Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 (Consequential, Saving, Transitional and Transitory Provisions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, the title of this statutory instrument is quite a mouthful, even when delivered in the dulcet tones of my noble friend. It has been brought about by the UK’s exiting the European Union and therefore also leaving the free movement of people system, which prevails within the EU. This is a historic step for this country, and it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to reflect on that. Free movement of people is one of the four fundamental freedoms of the European Union, and it is easy to see why, when devising the single market structure, it was included along with the other three. But it has always been controversial.

Interestingly enough, the person who most accurately put his finger on the problem with free movement of people is Bernie Sanders, the former self-declared socialist candidate for the US presidency. Questioned about free movement in an interview in 2005, he said that that meant

“doing away with the concept of the nation state”.

He is right, of course. The simple fact is that the world has organised itself into nation states. With nation states come borders, and with borders come border controls.

Moreover, if you are not well-off and have few skills, you welcome that. Your country is there to protect you. It is okay if you are Sir Philip Green, who appears to live mostly on a yacht off Monaco; borders do not matter to people like that. But if you are an NHS porter in Darlington, they do.

That is why it surprised many people that the Blair Labour Government bought so heavily into free movement. Noble Lords may recall that they even eschewed the seven-year transition period allowed under the rules, which other European Union countries adopted. That Labour Government also, of course, increased immigration from other non-European sources, for example by dropping the primary purpose rule and by expanding the work visa system. Net immigration, which had been steady at tens of thousands a year and not caused a problem for decades, surged to hundreds of thousands a year.

The results were devastating for some working-class communities. For instance, as Paul Embery, the Labour and trade union activist, writes in his book, Despised, the non-UK-born population of Barking and Dagenham, where he lives, increased by 205% between 2001 and 2011. Local services were overwhelmed; the demographic shifts were rapid and huge. Local papers were filled with complaints but no one listened. When a Labour supporter in Rochdale raised the question of immigration in the 2010 election, Labour’s Prime Minister simply called her a bigot—when, of course, he thought she was out of earshot. The Conservatives promised to do something, and had some initial successes in closing down bogus colleges, for example, but they appeared to run out of steam under pressure from business interests—and, of course, they could do little about European Union immigration, as much as David Cameron clearly tried.

There were two political results from this. The first has been Brexit, which has not been entirely about immigration, but I think that leave leaders would admit that the campaign could not have been won without it. One of the supreme ironies of the Brexit saga has been to listen to Labour and Liberal remainers in your Lordships’ House complaining bitterly about Brexit without understanding how much it was their doing. Secondly, there has been the collapse of support for Labour among the working class—as instanced in the last election, when they realised that, on this issue, Labour was not on their side. The party that was built to represent the working class got only 33% of its vote in 2019, while the Conservatives got 48%. What a shocking indictment of the Labour leadership that is.

It would have been better if Labour, Conservative or Liberal politicians had got a grip on the problem at an earlier stage, and better if the politicians of the European Union had been less dogmatic in their defence of free movement. Now we are closing in on a defining moment in the UK as free movement ends and we move to a new system, as my noble friend has explained, with immigration controls. One can only hope that present politicians of all strands understand the lessons of the past 20 years and listen more to the views of the British people. It is not rocket science.

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

Lord Horam Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued) & Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 5th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Judd, who invariably speaks with eloquence and passion. I was also delighted to hear the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Polak and Lord Alton, especially in view of the misery they are feeling about the Liverpool result over the weekend. I speak as a Manchester United supporter and I share their misery.

This debate reminds me of the time, some years ago, when the Government of the day asked pensioners to sacrifice their pension books, which they took to the post office, for payment directly into their bank accounts. At the time I was the MP for Orpington, trying to defend a majority of 269. A Labour Government perpetrated this change and it was manna from heaven, frankly. I remember waxing on about the heartlessness of a Government who took away from old-age pensioners the comfort of the book that they took to the post office every week. It was hard-hearted but, in retrospect, the direction of travel was entirely right. The issue is always how it is handled and the time you allow people to make the adjustment necessary in the circumstances. This is happening here.

It has been pointed out that the Australian Government now have an entirely digital system. As my noble friend on the Front Bench knows, I have been a supporter of the Australian system that they have partly converted to, but not wholly—not enough. The truth, as pointed out in the excellent speech of the noble Lord, Lord Oates, is that although the Australian Government have gone to an entirely digital system, for eight years they allowed people to have a paper system for no cost, and for a further three years they could pay to have a paper system alongside the digital system. For a total of 11 years, they allowed this change to take place. The Government are expecting this to happen by next July. The reality is that it will not. Can anyone imagine this sort of digital change taking place by next July, with all the uncertainty we have heard about with digital behaviour of this kind? I think not.

I wish the Minister not only to think about the greatest happiness for the greatest number—as said by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr—and to look at things from the point of view of ordinary people, as all Governments should, but to avoid a U-turn, which they will probably have to later if they do not listen to what we are saying tonight.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

I take some comfort from that, because this Government have shown themselves to be fairly good at U-turns. I hope we see one this evening. In 50 years in Parliament, I have never been more perplexed by any debate and the obduracy of a Government without a cause that is defensible.

What we are doing here is willingly inflicting pain and worry on people who have often served our country, who love our country, who wish to continue to make their life in our country and who make enormous contributions to our country. We are saying to them—I speak as a digital agnostic—“You do this, or else.” It is an indefensible position. I joke about my own position because, until we went into lockdown, I had never possessed a computer, never used a computer and never had any desire to use a computer. I do it now and, with the aid of the wonderful digital support service we have in the House, I have been able to make many speeches on the screen and have attended numerous meetings through Zoom and Microsoft Teams—and I have hated every one of them.

We should be a tolerant House. Tolerance is one of the defining characteristics of the British people, yet we have seen it crack in several places over the past few years. Many of the letters that your Lordships have received, as I have, from truly worried people speak about the creeping xenophobia in our country following Brexit. As everyone in your Lordships’ House knows, I deeply regret that decision, but I have always accepted it. I argued passionately for Mrs May’s deal—Lady May, as she is now. Many of those people feel less wanted. That is extremely sad.

There are one or two things that we should all bear in mind. In his splendid introduction to this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Oates, to whom we are all grateful, referred to the Horizon scandal. It is reaching the end almost as we speak, but not the end for those who suffered—not the end for those who were told that here was a perfect digital system that could not conceivably be wrong; no, that was wrong. We should also remember Windrush—people put into a position of terrible distress because their bona fides were not accepted. Surely we can learn from these things. Surely we can learn from the experiences to which many of your Lordships have referred last Wednesday and this very day. We are not dealing with perfection; we are dealing with clever systems that can frequently let people down. My noble colleague talked about the farm payments scheme. I had many in my former constituency who lived in parts of Staffordshire where there was not good reception. Some of them were driven almost demented by it and the Government saw sense.

Many of your Lordships have paid deserved tribute to my noble friend on the Front Bench. She has shown herself to be a colleague who understands this House and who tries to give time to people who have worries about various aspects of government policy—she will have been very busy recently. I want to say to her directly: please do not let yourself down. Go and see the Home Secretary tomorrow and tell her that you tore up your brief, because it is not worth having. There is no logical, sensible answer to this extremely modest proposal. My noble friend would earn more than an accolade—she would deserve a halo—if she said, “You have been talking sense; I have been talking rubbish, and we are now going to put it right.”

