Sex Offenders Register
Lord Lilley Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Mrs May
I can say categorically to the right hon. Lady that it is indeed the Government’s intention to put the protection of the public first. Had she listened to my statement or read it beforehand, she would have noted that it says that in a number of places. We are appalled by the Court’s decision. I would far rather not have to stand here saying that we have to make a change to the sex offenders register, but we do have to make a change. We will do so in the most minimal way possible to ensure that we do put public protection first, and that we give the police and others the ability to ensure that the public are protected from such serious and appalling crimes as have been committed by individuals on this register.
The right hon. Lady asked quite a number of questions. She asked whether we are making the protection of families paramount, and I have said that we are. She said that the system should be extremely tough and, yes, our intention is that it will be as tough as possible. That is why we have looked not only at what we can do in the minimal way to put this judgment into effect, but at ways to toughen up the sex offenders register regime—for example, by the requirement that we want to introduce for individuals on the register to have to notify when they are going abroad for at least a day. That is a toughening of the current system.
The right hon. Lady asked about Parliament’s opportunity to debate this measure. It will be introduced through an order—a statutory instrument—so there will be an opportunity to debate it. She asked about the numbers who will be affected. That will be set out in the regulatory impact assessment that will accompany the statutory instrument. She asked about the process of consideration that the police will go through. They will be talking to all other agencies that have an interest in this area, so they will talk to the probation service, local authorities, social services, youth offending teams and a variety of other agencies to ensure that they have the best possible picture of the individual concerned in order to make the best possible judgment. I am sure that she will agree that the police are very clear about the importance of public protection. That is why I want the police to make these decisions; I believe that they will put public protection first. They will examine a series of issues, such as the seriousness of the offences originally committed and the age of the victims. They will address a range of issues when they are considering whether a review should be upheld and whether the individual should stay on the register.
The right hon. Lady asked about the ability of the police to deal with this. ACPO and the National Offender Management Service have been actively involved in putting together and shaping the policy. One of their considerations has, of course, been its deliverability. We are confident that the policy can be delivered, as is ACPO. Like us, ACPO wants to ensure that we have the toughest possible policy to protect the public. It is different from the vetting and barring scheme, where the problem was that lots of innocent people found themselves on it and were subject to its requirements. This proposal is about the people who have been found guilty of heinous crimes and is about making sure that we reduce the risk of reoffending to members of the public. As I have announced in relation to the Bill of rights, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Justice Secretary will make further announcements about that imminently.
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
May I astonish my right hon. Friend by saying that I think there is some merit in the Court’s decision, particularly in the way she has interpreted it? Does not this case illustrate the fact that rights are not absolute and that the rights of the victim have to be balanced against the rights of children and the public in general? The process of reconciliation is ultimately as much political as legal and Parliament should therefore always have the last word. Is it not a relief that this decision was taken by the Supreme Court and not by the Court in Strasbourg? Does she agree that we should resile from that as soon as possible?
Mrs May
My right hon. Friend tempts me down a route that it would not be appropriate to go down. On his first point, rights are not absolute. The article 8 right against which the judgment was made clearly is not an absolute right. I am sure that many right hon. and hon. Members—indeed, all of them, I hope—are as concerned as I am when a court makes a judgment that puts the rights of a perpetrator above the rights of the public and individual victims. In a similar area, I find it incredible that we are not able to deport people who are linked to al-Qaeda and who have terrorist intent in this country because the court says that their rights mean that we cannot deport them, but the court is not looking at the rights of members of the British public. That is what we should be doing.
Immigration
Lord Lilley Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Heidi Alexander
The hon. Gentleman hits the nail on the head when he says “as it stabilises”. My understanding is that although the security situation might be quite stable in parts of Kabul, it is not in other parts of the country.
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
It is probably all right as long as someone is not a British soldier. The bulk of the inhabitants of Afghanistan are living peacefully.
Heidi Alexander
I suspect that we are moving away from the subject of the debate.
