Legal and Illegal Migration: Suspension

Josh Newbury Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Dr Huq, especially given that this is my first speech in Westminster Hall. I thank my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson), for introducing this debate so thoughtfully and in such a balanced way, as several hon. Members have said. It has not gone unnoticed that my constituency has among the highest numbers of signatures on the e-petition. As has been rightly pointed out, the petition is a signal to the House of how people feel about immigration and the real impact on their lives. It is our responsibility as Members of this House to acknowledge that. It is also our responsibility to be clear that discussing immigration and the strains that it leads to is not racist or intolerant, but a legitimate part of our democracy in the same way as public debate over any other issue.

It is important for us to discuss the impacts of high levels of immigration, particularly where they are seen over a short period and where that immigration is concentrated in certain cities, towns or villages. The impact of that rapid rise in population in that context is not dissimilar to large new housing estates being built over a few years—except that, with house building, we can to some extent put in place mitigation through the planning system and allow for a direct transfer of cash from developers to infrastructure. We can—and, I am sure, will—debate whether the planning system delivers infrastructure quickly enough, but the bottom line is that rapid immigration to particular areas is far harder to plan for and therefore to address.

Over the past two decades or so, several pots of Government funding have attempted to address that point, such as the migration impact fund, introduced under the last Labour Government, and latterly the controlling migration fund under the coalition and Conservative Governments. However, those pots often fund efforts such as encouraging GP registration among new migrants to reduce the use of urgent and emergency care. Although that is positive for demand on services and, certainly, the public purse, it often does not address the core issues with the lack of infrastructure, such as the number of places at local GP surgeries or schools. I believe we need to revisit the question of how we make up for the impact of immigration at a very local level, where people are feeling the effects most.

Ultimately, we are here to discuss why hundreds of thousands of people have chosen to sign this petition. For some, it might be a worry about the pressure on housing, schools and healthcare, or an acknowledgment of the simple fact that net migration has been left to soar for far too long. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield mentioned, net migration reached staggering levels in recent years, and it has never reduced to the level that the previous Government aimed for.

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is making a measured speech, unlike the hon. Member for Bristol Central (Carla Denyer), but will he chart what he has mentioned in practical terms? Last year, there were 700,000 new GP registrations. No Government, Conservative or Labour, could cope with that scale of growth in demand.

[Josh Newbury]

Absolutely—I agree with the right hon. Gentleman on that point. Those of us who have had high levels of house building see that, and I am sure that is reflected in areas with high levels of immigration. We need proper planning wherever there is a rapid growth in population, and I worry that that has not been happening for a very long time.

GP registrations are a particular pressure point. I recently had a roundtable with all the general practices in my area, and I was told that they are at capacity—over capacity, in many cases—and that further house building is coming down the line. They worry that we do not have forward planning in the NHS, which is often slow to catch up. I say that having worked for an NHS commissioner in a past life. We must acknowledge that we need to do far better on that point.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield said, a key reason for the high levels of immigration is the unchecked issuing of work visas, particularly in sectors with high vacancies such as social care. That is why I welcome the Government’s commitment to finally link up immigration policies and our national strategy for education and skills. Only that will ensure that British people have opportunities to upskill, reskill and access those jobs—in some cases, they currently do not feel able to do so. That will also put a greater onus on employers to ensure that they use work visas for vacancies that genuinely cannot be filled by our workforce.

An early priority identified by the Deputy Prime Minister, the Education Secretary and the Home Secretary is social care, and it is not hard to see why. In many ways, social care epitomises the issues we are facing with immigration and workforce planning: we have an ageing population, so demand for the sector’s services is exploding; pay is generally low, especially given the importance of the work; the wider terms and conditions are not appealing for many young people starting their careers; and there are often no opportunities for skills training.

Last Friday, I was given a greater insight into the challenges of the care sector when I visited CSPC Healthcare and heard about the challenges it has seen in the sector for the 12 years that it has been operating. It provides domiciliary care in my constituency and across Staffordshire and the west midlands. It told me quite a lot, most of which I will save for a future debate on social care, but one thing it said that struck me was that many agencies, particularly those working with overseas recruitment agencies, are sponsoring huge numbers of work visas, only for those workers to find that the amount of work they were promised is not there when they come into the country, are bused out to a particular town and dropped off. That is exploitative and quite frankly an outrage if immigration figures are being artificially inflated when our economy does not need all those staff. That highlights the reforms we need for the immigration system and our skills and workforce planning.

The question that must follow all that is: would suspending all immigration for five years really solve all those problems? Our economy relies on workers from abroad to fill gaps in our workforce and in sustaining our vital public services, so I fear that a complete shutdown would risk huge consequences. In particular, we know that our NHS will always rely on workers coming to make their home here and contributing to those great institutions. Having worked in our NHS in a past life, I know that skilled staff from other countries, most of them European and Commonwealth nations, are critical to keeping the health service alive.

We will always benefit from international skills and talent to keep us globally competitive, but importantly, immigration must never be used as an alternative to training or tackling workforce problems here at home. The previous Government’s reliance on overseas workers, teamed with a failure to invest in skills here in the UK, left us with an immigration system that is neither properly controlled nor managed, resulting in net migration of almost 1 million people. Regardless of our stance on immigration control, surely we can all agree that that is unsustainable practically, financially, environmentally, or on whatever grounds we care to look at.

The decade of decline in skills training, particularly vocational skills in the sectors with the greatest need, saw employers unable to fill vacancies and therefore with no choice but to either do the nation serious economic damage or face eye-watering net migration figures. The work that Skills England is doing with the Migration Advisory Committee will show us the occupation shortages, which will ensure that people can access the skills training they need to fill vacancies in those sectors, raising growth sustainability across the country and stopping reliance on overseas recruitment.

I will finish with a point on dependants and a point on the practicalities of halting immigration for five years. As has been mentioned, dependants have been a key component of rising levels of immigration for many years, especially in visa categories where levels were previously very low, such as students. I absolutely sympathise with the view that our points-based immigration system needs to focus on bringing the most economically productive workers into the UK. However, we must also acknowledge that some of the highest skilled, most productive workers, just like British workers, have care responsibilities. Surely we do not want to shut out people purely because they have children or have to care for a sick or elderly parent, for example. What we need is a common-sense approach to dependants. Should a student be able to bring their whole family over with them when they study? In my opinion, no. Should a single mother with three children, who wants to work as a nurse in our NHS, be welcomed? Yes. I think the vast majority of the public support that pragmatic view.

I sympathise with what I assume are the motivations of the creator of this petition: giving the UK breathing space to rebuild our infrastructure, which has been so damaged by the age of austerity, a pandemic and huge levels of net migration. But the reality is that halting immigration for several years, or even months, would simply create huge pent-up demand for visas for that period of zero migration. During that time, presumably people would still be allowed to leave the country, raising the possibility of a mass shortage in our workforce. Then, if immigration were allowed again at some point in the future, the tidal wave of applications would almost completely overwhelm not only our visa system but the infrastructure that we are most concerned about. A total stop of immigration would therefore be counterproductive to tackling the impacts that underpin this petition and so much of our national conversation around immigration.

To conclude, I hope that the openness and robustness of debate we have seen today will continue. Closing down the debate around immigration with name-calling and demonisation, from whatever perspective, will close down the chance of getting to a point where we are able to address all the issues we have touched on. I welcome the Government’s choice to grasp the nettle of reforming our skills system and linking it to where job vacancies are, and I hope we can continue that debate in the months and years to come.