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

Lord Horam Excerpts

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

[Baroness Masham of Ilton (CB) [V]]

My Lords, in supporting Amendment 3, I congratulate the movers. However, I hope that the Government will realise that we are now in a social care crisis and that we should face up to the challenges now. There is a serious shortage of live-in carers to help disabled people, due to the combination of coronavirus and Brexit. Good social care takes the pressure off the NHS.

Many elderly and disabled people are at serious risk because they have had their benefits cut. Coupled with shrinking local authority budgets, the workforce is under pressure exactly when it is needed most. Also, the vast proportion of migrant employees in social care will be ineligible to work in the UK ,as most care workers’ earnings do not meet the threshold for the new skilled visa, as has been mentioned several times.

I wish Amendment 3 good luck.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I was not able to take part in Committee because of the all-consuming HS2 Committee, along with the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, who I see is in his place. However, I sat in on part of the debate and heard the remarks of the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, a very formidable pair when they debate these issues. It is rather like facing Federer and Djokovic at the same time, because of their very stringent remarks. In a conversation outside the Chamber, I said to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, that from what I had heard, I thought that he rather had a point. We all know where we want to be with social care. We want a well-paid and well-motivated workforce. We all know, sadly, where we are, and as he said in his previous remarks and repeated today, it is a question of the transition, of how we get from where we are to where we want to be.

Two things have happened since the previous debate. First, we had a report yesterday from the Migration Advisory Committee, which, as I am sure that the Minister will say when she winds up, is particularly concerned by the problem we face of a sudden end to the situation we are facing today, a precipice, before we reach any better solution. Incidentally, the MAC’s report covers 650 pages; I hope that when the Home Office look at some of these reports it cuts down the bulk. I do not know whether Ministers read all these reports, but it has become pretty much impossible. We are almost beyond despair when we see such a bulky product.

The second thing to have happened since the previous debate is the Chancellor’s Statement last Thursday. He flagged up in detail the situation which we all have been facing regarding unemployment, and finally put some numbers on it, pointing out that with the withdrawal of the very supportive job system that he has at the moment, we may well be looking at an additional 2 million unemployed people. At the moment, there are an estimated 122,000 vacancies in the social care sector, but surely it is not beyond the wit of God to find among those 2 million people some who might help in the social care sector. Indeed, it is likely that they will be exactly the sort of people who could care for people—they are people from the retail sector and from the hospitality sector. Some of them may not have exactly the right aptitudes and attitudes, as the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said—a nightclub bouncer might not be exactly the right person to go into the social care sector—but many will have exactly the human skills that we are looking for. If you cannot find 122,000 people from that additional 2 million unemployed, you really are not trying.

It is fair to say that many of the companies in this area who manage the care homes are a motley crew. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in the previous debate, made the point that many of the private equity companies got into this area and—sad to say—piled up debt on many of these companies and have sought a way out without too much care for the social consequences or the effect on their clients. That is a fair point, which I am worried about as well, but there are also many good companies in this area, trying to do good work, who really care about their clients and are trying to find a way forward. Therefore, we should give them the opportunity of recruiting from among those British people who may become unemployed.

As for the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that this is a sector that overall is controlled by the Government, that is fair, but none the less the Government are providing £1.5 billion of extra money for the sector through additional local authority subvention. There is also the Skills for Care programme, which is ongoing. This all indicates that there may be additional support for a company which is trying to do the right thing.

The MAC also said in its report that immigration is not the answer in the long term, and I do not think it should be. It highlights that, all too often, we have looked at recruitment difficulties and said that we must import from abroad, rather than looking at it the other way around, at what the problems are and how we can recruit, train and pay properly the people in this country before we look abroad. Indeed, I had the advantage of a personal chat about this with Professor Bell, the new chair of the MAC, and he made a very interesting point. He said that, in other countries with an equivalent of the Migration Advisory Committee, its reports do not just go to the Home Office, as they do here, but in the first instance to the education, business and health departments, with the implication “What are you doing to solve the problems of recruitment yourselves, before we even consider going abroad for further support?” Traditionally, we have too easily looked at this the wrong way around.

Mention has been made of the British Medical Association’s briefing, which we have all seen today. Once again, it makes the same mistake by talking about how we must import people to help with the obvious problems of recruitment in various sectors, from doctors and nurses to social care workers, but there are two remarkable omissions in that briefing. First, there is no mention of manpower planning in the NHS. Yet, as my noble friend Lord Lilley pointed out in a previous debate on this subject, 43% of those who apply for a nursing course are turned away. I cannot believe that 43% of those who apply are inadequate for the job, but they are being turned away for some reason. Equally, we do not know the situation with doctors, where there are similar figures. But, none the less, we should look at manpower planning as a whole in the NHS sector.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 6, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, and to which I and my noble friend Lord Horam—a fount of experience and common sense, as we heard in his earlier comments on social care—have added our names. Of course, the noble Lord is an esteemed expert in the field; there is no greater expert on some of these matters.

As the noble Lord said, the amendment calls for a limit on the total number of EEA and Swiss migrants coming into the UK for employment each calendar year. In practice, this would involve a limit on all immigration for employment. There is clearly a serious risk of the numbers getting very large indeed, as we have heard, if we do not find a way to control immigration more directly. We have to get this right or we will feel the result in public anger in years to come. Effectively leaving the number of migrants to the interests of employers, as is now proposed, is one-sided and inappropriate. It would make it impossible to plan properly for the investment we will need, given the scale of the dynamic change we will see. We will need additional houses, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries and transport facilities; we debated that in Committee but I do not think that anybody disagreed about the need for public investment to deal with the demographic change.

I know that we have the Migration Advisory Committee to help us and that, unlike SAGE, it includes economists; indeed, it is dominated by them. However, as I have already said, I fear that it is too focused on attracting talent from abroad in the employer’s interest; indeed, the Minister’s statement today heightens that fear. It is odd for me to speak against what might be seen as my own interest as a director—I refer to my interests in the register—but we are dealing with difficult economic dynamics and sensitive points of politics in what is already one of the most crowded countries in Europe. As the noble Lord, Lord Green, said, this is not an economic matter alone. Fairness is very important.

I believe that we need as many jobs as possible for those already in the UK, particularly given the extension of the Covid restrictions and the resulting rise in unemployment, which, sadly, will grow further. We also need a greater incentive for employers to train in the skills that we require in a more digital, flexible world. I therefore very much welcome the fact that a revolution in skills was at the heart of the Prime Minister’s welcome announcement yesterday. However, as the noble Lord said, it is not too late for the Government to look carefully at the arrangements they have made and perhaps change them in the light of the Covid tsunami.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, it has been obvious during these debates on the immigration Bill that there are two clear points of view. One is that we should carry on roughly with the status quo, which primarily reflects the interests of business. The other view, which perhaps supports workers’ interests, is that we need more control than we have now and a lower level of immigration. My point is a simple one: both points of view can be accommodated. I hate to use the phrase, “We can have our cake and eat it” because it has been somewhat devalued by our Prime Minister. None the less, the fact is that we can do that if we think this through carefully.

