European Union: UK Membership

Debate between John Hayes and Scott Arthur

Monday 24th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you today, Chair—I notice that you have got younger just in the last few minutes. [Laughter.] I hope it is orderly to flatter the Chair.

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

Speak for as long as you like!

[Dr Arthur]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Paul Davies) for opening the debate so ably, and the many people in Edinburgh South West who signed this petition. I will speak briefly because what I was going to talk about has been well trod. Brexit has been an absolute tragedy for the UK, both economically and culturally. The Conservatives have taken a share of the blame today, along with Reform and its predecessor parties, but I have to be honest and say that when I think about how close the Brexit result was, I think about my party’s leadership at that time. More could have been done, so some blame should certainly be shared there.

I came to this place last July from higher education, so I want to speak about the impact of Brexit on that sector. I do so in the context of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I should also mention that Patrick Thomson from the University of Strathclyde is shadowing me today—which so far has largely involved drinking coffee when I drink coffee. In higher education, Brexit has been problematic. Fewer students now come from the EU to Scottish universities. That is primarily not a money issue; it is about the diversity of thought within the classroom. It is a real problem and it leaves us all poorer. It is harder for universities to attract staff from the EU now. If we are serious about growing the economy, we need the best staff from around the world in our universities, and we should not be ashamed of that. I remember when we were going through the Brexit process, EU nationals were leaving universities and going back to Europe. That is a tragedy, and we should be ashamed of it.

Research funding from within the EU has got harder. I know it has improved slightly recently, but during the process it was difficult to build consortiums with a UK lead, and some partners were even worried about having UK universities within their consortiums, so we should not overlook the impact of that. Those problems only amplify the wider economic problems that Brexit has imposed on our economy, and they are felt more inside our university sector. I am pleased that the current Government are trying to rebuild relationships and get as close as possible with Europe. If we are doing that work and looking for trailblazers, that should be done within our universities, because there is much more that can be done to rebuild those relationships.

I support this petition on rejoining the EU as soon as possible, but what does “as soon as possible” mean? My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) explained that it could take many years of harmonisation, which is a real challenge for us; however, the bigger challenge is the division and acrimony that comes with referendums, because we would need a referendum to go back in. I have lived through the Scottish independence referendum and the Brexit referendum, both of which divided our communities and were toxic in many respects. They divided families, workplaces and even households, which is incredible. We have to start building the case right now if we are to avoid that situation happening again, and we must make the positive arguments for rejoining the EU. We should start making them from within universities, because that is where international collaboration works best.

I also think that people were not wrong to vote for Brexit, but they were misled, so we have to be honest with them about that. We must explain why things have not unfolded as they were promised by people not in this room today, who should be owning up to the tragedy that they created. We have to be honest, frank and transparent with people, and we have to lead this debate. Hopefully, after the next election, we can build up to that referendum to rejoin.

Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension

Debate between John Hayes and Scott Arthur

Monday 10th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I am extremely grateful for being allowed to contribute to the debate, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) not only on bringing the subject to the House, but on the measured way he introduced it. It is good to hear someone offering a balanced view on immigration. I have good news for him: I am not frightened or nervous about speaking about migration for fear of being labelled a racist. Indeed, I have spoken about it for a very long time, and will continue to do so.

The plain fact of the matter is that this country has had far too much immigration for far too long. Much of the debate recently has, understandably, focused on illegal immigration. One hundred and fifty thousand people have crossed the channel, and that number has risen since last summer. People see our borders breached with impunity and regard that, perfectly properly, as a challenge to the rule of law. Is it not curious that many of the people now coming are coming from Vietnam? Before that it was Albania. There is not much evidence that these people are fleeing countries that are tyrannical and persecute people. The truth is that many of those coming here are economic migrants.

It is unsurprising that someone in a part of the world that is less advantaged than this one—although not godforsaken because nowhere is godforsaken—would want a better life for themselves and their family. Such a person might well become an economic migrant if they felt they could do so without cost, although in this case, the cost is substantial. They pay people smugglers great sums of money to get them here, knowing that once they are here, the chances are that they will never leave.

CS Lewis said that failures are

“finger posts on the road to achievement”.

Well, one certainly hopes so, because successive Governments have failed. They have failed to deal with illegal immigration, and failed to recognise that legal immigration is a much greater problem still. For all the awfulness of our borders being breached, the scale of legal migration and its effect on population growth is so immense that it dwarfs the challenge and problem of people coming here across the channel. Office for National Statistics figures suggest that our population will surge and that most of the increase will be a direct result of migration. The scale of migration is so great now that it is impossible to build sufficient houses to meet demand, and impossible to provide healthcare for the sort of numbers by which our population is increasing.

Let me give some figures to illustrate my point. In 2023, net migration to this country—this is not about people coming and leaving; this is the net figure—was 866,000. Even the most ambitious Government—a Government who exceed all previous records—might build 250,000 or 300,000 houses a year, but the net population growth through migration in a single year was 866,000. The year before, it was 822,000, and the year before that, it was 250,000. This is an entirely new phenomenon. In the period running up to the mid-1990s, migration was basically in balance; in some years more people left, in some more people arrived. In an advanced country, people always come and people always leave, and it is right that they should be able to do so, subject to certain conditions—in terms of the people arriving, that is. But this dramatic change has swelled our population very rapidly. No country can cope with that sort of population growth without very serious consequences for public services.

