy decisions on? By any interpretation, it interprets population data and demographics and, as one or two other noble Lords have commented, there is the Migration Advisory Committee, which is well respected and produces authoritative judgments on population shifts and, in particular, migration matters I think we should be clear. I think this Bill is very much more about immigration than demographic change. The noble Lord’s 2019 report making this proposal was called Overcrowded Islands? The Challenges of Demographic Change for the United Kingdom and there is a clear reference to population rather than demographic change. The only reference to a specific criterion in the noble Lord’s Bill is at Clause 2(1), which places a duty on the Government to "prepare an annual document for the Office for Demographic Change, to be known as the Charter for Demographic Change" which would set out "policies"—in other words, it is a policy document— "relating to anticipated demographic change." So far from being an independent source of advice, it is to determine and provide policy options. The think tank that published the report has published many other reports, including Large-scale Immigration: Its Economic and Demographic Consequences for the UK, which argues simply that the economic benefits of large-scale immigration are outweighed by the strain of population growth. It is about that rather than about being an independent nation in how we judge the demographics of our country Since the noble Lord raised the issue in his opening comments, which were very interesting, how would the office for demographic change respond to things such as the crisis in Ukraine where we are all being asked, quite rightly, to provide humanitarian support? Where would that sit among the office for demographic change’s priorities? How much more constrained might we be in those circumstances if that office had opined that we could not accept more migration, even of a temporary nature, because of the pressure it places on public services I always think that we should be careful in how we look at and what trust we put in data in such fields. As the noble Lord knows, it can be highly loaded and political by its very nature and not as neutral perhaps as the noble Lord and other noble Lords who have contributed to this debate might argue In short, I support investigation, objective judgment and data-led policy interventions, but I do not see much purpose or point to the Bill, other than the slightly less than helpful contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, underlining where he saw the value of this demographic change coming from. Like other noble Lords, I favour debate and careful thought about migration issues, but I am not convinced that this Bill, if it were enacted, would add much to our understanding of migration as its design seems entirely motivated by a desire to prompt loaded questions. For those reasons, I feel unable to support the Bill, but it is the tradition of this House that we do not oppose Bills at Second Reading, particularly Private Members’ Bills.