One of my concerns about removing children or young adults to places such as Afghanistan relates to age disputes. It is difficult for us in this country accurately to determine the ages of young people, some of whom are forced to return.
In May, the Prime Minister welcomed the fact that the UK is more open at home and more compassionate abroad than it was a decade ago. I agree, but I would go further. I want us to be more open abroad and more compassionate at home. With every day that goes by, our world becomes smaller. If we are not open to the world, how do we expect to play our part in it? If we cannot be compassionate at home, this is not the sort of country I want to live in. I am not saying that any of this is easy, but a game of numbers alone hides the complexities of the issue, and it would be wrong for any of us to try to simplify it in that way.
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this debate, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) on introducing it. Like him, I welcome the change in tone that has occurred in raising and debating the subject of immigration. In 2005, I wrote a pamphlet on the subject entitled “Too much of a good thing? Towards a balanced approach to immigration”. I was immediately assailed by my political opponents in my constituency and accused in the local press of being racist. That was before they had read anything that I had said. In those days, simply raising the subject was deemed to be racist, but I am happy to say that when they read what I had said they withdrew their remarks, because I was manifestly not racist. I am glad that we have moved on, and that we can now discuss such matters.
For much of my adult life—this is probably not true of most hon. Members in the Chamber—I have lived in parts of London that have strong immigrant populations, and cheek by jowl with people who had emigrated to this country. As a result, I knew from working with people of immigrant origin, and from knowing them as friends and neighbours and worshipping in the same churches, that the caricature of immigrants often portrayed in the media is often the very reverse of the truth. Far from being scroungers, criminals and a threat to society, the majority of them are decent, hard-working, law-abiding people who want to make a positive contribution to the community.
So I began with a bias in favour of immigration. I became involved in the subject and was prompted to write the pamphlet only because I was investigating the housing issue in Hertfordshire. I was intrigued as to why housing targets were constantly raised. When I inquired why, I was told by the great and the good and by the officials in local authorities and planning authorities that there were two reasons that we needed constantly to build more houses. The first was declining household size, and that was true. On average, if there were an unchanged population in Hertfordshire, we would need 0.5% more houses every year because household sizes are declining by 0.5% each year.
The second reason I was given was that there was an inflow into the south-east from the rest of the country. I looked into that, and I found it to be untrue. It was what we would call, in places other than this, a lie. In fact, there was a net outflow of people from the south-east of England to the rest of the United Kingdom. There was, however, a net inflow into London, particularly, from abroad. In 17 statements to the House on housing made by the previous Government, the impact of international migration on demand for housing was never once mentioned. That was the nature of our debate. We were pretending that the phenomenon was not happening, even though everyone could observe that it was.
As far as my constituency was concerned, people were moving to London from abroad and occupying houses—because they were allocated them, because they had bought them or because they had rented them—that would otherwise have been occupied by the people already resident in London. Those people therefore moved out to Hertfordshire and the rest of the home counties, and we had to build houses for them.
When I looked into the matter further, I found that 80% of the expected population growth and more than 40% of new household formation in this country was the result of net immigration from abroad. That is why we have a housing crisis in this country. That is why housing waiting lists have increased so dramatically over the past 10 or 15 years. That is also why so many of our constituents link housing with immigration. They do not dislike immigrants. Like me, they probably know them and live with them—we are all human beings; we are all children of the same God and I hope that we all get on with each other—but they know that if there is a net inflow into the country and we are not building as many houses as there are people coming in, that will result in a housing crisis and the people who are already here will have to bear the brunt of it in due course. I therefore wrote about that and thought about it purely in those terms.
I went on to look at the economic benefits that were alleged to result from large-scale immigration into this country. I found that the debate on those supposed benefits was depressingly superficial. It consisted of slogans rather than analysis. When I looked at the analysis that had been seriously carried out into the economic benefits that flow from immigration, I could find no major study that believed there to be any substantial net gain to an economy from large-scale net immigration. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), who is no longer in his place, mentioned certain publications by the Institute for Public Policy Research that were in favour of immigration, but I shall quote from a document that the institute published entitled “The Politics of Migration”. It contains an essay by Mark Kleinman, in which he states:
“There is not a compelling long-term case for increased immigration purely in terms of economic benefits.”
