Immigration Bill
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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“( ) The Secretary of State must by regulations made by statutory instrument provide for the application of the provisions and penalties under this section to those responsible for assuring that border controls are enforced on arrivals and departures at general aviation sites, private landing strips and helipads.”
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we are now on to Part 6 of the Bill on border security. This is the first of a number of amendments on that. I welcome government Amendment 239C, which recognises that border security is not only about maritime security; we have a land border in Northern Ireland. Many years ago when I was at Chatham House and dealing with the beginnings of European co-operation in police, I kept coming across policemen, as well as Conservatives, who said, “But we’re different. We only have a maritime border”. They should go to Dublin and try to explain that. The delicacy of the border between Northern Ireland and southern Ireland is very considerable and would be very sharply affected if we were to leave the European Union. It is very good to see the government amendment.
My initial interest in this area came from looking at the Channel Islands as a very odd, semi-British dependency. I noted that the owners of the Daily Telegraph—a newspaper that bangs on about border security and the defence of British sovereignty—have a company that owns at least one helicopter, which advertises that it flies between Brecqhou and Monaco. Since the Channel Islands’ authorities rarely, if ever, send a policeman to Brecqhou, let alone a border security officer, I assume that this is a means of entirely avoiding border security. I mark that as one of the many oddities of the way the debate on sovereignty and border security in this country takes place.
Thinking more widely on this, we can see that it is clearly a serious loophole. I am one of those people who occasionally looks at the Financial Times weekend supplement, How to Spend It, just to see how people who earn £3 million a year or more get through it. The editor of the Daily Mail, another newspaper that bangs on about sovereignty and border security, is supposed to earn £3 million a year, so now doubt he thinks about spending his money on things such as that. There are advertisements in How to Spend It for yachts with their own helicopters, so you can fly directly from your yacht in the Mediterranean to your helipad on your estate in Surrey—or, for that matter, the helipad close to us in Yorkshire, where you can get straight on to the grass moors, if you like, again without passing through border controls.
As the super-rich extend their ability to fly in light aircraft and helicopters across national boundaries, there is a growing problem that needs attention. When I first came into government I was briefly spokesman for that aspect of the Home Office that dealt with counterterrorism and border control. I spent a very interesting day with the West Yorkshire Police and the combined Yorkshire serious crime squad, learning about how they work. One of the things I remember most strongly from that was that there is no domestic serious crime. All serious crime involves criminal networks; all important criminal networks are cross-border.
The idea that we do not need to be too careful about helipads at luxury hotels, golf courses or estates in Surrey because the people who go there are rich and therefore law-abiding is not necessarily accurate. Some of them may be rich and not entirely law abiding. Some of the richest people in this country are Russian oligarchs. They may, or may not, be law abiding in this country, but the origins of their wealth may not have been entirely according to British legal standards. Others are from Gulf royal families. Most of them are entirely honourable people, but occasional ones claim diplomatic immunity because they represent St Lucia on the International Maritime Organisation or whatever. There are, therefore, occasions when they may not be entirely in accordance with British law. We have no idea who they may bring in and out of Britain in their private aircraft or helicopters. They may even be bringing domestic workers without visas to work for them here under conditions which we regard as illegal and against the Modern Slavery Act.
I raise this question as there is a major loophole in border security and incursion into British sovereignty. I hope the Government will provide a sign that they are aware of the seriousness of this loophole, which is growing as air traffic from private aircraft and helicopters grows, that they are doing something about it and that they will close the loophole. I beg to move.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 241A in my name. At the end of the debate at Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, responded extensively to a wide range of questions and comments. One of them, brought up by me and a number of other noble Lords, was about the fact that we have so little information in this area. In his response, the Minister read off a whole lot of evidence and research that the Government had possession of. I was unsatisfied by that, because most of the information did not help to determine an evidence-based policy towards migration, particularly the illegal migrants who are in the country. I therefore set myself a challenge: if I was making a decision, as a Minister, on the basis of evidence, what would I want to know? If, in my business life, I was looking at market research, what would I try to determine? I then asked myself if it was possible to determine them, because that is clearly the second stage of this. I have put in the amendment the sort of information that I would want to know if I was a Minister or Secretary of State making decisions about how I approached this subject. Illegal migrants in the country are clearly a problem: no one denies that. If they are here illegally they should not be here, and we should be able to take action. I have a list of eight or 10 things that I would want to see. I will be interested in the Minister’s response in terms of actually finding those things out. Are they, indeed, the sort of things they should know?
The second question is: is it possible to know about and explore something that is an illegal activity? There have been studies of the number of illegal migrants in the UK but I understand that the last major one—maybe by the LSE—was in 2009. It estimated that there were somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 in the UK. There is quite a large margin of error between the minimum and maximum numbers in that estimate. Is it possible to measure illegal activities? I expect that noble Lords are aware that in May 2014 the Office for National Statistics started to include in GDP figures the amount of GDP generated by illegal drugs and prostitution. Prostitution is not strictly illegal, but in terms of how it is carried out it is broadly seen as an illegal activity and therefore had not been brought into GDP before. The total GDP for those two activities was about £12 billion; more or less 50%, or £6 billion, related to illegal drugs, and approximately the same figure related to prostitution. It is therefore possible to estimate those types of figures with a reasonable standard error, if not with certainty.
The techniques that have been used to measure illegal migration are the Delphi method, the capture-recapture method and the residual method, which has been used to make these estimates in the United States. I am not for a minute saying that this is an easy or totally accurate exercise, but for decisions around such important areas as this, which we all want to solve, we should spend a little more resource and time moving away from rhetoric and into understanding what is going on. By doing so, we might have a lot better decisions about migration management, and there might be legislation that we can all agree on, rather than taking rather normative views.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
The Home Office understands that because it takes advice from the law enforcement agencies. Of course, we also take advice from my noble friend. It is not true to say that the Home Office does not recognise the security situation. In fact, the Home Secretary regards it as her highest priority.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the noble Lord must clearly be too young to remember who abolished exit controls. It was indeed Margaret Thatcher, when Prime Minister, as an economy measure. She thought that they were unnecessary and cut the number of people employed by the border service. That was some time ago.
Lord Green of Deddington
Perhaps I may correct the noble Lord. Exit checks to Europe were abolished by the Conservative Government in 1994 and exit checks to the rest of the world were abolished by the Labour Government in 1998. Both decisions were wrong.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I tabled my amendment simply to make sure that the Government and, in particular, the Home Office took this point on board. I am very happy to talk further. We are looking for a response from the Government on this. Of course we recognise that 3,000 private airports cannot be entirely covered. One has to use intelligence. As the noble Lord replied, I was thinking of the days when as a schoolboy I used to dip sheep on a farm. The policemen always turned up to check that you were dipping the sheep properly. In those days, there were ways in which they made sure that the law was enforced in all sorts of places around the country. Clearly, we need a degree of intelligence.
