Migration

David Mowat Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Progress has been slow, and we are a bit short of time, but the last question was commendably pithy. If we can follow in that vein, it will help the House with later business.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

Like others, I welcome today’s statement, but could the Home Secretary tell us a bit more about the criteria she will use to determine the proportions of settlers going to the various nations and regions of the UK?

[Mrs May]

There will be a balance between the offers of accommodation and the availability of the appropriate support for individuals. It is a careful process to ensure that individuals are placed where their needs can be best met. For example, it might be appropriate for somebody with a particular medical need to be in the vicinity of a hospital with such a specialty. It is not a question of allocating on a quota basis across the UK, even if others might suggest we do that within Europe. It is important to fit the offers of support to the needs of the individuals.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Mowat Excerpts

Monday 9th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

13. What assessment she has made of the role of voluntary organisations in tackling radicalisation and extremism.

[The Minister for Security and Immigration (James Brokenshire)]

Voluntary organisations and communities can play an important role in confronting and challenging extremism. Local Prevent projects have reached more than 55,000 people since early 2012, and the Government have supported community-based campaigns such as Families Matter and Making a Stand.

[David Mowat]

The Minister will be aware of the successful work being done by the Warrington-based Foundation for Peace with young people who are vulnerable to extremism, many of whom have now moved on to become young leaders in their communities. That work is focused mainly on parts of northern England. Would he support a wider roll-out, and will he meet me and members of the foundation to discuss how that could be achieved?

[James Brokenshire]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for highlighting the work of the Foundation for Peace, which I visited a couple of years ago. I am aware of its continuing work, and I would be happy to meet him and representatives of the foundation to discuss the steps that they are taking. We are clearly looking for good practice that can be shared around the country to confront and combat extremism and radicalisation.

Home Affairs

David Mowat Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). I have been desperately trying to think of something that I could agree with him on at the start of my remarks, but we will just have to let that pass.

I support the provisions in the Queen’s Speech. There is a great deal in it about modern slavery, about child protection, on which we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee), and about trafficking. In particular, there is a great deal about cybercrime and strengthening the legislation around disabling IT systems. We need a reorientation in the criminal justice system to address that issue, which is a massive and growing problem that threatens not only financial loss but organisations’ economic stability.

Of the 11 Bills in the Queen’s Speech, I want principally to address my remarks to those on pensions tax and private pensions, and the Bill on infrastructure and what it means for our energy security and for fracking. The pensions legislation was described by the Prime Minister as the centrepiece of the Queen’s Speech, which in many ways it is. It is hard to think of an issue that affects so many people so much as what they will have to spend in retirement. We have systematic under-provision of retirement income throughout the country. There is a rule of thumb that says that pensioners are divided into three slugs of a third each. One third broadly has some kind of public sector pension, possibly not enough, but nearly always more generous than the next third, who are broadly in some kind of private sector scheme. Increasingly, the gold-plated private sector schemes have been closed, but even those people are better off than the final third who have no provision at all. The pension reforms in the Queen’s Speech, and lately in Parliament, have addressed those last two-thirds.

In the comparison between public and private pensions—this is not a dig at public pension provision; we need good and generous provision—it is worth reflecting on the fact that a pension that is inflation-proofed at around £15,000 per annum would cost £400,000 to purchase in the private sector. Virtually no one can do that. The average pension pot in the private sector is about £35,000. A problem is about to hit us.

The structural issue in the UK comes of a policy point versus the EU. We have chosen to pay relatively low pensions to people on the assumption that they will be topped up by the private sector. Nearly every other country in Europe has chosen not to go down that route but has higher provision. The Pensions Minister has made some progress in addressing that. We have paid £40 billion per annum tax relief into the pension system to mitigate this problem, but it has not worked and it is not working. There is a massive distrust of the pension system among the punters out there. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that they would rather bite off their right arm than invest in a pension. Typically, that is because there is a view that so much goes in charges. There has been a market failure. For a pension pot, about 30% or 40% can go on charges, and the provisions need to address that.

