Comment: It's your choice - more immigration or work longer?

Thursday 01 February 2018

There can be few subjects which polarise opinion in Jersey so much as whether a growing population number is good or bad for the island.

As ever, it is set to be one of the hot topics in the forthcoming elections, with concerns over the environment, infrastructure, education, traffic and health care featuring prominently in the discussion. Today, our columnist Kevin Keen looks at the numbers: with no immigration, retirement ages may well have to increase.

"Managing our population is a topic that really gets some Islanders hot under the collar; I have even heard the Chief Minister being accused of backing a Ponzi scheme when it comes to immigration. Emotive language like this prevents politicians and the community engaging in a grown up and informed debate of the potential responses to the challenge of demographic change.

So what do we do? I have always thought that the headline population number (104,000 at the last count) was the wrong one to be looking at. We can’t banish pensioners to Guernsey or introduce a single child policy so any control is likely to fall on the working population, estimated at around 58,000. If we accept that this level needs to be maintained just to get Jersey’s work done, then as far as I can see, we have two choices: -

1. accept some immigration.
2. Forget retiring at 65 and work longer.

The Statistics unit is one of my favourite States departments producing huge amounts of useful information to support important decisions.  They very kindly did some quick calculations on how much the retirement age would needs to increase, if we want to maintain the population without immigration. Here is the table they produced based on the October 2016 population predictions (you can see the supporting information here.

Although not very appealing I could see that desk-jockeys like me being able to keep working to age 75, but there are a lot of jobs (especially the physical ones) where that could be a real challenge!  Then there is the need to maintain the right mix of skills to allow us to respond to all the other changes going on in our world.

As I am not planning a political career I can come right and say that I think we have to accept our headline population is going to need to increase, and we need to devote our attention to how we manage that in the best possible way. Accepting taller buildings, making sure redundant sites don’t sit around for years, supporting efforts to use technology to make us more productive, investing in life long education and making sure our tax system is fit for the future.

One final thing to reflect on, if Jersey had the same population density as Hong Kong Island there would be about 2 million of us, so we really are far from full. In a way we are very lucky, people still want to make their future here. To keep it that way we are going to need to make room for a few more of them."

The views expressed in this article are of Mr Keen personally, and are not necessarily shared by any of the businesses with which he is associated.