Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

David Ruffley Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) on initiating the debate. I also congratulate my 73 parliamentary colleagues who, like me, signed his amendment to the Immigration Bill, although, regrettably, it will not be considered this side of 1 January 2014. However, it is an important amendment that would extend the transitional controls for an extra five years, and we will debate it next year.

Let us be clear about what the debate is not about: it is not about a zero-immigration policy, and it is not about closing this country’s borders to every other country in the world. It is, however, an expression of concern about the fact that, while my hon. Friend the Minister and his predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green), have done sterling and impressive work in restricting influxes of unskilled labour from non-EU countries, we have not been able to effect the same restraint in respect of EU countries. That is the heart of the matter.

Just to be crystal clear, I want to put on record my gratitude to our splendid Home Secretary and the two Immigration Ministers we have had in this Parliament, who have moved this country much more towards the Australian model. We now have a rigorous points system for those who wish to come into this country from outside the EU; those people must have skills and something positive to contribute. However, when it comes to the EU, because of its quite pernicious freedom of movement rules, we are having to have this debate.

All of us in the room who speak to our constituents know that this is the No. 1 concern for the public after the economy. Only a few days ago, in a national newspaper, the opinion pollsters Harris found, in a very large poll, that 82% of adults in this country did not want the transitional controls that currently exist for Romania and Bulgaria to be lifted, while 85% thought that migration was putting huge pressure on our schools, hospitals and housing stock.

Although the 74 signatories to the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley are predominantly Conservative Members, this debate is not a purely Conservative party concern. It is a fatal misreading of British public opinion to assume that it is something to do with Conservative Members being worried about the UK Independence party. It is much more important, for reasons I shall develop, but we know one thing about this issue: two rather good Labour former Home Secretaries do not have a problem with the proposal. In recent days, we have heard from the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) on his concerns about what may happen on the streets of Sheffield when transitional controls are lifted; and from the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw).

It is worth repeating why the right hon. Member for Blackburn thought the influx from a new EU accession country had deleterious consequences for civil society and the economy. He said, a matter of days ago, about the events of 2004:

“Thorough research by the Home Office suggested that the impact…would in any event be ‘relatively small, at between 5,000 and 13,000 immigrants per year up to 2010.’

Events proved these forecasts worthless.”

There is, then, some cross-party agreement on the potential influx of Romanians and Bulgarians from 1 January. We are talking about an indeterminate number. I shall disagree in only one respect with my hon. Friends the Members for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) and for Wellingborough (Mr Bone): I understand why Home Office Ministers will not enter the territory of forecasting numbers; they would almost certainly be proved wrong.

Let us explore how many Bulgarians and Romanians might be attracted to living, settling and working in our country. It is estimated that 23,000 workers from Romania and Bulgaria have come to this country in the past 12 months, under the existing rules; they have been able to come if they are self-employed or work in agriculture, or, equally, if they can get a work permit to do a job that the UK Border Agency thinks cannot otherwise be done by an indigenous British worker. They certainly like coming to Britain; 23,000 did in the last 12 months.

We also know from the statistics that there are now 135,000 Romanians and Bulgarians working in the UK, which compares with a 1997 figure of 2,000. A leap from 2,000 in 1997 to 135,000 this year is pretty persuasive evidence that people in that part of south-east Europe rather like what is on offer in the United Kingdom. Also, in the past 12 months, one in six applications for vocational courses in British colleges was made by people from Romania or Bulgaria.

As we have already heard, Migration Watch UK estimates that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians coming here to work or seek work could be anything over 50,000 a year for five years. I do not know whether that is correct, but we can certainly expect a considerable number over and above the number of Poles who came between 2004 and 2010, as the right hon. Member for Blackburn so powerfully reminded us. Ministers generally have my respect, but it is not good enough to say, on the basis of virtually no evidence, “Well, Romanians and Bulgarians will probably prefer Germany as a destination.” I have seen no evidence for that, but hope I have cited evidence that there are many reasons to suspect that they will want to come to the United Kingdom.

