Rights of EU Nationals

Huw Merriman Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield]

By giving those guarantees to EU nationals living in this country, we set the marker, and we give the best guarantees to our citizens living in the rest of the EU by making that stand now.

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

Would it not therefore be better for Ministers to be out there negotiating and getting the reciprocal rights, rather than having to remain at the Dispatch Box for these futile debates that stop them getting on with the job?

[Paul Blomfield]

I think it would be much better if Ministers did not see EU nationals in this country as bargaining chips, but instead saw them as citizens contributing to our economy and society, as the Foreign Secretary said in the debate in July.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the powerful speech of my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double). I, too, agree with the first part of the motion, because I certainly recognise and appreciate the contributions that workers from the EU have made in this country. Some key businesses and public sector services—many hon. Members on both sides of the House have identified them in their own constituencies—are vitally served by EU workers. In my own constituency of Bexhill and Battle, where the proportion of older people is particularly high, none is more key than our care home sector, and we would be in a very difficult position without those EU workers. Of 35 care homes inspected, only nine were rated good, and the rest required improvement or were inadequate, so where would such homes be without key workers from the EU?

I maintain that during the past six years the Government have provided the economic base for many workers to come to Britain and make a great success of themselves. More jobs have been created in the UK during that period than in the rest of the EU put together. Those individuals have come here with great aspiration and a desire to work, as well as endeavour and enterprise. It is in their DNA, and it is certainly in the DNA of my party and my hon. Friends on the Government Benches. In that sense, we certainly do not need any lectures on our support for EU citizens.

I have concerns about the second part of the motion in reference to the future, and I therefore certainly cannot support it. As colleagues on the Government Benches have pointed out, there is a typo in the motion: it says “should” the UK exit the EU, rather than “when” it does so. I did not vote to leave the EU, but in my view, now that the decision has been made, we need to embrace the opportunity and get on with it.

I made this point earlier, but I find it frustrating that there are so many debates in this House about the pitfalls, that we are holding up Ministers and preventing them from getting on with the job and getting it done. There is a certain irony in my position. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) is chuckling. He, like me, was in Strasbourg last week, where we were working with our European partners, only for us to come back to the House for a debate about Europe. We could have been in Europe, making friends and building relationships, which would be a better use of our time.

During the last week of the referendum campaign, I visited 25 schools, and I visited another 10 during my own party conference. Teachers and, indeed, pupils consistently asked me questions about the right to remain, to which I made the point that in time, once this is settled, should we leave the EU, I would imagine that the right to remain will absolutely be honoured. I certainly hope that it will be.

I should point out that people who have been here for five years already have the right to remain. Indeed, by the time we exit the EU, those who have come here relatively recently will have reached that five-year point. I therefore find much of this debate slightly false.

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. When constituents who are concerned and need reassuring come to my surgeries—3,000 eastern Europeans live in my constituency —I make the point he has just made. Five out of every six EU nationals living in this country either already have the right to remain or will have it by the time we leave the EU. The 2.9 million EU nationals living in the UK today have nothing to worry about.

[Huw Merriman]

My hon. Friend makes a fine point. Like me, he is a lawyer. I am not sure how many of the 1.2 million UK citizens resident in the EU have the same right. To support those 1.2 million people, it is even more imperative to ensure that they have the same right to remain as the five out of six EU citizens working here to whom he refers.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) pointed out that no Government Members—indeed, this does not seem to be debated at all, except on Opposition motions—are calling for any rights to remain in the UK to be rescinded. Nobody on our Benches is using the words “bargaining chips”. I point that out because the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands), whose speech I listened to carefully, used those words about five times. Such rhetoric is coming from SNP Members, not those on this side of the House. I ask Opposition Members to be a little more responsible with their language, because that sort of language is not being used by those of us on the Government Benches. We absolutely must ensure that we serve the rights of those from EU member states working in the UK, but we must give equal priority to serving those people from the UK living in the EU. I hope that the official Opposition and the SNP will start to talk in the same language and even things up.

In the minute remaining to me, I want to caution against using the EU referendum result in the separate debate on immigration. I recognise that 52% of the country voted to leave the EU, but nowhere within that was there a definitive mandate for curbing or controlling immigration. I know that many people—including colleagues on the Government Benches—will say that the immigration debate was implicit in the referendum, but from my perspective, all we know is that 52% of the UK voted to leave, so 48% voted to remain, and nothing more. Similarly, we do not know that a large chunk of the 52% were duped into voting to leave the EU; we know only that we are leaving, and that is that.

In a recent YouGov poll, two thirds of people stated that they wanted to see immigration reduced, somewhat busting my argument. However, when asked how much they would pay personally for it to be reduced, about the same amount said zero, and therefore that they would be willing to have the same number of immigrants in this country. I add that purely as a note of caution. I recognise that we are leaving the EU, but I return to my real passion for making sure that we protect the EU workers who have come this country and that we do not use the referendum as anything other than a decision to leave the EU.