The same is true of annuities. Until quite recently, pensioners have been buying annuities without going on the open market. There have been inconsistent and inappropriate products. In my constituency, about 1,200 people per annum are buying an annuity, of whom more than a half are buying the wrong product. That is just wrong. This is compounded by the auto-enrolment initiative and its success, making the need for action even stronger.

The Government have introduced legislation to allow small pots to be combined; they have provided a cap on pension charges at 0.75%, half the amount the Opposition had in terms of stakeholder provisions; they have dramatically and structurally changed the annuity rules so that annuities no longer need to be taken out, which has burst the whole market wide open; and they have removed many of the abusive features of pension funds, such as active market discounts whereby pensioners who remain in a pension fund having left the company pay more in charges. Most interestingly, in this Queen’s Speech they have brought forward a collective defined contribution idea, which is a paraphrase of the Dutch solution, to try to make progress on costs. Broadly, the assumption there is that there is a collectivisation of risk with pension schemes coming together with the idea that costs will be reduced, which I very much hope happens. There is evidence that in Holland the average pension is 20% to 25% higher than in the UK. The collective schemes may be one reason for that, and another is a much higher propensity to use passive investments. I very much welcome what is going on in that area.

It is worth pointing out that in Holland these collective schemes, which are brought forward in the Queen’s Speech, tend to be industry-specific. Pensioners share the risk, but there is also an element by which pensioners can be penalised, even after they have retired, something which is not currently allowed in UK law. There is therefore an intergenerational issue to be fixed there, but it is an important first step, which I support.

In summary, the Government have addressed some of the issues in the pensions industry, including under-provision in the private sector, but there will remain a massive problem, which I have not talked about at length. The £40 billion of tax relief that we have put into the pension system is to a large extent misdirected, and at some point some Government will have to address that and make progress on it.

The Infrastructure Bill, and the encouragement it gives to the exploitation of unconventional gas, either coal gas or shale gas, is important in relation to the three tenets of our energy policy—decarbonisation, lower cost and security of supply. We hear a lot about whether we should frack. Is it important that we do so? We talk as though it is an option, as though no one else is fracking.

The world has changed when it comes to fracking. It changed about five years ago when the United States went into the industry at great velocity. That changed our entire energy supply market. It is now a net exporter of energy and gas, as opposed to an importer. That has implications for its foreign policy—what it does in the gulf of Arabia and all that goes with that—but even more important in terms of how it relates to us is the fact that now its chemical feedstock and electricity costs are one-third of what ours are in the UK. That is a massive competitive change; it is a game-changer. The consequence of that is not necessarily whole businesses immediately moving from here or from Germany to America; it is rather that a new unit or distillation plant in Teesside or the north west will now be built by global companies in America to take advantage of costs that are one-third—not 10%—cheaper than ours. We have to address this situation.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I do not know about my hon. Friend’s constituents, but this week alone I have received more than 100 letters from mine who are concerned about fracking. Does he accept that the Government need to do more to convince British people of the need for fracking, and what is his constituents’ perception of fracking?

[David Mowat]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I accept that we need to do more to convince people that we need fracking; that is one of the reasons I am making a speech about it. It is a little bit about leadership—if we think something is the right answer, we go with it.

I do not want to say that there are no environmental issues associated with fracking, and of course it is important that we frack in the right areas; there will be some places where we should not frack and some places where we should. All that is true, but it is not a reason to turn our backs on this industry. The case that I am putting to my hon. Friend and to other Members is that the world is already fracking. This week, Germany gave the go-ahead for fracking; it had been reluctant to do that, but did so under pressure from its industry. We need to decide as a country how competitive we wish to be, but one of the vehicles of being competitive is cheap prices for energy and chemical feedstock, and fracking is one of the ways in which those cheap prices will be delivered.