I could quote from many other studies that reached the same conclusion. According to some, there might be a mild economic benefit if we ignore all the housing and infrastructure problems, or according to others, there might be a small net loss. The idea that we can substantially improve the well-being of this country through large-scale immigration is simply unsubstantiated by any major study.
This does not mean that we should have no immigration. My analogy is that immigration is much more like a lubricant than a fuel. Without lubrication, a car would suffer severe damage, but once it has enough lubrication, adding more will not make it go better; it might even cause problems. Likewise, stopping all immigration would damage the economy, but encouraging more immigration beyond a certain point will not make those already here any better off. I challenge anyone to rebut that basic thesis. We need a modest amount of to-and-fro among people, with some moving here, others returning or moving elsewhere, but we do not need a substantial net increase in our population through immigration.
I shall deal with just one economic argument—the issue of skilled workers. The debate in this area is particularly superficial. It is widely assumed that allowing any skilled workers into the country must always be beneficial to the well-being of those already here, but that is not necessarily so. The only way to raise the living standards of our existing population over time is to increase the level of skills and the proportion of our population that has those skills, expertise and experience. Importing skills from abroad is often a substitute for doing that and discourages it. This is not the only reason, but it has contributed to the fact that this country has a less skilled population than many of our competitors, including Germany, France, Japan and America. A smaller proportion of our population has qualifications below degree level than almost any of our competitors.
We pretend that we can make do by importing skilled people instead, thereby simply leaving large swathes of our population unskilled, with reduced incentives to acquire skills, depression of the wages of people with skills and reduction of the differentials that can be gained from acquiring a skill. That cannot be right. Employers might say, “Ah, I would like to employ some skilled workers from abroad,” but we should be wary of saying that this is a good thing. Employers always like to employ cheap labour. They would like to get cheaper accountants from abroad, cheaper lawyers from abroad, cheaper journalists from abroad—
Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we have to bring in some skills from abroad? There are new technologies abroad, such as the electric cars being developed by Toyota in Japan. In those cases, do we not need to bring in the skills from abroad so that people can bring the technologies with them? Is that not necessary to keep this country’s skills up to date on technologies that are available abroad, but not available here?
Mr Lilley
In a moment, as I want to finish answering the point that was raised.
I am not suggesting that certain categories of skilled workers could not be used during a temporary shortage while domestic employees were being trained, or that there could not be a skills transfer when the skills that were required could not, by their very nature, be acquired domestically or through training. We have traditionally allowed companies to import workers for the purposes of skills transfers when the skills concerned are company-specific.
Let us say that IBM is setting up a factory here. It has an IBM way of doing things. Initially, it will need to bring in the IBM accountant to show British accountants how to run the accounts and the financial system. Those running the production line may have to bring in IBM production engineers to train British engineers in their ways of doing things. It is not possible to buy such company-specific skills on the market; they must be imported temporarily. However, because the people who have transferred the skills invariably return, the transfer does not result in net migration. That is very different from allowing cheap skills into this country.
In a blog that is influential in the IT industry—here I declare an interest—the author of the Holway report constantly hammers home the fact that we are moving slowly towards circumstances in which fewer and fewer entry-level jobs are available in the industry. Last year 9,000 skilled IT workers were brought into the country by a handful of companies under the intra-company transfer scheme. That is not transferring skills from a company to domestic residents; it is importing cheap labour. However, we allow it, although as a result the IT sector has one of the highest rates of unemployment in industry. The Government must think seriously about the issue, and must not form policy on the basis of slogans such as “Skilled work is good” and “Open border to skilled workers”. That is not good in the long run if it means that fewer of those who are already here acquire skills, experience and expertise.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)
Using the analogy of the IT industry, my right hon. Friend has pointed out that unemployment exists, and that there is a demand from a small number of companies for a large number of people to come into the country. The corollary is that, in a process called outsourcing, we move jobs to other parts of the world. That is just part of being a free trade country. If we wish to position ourselves as leaders in terms of free trade, as the Prime Minister said 10 days ago, the corollary is a degree of freedom of movement. There has been a massive skills failure in the country over the past decade and a half. Most of the 180,000 entrants are for STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. If we are unable to train people ourselves, it behoves us to allow them into the country in a way that benefits us.