I will turn shortly to the other consequences, which the hon. Member for Lichfield touched on, but let us first deal with the economic arguments. The hon. Gentleman rightly said that the justification for immigration has usually been economic—we needed these people to fill jobs that others could not do. When I was attending Cabinet, David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, said that it seemed that only he and the Home Secretary believed in his policy of reducing migration to tens of thousands. Every time he went to Cabinet, one or more Cabinet Ministers would plead that we needed more health workers, construction workers, farm workers, dentists, doctors or nurses. Who did we not need? Every single Department pleaded that they were a special case, such that the policy was almost impossible to pursue or to achieve.

That is the problem we had, but it ignores the point I made to the hon. Member for Lichfield. As I said, he made an extremely balanced case, and he is right to say that an enormous number of people have been admitted on work visas. From June 2024, 270,000 workers were brought in to work in healthcare, but they brought with them 377,000 dependants, almost none of whom will have worked in health or care, and many of whom will have perfectly understandably depended on the provision of both. This was not meeting an economic need; it was creating an economic demand.

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir John Hayes]

I give way to the hon. Gentleman, although he looks like a bespectacled economist, so I am slightly nervous.

[Dr Arthur]

I am not sure if that was an insult or not. First, I should declare an interest by saying that back in 2015, an overseas healthcare worker saved my life. It was my cardiologist, and I put on record my thanks to him. The right hon. Gentleman will know that the population in the UK is falling, and we are getting older as well—I am evidence of that. Without immigration and workers coming into the country, particularly for our healthcare system, we may be stuck. Does he not agree with that?

[Sir John Hayes]

I will deal with those points in order. On the question of population, the ONS is clear that net migration is likely to fuel a rise in the UK population to 72.5 million by 2032. For most of my childhood and adolescence, the population was somewhere around 57 million, 58 million or 59 million. We have never at any point in our history had a population of anything like 72.5 million. The growth has been dramatic, taking place within a generation and a half. We can never build infrastructure to cope with that kind of growth. No Government could. It is not about whether the Government are Labour or Conservative or from a fringe party—by that I mean the Liberal Democrats, of course—it is about the public service being funded in a feasible and tenable way.

Of course it is true that many of the people who come into the country do great things, and of course it is true that our population has people from all kinds of places of origin who contribute immensely to our wellbeing and welfare. However, the truth is that the healthcare visa scheme was a palpable and absolute failure. If we look at the number of vacancies in that sector during the period I have described, it barely moved. It fell slightly, but by nothing like the number of people who were brought in. That leaves the question: what are these people doing now, and what did they do shortly after they arrived? My estimation is that many of them never intended to work in the healthcare sector and were brought into the country by businesses which never intended to work in it either. That is just one example of how the arguments about the economy and the value to the economy need to be re-examined and challenged.

I spoke earlier about the economic cost that people bring as well as value; what I did not mention, and must also be considered, is the displacement effect that migration has on investment in skills. When I was skills Minister, I helped to rejuvenate the apprenticeship system—under my stewardship we built the biggest number of apprenticeships we have ever had in modern times. I did that because I believed in investing in vocational, practical and technical competencies, not only to fulfil economic need, but because many people’s aptitudes, tastes and talents take them in that direction. However, if we say to businesses, “There is no need to invest in training or recruitment and retention, because you can bring people in from abroad to do those jobs”, what possible incentive is there for them to eat into the number of people who find themselves outside the labour market?

I feel particularly for young people. The number of so-called NEETs—those not in education, employment or training—is stubbornly high and has gone up to around 1 million now. Those 16 to 24-year-olds deserve better than a system that says, “We won’t train you; stay on benefits, because there is someone elsewhere who will do the job you might be trained to carry out.” That is not good Government. It is not reasonable or responsible.

We have to displace immigration and invest in skills, rather than the opposite—exactly what we have been doing for so long under successive Governments. Hon. Members will notice that I make no apology for the record of previous Conservative Governments. I am being absolutely frank: this has been a failure by the whole of the political establishment. Indeed much of that establishment, drawn as it is from the liberal classes, misunderstands the argument entirely. The hon. Member for Lichfield boldly and accurately drew attention to the gulf between the views and opinions of a very large number of our constituents and those who populate organisations such as the Migration Advisory Committee —it is a murky group; I never know quite who is on it or how they got there, but they certainly do not seem terribly sensitive to the kind of arguments that the hon. Gentleman advanced when he talked about the frustration and fears that people feel about the scale of migration for economic reasons.

Let me also say something about the social consequences. The hon. Gentleman, in his opening remarks, touched on the fact that societies work when they cohere—when they have a shared sense of belonging that draws people together and mitigates the differences that inevitably prevail in a free society. That shared sense of belonging is itself dependent on change being relatively gradual. Of course, everywhere changes, and our individual lives change too. We can cope with so much change in a human span, yet we have seen towns and parts of cities in our country alter beyond recognition. It is hard to reconcile that with the maintenance of that sense of belonging.

We need to be able to absorb people, and we need to be able to welcome those people, knowing there is something for them to integrate into. Yet, in some parts of Britain, there is a precious little left to integrate into. It is not fair to the indigenous population, nor is it fair to the incoming people, because it cheats them of their chance to gain that sense of belonging, that sense of Britishness, that the hon. Gentleman rightly identified as critical to our communal wellbeing. He is right that some people are frightened to say that. I have never been on the Clapham omnibus—you might have been, Dr Huq—but I can imagine what the people on it are like, because they are probably rather like the people on the Spalding omnibus, or even the Boston omnibus.