There are three tenets of energy policy, the first of which is decarbonisation. Fracking—or gas, I should say—is an element of any decarbonisation strategy that we seriously wish to pursue. In this country, something like 50% of electricity comes from coal and oil. Replacing that coal and oil with gas is the single quickest and most effective way of reducing our carbon footprint. Indeed, of all the countries in the OECD, the one that reduced its carbon by the most in the last five years is the USA. It has done that because it has reduced its coal expenditure and usage, and instead used gas.

The UK—perhaps slightly counter-culturally—already has one of the lowest amounts of carbon per capita and per unit of GDP in the EU. A strategy based on replacing our coal with gas, and doing so more quickly, would lead to even more progress in that regard.

I have talked a little bit about cost, but it is self-evident that there is a correlation between GDP and energy usage. We cannot rebalance our economy on differentially high energy prices, particularly if we are rebalancing it towards manufacturing, and part of the solution is cheaper gas prices.

It has been said that our having unconventional shale gas in the UK does not necessarily reduce prices, and to an extent that is true. However, it is rather like saying we should not have exploited North sea gas or oil 30 years ago because there is a world market for North sea oil and we cannot guarantee that lower prices would—

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman is doing a very good job in answering the question that his colleague, the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), put about selling the whole idea of fracking. Does he agree not only that there are environmental benefits to fracking but that when one way to tackle fuel poverty, provide fuel security, make UK industry more competitive and even attract some industries that have gone overseas to come back again is to have our own supply of gas from the shale gas available to us?

[David Mowat]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman on all those points, and he made them succinctly and well. Fracking is not something that we can turn our backs on, and I am very pleased that it is in the Queen’s Speech. The point I was making was on the relative cost of energy. I have heard it said in this place that just because we produce shale gas, that will not necessarily reduce our gas prices by 60% or 70%, to the level they are in America. Of course, there is some truth in that; there is a worldwide market in gas, in the same way that there is in oil.

That said, the gas market is a little bit less mobile than the oil market. The European gas hub, which would be affected by gas prices, is smaller than the global market for crude oil. One of the reasons that we in this country cannot benefit from US gas in the way the US benefits from its gas is that the cost of the US sending it to us would probably double its price; it would still be cheaper, but it would be double the price that we would pay vis-à-vis the US. The summary of all this is that we need to get on with it.

The final point, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), is that of security of supply. Whether we like it or not, North sea production is coming down. There may be many things that we can do, either with an independent Scotland or with Scotland within the United Kingdom, to keep that supply going for as long as possible, but gas production in particular is considerably down; it is now something like half what it was at its peak.

Although we in this country have not up till now had to use Russian gas—most of our imported gas has come from Norway—I think I saw a report last month saying that Gazprom and Centrica have signed their first deal, so there is an element in all this of security of supply vis-à-vis the geopolitics of Europe as well.

I hope that the provisions in the Queen’s Speech to make it easier to exploit shale are proceeded with. What the legislation is really saying is that someone’s property rights do not necessarily extend to stopping people drilling a mile under their house or land. That seems to me as logical as saying that someone’s property rights do not extend to preventing aeroplanes from flying over their land. I believe that that was an issue in the USA at one time, and it had to be legislated away in much the same way as we are legislating here for fracking.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Mowat Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

I would never accuse the Secretary of State for Education of being narrow-minded. I take on board the hon. Lady’s praise for my Secretary of State who is leading the growth in the creative industries. We in DCMS are led by a Secretary of State who is leading a Department for growth. That is very good news indeed, and I repeat what I said: there is a huge input from the Secretary of State for Education.

I really would not take too much from an Ofsted report that looks at music hubs four months after they have been created and condemns them. The hon. Lady should speak to her friends in the Musicians Union, who are furious about that report.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

9. What steps she is taking to reduce differences in Arts Council funding spent in London and the regions.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

Arts Council England makes its funding decisions independently of Government, but it must take care to ensure all areas of the country have access to its funding. We have discussed this with the Arts Council and continue to do so, and the Arts Council has indicated that a priority in its forthcoming investment round will be to achieve a better balance from public funding and lottery investment across the country.

