Immigration

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Field]

I have no evidence, but a constituent of mine was one of those who had their legs blown off in the London bombing.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Field]

No; I have given way on that point.

My second question is on the mountain we must climb. I reiterate the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex made. If the Government are not successful within a 15-year period, if not sooner, our population will go beyond 70 million. As he said, in concrete terms, that means that if we wish to maintain existing living standards rather than see them cut, we must build the equivalent of Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Bristol and Glasgow. That must happen during a period when we will experience a more sustained number of years of cuts in public expenditure than we have ever experienced. With those cities must come roads, utilities and the necessary extra schools and health facilities. Does any hon. Member believe that if we are not successful in meeting the Government’s objective, we will meet the objective of housing people on an equivalent basis to how they are currently housed?

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[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I welcome the newly appointed Minister to the post. He was a popular Minister in his last job, but he will now find it easier to have every Conservative Member—and many others—supporting him.

Ever since I became an MP, and indeed since long before, it has been clear to me that we needed to take more seriously people’s views about immigration. However, both the Liberals and the Labour party took exactly the opposite view. They believed that there needed to be complete concealment from the public on this issue, and anyone who believed the contrary was a racist. The fact is, however, that many people were becoming so concerned they were prepared to accept being labelled as racists if the consequence was to do anything good on immigration. The number of migrants allowed into this country was far and away in excess of what we needed for economic growth, and many people in all parts of the country were sickened by it.

Let us go back to the year I was born. We took approximately 3,000 people into the country in 1953. By the 1970s, we admitted an average of 45,000 per year, and that did not include the 27,000 Ugandan Asians from Idi Amin’s genuinely racist regime. In the 1980s and early 1990s, 54,000 were admitted each year, rising again in 1999 to around 97,000. Let us make it absolutely clear. It was the intention of the Labour party to admit far more migrants than ever before. Its aim was to create a rainbow coalition—what it succeeded in doing was creating ghettos in many parts of the country. This is something that had long been suspected by Conservatives and was realised with the Labour party’s draft policy paper in 2001, which was thought to have mentioned “social objectives” within its overall migration strategy.

[Kate Green]

I do not recognise the history that the hon. Gentleman portrays, but does he recognise that many of my constituents, who arrived as migrants or are now second and third generation migrant families, will be incredibly hurt and offended by the way in which he characterises them as somehow undesirable in our society?

[Mr Turner]

If the hon. Lady would indicate what is wrong with what I have said, I will change it if necessary.

In the period between 1997 and 2010, we admitted 200,000 people per year. That is the same as creating a new city the size of Birmingham every five years, not including illegal immigrants as we had no idea where they were. When Lord Howard of Lympne led the party in the election in 2005, we were called racists for wanting to impose effective limits on migration. It was the first real attempt by even the Conservative party to stand up for the people who live here.

Labour, under the then Prime Minister, began to see the truth after many years of attack on a small minority of politicians, such as my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) and, even more so, the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) for leading the debate. But even during the last election campaign, the then Prime Minister called a pensioner and lifelong Labour supporter a bigot for questioning the scale of migration.

In the 2010 election, we Conservatives promised to reduce the number of migrants to 100,000 per year by 2015. The question is whether we are doing enough, and the answer is clearly no. Our policy is not to offer free health care except in emergencies, to migrants from outside the EU, but there is no effective system in place to enforce that. The same goes for migrants from within the EU. Spain, unlike us, has this system under control, and migrants from the EU cannot get health care unless they produce the right papers. Migrants who intend to live in Spain for more than three months have to produce a job contract or evidence of their ability to support themselves, otherwise their requests will now be denied. We need answers.

There are other points that we need to press more strongly. First, there are still no controls on people coming from the EU. Quite clearly, we must effect such controls. Secondly, there are students. Some of them are false, and we congratulate the Government on how, even this week, they have been reducing their number. On the other hand, however, we do not intend to keep genuine students away. They must fill in the visa forms, and we must make it clear that they are welcome. Thirdly, there are the illegals. We must keep working at them in order to reduce their number, but the law is not 100% behind the Government in this area, and a change from the judges would be much welcomed. Finally, there must be genuine help for those who wish to return to their country of origin.

