Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Altmann Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 7th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 47, to which I added my name, but I also strongly support other amendments in the group, particularly that of my noble friend Lord Patel, who spoke powerfully in favour of making sure that we do not create barriers preventing health and social care staff coming to this country. I do not want to duplicate what others have said, so I will speak briefly about the difficulties we have in recruiting staff over here, which others have certainly emphasised.

The NHS employs half a million staff and has 100,000 vacancies reported by trusts, many of them among low-paid workers. This figure is projected to rise over the coming years, rather than diminish. Our problems will become pretty well impossible to manage unless we do something about it.

We want more support staff employed in primary care. This has been a policy goal for a long time and the NHS long-term plan continues to reflect this ambition, but the number of support staff working in community services has continued to fall, and I expect it to continue to do so. GP surgeries are desperate to appoint support staff but cannot do so. As others have said strongly, a similar picture applies to the social care sector, where we have 8,632 vacancies, according to the latest available data—surely unsustainable, as the number of elderly people needing care rises relentlessly, not to mention, as others have, the many people with disabilities and a range of problems.

The NHS Long Term Plan acknowledges that international recruitment will continue to be vital in the short to medium term if we are to deal with our staff shortages. This is being constrained, says a report by the Health Foundation, by immigration policies. Surely the Government need to pay attention to that, and I hope the Minister will respond to that point. Immigration policies are really causing problems for our health and social care services. Instead of imposing barriers to EEA and Swiss entrants, would it not be better for Ministers to concentrate on reducing barriers to well-qualified migrants with good English from the rest of the world? Amendment 47 is key, as are the other amendments in this group, if we are to improve our health and social care staffing or to avoid a serious drop in the quality and availability of these crucial services. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Altmann (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. I have added my name to Amendments 47 and 66, but the intentions and sentiments already expressed so well by many noble Lords are ones that I fully endorse. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Masham, and other noble Lords for the excellent way in which they have explained the urgent need for measures in the Bill that specifically address the shortage of social care staff. I implore my noble friend on the Front Bench, who I know cares about this issue as much as so many of us around the House, to take back to the department the strength of feeling across the House on this matter and address some of these issues before Report.

We are talking here about the biggest failure of social policy in modern times. The inadequacy of our social care provision is already well documented and well known, and the Government are already committed to addressing this issue as soon as possible. We cannot move forward and improve the quality of social care without staff. We cannot mechanise this. Care workers may be low paid, but that does not mean they are low skilled. They are essential to enabling increasing numbers of people to live decent lives. We are not talking about bringing in low-paid shelf stackers; we are talking about the emotional, physical and mental well-being of some of our most vulnerable citizens.

Given that the Government are the main funders of social care and have not yet funded adequately social care providers who employ staff who might generally earn above the £25,000 cut-off, that imposes on the Government a duty to ensure that our immigration policy does not deter those who might be willing to work for less than that figure—most of the people who work in social care already do so—from coming to this country when, as we have already heard, around one in five of our social care staff is already from overseas.

I know my noble friend responded to these concerns at Second Reading by saying that the Government hope that Britons will fill the shortfall, but hopes are not good enough. It takes time to try to find any UK nationals, train them in the right skills and raise the standards of pay. What are these elderly and disabled people supposed to do in the meantime? They need care. I therefore hope my noble friend might still consider the implications of these amendments, or at the very least agree to a transitional, temporary social care visa, perhaps for five or 10 years, that specifically enables social care providers and individuals who need to employ somebody to care for them in their own home to find those overseas workers who are willing to come here and fill the gaps we currently have, rather than having an immigration system that rules out being able to bring them in.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, has withdrawn, so I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Altmann (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendments in this group. I echo the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who moved them clearly and explained the importance of what is being sought by introducing them.

As the noble Baroness mentioned, this seems timely, given some of the recent very troubling reports. Lately, the possibility has arisen that the Government are not satisfied with the withdrawal agreement in some way, having signed it recently in good faith, while working, hopefully, towards an agreed exit after the transition period at the end of this year. I hope the Minister will be able to reassure the House that there is no intention of trying to override the withdrawal agreement in any way and that our country will not be seen to be trying to renege on an international agreement, especially so soon after having signed it.