Mr Lilley
My hon. Friend’s intervention prompts a number of questions. For instance, why do we not train people?
For a while I was chairman of a small German company as a result of a merger, and the first thing that we did was bring in British employees to train its employees. It is considered automatic: every company, even a small company with only 200 employees, trains people. Sadly, that culture does not exist in this country. All that we think of doing is importing people from abroad, or possibly stealing them from our competitors down the road. At least if we steal them from our competitors down the road, we have to bid up the salaries for the particular skill involved. We encourage more people to acquire that skill, and as a result increase the number of people with such skills in our economy. However, the idea that we should assume passively that this country alone in the world cannot train people to acquire skills that semi-developed countries seem to be able to train their people to acquire strikes me as a defeatism that is sad and deplorable.
I hope we will recognise that there are some skills that we should allow into the country: entrepreneurial skills, for example, I rather doubt whether entrepreneurship can be taught. Some people are natural entrepreneurs while others are not. That is fair enough: if someone has proven success as an entrepreneur abroad, we should let him in, with some of the capital that he has acquired. Only a small number of people will be involved, however. That is not mass immigration. It will generate a lot of jobs and it is a sensible thing to do, so let us do it. However, we must distinguish between those sorts of skills and the sorts of skills we can enable the existing population of all ethnic origins to acquire, so that the well-being of those already here improves.
Mr Virendra Sharma
First, let me say that I take the recent sedentary comment of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) as a compliment, rather than something negative. The right hon. Gentleman agrees that there is a skills gap within the work force at present, and to fill that gap we need workers coming from overseas because we cannot train people here overnight or in a short period. We need to address both ends of this issue by filling the gaps now from overseas while training the work force here for the future.
Mr Lilley
Yes, and that would imply the following policy: if a company says, “No one in this country yet has expertise in—”[Interruption.] Yes, in electric cars, as the hon. Member for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle) suggests. I do not know whether that is the case, but if it is we might have to introduce that expertise from overseas in the short term, but the understanding should be that that is in order to transfer the expertise to the domestic population, rather than because we have given up on the domestic population ever learning the skills to make electric cars. It should be short-term immigration, not long-term immigration.
Mr Lilley
May I make a little more progress?
The hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) mentioned the skill of cooking Bangladeshi meals. There are a large number of unemployed Bangladeshi people in this country, and there are a large number of Bangladeshi restaurants. Why, therefore, do the restaurateurs not train up their staff to acquire these skills? I am afraid that the reason is because they can get staff with such skills more cheaply from the subcontinent. We must say that we want to have well-paid chefs in this country, not depress the pay by importing from abroad.
I want to refer to an aspect of the debate that none of us has mentioned, and that I suspect nobody except me will mention. Indeed, I would not have done so had I not acquired my copy of Prospect magazine yesterday. It is a left-wing magazine, but I am very open-minded so I read even left-wing monthly journals.
Mr Lilley
The hon. Gentleman is one of the few Members of this House who admits to general illiteracy.
