Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, when we debate Bills in Committee and on Report, we are liable to be accused of making Second Reading speeches. Now that this is Second Reading, perhaps I will be forgiven for making one. I will look at the wider issues of immigration that are of course referred to in this Bill, which addresses some of the problems.

I support my noble friend the Minister’s view that we have benefited enormously from immigration into this country in the past and that we welcome immigrants to this country. However, it is a question of numbers. We cannot get away from numbers. The noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, just said that we have already made a modest 1% contribution to the refugee crisis taking place. To put that in context, that small number of Syrian refugees we are taking in is in addition to the 330,000 immigrants who came legally into this country in the last year. That contrasts rather forcibly with the undertakings that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister made that immigration should be limited to 100,000 a year—or to tens of thousands. Despite the number of times that that commitment has been made, we seem never to have met the 100,000 target. That is a problem.

We now face an immigration crisis across Europe of proportions never seen before. These are very large numbers of people indeed. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, referred to Germany as being the conscience of Europe. Angela Merkel may well have been moved with compassion when she said that Germany would take 900,000 Syrian refugees, but I suspect she has regretted that remark ever since. She created enormous problems within her own party. Indeed, I would have thought that that remark was extremely ill-advised if she did not want to see the renaissance of extreme right-wing parties in Germany in future.

My noble friend Lord Horam referred to my right honourable friend the Home Secretary’s remarks at the Tory Party conference. The problem is that, if immigration is in too large numbers, it creates very serious stresses in the home nation. This is something we cannot overlook. At the moment we suffer from a major crisis in housing—in particular, in affordable housing. We are not building enough. This is a problem we have with our existing population. If we take in very large numbers of immigrants, they are almost invariably in greater need of affordable housing than the resident population in this country. That creates enormous resentment. This may well be one reason why UKIP has had a certain amount of electoral success in areas traditionally regarded as bastions of the Labour Party. We cannot overlook this, as my noble friend Lord Horam said. Immigration is a very high priority in the views of the people of this country. We cannot take unlimited numbers of people. I come back to what I said originally: it is a question of numbers.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord in a Second Reading speech. I entirely agree with him that we have a housing shortage. Might he possibly address the question of how we will overcome that shortage when we have such a remarkable lack of skilled labour to build houses within this country? Is there not a real problem that a major housebuilding programme now would draw in a very large number of people from abroad to build those houses?

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, knows very well that it is a question not only of the shortage of skilled bricklayers and people who can build houses, but also of the enormous shortage of land on which you can build. This is all to do with our planning laws and is a much more complicated issue than just a question of the shortage of people.

If we control immigration and have a system of allowing in the people with the skills we need, I do not have any problem with that. The problem is if we allow very large numbers of people in who do not have those skills. That is a totally different issue. It is what puts enormous pressure on all our services at the moment. It is not only housing, which is the most obvious issue. The National Health Service seems to be creaking under the demands pressed on it at the moment. Our infrastructure and education are also under great pressure. With all these things, if you have enormous numbers of immigrants coming in, the pressure on public services inevitably grows and that creates resentment and difficulty.

With the EU referendum coming up, I refer to the question of European immigration. As we know, EU citizens are allowed into this country. We apparently do some survey to find out how many there are of them. The figures for last year were 330,000. That is net immigration, netted off against those going out. It is reckoned that about half that number are EU citizens—some 150,000. At the same time, some reports came out recently about 2 million EU citizens applying for national insurance numbers over a period of four years. That is an average of half a million per year. I know we are not comparing like with like here, but it seems that you must do something to reconcile these two numbers. You have half a million EU citizens applying for national insurance while, in theory because of the surveys we do, we had only 150,000 come into this country last year. I believe the number may be even bigger this year. When my noble friend comes to sum up, I would be grateful if he could confirm that 2 million EU citizens applied for national insurance numbers over the past four years. How does he reconcile that with the number of EU migrants that are supposed to have come to live here? We need statistics.

I also support the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, in saying that we need to know what the Government estimate to be the number of illegal immigrants in this country. If we do not have that number, it is extremely difficult to assess whether this Bill has been a success or failure in reducing that number.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I hope that we are now moving into slightly calmer waters. I tabled this amendment in anticipation that the House might vote to enfranchise 16 and 17 year-olds. I do not think there can really be too much opposition in the House to my amendment because we have to ensure that the new franchise actually happens. The amendment enfranchising 16 and 17 year-olds passed by a very big majority in your Lordships’ House and it may well be that it never comes back from the Commons, either. There are a number of different reasons why the other place might actually accept the amendment, so there may well be no future opportunity to amend it.

The whole point of my amendment is to ensure that we do not enfranchise 16 and 17 year-olds with one hand and disenfranchise them with the other. We have heard different stories from the Electoral Commission. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said that she had been assured by people at the Electoral Commission that it would be possible to get all this through by September. But we are in uncharted waters and we really do not know how long it is going to take to get the new register drawn up; it is completely new territory. All these people have to be individually registered, which may take a quite serious amount of time.

All my amendment does, which I am sure must be acceptable to the House, is to say that the Electoral Commission must be able to tick the box for the Government and say, “Yes, we have got a decent number of 16 and 17 year-olds on the electoral roll”—I am not saying it should come back and say that it has got 100% of them—and that should be acceptable to everybody. We do not want to end up with a whole lot of 16 and 17 year-olds going round saying, “I was told that I had a vote but I never got on the electoral roll”— because the process was only half completed, or whatever. So is it really too much to leave it to the Electoral Commission to tell the Government or whoever is deciding on the date of the referendum when the new register has been drawn up and everything is in place?

