Immigration Bill

Debate between Baroness Hamwee and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, before my noble friend responds on our amendments, I wonder whether the Minister can advise the Committee how noble Lords should deal with this when further government thinking becomes clear. As he well knows, we can scrutinise to our heart’s content but we cannot actually do anything about what is in regulations.

I thought that the Minister said at the beginning of his response that there had not been a decision and that this was permissive of regulations, but at the end he confirmed that this is what is in the Government’s mind, which is obviously common sense. However, by bringing forward such a significant new policy proposal as this, having given the Commons five minutes to debate it, as my noble friend said, I do not know how we can really deal with this just through regulations.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That is precisely what I was about to say. At present, the House is extremely nervous about allowing the Government to legislate by regulation for very obvious reasons based on what has recently happened. Having listened to the Minister, the words “pig” and “poke” come very much to mind. We are being asked to accept something on which the Government have not quite made up their mind about how it will work. They have not yet managed to consult, but if we pass this they will produce some regulations when they work out what they want to do. If we are no clearer than that when we get to Report, it will be very difficult to persuade any of the major groups in the House, apart from the Conservatives, to accept something so unclear.

The noble Lord, Lord Green, and I agree strongly on one thing in the migration debate—that better training and education in Britain are absolutely part of what we need to have—but that should not replace the circulation of highly skilled and intelligent people which is a vital part of our research network in medicine, STEM subjects and elsewhere. If we are beginning to block that, which this suggests it will do, we will damage our standing in the global academic and intellectual world. That is what universities are most concerned about at present. We absolutely need some assurances on that. Last week, I was talking to a vice-chancellor in Wales who was not aware of the implications of this proposal. As the Minister will know, the academic lobby in the Lords is not entirely without a degree of influence. I will do my best to make sure that it is aware of it by the time we get to Report.

There are some large issues here about the private and public sectors, including the question of how we persuade the private sector to invest more in training. This is a Government who need a rather more active and concerned labour market policy. Someone said to me last week that further education funding is about to fall off a cliff. If the Government are looking to further education colleges to help to train apprentices, this proposal is not a good thing to do as part of a whole-government approach.

This proposal suggests that some young man aged 23 in either Policy Exchange or the Institute of Economic Affairs, with a first from some university or other, has written it at speed and the Government have swallowed it. There have been previous occasions in other Governments when those sorts of things have happened. This clearly has not been thought through. If the Government can publish some more detail on what they have in mind by Report, we might be able to make some progress. If they do not know by Report what the details of the policy will be, the House will find it very difficult to accept the proposals in the way the Government have put them before it.