The supporters of the existing immigration policy, at a fairly high level, want to have freedom of movement for academics, creative people, entrepreneurs, engineers and all the valuable people we need in our society and contribute so much. For example, it was recently pointed out that nearly 50% of the Nobel prizes won by people in the UK have been won by people who originated abroad. However, to get that element in society, you do not need to have a net immigration level of over 350,000 a year. It can all be done on a net immigration level of 50,000, 70,000 or less than 100,000, which we had for decades before the Blair Labour Government opened the gates in the early part of this century.

Therefore, the problem with the large-scale immigration that we have had for the last 15 or 20 years, as has been pointed out by my noble friend Lord Hodgson, is that it affects the quality of life, puts a huge strain on resources, has a big environmental and social impact and affects jobs and wages. Even the MAC has pointed out that people on low wages have had them reduced by 5% in real terms over the last few years. It even led to the biggest tragedy of all for people who are remainers, like myself—Brexit. The casual treatment of people’s views on immigration was a clear factor in the referendum and certainly a decisive view of those who voted for Brexit. In other words, the liberals and middle-class people who wanted more immigration dug their own grave over the referendum.

The way out of this dilemma is absolutely clear, as has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington. It is to have a cap at a reasonable level. You could then accommodate the people who want to bring in the creative artists, entrepreneurs, businesspeople and so forth without having the numbers that are objected to by the workers and the bulk of people in this country.

In my previous speech, I praised the pamphlet produced by my noble friend Lord Hodgson, who looked at the issue in totality in relation to the demographic trends and population. I will now quote from another pamphlet that was brought out a lot less recently: Beyond the Net Migration Target, by the Onward think tank. The author is Will Tanner, who was a special adviser in the Cameron Government to Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary. He states:

“We recommend that the Government moves to a detailed and transparent Sustainable Immigration Plan, which would set out ministers’ objectives for the level and composition of migration and be updated on a rolling basis every year… This type of detailed approach is commonplace in other countries… For example, Australia has an annual planning program, where it sets the number of permanent visas in the budget each year.”


Tanner sets out what happens in Australia. For example, from 2019 to 2020, they planned to have 30,000 employer sponsored visas and skilled independent visas to the tune of 18,652. All this is set out in an annual budget decided between the various departments and stakeholders concerned, brought to their Parliament, debated and settled, and they have another look at it the following year. It is all perfectly transparent, above board and very democratic. The same thing happens in Canada and New Zealand. All these people are very experienced in dealing with this problem of immigration.

There it is: it can be dealt with by the simple methods already extant in other countries. I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that this is the way forward to meet both these objectives: those of the people who understand the value of a limited amount of immigration and those who do not want the high level of immigration that we have had over the last 20 years. Both sides can have what they want, and I present this to my noble friend as one of the answers to the way forward. It is a very simple pamphlet and, unlike the 650 pages of the MAC report, at 21 pages it is very readable. I hope that she can take this on board and present it to the Home Office as a very sensible way forward.

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[Lord Horam (Con)]

Will the noble Lord give way?

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

No. I cannot.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

But on the last group—

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

No. In their contributions, the noble Lords, Lord Horam and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, referred to think-tank reports. I will be interested in the reports from those think tanks. I should declare that I am the treasurer of a think tank—the Fabian Society—but I am a bit concerned about these bodies because, unlike the Fabian Society, a lot of them are quite opaque. We do not know who funds them, where the money comes from or who is behind these reports, so I would be a bit more interested in what those bodies had to say if we knew who paid for what. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, will speak on the next group, so maybe he can tell us who funded the report to which he has referred many times. I will be interested to hear that.

The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, made an important point about the number of EU migrants coming to the UK. In fact, that number has fallen. I carefully read the debate in Committee on this and on many points I found myself in agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, and I have heard nothing so far in the debate to persuade me otherwise.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment, to which I have added my name. Indeed, of the three proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Green, this is the one I have most hope of the Government accepting, in the context of the narrow EU-EEA focus of the Bill. I find it extraordinary that we should be thinking of dropping the long-standing requirement that jobs be advertised in the UK before overseas recruitment takes place. This will encourage employers, especially big employers, to recruit overseas without even trying the home market. We already have the benefit of the pool of 3.8 million or so EU citizens who have applied for the EU settlement scheme. Thanks to coronavirus, UK jobs are being lost everywhere, from the high street to our wonderful arts and entertainment industries.

In earlier discussions, defending the decision to dispense with the labour market test and the 28 days of domestic advertising it lays down, the Minister put a lot of emphasis on the salary thresholds and the immigration skills charge. I am not against the points-based system, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, seemed to suggest; however, with my experience of a number of industries, I think the thresholds look much too low, especially post-Covid. The skills charge has to be set against the recruitment fees that might have to be paid in the more demanding UK market. I appreciate, of course, that there will be scope to flex these numbers going forward—that seems to be what the Minister has been saying—however, I think this particular change is especially unwise.

While I do not rule out special arrangements for agriculture, mentioned earlier by my noble friend Lord Naseby, and for health workers—although the latter steals training and talent from countries that sometimes badly need it—we need our jobs to go to the home team wherever possible. We need a mechanism to encourage training, especially in the social care sector, which is crying out for suitable people, as my noble friend Lord Horam explained so eloquently in relation to Amendment 3. We are embarking on a skills revolution in the UK, and a jobs-first pledge, by advertising at home, should be part of our prospectus.

As I have said before, I am puzzled that trade unions such as USDAW, who I have worked so well with and who have done such a fine job in retail, are not strongly supporting the retention of some form of labour market test.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

This is about the resident labour market test and I find it quite astonishing, like my noble friends who have spoken to the amendment, that this should be removed at the point when we are entering a period of huge unemployment, as predicted by the Chancellor in his Statement only a few days ago. It is completely astonishing that that should be the case at the moment.

It is also amazing that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has so far not supported such an amendment: it beggars belief, frankly, that the Labour Party spokesman is willing to give this up in such circumstances. I hate to attack—rather, argue—with the noble Lord but he did take me on in our last debate. I will not take long over this but he did ask, “Who is this think tank, Onward?” It is a perfectly reputable, charitable think tank. The point it was making, as am I, is that Australia has had a cap on immigration for years. We have imported half the Australian points-based system but are refusing to import the rest, which is the cap. They say in Australia, “no cap, no control”, and that is why they have a cap.

It is the same in Canada, where they have the same system and it is debated in Parliament. It is all perfectly transparent and its Parliament has a role. It is the same in New Zealand. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, also said that he was worried about the economy, but Australia and Canada have successful economies and caps on immigration; New Zealand has a successful economy. They are all rather more successful than we are, in many respects. I advise the noble Lord, as a true friend—we served together on the Electoral Commission and I really appreciate him as a stalwart Labour man—to think again about this and reposition his party. Believe you me, if the Labour Party does not reposition itself on immigration, I can tell him, it is in real trouble.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment, as the House would expect, but before I get there, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, threw down a challenge and I had better get to that first. I am pleased to be able to tell him that I paid for every single bit of that pamphlet. Every single envelope, stamp, and bit of printing was paid for by me and I am happy to share the receipts and information with him if he wishes. The only time that I used any of the facilities of the House was to distribute the pamphlet, a copy of which went to every Member of your Lordships’ House and every Member of the House of Commons.