The magazine contains a very interesting article by Professor Coleman, a professor of demographics at Oxford university and former consultant to the Government. I have always dealt with immigration in terms of net immigration. I have been concerned about numbers and housing, and so forth. If 200,000 people come here and 100,000 people leave, that is a net change of 100,000. The professor’s article, however, looks at the impact of gross flows on the composition of this country’s population. He observes that projections carried out by the Government Actuary’s Department suggest that if the levels of immigration we inherited from the last Government and factors such as the birth rates of those who come from abroad, as against those of the domestic population, persist into future decades, in 50 years less than 50% of the population of this country will be ethnically British—ethnically English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. That may not matter. If we reduce the level of net immigration into this country to 80,000 from the many tens of thousands, as we promised to do, it will take 70 years before less than half the population of this country are the original, indigenous, ethnic British. If we move towards a position of balanced migration, on which I have supported the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, it will take to the end of the century— 90 years—before the existing British ethnic population is a minority. If there is no immigration and no emigration—that is a rather unlikely eventuality—by the end of the century we will still be 75% ethnic British. All I ask of Members of this House is to consider whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Does it matter if the indigenous population becomes a minority, as has happened in Fiji, where the Fijians now constitute less than half of their population? I do not expect to receive a reply, because that is the sort of question that polite people do not ask. But it is what our constituents are asking and we should face up to it.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to follow the speech of the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell). I cannot believe he has been in the House for only six months. Given the eloquence and fairness of his speech and the way in which he crafted it, it sounded to me as though he had been here for six years. He is very proud of his multicultural constituency, and I thought he was fair and balanced in how he put his arguments forward. It is right that we should conduct a debate on immigration in such terms.
I apologise to the House for having missed part of the debate. The Liaison Committee was meeting the Prime Minister for the first time, and of course it was important for me to be there as the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs. In fact, the Prime Minister gave us a bit of news on immigration that I will report to the House in a moment. I missed the contributions of many right hon. and hon. Members, and I look forward to reading them in Hansard tomorrow.
I declare an interest: I, of course, am an immigrant. My parents were originally from Mumbai, having gone there from Goa to seek work. They then went from Mumbai to Yemen for similar reasons, as economic migrants. I and my sisters were born in Yemen, and I came to this country when I was nine years of age. As in the situation that the hon. Member for Croydon Central described, my parents chose to come here, exercising the rights that they had through living in a British Crown colony, Aden, to enable their children to grow up and remain here.
I am extremely proud of this country. I am proud of its multiculturalism and the way in which it has absorbed so many communities, not just in the past 30 years but throughout its history. It is difficult these days to know what is pure English, because the British people have been represented by so many different cultures over the past 1,000 years.
What has been good about this debate is the tone in which it has been conducted. I remember that, when I was first elected, great passions were raised on both sides of the House on the subject. I was in opposition then and have returned to opposition now after 13 years. No debate on immigration policy was conducted without people getting extraordinarily passionate and very angry with each other across the Floor of the House. Today’s consensus is extremely important, and I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) for suggesting the debate and the Backbench Business Committee for holding it. Normally, we discuss immigration only when the Government of the day, be they Conservative or Labour, introduce legislation. We have had many immigration Bills over the 23 years I have been in the House, and I am not sure all of them have achieved what they have been intended to achieve. It is good to be able to discuss immigration in the House and to share our experiences.
The Home Affairs Committee has just published its report on the immigration cap. I urge all Members to read it or at least the conclusions and the summary, as I do with other Select Committee reports. We did not argue with the Government’s desire to impose a cap—that is not the purpose of a Select Committee—but we wanted to see whether they could achieve their goal of reducing immigration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. Our conclusion—this was an all-party decision, and there was one unanimous vote in the Committee, which is, of course, in the report—was that they needed to look again at the cap because it cannot, as currently constructed, achieve what they want within the five years they have set out. If they want to look at the figures in five years’ time, they will have to look at the immigration figures in 2013 and extrapolate them to 2015.
The Committee made a number of suggestions that it felt would be helpful. We thought it was extremely important that the Government should look at different avenues if they were to reduce immigration to tens of thousands. The fresh piece of news that I bring to the House this evening is that, in answer to a question at the Liaison Committee—I do not know whether the Minister even knows this, although he may have mentioned it in his speech—the Prime Minister said that the Government’s new immigration policy would be announced next week.
That is the earliest indication that we will have a statement to the House at some stage, and we welcome that. At the moment, we have a temporary immigration cap, and people are concerned. Business is concerned about whether it will be able to bring in the employees that it absolutely needs to fill vacancies that it cannot fill from within this country. Students need to be told whether they will be caught by the permanent cap. As the Committee said in its report, if the Government are to achieve their reduction in numbers, the overseas student population will have to be reduced by a huge number, which will, of course, affect the education system. At a time when fees will be going up, the loss of income to some of our colleges and universities will be very serious.