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[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

I should like to start by paying tribute to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) for their courage, conviction and determination in tabling the motion. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee for ensuring that the debate was held today; it is a debate that the vast majority of people in this country want us to have.

I have been involved in local politics and parliamentary politics for some years. My constituency of Crawley is multi-ethnic, and one of the most important issues that people raise with me—regardless of their ethnic background, although it is often raised by people from an ethnic minority—is the concern about the sheer number of people coming into this country over the past decade or so. If people continue to enter the country in those numbers, the situation will be unsustainable. A population in excess of 70 million would certainly be unsustainable.

It is worth repeating that, for far too long, the main political parties and the political establishment in this country have not addressed people’s concerns about the sheer level of immigration, particularly over the past decade or so. As a result, reasonable people who are not prejudiced or racist have found themselves supporting racist organisations and parties such as the British National party and the so-called English Defence League. That is a great shame, in a country that has traditionally been—and still is—one of the most tolerant nations anywhere in the world. It is appalling that our lack of willingness to address the situation has led to those thoughts being held by reasonable people.

Immigration has played a big part in the history of this nation. There have been various waves of immigration, but we are now, for the first time in a millennium, seeing unsustainable numbers. Some estimates mention 3 million people, but the important point is that we do not actually know the figure because the numbers of people coming to this country are not properly recorded. That has put enormous pressure on our infrastructure. That is evident in my constituency, where the pressure on housing is immense. Areas that were originally designated for commercial development have had to be re-designated as residential development to support the numbers of people coming to live there. That results in pressure on infrastructure—not just the physical infrastructure such as the highways, but, perhaps most acutely, the schools. Many have had to expand their classroom capacity in quite difficult circumstances to accommodate the numbers.

Mention was made earlier of the pressure that immigration has been putting on the national health service. Next Tuesday, I am pleased to be presenting a ten-minute rule Bill on this issue, which will seek to require a proper audit to be carried out in order to recover reciprocal costs incurred in the treatment of foreign nationals by the national health service. At the moment, the figures are not properly recorded or monitored, but they suggest that the health service is paying more than £1 billion a year on supporting foreign nationals who would otherwise not be entitled to free care.

[Kate Green]

I note what the hon. Gentleman says about the use of the national health service, but does he also recognise the substantial contribution made by immigrants who are employees of the NHS? How does he think the NHS would manage if we were unable to attract migrants to come here and do that work?

[Henry Smith]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for using the word “manage”. That is what has been missing from our immigration system up to now. My wife was an immigrant to this country, and she used to work in the national health service. The hon. Lady is quite right to say that the NHS has relied on people coming to this country to support it.

However, we need an immigration system in which we know who is coming into and leaving the country, and in which those who come in use a fair and lawful route. When the so-called accession eight countries became part of the European Union in 2004, only the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden did not exercise their right to a period of controlled immigration. As we were the largest country not exercising the right to control immigration, and as we are an English-speaking country, we saw millions of people coming here in a rapid and unsustainable way. That has resulted in many pressures in communities up and down the country.

Let me start to conclude by congratulating the Government on the work they have already started to do. I very much welcome the new Minister to his post, and I am sure he will continue the excellent work of his predecessor over the past two and a half years. I am encouraged that the number of net migrants to this country has come down, as recently reported, from more than 250,000 to just over 200,000—but we still have to go much further. I congratulate the Minister’s predecessor—I know that this good work will continue—in closing down the sham marriage route and the illegal routes to entering this country through bogus college courses. Again, the action we have seen over the past week is to be welcomed, but we need to continue our pressure and our determination to get a grip on this situation. As we heard earlier, it would need eight cities to be built outside London over the next 15 years to accommodate the projected rise in population as a result of immigration, which is clearly unsustainable. I echo other hon. Members in saying that we have a duty to the British people to ensure that we address this issue for our future harmony and prosperity as a nation.