Immigration

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Field]

The hon. Gentleman changed his line during his intervention. He ended his intervention by saying that such people could not be wholly responsible, whereas he said at the beginning that they were wholly responsible. I do not think that we should duck the political failure of this place and of successive Governments who have not had their wits about them, and have not recognised that a country is in a new ballgame when it opens its doors to mass immigration. We were negligent, and that applies to both sides of the House of Commons.

Let me emphasise that I do not want the debate to turn against people on whom we placed no duties when they came here. We did not bother to teach the meaning of citizenship to people who have been based here for generations, including many in my constituency. The hon. Gentleman has touched on what is, in fact, a much wider question.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Field]

I fear that interventions may take up the entire time allotted for the debate, but I am happy to give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Mr Brazier]

I am sorry, but I am so filled with admiration for the right hon. Gentleman that, while endorsing what he has said, I would go a little further. Surely the key point is that the political elite across the board had lost confidence in the very British institutions that we should have been supporting and identifying as beacons for newcomers to the country.

[Mr Field]

I think it is worse than that. I think that those people had lost confidence in their role as politicians. They had lost sight of the fact that the issue was one that should be dealt with, and ideas about national identity, citizenship and protecting the country fell away from what should have been their main charge.

As you may remember, Mr Deputy Speaker, about 10 minutes ago I was talking about the progress that had been made. The fact that we can now raise points such as this in a friendly way without disputing others’ motives is a sign of the extent to which we, as a group of parliamentarians, have progressed. As for the progress being made in the public debate, let us consider some of the public statements that have been made since the Government announced a temporary cap on the number of people coming here to work. In its submission to the Government, the City of London said that the Government had every right to pursue their policy, but expressed concern about the way in which it might work in practice. The City certainly does not think that the Government should not discuss this topic, or that they should ignore what the electorate were saying during the election, but it would like to enter into detailed conversations.

We have all recently experienced what our electorates think, and none of us enters the Chamber now without being fully aware of the way in which voters in each of our constituencies view the issue of immigration.

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[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

It is a huge pleasure and an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field). May I start with a word of tribute to him and to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), who sadly is at a family funeral and very much regrets being unable to be with us? The way in which they have taken this issue of huge concern to people up and down the country, including many who are themselves of immigrant stock, detoxified it, moved us away from the old debates of the past and brought the real concerns of millions of ordinary people into this Chamber and the public domain cannot be commended too highly.

So many immigrants have made such a huge contribution to British life, economically as well as socially. Examples abound: the impact on manufacturing and culture of the influx of Huguenots, which was largely in response to the horrid repression under the Louis in the 17th century; the contribution of Jewish immigrants to banking and the rise of the supermarkets; and, post-war, the last-ditch rescue and transformation of so many small community shops, including my local village shop, by Indian families—it was just about to go bust, but is now a thriving venture.

Most debates have all too often focused on matters relating to assimilation. There are some issues to be raised in that regard but, like the right hon. Gentleman, I wish to focus almost exclusively on issues associated with numbers. Before doing so, I wish to make two wider points. The first is that I am extremely proud that my grandfather served in the Indian army. He did so in the first world war, but it is worth remembering that in the second world war, under the British Crown, the largest volunteer army in the history of mankind assembled, fought against the unspeakable evil of the Japanese army and prevented it from repeating the massacres of millions of people that had occurred in neighbouring China. This volunteer army was an organisation that brought together people from a wide range of ethnic groups and religions, and that has some lessons for us in terms of the importance of institutions and so on.

My second observation is that much of the current debate on immigration is poisoned by the fact that we have a legal culture in our courts which makes it very difficult to deport the small number of people who come here and grossly abuse the system. Every time a judge produces a fatuous ruling—I am not going to get into whether that is the fault of the judge or of the human rights legislation; it is a combination of both—that enables somebody who clearly should be deported to stay in this country, it builds up the far right, the extremists, and helps to build the tensions that it is so important for this country to move away from.

