Immigration

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, let me start by saying that I had noticed next Monday’s business. I thank everyone who has taken part in this sometimes passionate debate and the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, for opening it. As the noble Lord remarked, it is an uncomfortable position for a Liberal to have to defend limitations on immigration. Liberals believe in open societies, in an open global economy and in the principles of free trade and free movement of goods, capital, services and people. Sadly, however, we all recognise that such openness is not possible now or in the foreseeable future as far as the global free movement of people is concerned. We all recognise that that is where we are.

There are intense immigration pressures on the rich, secure and law-abiding world from bright, determined, or sometimes desperate, people in the poorer, insecure, more conflict-ridden countries of the world. There are pressures arising from global population growth, which is likely to continue for the next 20 or 30 years. There are pressures from those countries which are now producing many more graduates than they can absorb within their own economies, in the Middle East in particular. There are the natural desires of millions of individuals to better themselves or their families. Each of those might be a worthwhile cause on its own but, cumulatively, they are more than we or other developed democracies can cope with. There are also the global ambitions of the highly talented, of which many have spoken in this debate, in a global economy.

The response to this in all developed democracies has been to attempt to strike a balance between setting limits on immigration and allowing continued access for the talented, for the most desperate and for those who will contribute to and enrich our society and our economy. It is immensely difficult to design a fair and balanced immigration policy. Successive Governments have struggled with this objective for 50 years since the first restrictions on Commonwealth migration were imposed.

In the past 15 years, there has been a surge in net migration into this country. The ONS projects that the British population will rise to 70 million and beyond and that the driving force in that rise in population will be immigration and the children born to recent immigrants. That produces pressures on resources, housing, space and public facilities, above all in the south-east of England, which now rivals the Netherlands as the most densely populated part of Europe with a population density that is approaching the levels of Singapore. That in turn puts pressures on jobs, particularly competition for low-skilled and low-paid jobs. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, rightly remarked that often the poorer areas and the poorer people are most at risk from the pressures of immigration.

I must correct the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, a little about his impressions of what has happened with net migration. The Government’s figures for net migration in 2009 are that, of the net migration into and out of Britain of just under 200,000, the figures for those coming from the European Union and European economic area were roughly in balance. There were a mere 12,000 more returning British citizens and EU residents coming in, whereas there were 184,000 migrants from outside the European economic area. I should also say that, in terms of working and retirement, the noble Earl suggested that people would leave Britain and only come back to retire. The figures are that more than 2 million British citizens have retired elsewhere within the European Union—that may have something to do with the weather, of course. Indeed, we now have a substantial French colony in the south-east of England who have come here to work, but many of whom, anecdotally, have said to me that they will certainly go back to southern France when they retire. Britain is a good place to work and the diversity of our population—the very substantial French, American and Japanese communities in London—suggests that we are a very attractive place to work.

The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, asked me on behalf of the Government to reassure the House of their commitment to multiculturalism. We do so happily. I come from a party whose previous party president was the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia. I am now in coalition with a party whose chair is the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. We live and work in a happily multicultural society, although we recognise the complexities of multicultural society and of societies that continue to undergo new waves of immigration. I am sure that I do not need to remind the noble Lord of Rob Putnam’s work on community and diversity and on the problem of solidarity that rapidly increasing diversity raises for communities.

I have certainly found from my own working and political life in Yorkshire and Lancashire that recently settled communities often feel threatened by further migration. I found that even 40 years ago when I was a candidate in Huddersfield. I still find it as I work in Bradford, Leeds and elsewhere. Many in the south Asian community in Bradford who are first-generation immigrants or the children of immigrants express active anxiety about the undercutting of their job opportunities and of their wage rates by Poles and Ukrainians. This is not simply a question of race or of ethnicity; there are some real, complex economic and social pressures, to which continuing immigration leads.

Our country has stubbornly high levels of unemployment. There are 2.5 million unemployed people in Britain, many of whom are long-term unemployed. Those are above all the low-skilled and those who have not entered apprenticeships or begun to pick up the skills that to take them into work, although we already have almost 200,000 recent graduates on our unemployment registers. Under the previous Government, too little investment was made in skills training or in apprenticeships, but as noble Lords know, my right honourable friend and colleague Vince Cable is actively concerned to increase the number of apprenticeships.

Part of the context of the debate, therefore, comes from popular suspicion and press stories—and some evidence—that companies find importing skills easier than paying for training and that immigrants competing for jobs drive down wages. Like the predecessor Government, we have attempted to respond. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, remarked, in 2008 the previous Government introduced the points-based system with its five tiers. A constant aim, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, suggested, of the Labour scheme as well as all previous schemes, has been to let in the right people and to keep out the wrong ones. That is a wonderful aim but it is not easy for any Government to apply in practice as we constantly rediscover how immensely difficult it is to discriminate between the many talented candidates, between the deserving and the very slightly less deserving whom one would nevertheless like to take on. There are so many promising and talented individuals—sadly, sometimes too many.