I hope that UK citizens living in the EU can be reassured that the measures in the Bill will not be affected deleteriously by future regulations that might change what they thought was already enshrined in this international agreement and that pensions, pension increases, other benefits and health care will be protected, as was intended and implied in the withdrawal agreement. I also hope that the measures in the Bill will remain consistent with the withdrawal agreement and that no powers under the Bill will be used to make provisions inconsistent with that agreement.

I know these are probing amendments and I hope that the reassurances or necessary changes can be made to satisfy the House. I support the intention of these amendments and look forward to my noble friend’s response.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, this group of amendments, led by my noble friend Lady Hamwee, is about ensuring that the Government cannot legislate by regulation, contrary to the withdrawal agreement. This is a prescient set of amendments, tabled when it might not have been thought that there was a particular danger of that happening. However, the pronouncements and press reports since last night—there is some backtracking going on, however, which we will debate in the Chamber tomorrow—raise serious fears about the Government’s reliability and integrity in respecting the withdrawal agreement, and, indeed, any other treaty commitments. It raises the question of whether they can be trusted.

We will be debating separately the question of the Government’s refusal to give settled status applicants a physical document, not just a digital code. I will raise a brief query here: whether a digital code alone would satisfy the requirement in Article 18 of the withdrawal agreement for

“a document evidencing such status which may be in a digital form.”

Those latter words were added at the UK’s insistence, as we understand it, but it still talks about a document evidencing status. I wonder whether a digital code is a document.

Not least as a feature of the settled status scheme which has been flagged up by the3million, which does excellent work and has provided some fantastic briefing—I shall use this occasion to thank that organisation along with the organisation, British in Europe—non EU-national family members get a physical document in the form of a biometric residence permit. Since Article 12 of the withdrawal agreement requires the Government not to discriminate on the grounds of nationality, it is odd that EU citizens do not get a physical document but those in the family who are not EU citizens have a biometric residence permit. That is rather strange.

In the context of group 1, I raised comprehensive sickness insurance. The Minister said that the Government would use their discretion in deciding whether the absence of CSI in the past would bar a person from getting UK citizenship. I know that this will come up again in a later group. However, it is important to note that the UK is regarded by the European Commission as being in breach of EU law by insisting on the term “comprehensive sickness insurance” as it is in the 2004 citizens’ rights and freedom of movement directive. The Commission insists, as indeed MEPs did at the time, that this means only that relevant persons should have access to whatever the health system is locally, so the Government’s insistence that they should pay for private health insurance is, as I understand it, the subject of ongoing infringement proceedings.

In 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May promised EU citizens that the CSI—I prefer to call it private health insurance because that is what we are talking about—for those who had been economically inactive would be dropped as a requirement for settled status under the new system. However, what is happening now is that those people applying for citizenship are at risk of having their applications refused because in the past they did not have private health insurance, even though they had been told that they did not need it for their settled status application. When they apply for citizenship, they are told that retroactively they will be barred if they did not have private health insurance in the past. This feels like moving the goalposts, playing cat and mouse and so on, and the Government will not make any friends by this. The Minister referred to a power of discretion, but I do not believe that any details have been made known about how that would be applied, so that leaves people in the dark and in a state of anxiety.

I should mention also that Article 10 of the withdrawal agreement states that those covered by the citizens’ rights provisions of the agreement include

“Union citizens who exercised their right to reside in the United Kingdom in accordance with Union law”.


Union law—that is, EU law—means that the ability to use the NHS qualifies as “comprehensive sickness insurance”; that is the view of the European Commission, which as I say is following infringement proceedings. If the Government persist with this, I fear that they will come up against problems under the withdrawal agreement and there is a risk that they would be seen to be acting in bad faith. The amendments in this group therefore insist that the Government must abide by the withdrawal agreement in making regulations under both Clause 4 and Clause 5, and that should include doing away with the retrospective demand. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some reassurance on that point.

A great deal of justified concern has also been expressed about children either in or leaving care. I do not have time to talk about this now because it will come up again at least in part in a later group, but it is a matter of great concern. Local authorities, even with the best will in the world, have found over the past six months with the challenge of Covid that they have not had or have not applied the resources to assist children who ought to be applying under the settlement scheme. They are finding it very difficult to get the evidence together, so I hope that the Government can give some reassurance about the assistance that they will be given. We will also talk later about the dangers of another Windrush.