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The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)
It is a pleasure, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) on securing this debate. The right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) said that she served an aperitif, or a full plate of hors d’oeuvres. This is the first chance I have had to welcome the right hon. Gentleman to his post. He said that he has been doing the job for 10 days, and I look forward to our debate in the House this afternoon and the time we will spend discussing the Bill in Committee.
The right hon. Gentleman said that the issues are important and referred to the labour market. He also referred to the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Democratic Unionist parties. I am astounded that no Labour MPs thought the subject worth debating. I am sure their constituents raise the matter with them all the time, and I cannot for the life of me understand why they did not want to come here. Perhaps the previous Labour Government’s record will explain that.
Mr Harper
I am sure they are wise to trust the right hon. Gentleman, but I have not noticed before in debates that because he is a Labour party spokesman, Labour Back Benchers did not believe it necessary to come along and contribute.
I want to spend some time responding to the points raised by my hon. Friends, but first I want to explain briefly why the issue is of great concern. My hon. Friends the Members for Witham and for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) put their finger on it when they said that we inherited a shambles. The previous Government had let migration run out of control at more than 250,000 a year.
The asylum system was also out of control, and my hon Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) alluded to that. When we came to office, we inherited 450,000 cases that had not been concluded; my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green), did a sterling job in sorting that out and driving the number down. The hon. Gentleman is right in saying that we have not completed that work; we are still working through some very old cases. We know from the work of the chief inspector of borders and immigration that there was a period from 2007, under the previous Government, when, when there were queues, checks were not carried out, to manage the length of the queues. That does not happen now. We have an operating mandate: everyone who arrives at an airport is checked.
The right hon. Member for Delyn mentioned the one mistake that I believe the Labour party has acknowledged. The lack of transitional controls on accession countries in 2004, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster mentioned, was a huge mistake and is part of the reason that immigration is an issue. Parts of the country saw significant and fast growth in the number of migrants, which put public services under pressure. However, the right hon. Gentleman did not mention something that the Labour party skips over. During its period in office, the number of people coming from outside the EU was twice as high as the number from inside the EU. Yes, the Labour Government made a mistake with transitional controls for EU migrants, but what they do not talk about is the fact that twice as many came from outside the EU and there were no legal constraints from EU rules. They let that run out of control.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster talked about the importance of welcoming people who contribute. That is absolutely right. Ministers are always clear, although this is not always reflected in what is reported, about achieving a balance. We want the best and the brightest to come to Britain and we want people to contribute. The Queen’s Speech referred to an immigration Bill and it was clear that it would have two purposes. One was to attract those who wanted to come and to contribute, and the other was to deter those who did not. We must get both parts of that story right; I will touch on the detail in a moment.
My hon. Friends the Members for Cities of London and Westminster and for Witham talked about issues with EU nationals and where we need to tighten up on those who abuse free movement, particularly when there is criminality. There are some real issues of criminality in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster. Immigration enforcement officers are working closely with his local authority and the Metropolitan police to deal with those involved in what we tend to call low-level criminality, but which has a real impact on UK nationals and visitors who want to come and spend money in our country. We have taken significant steps.
The real issue with EU nationals is that although we can remove them from the country and we have had some successful operations—for example, we removed a significant number of Romanian nationals from Hendon— they can come back. My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster should be aware that we are looking closely at the legal scope to take a tougher approach, and I hope that he will welcome that.
My hon. Friend should also be aware that because of pressure from the Home Secretary at EU level, we finally got the message home. At the Justice and Home Affairs Council on 7 and 8 October, the Commission accepted for the first time that there is an issue with abuse of free movement rights. Commissioner Reding stated that free movement is a fundamental achievement, with which I agree, but the Commission also noted that free movement rights are weakened by abuse and that it would support member states to use existing EU tools—including sanctions such as expulsion and re-entry bans in certain circumstances, with the appropriate safeguards—to fight such abuse. That is very welcome.
The Home Secretary raised those issues with the Commission and with colleagues from Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, and we have started to build a sense that there is a problem to solve. If we solve that problem and the problems of abuse, we will strengthen the benefits of free movement across the EU, from which many British citizens benefit, and make Britain a more attractive home for inward investment. I can give my hon. Friends the Members for Witham and for Cities of London and Westminster some comfort that we are addressing that situation.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster will also be familiar with Operation Nexus, on which we are working with the Metropolitan police to identify foreign nationals at the point of arrest and to consider where we have immigration powers that may be used alongside criminal justice interventions to remove people from the country who should not be here and who are potentially involved in criminality.
Jim Shannon
Operation Nexus is a campaign run by Scotland Yard, which I understand has indicated that it is seeking more resources so that it can do its job better. I understand that Scotland Yard is seeking resources from Europe, too. Have those resources been allocated? If so, are they allocated from Government funds or through European funding?
Mr Harper
On resources—I mean to present this in a balanced way—it is not surprising that about a third of criminals in London are foreign nationals, but that is not a hysterical point; it is understandable, because broadly a third of the population of London are foreign nationals. The Metropolitan police’s core job of addressing criminality involves dealing with a significant number of foreign national criminals. The number is not disproportionate; the proportion is about what would be expected, given that there are significant numbers of foreign nationals in London. The tools we are able to give to the Metropolitan police, working with our immigration enforcement officers, means that it can do that job more effectively. We have seen significant success, and we have started to roll out those resources in the west midlands, for example, and increasingly in other police forces across the United Kingdom. I think that will be helpful.
