Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Jack Brereton and Kate Green

Thursday 14th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Kate Green]

Q I guess it would be possible to constrain the scope of what could be amended in delegated legislation more tightly than the Bill does.

Joe Owen: Yes, that is certainly an option.

[Jack Brereton]

You have mentioned the constraints of time, which, obviously, are potentially quite challenging. If we were to leave with a no-deal scenario on 29 March, and the Bill was in place by then, how do you think implementation on the ground would go? Would there be challenges to get things running in that timeframe?

Joe Owen: There are two things when it comes to no deal; there is the settlement scheme for EU citizens who are here before 29 March, and then there is the temporary leave to remain scheme for those who arrive afterwards. The first system is up and running and being trialled. While rights change in certain areas as a result of there being no deal, the process in the system is the same—so, credit to the Home Office for having a new technology system up and running and being trialled within two years. Most people, looking at Government IT projects, would say that was pretty impressive. Obviously it still has a long way to go before it can be said to be complete.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Jack Brereton and Kate Green

Thursday 14th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Jack Brereton]

Q Obviously, quite a substantial number of British citizens are living in EU countries. Do you feel those EU countries have taken adequate steps to address the rights of those citizens?

Martin Hoare: I do not profess any expertise on European law, but no doubt European Governments will look at how we treat citizens of European countries and will wonder whether they should treat our own citizens in the same way. I think there will be many vulnerable British people living in European countries who do not quite understand that yet.

[Kate Green]

Q How confident are you that the Home Office will be able to scale up the existing immigration scheme that applies to non-EEA nationals to meet the needs of individuals and employers after Brexit? What challenges do you think it will have to address?

Martin Hoare: I think the Home Office will find it very difficult. It finds it very difficult to make quick and consistent decisions at the moment. Unless the Government propose a significant increase in resources to the Home Office, I think it will find it very difficult to cope with additional case work and a whole set of new rules.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Jack Brereton and Kate Green

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Jack Brereton]

Q The key point that I was trying to understand was: would changing the ability of new nurses to come here from the EU have an impact on the NHS? I was not talking about the ones who are already here.

Professor Dame Donna Kinnair: It has an impact, because actually that has been one of our policy planks, hasn’t it? Instead of growing our own domestic supply, we have relied on international recruitment, so whether we are talking about people from the EU or outside the EU, anything that inhibits that will impact on our ability to deliver care to the people of this country. It has been a major plank of policy that instead of growing our domestic supply, there has been reliance on that by successive Governments, so of course there will be unintended consequences for the care we are able to deliver to meet the needs of our population.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Q I have two or three questions, probably mainly for the TUC. Again, they are about the £30,000 threshold. In Greater Manchester, for which I am an MP, the average salary is quite a bit below £30,000, and that will be true in a number of other parts of the country, too. We also know that younger workers and women are likely to be on lower salaries. Does the TUC have a view on whether there should be different thresholds for different industry sectors, different workers or different geographies? Perhaps Vivienne and Donna would also like to reply.

Rosa Crawford: It is important to highlight the vulnerable groups that would be particularly negatively affected by the £30,000 threshold. Of course, women and other groups that are already marginalised are likely to become more marginalised by that threshold, and caught in it.

Regarding your question about the specific thresholds that we would want to set, as I hope my earlier question suggested, the TUC is calling for a future immigration policy that sits with an overall Brexit deal that delivers for working people. For us, that would mean a policy that does not introduce additional restrictions, but rather promotes the rights of all workers. It would have stronger domestic enforcement and stronger regulation of the labour market, which is an important point to highlight, because undercutting is taking place right now. We are well aware of that, and we feel it fuelled some of the insecurities that were taken advantage of during the Brexit referendum. However, it is about domestic labour market reforms and enforcing additional rights, rather than a differentiated migration regime.

We want to address the problems with the current regime, such as the thresholds that are limiting recruitment from outside the EU, and where there are insecurities or certain visas for non-EU workers, such as overseas domestic workers. We would not want anything that narrows down EU citizens’ ability to come into the country, because of what that would mean for overall rights and our overall prospects for a Brexit deal.

Vivienne Stern: There is an argument for differentiating by occupation and by geography, but the problem is that if we introduce a system that is so nuanced, it becomes difficult to explain to people and operationalise. We are really quite concerned about the bureaucracy that will be associated with moving from a system in which, frankly, we do not have to worry about these individuals from a compliance point of view, and they do not have to worry too much about the requirements of applying for a visa, to one in which we have to explain to EU nationals what this all means and help them through the process, just as we do for non-EU nationals.

There is an argument for simplicity, which is why we decided that our position would be to suggest a lower threshold overall. However, the point you make about the potential for this system to be unintentionally discriminatory by gender is an important one. I imagine that we will come on to talk about the impact that this will have on students. One of the arguments we have made in relation to those students who want to stay and work in the UK on the tier 2 regime is that if you are in the north of England and you happen to be a woman, you quite often do not meet the minimum required salary threshold. It is not a policy that is intended to be discriminatory by gender, and you can say that it is not the Government’s fault that there continues to be a gender pay gap—it is a wider issue—but none the less, if this policy does not address that issue, that is its effect.