I do not pretend to know how long the process is going to take. At one stage the Electoral Commission was telling us that it would take up to 12 months. It is now reining back from that and saying that perhaps it will be quicker. But that is not really where I come from. It does not matter how long it takes. If it takes three months, fine. If the Electoral Commission can come back in three months and say that the job is done, that is absolutely fine and the referendum can be held after that. But it is very important to ensure that we do not, as I say, give enfranchisement to 16 and 17 year-olds with one hand and then, by having a very early referendum, ignore all those who are not on the electoral roll and take it away with the other. That is the point of my amendment. I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, if I had heard the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, arguing against this I would think it a blatant attempt to bias the level playing field of which he is so fond by delaying the referendum. This amendment is simply unnecessary because the Electoral Commission will of course vouch for when the process has reached an appropriate stage. We therefore do not need to write this into the Bill. While I am on my feet, in his last speech during Committee the noble Lord referred to our friends and enemies within the European Union but did not specify which Governments he thought were our enemies within it. If he is going to reply, it would perhaps be helpful if he said whether they are the German Government, the French Government or others, because that would help us in understanding where he is coming from in the various amendments he has tabled.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

That is a particularly silly point from the Liberal Benches. I was merely making the point that we have people who are on our side in certain negotiations, and people who are against us. That was the rather loose way in which I used the term “enemies”. To go back to the noble Lord’s earlier point, the fact is that the Electoral Commission’s job is to advise the Government, who do not have to take its advice. The Government could say, “There is a wonderful opportunity now to win this referendum” and hold it after three months, when only a handful of 16 or 17 year-olds would be on the register.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am well aware that the political definition of a level playing field is a field in which, when the ball is placed in the centre, it rolls naturally towards your opponent’s goal. That is one of the problems with trying to define a level playing field.

I am fascinated to hear so many Conservative Peers speaking in favour of an expenditure cap to ensure that one side in a campaign does not spend more than another. I look forward to the speeches that will come from those Benches the next time we discuss political party funding. Perhaps they will support a similar principle then. The Conservative Party spent a great deal more than any other party in the recent election. I do not recall any complaints from Conservatives on that—whatever position they take on the European Union—either then or since.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Is the noble Lord saying that the general election principle is unfair because one party can raise more money than another, and that this unfairness should continue in the referendum?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am simply remarking that principles should apply across the field. I am strongly in favour of greater control over political parties’ spending, which the Conservative Party has resisted extremely strongly. I just remarked that we need to be a little more consistent than we were being.

I will make one other point relating to this group of amendments and to the next.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I, too, agree with this amendment. I anticipate that when the negotiations are complete, the Prime Minister will publish a paper and I think it highly likely that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, will disagree fundamentally with what the Prime Minister says.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I went to the Public Bill Office and said that I wanted to put down an amendment very similar to this. It would have called for a White Paper, which this amendment does not. When it was pointed out to me that my noble friend Lord Forsyth’s amendment was already tabled, I added my name to it. This smacks very much of Amendment 1, which I put my name to and which was supported very early on by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. The Liberal Democrats supported it, too, and I suspect that the Front Bench of the Labour Party is going to support it. This amendment ties in with everything that the Government have said already. The only worry I have is that my noble friend the Minister may say that the Government have given an undertaking to this and that it does not need to be in the Bill. I have to say that we will all be very reassured if it is.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, perhaps as two of the amendments mention the EU balance of competences review, I might be allowed to comment on the extent to which the 32 reports that that review produced over two years in four tranches have provided a solid basis of evidence for a rather more dispassionate result. I am well aware that at the time of the 2010 coalition agreement, some in the Conservative Party thought that inviting evidence from stakeholders in law, business, the economy, aviation, and so on, would provide the basis to ask for repatriation of powers, which those various stakeholders felt were already excessively transferred to Brussels.

The outcome of the 32 reports, which I warmly recommend to the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, as evening reading over the next six months, was an overwhelming conclusion from most of the 2,500 pieces of evidence that came in that the current balance of competences suits us fairly well. That is part of the reason why people in No. 10’s press office and others wanted to ensure that the reports were published the day after Parliament rose for the summer or for Christmas so that they would receive as little publicity as possible, but they are there.

I particularly recommend to the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, the report on criminal justice co-operation and the evidence from the Association of Chief Police Officers and various other bodies on why the current arrangements are so strongly to Britain’s advantage. I also recommend the report on co-operation in civil justice, which contains evidence from the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland and the Law Society.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for telling me what my reading should be, but can he explain why the existing arrangements cannot continue just because we vote to pull out of the EU?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think the noble Lord wants to negotiate that we should have a special status and be able to pick those things that we want and say no to those that we do not. However, all international multilateral negotiations are trade-offs and it is not always easy to get exactly the arrangements that you want. There are those who would argue—as I think the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, would—that much of what is currently imposed on us is a conspiracy cooked up by people in Brussels. I am merely saying that we need to get hold of the evidence of where we are and what are the costs and benefits of a whole set of very complicated international regulations in a highly internationalised economy and a world where the number of British citizens who cross the channel each year has increased by a factor of 10 over the past 30 years. That has certain implications for policing, crime and all sorts of other things.