Immigration Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Mims Davies and Gavin Newlands

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Mims Davies]

Q 94 Fantastic. Are you also able to expand on the CBI’s concerns about the apprenticeships levy? It is obviously the Government’s ambition to see apprenticeships grow. Will the levy affect your members, or the immigration skills charge? What is the impact that you see on businesses?

Neil Carberry: Apprenticeship levies are quite complex at the moment because there are two of them. They have become known in the CBI’s employment team as the big levy and the little levy. There is the large apprenticeship funding model levy, which is a deep concern for the CBI.

On the question of the skills charge, although we do not welcome additional costs, we fundamentally disagree with the idea that immigration is used to resolve skills issues and to avoid training, because companies in the UK do extensive amounts of training—more than many other large western European competitors in terms of spending.

Having said that, if there is to be a skills charge, we need to make sure that it is effectively targeted, so that the money raised does go into apprenticeships that are training people towards the levels of skills that people who came in on a visa were helping to resolve the shortage of. More broadly, it is probably preferable to us that these charges exist than that we make changes to the pay bands for tier 2 migration. Additional cost for a visa is one thing, but being unable to get a person you need at any given point because of changes to the pay bands is more of a business problem. For us, in the grand scheme of things, although we do not like it, we would rather have an immigration skills charge than a much higher entry level of pay to bring people in.

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

Q 95 In trying to target action against criminals who exploit workers, which is something we can all agree on, do you think the Bill blurs the lines between employment law and criminal activity?

Neil Carberry: I think that is a significant risk, less so around the role of the director than the recent discussion about expanding the role of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. The role of the GLA so far has largely been an employment process. Since its creation the GLA has spent rather more time telling my members where the commas should be in employment contracts, which is an employment issue, than kicking down doors in parts of the country where doors need to be kicked down.

My sense is that we need to maintain that gap, for exactly the reasons that your colleague raised earlier, which are that employment law is a civil issue; most of its infraction is inadvertent or due to lack of knowledge, so it is really important that people are able to address that—there are routes for people to address that—and it is about the bit of the labour market where workers are not able to secure their rights, which should be at issue in the Bill. The CBI’s test for this Bill, in practice, when it finishes its passage, is to make sure that the actions contained within it are about addressing those issues of exploitation.