Draft Immigration (Health Charge) (Amendment) Order 2017
Debate between Diane Abbott and Mark Harper(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
The Minister and the Committee will be pleased to know that I plan on speaking briefly. Indeed, I had not planned on speaking at all, but was forced to do so by the Shadow Home Secretary’s speech. My understanding—the Minister will no doubt correct me if I am wrong—is that this immigration health charge is not about health tourism at all, if by health tourism we mean visitors who come to the United Kingdom specifically to get healthcare to which they are not entitled. Of course, it is a national health service, not an international health service.
Mr Harper
Let me finish the point. This is about making sure that people who come here as migrants to work, or who have other leave, pay a reasonable amount towards services that they get from the health service. It is not about visitors to the United Kingdom who are not entitled to healthcare at all.
Ms Abbott
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for letting me intervene. I am clear what this order is about, but the context of this debate about people paying for healthcare is the very lively tabloid debate there has been about health tourism. That was my point; I was putting the debate in context, not setting out the purpose of the order. If I did not make that clear, I apologise.
Mr Harper
I accept that may have been what the hon. Lady was doing, but I was the Minister who took the original primary legislation through the House, and we were very clear about what it was, and was not, about. I do not agree with her. The context was about making sure that those who come to Britain to work and are here perfectly lawfully, contributing to the country, make a relatively modest contribution to the cost of the services that they and their families may get from our national health service.
As for visitors who come to the United Kingdom with the specific intention of getting healthcare to which they are not entitled, we already have provisions on that. My right hon. Friend the Health Secretary is making sure that the national health service, which, properly, does not charge British citizens and others who are entitled to be here, is better at establishing when people have an entitlement to healthcare, and at collecting money from those who are not entitled to it; that makes our national health service more robust, sustainable and able to provide free care to those who are entitled to it. That is the context in which we introduced the charges; we were making sure that people who are here lawfully make a reasonable contribution to the health service that we have all paid for. The rules for those who are guilty of health tourism and are abusing our national health service are different, and are not brought into play by this health charge at all.
Notwithstanding that, I thought the Minister put the case very well. I particularly welcome the exemption for victims of slavery, and I welcome the work the Government have done on putting in place the Modern Slavery Act 2015, a world-leading piece of legislation to deal with that heinous crime perpetrated by organised criminals. The Minister put the point very well, and I am very happy to support the order.
Immigration Bill
Debate between Diane Abbott and Mark Harper(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I am glad to be able to speak about the Bill. I have taken an interest in immigration policy for very many years, first as an administrative trainee in the Home Office, and secondly as somebody who year on year is in the top 10 of MPs processing immigration casework. I have also, of course, taken an interest because I represent a constituency with very many immigrants from all over the world, and, finally, because I am the child of immigrants. I say from my knowledge and experience of the immigration system that it is bedevilled by poor administration and rushed and incoherent legislation, motivated by short-term political advantage—and I do not except the Labour party from that. I am afraid that this Bill is more of the same.
I say right at the beginning that there are many details in the Bill that I agree with—which is not surprising, because some of it merely puts into legislation matters that were regulations under the Labour Administration—but I deplore the rhetoric and I deplore the political direction of travel. I remind the House that immigration as an issue has been freighted with emotion since the days of Enoch Powell, and since those days immigration has been a synonym for black, Asian and foreign-looking people—for “the other”. Any Member of the House who pretends that immigrant, immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric does not have that underlying narrative in British politics is being naive.
If people do not believe me, I urge them to read the report of the royal commission on alien immigration in 1903 and the subsequent Aliens Act 1905, which deal with exactly the ideas that those on the Government Front Bench are trying to push forward today. What people say about east European migrants today is what was said about east African migrants in the ’60s, what was said about west Indian migrants, what was said about Jewish migrants to the east end after the first world war, and what was said about Irish migrants in the 19th century: driving down wages; living in terrible housing conditions; assaulting our women. It is always the same narrative, which should be a clue to the House that it is always the same issue.
