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

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Naseby

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 30th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I hope the Government will listen to the noble Lord, Lord Green, who has been very persuasive over a great many years. He does his homework and is well worth listening to.

Context is the key issue. It does not take a genius to work out that we will probably have higher unemployment in the next two years than anyone in this House has ever experienced. Against that background, the driving force must be how we get our people back into work. That must be the number one priority.

I had the privilege, with my noble friend Lord Horam, of reading economics at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. We were taught in some depth about Keynesian economics. Keynes came to the fore between the wars, with the unemployment situation. It was his driving force that produced the system whereby the public sector produced public sector works and employed the unemployed. That must be the driving force for the next two years.

There will be sections of society where we need immigration. Two come to mind: we always seem to be short of qualified doctors and we are clearly short of lab technicians, otherwise the testing and the analysis of it might be working together instead of one behind the other. Sections of our economy will need immigration, but it is not beyond the worlds of all of us to sit down and work out where that should happen.

I am pleased the Minister has made a statement today having consulted business—somewhat in contrast to Mr Gove and the haulage industry. Nevertheless—although I have not seen the whole speech—if he is talking to business, that is good.

We need more control. I do not know what the right figure is, but it is 100,000 or under. Our Government should look at that hard and in the context of where we really need some help because we sadly cannot use our unemployed.

I finish with basically the same sentence as I finished up with on the Agriculture Bill: we need to produce more home food. To do that, we need people to work in the fields, bring in the harvests, pick the apples, dig up the leeks, whatever it may be. If there are not enough people among the unemployed in Britain prepared to do that, we jolly well have to take it on the chin and bring in people to do it.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I was very sorry not to be able to be here for the debates in Committee on these amendments, to which I put my name. I had an unavoidable business commitment elsewhere. I apologise to the House; I took the trouble to read Hansard carefully.

I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Green. We need a limit on the annual numbers from the EEA and Switzerland seeking employment. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, said we should stop talking about it and just get on with it. She is right in a way, because a cap is inflexible and clumsy, but I have come to the conclusion—somewhat reluctantly—that it is inevitable and the only way we will be able to grasp the challenges that the number of arrivals in this country now poses.

Simply put, without a cap the Government will never get control of this issue. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, who I am glad to see is still in her place, asked why we think this. History, particularly recent history, has shown how extraordinarily difficult it is to grasp this problem. We have heard a lot about taking back control, but the awful fact is that, where we have no control over current arrivals—those from the EEA—arrivals are falling, but where we have always had control, they are rising sharply. In 2016, there were 133,000 arrivals from the EU; now there are 58,000, in the figures produced by the ONS a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the non-EU arrivals were 175,000 and are now 316,000—nearly double.

I sat in this Chamber for many hours, hearing all those noble Lords saying that Brexit was going to chase everybody away and no one would come here because we would all be anti-foreigner. I can tell the House that in 2016, 308,000 people arrived here, and the latest figures say that 374,000 have arrived, so that is not a sign that people are being frightened away. Nor is it about no immigration. It is about scale—about 374,000 people. It is about 900 a day and all that means. I will not go through the things other noble Lords talked about, such as houses and the impact. We have 6 million more people in this country, and that is with drastically reduced levels from where we are today. If we go on at the current level, it will be 8 or 9 million more. At 6 million more people, we will build over an area the size of Bedfordshire by 2040. No ifs, no buts, no maybes—that will happen. We will almost certainly be unable to stop it, because you always look 10 or 15 years out when you do demographic planning. We need to be honest and clear about the implications of the decisions that we take in Bills and statutes like this.

How has this happened? At root, it is because it is in employers’ commercial interest to recruit trained but cheaper labour from overseas. Why go to the trouble and the expense of training members of a settled population, many of whom may be quite recalcitrant and not particularly grateful, when you can avoid all that effort by recruiting someone from overseas, who is probably jolly grateful? British industry and commerce have become addicted to overseas recruitment at the expense of our own people. Figures bear that out. My noble friend Lord Horam referred to the think tank Onward. Last year it reported:

“Since 2011 employer spending per trainee has fallen by 17% in real terms”.


Employers have avoided having to put money into training; they have been able to go overseas instead.