The use of private planes and private helicopters is clearly growing. This is not a static situation. The Government’s response therefore cannot be entirely static. They have to be much more aware of what is going on and of the potential for abuse and for people who are engaged in illegal activities, possibly even terrorism, to use this route as well as many legitimate people.
The noble Lord did not mention the Channel Islands loophole. I have asked a number of Written Questions on it. I am struck that the liaison between the British Border Force and the authorities in the Channel Islands may not necessarily be as tight and mutual as we would wish. If one looks for areas where our border controls may not be entirely secure, the Irish land border and the Channel Islands maritime border are the most vulnerable. I will be interested to hear what the Government have to say on that in particular.
Above all, we need to be sure that the Government do not give the impression that there is one law for the rich and another for the rest of us. There are a number of other areas where the Government are edging towards a situation where unkind people, or Private Eye, could indeed suggest that there is now one law for the rich and another for the rest of us. I look forward to further discussions off the Floor with the Government. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, when I was in government I asked on a number of occasions how many British citizens hold dual nationality. We all know that we run into a number of problems with dual nationality, particularly when a British citizen of origin of another country is taken into custody in the country of origin. Dual nationality is a very cloudy concept. I should simply like to add that it would be very helpful if the Government would take this back and possibly even provide a Green Paper on the whole issue of dual nationality within Britain. We all have friends in that situation. I have a nephew and niece who hold British and Irish passports and a nephew who holds British and South African passports. My niece, who works for a development charity, sometimes finds it extremely useful not to be a British citizen when she is in a rather difficult country.
There are some major issues here. A substantial minority have British and Pakistani citizenship, and another substantial minority have British and Bangladeshi citizenship. These are delicate issues. They raise large public policy questions and some security questions. It would be useful if the Government would commit to looking at this matter further and reporting back to Parliament.
Lord Ashton of Hyde
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. Perhaps I should first declare an interest in that one of my daughters has dual nationality. Indeed, she has two passports.
I start by saying that the noble Lord, Lord Green, very kindly asked me to ask my officials rather than answer his question. I certainly will ask my officials. Equally, I will take on board the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and take them back to the department.
My noble friend Lord Marlesford has form on this question. I am conscious that I am but the latest in a long line of Ministers—“distinguished Ministers” is being whispered to me—including my noble friends Lady Anelay, Lord Taylor of Holbeach and of course Lord Bates, who, within a very short space of time, have answered the question put by my noble friend Lord Marlesford during debates on immigration Bills, counterterrorism Bills and in Questions in the House. As I said, I am just the latest in a long line and so, in hope rather than in expectation, here goes.
My noble friend will be aware from his long-standing interest in this matter that Her Majesty’s Passport Office requires holders of passports issued by another country to provide details of that passport at the time of application. He made the point that he understood that; the question was whether it would be on an electronic, searchable register. The reason for asking for other passports is to minimise the ability of the British passport applicant to obtain a British passport in a name and identity which is not consistent with an overseas passport. The holding of dual or second nationality is not in itself relevant to the issuing of a British passport. Instead, HMPO collects the information on any other passport held in order to help confirm the identity of the applicant. It provides an additional element of identity verification.
Therefore, requiring a British passport holder who holds or held dual nationality to supply information outside the British passport application process would be an unnecessary and additional function for HMPO. Failure to notify any acquisition or loss of citizenship would require an enforcement and penalty structure. This would in our view be disproportionate and likely result in legal challenges as the failure to notify would have no impact on the validity of the British passport. As I said, it is already a mandatory requirement for all applicants to submit any other passports that they hold, British or otherwise, when applying for a new passport. However, I can tell my noble friend that the Home Office continues to explore ways in which information held within the department is shared effectively to help to prevent and detect crime. My noble friend will be pleased to learn that HMPO is looking at enhancing how information at the point of application is collected and shared across Home Office agencies by making better use of technology. This would include information collected on dual national passport holders at the point of application. Information is held by the Home Office on dual nationals who apply for British citizenship and who subsequently apply for a British passport. Such information is necessary to progress the application for citizenship or when making jointly an application for citizenship and a passport. Outside of either process, the need for information on dual nationality would be unnecessary and would not serve any useful purpose.
Finally, I recognise that my noble friend has concerns about the security implications if his suggestions are not accepted, and I agree that the security of the public is of the highest importance. That is why we ask the views of the law enforcement agencies each time this matter is raised. Their response remains consistent—that the establishment of a dual national database is not considered operationally essential. Despite that, I fear that my noble friend will not be convinced by this response, but I hope that he will acknowledge that information on dual nationality is already collected and maintained. We do not see additional security benefit in extending the data collection process. I respectfully request that the amendment be withdrawn.
“( ) Regulations under this section must provide for exemption from a charge in the case of an application made—
(a) to fill a skills gap directly concerned with the provision of education;(b) by an institution whose primary function is the provision of education or skills training;(c) to fill a skills gap directly concerned with the provision of health services;(d) by an institution whose primary function is the provision of health services.”
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I recognise that it is late. This is an important proposal on which the House of Commons spent precisely five minutes during its wind-up in Committee. I have another important amendment still to come, Amendment 242S on the tier 1 investor charge, to which I attach a great deal of importance. I have received quite a lot of outside support and some outside briefing on both these amendments. I am conscious that time is short, but these are important issues. It is always the case that the last clauses of a Bill get the least attention.
The proposal for an immigration skills charge is a major innovation, not yet fully developed. It was first floated in a speech by the Prime Minister two weeks after the May election, less than nine months ago. He said,
“we will reform our immigration and labour market rules— reducing the demand for skilled workers and cracking down on those who exploit low-skilled workers. That starts with training our own people.
For too long we’ve had a shortage of workers in certain roles. Engineers, nurses, teachers, chefs—we haven’t had enough Brits trained in these areas and companies have had to fill the gaps with people from overseas. With Sajid Javid as the new business secretary we’re going to get far better at training our own people. This involves creating 3 million more apprenticeships—and we will consult on getting the businesses that use foreign labour to help fund them through a new visa levy.
And today I can announce we will consult on another big change. As we improve the training of British workers, we should—over time—be able to lower the number of skilled workers we have to bring in from elsewhere. So as we embark on this massive skills drive, we will ask the Migration Advisory Committee to advise on significantly reducing the level of economic migration from outside the EU”.
