Immigration

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

It is a huge pleasure and honour to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), who has spoken out on this issue again and again, including when abuse was heaped on anyone who tried to do so. I also praise my hon. Friend the Minister, who has brought great energy to one of the most difficult briefs in Government. What I am about to say will be pretty bleak, frankly, but not one word of it should be taken as a criticism of the huge amount of energy and intellect that he has brought to his job.

It is curious, looking through one’s postbag, how many of the pressing issues facing Britain today—housing shortages, congestion on roads and public transport, water shortages, pressures on public infrastructure of every kind—derive largely from a single, common factor: population growth, to which my right hon. Friend referred. We are one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with 255 people per square kilometre. During the time of the last Labour Government, immigration policies encouraged an unprecedented influx from EU and non-EU countries, which has boosted populations in some urban areas to near crisis point. Between 1997 and 2009, after deducting the number of those leaving, more than 2 million extra people were recorded as settling in the UK, a surge that is unprecedented. However, for the first time, those figures were calculated without using embarkation records, so the true figure may be much higher. The ONS projections to which my right hon. Friend referred have been upgraded again and again. For example, in 2004 they indicated that by the middle of this century our population would reach 67 million. In just three years that projection was increased to 77 million, and it continues to rise.

I believe we need to look at gross rather than net migration figures, for several reasons. First, many of those leaving are elderly people, looking to spend their retirement abroad in the sun. In contrast, the vast majority of immigrants are young. First-generation immigrants typically have large families compared with indigenous families. There is a further, obvious point, which was well understood in this country until the middle of the last century, which is that because we are basically overcrowded we always used to have more people leaving, precisely to find homes in emptier lands. Today, housing pressures are caused by domestic factors, such as family breakdown, increased longevity and so on, which have led to smaller household sizes, so if we do not have a degree of net emigration, we will have to keep building more and more.

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman’s last comment—that the reason many British people have gone around the world and settled elsewhere is because Britain is overcrowded—is factually wrong. The parts of the country from which many people left—Scotland and Wales—are the least crowded. In fact, they mostly went because there were no jobs in this country or, originally, because of religious persecution. It is nothing to do with overcrowding.

[Mr Brazier]

One can go back quite a long way, into religious persecution and earlier history, but we were very keen to encourage, for example, the Australians to keep an assisted package programme going for nearly two thirds of the last century. Much of that was precisely to reduce overcrowding. There was also a degree of internal re-location—for example, with the setting up of new towns outside London—but we encouraged movement abroad, as well as out of our major cities.

Everybody agrees that previous generations of immigrants have brought huge benefits, in such fields as business, science, sports and the arts. We all have friends from a variety of different communities. My family has particularly benefited from a doctor, without whom two of my sons would not be alive today, who is a recent immigrant. However, few people recognise the sheer impact of population growth on our country today, and I want to focus on two issues: housing and infrastructure.

The most serious social and economic issue facing middle and lower middle-income families in Britain today is the shortage of housing, and not just in the south-east where land is at the highest premium. The huge inflows of population that took place under the last Government are going to require very large releases of land, much of it countryside, even without any further population growth. Our house prices today, despite some fall from the peak during the recession, remain very high by international standards and, crucially, in relation to our falling incomes.

As the Prime Minister pointed out the other day, the average age of first-time buyers has risen to 37. Many families are now burdened for much longer than ever before with heavy mortgages, so adults have to work longer hours and for more years in an attempt to service those mortgages. An OECD survey showed a few years ago that a higher proportion of people in this country feel they are working more hours than are good for their family life than people in any other major country in the developed world.

Shelter paints an equally bleak picture of the rental market. More than half of local authorities in England have a median private rent for a two-bedroom house that costs more than 35% of median take-home pay. Families are forced to cut their spending on essentials—food, heating or whatever—to pay the cost of rent or the mortgage.

The Government have set out plans to revive building, which was at an all-time low at the end of the last Government, but that will have the knock-on effect of causing huge problems for infrastructure. The Environment Agency, for example, estimates that 5 million people live in flood-risk areas in England and Wales, and as climate change accelerates, that number will no doubt rise. Yet in a county such as mine—Kent—the majority of all land that does not fall into a protected category is now on floodplains, so much of the building we are going to have to provide to cope with our existing population, including the rise caused by the bulge in immigration, will have to be built on precious protected land or else more communities will have to be exposed to the dangers of flooding.

Water supplies in many parts of the country are under strain, too. In fact, our national average per capita is now lower than that of Spain and Portugal. As more water is abstracted from aquifers and rivers, the flow in rivers falls, killing wildlife and scarring the countryside.

