Accession (Immigration and Worker Registration) (Revocation, Savings and Consequential Provisions) Regulations 2011

Baroness Neville-Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, this statutory instrument was drawn to the attention of the House because of the public policy likely to be of interest to it, not because of a defective Explanatory Memorandum. It is not so long ago that we had no Explanatory Memoranda to orders, only Explanatory Notes, which still exist but which are much narrower, technical and often, I must say, opaque. It has only been since 2004, when the Merits Committee was formed, that we have had this type of assistance. I should declare that I am a member of the Merits Committee at present. I should like to take this opportunity to congratulate the committee's advisers, Jane White and Grant Oliver, who pursue with a quiet doggedness issues which arise on too many of the literally thousands of SIs which come before us: things such as lack of reporting on the outcome of consultation, and very often the late presentation of an order so that there is no proper time to investigate before it comes into force.

It should go without saying—although I had better say it—that accountability and access to what the Government do is of the utmost importance. Transparency may be a little overworked as a term, but the concept is not. Information must be available and accessible, not least to avoid any suggestion that what we have—this is not my term, although I wish it was—is not evidence-based policy but policy-based evidence. The Explanatory Memorandum is important, because it is a public document, but I think that this Explanatory Memorandum is clear. It is detailed within its own terms. Perhaps it would be good to have an impact assessment to accompany statutory instruments, but, as things are at the moment, that is not usual.

My greater concern is the usual—the importance of joining up different parts of government. The SI comes from the Home Office; it was announced by the noble Baroness. Her statement dealt with the procedures affecting people coming into the UK from the accession states, not the wider impact. The report notes with disappointment that the DWP has not provided an estimate of associated costs. It had seven years to do so. I cannot resist the basic arithmetic, which tells us when six of those seven years were.

The noble Lord has raised a number of interesting questions, and I will, to an extent, repeat them. Given the time that there has been, why have the Government not sought to develop a more accurate measure of the likely numbers? The noble Lord referred to the 11,000—it may be almost 12,000—claims rejected in the past calendar year which apparently would have succeeded with the ending of the transitional arrangements. How confident are the Government that those figures are close to being accurate? How will they seek to verify them? Newspaper articles use the figure of more than 100,000 migrants. If I were to ask the Minister whether she knows where the newspapers got the figure of 100,000 from, that would probably be an unfair question, because we all know that newspapers are not necessarily the most accurate reporters.

Have the Government worked out the cost of the increased access to benefits? It would be helpful if the Minister would say a little about the Jobcentre Plus team to which the noble Lord referred. Is it dealing with just these accession state nationals? I hope not, as I hope this is all in a wider context. I also hope that it is not just the DWP but, for instance, BIS or Communities that have considered the implications of this change. I am not suggesting that they have not.

The point of the transitional arrangements was to monitor accession state nationals’ access to the UK labour market. We are told that by paragraph 7(2) of the Explanatory Memorandum. What was the result?

The best argument for a full Explanatory Memorandum dealing with the impacts is yesterday’s Daily Express, whose front page screamed, “Migrants Flood Back to Britain”. I know the reluctance to let the facts get in the way of a good story, but perhaps fuller Explanatory Memoranda on this sort of issue would assist in ensuring accuracy rather than raising the temperature so unnecessarily and unpleasantly.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Neville-Jones)]

My Lords, I thank the two noble Lords who have spoken. Let me try to explain why the Government limited themselves in the Explanatory Memorandum to the points that it made. It was not out of a desire to deny Parliament legitimate information. It had much more to do with the inherent difficulty of getting reliable figures into the public domain. I will try to explain why we were cautious.

There are two aspects to this. The first is what the future pattern of migration to this country is likely to be and the second is the consequences for the benefits budget. My first point is about migration. Noble Lords will know from experience that making predictions about levels of migration from new member states is a fairly precarious activity. The Benches opposite are abundantly aware that previous efforts to put numbers on expected arrivals after May 2004 were not entirely successful. Indeed, they subsequently chose not to estimate arrivals from Bulgaria and Romania when they joined the EU on 1 January. I have sympathy with that because of the previous experience. We all recall that it was estimated that 13,000 A8 nationals would migrate to the UK in 2004. There is genuine difficulty in this.

However, there are some points that can usefully be made. First, there is the position of A8 nationals who are already here. One effect of the worker registration scheme has been that those entering the UK labour market have generally been prevented from having immediate access to out-of-work benefits if they are seeking work or become unemployed. It is also reasonable to assume that a substantial proportion of those who have arrived since 2004 were already no longer subject to the restrictions because once they have worked here legally for more than 12 months they are no longer subject to the WRS.

The number of A8 workers who have registered under the WRS since May 2004 is approximately 1.1 million. The WRS does not record how many of those who have registered have subsequently left the UK, but statistics from the Labour Force Survey suggest that the number of A8 nationals in employment in the UK in the three months to the end of 2010 was 615,000. It can be assumed that a fraction of that number, but we do not know how many, are A8 workers who have already worked legally and continuously in the UK for more than 12 months and so are not subject to the WRS and therefore the termination makes no difference to their status.

What is more difficult to predict is the extent to which we may experience more or less migration from A8 countries after 30 April 2011. While the Labour Force Survey provides us with some information on the stock of A8 migrants to the UK, it does not tell us about flows over time. The general trend indicated by the International Passenger Survey estimate of long-term migration from A8 countries, which was published by the Office for National Statistics last year, is that immigration levels steadily fell during 2008 and 2009 and then levelled off while numbers of A8 nationals emigrating from the UK rose sharply in 2008 before exits fell off. The result is that net migration from A8 countries appears to have been positive, but not particularly strongly, over the past year.