I wish to focus on four key issues relating to numbers and population density: the impact on our green footprint; the impact on housing; the impact on employment; and, finally, universities and English language schools. On the first, when I was the Opposition spokesman on aviation and shipping, I discovered a set of facts that, as far as I know, have not been in the public domain and which left me staggered. The right hon. Gentleman focused, as I shall for most of my speech, on net immigration, but this is a problem not only with immigration, but with emigration. By far the fastest growing category of flights in this country was not business flights, which had peaked when the recession came as socially conscious businesses moved towards video conferencing and so on, or holiday flights, which were still increasing, although not very quickly. The vast majority of the growth in aviation over the few years leading up to the recession was in a third category— the so-called visits to family and friends. The truth is that every time an individual moves here from a distant part of the world, or a British citizen leaves this country to go to all-too-often distant parts of the world, it creates a huge number of flights between family members.

In the last year for which I have seen figures, 32% of all flights from Heathrow reunited families and friends. It was a case of relatives visiting people who had come here, in almost all cases, completely legitimately, and those people living here visiting residents of the countries from which they originated, or of indigenous British people going off to visit granny in Sydney, for instance. We must recognise that the churn of population and the huge turnovers in it are having a huge effect on the growth of aviation. That factor has been left out of the debate.

[Mr Virendra Sharma]

Is the hon. Gentleman advocating that there should be no migration, no travelling and that people should not move from one place to another?

[Mr Brazier]

I have huge respect for the hon. Gentleman’s reputation. He was an active member of the Select Committee on Home Affairs for a long time and participated in a couple of interesting reports on this subject. He knows, of course, that that is not what I am recommending. Like the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, I am trying to say that numbers are critical. The heavy rates of churn that have taken place between countries over the past few years are among the key drivers in greenhouse emissions, but they are also a factor that has notably been left out of this debate.

[Mr Sharma]

I just want to correct the hon. Gentleman. I am neither a member of nor the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee—that is my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz).

[Mr Brazier]

I believed that the hon. Gentleman was a member of the Committee and I apologise if I am incorrect. I have certainly heard him talk sense on this subject in the past.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I have a brother and a sister, both of whom have migrated to America, and I am rather concerned. When the hon. Gentleman says it is about numbers, whose brother and sister should not be allowed to travel? That is what the question boils down to when we say it is about numbers. Whose relatives are to be debarred from engaging in family visits if we are trying to reduce the carbon footprint of migration?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I think we are straying off the debate somewhat, into climate change and aviation. The debate is on immigration, so perhaps we can focus on that.

[Mr Brazier]

Indeed I shall, Mr Deputy Speaker. Let me make a general point, if I may. When we discuss immigration and the pressures that it creates on housing, nobody is suggesting that any immigrant should be denied the right to buy or rent a house. When we discuss the pressure on jobs, we do not mean that anybody legitimately coming into this country should be refused such opportunities. The point we are trying to make is that large movements of people create pressures on all those areas. I am simply making the point that the green footprint is one factor that we must take into account in deciding what level of immigration we allow into this country.

Let me move to a second such factor, which is housing. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead observed that it is estimated that approximately 40% of housing need in this country is accounted for by net immigration. In fact, eight years ago the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated that Britain would need 4 million new houses by 2022. If we rework the calculations based on how the numbers have moved on since then, we can see that that was almost certainly a substantial underestimate. In an area such as mine, where there are extreme housing shortages, that should give us all pause for thought.

Forty per cent. of housing need is accounted for by net immigration, but we easily forget that one of the most common reasons given by people for leaving this country—it is second or third in most of the recent surveys—is that they feel that it is overcrowded. In many cases, they want to move to places that are less congested. Ironically, even by balancing the numbers we are keeping up levels of pressure that are already felt.