Anyway, the crucial thing is that we will get a statement of Government policy next week. In a sense, the debate should have taken place next Thursday, rather than this Thursday. However, I am sure that we will find opportunities for further debate on this issue.
The hon. Member for Croydon Central mentioned the possibility of an exemption for footballers. In fact, that is what we have at the moment. Footballers are exempted, but scientists who might win Nobel prizes—the elite scientists—are not. One of the recommendations in the Committee’s report is that if we are going to exempt footballers—even after last night’s result, although everyone who plays for England is, of course, English—we should look at groups that could help the economy.
The Committee also suggested that intra-company transfers should be excluded, because they represent 60% of tier 1. Within 12 hours of our report’s being published, the Prime Minister accepted that recommendation at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Select Committees always feel rather chuffed when their recommendations are accepted by Ministers, and especially by the Prime Minister.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead mentioned Professor Metcalf, and I join the praise of him. The Migration Advisory Committee, which survived the cull of quangos, provides a very useful service. Today, it published a report telling us in stark terms that there will have to be a reduction in student migration and family migration if the Government are to get to their figure for 2015. I am afraid that that will affect all those in the House with constituencies that contain settled communities whose members, for whatever reason, want to bring spouses and dependants from abroad.
Across the Chamber, I see the hon. Member for Croydon Central and the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who must have quite a large settled community. The hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) has a big immigration case load. On the Opposition side of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), both shadow Ministers—my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford South (Mr Sutcliffe) and for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood)—and many others, including myself, have immigration case loads. Our Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), will have hundreds of immigration cases to deal with at her surgery tomorrow. The reduction in immigration will affect not only people coming as students, but our settled communities—British citizens whose sons and daughters wish to bring spouses or dependants from abroad. We will all be affected as constituency MPs who deal with immigration cases.
I commend to the House the excellent report of John Vine, the chief inspector of immigration. When he was originally appointed a year and a half ago, he had a pretty hard time from the Home Affairs Committee, because we did not like the fact that he was called an “inspector” and wanted him to be called the “independent inspector”, and we felt he was far too close to the Home Office. However, we need not have feared for his independence, because every single one of his reports has been severely critical of the UK Border Agency. Even today, he has reported that of the £40 million-worth of fines imposed by UKBA on those not complying in respect of illegal immigration, only £5.6 million has been collected. He says that if the Government are to tackle illegal immigration, they must be strong and firm. Any discussion of immigration must deal with illegal immigration as well as legal. I do not agree with the Mayor of London that there should be an amnesty for those living illegally in this country. However, it is important that we consider their cases and give them a decision as quickly as possible.
That leads me to the second part of what I wanted to say today, which relates to a constituency interest of the hon. Member for Croydon Central—I hope he does not take it personally if I criticise UKBA, which is based in his constituency. UKBA remains unfit for purpose. Of course, a Labour Home Secretary announced that, but it will be still less fit for purpose following 20% budget cuts. When Lin Homer appeared before the Home Affairs Committee last week, she said that she could cope with that 20% reduction and with losing 5,000 members of staff, but the Committee believed that such cuts would mean that UKBA could not provide the kind of service required.
One problem is that in the time it has taken UKBA to deal with immigration cases, people get married and have children, which is inevitable when people meet someone they love. Then they want to stay, because they have been here for years. I am sure all right hon. and hon. Members know of such cases in their constituencies. Last week, I met at least half a dozen people who had been in this country trying to get their cases resolved for 14 years. They have become settled and they do not want to go back, and UKBA must deal with that problem. We must be careful in asylum cases that we do not send back those who are genuinely persecuted, but we must deal with other cases as quickly as possible.