[Mr Hollobone]

I am enjoying my hon. Friend’s impressive speech. Is not London one of the big United Kingdom pull factors? It is the biggest city in Europe apart from Moscow, and the most cosmopolitan city in the world where everyone speaks or learns English. It is a city such as no other country in Europe has.

[Mr Ruffley]

Indeed. I am reminded of Cecil Rhodes’s comment that to be born a free-born Englishman was to have won first prize in the lottery of life. English as the world language is obviously the reason why so many migrants want to come from within and outside the EU, and attend language schools in this country. My hon. Friend is correct in suspecting that London will be a huge magnet for Romanians and Bulgarians. There are perfectly understandable reasons for them to want to come to this country, and many will no doubt want to work hard. Perhaps some will take jobs illegally under the minimum wage level of £6 an hour. We do not criticise those individuals who want a better life; we merely suggest that what I have outlined is a luxury that the country cannot afford, now or in the future.

[Mr Harper]

On the argument about where people might go, my hon. Friend considered the facts regarding the number of Romanians and Bulgarians who are already here, but let us look at the other countries mentioned. Italy did not have transitional controls, and there are 1 million Romanians and Bulgarians there. Spain and Germany did, and 500,000 Romanians and Bulgarians went to Germany and 1 million to Spain. I do not say that that is conclusive, but it may be one aspect of what was meant when it was suggested that there is a range of options for Romanians and Bulgarians besides coming to the United Kingdom.

[Mr Ruffley]

One could argue that in Germany and the other countries my hon. Friend mentioned, job vacancies for Romanians and Bulgarians are perhaps pretty much full up now, and they may want to try their luck in the United Kingdom, where, if they do their research, they will understand there are many job vacancies that remain unfilled, despite the economic recovery, and that there could be rich job pickings. However, I do not think that the argument can be made conclusively either way.

I am getting rather tired with the argument that all immigration to this country is by definition good, in economic terms. First, I pray in aid a 2008 report of the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, which made the point that total output can be driven up by increasing the number of people in the country. The greater the population, the greater the economic growth. That is an economic truism that no one disputes. However, the Committee also said that that was beside the point. What matters is not GDP, but GDP per capita. A much larger population, generating a higher total output, means there is a bigger cake; but there are also more people who want a slice of it.

The key point, which the Home Secretary and her Ministers have identified, is that this is not just about getting bodies into the country to generate more economic growth; it is about getting the right people in, with the skills and specialisms that we need. That, almost by definition, means small numbers of immigrants, who will meet a high-skill, high-value-added specification—not tens or even hundreds of thousands, as there were in the case of Poland and other accession countries in 2004. I fear that what happened then will also happen with Romania and Bulgaria.

If anyone is thinking of references for the debate, many arguments have recently been made about work by University college London that argues that immigrants contribute more in tax than they ever take in benefit. I do not have time to say why that work is grossly inadequate. Another grossly inadequate body, in my view, is the Office for Budget Responsibility, which in the past six months has blithely said that, unless this country has 7 million more immigrants between now and 2050, we will not cut our deficit and our national debt. Those figures are “Through the Looking Glass” stuff. I repeat again that the current Home Office Ministers understand that truth, but they are not able to say that they have made it tougher for EU migrants to come here, as they have with non-EU migrants. As a result of the EU treaties, Ministers have not been able to impose such welcome discipline on the number of EU migrants coming into this country.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) talked about the polarity—which he helped to set up, if he will allow me to say so—between little Englanders and free traders. I like to think that I am a free trader, and I want to run the Prime Minister’s global race, as I am sure we all do. I can hardly wait to run that race. As a free-market, right-of-centre—nay, right-wing—Conservative, I believe in free trade and Britain facing outwards to the world, but we should still understand that the best way to earn our way in the world is not to open our doors willy-nilly to an undifferentiated mass of workers from other countries, when we have no way of sifting to see what skills they have and how highly specialised those skills are. We can do that for workers from the rest of the world, but we cannot do it for workers from the EU.