The problem in a county such as Kent is not just that we have a large number of people on housing waiting lists. The need for more housing has a range of pernicious side effects. Almost 90% of all the land in Kent that is either not grade 1 agricultural land or protected as an area of outstanding natural beauty now lies on floodplains, and we are also short of water. In fact, as one engineer pointed out to me the other day, the new building work in east Kent, particularly around Ashford—much of which has been built on floodplains—has managed simultaneously to add substantially to the flooding risks in winter, and many hundreds of my constituents have had their housing wrecked by flooding, and to contribute to shortages of water in summer in a county that has had repeated hosepipe bans over the past 10 years.

[Pete Wishart]

In Scotland we are facing for the first time in 100 years the prospect of our population falling below the iconic 5 million mark. Surely we require international solutions throughout the UK as well as regional solutions, or we will all experience difficult problems.

[Mr Brazier]

I heard the hon. Gentleman’s intervention on the right hon. Member for Birkenhead and I do not want to go too far down that route, but I do not believe that it is practical. I know that the Australians have done it, and the hon. Gentleman made that point vigorously. I am familiar with the Australian system, but there are two big differences between the six states that make up Australia and the four nations that make up Britain. The first difference is that the entities in Australia are very large and the population centres—most of the population of each of the six states lives in one part of that state, except in Queensland—are a very long way apart, so it is easier to see that people are fulfilling their obligations. The second key difference between Australia and Britain is that Australia has a legal system that works, so if people break the rules, they get deported, but we do not. Trying to provide people with permission to come as long as they settle in Scotland is not practical. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not go further down that route.

Although the cost of housing has come back a little from its recent gross peak, it is still very expensive compared with housing in the majority of other countries, especially for first-time buyers. The primary effect of unaffordable housing is that vast numbers of young families either cannot get housing or work very long hours to pay their mortgages. Even nine years ago—the situation has worsened since then—a huge one-off survey by the OECD discovered some very sad facts about Britain. Some 63% of UK families thought that they only just managed on their household incomes and a higher proportion of Britons than inhabitants of any other major EU nation felt that they had to work more hours than was good for their family life.

Apart from a couple of small countries, we have almost the highest proportion of working mothers in the world. Of course mothers should be able to work—my wife worked when she was a mother—but mothers, including some who work as staff in the House of Commons, are being driven into working much longer hours than they necessarily want to when their children are small because they are paying mortgages for overpriced houses in an overcrowded country.

Along with housing, other relevant issues include health care, social housing and the cost of providing infrastructure. I have mentioned water shortages in Kent; huge costs are associated with the next dam that we are going to need. Those things all cost money and all have to be brought into the balance when we decide whether we want a population of 70 million in a generation’s time.

The third area that I want to discuss is employment. Let me reassure hon. Members that I do not suggest that anyone who is here legitimately, whether as a successful asylum seeker or through a legitimate marriage, should ever be disadvantaged in the job market. I do not suggest there should be discrimination, but we must do what the right hon. Gentleman did in his speech and examine the impact of allowing heavy net immigration, as has happened in the past few years, on the employment of our population. That immigration has not been overwhelmingly from Europe: in the past decade, about two thirds has been from outside Europe.

Interestingly, the employment of UK-born people averaged about 64% in the latest figures available, having fallen by half a per cent. The corresponding employment rate is slightly higher for non-UK-born people at 66.5%, so the right hon. Gentleman’s point about many of the incoming groups teaching us a lesson about the work ethic is true. However, that is not the whole story: we have one of the highest rates of workless households in the developed world. Nearly 4.8 million people of working age are not working and 1.9 million children are living in households in which no one works, many of them households in which no one has ever worked.

Government figures show that 1.4 million people in the UK have been on out-of-work benefits for nine or more of the past 10 years. As John Hutton said in 2006, when he was the Work and Pensions Secretary,

“if people have been on incapacity benefit for more than two years, they are more likely to retire or to die than ever to get another job.”—[Official Report, 24 January 2006; Vol. 441, c. 1305.]

