Immigration

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Field]

My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, laughed, as I did, at that suggestion, but I think it is a rather good one. I shall touch on the Migration Advisory Committee report later. The Government might wish to refer to it; it would solve some of our difficulties. It is an intriguing idea and I hope that it will be developed in the debate.

We were talking about how the debate has changed. Perhaps the best way of showing that is to look at the stance of the Institute for Public Policy Research. In the past, no organisation was more adamant that we should have open borders and less prepared to consider the downside of such a policy. It is very significant that, this week, the IPPR has moved into the mainstream of the debate by saying that this country benefits from immigration—I doubt whether anyone would wish to express a contrary view in this House, which is important on account of our teaching role in the country at large—but that the debate is about the numbers, not about the principle.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that during my 23 years in this House and during his time here, there has been a shift in the tone of the debate. There is agreement that immigration has to be controlled, but can we be clear that we are talking about non-EU immigration? Does he accept that we cannot do anything about 80% of the people who come into this country?

[Mr Field]

A number of hon. Members might wish to catch your eye, Mr Deputy Speaker, to dispute that fact. Just as some might wish to stretch your tolerance, Mr. Deputy Speaker, by going down the road of the devolution settlement, others might want to open up the issue of the European settlement. The numbers coming here to work from the European Union represent a minority. I do not dispute the fact that this is an important issue, but it is not one of the dimension my right hon. Friend describes. I see in his place the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), who might want to deal with the issue later.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the speech of the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell). I cannot believe he has been in the House for only six months. Given the eloquence and fairness of his speech and the way in which he crafted it, it sounded to me as though he had been here for six years. He is very proud of his multicultural constituency, and I thought he was fair and balanced in how he put his arguments forward. It is right that we should conduct a debate on immigration in such terms.

I apologise to the House for having missed part of the debate. The Liaison Committee was meeting the Prime Minister for the first time, and of course it was important for me to be there as the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs. In fact, the Prime Minister gave us a bit of news on immigration that I will report to the House in a moment. I missed the contributions of many right hon. and hon. Members, and I look forward to reading them in Hansard tomorrow.

I declare an interest: I, of course, am an immigrant. My parents were originally from Mumbai, having gone there from Goa to seek work. They then went from Mumbai to Yemen for similar reasons, as economic migrants. I and my sisters were born in Yemen, and I came to this country when I was nine years of age. As in the situation that the hon. Member for Croydon Central described, my parents chose to come here, exercising the rights that they had through living in a British Crown colony, Aden, to enable their children to grow up and remain here.

I am extremely proud of this country. I am proud of its multiculturalism and the way in which it has absorbed so many communities, not just in the past 30 years but throughout its history. It is difficult these days to know what is pure English, because the British people have been represented by so many different cultures over the past 1,000 years.

What has been good about this debate is the tone in which it has been conducted. I remember that, when I was first elected, great passions were raised on both sides of the House on the subject. I was in opposition then and have returned to opposition now after 13 years. No debate on immigration policy was conducted without people getting extraordinarily passionate and very angry with each other across the Floor of the House. Today’s consensus is extremely important, and I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) for suggesting the debate and the Backbench Business Committee for holding it. Normally, we discuss immigration only when the Government of the day, be they Conservative or Labour, introduce legislation. We have had many immigration Bills over the 23 years I have been in the House, and I am not sure all of them have achieved what they have been intended to achieve. It is good to be able to discuss immigration in the House and to share our experiences.

The Home Affairs Committee has just published its report on the immigration cap. I urge all Members to read it or at least the conclusions and the summary, as I do with other Select Committee reports. We did not argue with the Government’s desire to impose a cap—that is not the purpose of a Select Committee—but we wanted to see whether they could achieve their goal of reducing immigration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. Our conclusion—this was an all-party decision, and there was one unanimous vote in the Committee, which is, of course, in the report—was that they needed to look again at the cap because it cannot, as currently constructed, achieve what they want within the five years they have set out. If they want to look at the figures in five years’ time, they will have to look at the immigration figures in 2013 and extrapolate them to 2015.

The Committee made a number of suggestions that it felt would be helpful. We thought it was extremely important that the Government should look at different avenues if they were to reduce immigration to tens of thousands. The fresh piece of news that I bring to the House this evening is that, in answer to a question at the Liaison Committee—I do not know whether the Minister even knows this, although he may have mentioned it in his speech—the Prime Minister said that the Government’s new immigration policy would be announced next week.

That is the earliest indication that we will have a statement to the House at some stage, and we welcome that. At the moment, we have a temporary immigration cap, and people are concerned. Business is concerned about whether it will be able to bring in the employees that it absolutely needs to fill vacancies that it cannot fill from within this country. Students need to be told whether they will be caught by the permanent cap. As the Committee said in its report, if the Government are to achieve their reduction in numbers, the overseas student population will have to be reduced by a huge number, which will, of course, affect the education system. At a time when fees will be going up, the loss of income to some of our colleges and universities will be very serious.