[David Mowat]

The Minister might be aware of the recent report, “Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital”, which stated that in 2012-13, £69 per head was spent in London while £4.60 per head was spent in the English regions. That represents a ratio of 15:1, which does not exist anywhere else in the world. How long will it take to get this fixed?

[Mr Vaizey]

I think we are making very good progress—

Oral Answers to Questions

David Mowat Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Vaizey]

The hon. Lady raised this point in yesterday’s Opposition day debate. She also extolled the many cultural virtues of Liverpool, and I heartily endorse her comments. I am sorry that I did not answer her question then. As I understand it, the Arts Council is talking to Liverpool about the cultural support it can give around the international festival, and I will talk to the Arts Council about its plans, and write to the hon. Lady.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

T6. The England football team is a valuable national asset, yet of the millions of pounds raised, over 50% goes to the professional game, not the impoverished grass roots; I speak as a director of Warrington Town football club, an example of the impoverished grass roots. Does the Minister intend to follow the Select Committee recommendation and make it Government policy to make a switch in regard to that funding?

[Hugh Robertson]

The Government can clearly direct funding only when they provide that funding, which they do through the whole sport plans and the football foundations. However, the Football Association is a signatory to the new code we set up in 2010 at the last review of the list, whereby it is pledged to give 30% of its UK broadcast income to grass-roots sport.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Mowat Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call Mr Graham Allen. Not here.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

7. What steps her Department is taking to encourage the development of non-league football clubs.

[The Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Hugh Robertson)]

We have been clear, along with the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, that we expect the Football Association to reform the governance of the game as a top priority. As part of that, we expect the FA to show representative, accountable and strategic leadership and help develop football across all levels including the grass-roots, non-league and professional parts of the game.

[David Mowat]

I declare an interest as a director of Warrington Town football club, which would not exist were it not for dozens of donors and unpaid volunteers. Other non-league clubs are going bust, yet 50% of the money from our national team continues to be diverted to the professional game, which is really very wealthy. The Select Committee has mentioned that problem. Will the Minister update us on the progress towards fixing that allocation?

[Hugh Robertson]

There is a fine dividing line here, because it is not for the Government to tell the sport how to allocate money that it raises itself any more than it would be for us to allocate the England and Wales Cricket Board’s broadcast income or the Rugby Football Union’s income from Twickenham. However, my hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the issue. If we can get the reforms at the FA that we and the Select Committee are pushing for, they will empower the board to take precisely the decisions that he advocates instead of relying on an arbitrary 50% split.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Mowat Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

One problem is that a lot of people are claiming that the UK is not open for business because of our visa system. The former Immigration Minister went out to visit China and clearly gave out the message. The former and current Immigration Ministers and I have met people from the universities, the CBI and other business sectors to talk to them about the issue. It is not just for the Government to go out and say that Britain is open for business—business organisations and universities should give out that message. As the Immigration Minister said earlier, UCAS figures show that the number of applications from non-EU overseas students to our universities has gone up. The universities should stop claiming that there is a problem and go out and say that they are open for business.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

11. What assessment she has made of the potential for achieving savings through economies of scale in police procurement.

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)]

The Government estimate that savings of £200 million per year, including from economies of scale, can be made through joining up police procurement by the end of March 2015.

[David Mowat]

One area with potential benefits is IT spend, which should not continue to be replicated 42 times. Will the Minister give us an update on the progress of the Police ICT Company, announced in July, and confirm that the police and crime commissioners, including the excellent John Dwyer in Cheshire, will be expected to use it?

[Damian Green]

I echo my hon. Friend’s praise for the new PCC in Cheshire. We hope that the PCCs will eventually own, take over and run the Police ICT Company because its purpose is to ensure that the PCCs have the opportunity to secure critical services and help to make savings. The company will offer services that help individual forces achieve efficiencies through the procurement, re-use and management of their ICT, and I very much hope that a large number of commissioners will take up this offer.