Note that the Prime Minister emphasised that the Government would focus on a massive skills drive and consult on another big change that would follow. He noted that some of the skills in greatest shortage are for teachers and nurses—he could have added doctors. However, in spite of an earlier reference in his speech to “a whole government approach” to the immigration issue, he does not note that these are public sector jobs, for whose training the Government lay down targets and conditions, and for which government departments such as health and education bear some responsibility. There is no mention of these departments in the speech—BIS is the only one mentioned.
The Government asked the Migration Advisory Committee to advise on how to take this loosely defined idea forward. The Migration Advisory Committee report was published on 19 January 2016, just three weeks ago, after the Commons had completed its consideration of the Bill. It addresses the issue of the introduction of a skills charge in the context of a review of the entire tier 2 visas category. It recommends raising the minimum salary thresholds, limiting the period in which skills shortages can be declared for any particular sector, and introducing a charge at a level it suggests should be between £500 and £2,000 per year—I emphasise “per year”. The Government intend this to be a perpetual charge, and they have chosen £1,000 for every year that someone from outside the EEA is employed by a British company, university, school or hospital. One university has estimated that this will cost it £800,000 a year; others suggest higher figures, particularly for universities with global reputations in science and engineering. The CBI has warned that it will impose additional charges on top of the new apprenticeship levy on innovative firms.
This new MAC report also notes in paragraph 1.25 that,
“the public sector may require time to transition to the new salary thresholds”,
since it is in the public sector that recruits from outside the EEA are paid less than their UK equivalents, rather than more. The MAC’s “strongest recommendation”,
“is for any changes to be kept under active review”.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that James Brokenshire, in a speech in London in late January, declared that the Government are “in listening mode” on this proposal, which, as we all know, is code for saying that Whitehall has not yet worked out what it means and still needs advice from the outside.
So why are we being presented with such a blunt proposal today? Why have the Government not consulted further on its implications for the public sector, above all for the health service, universities and schools? The Prime Minister said that he was going to do so, but it has not yet happened. Have the Government yet consulted with the NHS and the education sector on the likely impact of this charge? Have the Treasury and the Department of Health taken into account the impact of this charge on the NHS budget once it is applied, or on BIS and the DfE, given the implications for the education sector? Will the Government allow the public sector time to manage the transition or are they going to impose it, just like that?
Overall, the Government are relying on the market to provide the 3 million additional apprenticeships they are promising, with the penalty of the apprenticeship levies to spur it on. The massive skills drive that the Prime Minister promised is to be left to the market; it neither starts nor finishes with the Government, in spite of what the Prime Minister says.
The Explanatory Notes to the Bill suggest that the Prime Minister’s creation of 3 million additional apprenticeships will depend almost entirely on this charge. It says:
“The primary purpose of this clause is to increase funding available for apprenticeships in the UK and address the current skills gap in the UK workforce”.
How many apprenticeships will the estimated £240 million to be raised from this charge pay for? Will it get anywhere near funding 3 million apprenticeships? Business, not unnaturally, sees the double imposition of the levy and the immigration skills charge as adding to the burdens on the private sector, without a coherent government approach to labour market policy that is linked to education, at all levels, and to training. In the public sector, the Government have lifted the cap on numbers in nurse training while, at the same time, ending nursing bursaries, and so deterring potential nurses from entering the profession. They have done that at the same time as they recognise the need to increase their numbers.
There are particular issues for UK universities and for medicine—and I thank Universities UK for the brief that it gave me. The global reputation and quality of UK universities and medical research depends on the international circulation of academic and medical careers, with British students spending time studying and working abroad, and overseas students and professors coming to work in the UK. I have visited universities in several countries as an academic where the majority of the staff began their careers as local students, moved on to conduct graduate research there, and were then appointed to the faculty, without much, if any, intellectual challenge from exposure to other institutions or countries. None of these universities is anywhere in the global rankings, but our world-class universities depend on scholars coming in and out. The Prime Minister loudly declared that he wanted to attract the “best and the brightest” from outside the UK; imposing this charge is more likely to keep them out.
This charge will obstruct the circulation of scholars into the UK, and impose additional burdens on university budgets. It will have a particularly adverse effect on the STEM subjects, where over 15% of current staff are from outside the EU. But then, a substantial proportion of UK citizens in these disciplines in British universities have studied and taught overseas in their turn. Have the Government thought through how far this principle of penalties and charging might extend? Should British universities receive credits, say of £1,000 a year in perpetuity, for attracting British scholars with American PhDs back to this country? My son has just taken up a post at a UK university, having benefitted from American funding for his entire graduate education and two post-doctoral fellowships. Should that benefit to the UK as he returns generate a financial credit for the British university that has hired him, or does the Home Office assume that the traffic in academic excellence is all one way—foreigners into Britain? If we are so concerned about the nationality of those employed in the higher education and medical sectors, should the Government also impose fines on UK-trained doctors who then opt to leave Britain to practise elsewhere? Would the British Government be happy if a future Republican Administration in the United States were to impose charges on American institutions that sought to recruit from the UK?
I see no evidence that this has yet been thought through. Some free market economists, no doubt from some right-wing think tank, appear to have convinced the Home Office that the price mechanism will sort everything out, without the need for more active government intervention. That is as daft an idea as imposing central London economic rents on core government buildings in Whitehall, to be then taken off existing departmental budgets—but then the Government have just said that they are going to do that as well. What is even more striking is that the Government do not propose to apply the price mechanism to tier 1 investor visas, in spite of recommendations from the Migration Advisory Committee, where super-rich foreigners would no doubt bid happily against each other for the privileges offered. We will come to that in a later amendment.
We therefore offer in this group a number of amendments which protect the public sector, require consultation with those affected by the charge, and require, as the MAC report suggested, the earliest possible review. We particularly emphasise that it would be idiotic to impose the charge on teachers in shortage subjects in the UK, given the Government expect that domestic demand for education and training in shortage sectors will have to rise, and when funding for further education is already being cut savagely. Two weeks ago, I met three secondary head teachers who told me that maths and computer technology teachers are so hard to recruit that they are looking to Australia to find them, without yet realising, of course, that that would bring an extra charge on their budgets of £1,000 per maths teacher for the foreseeable future.
This clause attracted almost no attention in the Commons. In any event, the Government had not provided the information on which to assess the proposal. That makes it even more appropriate to test the opinion of the House on Report, unless the Government can come up with their own substantive amendments and a good deal more explanation of what this means in practice. I beg to move.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, before my noble friend responds on our amendments, I wonder whether the Minister can advise the Committee how noble Lords should deal with this when further government thinking becomes clear. As he well knows, we can scrutinise to our heart’s content but we cannot actually do anything about what is in regulations.
