Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension

Monday 10th March 2025 Westminster Hall

16:30

[Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 700824 relating to suspending legal and illegal migration.

Before I begin my remarks, may I say what a pleasure it will be to serve with you in the Chair Dr Huq? This is a topic of real importance, which matters to an awful lot of people across Britain, but too often politicians fail to talk about it with the seriousness and depth it deserves. Views on immigration have become increasingly polarised in this country, and it is a sad fact that, at the close of today’s debate, I will receive hate mail, as I am sure many other Members around the Chamber will. Some will be from people who think that, because I am willing to talk about the rapid rise of immigration, I am somehow a racist, but some will come from people who think I am the worst example of “woke thinking”—whatever that is—and a soft touch who does not care about the country’s national security. Neither of those positions is right.

Actually, when I talk to people face to face—real-life people who are not in politics—very few hold either of those essentially polarised opinions. One thing I am really hoping for from today’s debate is that we can bridge that gap and start to talk frankly and fairly about this issue. Everybody in this room wants to make progress on it, and I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will bear that in mind and that we can have a positive and open discussion—a grown-up debate—which is what this country deserves.

When thinking about immigration, two things are clear to me. The first is the role that migrants have played, going back centuries, in making this country what it is today—the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Jutes, the Normans, the Flemings, the Irish, the Windrush generation, people from across the Commonwealth and countless others. It would be remiss of me not to go through that list and make particular mention of the contribution of the millions from across the Commonwealth, and further afield, who fought shoulder to shoulder with our soldiers in both the world wars in the last century—and not only that, but who helped win the peace afterwards.

The second thing we need to do, though, is to respond to that by saying that immigration has grown rapidly in Britain in recent years. In the years since the covid-19 pandemic, it has spiked dramatically, and I am sure it is clear to all of us in the Chamber—and certainly to the 219,000 people who signed the petition—that that is a worry for a lot of people. Voters consistently tell pollsters that immigration is one of the biggest issues we face, and the most recent survey by YouGov found that 69% of people think it has been too high over the past decade.

I think that the worry that migration figures have grown too quickly is what underpins the petition. When I mentioned that I was going to lead this debate, I spoke to somebody back home, and their view was that, because the petition starts with the, “Close the borders!”, I should just try to ridicule somebody. That is absolutely the wrong approach in this situation. When we look into the detail of the petition—the explanation for it and what the petitioner has written—actually, the real drive here is not trade or imports; it is very much immigration, and I really do not want to try to patronise anybody by picking on a particular point and making ridiculous comments about it.

Unfortunately, it has been a little more difficult than usual to prepare my introduction. When I have introduced petitions debates before, it has been my common practice that one of the first people I speak to is the petitioner themselves. It has been really valuable to speak to that person face to face, or via Zoom, to really see where they are coming from and, hopefully, build the speech around that. Unfortunately, the petitioner has not been able to respond to any of the requests for a meeting, so I have not been able to have that face-to-face discussion. However, I am going to do the very best I can to do justice to their petition and to talk about it in as much detail as possible.

The petition calls for a temporary halt to all immigration, both illegal and legal, for five years. That word “temporary” is important. The petitioner writes that

“our country is facing serious challenges both from legal and illegal migration”,

and argues that strong action is needed. That speaks to a sense that we have reached a moment of crisis. The petitioner is not saying “never again” or dismissing the contribution that migrants make to our society, but they are worried about where we are right now. To go back to my initial point about having a grown-up debate, it is important that we recognise that the petitioner is not saying, “No people who weren’t born here”; this is a response to the situation as they see it.

So where exactly are we? Since I have the opportunity to present this debate, let me present some facts to go around it. Since 2021, immigration to Britain has risen to unprecedented levels. In the 12 months to June 2024, net migration—the total number of people moving here, take away the total number of people who have left—was well in excess of three quarters of a million people. That is down on the previous year, but it is still vastly higher than the pre-pandemic estimate, which would have been closer to one quarter of a million.

Within the 1.2 million people moving to the UK, 5% were Brits who were living elsewhere and who came home. I do not think in a million years that the petitioner would say that people who were born in the UK did not have a right to come back—I do not think that that is the point of view the petitioner is coming from—but the numbers do count them as people who have immigrated to the UK, because it is an inward flow. Another 10% of those who came were from the European Union, plus Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, although more people from those countries actually left Britain than arrived here.

The vast majority, about 1 million people, were non-EU nationals. Almost half, about 400,000, came here to work; around 375,000 were students and roughly 150,000 were asylum seekers or people coming through specific humanitarian schemes—the Ukrainian and Hong Kong nationals schemes are great examples there, and I am sure there is widespread consensus about the importance of maintaining those safe and legal routes. Most of the remaining 100,000 or so people came for family reasons, and again I think most people would support people’s right to live a proper family life.

The petition talks about both legal and illegal immigration. The vast majority of people arriving in this country do so through standard legal routes, with a work permit, a student visa or some other type of permission. However, we all know that a large number of people come to the country through what the Government call “irregular routes”, most of them by crossing the English channel in small boats. Of those people, around 94% go on to claim asylum and around 70% are successful, which is a similar proportion to those arriving through other routes. In the year to September 2024, just under 30,000 people arrived in small boats; that figure is down by a third from a peak of more than 45,000 in 2022, but still much higher than we saw before that. In fact, it is 100 times—not 100%, but 100 times—higher than it was in 2018.

However we look at it, that is a really bad thing. The English channel may only be 20 miles across at its narrowest point, but in boats such as those we have seen people using to try to cross it, journeys can be extremely dangerous. It is one of the busiest shipping lanes on the planet, and the crossing is very dangerous. By October last year, 2024 had already become the deadliest year on record for channel crossings: 69 people had died trying to reach our country. Those are lives that should never have been lost. The people who profit from those journeys are the organised criminal gangs that are prepared to put profit in the way of people’s safety.

Given that background, it is important that we debate the petition in full, in detail and openly. As part of the work behind writing this opening speech, I spoke to a wide range of stakeholders, who said that suspending migration would be possible as a policy choice, but that it would have impacts. That is also worth saying: it is potentially doable, but as legislators we have to go one step further and talk about what effect it would have. Before I carry on, I thank everyone who shared their time and knowledge to help to make this as informed and useful a debate as possible: the Centre for Policy Studies, the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

When we talk about the effects that introducing this policy might have, let us start with work. What would it mean for jobs and our economy to stop that immigration completely, even for just five years? Polling suggests that, right now, the only factor that worries Brits more than immigration is the economy, for obvious reasons. Therefore, thinking about the impact of immigration on jobs is a huge part of where the debate should be going.

One of the big worries voters have is that migrants take jobs that could otherwise be done by Brits, driving down wages in our economy. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that there is no fixed number of jobs in Britain and that, because we have the advantages of living in a liberal, free market economy, the number of jobs rises in good times, when people have money to spend, and in bad times—

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I am loath to interrupt the hon. Gentleman’s short seminar on economics, but let me add my thoughts. Everyone has an economic value and an economic cost, and some people who arrive in Britain bring an economic value; indeed, some bring great value, such as people with skills that we need and so on. However, some people bring far more costs than value; for example, if they bring dependants, such as elderly relatives or young children, who need education or healthcare, they bring little economic value, which is not to say that they are not valuable people—they may well be. Therefore, in terms of the economic argument, is the hon. Gentleman as alarmed as I am about the high number of dependants —who bring no economic value to the country—that immigrants bring with them?

[Dave Robertson]

I was about to pick up on a couple of the right hon. Member’s points, but the major thrust of what he was saying was about dependants who do not bring any economic value. However, particularly if we are talking about dependants who are children, we have to consider the future economic value of having potentially amazing people coming to this country, with potentially amazing skills, who can deliver wonderful things for our country.

My wider point, on what migration means for the job market, is one that is worth discussing. Migrants do not take jobs from a fixed pool. The simple fact is that, when people migrate to the UK, they spend money. A rise in population can mean more cash in the economy and more money for businesses, allowing them to expand and create more jobs for those who have come to the UK. However, the reality is that the impact that migration has on the economy is quite small. Overall, migrants make our GDP bigger—that is a fact—but not by a vast amount. Migration is not a silver bullet to create more jobs, higher wages and boom times, which is pretty unsurprising if we think about it: if immigration did do all that, I do not think that as many people would be as worried about it as they are.

The other thing that comes up when we talk to people about this issue is wages. Although migration may have an impact on GDP, they are interested in what it does to the wages that people can earn? For the most part, looking across the economy as a whole, all the measurements say that the answer is very little. The impact is difficult to measure—it is such a small value that it is difficult to put a number on—but experts find that wages are not substantially higher or lower because of migrants.

Most of us know, however, that people’s understanding of the economy is not about a number written on a spreadsheet somewhere that an economist is looking at; it is about, “Do I have a job?”, “Does it pay well?”, and, “Do I have enough to get by?” The one place where immigration does have an impact is on the lowest-paid workers. For those people, it has an admittedly small impact, but it does depress pay ever so slightly. That is very easy for us to say, but if people are struggling to make ends meet anyway, any impact on their wages in the wrong direction is a big deal.

Beyond that, if we are to talk about immigration, jobs and the economy, we have to talk about what sectors of the economy rely on migrants. Many sectors and lots of industries in our economy struggle to fill jobs with British workers. The ones that I would single out, though, are seasonal agricultural work, such as fruit picking, and care work. Those are two sectors where migrants make up a big share of the workforce.

To look at care specifically, in England, which is where I will start, carers are often paid less than they could get working in a warehouse for one of the large internet companies—I will not name the one that begins with an A—as a delivery driver or in the local supermarket. That can make care work unattractive to people. People who want to be carers do it not only for the pay at the end of the month, but because they enjoy looking after people who need their support and help—older, disabled or other vulnerable people. As a result, almost one in five carers in the UK is a migrant worker and, for them, the wages are better than they might get at home.