Abu Qatada

David Mowat Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I came to the Dispatch Box to make the announcement because the Government were taking action, and I rather thought that the House of Commons would like to hear about it.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

The Home Secretary may have seen today’s press reports saying that the appeal was launched only after a reminder was sent by officials of the Court to Abu Qatada’s lawyers. If that is the case, does it not bring into question the independence of the officials and of the Court itself?

Immigration

David Mowat Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lilley]

In a moment, as I want to finish answering the point that was raised.

I am not suggesting that certain categories of skilled workers could not be used during a temporary shortage while domestic employees were being trained, or that there could not be a skills transfer when the skills that were required could not, by their very nature, be acquired domestically or through training. We have traditionally allowed companies to import workers for the purposes of skills transfers when the skills concerned are company-specific.

Let us say that IBM is setting up a factory here. It has an IBM way of doing things. Initially, it will need to bring in the IBM accountant to show British accountants how to run the accounts and the financial system. Those running the production line may have to bring in IBM production engineers to train British engineers in their ways of doing things. It is not possible to buy such company-specific skills on the market; they must be imported temporarily. However, because the people who have transferred the skills invariably return, the transfer does not result in net migration. That is very different from allowing cheap skills into this country.

In a blog that is influential in the IT industry—here I declare an interest—the author of the Holway report constantly hammers home the fact that we are moving slowly towards circumstances in which fewer and fewer entry-level jobs are available in the industry. Last year 9,000 skilled IT workers were brought into the country by a handful of companies under the intra-company transfer scheme. That is not transferring skills from a company to domestic residents; it is importing cheap labour. However, we allow it, although as a result the IT sector has one of the highest rates of unemployment in industry. The Government must think seriously about the issue, and must not form policy on the basis of slogans such as “Skilled work is good” and “Open border to skilled workers”. That is not good in the long run if it means that fewer of those who are already here acquire skills, experience and expertise.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

Using the analogy of the IT industry, my right hon. Friend has pointed out that unemployment exists, and that there is a demand from a small number of companies for a large number of people to come into the country. The corollary is that, in a process called outsourcing, we move jobs to other parts of the world. That is just part of being a free trade country. If we wish to position ourselves as leaders in terms of free trade, as the Prime Minister said 10 days ago, the corollary is a degree of freedom of movement. There has been a massive skills failure in the country over the past decade and a half. Most of the 180,000 entrants are for STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. If we are unable to train people ourselves, it behoves us to allow them into the country in a way that benefits us.

[Mr Lilley]

My hon. Friend’s intervention prompts a number of questions. For instance, why do we not train people?

For a while I was chairman of a small German company as a result of a merger, and the first thing that we did was bring in British employees to train its employees. It is considered automatic: every company, even a small company with only 200 employees, trains people. Sadly, that culture does not exist in this country. All that we think of doing is importing people from abroad, or possibly stealing them from our competitors down the road. At least if we steal them from our competitors down the road, we have to bid up the salaries for the particular skill involved. We encourage more people to acquire that skill, and as a result increase the number of people with such skills in our economy. However, the idea that we should assume passively that this country alone in the world cannot train people to acquire skills that semi-developed countries seem to be able to train their people to acquire strikes me as a defeatism that is sad and deplorable.

I hope we will recognise that there are some skills that we should allow into the country: entrepreneurial skills, for example, I rather doubt whether entrepreneurship can be taught. Some people are natural entrepreneurs while others are not. That is fair enough: if someone has proven success as an entrepreneur abroad, we should let him in, with some of the capital that he has acquired. Only a small number of people will be involved, however. That is not mass immigration. It will generate a lot of jobs and it is a sensible thing to do, so let us do it. However, we must distinguish between those sorts of skills and the sorts of skills we can enable the existing population of all ethnic origins to acquire, so that the well-being of those already here improves.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

I apologise in advance to the House for the fact that my remarks may appear less entertaining and somewhat more low-key than the previous exchange. I am also aware that we are nearing the end of the debate, so I shall be fairly brief.