One perennial problem for all hon. Members who deal with legacy cases is the letter that comes back from UKBA saying, “Sorry, we can’t deal with this case now, but we’ll have it done by July 2011.” There are hundreds of thousands of legacy cases, some of which lasted the entire length of the previous Labour Government. I have told Immigration Ministers a number of times, “You could be the first Immigration Minister in history to clear the backlog.” None seems to have wanted that epitaph, so the backlog remains after 13 years. Lin Homer has said that if the backlog is not cleared by 31 July 2011, neither she nor any of her senior officers will take their bonuses next year. We will hold her to that. I want to see how she does that following a reduction in staff.
Another thing that concerned us was the rise in indefinite leave to remain—up 4% over the past four months. The House brings in legislation, and tries to do it as quickly as possible, but the figures are going up because the Home Office is granting indefinite leave. Indeed, net immigration this year might even increase, despite the temporary cap, because of the number of ILRs being granted. We should therefore be very sceptical. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead keeps talking about the numbers. Those numbers will continue to rise if we clear a backlog of 400,000 and grant indefinite leave at such a rate—an extra 30,000 cases since February. We do not want people arguing at the end of that, “This Government have let in a whole lot of immigrants.” It is a necessary conclusion to the legacy process.
My next point is about foreign national prisoners. One of the problems is a lack of co-ordination between the Prison Service and the UK Border Agency and the length of time between the finishing of a sentence and removal. Even though we assist people to leave—we pay them up to £1,500 to leave the country—there is no monitoring to ensure that they do not re-enter the country. I and other Home Affairs Committee members went to the camp at Calais, which was cleared several weeks after we visited, and the people to whom we spoke had every intention, if removed, of returning to Calais and making their way from there to the United Kingdom on the back of lorries. They know that the French police protect and monitor their border not on a 24-hour basis, but on a shift basis. Those determined to break immigration law know exactly when those shifts end. So rather than more legislation, there are practical and administrative ways of dealing with this issue.
This has been a good debate—it is important that we can discuss immigration in the way we have—but I caution Members on both sides of the House if they think that the solution to this problem rests entirely with non-EU immigration. One Select Committee member, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), who I think is one of the most outstanding Members in the new intake, inserted into a recent report a phrase about how the Government should be careful about being more restrictive on the routes of migration that they can control, because they cannot control other routes of migration.
That brings me to my final point about EU migration: neither Members nor the Government can do anything about 80% of the people entering this country, because they do so under treaty obligations that Conservative and Labour Ministers and Prime Ministers have signed over the years.
Mr Lilley
The right hon. Gentleman is very distinguished and knows the facts, even though he was not here when the Minister quoted them: net immigration into this country is 196,000, and net immigration from outside the EU is 184,000, so it is the bulk of the problem. To pretend otherwise is to mislead people outside the House.
Keith Vaz
I have great respect for the right hon. Gentleman, who is very interested in this subject and has spoken, I think, in every immigration debate in which I have spoken. Immigration is inevitably about volume and numbers, but the freedom of movement enjoyed by EU citizens means that they can come and go as they please. I was the Minister for Europe at the time of enlargement.
Keith Vaz
Yes, and that is the point. Some of our constituents’ criticisms are not about people who come from outside the EU, but about people who come from the EU. Hon. Members will remember the general election and the confrontation between the then Prime Minister and Mrs Gillian Duffy, whom I met for the first time at the Labour party conference one month ago. Her complaint was not about non-EU immigration, but about EU migration. That is what Mrs Duffy was concerned about. When we talk about such immigration and those numbers, we need to know that this House can do nothing about it. This may be an unpopular view in the House, but EU migration has been very good for Britain, for exactly the reasons that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned. During the boom years, people from Poland, Romania and Hungary came to this country and contributed to the boom; when it went, they went back.
