Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

Brooks Newmark Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills]

Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. It can be no surprise that the public have great concern about what might happen when new nations have unfettered access to free movement, given that our experience with other eastern European nations gaining such freedom is that so many of their nationals chose to come to this country. I accept that most of them chose to come here to work, but that leaves us with the fundamental question of how to deal with that when unemployment in this country is still far higher than we would like.

[Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)]

I realise that my hon. Friend is trying to make progress, but he makes an important point about the contradiction between people coming from Europe, eastern Europe in particular, because they believe jobs are here, and the perception of people locally that they are taking jobs. The reality is that many local people simply will not take those jobs; that is why they are being filled by eastern Europeans. That is the skills gap at the low end. It is not that there are no jobs; many people locally will simply not take the jobs, because they do not want to work for such pay or in those particular roles. That is the issue.

[Nigel Mills]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. One of the drivers of the Government’s welfare reforms is to encourage people to take work if they are offered it; if they choose not to take work that is available, they do not get the benefits that they would presumably like to keep. For the welfare reforms to work, however, we need jobs to be available, so that people can be gently encouraged to take them, even if they are perhaps not their first choice. If the jobs that exist are taken by those who have just arrived in this country, those necessary and important welfare reforms become much harder to achieve. We must remember that a first job can be the start of the career ladder; it is not necessarily the end of it. Encouraging people to take jobs even if they do not think that they are suited to them, or if the jobs are not quite what they are after, is perfectly appropriate policy.

I shall try to get back to the thread of my argument. Let me set out why I tabled an amendment in Committee to keep in place transitional restrictions—and I am grateful that 73 other MPs have chosen to sign that amendment for Report. Looking at the criteria in the accession treaties that allowed us and other western European nations to keep restrictions until the last possible minute, we were allowed the restrictions, and chose to keep them, because there was still serious disruption in our employment market.

Two years ago, the Government commissioned an independent assessment from the Migration Advisory Committee of whether the test was still being met. The main criteria looked at were levels of employment and unemployment, the claimant count, and vacancies, both in 2011 and pre-recession. The pre-recession level of employment was 72.7%; two years ago, that was down at 70.6%. Unemployment before the recession was 5.1%; two years ago, it was 7.8%. The claimant count was 3% pre-recession and 4.6% two years ago; vacancies had been 621,000, but were down to 469,000. Those figures were the justification for saying, “We need to keep these restrictions for another two years. Our labour market can’t cope with the potential disruption of a large number of people arriving.”

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[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time today, Ms Dorries. I welcome the measured way in which the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) put his case. I congratulate him and the hon. Members for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) and for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) on applying to the Backbench Business Committee for this debate. It is good to see so many people here in Westminster Hall on the day that the House rises, but what a pity it is that the debate is not being held in the Chamber itself, where we could have had an even longer and more detailed debate.

[Mr Newmark]

I respect the fact that the right hon. Gentleman is here, but I find it strange that an enormous amount of Conservative Members are here to discuss this important issue. I cannot believe that the issue is of concern only to those Members of Parliament who happen to be Conservatives or to their constituents. Surely there are Labour MPs with the same concerns, so why have they not joined him here today?

[Keith Vaz]

The remit of the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee does not extend to controlling the diaries of members of the parliamentary Labour party, but it is their loss: I think it is important that we should be here participating in this debate.

We should start by acknowledging the strong and important relations that we have with Bulgaria and Romania. I visited both countries while I was Minister for Europe, when we started the enlargement process. The ambassadors representing the two countries here are excellent, as are our ambassadors in Sofia and Bucharest; in particular, I want to acknowledge the way in which Martin Harris, our ambassador in Bucharest, is ensuring that good relations between our two countries are fostered even at this challenging time.

The Home Affairs Committee has been looking at the issue of the transitional restrictions for a number of years and has made a number of recommendations. Earlier this year, with the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who is currently sitting on my right, and the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), I went to Bucharest to meet members of the Romanian Government and to talk with members of the Romanian community. If there are regrets—I have a few regrets in my speech—my primary regret is that the Immigration Minister and the Home Secretary have not taken the opportunity over the past year to go to Romania and Bulgaria and engage with those Governments. We talk about push and pull factors—why it is people decide to travel all the way from Bucharest or Sofia to live in Leicester, London or Manchester—and we should have worked with other Governments to find out the problems and look at the issues.