Immigration is putting considerable pressure on our schools, too. A report by London Councils stated that on current projections, London is 18,000 places short. It is not just London. Between 1998 and 2010, the proportion of children in primary schools in England for whom English is not the first language very nearly doubled to 16%, and in inner London native English-speaking children are in the minority. The noble Lord Knight, until recently a Labour Education Minister, admitted that

“undoubtedly there can be problems”

in schools with large numbers of non-English speakers. That is massively to understate the handicap suffered by all the other children in those schools.

The number of arrivals from overseas registering with a GP has increased dramatically. One of the hardest hit NHS specialties has been midwifery, as birth rates have risen most sharply in areas where numbers of immigrants are high. When Labour came to power in 1997, one baby in eight was born to a foreign-born mother. That has now risen to one in four.

My hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration has put it well: the real questions are how Britain can benefit most from immigration and what controls do we need to maximise those benefits and minimise the strains. The last Labour Government—we still have not had an answer from the shadow Minister as to whether he believes immigration is too high—maintained that immigration was good for Britain and the British economy as a whole since immigrants boosted GDP. Of course it is true that on average immigrants pay more tax than they receive in benefits or consume in public services. Many, especially the kind of immigrants who came through in generations before Labour opened the borders, make a gigantic contribution, but taking an average disguises the bottom end of the spectrum.

Many of those who arrived in Britain under the last Government, particularly from the Asian subcontinent, were unskilled and joined often insular communities in which incomes were already low and in some cases the unemployment rate was near to 50%. Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, for example, were those most likely to enter the UK through the family route after the primary purpose rule was dropped.

Baroness Flather, the first Asian woman to receive a peerage, caused outrage when she made a brave speech in the House of Lords. She said:

“The minority communities in this country, particularly the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis, have a very large number of children and the attraction is the large number of benefits that follow the child.”

She went on to say:

“Nobody likes to accept that or to talk about it because it is supposed to be very politically incorrect.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 13 September 2011; Vol. 730, c. 706.]

Of course it is true here as in countries all over the world that the trend is for birth rates in ethnic groups that integrate to go towards the national average. The problem, as the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) has pointed out, is that under the last Government we grew significant numbers of communities where there was no integration and no trend in birth rates or anything else towards the national norm. The whole economic argument has largely ignored the costs to the overburdened public purse in infrastructure and the loss of quality of life to the population, as overcrowding worsens.

There are powerful voices that welcome continued heavy immigration. Big business benefits from the arrival of large numbers of people willing to work, since they drive down the cost of labour at the expense of the living standards of the indigenous workforce; and the wives of the better-off are able to get help in the home at a fraction of a living wage for local people, but then they and their families are not usually struggling to pay their mortgages and watching their children’s education being destroyed in schools with dozens of languages.

[Mr Ward]

The hon. Gentleman has made two references to education and attainment in schools, about which I know something. There is no evidence that indigenous children for whom English is the first language suffer as a result of the presence of children with other first languages. The evidence to support that view is just not there.

[Mr Brazier]

I have just quoted the words of a former Labour Education Minister, and I will write to the hon. Gentleman if he would like me to find a study for him.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

I am afraid that the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) is incorrect. There is evidence to suggest that. The Minister acknowledged in a Westminster Hall debate earlier this year that children without English as their first language are 19% less likely to succeed in key stage 2 SATs. That is an important issue, particularly for primary schools.

[Mr Brazier]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend. I shall not repeat the powerful point my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex made about students, but there is a very real issue to consider. At a time when the domestic take-up of degree courses is likely to shrink sharply, I suspect that the problem will grow more acute.

Middle-income and lower middle-income Britain is hurting: with long working hours, high levels of debt and rising prices in so many sectors, people struggle to meet their mortgages and rent payments and they see their standard of living eroded. There is a severe shortage of homes, and overcrowding in many schools, hospitals and prisons, too. We are trying to cope with the strains of a growing population. Infrastructure is also desperately overstretched in so many ways, with issues of flooding, water supplies, roads and land preservation looming.

We all recognise the huge contribution that moderate levels of immigration have made to this country in the past. I welcome the measures that Ministers and the Government have taken. I would argue, however, that the coalition has a long way to go on this issue. The heavy criticism from big business and elements from the left must not put them off. It is time to recognise that we must take much stronger action if we want to head off the most severe social consequences and a backlash orchestrated by some unattractive people in the extremes—not just from indigenous people, but increasingly from many concerned people in our settled ethnic minority communities.