Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time today, Ms Dorries. I welcome the measured way in which the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) put his case. I congratulate him and the hon. Members for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) and for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) on applying to the Backbench Business Committee for this debate. It is good to see so many people here in Westminster Hall on the day that the House rises, but what a pity it is that the debate is not being held in the Chamber itself, where we could have had an even longer and more detailed debate.

[Mr Newmark]

I respect the fact that the right hon. Gentleman is here, but I find it strange that an enormous amount of Conservative Members are here to discuss this important issue. I cannot believe that the issue is of concern only to those Members of Parliament who happen to be Conservatives or to their constituents. Surely there are Labour MPs with the same concerns, so why have they not joined him here today?

[Keith Vaz]

The remit of the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee does not extend to controlling the diaries of members of the parliamentary Labour party, but it is their loss: I think it is important that we should be here participating in this debate.

We should start by acknowledging the strong and important relations that we have with Bulgaria and Romania. I visited both countries while I was Minister for Europe, when we started the enlargement process. The ambassadors representing the two countries here are excellent, as are our ambassadors in Sofia and Bucharest; in particular, I want to acknowledge the way in which Martin Harris, our ambassador in Bucharest, is ensuring that good relations between our two countries are fostered even at this challenging time.

The Home Affairs Committee has been looking at the issue of the transitional restrictions for a number of years and has made a number of recommendations. Earlier this year, with the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless), who is currently sitting on my right, and the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), I went to Bucharest to meet members of the Romanian Government and to talk with members of the Romanian community. If there are regrets—I have a few regrets in my speech—my primary regret is that the Immigration Minister and the Home Secretary have not taken the opportunity over the past year to go to Romania and Bulgaria and engage with those Governments. We talk about push and pull factors—why it is people decide to travel all the way from Bucharest or Sofia to live in Leicester, London or Manchester—and we should have worked with other Governments to find out the problems and look at the issues.

For example, in response to the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), the hon. Member for Amber Valley referred to the number of talented people leaving Romania and Bulgaria. When we were in Bucharest, we spoke with the president of the Romanian equivalent of the British Medical Association. He lamented the fact that so many talented young Romanian doctors had decided to leave Romania to work in the United Kingdom and in other countries—on average they trebled or even quadrupled their salaries when they came to our countries—which was having a detrimental effect on Romania and Bulgaria. That is why I wish that the Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister had visited, because they would have been able to establish a dialogue and try to see what we could have done to help those countries.

One way in which we could have helped was in respect of the huge amount of money that was allocated to Romania when it joined the European Union. It may surprise Members to note that 87% of the £20 billion that was given to Romania in pre-accession funds have still not been accessed, because sufficient assistance is not being given to the Romanian Government to ensure that they get the funds. If those funds were accessed, the jobs that people seek to find here might have been made available in those countries. Across the House, we all support the enlargement of the European Union; I cannot remember an occasion in the past 26 years when any party has voted against enlargement. We allow countries to join the European Union, but then we leave them on their own. Our Ministers should have engaged more—under the previous Government and under this Government—to ensure that there was proper access to those funds.

The big question that remains unanswered is why we still do not have estimates of how many people will come here next year. On 21 October 2008, the then shadow Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), said that one of the greatest failures of the last Government was the failure to predict the consequences of enlargement in 2004. Given that, research should have been conducted so that we would be aware—at least have estimates—of the numbers that would be coming into this country. For the reasons outlined by the hon. Member for Amber Valley—the pressure on housing, on schools and on the health service—if we had even estimates it would be helpful. When we went to Bucharest, we came across a university that had conducted research and had produced estimates. It is very remiss of this Government not to have done the same.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the people most vulnerable to the next wave of mass immigration are not the people in this room? They are previous immigrants, particularly the last wave of immigrants. Competition for jobs, housing and public services will be intense, particularly in inner city areas such as his constituency.

[Keith Vaz]

It is intense, but I think we can deal with such issues. It is right that in the first wave of enlargement, a million people came, but a lot of those people have returned. We will come on to benefits later, but what upsets people more than anything else is the issue of those who, for example, claim benefits in the United Kingdom—38,000 from the EU—yet their children live in other EU countries. There are simple changes that we could make to satisfy our constituents, because I do not believe that the Romanians and Bulgarians who will come to this country are coming to go on benefits. They are coming to work. The migration process is for that purpose. Last week, the Select Committee had before it the chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee. We specifically asked Sir David Metcalf whether the Government asked him and his committee to conduct research into the number of people coming into this country after 31 December. He specifically said no. He said that they are set their homework by the Government, and the Government did not ask them to do that. I think that that is big mistake. We have estimates of annual migration that vary from 10,000, according to the Bulgarian ambassador; 20,000, according to the Romanian ambassador; and 50,000, according to Migration Watch. We have such problems because the Government were not prepared to ask the very body they established.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

On the issue of changing the benefits system, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is difficult to contemplate the Government making changes when, at the moment, they do not even have data on the nationality of individual claimants? Back in January this year, I was told in answer to a parliamentary question that the UK’s benefit payment systems do not record details of claimants’ nationality. The most basic information is not being sought by the Government.