Anyway, the crucial thing is that we will get a statement of Government policy next week. In a sense, the debate should have taken place next Thursday, rather than this Thursday. However, I am sure that we will find opportunities for further debate on this issue.

The hon. Member for Croydon Central mentioned the possibility of an exemption for footballers. In fact, that is what we have at the moment. Footballers are exempted, but scientists who might win Nobel prizes—the elite scientists—are not. One of the recommendations in the Committee’s report is that if we are going to exempt footballers—even after last night’s result, although everyone who plays for England is, of course, English—we should look at groups that could help the economy.

The Committee also suggested that intra-company transfers should be excluded, because they represent 60% of tier 1. Within 12 hours of our report’s being published, the Prime Minister accepted that recommendation at Prime Minister’s Question Time. Select Committees always feel rather chuffed when their recommendations are accepted by Ministers, and especially by the Prime Minister.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead mentioned Professor Metcalf, and I join the praise of him. The Migration Advisory Committee, which survived the cull of quangos, provides a very useful service. Today, it published a report telling us in stark terms that there will have to be a reduction in student migration and family migration if the Government are to get to their figure for 2015. I am afraid that that will affect all those in the House with constituencies that contain settled communities whose members, for whatever reason, want to bring spouses and dependants from abroad.

Across the Chamber, I see the hon. Member for Croydon Central and the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who must have quite a large settled community. The hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) has a big immigration case load. On the Opposition side of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), both shadow Ministers—my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford South (Mr Sutcliffe) and for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood)—and many others, including myself, have immigration case loads. Our Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), will have hundreds of immigration cases to deal with at her surgery tomorrow. The reduction in immigration will affect not only people coming as students, but our settled communities—British citizens whose sons and daughters wish to bring spouses or dependants from abroad. We will all be affected as constituency MPs who deal with immigration cases.

I commend to the House the excellent report of John Vine, the chief inspector of immigration. When he was originally appointed a year and a half ago, he had a pretty hard time from the Home Affairs Committee, because we did not like the fact that he was called an “inspector” and wanted him to be called the “independent inspector”, and we felt he was far too close to the Home Office. However, we need not have feared for his independence, because every single one of his reports has been severely critical of the UK Border Agency. Even today, he has reported that of the £40 million-worth of fines imposed by UKBA on those not complying in respect of illegal immigration, only £5.6 million has been collected. He says that if the Government are to tackle illegal immigration, they must be strong and firm. Any discussion of immigration must deal with illegal immigration as well as legal. I do not agree with the Mayor of London that there should be an amnesty for those living illegally in this country. However, it is important that we consider their cases and give them a decision as quickly as possible.

That leads me to the second part of what I wanted to say today, which relates to a constituency interest of the hon. Member for Croydon Central—I hope he does not take it personally if I criticise UKBA, which is based in his constituency. UKBA remains unfit for purpose. Of course, a Labour Home Secretary announced that, but it will be still less fit for purpose following 20% budget cuts. When Lin Homer appeared before the Home Affairs Committee last week, she said that she could cope with that 20% reduction and with losing 5,000 members of staff, but the Committee believed that such cuts would mean that UKBA could not provide the kind of service required.

One problem is that in the time it has taken UKBA to deal with immigration cases, people get married and have children, which is inevitable when people meet someone they love. Then they want to stay, because they have been here for years. I am sure all right hon. and hon. Members know of such cases in their constituencies. Last week, I met at least half a dozen people who had been in this country trying to get their cases resolved for 14 years. They have become settled and they do not want to go back, and UKBA must deal with that problem. We must be careful in asylum cases that we do not send back those who are genuinely persecuted, but we must deal with other cases as quickly as possible.

One perennial problem for all hon. Members who deal with legacy cases is the letter that comes back from UKBA saying, “Sorry, we can’t deal with this case now, but we’ll have it done by July 2011.” There are hundreds of thousands of legacy cases, some of which lasted the entire length of the previous Labour Government. I have told Immigration Ministers a number of times, “You could be the first Immigration Minister in history to clear the backlog.” None seems to have wanted that epitaph, so the backlog remains after 13 years. Lin Homer has said that if the backlog is not cleared by 31 July 2011, neither she nor any of her senior officers will take their bonuses next year. We will hold her to that. I want to see how she does that following a reduction in staff.

Another thing that concerned us was the rise in indefinite leave to remain—up 4% over the past four months. The House brings in legislation, and tries to do it as quickly as possible, but the figures are going up because the Home Office is granting indefinite leave. Indeed, net immigration this year might even increase, despite the temporary cap, because of the number of ILRs being granted. We should therefore be very sceptical. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead keeps talking about the numbers. Those numbers will continue to rise if we clear a backlog of 400,000 and grant indefinite leave at such a rate—an extra 30,000 cases since February. We do not want people arguing at the end of that, “This Government have let in a whole lot of immigrants.” It is a necessary conclusion to the legacy process.

