Global Migration and Mobility (EUC Report)

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I was quite encouraged by the direction of government policy on migration last week. I remember landing a couple of years ago at Stansted Airport; I was coming from somewhere in Europe—I cannot remember where. It was soon after the UK Border Agency was formed. I came into the immigration hall, which had black and white signs saying, “You are about to cross the border of the UK”. It was menacing. I was afraid. I was very afraid. It was as if we were there, whether we were British citizens, visitors or—heaven forbid—“irregular” migrants trying to come in, and we were going to be found out and that would be it.

Last week, I came back from Estonia, a country that is suffering from net migration of much of its population. However, we would not want to stop that because, during its Soviet occupation, the one thing Estonia’s citizens could never do was to get out. Their great freedom is that they now have mobility. I came back to Gatwick Airport and, as I came into the passport hall, there was a pull-up sign that said, “Welcome, international students”. The only trouble was that I walked past it without noticing and my wife, who is also interested in these affairs, had to draw it to my attention.

I congratulate the Minister. We have at least changed the tone of how we enter the UK, and are on occasions welcomed rather than seen as a threat, even coming back to our own homes, families and houses.

Like many fellow noble Lords, I thought this was a very good report, mostly because it is very factual—it is a myth-buster—and brings out a number of issues that are important to understand. A couple of them were what we think of as problems we have with migration; the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, was absolutely right in certain areas of his analysis. However, if we think in terms of refugees and that Pakistan has 1.7 million within its borders, that may put some things into perspective.

We must understand that most irregular migration is the result of overstays rather than people coming in clandestinely in boats, aeroplanes or in similar sorts of ways. However, I was quite astounded by the figure of what the report calls the dependency ratio, which effectively is the number of retired people in relation to the workforce, and by the fact that in 2008 that was some 25%—hardly anything at all—but by 2060 it will have risen to 53%, as predicted in the UK and elsewhere. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that perhaps one problem is that without migration we would be building old people’s homes but with absolutely no one to help us in our dotage and old age. The way in which that dependency ratio threatens our future and that of the next generation is a real issue.

I will concentrate on a couple of areas. First, something that is often forgotten but, I was delighted to see, is mentioned in the report, is the fact that we have two travel-free areas within the European Union—and indeed they creep outside it. One of them, of course, is Schengen, but we also have the common travel area which includes not only the UK and the Republic of Ireland but the islands which are not part of the EU—although we should remember that Schengen includes a number of non-EU states as well.

Something I had not thought about before, but which would be very sensible in terms of future government policy, would be to try to align the policies of those two travel areas far more carefully. Whether you are a tourist, a visitor, in business, a business manager or director, a high roller or whatever, you have to go through two visa procedures to visit a country in the Schengen area and the UK and the Republic of Ireland. That is understandable, but if those visa procedures were similar or pretty well the same, it would solve many issues.

The other issue was on the readmissions agreements and treaties with third countries. Again, we as the United Kingdom—whether we just give the impression that we do it or whether as I believe we actually do it—try to cut off our nose to spite our face to prove something in terms of being distinctly non-core EU, while prejudicing and harming our own national interests.

I will speak very briefly on the issue that I feel is most important from an ethical point of view. That issue of the reunification of families is in the report. I, like my noble friend Lady Hamwee, have received a certain amount of correspondence about British citizens who are unable to do three major things these days. First, they are unable to bring their proper spouse—not one from an arranged marriage—to join them in the UK. Secondly, UK citizens living abroad who have been married abroad are unable to come back to their home country, and the rest of their wider family are unable to enjoy their marriage together because the partner, who may be non-EEA, cannot come back. Then there is even the not unusual situation where the spouse outside the UK, without UK or EEA citizenship, is the person who primarily looks after the children, who are probably British citizens as well, who are then also unable to come to the UK.

Is it not part of our fundamental British DNA that, as regards a real marriage, under no circumstances should the state be able to determine that a husband and wife—or a wife and wife, or husband and husband, or wherever we get to with the other Bill—should not be able to live together in family life? That to me is a fundamental, English—probably British, but certainly English—principle of life that we must protect, yet we are now failing to do so. That problem will get worse, as I know from my own extended family. In the next generation, some members of my extended family are married to Singaporeans, while others live and work in Argentina. They travel abroad and often meet their future spouses abroad, and these multinational families and marriages will happen more and more. What we are doing through our migration policy is saying to them, “I am sorry, you cannot live together in your country of birth”. All sorts of people are able to do that, but the thresholds are far more difficult than often we believe.

My ancestors migrated from, I think, Denmark around the first millennium into what is now the county of Suffolk. I do not know whether my ancestor was invited or whether he made his way across the North Sea uninvited and unwelcome. However, I surely know that when he or she married a spouse of their choice, they were able to reside in Suffolk for however long they wanted to, and consequently I was able to migrate to the Celtic nation of Cornwall, where there are no such divisions. This is absolutely fundamental to the DNA and principles of our national life.

Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich]

My Lords, I do not mean to detain the House for long, but I would like to echo some of the concerns that have been mentioned today, particularly on the inflexibility of the income test. Looking at what is laid before us —a specified gross annual income of at least £18,600, an additional £3,800 for the first child and an additional £2,400 for each additional child—a clergy family with three children would not earn enough stipend to meet that test. The reason why they survive very well is because their housing costs are met, as are their council tax, and there are other means of keeping them housed in areas where the Church wants them to live and minister.

I can think of two examples of a UK passport holder, a member of the clergy, whose spouse holds a foreign passport outside the EU, one of whom has three children. Whatever you think of the mission of the Church, which is of course promoting the Christian religion of the Church of England, one of them also lives in an extremely deprived area, and the social capital that he has added to that area is considerable. This is not simply someone coming to take advantage of the state but someone who has given an awful lot, which has been recognised by local authorities.

Inflexible rules cannot deal with these sorts of difficult anomalies, and so discretion needs to come in. The overall thing that I would like to echo is: how is this now being monitored? How is it being applied, and is it applied fairly? When UK Border Agency hard cases come into the public domain, anxiety is always raised, and of course it is easy to do that. I appreciate the fact that these are hard-working officials, and indeed, when given an opportunity to meet some of them I appreciated their frankness and their willingness to look at how they might help. Nevertheless, there are too many stories of the difficulty that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, described as happening in some of these applications. I can think of another member of the clergy, a UK passport holder, who was going through the whole process to help his spouse to get leave to remain. They were told that they could not apply before a certain time limit. They applied at the time limit and then, when they applied for a slot for her interview, they were told, “There are no slots left”. These are intelligent people who can cope with that sort of thing, but there are many people who cannot.

I do not think that anyone in this Chamber would want to deny the scale of the problem that we must face as a country, but against that background, having realised the problem, where are fairness and justice going to be helped to be seen to be done, and how is the UK Border Agency being monitored to see that it is applying standards of fairness to the best of its ability?

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, very much for bringing this regret Motion before the House. In fact, if anything, I regret that it is only a regret Motion. I would certainly have followed her through any Lobby if it were more of a fatal Motion because I feel that there are some fundamental issues here.

It is interesting that this regret Motion has been put forward this week. My weeks are often imaged by the cover of the Economist, which I read most weeks. This week it is inaccurate in one way, although accurate in another. It says:

“Immigration. The Tories’ barmiest policy”.

Of course, that is wrong. It is not a Tory policy; it is a coalition policy. It includes my party as well. Its argument is that the policy on immigration very much restricts the economic and financial potential of this country, but here we have pinpointed an area where we are restricting the moral, ethical and family aspects of our society within the UK.

I say to the noble Baroness that I was probably one of the few people in this country to be very disappointed that the leader of the Opposition apologised for Labour’s “migration mistakes” in 2004, which allowed the best talent from the new European member states—which in many ways we had treated treacherously in the settlement after the Second World War—to come to this country, because they were restricted in going to other EU states. They repopulated much of Scotland, and in the south-west, where I come from, they manned much of the tourist industry, which had found it difficult to find talented and energetic workers. Therefore, I regret that that happened.

I understand entirely that sham marriages exist. They are a cancer on the institution of marriage and they are probably growing in number. That has to be stopped by whatever means possible. I also agree that there cannot be limitless migration. However, our society is becoming more and more international. Taking my family as an example, some of my wife’s children live in Singapore and others live in Argentina. Her grandchildren have mixed religious affiliations and mixed nationalities. People meet other people more and more on an international basis, particularly when they are youngsters and in their first areas of work. Therefore, this problem is going to get worse.

I say to the Minister that I believe this matter comes down to two important issues. Those are fundamentally moral and ethical, with human rights perhaps coming third. First, it must be fundamentally in the DNA of the UK that its citizens can marry whomever they want. That has to be a basic right of our citizens, who have one of the greatest and deepest histories in terms of being able to exercise individual rights. I also say to my Conservative colleagues—perhaps not the ones who are here but some of the others—that it is absolutely wrong for the state to intervene so strongly in deciding whom you are able to marry and live with. It is wrong that the state should be able to intervene to that degree. If the marriage is a real one—and that is always the important question—then people should be able to marry exactly whom they like and to live exactly where they like.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I confess to a number of areas of confusion, the first being what the rules actually say. Other noble Lords have referred to their complexity. For me, looking at any set of Immigration Rules is a quick route to a migraine. I have been used to reading rather more than glossy magazines in the course of my career, so if I find them difficult—without wanting to be too big-headed—then so will many, many others.

I was reassured, in a sense, by the briefing from the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association but that reassurance is very limited. It tells us that it is running advanced courses for solicitors and barristers on the financial requirements that are a part of these rules and has sent noble Lords an extract from its training notes, just to give us a glimpse of the complexity. Our laws should be accessible. Immigration is so difficult that legal practitioners have to be specially licensed. I, for one, am very grateful to the organisations that have briefed us. They helped me to short-circuit the work for this debate quite a lot, but that is not good enough when you are actually advising individuals.