For example, in response to the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), the hon. Member for Amber Valley referred to the number of talented people leaving Romania and Bulgaria. When we were in Bucharest, we spoke with the president of the Romanian equivalent of the British Medical Association. He lamented the fact that so many talented young Romanian doctors had decided to leave Romania to work in the United Kingdom and in other countries—on average they trebled or even quadrupled their salaries when they came to our countries—which was having a detrimental effect on Romania and Bulgaria. That is why I wish that the Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister had visited, because they would have been able to establish a dialogue and try to see what we could have done to help those countries.

One way in which we could have helped was in respect of the huge amount of money that was allocated to Romania when it joined the European Union. It may surprise Members to note that 87% of the £20 billion that was given to Romania in pre-accession funds have still not been accessed, because sufficient assistance is not being given to the Romanian Government to ensure that they get the funds. If those funds were accessed, the jobs that people seek to find here might have been made available in those countries. Across the House, we all support the enlargement of the European Union; I cannot remember an occasion in the past 26 years when any party has voted against enlargement. We allow countries to join the European Union, but then we leave them on their own. Our Ministers should have engaged more—under the previous Government and under this Government—to ensure that there was proper access to those funds.

The big question that remains unanswered is why we still do not have estimates of how many people will come here next year. On 21 October 2008, the then shadow Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), said that one of the greatest failures of the last Government was the failure to predict the consequences of enlargement in 2004. Given that, research should have been conducted so that we would be aware—at least have estimates—of the numbers that would be coming into this country. For the reasons outlined by the hon. Member for Amber Valley—the pressure on housing, on schools and on the health service—if we had even estimates it would be helpful. When we went to Bucharest, we came across a university that had conducted research and had produced estimates. It is very remiss of this Government not to have done the same.

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[Keith Vaz]

The only thing that I can say to the hon. Gentleman is that he should come and join us. If he thinks for one moment that the media will turn up at 7.40 am after the biggest party of the year—31 December —he will be very surprised. I do not expect that any of them will be there, but the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood and I, who are not big partygoers and who both abstain from the usual parties on new year’s eve, will be there.

However, the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) makes a more valid point, in that people are already here. Of course they are, and therefore, if they are already here, we should also be considering what is happening to those people. At the end of the day, 1 January is the critical time. That is when the restrictions are to be removed.

[Mr Newmark]

I have been listening carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman is saying, and I am still not sure of his direction of travel, if I may say that. I am not sure whether he is saying that Romanians and Bulgarians will suddenly buy tickets to get on a plane to come here and live off our exceedingly generous benefits system, and if so, we have heard what the Government are doing, which is to put far greater restrictions on the ability of those to come here, before they can claim benefits or even housing or anything like that—the Government are trying to deal with that issue; the longest period of time that somebody can claim will be six months, and they have to wait three months—or is he saying that they are coming here because there are lots of jobs?

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[Mr Bone]

I am grateful for that intervention. The simple answer is no. I think that we need to control our own borders. I do not think that we should be tinkering with the mechanisms; we should have complete control of what we do, as I think the right hon. Gentleman said in his concluding remarks.

A recent report on the economic effects of immigration found that those on the lowest wages feel the biggest impact of immigration, as immigration holds back the wages of the least well paid. We should be supporting those hard-working people, not eroding their wages by allowing uncontrolled immigration from countries with such vast economic differences. Moreover, although unemployment is down, youth unemployment is proving stubbornly high. With nearly 1 million under-25s still unemployed, the focus should be on helping them into jobs, not allowing into the job market an inpouring of immigrants who are looking for work.

[Mr Newmark]

Will my hon. Friend at least acknowledge that the Government’s policy, in the autumn statement, of abolishing the jobs tax for under-21s will encourage many small businesses, especially retailers, to hire young people? I go back to the question that I asked my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills): there is a skills gap at the lower end, so who will fill that skills gap if we do not have people coming in from eastern Europe to plug that hole?

[Mr Bone]

I am grateful for that intervention. No one in this Chamber is prouder than me of what this Government are doing to lower unemployment, and of the great efforts that the Prime Minister is making, but my hon. Friend is completely wrong on the second bit of the argument. We should not be paying jobseeker’s allowance to people who have the opportunity to work, but do not want to work. That is how those jobs will be filled—not by bringing people in from central Europe. Gosh, I got quite cross about that.