Trade Bill

Debate between Earl of Clancarty and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I have put my name to this important amendment and I will speak briefly about services in relation to free movement.

The recent no-deal impact statement says that free movement of people supports services. It would be more correct to say that free movement is intrinsic to services. This is certainly true of the creative industries but also of many other areas of the services sector. As a British IT worker said, “We freelancers export ourselves”. As the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said in Committee, “Trade is people”. Yet, despite their massive importance—the noble Baroness has given us the figures—the services sector is, as Sir Ivan Rogers said at the University of Liverpool in December,

“the dog that has largely failed to bark”—

an observation that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, also made in Committee. And services continue not to bark. This is deeply worrying.

Of course, Brexit has not yet happened and may still not do so. But it is happening now for British workers who provide services in Europe. One is tempted to call them the canaries in the mine—except we are talking about the endangering of people’s livelihoods. More reports are coming in of projects put on hold and of individual freelancers being told not to bother applying for a job unless they have a European passport, irrespective of the level of qualifications they possess. It is becoming a precondition. For many European companies it will make no difference what kind of Brexit we end up with if it is a Brexit without free movement.

I urge the Minister to look at a video blog doing the rounds on social media. It was recorded in English by an IT agency based in Rotterdam and makes it clear that neither the agency nor their clients can work with you if you are not in Europe—“Europe” of course meaning the single market. The impact statement says that the effects on services will be mitigated by a reciprocal mobility framework. However, in reality, the mobility of British workers abroad will be restricted by the severity of the immigration policy outlined in the White Paper and coming our way in the Immigration Bill—a policy which completely ignores the effect it will have on our service industries and on British workers in Europe. Sir Ivan Rogers said:

“UK service industries’ needs have been sacrificed to the primary goal of ending free movement”.


The amendment also refers to study. Unless we have free movement, I am pessimistic about our membership of Erasmus+ beyond 2020. Look at what happened to Switzerland, which was thrown out of Erasmus when a referendum voted against free movement. After a new agreement, I believe that Switzerland is now back.

There are many important reasons for supporting this amendment. From the point of view of trade, it should be supported not just to protect our valuable trade in services and the increasingly important servitisation aspect of manufacturing, but, importantly, to protect British workers and British jobs.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I have not participated on this subject before, but I listened to the persuasive explanation by the noble Lord, Lord Fox. I note the phrase “mobility framework”, which sounds incredibly friendly. But I will urge my noble friend to reject this amendment. This is not because I want to build a wall or because I think perceptions of immigration have been wholly erroneous—although he quite rightly drew the House’s attention to that. The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said that we need to talk about facts. I will share a couple of facts, which will take only a minute. The population of the United Kingdom is going up by 1,200 a day: that is, 400 from natural increase, 600 from immigration from outside the EU and 200 from immigration within the EU. So we are putting a small town or large village on the map of the UK every week. The ONS projections are that the country’s population will go up by 7 million to 9 million between now and 2040. Manchester currently has 2.5 million people living in it—so we will have to find homes for three cities the size of Manchester.

The UK will by that stage have overtaken Germany as the most populous country in Europe and England will have overtaken the Netherlands as the most densely populated. That is against the background of a new industrial revolution that it is believed will cause 7.5 million jobs to be either lost or radically altered. I quite understand the wishes of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and the other movers of the amendment, but this had to be looked at in the round of our demographic future. It is not about whether you arrived here recently, or about your colour, your race or your creed. It is about what will enable our society to operate cohesively and well as we see that scale of arrivals, and that scale of change to the way we live and work.