The Home Office is also leading work with the Ministry of Justice and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to address foreign national offenders. We have 16 priority countries—not 10, as my hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said—including two EU member states, Portugal and Romania, which we are supporting in the use of the EU prisoner transfer agreement. We are working closely with colleagues in Romania to consider the effectiveness of Romanian criminals arrested in the UK being able to serve their sentences in Romanian prisons.
As the right hon. Member for Delyn said, we are working closely with the Nigerian Government. That work is not just the agreement, in which he rightly said that the previous Government had a role; the agreement had to be translated into Nigerian law, which has now been done. We have just signed a compulsory prisoner transfer agreement with Albania.
Mr Harper
If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I want to address some of the points raised earlier in the debate.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster talked about the importance of being open for business, and I draw his attention to an excellent one-page guide circulated yesterday by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), who ran the all-party group on balanced migration. The document is an excellent quick guide showing some important statistics on Britain being open for business, the number of business visitors and how easy it is to get a job here after university.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster is right that there are issues, although, largely, they are not issues of perception, but that does not mean they are not important. Of course, part of the job that the Chancellor and the Mayor of London were doing last week in China was to ensure that perceptions catch up with reality. For example, in China the average time for a business visitor to get a visa to Britain is some eight days, and we are looking to make that even faster for high-value visitors. I am not pretending that there are no real issues on the business side, because there are, but, certainly for overseas visitors, we have seen very strong growth.
There are many perception issues, which is why we have to be clear about what we are doing. I regularly meet universities and businesses, and I have met the City of London corporation. We are incrementally improving the system, and my hon. Friend is absolutely right that that is important for Britain.
My hon. Friend is also right to draw attention to health issues and the pressure on St Mary’s hospital, Paddington, in his constituency. He will have seen today that the Health Secretary has published a significant independent audit, which has been peer-reviewed and shows that the NHS is failing to recover some £500 million of income that it should be getting from the foreign nationals that it treats. Frankly, I find it extraordinary that the Labour party, or at least its health spokesman—I do not know whether he talked to the right hon. Member for Delyn—has said that it will not support our proposals on that. I do not know whether that is connected to the Unite union’s opposition to those health proposals. In fact, Unite has said that health workers should not collect money from foreign migrants. I do not know whether Unite is setting Labour’s policy, but that statement is extraordinary. We have a national health service, not an international health service. We are not talking about not treating people, which is one of Unite’s scare stories; it is about charging people who have no right to free treatment.
If my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary and I go to another European country, that country is much better at charging the UK for our health treatment; we are not very good at charging for such treatment. If we went to another country, we would be expected to use private health care. In some countries we would not get health treatment before paying for it. In the UK, though, we are talking about never withholding urgent treatment but ensuring that people pay for it, which is fair to taxpayers. I look forward both to the changes that we are making in the Immigration Bill and to my right hon. Friend’s proposals for charging overseas visitors and being more effective at recovering the money.
I will forgive the right hon. Member for Delyn because he has been in his job for only 10 days, but he should be aware that the Government who stopped fingerprinting clandestines at Calais were the Government of whom he was a member. That change took place in January 2010, which, as far as I can tell from looking at the calendar, was prior to the general election. Perhaps he should check. We will consider whether that is still correct and whether we could improve the process.
In her comprehensive speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Witham referred to ways of improving how we deal with cases. She is right, and several Members have touched on there being in-country issues in the United Kingdom when assessing cases, which is why my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary broke up the UK Border Agency. We now have a UK visas and immigration operation that has a real focus on customer service for people who are paying for visas and coming to the United Kingdom to work hard, study and contribute. We want to give them good customer service. We are not there yet, but we have significantly improved on the backlogs that we saw in 2012-13. We are trying to improve both the overseas performance we deliver and the performance in-country.
I will continue meeting universities, as I did with my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge—I had an excellent meeting with his university. We have taken some of those meetings forward. I meet the Russell Group, and I meet other top-quality universities in Britain to address their real issues, so that we can continue to increase the number of university students who come to Britain while ensuring that those institutions that are selling not education but immigration permits, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster talked about, are put out of business and cannot abuse the immigration system.
My hon. Friend the Member for Witham talked about people who make lots of claims and delay things, and she is right. I fundamentally believe that we should offer asylum to those who are genuinely fleeing persecution, but if the system is to work and to command public confidence, the flip side is that those whom we find do not need our protection—and where an independent judge agrees that they do not need our protection—should return to their country of origin. We should not have to spend thousands and thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money detaining those people and enforcing their removal. Everyone who abuses our system in such a way is damaging the interests of genuine refugees, to whom I want Britain to give a warm welcome and to enable them to rebuild their lives. [Interruption.] With the greatest respect, this debate was called by my hon. Friend the Member for Witham and I am trying to cover all the important points.
The Immigration Bill will streamline the immigration process and ensure that for foreign national offenders, if we can, we will have non-suspensive appeals so that, as long as they do not face irreversible harm overseas, we can deport them first and hear their appeal afterwards. In many cases, I suspect that will mean that we never hear the appeal, because my hon. Friend and I both know that the appeal is a mechanism to delay their removal from the United Kingdom.
We have had a comprehensive debate that is perhaps a warm-up for the Second Reading of the Immigration Bill, which I look forward to.