It has already been observed but is worth repeating that, although the previous Government can take credit for creating more than 2 million jobs, almost three quarters of those were accounted for by people coming from outside the country. The previous Government effectively had a policy of replacement migration. I am a huge admirer and supporter of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pension’s shake-up of the welfare system, but, as he has hinted in his speeches, it can work only with diligent application of the Government’s plans on immigration, because if large numbers of people are encouraged to get back into the work force—there are some expensive carrots as well as sticks in that regard—they will not have a great deal of luck, as we pull very slowly out of a very difficult recession, if there is a steady stream of young economic migrants to take their place. We cannot do anything about people coming from eastern Europe, but we can do something about those coming from other parts of the world.

The fourth issue I want to address is the student system. I am very proud to represent the largest number of students in any constituency. I have two excellent universities in my patch and a number of highly valued English language schools that act as feeders to those universities and others. However, we must recognise that the problems in the student system that the right hon. Gentleman hinted at are very real. Unlike him, I do not believe that they are confined to a number of bogus colleges, but it is good that the Government are clamping down on them.

I know two people who regularly go to other parts of the world to market their organisations, both of which are legitimate—a Russell group university and an English language school with a very good record in the field—and they both say that the first thing they are asked in many countries is, “Once you get a foot in the door, can you stay?” All too often, people from even the most respectable institutions are tempted to say, “Well, yes, in practice, that almost always follows if that is what you want.” As the universities come under pressure, with the new funding regime starting in 2012, the temptation for those organisations, particularly those that are struggling economically and cannot fill their books, to take people who can pay the money but do not necessarily have the right academic qualifications will be huge. As the right hon. Gentleman pointed out, the largest single route for entry into this country is the student system.

We have to strike a balance, but that will be difficult. It is essential that the best lecturers have the opportunity to come if they want to spend part of their career here and we must have a system in which the brightest and best students see Britain as a place to come. That will be good not only for the countries they come from and the universities that receive them: a key third benefit is that, a generation on, Britain will have friends, potentially in high places. In striking the balance, we have to make sure that perfectly legitimate organisations at the lower end of the economic scale do not pad their numbers out with people who are willing to pay a year’s fees up front and then disappear into the system.

I conclude by drawing attention to an absolutely extraordinary hole in the immigration system that came to my attention at my constituency surgery on Saturday. My constituent, Mr Spence, is happy for me to share his experience with the House. He had a suitcase containing all his personal documents stolen. He has never had a passport, but it included his birth certificate. He was born in Rutland and he was told that to get another birth certificate from Rutland county council, he needed to fill in a form online and send a cheque for £9. He asked what verification was needed and was assured that there was none. Let me inform the House that Government guidelines to anyone applying for a job—I have seen a string of these from various organisations—say that someone who has either a passport or a birth certificate and a letter from a Department, which could be anything and does not require any identity checks, can come into this country.

[Robert Halfon]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the great author, Mr Frederick Forsyth, identified this problem a long time ago in his book “The Day of the Jackal”?

[Mr Brazier]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I was wholly unaware of that and must reread the book.

Mr Spence’s story gets better—or worse if one is being serious about it. When he was five, his mother remarried and changed his name by deed poll. He contacted Rutland council and said, “There is just one problem: I need to change my details because my name was changed a long time ago.” “Ah,” said the council, “That is no problem.” He had only to fill in another online form and send a cheque for £40 for it all to be fixed.

Unlike the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, I am not going to end with a shopping list of firm recommendations, although I have hinted at a number already. I simply end by observing that we cannot continue to have an open-door policy. I welcome the steps that the incoming coalition Government have already taken, but I firmly believe that they must go further, as we have inherited a system that certainly is not fit for purpose. I congratulate the co-sponsors of the motion and the Backbench Business Committee for giving us the opportunity to discuss this subject.

