Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hollobone]

My hon. Friend needed to pay more attention to the presentation. The estimate is 30,000 to 70,000 a year, with a central estimate of an increase of 50,000 a year in the population for five years, as the right hon. Member for Leicester East said. The estimate is based in part on the precedent set by the A8, but also on the growth rate of the current Romanian and Bulgarian population in the UK and the number of national insurance numbers issued, as well as the disparity in incomes and living standards between the UK and Romania and Bulgaria. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) will appreciate that the disparity between us and Romania and Bulgaria is rather bigger than the one between us and Poland. A Romanian or Bulgarian moving to the UK to work at the minimum wage could increase his take-home pay by four and a half to five times, after accounting for the cost of living. Families could increase their income by between eight and nine times. To put it another way, workers on the minimum wage in the UK could earn in one hour roughly what could be earned in a day in Romania or Bulgaria.

There are other factors to consider. Spain and Italy, where unemployment is now very high, especially among the young, have nearly one million Romanian and Bulgarian workers each. A worker from Romania or Bulgaria could increase his take-home pay in Spain or Italy by at least 50% if he or she were to move to the UK. Another serious issue, to which I have not had a satisfactory response from the Minister despite raising it on the Floor of the House, is that Romania is known to have issued some 600,000 passports to ethnic Romanians from Moldova. Moldova is not a member of the European Union and yet a significant proportion of its population has the right to move to, live in and work in the UK. I am sure that that was never the intention of the accession treaties. The number of ethnic Roma from Romania and Bulgaria who might migrate is another factor to consider, but the numbers are extremely uncertain. Substantial numbers of Roma people live in poor conditions in a number of EU countries. An estimated 2.5 million Roma live in Romania and Bulgaria.

There have been welcome changes, such as the Government’s announcement about out-of-work benefits for people coming from Romania and Bulgaria. The announcement was good, but do the measures also apply to tax credits? I would like a specific response from the Minister. Does the new three-month rule for entitlement to out-of-work benefits extend to people from other EU member states or only to those from the new entrants, Romania and Bulgaria?

Crime is a big concern. To put the issue into a pithy sentence, I would say that we are importing a wave of crime from Romania and Bulgaria. I put it as strongly as that deliberately. There are no powers to deport EU citizens, unless they have been convicted of an offence that attracts a two-year prison sentence or a sentence of 12 months or more for an offence involving drugs, violence or sexual crime. We should be able to deport any foreign national, whether from an EU or non-EU state, to their country of origin if they are convicted of any crime in this country. That is one thing on which I agree with the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), who said that on the Floor of the House when he was Prime Minister, but sadly his Government did nothing. The right hon. Member for Leicester East, who is currently conversing with you, Ms Dorries, mentioned Judge Sean Morris, who said in court the other day to Romanians and Bulgarians,

“don’t come here and commit crime.”

He has delayed sentencing one such criminal, because of his frustration with delays of six months and more in obtaining criminal records from the Romanian authorities, and he has called on Ministers to do something about it. In Westminster Hall some months ago, I raised directly with the Minister the issue of the number of criminals from Romania and Bulgaria coming to our shores. There is a crime wave, particularly in London and particularly on the London underground, to do with Romanians.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

I am sorry to arrive in the middle of the hon. Gentleman’s speech. He raises an issue that resonates closely. Just across the river from the House of Commons, there is an increasingly difficult problem with many people doing exactly what he describes in the Waterloo area. Everyone gets involved—the police and the community safety teams—but at the end of the day, they can do nothing to get those people, some of whom do not even have the right to be here as EU citizens, out of the country. People are getting angry. I hope the Minister will respond to that.

[Mr Hollobone]

I welcome the intervention from the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), not least because, as always, she knows what she is talking about. She is a proud champion of the concerns of her constituents, who will be rightly concerned about that issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

I do not think the name of the aircraft was the precursor of the deal falling through or the reason why it did so. I could have said “Typhoon”, as my hon. Friend is aware.

The majority would agree with the approach that I have spelled out, but fundamental flaws, out-of-date practices and British schoolboy errors have allowed a scale of migration into the UK over one decade that is incomparable with the spikes in migration on this island in all its history, as I mentioned earlier. That is what concerns my constituents and those of other hon. Members.

Let us look at some of those mistakes. Like other hon. Members, I am sorry that there are now no Labour Back Benchers—[Interruption.] I am sorry; apart from the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), who was not here at the beginning, there are none here to put the case. And there is not a single Lib Dem here, either.

Under Labour, in 2004, there was a deliberate policy of uncontrolled migration, resulting in more than 1 million people coming from central and eastern Europe, who now live here. Why? Because the UK completely opted out of the transitional controls on new EU member states. Britain was the only country to do so, ignoring the right to impose a seven-year ban before new citizens could come and work here. We were almost all alone in Europe.

[Kate Hoey]

On that point, many members of the Labour party were against that at that time. Indeed, my hon. Friends on the Front Bench at the moment have said that that was the wrong decision and have apologised for it.

[Mr Ellwood]

I am not sure that the apology will be accepted by a nation that is now having to live with the consequences. As we have seen, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) is now embarrassed to admit that that was a huge mistake. I am sorry that the hon. Lady was not more vocal at the time or that her voice was not listened to, because that decision has had a profound effect, not only in respect of migration, but on the balance in the UK, as has already been mentioned.