It is interesting to compare that to Scotland and Northern Ireland, where there are far fewer migrant carers. That is because wages for carers are higher in those areas, so they are attracting more British workers and there is less of a drive to employ migrant workers. The Migration Advisory Committee reckons that raising the wages of carers by £1 an hour would make the job much more attractive to English workers, beating out those other jobs that currently pay more. That is where we can talk about this being a policy choice. It is down to any Government to make these policy choices. They could choose to do the investment—it would be about £2 billion a year—that would enable that to happen, but it would potentially leave unfilled jobs in other key sectors, or leave other areas unable to find the labour they needed.

I have a few points to make before I shut up and let other people contribute. I think it is important that we talk about public services. Immigration will have an effect on them. Everybody recognises this; it makes an obvious difference, with more people registering for doctors and dentists, needing hospital treatment, sending their children to school, and using other public services. However, it also means more people paying tax to pay for those things, so it is not quite a “good or bad” argument; it is one that we have to have in the round.

If we look at the figures, we see that some migrants, particularly those highly paid migrants mentioned by the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), tend to pay more in tax than they take out by using those services. However, in other areas the impact is not offset in quite the same way, and having more people just makes things harder. Housing is the most obvious example. We know that we have a housing crisis in the country; there is broad political consensus about that. Rents are rising, and people are paying eye-watering sums to own a house. It is becoming much harder to get out of the private rental sector and on to the housing ladder. Because migration increases our population, it means more competition for homes and potentially even higher prices. The irony is that, in the short term, we need skilled construction workers to come here to start building the homes, because we have a gap in those skills in Britain, but if the population rises faster than we can build housing, it will exacerbate the crisis.

Earlier I spoke about the number of people coming to live in the UK on student visas, and I think it is important that I go into a bit more detail on that now. Some of us, and some people I have spoken to, may not consider international students to be migrants, but that is how they appear in the numbers, which show that almost a third of the migrants to this country last year came here to study. The international education strategy set by the previous Government aimed to increase the number of international students studying in the UK to 600,000 by 2030. Those students pay higher fees, which helps to pay for the world-class research universities that we have in the UK—one of the things that I am sure all right hon. and hon. Members are very proud to support. International students make up roughly a quarter of all students in British universities—up from closer to 10% all those years ago when I was a student. At some of our universities, though, the share is much higher. International students make up more than half the total at Imperial College London, University College London, BPP University, Coventry University and the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton.

The number of international students is already starting to fall, because they are no longer allowed to bring dependants with them or switch to a work visa before the end of their course. Applications were down by almost a third last year, which means we have another difficult choice to make: either raise the fees that British students pay to help to balance the books, or potentially remove funding from the university sector, which is so important to the economy and to our soft power. Cardiff University has already announced plans to cut 400 jobs and axe courses because of fewer international student applications, so this is already starting to have an effect. Fewer international students could result in some institutions going under.

The final point that I want to make is about culture. This is a much more difficult issue to tie down, but a lot of voters talk to us about the culture that people bring with them, and the potential impact of high levels of immigration on British culture and the kind of country that Britain is. I think all of us know that there are lots of versions of Britishness and that trying to tie down a definition of that word would take longer than the three hours we have for the debate today. There are people in this country who are totally chalk and cheese, whom we love and we loathe. There are different groups—those who really identify with others and those who really do not. Again, we could spend a long time talking about that idea on its own. None the less, at the same time there is a shared sense of what it means to be British. That is not just about where somebody was born, or the colour of a passport; it is something much more fundamental—something that people share. It is fuzzy and hard to define, but we do know it.

For lots of people in this country, Britishness is not the only part of who they are, whether they are a third-generation immigrant or somebody newly arrived here. It is not a zero-sum game, where people must only be British and nothing else. It is perfectly legitimate for people to feel British-American, British-Canadian, British-Nigerian, British-Indian or British-Pakistani. Dual nationality and the variety of approaches that people have brought to the country have resulted in amazing developments in the last centuries. That is something that a lot of us want to celebrate, but while a lot of people see that the vibrancy, the new cultural ideas, the new foods and music and the different businesses on the high street are great, there are some who feel hesitant and that things are moving too fast for them.

I believe that when we get to know people who seem a bit different, we tend to find that we have a lot more in common with them than we first thought. Breaking down barriers and getting to know our neighbours can result in people feeling closer, with a stronger sense of community, but if that work is not done and people feel unable to break down the barriers, they may feel more isolated, distant and nervous, and that their community is changing in ways that they did not agree to and cannot control.

I feel the need to say that a minority—and it is a minority—of people in this country have views on race and immigration that we should all condemn. There are, unfortunately, some people who will try to use debates like this to further their own poisonous ends. There are also in this space many people who feel nervous discussing such matters—nervous about being dismissed as being racist, even though they are not coming from a place they consider to be racist. That is why I return to my initial point: let us have a grown-up discussion, talk about this in the round and recognise that not everybody starts from the same place. Let us also recognise that if we want to get this right—and people do want to get this right—we will have to build consensus, build bridges and work with everybody in our community, whether that is the settled population, different parts of the settled population, migrants, expats or anyone else.

There is clearly a mood in the country that immigration is too high. That tells us something about how Brits feel about our country. It speaks to everything that the UK has to offer that so many people want to make their lives here and share in our Great British values, but it is hard for some people to feel proud and optimistic about that when they look around and see shut shops, when jobs in their town, city or village do not pay well despite long hours, when they cannot see a doctor or a dentist, and when they cannot afford to pay their rent or even dream of buying a house. Fixing those problems is hard and complicated. Ending immigration is a policy choice the Government could choose to make, but it will not be a silver bullet that will fix all those issues. Any Government who made that decision would have to do so with full knowledge of the potential impacts, some currently unseen.

This petition, more than anything, demonstrates the fear about where we are right now. Change is needed. People are really eager to see Members like us, who have the opportunity to speak about this subject, talk about it in a way that, hopefully, moves the country forward.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

I remind Members to stand if they want to speak, so that we can work out who is going next.

16:53

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I am extremely grateful for being allowed to contribute to the debate, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) not only on bringing the subject to the House, but on the measured way he introduced it. It is good to hear someone offering a balanced view on immigration. I have good news for him: I am not frightened or nervous about speaking about migration for fear of being labelled a racist. Indeed, I have spoken about it for a very long time, and will continue to do so.

The plain fact of the matter is that this country has had far too much immigration for far too long. Much of the debate recently has, understandably, focused on illegal immigration. One hundred and fifty thousand people have crossed the channel, and that number has risen since last summer. People see our borders breached with impunity and regard that, perfectly properly, as a challenge to the rule of law. Is it not curious that many of the people now coming are coming from Vietnam? Before that it was Albania. There is not much evidence that these people are fleeing countries that are tyrannical and persecute people. The truth is that many of those coming here are economic migrants.

It is unsurprising that someone in a part of the world that is less advantaged than this one—although not godforsaken because nowhere is godforsaken—would want a better life for themselves and their family. Such a person might well become an economic migrant if they felt they could do so without cost, although in this case, the cost is substantial. They pay people smugglers great sums of money to get them here, knowing that once they are here, the chances are that they will never leave.

CS Lewis said that failures are

“finger posts on the road to achievement”.

Well, one certainly hopes so, because successive Governments have failed. They have failed to deal with illegal immigration, and failed to recognise that legal immigration is a much greater problem still. For all the awfulness of our borders being breached, the scale of legal migration and its effect on population growth is so immense that it dwarfs the challenge and problem of people coming here across the channel. Office for National Statistics figures suggest that our population will surge and that most of the increase will be a direct result of migration. The scale of migration is so great now that it is impossible to build sufficient houses to meet demand, and impossible to provide healthcare for the sort of numbers by which our population is increasing.

Let me give some figures to illustrate my point. In 2023, net migration to this country—this is not about people coming and leaving; this is the net figure—was 866,000. Even the most ambitious Government—a Government who exceed all previous records—might build 250,000 or 300,000 houses a year, but the net population growth through migration in a single year was 866,000. The year before, it was 822,000, and the year before that, it was 250,000. This is an entirely new phenomenon. In the period running up to the mid-1990s, migration was basically in balance; in some years more people left, in some more people arrived. In an advanced country, people always come and people always leave, and it is right that they should be able to do so, subject to certain conditions—in terms of the people arriving, that is. But this dramatic change has swelled our population very rapidly. No country can cope with that sort of population growth without very serious consequences for public services.

I will turn shortly to the other consequences, which the hon. Member for Lichfield touched on, but let us first deal with the economic arguments. The hon. Gentleman rightly said that the justification for immigration has usually been economic—we needed these people to fill jobs that others could not do. When I was attending Cabinet, David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, said that it seemed that only he and the Home Secretary believed in his policy of reducing migration to tens of thousands. Every time he went to Cabinet, one or more Cabinet Ministers would plead that we needed more health workers, construction workers, farm workers, dentists, doctors or nurses. Who did we not need? Every single Department pleaded that they were a special case, such that the policy was almost impossible to pursue or to achieve.

That is the problem we had, but it ignores the point I made to the hon. Member for Lichfield. As I said, he made an extremely balanced case, and he is right to say that an enormous number of people have been admitted on work visas. From June 2024, 270,000 workers were brought in to work in healthcare, but they brought with them 377,000 dependants, almost none of whom will have worked in health or care, and many of whom will have perfectly understandably depended on the provision of both. This was not meeting an economic need; it was creating an economic demand.

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir John Hayes]

I give way to the hon. Gentleman, although he looks like a bespectacled economist, so I am slightly nervous.