I support the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Green, and my noble friends Lady Neville-Rolfe and Lord Horam. I do not want to go over all that again now. In my remarks on Amendment 6, which we have just dealt with, I explained how employers have become addicted to cheap labour from overseas because it is in their commercial interests to do so. As a result, we have become thoughtless and careless about the employment opportunities for our settled population. We have young people locked into zero-hours contracts. We have members of minority communities locked into low-paid, low-prospect jobs. Increasingly, and really seriously because they are a larger part of our population, the over-50s find it hard to get jobs even as we raise the retirement age. A 2018 House of Commons report revealed that 1 million people over 50 would like to work or work more; 14% of 50 year-olds are out of work and 35% of 60 year-olds are out of work. Removing the resident labour market test opens them up to an even greater degree of unemployment risk.

As many noble Lords have said, as the impact of the pandemic makes itself felt, all these problems will get worse. How do we protect and look after our settled population in these circumstances, particularly since these same economic pressures will make employers ever keener to game the system and access cheaper labour from overseas? The first line of protection would have been a cap but we are not going to have it because my noble friend the Minister has told us so. This amendment is a second line of protection, as explained by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, since the resident labour market test prevents the grosser excesses of undercutting wages by recruiting from overseas.

I apologise to the House for not having been present in Committee, but I have read the debates and, following a point made by my noble friend Lord Horam, I was really astonished by a comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, at col. 843 of Hansard, about the trade unions. Why every union at the Trades Union Congress is not down here supporting this amendment as a way of helping and protecting the working man they seek to represent, absolutely astonishes me. Now, that is for the party opposite to sort out.

The strains that our society will face do not just come from the pandemic. They will come also from the impact of the fourth industrial revolution—from artificial intelligence and robotics, not often mentioned in our debate so far. In those circumstances, policies that will likely result in close to 1,200 people arriving on an average day cannot be sensible.

A key determinant of a person’s self-confidence and sense of self-worth is, undoubtedly, purposeful and secure work. Professor David Blanchflower said in his book Not Working, published last year:

“Unemployment hurts and it hurts a lot.”


The amendment, if the Government accepted it, would help reduce but, sadly, not eliminate that level of hurt, which is why I support it.

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We can argue about the correct consultation and scrutiny process, which is the subject of this amendment. Actually, I agree with some of the sentiments expressed earlier in the debate on Amendment 4, on the lack of parliamentary scrutiny of regulations made under some of the Bill’s provisions. However, I would argue that Parliament is in fact going too far in permitting such a scheme for new entrants on this scale; I do think we could live to rue the day. We are bringing in too many changes at once, and we risk losing control of our borders. This is another change, like the advertising of vacancies at home, that I think the Secretary of State should look at again. I hope that she will reach some of the conclusions that I and our colleagues have reached in looking in detail at these important provisions and the points-based proposals that the Home Office has now helpfully brought forward.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

The contributions to this debate are getting shorter and shorter, and I intend to adhere to that pattern. The simple point I want to make is that this is part of a loosening of the arrangements—I would not call them controls—which were put in place at the beginning of this year and then amplified in July. Of course, since then we have had the coronavirus pandemic. We have the prospect now of an additional two million unemployed, and young people coming into the job market face a very bleak situation. These are not normal times.

The Treasury has responded rapidly and comprehensively to this situation with a major package earlier in the year and the less pronounced package of the last 10 days. What I hope and expect is that the Home Office reacts similarly and recalibrates the ideas it had before the world changed when the coronavirus set in. We really do need it to respond. I do not believe that the Home Office is unfit for purpose, as was once said by a Labour Minister. It has many able civil servants who are perfectly capable of responding to a changing situation, but they need to show it now; otherwise, people will lose faith in the Government.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, one of the weaknesses of the whole Bill is the extent to which the detailed implications are contained in regulations which are only now beginning to emerge. Every Member of your Lordships’ House will be aware that the scrutiny of regulations is much less effective than that of primary legislation; the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, raised that issue in the debate on one of the previous amendments. I should perhaps, just for the record, declare that I am the chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, but I am speaking for myself, not for the committee.

As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, the regulations are unamendable, so the House is left with what I call the “nuclear option” of complete rejection. Unsurprisingly, the House has veered away from that course of action, except on the rarest of occasions. That is one of the reasons why I support the noble Lord, Lord Green, in this case, because he is actually trying to wrest back a bit of control by having some more specific plans built into the Bill. They are necessary for the reasons that he, and indeed my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, laid out. In its way, this amendment is the third and last line of protection in regulating the extent to which the employment opportunities of our settled population can be undermined.

We already know that there is no cap and that we will have no resident labour market test. Therefore, if my noble friend the Minister refuses to accept this amendment—and I fear that if I could glance over her shoulder at her speaking notes, I would see that she might just be going to do that—it is extremely likely that our future levels of immigration will continue, probably in excess of a quarter of a million each year. It may be slightly below what we have now, at 320,000, but it will be well over a quarter of a million each year.

In Committee I chided the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, who has been coming back at me this afternoon, when he refused to back my proposal to establish an office for demographic change, which was a planned idea, independent and transparent, to look at the complexities of these issues in the round—environmental, ecological, societal. It is easy to laugh—the noble Lord is already grinning—but the reality is that there are serious issues around water, land quality and species loss which are all related to how our population is growing. They are not entirely due to it, but they are very largely related.

I said to the noble Lord, I hope, gently, because I do not want to upset him—he is a sensitive soul—that his party had to decide where it stood on demographic growth, of which immigration is a part, because it is an issue that really resonates in the country. We have heard the percentages; 60% to 70% of people are concerned about it. In particular, his party must decide where it stands, or all the possibilities of recovering the red wall, now blue wall, seats will be vanishingly small.

However, it is perfectly fair to say that this is not without dangers for my party. We will face quite significant challenges. If those of us who are concerned about what happens if our population grows by 6 million or 8 million are right, and the package of policies before us continues to allow rapid growth—it is not about whether they are foreigners, black or white, or what their colour is; it is about the number of people—we will have two big challenges. First, a lot of the people who turned the red wall seats into blue wall seats did so because we promised a sustained reduction in the level of immigration. If we do not deliver that, they will feel betrayed and let down.

In parallel with that, every year we will have to build 100,000 houses to accommodate the quarter of a million people likely to arrive. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, says that they pay more in tax than they draw in benefits, but there is a much more complicated issue, with which I will not bore the House this evening, about the capital investment to maintain and extend our roads and structures. They are not covered just by taxes; a much bigger level of capital expenditure is required. He and I can discuss this over a socially distanced cup of coffee, but I will not bore the House with it now.

We will build 100,000 houses a year, and they will be built in our shire counties. These people will not be delighted about it. We know that; housebuilding is intensely unpopular. The coming storm about the planning algorithm, which is now doing the rounds, is just the beginnings of the trouble there will be if we continue down this road. My noble friends Lord Horam and Lady Neville-Rolfe are right. The Government are wrong in believing they have the situation under control.

