Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Chesterton and Lord Rosser

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I am moving again an amendment which we moved in Committee which we consider to be key and ought to be in the Bill. Clauses 43 and 44 deal with the issue of work and would, first, streamline the processes by which an employer can object to or appeal against a civil penalty by requiring employers to raise an objection to the Secretary of State before making an appeal to the civil court. Secondly, it would make it easier to enforce unpaid civil penalty debts in the civil courts.

Immigration is a welcome and important part of our life and our country’s success over the years owes much to the people who have come here from around the world and have helped to make it a better place. However, we are all aware of the fact that immigration can bring with it certain pressures and certain difficulties for our communities. The Bill does not include any of the important work-related measures which we have been calling for, and we tabled a number of amendments for Committee stage as a means of raising these issues. Amendment 53 has the aim of ending the practice of some recruitment agencies excluding local workers.

To state what I hope is obvious, many or most recruitment agencies are a great asset to the communities in which they work, helping employers and potential employees find work, and keeping local economies in particular ticking over. However, there has been a problem with some employment agencies effectively taking on only foreign workers and excluding British people from their books.

That has become more of an issue because, over the past couple of decades there has been a significant growth in agency employment; I understand that the figures show a 500% increase in agency workers between the mid-1980s and 2007. A look at the figures shows that migrants are increasingly overrepresented within agency work, particularly at the lower end, with A8 accession country migrants constituting the largest single group of agency workers. In some sectors—the meat and poultry processing industry, for example—there are examples which have come to light of British workers facing difficulty registering for work with some agencies which exclusively supply migrant workers, generally eastern European nationals.

We have the evidence of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which conducted a major survey in 2010 and found that one-third of agencies confirmed that they had acted unlawfully in sometimes supplying workers by judging what nationality the processing firm would prefer, or responding to direct requests often based on stereotypes about the perceived dependability of particular nationalities. There has been the example of an organisation advertising cleaning services with a message saying that it has a thorough vetting system for all its cleaners, and then going on to say that they all come from Poland and that several of them have had extensive cleaning experience in the United Kingdom. In 2010, we had the case of a British supermarket supplier accused of discriminating against local workers after insisting that new recruits had to speak fluent Polish. The firm, I believe, was one of Asda’s biggest suppliers—it was not Asda itself—and it maintained that the requirement was necessary to ensure that all employees could understand the same instructions. The condition was included in an e-mail advert sent out on behalf of the firm and dispatched to hundreds of potential applicants on that particular agency’s books. The advert read:

“Immediate factory work available! If you are available or have any friends available, work is starting tomorrow for induction training. Ongoing factory work (meat production) for 4-5 months, shifts are 7am-5pm or 9am-7pm. Transport provided. Applicants must speak Polish”.

The latter sentence would appear to indicate that it was asked for a certain category of potential employee, since I do not know that Polish is spoken very much in this country, apart from among Polish people.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to reinforce that point. In the previous election in Stoke, I found people complaining bitterly that you had to speak Polish and that all the health and safety instructions were in Polish in certain factories. There are other such stories, so it is a serious point.

[Lord Rosser]

I thank my noble friend for that helpful intervention. The idea that, in core sectors of our economy, recruitment agencies should exclude local workers and make a virtue of being able to offer—this is often the reason it is done—cheaper, more flexible and allegedly more compliant staff than those available locally is surely wrong. It cannot be fair on UK workers who do not have the opportunity to compete for those jobs, and it is certainly not going to help us rebuild our economy.

As I understand it, currently the only way for action to be taken is for an individual to bring about a discrimination case through an employment tribunal or for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to bring a compliance order. That is because recruitment agencies—or, rather, the recruitment agencies concerned; I do not want to suggest that it is all of them—are not legally prevented from acting in this particular way. We need to strengthen the law so that agencies are not able to operate such practices, either formally or informally. If this kind of practice is going to continue, then we need to start enforcing that law properly, with more prosecutions for agencies that flout discrimination laws. That is why we have tabled this amendment again on Report. In replying to this point in Committee, the Minister, on behalf of the Government, acknowledged that,

“there is a problem with a small number of unscrupulous employment agencies that source labour exclusively from overseas, particularly eastern Europe”.—[Official Report, 17/3/14; col. 19.]

I believe the Minister said that he was “sympathetic” to the aims of the amendment. I am not sure that sympathy, although welcome, is really enough because sympathy does not put right what is surely a wrong that ought to be rectified.

Our amendment gives the Secretary of State the power,

“to prohibit United Kingdom based agencies, as defined in this section, from including only people not ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom as their clients”.

It is an order-making power, and the principle that it is seeking to establish is clear. If the Government are sympathetic to the terms of the amendment, it would of course be open to them to set out more of the detail in the order to ensure that it achieves its aims. Alternatively, if the Government accept the principle of our amendment, they could come back with their own amendment at Third Reading if they do not agree with its specific wording. Of course, we had an example of that happening very recently with the Defence Reform Bill, where an amendment was discussed on Report. The Government clearly did not like the wording but they accepted the principle and came back with their own amendment at Third Reading, which was duly carried. So that is a very recent example of the Government saying that they agree with the principle of an amendment, perhaps do not like its wording and agree to come back with their own wording at a later stage in the Bill, in this case Third Reading.

Therefore I say, simply, that there is a problem, and, as I understand it, the Government recognise that. This amendment gives the Government the opportunity to act now to rectify this problem by either accepting this amendment or, if they do not like its wording, by agreeing to come back with their own amendment on Third Reading to address the issue I have raised. I beg to move.