[Dr Arthur]

I am not sure if that was an insult or not. First, I should declare an interest by saying that back in 2015, an overseas healthcare worker saved my life. It was my cardiologist, and I put on record my thanks to him. The right hon. Gentleman will know that the population in the UK is falling, and we are getting older as well—I am evidence of that. Without immigration and workers coming into the country, particularly for our healthcare system, we may be stuck. Does he not agree with that?

[Sir John Hayes]

I will deal with those points in order. On the question of population, the ONS is clear that net migration is likely to fuel a rise in the UK population to 72.5 million by 2032. For most of my childhood and adolescence, the population was somewhere around 57 million, 58 million or 59 million. We have never at any point in our history had a population of anything like 72.5 million. The growth has been dramatic, taking place within a generation and a half. We can never build infrastructure to cope with that kind of growth. No Government could. It is not about whether the Government are Labour or Conservative or from a fringe party—by that I mean the Liberal Democrats, of course—it is about the public service being funded in a feasible and tenable way.

Of course it is true that many of the people who come into the country do great things, and of course it is true that our population has people from all kinds of places of origin who contribute immensely to our wellbeing and welfare. However, the truth is that the healthcare visa scheme was a palpable and absolute failure. If we look at the number of vacancies in that sector during the period I have described, it barely moved. It fell slightly, but by nothing like the number of people who were brought in. That leaves the question: what are these people doing now, and what did they do shortly after they arrived? My estimation is that many of them never intended to work in the healthcare sector and were brought into the country by businesses which never intended to work in it either. That is just one example of how the arguments about the economy and the value to the economy need to be re-examined and challenged.

I spoke earlier about the economic cost that people bring as well as value; what I did not mention, and must also be considered, is the displacement effect that migration has on investment in skills. When I was skills Minister, I helped to rejuvenate the apprenticeship system—under my stewardship we built the biggest number of apprenticeships we have ever had in modern times. I did that because I believed in investing in vocational, practical and technical competencies, not only to fulfil economic need, but because many people’s aptitudes, tastes and talents take them in that direction. However, if we say to businesses, “There is no need to invest in training or recruitment and retention, because you can bring people in from abroad to do those jobs”, what possible incentive is there for them to eat into the number of people who find themselves outside the labour market?

I feel particularly for young people. The number of so-called NEETs—those not in education, employment or training—is stubbornly high and has gone up to around 1 million now. Those 16 to 24-year-olds deserve better than a system that says, “We won’t train you; stay on benefits, because there is someone elsewhere who will do the job you might be trained to carry out.” That is not good Government. It is not reasonable or responsible.

We have to displace immigration and invest in skills, rather than the opposite—exactly what we have been doing for so long under successive Governments. Hon. Members will notice that I make no apology for the record of previous Conservative Governments. I am being absolutely frank: this has been a failure by the whole of the political establishment. Indeed much of that establishment, drawn as it is from the liberal classes, misunderstands the argument entirely. The hon. Member for Lichfield boldly and accurately drew attention to the gulf between the views and opinions of a very large number of our constituents and those who populate organisations such as the Migration Advisory Committee —it is a murky group; I never know quite who is on it or how they got there, but they certainly do not seem terribly sensitive to the kind of arguments that the hon. Gentleman advanced when he talked about the frustration and fears that people feel about the scale of migration for economic reasons.

Let me also say something about the social consequences. The hon. Gentleman, in his opening remarks, touched on the fact that societies work when they cohere—when they have a shared sense of belonging that draws people together and mitigates the differences that inevitably prevail in a free society. That shared sense of belonging is itself dependent on change being relatively gradual. Of course, everywhere changes, and our individual lives change too. We can cope with so much change in a human span, yet we have seen towns and parts of cities in our country alter beyond recognition. It is hard to reconcile that with the maintenance of that sense of belonging.

We need to be able to absorb people, and we need to be able to welcome those people, knowing there is something for them to integrate into. Yet, in some parts of Britain, there is a precious little left to integrate into. It is not fair to the indigenous population, nor is it fair to the incoming people, because it cheats them of their chance to gain that sense of belonging, that sense of Britishness, that the hon. Gentleman rightly identified as critical to our communal wellbeing. He is right that some people are frightened to say that. I have never been on the Clapham omnibus—you might have been, Dr Huq—but I can imagine what the people on it are like, because they are probably rather like the people on the Spalding omnibus, or even the Boston omnibus.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

I urge the right hon. Member to enjoy the pleasures of taking a bus to Clapham—it is a splendid experience.

[Sir John Hayes]

I would like to think that the hon. Gentleman, who is my constituency neighbour, spends more time in Lincolnshire than Clapham. I am sure he does. Perhaps, though, we could have an outing on the Clapham omnibus together.

When I go about my constituency, and I imagine this is the same in Lichfield and many constituencies across this House, I hear the frustrations; a feeling of resentment that so much harm has been done by so many people in power who have been oblivious to that harm. The last Government very belatedly, after overtures from people such as me and the hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson)—when he was still in the light, before he went into the shade—clamped down on some of those abuses. They cut the number of work visas in a range of sectors and they reduced the number of dependants that students could bring.

It was preposterous that students could come and bring their families, was it not? When people go to study somewhere, they do not go in order to bring their family; they go specifically for an academic purpose. That ability was curbed, and it had some effect on overall numbers, but it was too little too late. It was not sufficient, and it took a lot of hand-wringing to get to even that point.

[Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Reform)]

On that point, will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir John Hayes]

Now that I have been half-kind to the hon. Gentleman, I will give way.

[Lee Anderson]

The right hon. Gentleman is being most generous with his time in giving way, especially to a Member from a minority party. He raises an interesting point about people coming here to study and bringing dependants. Does he know of any British students who have gone abroad and taken their family with them?

[Sir John Hayes]

The key difference is the type and number of students. The hon. Gentleman and I rarely disagree, and we certainly do not disagree on this subject very much. If someone is studying for a PhD, and they are coming here to work for a considerable time and looking to build a long-term career in academia, I can understand why they might want to build a family life here. If they are coming for a shorter course such as a master’s, it is pretty hard to see why they would want to bring their family, given that they would expect to go home at the end of it. Most of those people will also be very young, so it is unlikely that they will have children, wives or husbands—so who are these dependants that they might be bringing? I agree with the hon. Member for Ashfield that the idea was preposterous to begin with. Happily, in the end we curbed it.

I know that others want to contribute to the debate, so I will not take up any more time, except to say that it is high time there was a sea change, and that we recognise those

“finger posts on the road to achievement”,

the failures by successive Governments. While I know that, to quote CS Lewis again,

“An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason”,

the cause of this situation has been a fundamental reluctance to measure the medium and long-term effects of things that in the short term seemed attractive because they dealt with shortages or gaps in the economy.

I hope that we can now make the necessary changes. I hope that we can reunite those in power with those whom their power affects, and that we can re-engage with a population who know the premise with which I began my short contribution: that there has been too much immigration into this country for too long—a widely held view by people who think that enough is enough.

17:11

[Jacob Collier (Burton and Uttoxeter) (Lab)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson), who is also my office buddy, for opening this important debate.

The petition demands a five-year suspension of all immigration. Although I understand the concerns that have led to more than 200,000 people signing it, if we were to do what the petitioners are asking for, we would make Liz Truss look like a saint and suck out the rich cultural tapestry that makes our country so great.

Migrants make up a fifth of our workforce. The NHS alone relies on more than 160,000 staff from overseas. Suspend all immigration tomorrow, and who will fill those roles? Who will care for our sick? Who will work on our buses—including the Clapham omnibus, perhaps? Who will staff our hospitality sector?

[Lee Anderson]

The hon. Member asks who will fill the skills gap or the labour gap. How about the 7 million people in this country who are economically inactive?

[Jacob Collier]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention, and I am grateful that he is here in Westminster Hall today; he has had a busy weekend, so it is nice to see him.

It is the Government’s plan to train up more British people and get them into the healthcare sector and other sectors. That is what the Government are going to drive forward, and I am sure the hon. Gentleman will be interested in the announcements later this week by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who will lay out our steps to get people back into work.

This particular petition is not a serious proposal or one that any serious Government should follow, but I recognise, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield said, the underlying concerns raised by the petition and the concerns that my constituents have about migration. Migration must be controlled, and the Government have rightly taken steps to bring down net migration to sustainable levels. We will not tolerate the vile trade of human smuggling, including the criminal gangs that are exploiting vulnerable people and making millions at the expense of our national security. That is not immigration—it is lawlessness. That is why the Government are investing in the new Border Security Command, delivering crackdowns on smuggling networks, increasing enforcement and expediting removals.

In the last six months alone, 16,400 people without any right to be in the UK have been returned to their home countries, and I know that the Minister and his Home Office team are working hard on this. That is real action and not just words.

[Lee Anderson]

I thank the hon. Member for giving way again; this is the last time that I will intervene. He said that 16,000 people with no right to be in this country have been deported. I agree with that figure, but is he aware that most of those people are overstayers on student visas or work visas, that they have been paid £3,000 to be deported, and that not one of them came over on those small boats?

[Jacob Collier]

The fact is that this Government are getting on with deportations, and we did not see that under the last Government. Indeed, they pursued the Rwanda policy, which cost the taxpayer millions of pounds and sent only four volunteers. What we are seeing from this Government is real action.

The Government know that secure borders are not an option, but a necessity. Legal migration is another matter entirely. Shutting off our borders to all might be a simple gimmick that some in this House support, but this is a serious issue and not one for snake-oil solutions. That is why we must take a balanced approach by investing in training and upskilling British workers to fill more vacancies in crucial sectors such as healthcare, while also ensuring that overseas workers with the skills we need come here and contribute to our society.