I thought that the Minister said at the beginning of his response that there had not been a decision and that this was permissive of regulations, but at the end he confirmed that this is what is in the Government’s mind, which is obviously common sense. However, by bringing forward such a significant new policy proposal as this, having given the Commons five minutes to debate it, as my noble friend said, I do not know how we can really deal with this just through regulations.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
That is precisely what I was about to say. At present, the House is extremely nervous about allowing the Government to legislate by regulation for very obvious reasons based on what has recently happened. Having listened to the Minister, the words “pig” and “poke” come very much to mind. We are being asked to accept something on which the Government have not quite made up their mind about how it will work. They have not yet managed to consult, but if we pass this they will produce some regulations when they work out what they want to do. If we are no clearer than that when we get to Report, it will be very difficult to persuade any of the major groups in the House, apart from the Conservatives, to accept something so unclear.
The noble Lord, Lord Green, and I agree strongly on one thing in the migration debate—that better training and education in Britain are absolutely part of what we need to have—but that should not replace the circulation of highly skilled and intelligent people which is a vital part of our research network in medicine, STEM subjects and elsewhere. If we are beginning to block that, which this suggests it will do, we will damage our standing in the global academic and intellectual world. That is what universities are most concerned about at present. We absolutely need some assurances on that. Last week, I was talking to a vice-chancellor in Wales who was not aware of the implications of this proposal. As the Minister will know, the academic lobby in the Lords is not entirely without a degree of influence. I will do my best to make sure that it is aware of it by the time we get to Report.
There are some large issues here about the private and public sectors, including the question of how we persuade the private sector to invest more in training. This is a Government who need a rather more active and concerned labour market policy. Someone said to me last week that further education funding is about to fall off a cliff. If the Government are looking to further education colleges to help to train apprentices, this proposal is not a good thing to do as part of a whole-government approach.
This proposal suggests that some young man aged 23 in either Policy Exchange or the Institute of Economic Affairs, with a first from some university or other, has written it at speed and the Government have swallowed it. There have been previous occasions in other Governments when those sorts of things have happened. This clearly has not been thought through. If the Government can publish some more detail on what they have in mind by Report, we might be able to make some progress. If they do not know by Report what the details of the policy will be, the House will find it very difficult to accept the proposals in the way the Government have put them before it.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Geddes)
I assume that the noble Lord would like to withdraw his amendment?
“Tier 1 (Investor) visa
(1) The Secretary of State must make rules which shall come into force no later than 1 January 2017—
(a) to close the Tier 1 (Investor) route;(b) to close applications to extend leave under Tier 1 (Investor) to applicants in the United Kingdom before 1 January 2017.(2) Nothing in this section shall affect leave to enter or remain of the holder of a Tier 1 (Investor) visa granted before that date in accordance with that leave.”
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, special arrangements for foreigners from outside the EU, the EEA and Switzerland who were willing to invest—actually, only to loan by investing in government bonds—a minimum of £1 million were introduced by the Conservative Government in 1994. The introduction of a tiered categorisation for visas in 2008 placed them in tier 1.
The Migration Advisory Committee issued an extremely critical report in 2014. The chairman’s foreword is strongly written. It says that,
“the main beneficiaries are the migrants”,
although,
“the law firms, accountants and consultancies that help organise the affairs of such investors”,
argue that their arrival is “self-evidently beneficial” to the UK—that is, these advisers to the very rich act as a lobby to bring more very rich in—“But”, the chairman continued,
“we do not need such investment to fund the deficit”,
and, if we were hoping that they might become entrepreneurs in the UK,
“we already have an entrepreneur route”.
The foreword goes on that,
“it would be injudicious for the UK to enter into a ‘race to the bottom’, matching special offers recently introduced by, for example, Malta, Portugal, and Antigua”—
and, I might add, St Kitts and Nevis.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I have some sympathy with the noble Lord in having to reply to this debate. I am fascinated by the caution expressed by the Labour Front Bench and I hope that the Labour Party will not find itself in a position of wanting to defend the super-rich against the criticism from the Liberal Democrats—of course, I speak for the Liberal Democrat Front Bench on this. Perhaps the Labour Party will reflect a little further on that between now and Report. I hope that I will not miss Report. I have to admit to everyone here that I am going on holiday for the first two weeks of March. I am going to Antigua, but I shall not ask whether I can buy citizenship while I am there.
Lord Bates
I will put a special plea to the business managers that we schedule Report then.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I hope that the Minister will be able to write to all noble Lords on the Committee between now and then with a number of answers. Have the Government examined the Canadian experience and looked at why the Canadians abolished their category? Have we considered the same? Can the Government explain why they accepted all of the Migration Advisory Committee’s proposals on tier 2 for the immigration skills charge, but did not accept two rather important proposals from the Migration Advisory Committee that there should be a limited number of sealed bids and a substantial donation to a good causes fund as part of the conditions?
I admit that the origins of my interest in this are from when I went as a representative of Her Majesty’s Government to the capital of a former Soviet state and found myself talking with someone who was clearly very much part of the oligarchy running the country. He told me that he had just been appointed ambassador to Britain and this was rather difficult for him because at that moment he held British citizenship as well as citizenship of his state. He was going to have to come back to his own country for some weeks while this was sorted out, but he had recently bought his son the house next door to his in Chelsea and as his son was rather young he did not want to leave him on his own for so long, so he was not quite sure how he was going to manage it. I began to think it was a little odd. I decided in my two days in that country that it was not a particularly democratic one and the distribution of wealth was clearly in the hands of a very small number of people, although one or two of them offered me some extremely generous gifts, which I, of course, had to pass on. It opened my eyes to something not desirable, not in the interests of this country and not contributing to our economy.
I would have been much happier if the figures I had discovered on tier 1 had shown that the exceptional talent category had 2,000 to 3,000 people in it, the entrepreneur category 3,000 to 4,000 people and the investor category 50. That is the sort of thing we should have if we believe the Prime Minister in his commitment to attract the brightest and the best. We have got it the wrong way round at present. I wish the coalition Government had been able to push a little further in that respect, but we will make up for it. We will do our best to push the Minister and see how far we can go. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, at this stage I shall be extremely brief although I am very happy to talk further, out of Committee. The purpose of the amendment is to probe. A Government who are deeply and publicly committed to the promotion of marriage appear to be imposing charges on it. Before I run off to the Daily Mail to tell it that the Conservatives are making marriage more difficult, perhaps we could explore the implication of some of these additional charges and discuss what the Government really intend with them. We are in favour of settled relationships, both civil partnerships and marriage. The Government have said many times before that they want to promote them. That is the purpose of this probing amendment. I beg to move.