I was particularly taken by two speeches that seemed to sum up the elements that we are trying to reconcile. First, we heard about the real concerns that are expressed to all of us by constituents who are decent people and, in many cases, members of ethnic minorities about the level and velocity of immigration and the impact that it has on our population levels. According to a quotation supplied to me by a Sikh gentleman in my community, given that the current level of net immigration is about 200,000 a year, our population will number 71 million in a decade and a half. That is about 10 million more than it is now. His point was that if that is what the Government wish to do to the country, they should at least ask us. Debates of this type give us a chance to discuss such issues. The pressure on services that is caused by such extensions of the population was described very eloquently by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley).

The counter-argument was presented in a very good speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer). Our country is in the vanguard of globalisation. We are the country that goes to summits and always takes the position that protectionism is bad, that world trade must increase and that the velocity of world trade is good for us.

The difficulty we face is in reconciling two key forces. Some of the issues involved in the subject under discussion, such as those caused by the temporary cap, arise from the difficulty that can occur in reconciling the concerns that my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green said were held by the business in his constituency with the genuine concerns that so many people have about the number of people coming into the country.

I have three observations on how we might reconcile the two competing forces. I now understand that policy will be announced in a week’s time, so my comments might come a little too late to influence that. On intra-company transfers, organisations such as GlaxoSmithKline, Shell, Accenture and IBM need to move people around. They cannot always plan how they do it, and they do not even consider individual jurisdictions or boundaries as being particularly relevant in profit and loss terms. They have to be able to undertake such transfers quickly and if we were to facilitate that, we could gain a competitive advantage. Britain could then become the place for projects that involve people coming together to work. In my business career, how quickly that could be done was a very big issue.

Academia is a second, and related, area. We have heard a lot about the impact of the temporary cap on academia. It is true that if we wish our society to become less reliant on financial services, much of our success will depend on applied science and engineering and on how well we address those subjects at university and transfer knowledge into wealth. We are in a global market, and we need to be able to treat it in a global way.

I was struck by something I recently learned about the Wellcome Trust. It needed to hire a zebra geneticist team leader. It was not able to do that without advertising in the local job market in Cambridge. Members will not be surprised to learn that there were no applicants for the job, and Wellcome was subsequently permitted to recruit by other means. That is a cumbersome process, and we need to do better.

[Mr Frank Field]

Does the hon. Gentleman not know that the opposite also happens? Jobcentres have reported to me that companies have gone through such a procedure and accidentally found the person they are going to appoint.

[David Mowat]

I am sure that is true, but I do not think it undermines the point I am making. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Finally, I want to consider why we are in this situation in the first place. Nine out of every 10 non-EU immigrants coming into the country are given work permits. That means that, on the face of it, they have a skill or a talent that we do not have here. Why do we not have it? I contend that one of the reasons is that over the last decade and a half we have completely failed to equip our work force with the skills needed for them, and for us as a country, to prosper in the decade of advanced manufacturing, STEM-type activities, and all that goes with that.

Some 30 years ago, I studied engineering at university. Last year, five times as many people graduated than when I graduated, but there were fewer engineering graduates from UK universities. That is a large part of the reason why so many organisations need to go abroad to find staff, and therefore cause some of these issues in the first place. I had an exchange with my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden on this during his excellent speech. Of course we have to put pressure on organisations and companies to train people better, and of course it is an easy option just to go abroad to hire the graduates companies need, but there is a chicken-and-egg situation here; we have to do both. Unfortunately, over the last decade and a half, we have not.

I thank the right hon. Member for Birkenhead for securing the debate.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House calls on Her Majesty’s Government to act on the overwhelming public concern about the present scale of immigration by taking firm measures to reduce immigration without excluding those individuals who are genuinely essential to economic recovery, on which so much else depends.