EU Drugs Strategy: EUC Report

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, on this report, which, given the number of people who are involved in this debate, shows how vital this issue is. During my short time as a practising economist, one of the things I learnt about markets was that while states can regulate them, they certainly cannot abolish them; where there is demand, there is always supply. That applies to the area of drugs probably more than anywhere else. It is an irony that the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs signed in 1961 and the subsequent war on drugs have been pushed particularly strongly by the United States, the country we see as the bastion of capitalism and markets, but there is an absolute contradiction here. The convention was implemented in 1964 and in theory there should be no global drugs market at all because the convention was signed by the vast majority of the members of the United Nations.

As the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, has said, the drugs market was worth $320 billion back in 2003, but perhaps what is more important—and I suspect that I am underestimating it—is that it represented 1% of GDP. In 2009 the market for cocaine was estimated to be worth around $85 billion, which can be compared with the income of Andean farmers at around $1 billion. There is a huge market in South America. Of that laundered money, which at today’s value is something in excess of half a trillion dollars, under 1% is actually seized during its transit by authorities, so 99% of it is recycled into organised crime. The report is very clear—and it has been mentioned by a number of other noble Lords—that, in terms of supply and demand, the existing EU strategy has had no noticeable effect whatever.

I was also interested in the statistics at the beginning of the report that suggest that almost one-quarter of EU citizens have admitted to using drugs, and one in 20 on an ongoing, annual basis. That suggests that whether we like it or not, drug taking—I suspect mainly so-called soft drugs—is a part of our culture and of life. However, simply because the law is transgressed, does not mean that we should endorse drug taking. I am sure many of us break the speeding limit, but that does not mean that we should not have speed limits as part of the rules of driving. However, there is an issue there about what we make legal and illegal.

One of the results of this policy, and the area that I will concentrate on, concerns consumer countries. We have black markets and we have health risks—because there is no quality control, taking drugs is more dangerous under a prohibition regime. There is no consumer advice. The activity produces criminals—in the United States it is estimated that one in four imprisonments is drugs-related and in the UK maybe up to 50% of crimes have some relation to drugs. We also have organised crime as part of our infrastructure. Perhaps more importantly, in producer countries we have already mentioned the 47,000 or 48,000 Mexicans who have been murdered during the presidency of President Calderón over the past six years, and 95% of all murders in Mexico are drugs related.

I very much welcome the comments of my noble friend Lord Mancroft about transit countries. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world. I chair the all-party group of a country that is not well known—Guinea-Bissau, an ex-Portuguese colony in west Africa. It is a state that has failed in many ways and has become a main route for drugs from South America into Europe. As a result, that society has disintegrated even more; corruption is strong and the military within the country has become a state within a state and is largely financed through the drugs trade. In those countries, we have not only drug habits but much greater corruption.

One of the most important paragraphs in the report, paragraph 64, quotes Youngers and Rosin in 2005, who say that,

“international drug trafficking breeds criminality and exacerbates political violence, greatly increasing problems of citizen security and tearing at the social fabric of communities and neighbourhoods. It has corrupted and further weakened local governments, judiciaries and police forces … it can be extremely damaging to local environments”.

This issue of displacement—I welcome its emphasis in this report—shows the great difficulty of this policy. When we clamp down in one area, it destroys another without mending the societies where the problem has been solved from a consumer state’s point of view.

I would probably disagree with noble Lords so far—I disagree with the report in this regard—about one area, which comes back to practical economics. One cannot decriminalise the consumption of drugs and keep the criminalisation of the supply chain. What happens in that circumstance is that one sits slightly more smugly as a consumer in your population, but you still lay waste to the developing world and the transit countries through which those supply chains operate, because no difference is made to the way the system operates there.

That is why this issue is particularly difficult and there are no easy answers. There are huge political risks —the newspaper issue in the UK has been mentioned by the noble Lord many times—but the system has failed, and now we have an international network of organised crime.

[Lord Judd]

I am impressed by what the noble Lord is saying, but could he help us by clarifying this issue? If he does not accept that you can decriminalise the taking of drugs while keeping the criminalisation of the trade in drugs, how does he compare that with the situation in which the illicit black market in tobacco is criminalised?

[Lord Teverson]

You will never completely take away criminalisation, but perhaps the least damaging solution—again, I am not pretending that there are any easy answers regarding the supply chain—is to have pharmaceutical companies becoming distributors of drugs like any other prescription drugs. Will you ever completely decriminalise something where there is high taxation or smuggling? The taxation-hedging that takes place is perhaps more the issue than the question of VAT on drugs like alcohol or tobacco, and is perhaps the area where you have to be more careful.

There is an international network of organised crime involving money-laundering; corruption; human misery, of course; and a very large black economy. More than that, though, we have reduced liquidity within that black market which allows arms trafficking, people trafficking and terrorism. You can regulate markets but you cannot abolish them. I agree very much with the report’s conclusions in general but I would very much like to see the EU lead this debate internationally into much more realistic waters for the future. I particularly agree with this part of the Government’s response, which reads:

“It is vital that this debate is focussed on clear evidence and analysis and we will continue to champion the use of evidence at local, national and international level”.

However, the track record of UK Governments on evidence-based drugs policy has been particularly bad.