Lord Bates
Currently, both the local registration service and the Registrar General provide a range of services in connection with the registration of births, marriages, civil partnerships and deaths for which, in some instances, there is currently no power to charge a fee. The existing fee-raising powers are restrictive and out-dated and do not cover the full range of services provided. For example, the Registrar General is involved with the verification of around 5,000 divorce documents each year which have been obtained overseas and also provides blank certificate stock to over 30,000 buildings for use in certificate issue. These are just two examples of services provided by the Registrar General for which there is currently no provision to charge a fee to the end-user and where the expense must be recovered from central funds.
Schedule 12 will modernise the process of setting fees for registration services and enable fees to be set for those services which have previously been provided without charge. The provisions also move existing fee-charging powers into regulations, providing more flexibility and making it easier to amend them in the future. This will allow the local registration service and the Registrar General to recover more of the costs of providing registration services. It will reduce the reliance on central funding and ensure that, where possible, any costs are borne by the users of the services on a cost-recovery basis in line with Treasury guidelines.
I hope that helps the noble Lord and he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
That is extremely helpful. I am happy to withdraw the amendment.
Islam: Extremism
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress has been made by the review into funding for extremist interpretations of Islam within the United Kingdom, including from overseas sources, announced by the Prime Minister on 2 December 2015 with the declared intention that it would report by the spring of 2016.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport and Home Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)
My Lords, the review into the funding of extremist interpretations of Islamic ideology, including funds that come from overseas, has made good progress. Analysts from across government are working on the review, led by the extremism analysis unit. It will report to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary in the spring of this year.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we understand that the Charities Commission has been doing some work on domestic sources, looking particularly at the role of Muslim charities. Foreign funding is entirely legitimate but it should be transparent, whether it comes from government or private sources. We have indications that some Governments have been supporting Muslim education in this country, but of course it should be directed to legitimate ends and not to the support of extremist versions of Islam.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I totally agree with the noble Lord that any source of funding that seeks to divide or disrupt what we have here in the United Kingdom should be looked upon, and the full force of the law for anyone seeking to create such divisions will be imposed. The noble Lord mentioned the review by the Charities Commission. That is very much factored into the review that is currently being carried out and I am speaking to colleagues in the Cabinet Office very closely on this subject.
Population Increase: Migration
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Government have focused on one of the pull factors—benefits—but not on what seems to many of us to be much more important, which is the skills shortages in Britain. I went round various Bradford schools last Friday, all of which, including the independent schools, said they are short of teachers and are recruiting from Australia and elsewhere. I am conscious that the National Health Service is trying to recruit 6,000 nurses from outside the EU and that there are trucking companies in the north of England directly recruiting from eastern Europe. Would not an active labour market policy and investment in skills training on a larger scale do a great deal more to reduce immigration than some of the other measures we have in place?
Lord Bates
The noble Lord is absolutely right. This is one of the reasons why we are investing in apprenticeships and in the quality of our education. A very important element of the Immigration Bill which is currently going through your Lordships’ House is the application of a skills levy on people who employ from outside the EU, which will then go back into making sure that the UK-based population have the skills necessary for those jobs in future.
Litvinenko Inquiry
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Lord Bates
I am very happy to do that. Of course, that is what we are aiming for. That is the direction and thrust of our policy. We want those two individuals to come to the UK so that they can be put on trial and all the evidence can be put to them, they can seek to defend themselves and a judgment can be made.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister think it possible or even likely that the polonium could have entered Britain in a diplomatic bag?
Lord Bates
The report does not go into that level of detail—or certainly not the parts that I have read. That is something that will be examined very carefully because, again, that would ratchet up this issue to a further level of deep concern.
Immigration Bill
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I wish to address four aspects of this complex Bill. The first is the importance of the pull factor in immigration and how best the Government should tackle it. Clause 55 gives the Secretary of State powers through subordinate regulations in the form of statutory instruments, of course, to,
“require certain employers to pay an immigration skills charge for each skilled worker from outside the EEA that they sponsor”.
It is good to see some explicit recognition by the Government that the shortage of skills in our domestic jobs market acts as a powerful incentive for employers to recruit from abroad, thus pulling immigrants into Britain. There has been too much emphasis on in-work benefits acting as a pull factor without the Government providing the evidence that this is a key incentive driving large numbers of immigrants. But our media are full of stories about shortages of skills within the UK, resulting in searches for qualified workers from overseas. Frank Field MP has just called for a crash programme to train young British unemployed people in building skills to supply the labour we desperately need to build more houses rather than, he argues, importing workers from abroad who in turn will require more houses to live in.
We read every week about the desperate shortage of nurses, with reports that hospital trusts want to recruit an additional 6,000 nurses from outside the EEA. The Commons Home Affairs Committee recently commented that the Government’s tier 2 migrant cap, “could have been responsible for a crisis in nurse recruitment”. I saw another recent story that the UK faces so wide a gap between supply and demand for long-distance lorry drivers that there are doubts that assembly plants, shops and supermarkets will be able to maintain the flow of supplies in peak periods. And we all know about the continuing shortage of youngsters with computer skills within the UK.
The Government’s answer to this in Clause 55 is to impose a charge on employers recruiting from outside the EEA in the hope of pushing companies to invest more in training. It is not clear whether hospital trusts recruiting nurses or doctors from outside the EEA will be expected to pay this charge, and perhaps the Minister could clarify whether public sector employers, including universities, will be included in the imposition of such charges. The implications for universities appointing academic staff from outside the EEA could be significant. But the underlying problem with this approach is that it ignores the problems of the English education system; it is particularly a problem in northern England, as we heard at Question Time today, in failing to motivate students or provide them with the skills the market needs. Cuts in further education and proposals that in future student nurses in England will be expected to pay for their training act as disincentives to acquiring the skills the country needs. There seems to be a complete absence of co-ordination across Government on this as the Home Office tightens controls on immigrants with skills while the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Department for Education and others cut back on training for those already here.
I have worked in Bradford with a social housing association which runs, as part of its social responsibility agenda, a superb apprenticeship scheme for the various building trades which is enormously oversubscribed. But then, another arm of government is making it harder for social housing associations to contribute to their communities in ways like this. Unless the Government take responsibility for the failings in our education and training systems, and their funding that contributes to the long-term skills shortages which drive inward immigration, they have no hope of reducing the determination of companies and public sector employers to recruit directly from abroad. I have told the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, that Migration Watch should be campaigning for a massive government training programme for the domestic unskilled and unemployed.
