Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)

My Lords, I welcome the Economic Affairs Committee report. I was of course a member of the committee, as can be seen. Most Members will know that you do not necessarily agree with everything in a report when you sign off on it but, in fact, on rereading it, I am quite surprised by how much I agree with. I thank my noble friend Lord Liddle for his introduction, but I must pick him up on something. He twice used the word “crisis” in relation to the challenges of an ageing society. The report specifically did not use “crisis” because, unlike financial and geopolitical shocks, demographic shifts are slow-moving and quantifiable decades in advance. The committee’s own projections run to 2074 and the key trends—falling fertility and rising life expectancy—are already fully visible in the data. That is an advantage. Policy can be phased, rather than improvised, and institutions can adjust incrementally, rather than under duress. There is also a precedent: we absorbed the post-war baby boom generation into education, housing, employment and, eventually, pension systems over several decades. Life expectancy rose substantially across the whole of the 20th century and retirement provision was adapted accordingly, however imperfectly. I will dodge the issue of triple lock except to say that, somewhat to my surprise, I totally agree with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, who gets it exactly right. We need a proper debate on the triple lock. The specific levers identified in the report—encouraging workforce participation, addressing the social care shortfall, improving productivity, expanding skills training and tackling misplaced assumptions about age and capability—are policy choices, not fixed constraints. What the report identifies as missing is not the capacity to respond but sustained political attention. There is an absence of a published government strategy or forum for addressing ageing as a standing priority. This is a remedial deficiency. Given the lead times available and a demonstrated historical capacity to absorb comparable transitions, the present challenge of an ageing society is not one without a solution, but one of sequencing and will.