We all have our candidates as to how to get around the problem. The noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, suggested that we should put a further squeeze on bogus students and bogus colleges. The Government are trying to do that, as did the previous Government. Another suggestion is a tighter squeeze on illegals and on people smuggling. Again, the predecessor Government tried and we too are trying. That overlaps with the problems of human trafficking. We all recognise what a morally ambiguous policy quagmire we are all in as we attempt to manage immigration. There is no easy and perfect policy to adopt.

I recognise that this debate is largely focused on tiers 1 and 2 and on the application of the cap that is to be applied to those tiers. The interim cap was imposed to avoid a surge of applicants before the new system is introduced in April 2011. The reduction in the cap was of a matter of 1,300 places. There will be an annual cap, which is intended to reduce the steady rise in the British population. A very large number of anxieties and concerns have been expressed to the Government over its application, and I have read a great many submissions on what would happen and what could happen, but I have to say that there were not many on what has happened. The Government’s consultation received 3,500 responses, so we are involved in a continuing dialogue with all those concerned, including London First. We want the best for Britain’s society and economy, and we all recognise that we have to respond to changing international conditions and trends in migration as they move up and down. The Government are now responding to the consultation and we expect that response to be made public within the next few weeks.

The balance between tier 1 and tier 2 is one issue that we will discuss. The figures suggest that around 10 per cent of those who have come in under tier 1 are not currently employed and that a further 20 per cent are employed in lower-skilled occupations than those that they claimed to be pursuing when they came into the country, so there is a case for expanding tier 2 and shrinking tier 1. We recognise the problems of scientific research and of universities, which need to be able to attract the best people. I declare a small interest in that I have spent some time over the past two weeks trying to help my son get a renewal of his visa to move from being a student in the United States to holding a post-doctoral fellowship there, although I should say that the Haskel and Wallis report referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, was not a reference to a member of my family.

We recognise also the concern that banks, accountants, law firms, engineering consultancies and others in the City have with regard to access to globally mobile people of different citizenship, as well as the whole question of the cultural world. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, for her suggestions on how to find ways to pursue the dialogue further, and I thank her in particular for her suggestion on training and apprenticeships. That is something that the Government would very much like to take further. Again, I declare an interest in that for many years I was involved as an academic in training for Barclays bank. I recall the day on which a new CEO arrived and shrank very radically the bank’s training programme as a non-essential part of what the bank should do. We want to make sure that all the firms in the City with which we work are investing in their workforce and in those whom they recruit and are not tempted to take the easy option of recruiting people already trained by others abroad. That is cherry picking, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said. We should be contributing rather than simply taking talent out of other countries.

We recognise that internal company transfers are also an issue. Some 22,000 of the 36,000 admitted last year under tier 2 were inter-company transfers. Of those, 12,000 were Indian nationals and 11,000 were in IT. At the same time, IT is the area of graduate employment with the highest percentage of unemployed in this country. We need to look at this area and talk to companies and banks about how to ensure that our own graduates get into the right jobs. We need a wider dialogue with UK employers about investment in developing the skills of their employees and of those whom they recruit.

On cultural talent, we recognise that there is a continuing problem. They are listed under tier 5 and tier 2 as a particularly important area, and I ask simply that we continue to talk about individual cases as often as we can. On Rotary Youth Exchange, I enjoyed the argument between the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, as to whether independent schools or the Rotary are more reliable partners for the UK Border Agency. I would say simply to the noble Baroness that perhaps we need to talk further about this, and that the understanding of school exchanges is that they are for separate terms or for six months, not for a year. Perhaps that is something about which we need to talk further.

The Home Office has taken a certain amount of flak, in particular from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about extraordinary bureaucracy at the UK Border Agency. This is not easy work. Officials, particularly in the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, have to deal with a large number of determined and needy applicants. It does not always work out as easily as it should, and sometimes people have to be more patient than they would have wished. When I was a student going to the United States, I used to suffer in long lines. That is one of the problems of the world pressures of population and migration. There is popular anxiety about migration and it is not just populist exaggeration or tabloid scaremongering.

Often the highest anxiety is among our most disadvantaged and within our settled immigrant communities, but we are attempting to design the fairest compromise that we can. We have consulted and we are continuing to consult. We will announce policy priorities for 2010 and beyond in the coming weeks, and we look forward to a continuing dialogue with all interested partners, from London First to the Royal Opera House to the Institute of Cancer Research to Universities UK and beyond on how immigration policies can best be balanced. We are committed to an open society and an open economy within the limits that sadly we all have to accept.