My second point is about fees. Clause 59, and Schedule 12, provide powers to charge fees for services that were previously provided without charge, and for any services provided in connection with marriages. Again, this seems to be an example of the Government pursuing entirely contradictory policies. They are strongly in favour of marriage, as we have read in successive manifestos, but determined to charge for them in the future. Fees, as anyone familiar with taxation knows, are regressive: the poor pay more, in effect, than the rich. Imposition of fees will make the business of marriage more expensive for the poor. Is that the Government’s deliberate intention? Do the Conservatives regard marriage as important for the well-to-do, worthy even of offering tax concessions to encourage, but not worth investing public money into for those already marginal in our society?
My third point is about border security—Clauses 44 and 45. These focus on civil airlines and airport operators, although Clause 45 also deals with private vessels, of which there are a great many crossing to and fro across the English Channel, and up and down the Bay of Biscay. When I briefly answered on policing and anti-terrorism issues for the coalition Government in this House, I was struck by the unavoidably transnational nature of serious crime, including drug-smuggling, and the frequent use of private aircraft and private airstrips and heliports in pursuit of illegal activities. I am struck by the apparent absence of reference to private airstrips and helicopter landing pads in this clause, and in Schedule 10. Is it assumed that these are used only by the rich, and can therefore be left outside our tighter border controls?
The Minister may know that I have asked specific Questions about Brecqhou helicopters, which fly the Barclay brothers to and fro from within the UK border control area—devolved in the case of Brecqhou to the Guernsey authorities, which I understand are strongly discouraged from ever setting foot on the island—and various parts of continental Europe. Do the owners of a newspaper that campaigns for the defence of British sovereignty from continental encroachment themselves live outside the reach of British sovereignty, while benefiting from free movement within the UK? Are there others, including Russian oligarchs and Gulf royalty with homes across southern England, who fly from private helipads beyond border controls? Are we moving towards one set of border controls for ordinary people, and a far lighter regime for the super-rich? I hope the Minister will be able to assure us that controls on private flights and landing strips will also be tightened. We cannot be sure that,
“Persons excluded from the United Kingdom”—
in Clause 46 might not be smuggled in by such means, as well as other illegal immigrants and undesirables.
My fourth point is about the impact of the tiered visa system on patterns of movement into and out of the country. The Minister will know that I have recently been concerned with a personal issue in this area, related to spouse visas for talented young Britons seeking to return to the UK after some years of study and work abroad. In the context of this issue, which I do not, of course, wish to discuss further here, I did some comparative investigation of the situation that faces British citizens who have gone abroad for graduate study, as many of us have done in recent years—I used to encourage my brighter students to do so—most often to the United States of America, and then wish to return to the UK to take up employment.
Fifteen years ago there was very little difficulty or delay in bringing those whom such people had married, while abroad, back with them. Now it is a lengthy and costly process. I was particularly shocked by the case of a British citizen who had married a Japanese fellow student while in the USA; his wife was refused entry and forced to hire lawyers to support an appeal. I was more deeply shocked by the comment from a young man I have known since he was an undergraduate, now equipped with a mathematics PhD from a top US university, and married to an American with a similar PhD from the same university. He told me that he is now unlikely to return to the UK because the sense of hostility that faces non-British applicants makes him feel, “that my wife and my children would be unwelcome in my own country”. How much talent are we going to lose in the next generation if that impression spreads across talented expatriates outside the EEA? Exchanges with postgraduates currently within the USA have suggested to me that that feeling is already widespread.
The Tier 1 (Investor) Visa, on the other hand, welcomes those who are willing to bring over £2 million with them into the UK to buy a house in central London, for example. So we open our arms to the super-rich of Russia, China, Malaysia and the Gulf states, looking for somewhere to invest funds they may or may not have accumulated through means that are legal in this country, while raising obstacles to British citizens who have improved their skills and developed their reputations by studying and working abroad. The Tier 1 (Investor) Visa is worthy of a tax haven, not a self-respecting sovereign country; it fits in with a housing regime which promotes sales of newly-built homes in London to overseas buyers before they have been offered to British citizens, and allows them to be bought through anonymous offshore companies.
I note that the Bill has no proposals to tighten controls on Tier 1 visas. If raising fees for marriage is appropriate to this Bill, then transparency of ownership for non-commercial property within the UK must also be entirely appropriate to add. Are the Conservative Government really determined, with Mayor Boris Johnson’s support, to build a country fit for foreign money-launderers to live in? One law for the poor, again, and another for the rich. It seems easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Great Britain than for the young and talented to go through the eye of UK border controls.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, when we debate Bills in Committee and on Report, we are liable to be accused of making Second Reading speeches. Now that this is Second Reading, perhaps I will be forgiven for making one. I will look at the wider issues of immigration that are of course referred to in this Bill, which addresses some of the problems.
I support my noble friend the Minister’s view that we have benefited enormously from immigration into this country in the past and that we welcome immigrants to this country. However, it is a question of numbers. We cannot get away from numbers. The noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, just said that we have already made a modest 1% contribution to the refugee crisis taking place. To put that in context, that small number of Syrian refugees we are taking in is in addition to the 330,000 immigrants who came legally into this country in the last year. That contrasts rather forcibly with the undertakings that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister made that immigration should be limited to 100,000 a year—or to tens of thousands. Despite the number of times that that commitment has been made, we seem never to have met the 100,000 target. That is a problem.
We now face an immigration crisis across Europe of proportions never seen before. These are very large numbers of people indeed. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, referred to Germany as being the conscience of Europe. Angela Merkel may well have been moved with compassion when she said that Germany would take 900,000 Syrian refugees, but I suspect she has regretted that remark ever since. She created enormous problems within her own party. Indeed, I would have thought that that remark was extremely ill-advised if she did not want to see the renaissance of extreme right-wing parties in Germany in future.
My noble friend Lord Horam referred to my right honourable friend the Home Secretary’s remarks at the Tory Party conference. The problem is that, if immigration is in too large numbers, it creates very serious stresses in the home nation. This is something we cannot overlook. At the moment we suffer from a major crisis in housing—in particular, in affordable housing. We are not building enough. This is a problem we have with our existing population. If we take in very large numbers of immigrants, they are almost invariably in greater need of affordable housing than the resident population in this country. That creates enormous resentment. This may well be one reason why UKIP has had a certain amount of electoral success in areas traditionally regarded as bastions of the Labour Party. We cannot overlook this, as my noble friend Lord Horam said. Immigration is a very high priority in the views of the people of this country. We cannot take unlimited numbers of people. I come back to what I said originally: it is a question of numbers.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord in a Second Reading speech. I entirely agree with him that we have a housing shortage. Might he possibly address the question of how we will overcome that shortage when we have such a remarkable lack of skilled labour to build houses within this country? Is there not a real problem that a major housebuilding programme now would draw in a very large number of people from abroad to build those houses?