I remind Government Members who think that they can get away with all this anti-immigrant rhetoric and not pay an electoral price that the Republicans in the United States thought that. They went to town with anti- Hispanic, illegal migrant rhetoric; they thought that anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric was a huge vote winner. But at the election they found that perfectly legal migrants ran, not walked, away from Republicans. Not just Hispanic migrants but Chinese, Japanese, Indian migrants—every migrant community—voted in unprecedented numbers for the Democrats, in what was a difficult election for them in many ways, because when people of immigrant descent hear that anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric they think, “Actually, they are talking about me, my dad, my mum, my auntie, the people on the landing.” Government Members should not think that they can continue down this anti-illegal immigrant path and not pay a price with the votes of the children and grandchildren of migrants. The danger with the Bill is not just that it will create the hostile environment for illegal immigrants that the Home Secretary was boasting of, but that it will tend to create a hostile environment for all of us of immigrant descent and our children.
I know as much about the UK Border Agency and abuse of the system as anyone. I worked in the Home Office and I knew about Croydon. People say that the Government inherited a shambolic immigration department from the Labour party, but as long as I have known the immigration department it has been dysfunctional and shambolic, and there are systemic reasons for that. It was always seen as an outpost of the Home Office in Whitehall and no one wanted to work there, so it was allowed to remain in a welter of administrative confusion. I bow to no one in my knowledge and my disapproval of the chaos, unfairness, inefficiency and poor administration of the immigration department. I also know—this has not been mentioned—of the abuses practised on my constituents by so-called immigration advisers. People talk about abuses of the system, but they are often triggered not by people who are simply looking for a better life for their family but by a class of so-called immigration advisers who systematically rip them off. My constituents come to me years later and I have to try to pick up the pieces of a case that was mishandled right from the beginning by people motivated only by profit.
I agree with what my long-standing friend and colleague, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), said about administrative problems, and I give him every credit for his work on the matter over the years. I also agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) said about people who are left in limbo, even though they are here legally, because the UKBA has not sent them their paperwork. There are systemic problems with the UKBA, but that does not justify trying to turn doctors and landlords into immigration officers on wheels. We need to deal with what is wrong with the administration before we ask untrained people to pursue matters that the Government and a state agency should deal with.
I want to say a word about what people hear on the doorstep, which keeps coming up in this debate. I hear about that from Government Members, and I am afraid that I hear about it from some hon. Friends. First, let us kill the myth that Labour had an open-door policy on migration. I have an office with filing cabinets stacked full of files about the thousands of cases that I dealt with year on year under a Labour Government. There was the issue of the miscalculation of the number of people coming from the eastern European accession countries—no one denies that—but if there was an open door, why did so many of my constituents have to wait years and years, divided from their family, to bring their children in? There was no open door. Far from apologising, the Labour party should make that point more clearly and more often.
What do we hear on the doorstep? I can believe that Members hear people complaining about immigrants. I have the children of West Indians complaining to me about eastern European migrants. However, in an economic downturn people always complain about the other, and want to blame the other for their economic circumstances. Of course we as politicians should deal with the underlying issues when people complain, whether about a lack of housing or job insecurity, but we must not allow public policy to be driven by people who are frightened of the changes they see around them, of economic insecurity and of the fact that the so-called upturn is not helping their living standards. We are now in danger of passing yet another ill thought-out Bill to go on the pile that has been heaped up since the 1960s.
Let us not forget that much of what we hear on the doorstep about immigration is simply not based on fact. It may be easy to say to people, “Oh, yes, you’re so right, we’re going to have fewer of them; we’re going to do this; we’re going to do that”, but politicians should deal with the facts first rather than pander all the time to urban myth, which leads to a downward spiral of rhetoric.
Turning to the content of the Bill, other Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), have dealt with the issue of landlords. Even landlords’ organisations are against the Bill. Richard Lambert, the chief executive officer of the National Landlords Association, has said:
“Existing referencing will pick up immigration issues anyway”.