My noble friend the Minister nobly and loyally marches to the beat of the Home Office drum, which essentially says, “Don’t worry; it will be all right on the night”. I wish I shared the department’s confidence.

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

Lord Horam Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 16th September 2020 Lords Chamber

I hope that the Government, and indeed the Opposition parties, will on this occasion show the necessary character and courage. I beg to move.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted that my noble friend was able to get these amendments tabled. I think we should pay tribute to the wisdom of the clerks on this issue in extending it as far as they have. This is the right way to approach immigration policy—from the point of view of demography and population growth. We should assess the optimum level of population for a country such as the UK and, once that has been settled, we should decide what our policy is on immigration.

My noble friend has set out this subject with great clarity in his pamphlet Overcrowded Islands, produced with the help of Civitas, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society—an entirely appropriate body, if I may say so, for this question. It is well researched, cogently written, beautifully illustrated and I urge noble Lords to read it if they get an opportunity. I may say in passing that it is far better than most government White Papers in this area, which are rather turgid by comparison. They could well take a leaf out of his pamphlet.

My noble friend has covered the ground very well in his remarks this evening, so I will confine myself to two points, remembering the advice of Lloyd George to Harold Macmillan after his maiden speech that a good speech should make no more than two points, and if the audience remembers even one of them you have done well.

My first point is that, despite being an economist myself, I wholly agree with my noble friend’s sentiments about the role of economics. It is entirely the wrong way to approach immigration through the prism of economic policy. Business and many commentators and, sadly, the Government, do this in spades. The Government’s main adviser in this area is the Migration Advisory Council and they invoke it at every turn. However, the fact is that the MAC is composed almost entirely of academic economists specialising in manpower issues.

The MAC does a good job within its narrow remit, under a lot of pressure from business interests. I have met the new chairman of the MAC, Professor Brian Bell, and he is an impressive man. But, as my noble friend said, immigration involves much broader issues than simply economic policy. There is the question of democracy and population. There are environmental issues. Quoted in my noble friend’s pamphlet is a certain Boris Johnson, who said in an article in 2007:

“Do we want the south-east of Britain to resemble a giant suburbia?”


Frankly, he seems to be going the right way about that at the moment, judging by his housing policy. He seems to have forgotten all about his excellent sentiments of 2007. However, that is another matter.

There are ecological issues as well as environmental issues. There is the quality of life issue. Do we want all the good things about Britain to be perpetually unavailable because of overcrowding? There is the question of social cohesion. There is even a moral dimension—I have attached great importance to this. What right has Britain, a rich, developed country, to scour the world for talent from poorer developing countries that need it more than we do? All these issues should be addressed and the sort of unit that my noble friend envisages has the right approach to do that.

Again, speaking as an economist, I should say also that the assumptions underlying the usual economic argument that large-scale immigration is essential for business are simply wrong. Large-scale immigration damages economic growth. The simple point is that growth depends on increasing productivity. Productivity comes from increasing capital assets per person. When a person comes to this country, they occasionally bring significant capital assets but usually do not, and therefore productivity decreases and economic growth is damaged. It is no surprise to me that the large-scale immigration we have had over the last 10 or 20 years has been accompanied by very poor levels of productivity in this country. It is a major problem and the two are not unconnected.

Those are the simple economics. In addition, allowing business to recruit immigrants on a large scale reduces the incentive to train people who are already here. That is one reason why technical education and apprenticeships have been so poor in this country. We have supported higher education too much and further education too little. Arguing that we need immigration for economic reasons leaves out all those other subjects that are so important. In my view, it is also bad economics and bad business.

My noble friend mentioned the views of the people. My final point is that it is about time that we listened to the views of the people. They have been saying consistently and for years that they do not want any more immigration. They have been ignored. This is one of the issues that led to Brexit. Now we have Brexit, and still the people’s views are ignored. Especially in a Covid-haunted situation, where jobs are scarce, I cannot imagine what the political explosion will be. The only sensible way out of this is to put a cap on immigration at a reasonable level, decided with the help of a body such as that proposed by my noble friend.

I appreciate, in addressing the Minister, that these are large issues that his brief may not cover to the extent which we would like. But he is from the north of England, as I am from the north of England, and I am sure he is well aware of opinion on matters of this kind in the north of England. I hope that he will convey to his colleagues in government the importance and urgency of understanding these issues.

[Viscount Craigavon (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful to be able to express my support for these amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. I particularly support the tour d’horizon of his opening speech.

I accept that these amendments are trying to sow the seeds of defining a wider principle than is focused on in the Bill, which is just on the EU. In my opinion, the two key words in these amendments are “demographic objectives.” As has been said, these will be defined by the Government and assessed by this new body, the office for demographic change. That office will focus exclusively on the agenda as put forward by the Government; it will not range freely wherever the current fashion happens to take it. However, it will focus on the current demographic objectives, while maybe revealing any shortcomings in them in practice.

Debate on this Bill has highlighted the need for a more systematic and dispassionate examination of this issue. There is, more than ever, a need for the public to have confidence in the statistics and aims on immigration to which the Government aspire. In the longer term, it is important that the department has some independent touchstone by which the public and Parliament can begin to assess the success or otherwise of what is being done in their name. The independence of the Treasury model gives some guidance as to how that might be achieved.

As a strong supporter of Brexit, and to the extent that we are no longer basing ourselves on the EU framework, I believe that we are now in a position to develop our own independent structures on immigration. Developing this new purported office or organisation to shadow how the department is framing its demographic objectives would be a vital process. This new office would not be an organisation that can range at will on the subject of immigration. Just to emphasise that, it is correctly restrained by the last line of Amendment 78, that it is not allowed to go wherever it wants and that it

“may not consider the impact of any alternative policies”—

that is, alternative to the Government’s.

Finally, following the stresses expected over the next few months, I would hope that the department and the Government could put this issue on their agenda for the future.

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

Lord Horam Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I shall strike a rather less partisan note. Like my noble friend Lord Naseby, I welcome the Bill because it is clearly a necessary part of the Government’s attempts to reduce the large-scale immigration we have had over the past 20 years to a more sustainable level. Large-scale immigration is damaging to Britain in a number of ways. First, it reduces the quality of life in these islands. The UK is a heavily populated country. The population is growing at its fastest for more than a century and two-thirds of that growth comes from immigration. The extra people have to be provided for, and that has many adverse effects. For example, an area of countryside the size of Cornwall has been lost to development since 1990. All this is well set out in a pamphlet by my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, which I recommend the House reads carefully. It is much more interesting than most government pamphlets and much better illustrated.

Secondly, large-scale immigration damages the economy. Most obviously it deters businesses from investing in training and apprenticeships for the domestic population. Thirdly, immigration on the present scale also increases inequality because the lowest paid suffer most from immigration. Fourthly, large-scale immigration makes the problem of maintaining social cohesion far worse. Fifthly, there is a moral point. What right has Britain to scour the world for skilled people when they are often desperately needed in their own countries? Finally, British people have repeatedly shown that they do not want large-scale immigration at this level. Despite this, the Labour Government under Tony Blair went ahead with large-scale immigration. It harmed the country, it cost Labour votes on a massive scale and it increased distrust of politicians because people felt they had not been consulted—and, indeed, they had not been.

