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.