Immigration and Nationality Statistics

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered immigration and nationality statistics.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Mundell—happy Christmas to you, the Clerks and other House staff.

I want to make clear my overall view of the rate and nature of immigration to Britain in recent years. To be frank, it has been a disgrace. Every Prime Minister since Tony Blair has promised control, only to oversee record numbers of people coming here. Immigration is the biggest broken promise in British politics, and probably the biggest single reason that British politics is so broken. This could not be more important, because mass immigration undermines our economy, capital stock, and cultural coherence and identity. It quite literally changes the country we are.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I think the issue that the hon. Gentleman and I agree on, and probably most Members in this Chamber will agree on, is that there are two categories: those who are fleeing their countries on human rights grounds and because of the persecution of their religious beliefs, who should go through the system, and economic migrants—those who are young and healthy, and who jump on the boat at Calais and come across. Those are ones we need to stop. Does he agree?

[Nick Timothy]

I certainly agree that most people crossing the channel are not really seeking refuge, because they are coming from a safe country: France. They are seeking their economic betterment, which may be legitimate from their perspective, but is not necessarily in our interests as a country.

I must be honest: my party played its part in this policy failure. I say “policy failure” because, at times—certainly when I worked in the Home Office and, I think, when my hon. Friend the Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam) was in the Home Office—there was a genuine attempt to get the numbers down. Indeed, back in those years, the numbers fell, but ultimately we failed, thanks to free movement rules, a loss of wider political support for our work across Government, and a failure to reform the higher and further education system, public services and the wider economy, so as to get off the addiction to more and more migration.

Brexit should have changed all that. It was a clear vote not only to reclaim our sovereignty, but to reduce and control immigration, but the points-based system that followed, with its hugely liberal rules, was always bound to increase the numbers dramatically. For that, my party will need to show sincere contrition and, if we are ever to win again, demonstrate to the public that we truly get it and have a plan to cut immigration drastically.

To inform the policy choices we face and help us to understand what we must do with the millions of newcomers who have started new lives here in the past 25 years or so, we also need much better data. Low-paid immigrants bring costs that are not adequately considered by Government impact assessments. They need housing, drive on roads, use transport, have health needs, take school places, claim benefits and eventually receive the state pension, which was recently valued by an actuary at £250,000 per person. Most immigrants and their dependants will, over their lifetimes, be net recipients of public funds.

However, the British state does not even try to calculate the net fiscal costs and benefits of different profiles of migrant. We get fragments of information from, say, the census, or prison statistics. We know that 72% of Somalis here, for example, live in social housing, compared with 16% of the population overall. We know that one in 50 Albanians here are in prison, and that nationalities such as Iraqis, Jamaicans and Somalis are disproportionately likely to be criminals. We know from now-discontinued income tax data that some nationalities, such as Bangladeshis, receive more in child benefit and tax credits than they pay in income tax and national insurance. That does not even include the costs of education, housing, healthcare, pensions, and other effects on infrastructure and services.

Some European countries have started to do the necessary work. In Denmark, for example, official figures show that Danes and Europeans are net contributors, but migrants and their descendants from the middle east, north Africa, Pakistan and Turkey are net recipients throughout their whole lives, including when they are working.

I have asked various Ministers in oral and written questions whether the Government will commission work to establish the true cost of immigration broken down by profile of migrant. The answer that comes back more often than not is that that has not been done before. However, that is not a reason not to do it now. My first question to the Minister is: if it is not to be done, why not? Can she give us a justification?

I have asked similar questions on specific aspects of policy. The Department for Work and Pensions told me in a letter that

“we are investigating the feasibility of developing and publishing statistics on the immigration status of non-UK/Irish”

nationals, or “customers”, as it bizarrely calls foreign benefits claimants. My second question is: what discussions has the Minister had with counterparts in the DWP about that? When will that work be completed? Will the data be broken down by nationality, visa route and type of benefit?

We know bits of information on social housing from the census, as I said, but that is not good enough. Only yesterday, a grotesque online video was published by Westminster city council promoting social housing in Arabic, Bengali, Spanish and French, which, given the rules around no recourse to public funds, I found somewhat surprising. My third question is: what discussions has the Minister had with counterparts in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government about that? Can we get annual data on social housing occupation by nationality, visa and asylum status?