Immigration Bill

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, who always brings a valuable perspective to these proceedings. I begin by stating something which is, perhaps, obvious but is worth saying to set the context for another Immigration Bill. For centuries, there have been waves of immigration into our country, going back to the Angles and Saxons, the Normans, Huguenots and Jews. Later, there were migrants from Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. These people have, in their different ways, helped shape our islands and enriched our country. Until the middle of the last century, the scale of migration to the UK was relatively modest. My noble friend Lord Hamilton and other noble Lords have explained how too great an influx of people into one locality, in too short a time, can create tensions. Health services, schools, housing: all can become overstretched. The danger then is anti-immigrant prejudice, bigotry and xenophobia. We have seen eruptions of that all too close to home in some European countries.

When people from overseas are here illegally, this creates real problems. The Government are right to want to deal with the problem of unscrupulous employers who exploit illegal immigrants, who often end up having to work for very low wages in dangerous and degrading conditions. I therefore welcome the establishment of a new statutory director of labour market enforcement, although I am not mad about the rather clumsy title. I am pleased to see that the Secretary of State will have to provide the new director with the resources needed to do the job. This is in marked contrast to the small business commissioner, now being set up by the Enterprise Bill, who will have to ask the Secretary of State for approval for the numbers they want to employ. Under this Bill, the new director of labour market enforcement will not be subject to those constraints, and rightly so, because—I echo the thoughts of my noble friend Lord Horam—the director will have a big job on their hands. They will need to collect information and intelligence, which will not be easy. The Bill talks quite a lot about a labour market enforcement strategy, but for this to be effective you need the relevant information about what is happening in some of the darkest corners of the economy. Without that, you cannot clamp down on the offences. Will the Minister, either today or in Committee, give noble Lords some detail about how it is expected that the director will actually do his or her job?

I also welcome the provisions in the Bill about the need for those working in, for example, the NHS, state schools or the police, to have minimum standards of English. This is obviously important for practical reasons but it is also vital for integration into British society. To achieve this, the Bill proposes a code of practice and sets out what the code must include. However, it is not clear how this will work in practice. I suspect we will not know for some time how effective it is.

More generally, the Bill is seeking to tighten up existing measures to deal with illegal immigration. Inevitably, therefore, it is very detailed and imposes new, and sometimes onerous, obligations on employers and landlords. These will need to be scrutinised very carefully in Committee. The questions we will want to ask on all these very detailed measures are whether they are practical and capable of being implemented, and whether they will be effective and achieve their objectives. We will also want to know—and to be reassured about—whether the resources necessary for all this work will be available.

I have one last point. Everybody, illegal immigrants or otherwise, must always be treated with dignity. Yes, we should enforce the law rigorously but it must be done in a proper and humane way. Does the Minister believe that any further training of immigration officers or others will be necessary?