Beyond economics, this is about the very fabric of our society. In Burton and Uttoxeter, we see a diverse community because of migration. While Muslims observe Ramadan in their mosques, local Christians are helping the homeless, the Polish community are shopping in the mini market, and the Burton Caribbean centre is blasting out soul music. That makes us a better place. Today, as we mark Commonwealth Day, I am reminded of the contribution that those nations and their people have made and continue to make to our country.

Earlier today, I was at Burton town hall, where Mayor Shelagh McKiernan and her cadet raised the Commonwealth flag. Sheila reminded us of the six Commonwealth values. No. 4 is tolerance, respect and understanding. In this debate, too often we forget that people are at the centre of it: people who contribute, build and enrich the very communities that they join. From the engineers who build our infrastructure to the care workers looking after the elderly, these people are integral to our national story, and always have been.

I am proud to be British because of the fundamental values of tolerance and respect for others. That is how I was brought up in school, and that is what my parents taught me. We owe it to the British people to have a debate and immigration system that are worthy of those values and the complexity of the issue, not slogans and not hysteria.

17:17

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

I am grateful to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I usually say how pleased I am to speak in a debate, but I have to admit that I am conflicted about being here today because I could not disagree more strongly with the petition’s demands. And yet, the thousands who have signed it have rightly identified that we face deep challenges in this country, and that people are being badly let down and are struggling. Those who have signed the petition want answers. They want politicians like us to take bold, decisive action that will genuinely change people’s lives for the better. Let me be very clear: stopping migration is not the answer to that problem—in fact, it is the opposite. But we do nobody any favours by pretending that the problems are not there.

The petition captures a view of migration that I fundamentally disagree with, but the view is clearly widespread, so I want to directly address the many people who have signed the petition and all those who feel frustrated, left behind and ignored. I want to give another view of the problems that we face as a country and give people another way forward—one that is determined to change things for the better, that is positive in the face of negativity, and that resolutely stands up to those spreading misinformation and prejudice from wherever it comes.

I will start with the positive. I am proud to represent Bristol Central, which is apparently the most pro-immigration constituency in the country. I know that that feeling is not universal across the UK, so I want to explain why I and so many of my constituents feel that way. The truth is that migration is good for this country. People come from across the world because they want to be part of our communities. They do vital work, as has been discussed, in our hospitals, schools and GP surgeries. They care for our children and our grandparents. They start businesses and create jobs. They pay tax and give to charity.

If we look at Spain, we see that, last year, its economy grew by five times the eurozone average and more than the US. Why? Because by welcoming immigration, its Government boosted demand in the economy and filled their labour shortages. Economic growth is not the best measure of the benefit to citizens, and I will come to that in a moment, but to pretend that migration is a problem and not an opportunity does a disservice to people who have grown up here and people who have chosen to make the UK their home.

The Government’s economics watchdog tells us that higher migration leads to lower Government deficits and debt. Instead of grasping the huge opportunity presented by people moving here to be part of our communities and contribute to our economy, the Government are subjecting immigrants to harsh arbitrary visa restrictions, forcing many to leave their families behind—one man’s economic dependence is another man’s children—and pushing many into jobs, such as in the care sector, where they are at risk of very poor treatment because they are under threat of deportation at any time.

A lot of people feel very protective of this country, and so do I. We should want to protect this country, our home, and a place where so many incredible things have been invented and created. We have such a strong culture, with inventions from the electric motor and penicillin to the first ever website—although arguably that has had some cons as well as pros. The UK is a wonderfully creative culture and economy. It has the most beautiful countryside and the most talented people. We should be proud and protective of this country, and I want to be, but who are we protecting this country against? Who does it need protecting from?

I agree with the petitioners when they say that

“we can’t even look after the people we have here at the moment”,

but why is that? It is absolutely true that people and powers in this country are making life harder for a lot of Brits—they are making it harder for families to feed their children, pay the bills, get a doctor’s appointment, get on the housing ladder, or even get a council house. But that is not the people who have moved to the UK from elsewhere; it is big corporations paying poverty wages and then taking their profits out of the country. It is energy companies hiking their bills time and again while polluting our environment, and water companies making us pay for the privilege of having sewage pumped into our waterways.

[Sir John Hayes]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Carla Denyer]

I will make a little more progress. It is the landlords who own hundreds of properties putting up the rent every few months, out of all proportion to incomes, so that people pay more and more of their wage packet each month. It is the big developers prioritising profit by building luxury developments rather than the affordable homes that we need. It is years and years of deliberate underfunding by Governments that have brought our public services to their knees.

None of this is inevitable. If the Government choose, they could raise the minimum wage so that it is genuinely enough to live on. They could take action on spiralling bills, put an end to rip-off rents and build the affordable housing we so desperately need. But some rich and powerful people have an interest in keeping rents high, or allowing public services to be sold off to the highest bidder, or letting the rich get richer while the rest of us struggle. Rather than answering difficult questions about why this economy has been designed in a way that benefits them, it is easier for them to point the finger at migrants.

It is not always easy to stand up and tell the truth when we are swimming against the tide of what people across the country are being told day in, day out by public figures, newspaper headlines and posts on X. It is not easy to challenge the perceptions that have become the mainstream, but we have to, because as long as we chase false solutions to our problems and ignore the real sources of those problems, the things we care about—how much money we have in our pocket, whether we have a safe, warm, secure home, a roof over our head, and public services—will not improve.

I am going to have to turn to the negative for a moment. There is a serious problem of racism in this country, and especially in debates around immigration. That is not to say that everyone who has concerns about immigration is racist, though I fully expect that I may have my speech characterised as such. But we need to be honest about the fact that racism is thriving in this country. Like a hideous parasite, it feeds off people’s fear and suffering and is nurtured by politicians and media outlets that benefit from finding someone else to blame.

Last summer in Southport, we saw a horrific attack against children that scared us all. Such horrors make us angry, and rightfully so. But just as unacceptable and scary is what happened next and how that anger was deliberately misdirected towards totally innocent people: towards black and brown families minding their own business, who are no more responsible for the behaviour of one young man who happens to be the son of immigrants than I am responsible for the behaviour of all other left-handers. The despicable scenes we saw in the riots are a chilling snapshot and reminder of what is happening in this country and of what I am here to speak against: a spiral of misdirected blame, anger and fear that fixes nothing, helps nobody and harms many.

When the Minister responds, I ask him not to focus only on the perhaps easier, but not entirely honest, answer of being tough on migration, but to meet the petitioners with sincerity about the challenges we face and how we can really tackle them. To quote the petitioners one last time:

“We believe we can’t even look after the people we have here at the moment.”

They are right. Successive Governments have failed the people in this country. They have failed to provide jobs with fair wages, affordable housing, affordable energy, access to healthcare—I could go on. Rather than solutions, millionaire politicians and millionaire media moguls have inundated our phones, TVs and newspapers with images and messages depicting immigrants as the source of all our problems.

People are struggling. They are worried about not being able to pay their bills, about not getting paid enough and about their safety. An overwhelming tide of loud voices is telling them who to blame. That does not ease their worry or stop their struggling; it capitalises on their anger for political gain at the expense of some of the most hard-working and, sometimes, vulnerable people in this country.

It is a story as old as time to blame the stranger, the newcomer, the one who looks different. No one ever beat that story by accepting the narrative or overcame it by validating it. People’s feelings about being let down are valid, but the direction in which they are being pointed is not. It is the responsibility of all of us in this House, and especially of the Government, to be truthful, confront the real issues and not let people’s pain be channelled into hatred.

17:28

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Dr Huq, especially given that this is my first speech in Westminster Hall. I thank my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson), for introducing this debate so thoughtfully and in such a balanced way, as several hon. Members have said. It has not gone unnoticed that my constituency has among the highest numbers of signatures on the e-petition. As has been rightly pointed out, the petition is a signal to the House of how people feel about immigration and the real impact on their lives. It is our responsibility as Members of this House to acknowledge that. It is also our responsibility to be clear that discussing immigration and the strains that it leads to is not racist or intolerant, but a legitimate part of our democracy in the same way as public debate over any other issue.

It is important for us to discuss the impacts of high levels of immigration, particularly where they are seen over a short period and where that immigration is concentrated in certain cities, towns or villages. The impact of that rapid rise in population in that context is not dissimilar to large new housing estates being built over a few years—except that, with house building, we can to some extent put in place mitigation through the planning system and allow for a direct transfer of cash from developers to infrastructure. We can—and, I am sure, will—debate whether the planning system delivers infrastructure quickly enough, but the bottom line is that rapid immigration to particular areas is far harder to plan for and therefore to address.

Over the past two decades or so, several pots of Government funding have attempted to address that point, such as the migration impact fund, introduced under the last Labour Government, and latterly the controlling migration fund under the coalition and Conservative Governments. However, those pots often fund efforts such as encouraging GP registration among new migrants to reduce the use of urgent and emergency care. Although that is positive for demand on services and, certainly, the public purse, it often does not address the core issues with the lack of infrastructure, such as the number of places at local GP surgeries or schools. I believe we need to revisit the question of how we make up for the impact of immigration at a very local level, where people are feeling the effects most.

Ultimately, we are here to discuss why hundreds of thousands of people have chosen to sign this petition. For some, it might be a worry about the pressure on housing, schools and healthcare, or an acknowledgment of the simple fact that net migration has been left to soar for far too long. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield mentioned, net migration reached staggering levels in recent years, and it has never reduced to the level that the previous Government aimed for.

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is making a measured speech, unlike the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer), but will he chart what he has mentioned in practical terms? Last year, there were 700,000 new GP registrations. No Government, Conservative or Labour, could cope with that scale of growth in demand.