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[Mr Brazier]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Government are addressing the issue by getting rid of the wasteful Train to Gain schemes, with all their phoney elements, and introducing proper apprenticeships. Does he accept that however hard we work at it, a man or woman in their late 40s or early 50s, who has come out of employment and is looking for a new job, is never going to be as attractive to an employer as a young incomer in their early 20s?

[Mark Tami]

The point that I am trying to make—and the hon. Gentleman’s point, I think—is that we have to address our training needs. Just stopping a person coming in does not address that problem. We still do not have the skill base. We lag behind other countries, and we have done so for many years. I am not saying that we got everything right, and I am certainly not saying that the current Government have got everything right. We will be having the same argument for many years to come.

We have to admit that some UK private industry has been reluctant to train people. Many companies see training as an avoidable cost rather than as an investment. For too long, rather than training people themselves, companies have preferred to poach a skilled employee who has been trained by another company. After a time, that becomes a bit of a vicious circle. Many people from companies, particularly smaller companies, have asked me what the point is of training somebody. They invest a lot of time and money in doing it, but then the bigger company down the road comes in, offers the employee more money and off that employee goes. Those companies say that they might as well not train anybody in the first place.

In the past, we had a number of nationalised industries; whatever their merits, most people will accept that they trained an awful lot of people to a very high standard. Many of those people drifted off to the private sector. After privatisation, one of the first things to suffer was the number of people being trained—numbers were cut and shareholders became the fundamental concern. We saw a big drop-off in the number of employees being trained by companies such as British Telecom, British Gas and the old electricity companies. People were not going from the public sector to the private sector in the same numbers to fill the gap that the private sector has always failed to fill.

I know that this will get absolutely no support from Government Members, but I support a training levy: a company of a certain size should have an obligation to train a certain number of people. That would mean a level playing field. It might address the problem of some companies not training people because they are worried—

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[Heidi Alexander]

I agree entirely. Earlier this week, the Secretary of State for Justice himself admitted in the House that people are being taken advantage of. He said:

“We have all known for many years that some…advice, usually given by non-lawyers…is not very good and that the prices charged are rather unscrupulous.”—[Official Report, 15 November 2010; Vol. 518, c. 671-72.]

I think “not very good” and “rather unscrupulous” are probably quite significant understatements. In my experience, some individuals dispense absolutely diabolical immigration advice, and something needs to be done to tackle that.

I fear that the challenges to legal aid will make the situation worse, and I understand that the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner will undergo a merger in the not-too-distant future. I ask the Minister to use this opportunity to look again at the accreditation process for immigration advisers and at the quality checks done on providers once accreditation has been obtained. I am told that the accreditation process for advisers without legal qualifications involves a simple online test, which seems somewhat open to abuse. Will the Minister speak with his colleagues in the Ministry of Justice about tightening that process?

Much of the debate has focused on the implications of the cap for top universities, but another part of the education sector could also be hit hard by changes to the immigration rules. Roughly half of international students in our universities have completed some form of foundation course in the UK. In my constituency, Twin Training International Ltd provides such courses, along with short English language courses. It makes an enormous contribution to the local economy; in fact, after Sainsbury and Tesco, it is the largest employer in the borough of Lewisham. However, it also puts money into the hands of many local families, who provide board to students. This is not some dodgy college set up to offer a way into the country, but a reputable business, which has the capacity to grow. However, it will not grow, and it will lose students to businesses in Canada and America, if the Government make it harder for those students to come here. Why would we encourage international students to learn English in Canada when they could learn it in England?

I accept that action needs to be taken against bogus colleges, and the previous Government started that process. However, it is important that we remind ourselves that only 12% of all migrants granted settlement last year originally entered the UK as students. Some 80% of all overseas students leave the UK within five years of entering. In taking action against fraudulent institutions, let us not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

I accept that we need some form of control over the numbers of people coming to the UK and over the purposes for which they come here, but please let us acknowledge the way in which the flow of people from all over the world makes a positive difference to our economy and culture. Let us also acknowledge the benefits of international students going back to their own countries with links to the UK.

