Draft Immigration Skills Charge Regulations 2017

Anne McLaughlin Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd March 2017 General Committees

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

I have listened to what you said about not going off the subject, Mr Streeter. Given your patience with me in another place yesterday, you will be pleased to hear that I have taken my pen and scored out an awful lot of what I was planning to say.

I want to speak about our fundamental opposition to the regulations. My colleague and hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North will have some more specific points and some questions. When we get back to the fundamentals of this, I would argue, mistaken proposal, it is clear that it is yet another policy driven simply by the Prime Minister’s unachievable aim of getting migration under 100,000. That ever-retreating mirage of a policy ambition is perhaps causing more misery on these islands than any other of the Government’s objectives, outside those of the Department for Work and Pensions and the Brexit Department.

Any economy that is to expand needs to fill skill shortages in the short term, as its businesses grow, even if it ensures that in the middle term local workers are given the opportunity to be trained. Nobody would argue with that intention. What these measures will do is to discourage skilled workers and tax-paying migrants from many of our closest friends and allies from contributing to the UK economy—a policy that, it is clear to me, will harm British business.

We should not be punishing companies that need to bring in skilled workers from elsewhere. Those workers will contribute to our tax base, as will the companies that sponsor them, and we should not be disincentivising that simply because some employers, as the Minister said, do not make the effort to train and find people from the UK.

In the short to medium term, all we are doing is encouraging further migration from the EU. That is something that I wholeheartedly approve of, but I do not think it was the intention of the drafters of the regulations. Companies will quite likely look to the continent to avoid paying the sponsoring fees, even as we stumble further forward into the shadows of Brexit. Whether those EU nationals will be the slightest bit interested in those overtures, given the insecurity they will face if they accept them, remains to be seen.

We share the concerns of the hon. Member for Blackpool South on the public sector, and in particular the health service. As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North will come on to that.

The Government are simply pulling up the drawbridge, not only on EU workers but on non-EU workers. I expect and hope that Scotland will choose a different path, but there is no guarantee of that; we may be stuck with this. Even if Scotland chooses a different path, I want the rest of the UK to be able to make it independently, seeing as that is what people have chosen. However, it will not make it if it keeps putting up barriers to people who have the skills to grow the economy.

We oppose the charge, and I urge the Minister to think again and to think about what we have all had to say today. I wish him a happy birthday, but I am more likely to bake him a cake if he considers what we have said.

[The Chair]

Before I call Kirsty Blackman, Caroline Johnson has a few words to say.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon]

For two reasons. First, we are trying to change behaviours and develop—[Interruption.] If I am given a chance, I will set out all the things we are doing to invest in skills in the NHS. The second reason is to raise funds to invest in skills. We want to change behaviours and we want to raise funds. We want to share the burden of paying for the cost of skills across the United Kingdom and not put all of the burden on the hard-pressed taxpayer but share it fairly.

[Anne McLaughlin]

Would it not be quite useful not just to invest in training new doctors and nurses, but to treat existing NHS staff a little better so that they want to stay in the NHS? For example, there might a nursing shortage because the Government stopped nursing bursaries. In Scotland, nursing bursaries still exist, plus there is an additional fund for those facing extra hardship. The result is that, while applications to train as a nurse in England and Wales have dropped, they have gone up by 50% in Scotland.

[The Chair]

Order. Interventions should be brief.