[Josh Newbury]

Absolutely—I agree with the right hon. Gentleman on that point. Those of us who have had high levels of house building see that, and I am sure that is reflected in areas with high levels of immigration. We need proper planning wherever there is a rapid growth in population, and I worry that that has not been happening for a very long time.

GP registrations are a particular pressure point. I recently had a roundtable with all the general practices in my area, and I was told that they are at capacity—over capacity, in many cases—and that further house building is coming down the line. They worry that we do not have forward planning in the NHS, which is often slow to catch up. I say that having worked for an NHS commissioner in a past life. We must acknowledge that we need to do far better on that point.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield said, a key reason for the high levels of immigration is the unchecked issuing of work visas, particularly in sectors with high vacancies such as social care. That is why I welcome the Government’s commitment to finally link up immigration policies and our national strategy for education and skills. Only that will ensure that British people have opportunities to upskill, reskill and access those jobs—in some cases, they currently do not feel able to do so. That will also put a greater onus on employers to ensure that they use work visas for vacancies that genuinely cannot be filled by our workforce.

An early priority identified by the Deputy Prime Minister, the Education Secretary and the Home Secretary is social care, and it is not hard to see why. In many ways, social care epitomises the issues we are facing with immigration and workforce planning: we have an ageing population, so demand for the sector’s services is exploding; pay is generally low, especially given the importance of the work; the wider terms and conditions are not appealing for many young people starting their careers; and there are often no opportunities for skills training.

Last Friday, I was given a greater insight into the challenges of the care sector when I visited CSPC Healthcare and heard about the challenges it has seen in the sector for the 12 years that it has been operating. It provides domiciliary care in my constituency and across Staffordshire and the west midlands. It told me quite a lot, most of which I will save for a future debate on social care, but one thing it said that struck me was that many agencies, particularly those working with overseas recruitment agencies, are sponsoring huge numbers of work visas, only for those workers to find that the amount of work they were promised is not there when they come into the country, are bused out to a particular town and dropped off. That is exploitative and quite frankly an outrage if immigration figures are being artificially inflated when our economy does not need all those staff. That highlights the reforms we need for the immigration system and our skills and workforce planning.

The question that must follow all that is: would suspending all immigration for five years really solve all those problems? Our economy relies on workers from abroad to fill gaps in our workforce and in sustaining our vital public services, so I fear that a complete shutdown would risk huge consequences. In particular, we know that our NHS will always rely on workers coming to make their home here and contributing to those great institutions. Having worked in our NHS in a past life, I know that skilled staff from other countries, most of them European and Commonwealth nations, are critical to keeping the health service alive.

We will always benefit from international skills and talent to keep us globally competitive, but importantly, immigration must never be used as an alternative to training or tackling workforce problems here at home. The previous Government’s reliance on overseas workers, teamed with a failure to invest in skills here in the UK, left us with an immigration system that is neither properly controlled nor managed, resulting in net migration of almost 1 million people. Regardless of our stance on immigration control, surely we can all agree that that is unsustainable practically, financially, environmentally, or on whatever grounds we care to look at.

The decade of decline in skills training, particularly vocational skills in the sectors with the greatest need, saw employers unable to fill vacancies and therefore with no choice but to either do the nation serious economic damage or face eye-watering net migration figures. The work that Skills England is doing with the Migration Advisory Committee will show us the occupation shortages, which will ensure that people can access the skills training they need to fill vacancies in those sectors, raising growth sustainability across the country and stopping reliance on overseas recruitment.

I will finish with a point on dependants and a point on the practicalities of halting immigration for five years. As has been mentioned, dependants have been a key component of rising levels of immigration for many years, especially in visa categories where levels were previously very low, such as students. I absolutely sympathise with the view that our points-based immigration system needs to focus on bringing the most economically productive workers into the UK. However, we must also acknowledge that some of the highest skilled, most productive workers, just like British workers, have care responsibilities. Surely we do not want to shut out people purely because they have children or have to care for a sick or elderly parent, for example. What we need is a common-sense approach to dependants. Should a student be able to bring their whole family over with them when they study? In my opinion, no. Should a single mother with three children, who wants to work as a nurse in our NHS, be welcomed? Yes. I think the vast majority of the public support that pragmatic view.

I sympathise with what I assume are the motivations of the creator of this petition: giving the UK breathing space to rebuild our infrastructure, which has been so damaged by the age of austerity, a pandemic and huge levels of net migration. But the reality is that halting immigration for several years, or even months, would simply create huge pent-up demand for visas for that period of zero migration. During that time, presumably people would still be allowed to leave the country, raising the possibility of a mass shortage in our workforce. Then, if immigration were allowed again at some point in the future, the tidal wave of applications would almost completely overwhelm not only our visa system but the infrastructure that we are most concerned about. A total stop of immigration would therefore be counterproductive to tackling the impacts that underpin this petition and so much of our national conversation around immigration.

To conclude, I hope that the openness and robustness of debate we have seen today will continue. Closing down the debate around immigration with name-calling and demonisation, from whatever perspective, will close down the chance of getting to a point where we are able to address all the issues we have touched on. I welcome the Government’s choice to grasp the nettle of reforming our skills system and linking it to where job vacancies are, and I hope we can continue that debate in the months and years to come.

17:38

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) on opening the debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee.

We all want to do things well—I am sure that is an ambition shared by all hon. Members—and immigration done well can be a great thing. It is what I call smart immigration, where we welcome people from across the world, with the skills required, in numbers that can be absorbed into the existing population. We welcome people who want to integrate, work and grow within communities, and learn the language. That is a great thing, and we have a long history, until the last 25 years, of actually getting that right.

When we are looking at strategy and planning our constituents expect us to do a good job, so when we look ahead to the next 20 years and see that population growth of some 10 million people is forecast—give or take; let us call it half a million a year—and the vast majority of that is through inward migration, we want to say, surely, “How will we plan for that? Where is the infrastructure? Where are the homes, doctors, hospitals and everything else?”

In a sense, the challenge that the Government currently face—there are many, which we all recognise—is dealing with the existing challenges. I suspect that there is very little real planning. The Government are planning to build 1.5 million homes in this Parliament, but that will barely alleviate the existing population’s housing challenges, let alone half a million more people coming to join our population every year over the next five years and beyond. I fear that for the next 20 years we are going to make the same mistake as the huge one we made 20 years ago.

If we had had this sort of debate in about 2005 and someone had said, “We’ve got a good idea, folks: let’s increase the population by 10 million people over the next 20 years”— give or take, about 17% of the then population—I am pretty sure that smart hon. Members would have said, “If so, we have to build the infrastructure, the houses and so on.” Someone would probably have asked, rightly, “Will that make us all better off?” The role of the Government in this great place is to make our constituents better off.

If something is planned for and delivered well, great results can be achieved. But if there is no proper planning, as happened, regrettably, under the previous Conservative Administrations—various shades of Liberal Democrat—uncontrolled migration and the situation of the last couple of years are the result. In one year, there was almost 1 million net inward migration and in a second year almost three quarters of a million. That is completely uncontrollable, and it puts huge pressures on the population.

The thing to focus on to bring people together in this sensitive debate is population. If we want population growth, we must plan for it, make sure that it is going to make everybody better off and then deliver it. The interesting point, of course, is that our population has never been bigger; according to official numbers, it is a whisker under 70 million people. We are not short of people in this country. There are, give or take, 7 million or 8 million people who are economically inactive and over 5 million people on out-of-work benefits. Surely, before we say, “We need another half a million people a year, every year, to provide the labour for the various services we need to fill”, we should be training and skilling up our own people.

[Dr Arthur]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for the sensitive way he is navigating through this. However, is it not the case that people defined as economically inactive include those who are retired? Is he suggesting that we go around the golf courses and bingo halls in our constituencies and get those people into the workforce, building houses for us? Is that the solution to the economic problems in this country?

[Richard Tice]

The point is that life expectancy has grown and the pension age is growing because we are healthier. That is a great thing. People enjoy work—work is a great thing. However, the real point is that there are some 5 million-plus people not of retirement age who we need to get back into the workplace. We want a world-leading benefit system that looks after the genuinely vulnerable and sick as well as the genuinely unemployed who are looking for work. I would have thought that we could all agree on that.

Let us look at what really did work well: back in the ’80s and early ’90s, net inward migration was about 30,000 to 50,000 a year on average—in some years, there was a little bit of net emigration. It was working well. People came to work and integrated—and guess what? Our economy was growing at 2.5% to 3.5% a year. Everybody was getting better off. We had real per-person wage growth, above the rate of inflation, of some 2.5% per annum in the 1990s.

We now have no GDP growth but significant population growth through inward migration, so we are all getting poorer per person. That is one of the challenges that we all face. If we know that the system worked back then, maybe we should be willing to learn the lessons of history. That was a time when there was no immigration debate, interestingly. Until about the early 2000s, immigration was not an issue because it was working well, with numbers that could be sensibly absorbed. People were getting richer—and that is a good thing.

My view is that we are not short of people, and the anxiety of those who signed the petition is that population growth is too great. We cannot cope with our existing population, and there is a need for pause—perhaps a policy of net zero immigration: one in, one out. About 400,000 people leave the UK every year; we could welcome a similar number in—that will ebb and flow—as long as they are highly skilled and highly qualified where we have shortages, while we train our own people.

Back in the ’80s, the interesting thing was that our healthcare system, the NHS, was working very well—

[Carla Denyer]

It was funded very well as well.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

Order. Through the Chair, please.

[Richard Tice]

It was working well, and we had people coming from around the world to help the NHS—but we were training our own, and that was a great thing. That comes back to the point that what has happened in the past 15 years is the complete failure to deliver for population growth at every level. The madness of the cap on training our own people who want to be nurses or doctors—it is absolutely ludicrous. We encouraged businesses in that by saying, “You do not need to invest in training. You can just bring in people from overseas.”