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, knows very well that it is a question not only of the shortage of skilled bricklayers and people who can build houses, but also of the enormous shortage of land on which you can build. This is all to do with our planning laws and is a much more complicated issue than just a question of the shortage of people.
If we control immigration and have a system of allowing in the people with the skills we need, I do not have any problem with that. The problem is if we allow very large numbers of people in who do not have those skills. That is a totally different issue. It is what puts enormous pressure on all our services at the moment. It is not only housing, which is the most obvious issue. The National Health Service seems to be creaking under the demands pressed on it at the moment. Our infrastructure and education are also under great pressure. With all these things, if you have enormous numbers of immigrants coming in, the pressure on public services inevitably grows and that creates resentment and difficulty.
With the EU referendum coming up, I refer to the question of European immigration. As we know, EU citizens are allowed into this country. We apparently do some survey to find out how many there are of them. The figures for last year were 330,000. That is net immigration, netted off against those going out. It is reckoned that about half that number are EU citizens—some 150,000. At the same time, some reports came out recently about 2 million EU citizens applying for national insurance numbers over a period of four years. That is an average of half a million per year. I know we are not comparing like with like here, but it seems that you must do something to reconcile these two numbers. You have half a million EU citizens applying for national insurance while, in theory because of the surveys we do, we had only 150,000 come into this country last year. I believe the number may be even bigger this year. When my noble friend comes to sum up, I would be grateful if he could confirm that 2 million EU citizens applied for national insurance numbers over the past four years. How does he reconcile that with the number of EU migrants that are supposed to have come to live here? We need statistics.
I also support the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, in saying that we need to know what the Government estimate to be the number of illegal immigrants in this country. If we do not have that number, it is extremely difficult to assess whether this Bill has been a success or failure in reducing that number.
Airport Security
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My noble friend raises another important point about the relationship with airlines. I assure him that we work very closely with all international partners and, where we can, we share important information with the airlines. They play an important role in areas such as advance passenger information, which in the UK is also shared with, for example, the Border Force.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, does this scrutiny extend to private airports and heliports? I was looking at the Channel Islands, for example, as a place which, formally speaking, is within our borders. Some months ago I looked at the helicopters flown between Brecqhou and Monaco. I am not aware that the Guernsey police ever visit Brecqhou, for example, but when passengers arrive there—it may just be the Barclay brothers and nobody else—there are no border controls. Do we make sure that private flights are covered? A considerable number of these come in and out of the United Kingdom, both to the mainland and to the Crown dependencies.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The noble Lord raises an important point about private flights. I assure him that security arrangements are in place at those airports. I will write to him on the specific airports that he mentioned.
Kurdistan Workers’ Party
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Bates
Political aspirations are of course noble and those are the types of issues which should be addressed in the peace talks that we want the PKK to return to. But the fact is that the PKK has been responsible for 140 deaths of military police and civilians in Turkey just in recent months, and that is the reason it is proscribed as a terrorist organisation and why it will remain so.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we understand the urgency of the Kurdish issue in Turkish politics, and of course now in both Syrian and Iraqi politics, but can the Government at the very least be active in saying to the AKP Government in Turkey that we welcome the peace negotiations between the PKK and the Government, but we think that the provision of better civil rights for the substantial Kurdish minority in Turkey is an important issue for the future, and that the treatment of the HDP over the past few months within Turkish domestic politics has been deeply unfortunate?
Lord Bates
A number of those points were raised at the EU/Turkey summit on Sunday which the Prime Minister attended. Of course there is an absolute need for those discussions to continue, but they must go through a diplomatic and political process; this is not to be decided by military violence.
Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Funding
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The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has mentioned the ODA budget. We have an excellent record of leveraging the ODA for the broader priorities of Her Majesty’s Government, not just the important role of poverty alleviation but the other areas to which the noble Lord has drawn attention.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, when the Ukraine crisis broke out, the FCO really felt its lack of expertise on Russia. If the FCO’s staff is cut further, expertise to analyse what is happening at the moment in countries in other very sensitive areas such as Central Asia, the North Caucasus and the Middle East will be in short supply. Do the Government take that into account when considering whether they can further cut the FCO both at home and abroad?
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, I always take careful note of what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has to say, due to his previous role in the department. Just to go into the number of posts, yes we have fewer posts than we had 10 years ago. However, since 2010 we have not closed any sovereign posts and we have opened or upgraded 18 posts under the network shift programme and strategic reprioritisation exercises, as well as deploying around 300 extra front-line staff in more than 30 countries.
Railways: Regional Passenger Trains
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I will certainly take back the particular lines that the noble Lord mentioned. On authorities that are collaborating, TransNorth, for example, is a great collaboration of local authorities. We hope that such collaborations, by bringing local authorities together, demonstrate what the acute need is for given regions across the country.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that one evening last year I watched on the London evening news the announcement that the “clapped-out trains” from Thameslink were going to be replaced by brand new stock? The next evening, watching the Yorkshire evening news, I learned that the northern electricals, which may or may not be introduced on the TransPennine line, will be supplied by “refurbished Thameslink stock”. Is the northern powerhouse to be built on hand-me-downs from London, or on something rather better than that?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I think the noble Lord is being a bit disingenuous: he was part of the Government when elements of the northern powerhouse were addressed. He knows full well that the northern powerhouse is alive and well. Indeed, apart from the £38 billion the Government will invest in rail, we are getting HS2.
National Well-being
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(14 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I very much welcome this debate. I share with the few who have spoken my enthusiasm for the topic and my view of its importance. I therefore much regret the very small number of people speaking from all Benches. I can remember five years ago or more, in my own party’s federal policy committee, being told that to have a working party on well-being and happiness was a woolly liberal topic that would arouse the scorn of the media. I read a book on happiness by one of my LSE colleagues at the time, which many thought was a woolly liberal book, written by an economist who only dared to do so because he was about to retire. The quality-of-life paper which my party debated at its last September conference was excellent. It drew on much more research than I had until then known was available. It was probably the first serious political party document that took this debate on board. I am very sorry that the Labour Party is so absent here, because it is absolutely the sort of topic that it ought to be taking on board. It is part of what our colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, is talking about when he talks about Blue Labour; the importance of community; the importance of social networks; and the importance of the non-economic factors, which old Labour ignored so dreadfully when it was knocking down the old housing communities and putting up those great and soulless estates.