Over the past year, as we all know, the British economy has begun to recover, thanks to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his tenacity in sticking to his economic project. Private sector employment is now at an all-time high. In the past, as the number of job vacancies increased, the response from employers in this country would have been to increase wages to attract the best workers. When the economy grew, wages grew. That is a fairly uncontroversial proposition, but that link seems to have been broken in the current recovery. The number of people in employment has increased, but real wage growth has been flat.

With gross migration to this country running at some 500,000 a year, and with many of those migrants coming from low-income countries, there is not much incentive for employers to increase wages. In 2004, when the Labour Government lifted the restriction on Polish and other eastern European workers coming into this country, the average wage in Poland was just 42% of the average wage in the UK. If a Polish plumber could more than double his salary by coming over to fit bathrooms in Wellingborough rather than Warsaw, who could blame him for jumping on the next easyJet flight? Good luck to him.

Although some think that lifting restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians will somehow produce a different outcome, we should bear in mind the following facts, which have been alluded to in earlier contributions. Average wages in Bulgaria and Romania are currently 31% and 34% of average wages in the UK respectively. That is even lower, relative to the UK, than Polish wages were in 2004.

Wage levels in the UK have been fairly flat recently, but since 2004, wages paid to workers in so-called elementary occupations, such as manual labourers and cleaners, have declined by 8%. Wages have not been flat. At the very lowest end, we have seen a very large fall in wages. Cleaning jobs and labouring jobs are hard, difficult and often monotonous work, but they are the sorts of jobs that many immigrants drift towards, at least when they first arrive in a country and need a job fast. Many immigrants have a strong work ethic. It is not surprising that several academic studies in many countries have found a close link, over time, between the scale of migration to a developed country such as ours and the wages of less-skilled workers. Those wages go down or stay flat.

If the restrictions are lifted—and it looks as if they will be—and there is an influx into this country of an indeterminate number of Bulgarians and Romanians, jobs in the elementary occupations might be paid at below the legal minimum wage. Why might that be? Paying below the minimum wage is, of course, illegal, but it is certainly anecdotally true that many immigrants do not have a tendency to inform the authorities that they are receiving £3 or £4 an hour, rather than the £6-plus that is the legal minimum in this country.

The problem of British workers being undercut by EU workers—in this case Bulgarians and Romanians—who are willing to accept extremely low wages, sometimes perhaps illegally low wages, may get worse in the coming year. This statistic has been mentioned before, but it bears repeating: the legal minimum wage in both Romania and Bulgaria is under 80p an hour; in the UK it is well over £6 an hour, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough recited. One factor that we all know, and which has also been referred to, is that British workers do not want low-paid jobs. We hear all the time that young people do not want to take jobs in domiciliary care, nursing homes and so on. Suffice it to say that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is doing excellent work in reforming the benefit system, but there is more to do.

We cannot say yet that the welfare reforms have been a success. As Andrew Green, the chairman of Migration Watch UK, reminds us, it is inexcusable for British employers not to give British workers a level playing field on recruitment. The key point is that, with 1 million young people not in employment or training, it is imperative that they are given a chance to get on the work ladder. The route to proper employment has to start somewhere, and 1 million young people in our country are not doing anything at all. It is fairly inevitable that the influx of Bulgarians and Romanians will crowd out the opportunities for young people to move off benefits and into productive work.

I will close my remarks by saying that we may have lost the argument on lifting the controls, but I hope that this debate, and the further debates that I trust we will have in 2014, will move on to new territory. That territory must include the views attributed to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, who I understand has floated a cap on EU migrants to this country of 75,000. EU migrants to this country should be blocked from claiming benefits not just for three months, but for three years or more. Finally, freedom of movement from poorer countries should be restricted, and we should insist that such movement may happen only when the GDP of those countries has reached 75% of the UK’s GDP. I hope that those of us here today, and those who support my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley, will press the Prime Minister to put such radical reform of freedom of movement at the very top of his list of renegotiation items when he comes to renegotiate this country’s future as it relates to the European Union.