Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Maria Caulfield and Alison McGovern

Committee Debate: 10th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 5th March 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to be back under your chairship, Mr Stringer.

To continue the point that I was making, the Bill will have a huge impact on our health service and, specifically, the social care sector—even though, ironically, the social care sector is the prime example of where a labour shortage has failed to increase the wages of the people working in it. That should be a lesson to us all, if we think that we can promise people a pay rise on the back of immigration restrictions.

That said, we have all received a lot of evidence about the impact of the Bill on the health service, and that supports the case for the new clause. The Government have a large degree of control over workforce issues in the national health service and in the social care sector, so it would be right for the Government to feel the need to report to Parliament on the matter.

[Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)]

I completely support some of the arguments that the hon. Lady is making. The social care workforce is made up largely of women. Does she think that that is a key reason why the sector is underpaid?

[Alison McGovern]

The hon. Lady is obviously a top feminist, because she identifies probably the single biggest reason why the care sector is low paid. The work done by women has traditionally, for reasons of structural power, been paid much worse than similar jobs that have traditionally been done by men, and that helps to make my point. If we want to increase the pay of women in the social care sector, a good way to go about it would be to encourage those women to join a trade union, so that they can enforce their rights, bargain for better pay and increase their dignity and their control over their workplace. I argue that a restriction on free movement is, at best, not the most effective way to support those women. None the less, it would be interesting to learn, and the Government ought to take responsibility for finding out.

In support of my new clause, I would like the Government to consider not just the impact on our labour market of the policy of ending freedom of movement, but the huge impact that the policy will have on UK nationals—we barely discuss the restriction of fundamental rights, freedoms and abilities that ending free movement will entail—and on some large and, in many cases, fast-growing sectors in our economy.

In the tourism industry, for example, many British workers spend time working in a different country to develop their skills, perhaps before they run their own tourism business or come back to work in the UK. Many such opportunities could be curtailed, and it would be a dereliction of duty for the Government to ignore the fact that that will be a consequence of the policy.

Arts, culture, film, music and sport are all areas in which the UK has traditionally excelled, and I hope it will do in future. They are multibillion-pound industries, and the impact on them of ending free movement will be huge. If we think about the orchestra in the city region that I represent in Merseyside—or the fine Hallé orchestra in the city of Manchester, which you represent, Mr Stringer—the impact of the ending of free movement on those orchestral musicians will be absolutely profound.

We are offering those industries a future immigration policy that is unclear at this point, and yet their ability to move around and work on the continent of Europe is mission critical to them in their great work of producing fantastic music—the best in the world, some would say, in the case of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. I simply cannot countenance the idea of the Government taking that step without thinking that they ought to report on it.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill (Ninth sitting)

Debate between Maria Caulfield and Alison McGovern

Tuesday 5th March 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Maria Caulfield]

On Friday, I went with the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) to Brighton University to see the new nursing apprenticeship schemes, which are enabling a new source of nurses—mature students—to train as student nurses, and earn while they learn. The students all said that that was better than the previous bursary scheme, as it provided them with better wages and more job security once they finished their training.

[Alison McGovern]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. I am perfectly happy for schemes to be called whatever they like; the fact is that we have to support nurses properly as they are training. The general point that I want to make, while accepting her experience of what sounds like a really good scheme, is that the general thrust of Government policy has not supported the training of staff for our national health service in recent times, and that has to change.

I will make one final specific point on this issue before I close, and it is about the social care sector. As the hon. Member has just mentioned, nurses are incredibly important and we have to get training and support for people coming into nursing, or back into nursing, correct, but social care is also important, and the pay in the social care sector is really dismal. It is a highly skilled job. If someone is working in a nursing home, they may have in their hands the care of the dying, and I do not think that there is a more important or dignified job in this country.

We have relied on EU nationals to a great extent and this Bill will have a huge impact on the social care sector. We have a massive staff shortage; there are hundreds of thousands of vacancies in the care sector. However, it is an interesting fact that that massive staff shortage has not increased pay in the care sector. If this was simply a matter of supply and demand, we might have expected wages in the care sector to rise quite rapidly over recent years, but the staff shortage has not increased pay, because in the end the funding for social care comes in large amount from the Government. That demonstrates the flaw in the argument that says, “Well, if we restrict immigration, that will necessarily put up pay”. Well, if in the end the funding—