Keith Vaz
The right hon. Gentleman cannot have it both ways. He cannot say that there is no impact, but then say something else when I say that there is freedom of movement. There is that capacity. We live on an island, so by all means let us have measures that will ensure that we do not overpopulate this island. That is now accepted in all parts of the House. I do not believe it possible to have a limit, because I do not think that the state can have a limit, as there are so many exemptions. America has an immigration cap, but there are so many exemptions that it is not even worth having. The American Government are currently charging Indian IT firms $2,000 a visa, to help with the cost of building the fence between Mexico and the United States. That is where things will end up unless we are careful about this whole debate. I believe that we can be careful. I believe that the Government will respond positively and that we need to conduct this debate in the kind of tone and with the kind of temperament that we have seen today.
Limits on Non-EU Economic Migration
Lord Lilley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mrs May
Let me first address the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the written ministerial statement and my coming to the House. He is absolutely right: I had intended to make a written statement, and the title was indeed placed before the House so that Members could be made aware of it. Over the weekend I spoke to the Government Chief Whip about the possibility of changing that statement into an oral statement, because at the time I felt it more important to come to the House to make an oral statement, which is precisely what I have done. The right hon. Gentleman said, “Will I take this issue seriously?” Government Members have taken Parliament seriously over the past 13 years, so I shall take no lessons from him or any of his colleagues about taking it seriously, given how they bypassed Parliament for 13 years and reduced the House’s powers to hold the Executive to account.
The right hon. Gentleman talked about migration figures, but immigration actually tripled under the Labour Government. It is our desire to get the number down from the hundreds of thousands a year that it has reached under Labour to tens of thousands a year. If he wishes to look at numbers, he should look no further than the past comments of the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), who said that there was “no obvious upper limit” to immigration. It is this Government who are taking the issue seriously, who promised that they would do something about it and who are taking the action that is necessary.
The right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle made a number of comments about technicalities and the issue of jobs being advertised for four weeks in a jobcentre. Currently, immigrants can come into the country if the resident labour market test or the shortage occupation list requirements are met. We are consulting on whether they should be combined so that a tier 2 migrant is able to come in if both tests are relevant and met. That would be a significant tightening of the current rules.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about the wider social impact, as opposed to the economic impact. He has only to go out and talk to people about the pressure in some areas on public services, hospitals and schools. Another issue that his Government failed to get to grips with over the years is the significant number of unemployed people in this country. Some of those people do not have the necessary skills to get into the jobs that are available, but the job of the Government is to ensure that they do have those skills and to give them the support they need to get into those jobs, rather than simply thinking that the answer is to pull in migrant workers from elsewhere.
The right hon. Gentleman referred to students. If, instead of commenting on the statement he thought I was going to make, he had listened to the statement that I made, he would have heard me say that we would indeed be looking at other immigration routes in due course and bringing further proposals to this House. I recognise that this is one part of the job that we are doing as regards immigration, and other measures will come forward in due course.
The right hon. Gentleman asked why we did not yet have a figure for the annual limit on immigration, despite the fact that this has been a Conservative policy for some time and was in the coalition agreement. I can tell him why not: because we have, for some time, been committed to going out there and consulting those who will be affected—businesses, public service providers and others—about what the limit should be. As I said, the Migration Advisory Committee will be advising the Government and recommending what that annual limit should be. Of course, this is in sharp contrast to the approach of the previous Government, who, in one consultation exercise after another, merely paid lip service to consultation because they had already decided what they were going to do. People then got fed up with being asked to give comments and finding that Government took no notice. We are genuinely consulting people and will be listening to the responses that we get.
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that although individual employers may benefit by importing cheap labour, as a nation we will get richer only if our existing employees are enabled and encouraged to acquire skills themselves so that they can produce more, and enrich themselves and the country, rather than have those incentives to acquire skills undermined by the importation of cheap labour from abroad?
Mrs May
My right hon. Friend makes an extremely valid point. This is another area where frankly, yet again, the Labour Government failed over the course of 13 years: they failed to ensure that people in this country had the skills necessary to get the jobs that become available. This Government, through our welfare reform proposals and our work programme, will be helping people and giving them much more support to get into the workplace, whereas under the Labour Government economic inactivity in the UK rose significantly. Many migrant workers were being brought in from overseas, and limiting that number will be part of the process of ensuring that we are able to help people to get out of unemployment and into the workplace.