What happened? That brought in low-skilled, lower-cost labour from overseas, and we were told by the authorities, the ONS and the Office for Budget Responsibility or its predecessors, that that would be a good thing for the country. Now, we have been told by the OBR, which has just caught up with things, that lower-skilled and lower-cost labour never contributes financially to the economy more than it takes out.

[Sir John Hayes]

This is in anticipation of our trip to Clapham, perhaps. Another economic point that has not been made so far in the debate is that if we allow for the kind of incoming populations that the hon. Gentleman described, we stultify the economy. Instead of investing in technology, in labour saving, or in creating the high-tech and high-skilled economy that makes us competitive across the globe, we reinforce an economy that has high levels of labour—usually unskilled and lowly paid labour—and we weaken our productivity and competitiveness. That is precisely the other economic effect that that policy has had over time.

[Richard Tice]

The right hon. Member makes a splendid economic point, which I was coming on to, because this is basic economics. If we have a labour shortage, employers have one of two choices. They can either say, “I need to pay higher wages”, which reflects what the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) was indicating earlier. Or, if they cannot afford that labour, they will essentially be saying, “I need to invest in capital equipment, which is more productive”, and that is what happened: in the ’80s and ’90s, businesses were investing in capital equipment. That is why we became ever more productive and why we got richer. That is the key thing.

From a legal migration standpoint, if we implement it well, with the highly skilled and highly trained going to where they will contribute to various sectors, it is a good thing and hugely welcomed across the country. That takes us back to where I think things were some 25 to 35 years ago. Done badly—like anything in life—we end up with problems. That is why we have ended up in the situation we are in: because of the failures of the previous regime.

That is the issue of legal migration. With competence of delivery, it should be sortable, but the British people are very anxious about the pressures on housing and public services, and that is driven by the pressures of population growth. The challenge for this Government is to try to deal not only with the huge problems that they inherited, but with the potential population growth. In a sense, if the Government said, “Well, we can’t cope with population growth, because we need to deal with the current challenges”, that might make life easier for them. Otherwise, the Government will be constantly chasing their tail and might never catch up.

That brings me to the issue of illegal migration. I would have thought that we could all agree that if something is illegal, we should stop it. In many ways, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about having to do something well: one has got to be competent, and occasionally it requires a bit of courage.

Interestingly—credit where credit is due—under the Labour Administration in the 2000s, we had significant numbers seeking asylum and we had significant illegal immigration, which was then not on boats but in lorries and vans and such, and the Government were doing a good job. They were catching people and saying, “Thank you very much for your application, but you are an economic migrant and have come here illegally. We are going to thank you but say no, you can’t stay.”

The Government were removing some 40,000 people a year and were assessing asylum applications in two to three weeks, with a couple of weeks for an appeal. The decision was made and either the person stayed or returned. In 2004, I think, the acceptance rate for asylum seekers was about 18% to 20%. That percentage is now somewhere in the 70s.

We have a history of being able to do things well. I think that is what the British people want.

[Dave Robertson]

I note the hon. Member’s comments about how things worked in the ’80s and ’90s. For most of that time I was not very old, but to his point about asylum success rates being different then and now, in both of those decades the UK was subject to the European Court of Human Rights, so does he agree that if there has been a change, it is probably not because of the Court?

[Richard Tice]

I think the fact was that the Government were assessing people quickly and promptly. I suspect that what we did not have back then—I may be wrong, and if so, I stand corrected—is a huge industry of lawfare that had grown up, as it has now, but I could be wrong on that. I think it comes back to the issue of competence.

Having been stopped from coming illegally primarily in lorries, people are now coming on boats. What the previous Government utterly failed to do, having had no strategy whatsoever, was stop the boats. There is a history of other nations stopping the boats, and the tragedy, as a previous speaker said, is that by not stopping the boats, people are dying. Last year was a record year—I think the figure of 69, give or take, was mentioned.

The current policy is the worst of all worlds. It is my opinion, having studied it and read it in great detail, that the 1982 United Nations convention on the law of the sea gives us the legal right to pick people up out of boats and safely take them back to France. Under that same treaty there is a legal obligation on our good friends the French to do exactly that. They have a legal obligation that they are failing to fulfil. We know that it works because the Belgian authorities pick up boats that try to leave its shores. They take them back and the whole thing is stopped very quickly. What that requires is competence and political courage, which we have not seen anything of in the last six years by either Government.

The Government have a strategy at the moment, and I hope that the Minister will address it in his remarks, which is to smash the gangs and pray that that will stop the boats. But the evidence so far—some seven or eight months into this Administration—shows that the numbers are some 20% higher than in the comparable period. We know that last year some 36,000 people came across on the boats.

This is costing the country billions and billions of pounds. It is quite hard to get a sense of how many billion, because it is being spent in so many different ways, but it is costing the country billions of pounds. It has also led to the destruction of thousands and thousands of jobs in hotels across the country in the hospitality sector. It has also put significant extra pressure on housing: some 150,000 have come across on boats; very few have been returned. There was that successful return of four people to Rwanda at the cost of many hundreds of millions of pounds. The question for the Minister is: how long will the Government carry on with this policy of smashing the gangs before accepting that it is not working and that it will not work? That is a very important question that I have previously asked the Secretary of State, and we are still waiting for an answer.

[Sir John Hayes]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way a second time; it is very generous of him. I have some figures that I hope will help him. He asked how much it is costing. What we do know is that £3 billion was allocated to housing asylum seekers in hotels. That is an average of about £8 million a day—£8 million that could be spent on the desperate, the needy and the dispossessed in our country.

[Richard Tice]

I am most grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, but I think the real number is many billions higher. Of course, the cost could be £10 billion a year—that is almost 10 times the winter fuel allowance, just to put it in perspective.

There is another issue here: the degree of illegal working going on in this country is completely off the scale. It is often unreported on. For example, 40% to 50% of all fast food deliveries, give or take, are now being done by people on sub-accounts. They rent the accounts from the original account holder, who they find on Facebook, at a cost of £50 or £60 a week. Why would someone pay someone else for a sub-account on a delivery company website if they were able to get an account for free? There can be only one reason: those people are working illegally.

If any Members enjoy the pleasures of fast food deliveries, I suggest they look at the person delivering their food and compare them with the picture of the person who was supposed to deliver it. Very often, they will see that it is not the same person. The scale of illegal working has the sad effect, which I have seen and spoken to people in certain towns about, of suppressing the wages of genuine British workers who want to earn a good living, and were earning a good living, by delivering fast food on bikes, e-bikes or whatever. Again, there is a serious lack of fairness; it is completely unjust.

There is a strange thing going on, and it is happening in my constituency of Boston and Skegness and elsewhere. I am talking about illegal legal migration. It is a racket and massive business. People are coming here on a visitor visa and when they arrive here, they go to a high street shop—they do this in Boston—where they get told how to fiddle the numbers on the form to show that they were here pre 2020. By doing so, they can subscribe under the EU settlement scheme, even though they have never been here before. That gives them a national insurance number for overseas, which entitles them to work, and soon after that it entitles them to claim benefits. We have ended up with a level of illegality up and down the country much greater than anybody dare talk about. I hope everybody agrees that it is incumbent on this Government to ensure competence in enforcement, because that will stop this level of abuse. It is suppressing the wages of British people, and it is adding huge pressure on housing demand, when there is a critical housing shortage.

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh in the Chair]

I welcome you to the Chair, Dame Siobhain; it is lovely to see you.

We have to get on top of the illegality, while recognising that legal migration done well is a very smart thing to do. Done badly, as it has been in recent years, it has led to the massive challenges and the concerns that tens of millions of people across the UK have.

In summary, I think this is about doing things well. It is about stopping illegal migration by doing the job properly, and being smart about how we motivate our existing population and getting people skilled up and back into work, so that we do not need to rely on large amounts of inward migration when we are paying huge amounts of money for people to stay at home. That cannot be smart, good government. I think any Government, if they do this well, will have the gratitude of the British people. I think the British people just want someone to do this job properly.

18:00

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I start by thanking all the participants in this interesting and wide-ranging debate, and the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) in particular for his comprehensive and very thoughtful introduction. He rightly reminded us that this matter is of great importance to many people and that we should not demonise or polarise people for their views in this discussion; we should be willing to listen and discuss the topic—as indeed we have today.

The right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) also recognised the importance of discussing this topic and highlighted his view of the country as being full, with migrants consuming public services. In relation to the Clapham omnibus—I should point out that underground trains and suburban trains are also available as public transport options in that suburb—I will perhaps encourage him to take a trip on said omnibus. He may be surprised to find that the viewpoints of residents in that area, which voted heavily to remain and is very diverse and cosmopolitan in many of its features, are rather different from those in his own constituency.

The hon. Member for Burton and Uttoxeter (Jacob Collier) talked about the need to tackle illegal migration and also recognised the long history of migrant contributions to our country. The hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) also highlighted the importance of having a respectful debate on the issue and recognised that housing is under pressure for a whole range of reasons. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) highlighted how the ageing UK population drives part of the need for migrant labour in this country, and how the planning system has not been effective at meeting population increases and ensuring that infrastructure and public service provision catch up.

That point was also made by the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice), who cited the failure of successive Governments, as well as making some positive comments about the Labour Government of the early 2000s and the need for UK skills investment. That was a point also very well made by the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings. In relation to Liberal Democrats of different hues, I assure the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness that our colour has always been orange. We would, of course, welcome suggestions for any changes to our colour palette.

When it comes to my own views on this issue, I think it is important to reflect on an overall philosophical point. My strong view is that, on average, people as individuals have far more in common—they have common needs—than differences, and that is far more important than where they came from. I feel this partly because I have Polish heritage: my Polish mother moved to this country in the 1970s and has spent decades always working and contributing to UK life. She has certainly fully integrated—perhaps aside from an occasional accent difference or getting her “a’s” and “the’s” mixed up.