Gavin Smart of the Chartered Institute of Housing has said that the measures will
“make it much harder for non-British people to access housing even when they have a legal right to live in the UK. Checking immigration status is complicated so landlords may shy away from letting to anyone who appears not to be British.”
That is landlords speaking. The effect of the Bill will be that when people such as my son and the children of some of my colleagues go to see a flat, they will be told that the flat is taken. Landlords will not want to take the chance of letting to someone who “might be” an illegal immigrant. I do not believe Ministers understand how it feels to knock on a door and be told, blatantly wrongly, that the flat or room is taken. That is what will happen as a consequence of the Bill.
Ministers like to give the idea that the problems in accident and emergency and the health service are caused by illegal immigrants. That is quite extraordinary. Even if their figures are true—I believe that they are scare figures based on the assumption that every person who comes here and gets treatment came only for the treatment in the first place—we are still not talking about the systemic reasons for problems in the NHS.
My mother was of that generation of West Indian women who came here in the ’60s to build the health service. Whether people like it or not, without immigrants we would not have an NHS. For as long as I am in this House, I will not allow Members to get up and say without challenge that the NHS’s problems are caused by immigrant workers. I owe that at least to my parents’ generation.
Also, there is already legislation about people who are not legally entitled to NHS health care. Why do the Government not get on with collecting money under that legislation, rather than introducing new legislation to do the same thing? It is because they are trying to make a political point and pander to UKIP voters.
We have already heard that 60% of successful appeals are due to administrative error. Why can we not move towards a more robust system for making decisions, rather than cutting people’s appeal rights, which currently are the only guarantee they have of some kind of recourse against administrative error? There is also the way the Bill would undermine article 8 of the European convention on human rights, the right to family life.
In drawing my remarks to a close, let me say this: it is simply not true that immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are responsible for the current pressures on public services. To say that, or to imply it, is to slight the millions of people of immigrant descent who keep all our public services, not just the health service, going, and they will take it as such.
It is also not true, as some people seek to imply, that immigrants cause low wages. That has been the anti-immigration attack since the 19th century. Immigrants do not cause low wages; predatory employers, insufficient workplace protection and weakened trade unions do that. That was true in the 19th century when people accused the Irish of driving down wages, and it is true today when people make the self-same accusation against the eastern European community.
Mr Harper
I just want to draw the hon. Lady’s attention to a quote from the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas), who is now the Labour party’s policy co-ordinator. At the end of 2010, just after the Labour Government had been kicked out of office, he wrote:
“At the macro-economic level, we’ve been using migration to introduce a covert 21st century incomes policy.”
It is people on her side of the House who think that the previous Government used migration to keep down wages, not people on the Government side.
Ms Abbott
People on my side of the House say a lot of things, but I do not necessarily agree with them. As Labour Front Benchers have pointed out, the Bill does not address the labour market issues properly.
We have to be honest about what the anti-immigration narrative in British politics has always been about. The Bill has more to do with political advantage, with demonstrating to UKIP supporters that the Government are cracking down on immigrants, as with the racist van, and with Lynton Crosby’s dividing-line politics than it has to do with good administration. I will believe the Government on immigration when they come forward with practical policies to improve the working of the UK Border Agency and when I see them cracking down on the employers who benefit by employing people off the books.