The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, says that this issue is starting to creep into the mainstream of public policy, and we must all accept that the word “creep” is important here. It has some way to go. It is also of course at the heart of the yet loosely defined concept of “big society” in the Conservative Party. I wish there were more Conservatives also taking part in this debate. There is a large cross-party, all-party debate to be had on this subject. It is still, sadly, only beginning.
I am answering this debate because, as the Cabinet Office spokesman in the Lords, I am responsible for the Office of Civil Society and answer for the Office for National Statistics—although I stress, it is an independent body to which I am answerable, but have no influence over. I think that is a very important part of this debate, because if we are talking about getting more reliable measures—measures that everyone in the debate will trust and be able to argue over—we need something like an independent Office for National Statistics to be able to hold the ground on that. I very much welcome the work that it is doing and the encouragement that the Prime Minister is giving to that.
The Stiglitz report, one of the key documents on this—after the book on happiness by the noble Lord, Lord Layard, some years before—says in its executive summary:
“What we measure affects what we do … Choices between promoting GDP and protecting the environment may be false choices, once environmental degradation is appropriately included in our measurement of economic performance … if our metrics of performance are flawed, so too may be the inferences that we draw”.
The problem, as we all know, once one gets involved in this debate, is finding objective measures of well-being and of having to depend partly on subjective measures of well-being. The ONS is experimenting with different forms of subjective work. The international dimension of this—the OECD has already been mentioned—in the work of the Canadians, Australians and others, helps to feed in to a more informed debate. Sadly so far, on the whole, it is limited to the experts, think tanks and social science faculties, but I hope it will spill out into a national debate. As I say that, I can immediately see myself, or perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Layard, in front of Jeremy Paxman as he sneers, “Surely you don’t believe that well-being has any relevance”, let alone imagine what the Daily Mail will say about this. It is going to take a lot of time to build respect for a very important shift in the national debate. It starts from recognition that GDP as a measure of social progress is limited. It does not distinguish between economic activity associated with positive and negative social progress, such as the cost of long commutes, crime, divorce, dealing with natural disasters and so forth. It does not include those important functions performed in the household and voluntary sectors. What we are looking for is a means of measuring social capital and social added value as well as economic capital and economic added value.
I note also in the literature, which I have read with great interest over the last few days, that there is the question of how one measures the quality of life as well as the quantity that one consumes. The Stiglitz report was extremely valuable as a way station in this. I very much welcome the way in which our Prime Minister has taken up the debate, started under the last Government and a number of international organisations, and has done his best to take it forward. I thoroughly enjoyed his excellent speech last November, in which he said,
“it’s high time we admitted that, taken on its own, GDP is an incomplete way of measuring a country’s progress … all of life can’t be measured on a balance sheet”.
And he recognises that,
“a new measure won’t give the full story of our nation’s wellbeing, or our happiness or contentment or the rest of it … but it could give us a general picture of whether life is improving, and that does have a really practical purpose … it will open up a national debate about what really matters”.
He continues that,
“information will help government work out, with evidence, the best ways of trying to help to improve people’s wellbeing”.
That is what the Government are engaged in. That is what the coalition parties are entirely signed up to. We very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, will in time persuade the Labour Party to sign up to it as well—perhaps, even, to understand the purpose of what is now under way.
As has already been mentioned, the ONS is designing the best measures that it can and is undertaking a large-scale survey, the results of which will be published next July. I hope that will take us on to the next stage in a widening public debate. This will look at a range of areas, including social interaction, relationships, family, community, volunteering, the whole concept of fairness—relative incomes have been mentioned—and a sense of having control over one’s own life. That is a very important set of questions. These are factors that can clearly be influenced and shaped by public policy. To make a slightly partisan point, my dislike for socialism was nurtured by being a candidate in Manchester and working on those huge rebuilt council estates. I fought a constituency in 1974 where 98 per cent of the population lived in council accommodation, mostly flats. I had some real argument with the city planners, who thought that they knew best what was needed for the people who lived in those houses. It was a concept of passive citizenship, in which people had things done for them but had no control over their own lives. That is part of what we have to reverse, and part of what Labour in particular has to reverse, in some of the old Labour thinking that is still there.
We are making progress. Some of these data do not entirely relate to what government can do, but there are very wide implications for public policy across the board. The much greater importance that we need to give to the whole question of mental health is part of this. I thought that the public health White Paper took us one small step in the right direction in that. We all know that depression is the opposite of well-being, and looking at well-being takes us into that whole area.
I myself am very much struck by the importance of the built environment. It is the opposite of the central Manchester council estates in Saltaire, which is a wonderful community. We are forced to live next to each other, because it is all terraced housing. We have green space—there is a park. There is an institute at the centre of the village, and we all as a result know each other and interact with each other. It has a real sense of social capital. Even from just spending the weekends there, I know many more people in Saltaire than I do in my neighbourhood in London. I hope that I do not sound too much like Prince Charles in wanting to build that sort of community, but there are some real questions about the lack of wisdom of building those new estates on the edge of towns with two car spaces outside every house where you absolutely do not interact with your neighbours. You do not have a local high street or a community pub, and as a result you grow up without interacting with your neighbours. So neighbourhood, community and a sense of self-control are all part of this.
That takes us on to the localism agenda, which the coalition agenda is developing. We still have quite a long way to go. Being in control of your own lives also means having more self-government; it means encouraging active citizenship. Many of us also think that it means more urban parish councils and more local, local government. That is something that we have to work on to reverse the alienation of so much of our population from our current style of politics, with the passive observance of Prime Minister’s Question Time as a form of distant entertainment that in no sense involves you.
So this has very large implications for consumer culture and the extent to which marketing and advertising encourage people to substitute buying things for actually thinking what they really want. There is the question of how far government policy should attempt to alter the way in which marketing and advertising go. There is the whole question of social trust and social capital. So we have a very long way to go.
I welcome the little remnant of us who have taken on this debate, all calling for a wider national debate, which shifts the national debate on to a new ground. It is a huge challenge to the conventional wisdom and a challenge to all political parties. It is also a challenge to the economics profession, which I hope the noble Lord, Lord Layard, continues to push. I hope for further debate in this Chamber as part of the wider debate, and I suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Layard, that he persuades Labour Peers to give the subject a full Thursday afternoon debate, or as full as possible, because this is a challenge to us all.