My next point is about foreign national prisoners. One of the problems is a lack of co-ordination between the Prison Service and the UK Border Agency and the length of time between the finishing of a sentence and removal. Even though we assist people to leave—we pay them up to £1,500 to leave the country—there is no monitoring to ensure that they do not re-enter the country. I and other Home Affairs Committee members went to the camp at Calais, which was cleared several weeks after we visited, and the people to whom we spoke had every intention, if removed, of returning to Calais and making their way from there to the United Kingdom on the back of lorries. They know that the French police protect and monitor their border not on a 24-hour basis, but on a shift basis. Those determined to break immigration law know exactly when those shifts end. So rather than more legislation, there are practical and administrative ways of dealing with this issue.

This has been a good debate—it is important that we can discuss immigration in the way we have—but I caution Members on both sides of the House if they think that the solution to this problem rests entirely with non-EU immigration. One Select Committee member, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), who I think is one of the most outstanding Members in the new intake, inserted into a recent report a phrase about how the Government should be careful about being more restrictive on the routes of migration that they can control, because they cannot control other routes of migration.

That brings me to my final point about EU migration: neither Members nor the Government can do anything about 80% of the people entering this country, because they do so under treaty obligations that Conservative and Labour Ministers and Prime Ministers have signed over the years.

[Mr Lilley]

The right hon. Gentleman is very distinguished and knows the facts, even though he was not here when the Minister quoted them: net immigration into this country is 196,000, and net immigration from outside the EU is 184,000, so it is the bulk of the problem. To pretend otherwise is to mislead people outside the House.

[Keith Vaz]

I have great respect for the right hon. Gentleman, who is very interested in this subject and has spoken, I think, in every immigration debate in which I have spoken. Immigration is inevitably about volume and numbers, but the freedom of movement enjoyed by EU citizens means that they can come and go as they please. I was the Minister for Europe at the time of enlargement.

[Mr Lilley]

They come and go.

[Keith Vaz]

Yes, and that is the point. Some of our constituents’ criticisms are not about people who come from outside the EU, but about people who come from the EU. Hon. Members will remember the general election and the confrontation between the then Prime Minister and Mrs Gillian Duffy, whom I met for the first time at the Labour party conference one month ago. Her complaint was not about non-EU immigration, but about EU migration. That is what Mrs Duffy was concerned about. When we talk about such immigration and those numbers, we need to know that this House can do nothing about it. This may be an unpopular view in the House, but EU migration has been very good for Britain, for exactly the reasons that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned. During the boom years, people from Poland, Romania and Hungary came to this country and contributed to the boom; when it went, they went back.

[Mr Lilley]

indicated dissent.

[Keith Vaz]

The right hon. Gentleman cannot have it both ways. He cannot say that there is no impact, but then say something else when I say that there is freedom of movement. There is that capacity. We live on an island, so by all means let us have measures that will ensure that we do not overpopulate this island. That is now accepted in all parts of the House. I do not believe it possible to have a limit, because I do not think that the state can have a limit, as there are so many exemptions. America has an immigration cap, but there are so many exemptions that it is not even worth having. The American Government are currently charging Indian IT firms $2,000 a visa, to help with the cost of building the fence between Mexico and the United States. That is where things will end up unless we are careful about this whole debate. I believe that we can be careful. I believe that the Government will respond positively and that we need to conduct this debate in the kind of tone and with the kind of temperament that we have seen today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Freer]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comment. The company is not looking for an intra-company transfer, and that is exactly the problem. If it cannot recruit a Chinese national or an Indian national, it will have to recruit them in an offshore company, or not at all. Either way, we are hampering the expansion of a good UK company, and that cannot be the purpose of the cap.

The other issue is that if we continue to recruit offshore highly skilled technical migrants who are essential to UK companies, we may benefit from the exports of the UK company, but we will lose the benefit that that small number of highly skilled economic migrants bring to the economy through their personal taxation and spending.

[Keith Vaz]

I apologise for intervening on the hon. Gentleman’s excellent speech, but that company needs those people now because of the skills they possess. This is not an issue of settlement; it is an issue of ensuring that we can produce goods and therefore employ more British people in such companies.

[Mike Freer]

I accept what the right hon. Gentleman says. We need a long-term strategy to develop the necessary skills. We can already provide the technical skills, but the training in our British universities cannot provide a knowledge of foreign markets. There is a difference between training someone in the latest Sri Lankan IT software, which we can do, and teaching them the nuances of how to access the decision makers in the Chinese economy, which we cannot. There is a big difference between the two.

I understand that the Government might be thinking of relaxing their stance on visa extensions. The company has an Indian graduate who can no longer get a visa extension. The company will lose his skills and his contribution. I ask the Minister to think again, and perhaps to assess companies on a case-by-case basis to see whether an extension could be granted because of the contribution that certain individuals make.