This is an enabling Bill and does not set out the Immigration Rules. Like the noble Lords, Lord Green of Deddington and Lord Adonis, I hope that when the Minister considers these comments she will look at what they said because I am afraid we have insufficient control of this situation and we have given employers too much control. None the less, I am delighted that the Government have said that they will keep the situation under review and will act quickly when necessary. I hope my noble friend will confirm that in her wind-up speech.

Bus Services Bill [HL]

Lord Horam Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I agree that there is no distinction, really, in accountability terms between a mayor and a councillor who is considering these matters. I strongly agreed with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, about London and London franchising. I live in London and I can certainly attest that what she said about that is entirely correct. London buses are, frankly, marvellous. Whether you congratulate Boris—poor chap, he is receiving rather a bad press at the moment so I might as well praise him for his new buses—or Thomas Heatherwick, who actually designed them, they are absolutely superb. Whether you praise Thomas Heatherwick, Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone, London really works from a bus point of view. In fact, my wife said to me the other day, “You’re becoming a bus junkie”. I actually took a bus to go one stage because the bus routes give you priority over cars, et cetera, so it really does work. Therefore, I am emphatically in favour of the Bill, which tries to extend franchising to the rest of the country, which I think badly needs it.

However, I am, frankly, horrified by Clause 4, which submits everything—apart from the one aspect of mayors with combined authorities—to the requirement that the Secretary of State should process it. It means that a council which wants to put on a new bus service from, let us say, Little Dribbling to Nether Wallop has to take it to the Secretary of State. That is absolute nonsense. I was a Minister of Transport in a Labour Government a long time ago and this system does not work. You need to get somebody who knows the situation locally, understands it well and can take a decision. Okay, there are always a few problems and occasionally things go wrong, but pushing it up to a civil servant and then to a Minister, who probably has no knowledge of the situation you are talking about, does not work. All it does is congest the Government at the top level.

I saw the other day that Prime Minister David Cameron was complaining that in comparison with Angela Merkel, he had much more to do because he had to take decisions about education, transport, the NHS and so forth and she did not; in Germany it was all farmed out to the Länder. This is why. We are taking all these absurdly detailed decisions at government level. Although my experience is quite different from that of the noble Lord, Lord True—his is extensively in local government, mine is not—from the point of view of a government Minister, it is nonsense, frankly. It simply does not work.

The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, tried his best to give a reason, which was about accountability. There is no difference between the accountability of an elected mayor and that of an elected councillor. It is a simple fact. They are both elected; they are both responsible to the local electorate. There is no distinction that I can see. I am not surprised that the Delegated Powers Committee said that there was no adequate explanation. I looked through the Explanatory Notes, hoping to find some rationale for this procedure, and there is none. Therefore, we have a real problem here and the Government really have to think again.

Another difficulty is that quite apart from overcentralisation, the British Civil Service seems to go in for too much complexity. If we raise the bar too high, either because things have to be processed up or because we put in a lot of regulations, which are sometimes unnecessary—they are no doubt sensible in some ways and no doubt advisable; none the less there is more and more regulation—it becomes likely that lots of local authorities which could use these powers will simply say, “Oh, it’s too much trouble. We don’t want to bother with all that. We won’t do it”. There are easy ways to get out of it and then blame the Government. When people ask, “Why isn’t there a decent bus service here?” they can say, “Because the Government made it so complicated”. It is an easy way out for them.

Therefore, while, like my noble friend Lord True, I am in no way criticising my noble friend on the Front Bench, who has his job to do and who does it extremely well, I believe that between now and Report in September the Government should look at this and extensively modernise it. If they do not, I do not think, frankly, that they have much chance of getting it through this House.

[Earl Attlee]

My noble friend Lord Horam observed that the Explanatory Notes do not justify the policy, but my understanding is that that is not the purpose of Explanatory Notes. Explanatory Notes, as I understand it, tell us what the Bill does and how it works and do not seek to justify the policy.

[Lord Horam]

It is not just that the Explanatory Notes, which should explain what each clause does, do not explain why this does what it does; the overview, which we also get, does not explain it either.

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, I am not getting involved in the squabble between noble Lords opposite, because I want to start one of my own, on this side. The fact is that I have never been in favour of franchising and I do not think that the proposals for franchising in the Bill are particularly sensible either.

I listened with interest to the view of the noble Lord, Lord True. I know that he is enormously talented, but I am not sure that he is qualified to run a bus company—although, obviously, as the leader of a council, he feels that he should. I share his view that elected mayors are not capable of running bus companies either, but we all know why they are being given that responsibility. Having created these large authorities against the wishes of the electors in cities such as Birmingham and Manchester, they have to give them something to do—and I am sure that letting them run the buses seemed to the Treasury to have been a good idea at the time.

I have asked Ministers about this and, indeed, the Minister here today indicated that the extra money needed to run those bus services in our large cities will be provided by the Treasury. That is not normally the way that the Treasury goes about things and it seems to me that these responsibilities are being passed on to big-city level without the resources to deliver them adequately.

Again, I have to say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that I do not share her view of the bus industry as it used to be. It is a bit like British Rail: everybody tells me how wonderful it was. Actually, I used to work for it and I did not think that it was particularly wonderful at the time. Now it is implied that the bus industry, when it was under municipal control, was a picture of tranquil harmony, with lots of satisfied passengers. I have bored your Lordships before with my own career, such as it was, in the bus industry, but, when I worked for Travel West Midlands, it was a group of municipal undertakings that were put together as a result of the 1968 Act, semi-privatised by the Conservative Government of the 1980s and actually acquired by its employees.

When I became a director of the company I did not think for a moment that it was due to my talent: I was told afterwards that I was the one person who both management and staff could agree on at the time. I am not sure whether that was praise or condemnation, but I became a director of the company in 1992. Many of its buses were quite ancient. The average age of the bus fleet of Travel West Midlands in 1992 was nine and a half years. After we, the employees, voted in 1997 to join the National Express Group, the age of the bus fleet when I stepped down as chairman in 2000 was just over six years. That was a quite dramatic reduction and indicates the amount of investment that was put into new vehicles during that period.

If bus services are franchised, what will happen to that investment? I have to say to my noble friend that, because we were a subsidiary of the National Express Group, it was my job and the job of the other directors to make a case for investment to the main board. We actually invested around £30 million during the time I was directly involved, in tranches of around £10 million each time. We had to convince the board of the National Express Group that it was sensible to invest that sort of money in bus services in Birmingham.

Does my noble friend think for a moment we would have got the go-ahead from the National Express Group if the idea of franchising was being held over the company’s head at that time? I will answer my own question: the fact is that we would not have got the go-ahead, because the view of the National Express board would have been, “We are not prepared to spend £10 million of our assets on buses when someone else—whether it is the noble Lord, Lord True, or someone else—will tell us where to run them, when to run them and how much to charge”.

Again, reverting to those so-called halcyon days of municipal control, my noble friend talked about the amount of profit that was made by the five major bus operators. As I have indicated, many of them operate new fleets. As far as wages are concerned, I will confine my remarks to Travel West Midlands, where I was chairman of the board. We paid our drivers the best rates in the United Kingdom, so those profits were not made off the sweat of the brow of our employees, although of course some went to shareholders. I know that we have some disagreements at the moment about the leadership of my party, to say the least, but I do not think that we are entirely anti-profit-making yet. We will have to see what happens in the next few days and weeks, but I do not think we object to companies paying their shareholders a dividend and paying their staff an adequate wage.

EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling (EUC Report)

Lord Horam Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I think that all of us in the Chamber agree that international migration, wherever in the world it is, on the present scale is a huge problem. It is bad for the countries that originate it. For example, I learned recently that Jamaica loses over 80% of its graduates every year. Imagine trying to substantiate sensible systems of government if you are losing four-fifths of your graduates every year. How can you possibly do that? No wonder Jamaica has huge drug and crime problems.

A few years ago I was in Botswana, which has a severe AIDS problem. It has a drug programme to try to control it, but I found that the problem was getting worse because the drugs were not available. That was because they were not being administered as there were not enough nurses. I asked why there were not enough nurses and the answer was that they were all in Britain helping the NHS. I was made to feel very guilty, understandably. That is the sort of detailed problem that we somehow forget when we talk about international migration. En passant, that makes me suspicious of the rather glib solution of the Australian points system that the Brexit people have come out with recently. How is it right for us to take the people we need and totally ignore the requirements of the originating country? That cannot be morally correct.

Apart from the problems in the originating countries, there are problems in the transit countries. The strain on facilities in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Greece, Libya and so forth at the moment is huge—it is far greater than we are experiencing in this country. There are also problems for the receiving countries, and I very much echo what my noble friend Lord Tugendhat said in his opening remarks: we must consider those extremely carefully. People are understandably alarmed at the thought of more than 300,000 people a year coming to the UK. How will they fit into this small island? They are also concerned that we have no control over the EU portion of immigration. People expect their Governments to have control over these issues—and so they should.

I was delighted to serve on the committee under the chairmanship of my colleague and noble friend Lord Tugendhat. In looking at Operation Sophia, we discovered that this early stab at trying to control immigration through Libya, across the Mediterranean to Sicily and Italy was not working at all well and that a much broader approach was required, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, said in her remarks.

We need a two-pronged approach. We need development aid to tackle the originating problems in the countries of north Africa. As the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, said, 50 million people may emigrate from those countries over the next five or six years if we do not tackle these problems. That needs to be coupled with a proper programme of deterrence.

I will deal with the deterrence issue first. As has been said, the problem with Libya is that there is no coherent Government at the moment. However, a unity Government is being established—an embryonic Government. They will need our help, and they are getting our help in some respects. As I understand, we are giving some military, financial and logistical help. I am also delighted that the Foreign Secretary was out there to co-ordinate that and give some diplomatic support. They need, for example, help with their coastguard service. The coastguards are patrolling a huge area of coastline and, inevitably, cannot deal with all the smugglers who are trying to get their poor immigrants across to Italy. We need permission to go inside the territorial waters to help their coastguards be more effective, to give them more resources and to stop it being simply a save and rescue operation, as it is at the moment, and to deal with the problem in a systematic way. The deterrence, as we all agreed, is well short of what is required.

We also need help for the countries of origin. I am delighted, therefore, that on 7 June the European Commission issued a communication talking about a new external investment fund totalling, I hope, €62 billion, which will be invested over a period of years into the countries of north Africa.

Again, quite clearly there are huge problems. As my noble friend Lord Tugendhat said, there are problems in Nigeria, where very rich people are making quite a lot of money. There are problems in Niger, where already the politicians have demanded £1 billion, almost in blackmail. There is corruption, there are dictatorships and there are human rights abuses. These are all problems in that part of the world and they mean that we have to conduct our affairs in helping them in a far more businesslike and efficient way than perhaps we have done hitherto.

Development aid and deterrence are required, working together. In that way, we may be able to manage down to a level that people can accept the migrant flows that are appearing. It is a huge challenge for the European Union, but it must be met with competence and realism, as well as humanity.

Immigration Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 227 and to oppose the proposition that Clause 34 stand part of the Bill. During my maiden speech I referred to time spent as a caseworker and head of office for my noble friend Lady Kramer when she was a Member in another place. I will recount the salient details of an immigration case that has stayed with me for more than a decade and which will illustrate several speeches made by noble Lords here.

One morning, I received a call from a concerned friend of a young man from Chad who had arrived here as an unaccompanied minor. He was anxious that his friend, having become 18 years of age, had been detained by immigration officers and was about to be deported. To cut a long story short, I was successful in locating the young man and succeeded in getting him off the plane—just. Now, this orphaned young man eventually succeeded in getting indefinite leave to remain, but not until he had spent several months having to report to Lunar House, often having to walk there from Kingston as he had little cash.

He also endured several months in Harmondsworth, where I had occasion to visit him. It was a prison in all but name. In all that time, he lived with the constant fear of deportation. No one should have to go through such mental anguish because of poor decision-making, which was the sole reason behind his ordeal. The Home Office got it wrong. Poor judgment on the part of the Home Office is still prevalent today. If this clause were to be passed as it stands, the injustice this boy suffered would be magnified inordinately.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I will make a brief contribution to this debate based on my own experience as the Member of Parliament for Orpington for 18 years. My experience may be the same as or different from that of other Members of Parliament in the other House, but I had so many immigration cases regularly that one out of my three caseworkers was solely devoted to dealing with them comprehensively. By the way, I think the people in these cases got a pretty good service. I am not sure that a lot of people could devote so much casework time to one particular aspect of what an MP has to face.

None the less, I want to address the question of Clause 34, rather than Amendment 227 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. However, while I understand the argument put forcefully by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the guarantee you get from having something in the Bill, my experience in relation to the handling of children is that they were handled exceptionally carefully. Whenever there was a family involved, the Home Office took particular trouble to do it properly. I felt that it pursued its statutory obligations very fully.

On the wider issue of Clause 34, my own experience was that the really difficult problem in dealing with immigration cases, whether they were economic migrants or asylum seekers, was the length of time the whole appeals procedure took. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, it is byzantine in its complexity. That is the truth of the matter. That very complexity and the number of possible appeals you could make—tier 1, tier 2 and then appeals beyond that—meant that cases went on not just for several months but for several years and individuals, whatever the eventual result of the case, were placed in a situation of great difficulty, resulting very often in mental problems and severe depression. These cases could go on for five, six or seven years before they were eventually resolved. This was the really big problem in dealing with immigrants.

Will this clause as it is improve that? Will it speed things up? We have evidence from the new procedures for dealing with visa applications, for example, on the hub and spoke principle brought in by the last Government, whereby visas were dealt with in a particular area—let us say Dubai for the whole of India, for example—and things were speeded up. Those measures were brought in so that visa applications could be dealt with more rapidly than hitherto. Great experience was developed in dealing with the paperwork, as opposed to seeing people face to face, which ordinary common sense would suggest is a better procedure than dealing just with paperwork—but none the less, that is what was developed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a means of dealing with these things more expeditiously than would otherwise be the case. If my noble and learned friend can tell me what experience and evidence we have that Clause 34 would speed things up, I would be in favour of it, because the real problem was the length of time that appeals took in immigration cases.