On that point, so often discussions about immigration and immigrants are softened when the debate turns away from the general and to specific individuals and personal relationships. For example, when I met local business owners at the Railway Inn pub in Culham in my Oxfordshire constituency, an initially very frustrated and hostile conversation about immigration suddenly softened somewhat when I talked about my Polish mother. Those people in the discussion talked about their own heritage and the many people they know in the area who have come from other countries, and recognised that, individually, they make a strong contribution.

It is important to remember that there are many types of migrants, with very different reasons for coming here. It is therefore essential that we examine the basis and reasons for people’s major concerns about migration. On irregular migration, I think we can all agree—as we have done during this debate—that we want to stop the dangerous channel crossings. Unfortunately, the previous Conservative Government failed to tackle them and arguably made the situation worse. Human trafficking gangs responsible for those crossings continue to operate with virtual impunity. We saw barriers erected to international co-operation by the previous Government that make it harder to crack down on cross-border people smuggling.

That Government’s inability to process asylum claims efficiently meant that those without a genuine right to stay were not being swiftly returned. As has been stated by the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings, that continues to cost the taxpayer a great deal for hotels and other forms of accommodation. It is clear that change is desperately needed, so it is right that the new Labour Government are taking steps to stop those channel crossings. Cracking down on the criminal trafficking gangs responsible will be crucial. The Liberal Democrats want to ramp up domestic enforcement against those gangs, including by establishing a new single enforcement body to crack down on modern slavery in the UK, which is how so many of those gangs make their money.

We also need to look at the root causes of why migration is happening to Europe and the United Kingdom, because we are not alone in facing this challenge—it is very much a continent-wide problem. We need to work constructively and collaboratively with our European allies, particularly France, via Europol. We need to create an effective and morally appropriate deterrent, such as deportation back to home countries if applications are rejected—again, that comes back to the importance of tackling that backlog and having an efficient system for processing applications. We need to consider the varying root causes that lead people to attempt to reach Europe and the UK, including war, oppression, climate change and, yes, a lack of economic opportunity. We need to consider further what safe and legal routes may exist for people to apply for asylum and refugee status from abroad.

Turning to legal migration, the Liberal Democrats agree that our country needs a fair and effective immigration system that enforces the rules on who has the right to stay in our country. Unfortunately, we saw nothing of the sort from the previous Conservative Government, with their chaotic approach of making and breaking headline-grabbing targets that has shattered public trust and left the system in a shambolic state. Net migration figures reached record highs on the Conservatives’ watch, and their inability to process asylum claims efficiently meant that those without a genuine right to stay were not being swiftly returned.

It is clear that the new Government have a mammoth task ahead: rebuilding an immigration system that works for our country and economy, while fixing public trust in the process. Many speakers in today’s debate talked about the challenges with the planning system eroding the public’s trust. Certainly in my constituency—which has seen 35% population growth in the South Oxfordshire and the Vale of White Horse districts—a system that does not match infrastructure and public services to population growth erodes public confidence in the entire system. As the hon. Member for Bristol Central said, having public services that work will be essential for regaining that trust.

Over the past two years, from the data that we have, the two main reasons for immigration have been work and study. Recent years have also seen a much higher number of people arriving for humanitarian reasons than in the past, notably via the Ukraine schemes, the Afghan resettlement schemes and the holders of British national overseas status from Hong Kong, who have quite rightly been welcomed here because of the oppression of the Chinese Government.

Migration is currently a source of population growth, and migrants tend to be younger on average than the general population, which can be useful when our own population is ageing. As has been said, the number of non-UK nationals in employment is greater than the 3.5 million people aged 16 to 64 who were out of work in late 2024, but who wanted to work. Of those, 1.5 million were unemployed, meaning they were actively looking for a job, while 2 million were assessed as economically inactive, meaning that they were not able to work.

If we want to reduce migration and have more “British jobs for British people”, as one Prime Minister once said, we need to examine why our economy is so dependent on migrant labour in many sectors. We need to recognise the risk that a suspension of immigration for five years, as has been suggested by this petition, would likely lead to labour shortages across the UK’s labour market, harming both the private sector and public services.

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Member is right that, if we did not get the unemployed people who could work into work, the circumstances would be as he describes them. We need to get those people into work. Many of them want to work, and many young people—the 1 million NEETs—do not have the skills necessary to work, and they deserve our support. Surely they must come first.

[Olly Glover]

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention and commend him for his commitment to improving skills training when in Government, which he discussed in his speech. I think the challenge of how we get there is significant, and I will come on to discuss that in my concluding remarks.

In my constituency there are examples of organisations that are intrinsically international in nature, for example the European Space Agency. I met two of its directors, one British and one French. There are many other science and high-tech employers, such as Tokamak Energy at Milton Park and Astroscale at Harwell Campus, which also rely on those specialist skills which depend on a global labour market.

Our commitment to rearming and boosting the defence sector will also increase the demand for labour. That is why we need to consider the steps and programmes that will be necessary before any clampdown on legal migration. It is also important to address the balance between improving the labour supply and incentivising it through better pay and remuneration, and our collective willingness to pay higher prices as a result of increased pay and labour costs—not least for food—if we do. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

18:10

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair this afternoon, Dame Siobhain. I am grateful to the Petitions Committee and the well over 200,000 members of the public who have requested that we debate this topic today.

Some may be uncomfortable with the petition before us, which calls on us to suspend all immigration for five years. That would represent a radical departure from the status quo. Some may even be tempted to be dismissive of it, but that reaction would be wrong. I commend the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) for taking this so seriously.

This petition is an expression of the deep and entirely legitimate frustration that the British public feel with the way that successive Governments of different political parties have handled immigration. I say that that frustration is entirely legitimate because the level of migration to this country has been too high for decades and remains so. Every election-winning manifesto since 1974 has promised to reduce migration. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch) has said, the last Government, like the Governments before them, also promised to do exactly that—but again, like the Governments before them, did not deliver. My hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) summarised it well in a speech he gave here in Westminster Hall a few months ago:

“Immigration is the biggest broken promise in British politics, and probably the biggest single reason that British politics is so broken.”—[Official Report, 18 December 2024; Vol. 759, c. 163WH.]

This is not only about the betrayal of the public’s trust, terrible though that is. People can increasingly see the tangible downsides of high immigration in their own lives. They can see it in their wages, which are stagnating because they are being undercut; they can see it in their soaring rents, in how hard it is for their children to get on the housing ladder, in the cohesion of their communities and in the pressure on their GPs, their dentists and our infrastructure.

Several Members today have mentioned the public’s fears about that, including the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury). Those of us in Westminster should not be surprised to see members of the public demand a radical change of course. Elected representatives must respond to these material concerns, not with platitudes, but with actual change. If we fail to do so we will see demands for a total shutdown on immigration grow louder and louder.

I do not believe that we should suspend all immigration. Like the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice), I believe that a small number of highly skilled people can make a valuable contribution to this country, bringing their talents, experiences and ideas with them—but our current system does not select for such individuals.

In part, this issue is about quantity. Over the last few years, this country has seen unprecedented levels of immigration: over a million people per year from 2022 onwards, and net migration at or expected to be at least 820,000 people, as we have already heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes). That means adding as many people to Britain’s population as live in Leeds, this country’s third largest city, every single year. Even if they are highly skilled and keen to assimilate, every person who comes to Britain needs infrastructure, housing and healthcare. Assimilation itself, bringing new migrants into the fabric of our communities, becomes much more difficult with people arriving here at anything like this kind of scale.

This issue is about not just quantity, but about the people we welcome to Britain. It should be a fundamental principle of our system that people who come to this country do not cost more than they contribute. What they pay in tax should at least cover the costs of the public services that they use. That is the opposite of the situation we have now. Only a small proportion of those who have come to this country over the last few years are likely to be net lifetime contributors.

After just five years here, many migrants will become eligible for indefinite leave to remain. With ILR status, they gain access to universal credit and social housing, surcharge-free access to the NHS and much more. According to analysis from the Centre for Policy Studies, over 800,000 migrants from the past five years could soon claim ILR, at an estimated lifetime cost of £234 billion —equivalent to £8,200 per household, or nearly six years of defence spending.

If we accept that the immigration policy of the past few years was a mistake, we should make every effort to reverse its long-term consequences. That is why the Conservative party is advocating that the qualifying period for ILR should be extended, giving us an opportunity to review time-limited visas issued over the last five years. ILR conditions should be tightened to ensure that future applicants are genuinely likely to be net contributors. Those who have come here legally on time-limited visas and who have not contributed enough should be expected to leave.

But it is not enough to correct past mistakes. Moving forward, we must also design a sustainable immigration system that addresses concerns about immigration volumes and the people we allow to come here. Those who come to Britain should be genuinely high skilled, with the capacity to support themselves and their families without relying on public funds. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex has previously argued, culture also matters. We must recognise that fact and design our system with assimilation in mind. It is both fair and sensible to prefer immigration from societies that are more like our own.

[Sir John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is giving a compelling summation of both the debate and the problem. She will know that Trevor Phillips, the Labour politician and columnist, first deconstructed the idea of multiculturalism. His argument was that it perpetuated the notion that cultures could co-exist without anything that bound them together, but that those cultures would in the end segregate and, in his words, create ghettos. It is important that we challenge that and build a society based on what we share, the things we have in common, and the links and bonds that tie a civil society together.

[Katie Lam]

It is important to say, as my right hon. Friend’s intervention reflects, that we absolutely can have a multi-ethnic society, but that it is fundamental that we are one country and one people with one perspective.