Let us also treat people who are here humanely. Let us think how we would feel if our children were being taken away from their school friends, our 17 or 18-year-old was being sent back to Afghanistan or our friends were being forced to live in limbo, as they waited for the Home Office to make a decision on their case.

[Mr Brazier]

The hon. Lady refers to Afghanistan. I am a strong supporter of a local charity that looks after unaccompanied asylum seekers, who are overwhelmingly from Afghanistan. Two of my wife’s relatives serve in the armed forces, so may I put it to the hon. Lady that when this country is committed to a policy of trying to turn Afghanistan round, and plenty of young British males and females are risking their lives to do that, it is not unreasonable, as the country stabilises, for people to return there when they reach adulthood?

[Heidi Alexander]

The hon. Gentleman hits the nail on the head when he says “as it stabilises”. My understanding is that although the security situation might be quite stable in parts of Kabul, it is not in other parts of the country.

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[Mr Lilley]

Yes, but above all we need to fill it by training people up. That is what countries that grow and prosper do, and we have got to learn to do it too.

[Mr Brazier]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Lilley]

May I make a little more progress?

The hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) mentioned the skill of cooking Bangladeshi meals. There are a large number of unemployed Bangladeshi people in this country, and there are a large number of Bangladeshi restaurants. Why, therefore, do the restaurateurs not train up their staff to acquire these skills? I am afraid that the reason is because they can get staff with such skills more cheaply from the subcontinent. We must say that we want to have well-paid chefs in this country, not depress the pay by importing from abroad.

I want to refer to an aspect of the debate that none of us has mentioned, and that I suspect nobody except me will mention. Indeed, I would not have done so had I not acquired my copy of Prospect magazine yesterday. It is a left-wing magazine, but I am very open-minded so I read even left-wing monthly journals.

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[James Brokenshire]

I entirely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. I have made it clear that we want to attract the brightest and the best to this country. We believe that it is possible to introduce limits and take account of the concerns of business and of the scientific institutions to which I referred.

We consulted business and other interested parties extensively on how the limit should work, and more than 3,000 responded. We also asked the Migration Advisory Committee—the well-respected and independent advisory body on migration policy—to consult on what the limit should be, taking into account the economic and social impacts of migration. The MAC report has been published today. I thank David Metcalf and the other members of the committee for their very full and helpful report, which we will continue to study in great detail. We will consider its findings alongside the responses to our own consultation on how the limit should operate, and we will announce how it will work in the near future. I will not comment this afternoon on the detail of the committee’s recommendations, as that would pre-empt the Government’s final announcement, which will be made in due course. However, this is a complex issue, and it is vital that we consider the best and broadest advice, including the responses made to the Home Office’s consultation on economic migration.

I now want to talk about the issue of intra-company transfers, which has been highlighted in the debate. Of course, we want companies to be able to transfer senior managers and specialists to enrich their UK operations. For that reason, the Prime Minister has already indicated that we have heard the concerns of business on this matter. However, in 2009 such transfers accounted for 22,000 migrants out of the 36,500 admitted through the tier 2 route, and about half of those 22,000 were in the IT sector—a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley). Given the numbers involved, we need to ensure that the ICT route is being used for its original purpose, and not to undercut regular jobs here, particularly in the IT sector. Last week, a study published by the Higher Education Careers Service Unit showed that graduate unemployment was highest among graduates in computer science, out of all the disciplines. We are therefore looking carefully at the rules on ICTs.

[Mr Brazier]

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. Six years ago, a study showed that computer scientists and mathematicians enjoyed the greatest premium of all on graduating, so there has been an astonishing change in that sector of the market.

[James Brokenshire]

My hon. Friend makes that point, and that is why we are considering these issues very carefully.