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, in the interests of speeding things up, I shall be very brief in putting a question to the Minister about absconding. There is an overlap again between these groups of amendments. The relationship between support and appeals is very critical, and I do not believe that the Government have quite got it right; they are trying hard but not succeeding. We are discussing asylum seekers facing genuine obstacles to leaving the UK; the Government want to remove their right of appeal against decisions to withhold or discontinue support. Does not that relate to Section 9 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004? My understanding of the Section 9 pilot is that nearly one-third of the families disappeared to avoid being returned to their country of origin. The rate of absconding was 39% for those in the Section 9 pilot but only 21% in the comparable controlled group, who remained supported. Can the Minister comment on those figures, because they would appear to lend credence to the amendment?

Immigration Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I share colleagues’ concerns about the lack of clarity of the remit and purpose of the Director of Labour Market Enforcement and the indications of a lack of resources for the organisation so far. The Migration Advisory Committee has already been cited, but it is worth mentioning the remarks of Sir David Metcalfe in evidence to the Committee in the other place. He said that funding remains an issue, particularly for the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, and that:

“In the low-skilled report, we calculated that you would get an inspection from HMRC once every 250 years and you would get a prosecution once in a million years”.—[Official Report, Commons, Immigration Bill Committee, 20/10/15; col. 20.]

The odds of bad employers being caught, let alone prosecuted, seem slim. It comes to something when the US State Department is moved to mention the lack of resources. In its Trafficking in Persons Report 2015 it mentioned concern that there needs to be an increase in funds for the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. It is a little galling to have to be told by another Government that there are not enough resources, but we could take that to heart. That report also stated that government funding for specialised services for victims of trafficking remains limited. We are judged to be falling down on resources.

I, too, was confused by the exchanges in committee in the other place about the director’s focus outside workers who are here legally. The suggestion seems to be that a labour market offence can be committed only against persons legally in the country, which suggests that others are going to be dealt with through an immigration lens. I add my voice to those who have asked for clarity about whether the director will be focused on employers who most exploit workers, including those without leave to be in this country and to work. Without that wider remit outside legal workers, the director cannot be effective against the worst employers.

I am confused by the number of definitions of worker. We can add to them the definition under EU free movement law, but perhaps that would unnecessarily complicate the matter in hand. However, there seem to be at least three definitions of worker, and it might be sensible to have one.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

I understand the questions raised by noble Lords and the dangers of a lack of clarity in this area, but we may be making a bit of a meal of this issue. In the House of Commons, James Brokenshire made the situation fairly plain. Referring to the comment quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, clearly, offences are matters not for the Director of Labour Market Enforcement but for immigration officers. Equally, the director may well want to look at intelligence arising from offences relating to immigration in the context of the strategy he is trying to devise to avoid labour market exploitation. There seems to be a difference between people on the ground who are trying to deal with immigration offences day to day, and the director, who is trying to enact a supervisory role on a rather larger scale.

If I am right about that—I may be wrong, and I fully agree that the situation is confusing and difficult and should be simpler—the amendments put down by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, are mistaken because they tie the director down too much. In practice, we may want the director’s remit to go rather wider and to take into account what he may learn as a consequence of the information he acquires from immigration officers operating on the ground. That is a sensible way to proceed administratively. I may be wrong, and I will listen to what the Minister says, but it seems to me that the situation is rather clearer than we seem to be suggesting.

Immigration Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, opinion polls suggest that immigration is the number one issue at the moment. We know why it is a big issue. For a long time post-war, there was almost no immigration in this country. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, it went up to the low tens of thousands, and then it went up massively under the last Labour Government, reaching a net level of hundreds of thousands.

At this point I pay tribute to the efforts of Migration Watch UK, started by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, whom I am glad to see in his place today. The fact is that, as has been said once or twice, it is very difficult to get concrete evidence on many issues in this area, including numbers. Migration Watch UK stepped into the vacuum that existed at the time and prodded the Government into getting better numbers. In my view, it has therefore performed a valuable public service.

A level of immigration higher than, say, that of the 1980s or 1990s is probably inevitable in the globalised 21st century. The fact is that controlled immigration brings many benefits to Britain and many immigrants have contributed a great deal to this country. However, the very large numbers that we have seen in recent years can, as the Home Secretary in her conference speech rightly said, damage social cohesion and national identity, as well as drive down the wages of the low paid, as evidenced by the recent Bank of England research, particularly in the service sector, where many of these problems are at their most acute.

What we have seen this year is not only large-scale immigration to Britain but mass immigration to Europe from failed states outside. In my view, that can be dealt with only by strong border controls, as well as diplomatic and military efforts to get some sort of governance back into failed states, plus international aid for the countries that need it.

It has always struck me that one of the problems with large-scale immigration is that it can damage not only the living standards of many of the poorest in the receiving country but the country the immigrants come from. I remember going on a parliamentary trip to Botswana, which has a huge AIDS problem. The country was having great difficulty in managing the drug-related health services that could mitigate the situation. The problem was a shortage of nurses. Where were they? They were all in the British NHS. They had all gone to make more money and to help us run our health service. Which was more important—to deal with the massive problem of AIDS in Botswana or to deal with our own NHS? It can be a real problem for developing countries.

That is why my right honourable friend the Prime Minister’s brave insistence on a generous and targeted international aid programme is entirely right. It goes hand in hand with a strong commitment to reduce immigration to more acceptable levels. Reference has already been made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and others to the levels of migration that we are seeing on an international scale now and can expect to see in the future. A combination of proper border controls and international aid is the right way to deal with this. That of course will take time, and the Bill does not attempt to deal with these broad issues; it is a relatively modest measure designed to deal with some of the more egregious problems thrown up by immigration.

As someone who has always supported a living wage as well as a minimum wage, I am strongly in favour of Part 1, which tackles illegal working and the exploitation of workers. In some areas this has become linked, as we know, with organised criminal activity. The Bill establishes a new statutory Director of Labour Market Enforcement, and that has been widely welcomed in this place, as well as elsewhere. When you have established these new bodies there is also, of course, the question of resources. I doubt people want to see a new director in the same position as the inspectors for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, who, on average, can visit a firm only once every 250 years.

I take seriously the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, from the opposition Benches about the effect on employees. These are very vulnerable people. I know that my noble friend Lord Bates is very sympathetic to this, and I hope that the situation can be carefully monitored. We do not want to see any counterproductive consequences for employees, who are, as I say, in a very vulnerable position.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 of the Bill strengthen the procedures dealing with those who have no right to be here. As my noble friend Lord Bates rightly said, the evidence is that the 2014 Act has worked well. This extends it to wider areas and will, I hope, cut down the hitherto ludicrous and extensive appeals procedure. I remember from my time as a Member of Parliament for Orpington appeals that went on for literally years and years, which is incredibly depressing for the people concerned and, indeed, harrowing for everybody.

I also support the measures to improve the language skills of immigrants who work in the public sector, and the charge on employers designed to improve the skills of the people they recruit. Employers, I am afraid, are often used to the easy solution of employing foreign workers rather than taking the trouble to train properly indigenous workers.

All this, frankly, is common sense. I believe that the Bill is not a game-changer. Getting immigration back to reasonable levels will take time, possibly even as long as a decade. However, the Bill was passed by the Commons with quite a large majority. I hope it will receive effective scrutiny here but also be supported by this House.