This is a very difficult issue, and it is confused by all sorts of urban myths, fears and worries. Generally speaking, immigrants are not the most popular group of people in politics today. Not a day goes by when we do not open the tabloid newspapers and read about some immigrant woman living in an eight-bedroom house in Knightsbridge paid for by the British taxpayer. The test for this House is how we deal with difficult subjects and speak up for people who are not necessarily popular or liked and who do not have a voice. By any test, this Bill is about short-term political advantage. It is of no real benefit to Britons, black or white, or would-be immigrants, black or white. Nobody on the Opposition Benches believes that people who are not entitled to NHS care should be able to get it for free, or that we should have a completely open-door immigration policy. We believe in speaking the truth about immigration, because if some people do not do that, we will see a race to the bottom, both in rhetoric and political practice.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Diane Abbott and Mark Harper(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Harper
I did not say that we would do nothing about the problem. I specifically said the opposite—that the Government are looking carefully at the Electoral Commission’s report and its outline of the problem, and that we are considering possible solutions. We are not yet persuaded that a legislative solution is the right one, however. When we have decided what we think the appropriate solution is, if that requires legislation we will introduce it at the appropriate time. Also, if we were to make this change, we would need to make it for elections in the round, not just for this particular referendum.
Mr Harper
I was not in any way underplaying the seriousness of the issue in those cases where these events happened. I was simply outlining the fact that it was not as widespread as people might have thought from the television coverage; I wanted to put it in context. However, as I said, I absolutely acknowledge that for those people who were affected, the problem was clearly very serious, and we want it to be solved, but we do not necessarily think that the proposal under discussion is the right way to solve it. There is a danger of creating as many, if not more, problems than those we are trying to solve in the first place. The law of unintended consequences might apply.
Mr Harper
The hon. Gentleman raises two separate issues. The latter problem is clearly one that I hope does not arise, although he says it may well. If so, it must be managed on a case-by-case basis. We cannot make provision in legislation for that, but we want to make sure we solve the problem.
The hon. Gentleman’s first point about the combination of polls next year highlights exactly why we have worked closely with the Electoral Commission and officials who administer elections across the UK to put in place sensible combination provisions to ensure that the elections run smoothly. It will be for those responsible for delivering both the elections and a referendum to look at what the likely turnouts will be and what complexities might arise from the elections, particularly in places such as Northern Ireland where there may be a number of polls with different electoral systems, and to put plans in place. One of the things that the Electoral Commission will be examining, certainly as far as the referendum is concerned, is whether people on the ground have made those arrangements. I know that the chief counting officer will be ensuring that the counting officers and regional counting officers have exactly thought through some of these issues to ensure that they do not arise again, and of course they have the power to direct some of these things to be sorted out appropriately, a power that they did not have for the election.
To be fair, it is worth making the point that although the Electoral Commission was criticised to some extent this year, it was not responsible for delivering the elections in those individual cases. It delivers the guidance and it encourages returning officers to think about some of these issues, but in the areas where there was a problem it was largely the responsibility of the individual returning officer for not having planned properly or having had proper contingency arrangements in place. That is where the responsibility lies, and we need to ensure that that does not happen again.
Ms Abbott
The hour is late, but I wish to put on the record how concerned people in Hackney were by the debacle that we had at the polls earlier this year. The number of people who were turned away is an underestimate, because in my constituency hundreds of people came out after work to vote, saw the queues, went away, came back again, saw the queues and went away again, so we will never know how many people were put off voting. The cause of the queues was partly that people in Hackney were voting in three different ballots—that was one of the problems. Another cause was that the returning officer put a great deal of effort into encouraging people to cast their votes—my area had its highest ever turnout, particularly among young people who had never voted before. Another cause was the enthusiasm of people in Hackney to vote Labour.
I wish to stress that in a democracy the state has a very basic responsibility to allow people to cast their vote. These people did not come along at 9.50 pm; they had been queuing since 9 o’clock, but when 10 o’clock struck they were told that they could not cast their vote because they did not have a ballot paper in their hand. All I am saying is that this matter caused great concern in Hackney and it was very demoralising, particularly for people casting their vote for the first time. Voting is a fundamental right, and it is a fundamental duty of Government to allow people who want to vote, and who have come out in good time, to vote. We all saw last year’s American elections, where very long queues of young people wanted to vote for Barack Obama. A system was put in place that allowed people who were in a queue to vote; once the point where the queue was stopping had been marked, everybody in that queue was able to vote, even if that took hours. I do not see why we cannot have a similar system here in the United Kingdom.