Immigration Bill

Charles Walker Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I sat in this Chamber for 13 years while a Labour Government were producing Acts time and time again. One thing that one learns in this role is that, in the immigration arena, one has constantly to be looking to see that the system is what it should be. There were some things that we were not able to do in the last Immigration Act that we are now able to do in this new Bill.

[Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mrs May]

I did say that I would make a little progress.

[Mr Walker]

Just very briefly, please.

[Mrs May]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will try to catch my eye later on. I will make a little more progress if I may.

I referred to our achievements and said that they were helping us to build an immigration system that is fairer, stronger and more effective, but if we are to ensure that we can protect our public services from abuse and that the system works in the national interest, and if we are to tackle the illegal labour market where vulnerable people are often exploited by unscrupulous employers and subjected to appalling conditions, then further reform is needed. The new Immigration Bill will help us to do that in a number of ways.

Part 1 is about tackling illegal working and preventing the exploitation of workers. The House will appreciate that illegal working is one of the principal pull factors for people coming to the UK to live and work illegally, but those who do so are particularly vulnerable and can find themselves living and working in dangerous and degrading conditions. The illegal labour market can also depress or hold back pay and conditions for the local sector, and undercut reputable businesses. Increasingly, we are seeing labour market exploitation becoming an organised criminal activity, and it is clear that Government regulators responsible for enforcing workers’ rights are in need of reform.

In June 2014, the independent Migration Advisory Committee called for better co-ordination between the various enforcement agencies so that employment rights can be enforced more effectively. Members of this House have pressed that issue on many occasions. In our election manifesto, we committed to introducing tougher labour market regulation to tackle illegal working and exploitation. This Bill will allow us to do that. It establishes a new statutory director of labour market enforcement who will be responsible for providing a central hub of intelligence and for facilitating the flexible allocation of resources across the different regulators. In addition, this morning we published a consultation on the future of labour market enforcement, and I will place a copy of it in the House Library.

[Mrs May]

My right hon. Friend is right. If somebody is admitted at the border, or is found at the border without the right papers, without their visa and without the right to be here in the United Kingdom, they may be turned around and returned to the country from which they have come. As he knows, if somebody is able to come into the country by other routes and get here illegally, identification is rather harder.

[Mr Charles Walker]

What we must do in this country is get better at removing people when we discover that they are here illegally. What frustrates my constituents and their Member of Parliament is that the appeals process can go on for year after year. People have worked out that, once they have arrived in this country, it is very difficult for us to remove them.

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend puts his finger on an important point. We have already been able to take some action in this area. We have reduced the number of appeals routes, from 17 to four, and, in the previous Immigration Act, we took some action with the “deport first, appeal later” arrangements, but that was restricted to a particular category of individuals. We will extend that in this Bill. Once again, we will ensure that it is easier for us to remove people who have no right to be here, without them having this continuous process of appeal after appeal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

I think that is where the Home Secretary is beginning to cut an isolated figure, as she did last week at her party’s conference. I understand that her own Cabinet colleagues are making the same argument to her—the Chancellor of the Exchequer got dangerously close to making the same argument on his recent trip to China. The hon. Lady is right. If we are looking for an area where there is economic benefit to the country in the long term, it is absolutely that of welcoming to this country students who will then commit themselves to the country for the rest of their working lives.

The critical response to the Home Secretary’s speech last week did not come just from the usual suspects on the Labour Benches. The Daily Telegraph called it

“awful, ugly, misleading, cynical and irresponsible”,

while the Institute of Directors, no less, dismissed it as

“irresponsible rhetoric and pandering to anti-immigration sentiment”—

serious words. They were not alone. The public can spot any attempt to play politics with this issue from a million miles away, and that is why the Home Secretary got the reaction she did. She claimed in Manchester that immigration was undermining social cohesion. I put it to her that legislating in haste without clear evidence and bringing forward half-baked, divisive measures is far more likely to do precisely that.

[Mr Charles Walker]

I know that the right hon. Gentleman is concerned about immigration, but the Leader of the Opposition, his boss, has said that there should be no borders in this country anywhere—forget the European Union. He said during the Labour leadership contest that we should have open borders. Does the right hon. Gentleman share that view?

[Andy Burnham]

I stood alongside him and he said no such thing, so I will move on from that pointless intervention.

A number of organisations—Amnesty International, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Justice, the TUC and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants—have expressed serious reservations about the Bill. They believe it could damage social cohesion, force children into destitution, undermine efforts to tackle human trafficking and modern slavery, erode human rights and civil liberties, and lead to widespread discrimination.

Let me take those issues in turn, starting with the potential for discrimination. Clause 12 in part 2 amends the Immigration Act 2014 to make it a criminal offence for a landlord to rent premises to an individual with no immigration status, punishable by five years in prison. The measure is intended to underpin the national roll-out of the Government’s right to rent scheme, as the Home Secretary said. I am not against asking landlords to carry out reasonable checks of identity documents, as they already do, but there are a couple of points to make. First, landlords are not border or immigration experts, they are not trained in reading official paperwork from around the world, and they are not experts in spotting forged documents, so on what basis are we planning to outsource immigration control to them? Will not the regulatory burden that this will impose on landlords be way beyond the capacity that many can manage? Secondly, given all that, is it really proportionate to threaten them with jail, and will not that have a major impact on the housing market and the way it works?

The House will recall that in the previous Parliament the Government tried to bring forward the same proposals, but given the huge implications, not least for private landlords, they were forced to back down and pilot them. A commitment was given to this House that the findings of the pilot would be presented to us before the Government proceeded any further. That was the commitment given by those on the Front Bench. We learned yesterday that that commitment will not be honoured. Although the Home Office has conducted its study, it will not present its findings until the Committee stage. That is not good enough. This House should not be in a position where it is being asked by the Home Secretary to vote tonight on measures that could have a huge impact in every constituency represented here today without evidence for what those measures might do. It is not just a discourtesy; it is downright dangerous. She is asking us to be complicit in legislating in haste, and this House should have none of it.

Let me explain why. We know that right to rent could cause widespread discrimination, not just against migrants but against British citizens. In the absence of the Government’s study, an independent survey was carried out by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants. It found that in the west midlands, the pilot area, 42% of landlords said that right to rent had made them less likely to consider someone who does not have a British passport, while 27% were now more reluctant—as my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) has said—to engage with those with foreign accents or names. Those are very serious findings. Why on earth is the Home Office not presenting its own information to the House so that we can establish whether it is correct?