In researching the pamphlet I recently published, I investigated the engineering industry, another sector where employers are always bemoaning the lack of UK-grown engineers. I was absolutely astonished to learn that last year, six months after graduation, fewer than half the engineering graduates of this country were working in engineering. I understand that they are not all going to go into engineering, but fewer than half is a surprisingly small number. When I went to talk to some of these young men and women about why they had not moved into engineering, they said that one of the problems is that UK employers preferred to offer jobs to someone with experience—no surprise there. UK undergraduates find themselves in a position where they cannot get experience without a job, and they cannot get a job without experience.

My noble friend will no doubt point to the Migration Advisory Committee, which has been the subject of a number of our conversations this afternoon, and its enlarged remit. The MAC is a fine body of men and women, but even a cursory reading of its annual report shows the enormous pressure that it is under to effectively abandon all controls. To quote from page 81 of last year’s annual report: “The majority of respondents”—that is, employers sending information to the MAC—

“agreed that there should not be a salary threshold above the National Minimum Wage”.

Secondly:

“There was stronger support for the idea of a salary threshold that was in some way variable to reflect employer needs”.


That effectively means nothing. On page one of the report, the MAC pointed out that this was the inevitable conclusion of “an employer-driven system”.

My noble friend on the Front Bench is a redoubtable Minister, as is the Home Secretary. No doubt there are many redoubtable Ministers in the Government, but they will find themselves under irresistible pressure, carefully argued by employers, about the inability of the UK to compete on a world stage unless more arrivals are permitted. Under that pressure, Ministers will first buckle and finally break. As other noble Lords have pointed out, the full effect of the pandemic has yet to make itself felt. Surely none of us seeks to argue that the consequences for the employment of our settled population will be anything other than lessened. Against that background, allowing annual immigration of 374,000 a year—1,025 a day—must be ill-advised and maybe runs the risk of societal disorder. That is why a cap—clumsy, yes; inflexible, yes—set annually, debated and approved in Parliament, is critical. That is why I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Green.

Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Naseby

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I had the privilege of speaking in Committee, when I declared my interests as a vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Cayman Islands, and the fact that I have family working in the Cayman Islands.

I reflected on what the noble Baroness, Lady Stern, said in Committee, particularly the examples she gave of developing countries being fleeced by the operations of the overseas territories—my words, not hers. I did a bit of research and asked the Cayman Islands for information on the type of operations conducted there. I give a case history that I think your Lordships will find interesting. Money does not stay in the Cayman Islands but flows through them to support growth in onshore jurisdictions, including in developing countries. An example of this is the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, which invested more than $400 million through Cayman-based investment vehicles in 2015 alone. The money supported critical development projects in more than 24 developing countries. That is not just a one-off example; there are many others in what I call the leading overseas territories. I will not repeat what the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said; I am grateful to him for the research that he has done.

I point out that the Cayman Islands had a new constitution in 2009, which was approved at Lancaster House and contained measures on the rule of law and human rights that meet the most stringent international and European standards. Included in their Bill of Rights is the right to privacy and strong laws on data protection.

It has already been made clear that most countries are not adopting public registers. Certainly, for the overseas territories in the Caribbean, the rival centres are the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore. They have all looked at public registers but not one has agreed to it. So if we force the overseas territories to have public registers, the effect will be that business will move away—there will be none of the sort of business that I have just cited, which is increasingly the nature of the business done in the overseas territories. Furthermore, the information Her Majesty’s Government get on money laundering or anything else they require would certainly be weakened greatly because the activities that people are interested in would not be available. My noble friend Lord Flight mentioned the situation in the EU, which takes the view that it would disproportionately infringe on human rights. I do not need to expand on that.

I will finish on a key constitutional point—perhaps, as someone who took the Maastricht treaty through, I had to learn something about constitutional law. I re-emphasise that the overseas territories are self-governing territories, and legislating for them is constitutionally questionable. It is true that Orders in Council have been used to impose legislation on the overseas territories, but only for constitutional or human rights issues. The need to consider the overseas territories’ interests was confirmed by the House of Lords in 2008. To use an Order in Council for financial regulation when the overseas territories have already adopted international standards while the UK has not would expose the UK to legal challenge as potentially irrational and therefore could be overturned on judicial review. It would also be provocative, as my noble friend has indicated, to Scotland and the other devolved Administrations in the United Kingdom. I for one will certainly, with a clear conscience, vote totally against this amendment.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I see the beguiling simplicity of the noble Baroness’s amendment, and after the powerful speech she made in moving it and the graphic examples she gave, I find myself carried along on an emotional tide. But the House needs to be aware of some of the unintended consequences that may flow from this if we are inclined to accept it.