The kind of immigration system that I have discussed is one that the British people have voted for time and again: limited, selective and tailored to our needs. Unfortunately, I have seen no indication that the Government are willing to implement such a system. Will the Minister confirm that the Government are not planning to extend the qualifying period for ILR? Can he outline what discussions he and others in his Department are having with ministerial colleagues about the impact that new ILR grants will have on public services? Have the Government made any estimation of the number of people who will receive ILR over this Parliament? Finally, will the Minister outline in detail, and most importantly with a specific timeframe, the substantive plans the Government have to address the volumes and impact of immigration, both legal and illegal?

18:18

[The Minister for Security (Dan Jarvis)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) for introducing this debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee. He framed it at the outset in a very sensible and reasonable way, and the whole House will be grateful to him for contribution he has made.

Eagle-eyed Members will have noticed that I am not the Minister for Migration and Citizenship, who is away on ministerial duty. Given that our national security is underpinned by our border security, I am pleased to be here this evening to reply on behalf of the Government.

A range of topics have been discussed and a broad range of views have been put forward, and I will come on to some of the areas highlighted during the debate shortly. Before I do, let me take the opportunity to summarise the Government’s position on these matters. Starting with legal migration, both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have been crystal clear that levels are too high and must come down. Net migration rose to a record high of more than 900,000 in the year ending June 2023. According to the latest figures, estimated net migration was 728,000 in the year ending June 2024.

Any debate about this issue needs to recognise the position that this Government inherited when they took office. Net migration has spiralled out of control in recent years, driven largely by overseas recruitment. We are determined to bring numbers down through continued implementation of tough restrictions on visas, particularly in relation to family members and dependants, and through measures such as increasing the general salary threshold for skilled worker visas.

More broadly, we are focusing on delivering much greater alignment between the immigration and employment systems. We need a stronger, more effective skills and training offer in the UK so that vacancies can be filled from the domestic workforce rather than by overseas recruitment. The independent Migration Advisory Committee has been commissioned to review key sectors, and we will set out our long-term plan in an upcoming White Paper.

The right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) raised an interesting point at the beginning of the debate about economic value and family migrants. We want to ensure that family immigration rules allow immediate family members to join British or settled relatives in the UK where they can be financially supported and integrate into society. That needs to be balanced with properly managed and controlled migration. Therefore, the Migration Advisory Committee has been commissioned to review the financial requirements in the family immigration rules to ensure that we have a robust basis for change.

Turning to illegal migration, it is important to recognise the situation we inherited. In 2018, only a few hundred people arrived in the UK by small boat. By the time this Government took office, the number was running at tens of thousands a year. Over that period, an entire criminal industry built up around our borders and beyond. The dire consequences of that dreadful trade are familiar to hon. Members on both sides of the House. Having gained the upper hand, ruthless smuggling gangs saw the United Kingdom as an easy target. Our border security was relentlessly and repeatedly undermined. Lives were tragically lost in the channel and elsewhere, and public confidence in the immigration and asylum systems collapsed. That cannot go on. Since the general election, we have been working at pace to stop the chaos and to return order to the system.

Hon. Members will no doubt be relieved to hear that, in the interests of time, I will refrain from giving an exhaustive account of our approach. However, among other actions, we have established the Border Security Command to mobilise various operational agencies against the criminal gangs, in an effort backed by £150 million of funding; significantly deepened Britain’s co-operation with key partners including France, Germany, Italy and Iraq; ramped up illegal working visits and removals of those with no right to be in the UK; and begun work to clear the asylum backlog. There is much more to do on that, which is why we have made secure borders the foundation of our plan for change and brought forward the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill to strengthen the UK’s border security and bring in new counter-terror-style powers to dismantle the smuggling gangs.

I will turn to the substance of today’s discussion and the petition that prompted this debate. I will directly address the suggestion that all immigration should be suspended for five years. The UK has a long history of helping those fleeing conflict, tyranny and persecution. That generosity and compassion is part of our national identity. But let me be absolutely clear: our borders need to be secure and the rules will be enforced. As we have seen over recent years, when that does not happen, the consequences are severe.

Equally, legal migration has benefited our country in all sorts of ways. For generations, people have come here from around the world to work and contribute to our society. It is in all our interests for the UK to be able to access the best talent from around the world, and this Government value and recognise the role that legal migration can play in supporting many sectors of our economy and our essential public services. The issues arise when the numbers become unsustainable and the system lacks order and control. Therefore, I would respectfully make the point to the petitioners that the answer to these challenges lies not in the closure of borders or the suspension of immigration, but in making sure that our approach is fair, effective and firmly in the national interest.

Let me turn to the specific issues raised during the debate. We heard a very interesting speech from the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings made a very interesting speech. He quoted CS Lewis—twice, I think—in the context of the failure of successive Governments. He is right about that, which is why this Government take these matters so seriously. He helpfully took us through the numbers and illustrated very clearly the scale of the challenge. He also made some very good points about training and skills.

The right hon. Member also mentioned a trip to Clapham—something that appeared to appeal to the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice). I should perhaps gently remind them both that trips to that particular location—including, of course, the common —have not always served Members of this House particularly well. [Laughter.] However, I will leave it to their judgment as to whether they select an alternative location.

My hon. Friend the Member for Burton and Uttoxeter (Jacob Collier) made an important point about the NHS relying on 160,000 workers who have come here from overseas. However, he also firmly made the point about recognising the need to bring migration down to manageable levels. He spoke about secure borders being essential, which is why this Government are working to ensure that our border is secure, including, of course, through new legislation.

The hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) was commendably clear in her views but, with great respect, I am afraid to say that I did not agree with many of her conclusions. However, given that my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield framed the debate in terms of having a balanced range of views, I thought she made a valuable contribution. She challenged the Government to respond in a balanced and fair way, and I will leave it to her to judge whether she thinks that that is the case.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) made his first speech in Westminster Hall, and I congratulate him on it. It gives me the opportunity to reflect on comments that were made in this place by a west midlands counterpart of his, Lord Spellar, who memorably said that if you want to keep a secret, tell it in Westminster Hall. We will see whether that proves to be the case, but my hon. Friend did make a number of important points, not least about linking immigration policies with skills, training and education policies. He is right about that, and I can assure him that that is the approach that this Government will always seek to take.

The hon. Member for Boston and Skegness made a thoughtful and constructive contribution. He spoke about the importance of having a plan, which is an entirely fair challenge. I think he would agree with me that there was not one previously, but I hope that he will be patient and that, in time, he will see that this Government do have a plan, that we recognise both the challenges and opportunities that come from a managed migration policy, and that we will always approach these matters with the seriousness they deserve.

The hon. Member suggested—perhaps a little unfairly—that our strategy was to smash the gangs and pray that that works. I can assure him that that is not our approach. The Government are prioritising important work to tackle organised immigration crime and reduce irregular migration to the UK, by adopting a new approach that considers the end-to-end process of organised immigration crime, targeting each stake to make facilitation unviable and to disrupt the activity of the organised criminal gangs.

That new approach to tackling organised immigration crime draws on the success of our world-leading counter-terrorism system and will prevent, by disincentivising migrants and deterring organised criminal gangs from participating in organised immigration crime; pursue, by disrupting organised criminal gangs and their criminal activity; protect, by detecting and acting on organised immigration crime at the border; and prepare, by managing, learning from and adapting the UK’s response to tackling organised immigration crime. As he knows, none of that is easy, but rather than employing gimmicks such as those we saw previously, we are working properly and at pace to address the issues he raised.

The hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) spoke interestingly about his Polish heritage, and I am grateful to him for acknowledging the scale of the challenge. I agree with his point about the importance of good, functioning public services, and the example of the UK Space Agency as an employer was very interesting. The Government will always remain happy to debate these matters with him further.

It is good to see the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), in her place. I agreed with her when she said we should respond not with platitudes but with real change. She was right to speak about having a sustainable immigration system that is fair and sensible, and I hope we can continue to debate these matters in the way we have done today. Before she sat down, she asked me a number of questions about ILR. She will perhaps understand why I will ask the Minister for Migration and Citizenship to write to her with the answers she requested; I hope that that will be satisfactory.

I again thank the hon. Member for Lichfield for introducing this constructive and thought-provoking debate, and all Members who contributed to it. As I have set out, the Government are getting on with the job of securing our borders and reducing net migration. In both areas, what matters most is that we restore order and control. For too long, those essential ingredients have been missing from our systems, but we are determined to put that right because the people of our country deserve nothing less.

18:32

[Dave Robertson]

It has been a pleasure to take part in this debate with you in the Chair, Dame Siobhain. I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for coming along today and contributing. This is obviously a hot-button issue across the country, and we should value having so many contributions from Members representing a wide range of constituencies, parts of the country and political persuasions.

I thank all Members for the way the debate has been undertaken. There is always a risk on highly charged issues such as this that we lose the debate a bit and, on both sides, descend into behaviours that do not befit the best history of the House, but that is not where this debate went.

This is a complex topic, and given that the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) espoused the benefits of migration and the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer) discussed the issues that drive people’s concerns about immigration, we can see that Members from both sides of the House have made this a considered debate. I hope that every single one of the petitioners looks at it with interest and sees that everybody has put a lot of time and thought into it. We all want to see some movement, if not to the same place, then in the same direction—there is widespread agreement on the need to deal with the crisis in the channel. We should applaud that, although we will have to wait and see quite how much of that makes it on to the front pages of the Daily Mail, the Express or The Guardian tomorrow.

I again want to address the petitioners. We are here on their behalf, and I really hope they are listening, watching and reading Hansard, and are aware of how seriously all parties take this issue, even if we do not agree with the outcomes suggested in the petition.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petition 700824 relating to suspending legal and illegal migration.

18:34

Sitting adjourned.