The amendment refers to the Companies House regulatory scheme as being the standard to which we should aspire. Companies House is a recipient of information; its interrogation is pretty limited. Noble Lords may be inclined to look in detail at the amendment and say, “Yes, but this is a higher standard because we are dealing with the section on persons with significant control”. As is shown in the register of your Lordships’ House, I am a person with significant control of a company, and I have never been asked anything at all about my entry. I hope—I intend—that it is accurate, but nobody at Companies House has ever approached me to say, “Is this correct?”; it is just accepted. There is therefore a danger that the seductive idea of a public register means that it is somehow better verified than the situation we now have. That is my first concern about the amendment.

The second relates to a point made by other noble Lords. If you raise the standards or increase exposure and transparency in one area, you merely drive business to another corner of the world. My noble friend Lord Naseby referred to Singapore and Hong Kong but there are other places a great deal less attractive to which business might be driven. As I understand it, each of the overseas territories has already established a proper register of beneficial owners of companies which can be interrogated at all times by our law enforcement agencies. My noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley referred to the fact that the efficacy of that regime is to be tested in a review which will be put before Parliament in the next couple of years. Really, the question at issue is whether there should be public access to that register. Those are the words that make the difference, but in my view in the present situation that will have little practical effect. At present, our law enforcers can interrogate the register. If the public are also able to access it, the result might be that it will drive people to areas of the world where we cannot have even a vestigial chance of enforcing the proper levels of law.

Like my noble friend Lord Flight, I absolutely understand the purpose behind the noble Baroness’s amendment, but in my view the best should not be the enemy of the good.

Financial Services Bill

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Naseby

Monday 12th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, my noble friend raised some very interesting points. Of course the RDR issue has two parts. He referred to the basis for charging, but there is the qualification aspect as well. RDR will require advisers to get QCF level 4, which is only A-level standard. It does not seem to me to be too much to ask that people who are advising on savings should have an equivalent of an A-level qualification. I rather support the idea that RDR should endeavour to encourage the emergence of a profession. He referred to the fact that the profession was largely an elderly one and that we needed to encourage some new, younger blood. Careers will be more likely to be attractive if the idea of RDR with some qualifications—making you like the solicitor and accountant in your high street—comes to pass.

My noble friend’s second point was about the method of charging. We have here the question of how we square the circle between the reluctance to pay fees and the need for continuing advice. If you have a pension scheme that will last you for 15, 20 or 25 years, you need someone who is prepared to step up and advise you as to how it is going ahead. My problem is that we are now sufficiently far down the track on the idea of fee paying and the ending of commission. There is no doubt that commissions were raised not so much from the IFAs but often from the producers, to try to make the sale of the product more attractive. I do not think, as my noble friend said, that by any manner of means the IFAs have been the only people to blame, but we are sufficiently close to the start now that we need to continue with the approach of fees. It is not ideal, but I think that order plus counter-order would equal disorder. We have been marching the IFA community towards a fee-based remuneration schedule for two or three years. To pull back in the middle of November, when it is due to go live on 1 January, would cause the most enormous difficulties for the producers and the industry.

[Lord Naseby]

My Lords, I was not intending to take part in this debate. At one time, I was chairman of the Children’s Mutual, which was a friendly society/insurance company. At the weekend, in Northampton, I had discussions with some friends whom I would call middle-class savers. Not a single person, frankly, was the least bit prepared to pay a fee. It goes deeper than that. One’s own children are not prepared to pay fees up front.

There may have been much wrong with the old system in that it was not as closely scrutinised as it should have been in terms of the total cost to the saver. Nevertheless, here we are three and a half years into a major austerity programme and sufficient resources are not available for people who are genuinely wanting to or having to save. I do not know what the minimum fee will be and perhaps my noble friends on this side will be more up to date on that. I cannot see that it can be less than £500, if not considerably more.

I say to my Front Bench that it is all very well ploughing on because this has to happen in January but, as an aside, I reflect on how the FSA took three and a half years to realise that the projections on pensions were totally out of court. We have all been living with a base rate of 0.5% for a couple of years. Here we have projections approved by the FSA at, I think, 5%, 7% and 9%. That was totally out of court and nothing happened from the FSA. There had jolly well better be a plan B somewhere in the hip pocket because I very much fear what will happen. During the first three or four months nothing much will happen but, thereafter, there will be a major crisis unless there is a plan B ready to deal with it.