[Keith Vaz]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman; he is absolutely right. That is why we wanted the Migration Advisory Committee to assist.

[The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)]

On that specific point, we asked the Migration Advisory Committee in 2011 the question about the labour market, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) referred. In its response, the committee stated:

“It would not be sensible, or helpful to policy makers, for us to attempt to put a precise numerical range around this likely impact.”

That was the advice it gave us, and that was the advice we followed.

[Keith Vaz]

I say to the Minister, for whom I have enormous respect—he is a hard-working and fair Immigration Minister, and I have seen quite a few in my time—he has obviously not had the time to read the evidence of Sir David Metcalf. I specifically asked him that question after it was also raised by others, and he said:

“we have never been tasked to make estimates of the numbers coming from Romania and Bulgaria.”

He said that last week. The Minister has quoted something from 2011, but frankly the chairman himself has not been asked yet.

[Mr Harper]

David Metcalf was right in what he said, and I have read the transcript. The point is that he and his committee said that asking them to do that work would not be sensible or helpful because of the uncertainty, so it seemed pointless to ask them, because they had replied to the point when we commissioned them in 2011.

[Keith Vaz]

That may be so, but that is not what he said to us last week. Perhaps the Government, because of the importance of the issue, should have kept in regular touch with Sir David Metcalf. If they had done so, perhaps he would have updated what he said in 2011.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Surely the point is that the British public do not really care who said what to whom. They are disgusted that Her Majesty’s Government have failed in their basic duty to provide the British public with a realistic estimate of how many immigrants we might expect from 1 January.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The public would have liked figures. Now that we have the former Foreign Secretary’s mea culpas on the issue of estimates, it is important that we have them, even though there are only 12 days to go. So the first issue is estimates. The second is the confusion about what will happen on 1 January. According to the permanent secretary Mark Sedwill in evidence to us last week, Olympic-style arrangements are being put in place at our airports from 1 January onwards. As far as I am concerned, that is pretty tough stuff. There is obviously an expectation that a lot of people will turn up on 1 January.

In her evidence to us on Monday this week, the Home Secretary said that it was business as usual. So we have the permanent secretary thinking that there will be Olympic-style security and the Home Secretary thinking that it will be business as usual. Just to be sure, the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood and I will be at Luton airport on 1 January. Mrs Dorries, that is not far from your constituency of Mid Bedfordshire. If you would like to join us, you are more than welcome. The first flight from Romania gets in at 7.40 am. The hon. Gentleman has said that he will be up at that time. The second flight comes in at 9 pm, but we will be there for the first flight to see what arrangements have been put in place and how many people turn up. If the only way to do it is with our own eyes, and nobody else wants to have estimates, I am afraid we will have to do that.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

I am listening carefully to the right hon. Gentleman, who is going to make an excursion to an airport to see what is going on. I think he is doing that more for the media than for anybody else. I hope he recognises that there is already a right for visa-free travel for Romanians and Bulgarians to the UK right now. It has been in existence since 2007, so what will he achieve by going to an airport? He can see people coming through already, even today, let alone waiting until the new arrangements are in place in January.

[Keith Vaz]

The only thing that I can say to the hon. Gentleman is that he should come and join us. If he thinks for one moment that the media will turn up at 7.40 am after the biggest party of the year—31 December —he will be very surprised. I do not expect that any of them will be there, but the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood and I, who are not big partygoers and who both abstain from the usual parties on new year’s eve, will be there.

However, the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) makes a more valid point, in that people are already here. Of course they are, and therefore, if they are already here, we should also be considering what is happening to those people. At the end of the day, 1 January is the critical time. That is when the restrictions are to be removed.

[Mr Newmark]

I have been listening carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman is saying, and I am still not sure of his direction of travel, if I may say that. I am not sure whether he is saying that Romanians and Bulgarians will suddenly buy tickets to get on a plane to come here and live off our exceedingly generous benefits system, and if so, we have heard what the Government are doing, which is to put far greater restrictions on the ability of those to come here, before they can claim benefits or even housing or anything like that—the Government are trying to deal with that issue; the longest period of time that somebody can claim will be six months, and they have to wait three months—or is he saying that they are coming here because there are lots of jobs?

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[Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)]

Order. Mr Newmark, interventions should be brief.

[Keith Vaz]

Let us be clear: I do not think that they are going to come here to go on benefits; I think that people who come to this country from those countries are coming to get jobs. I do not think they are coming here to be part of the benefits system.

[Mr Ellwood]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way very quickly on that point?

[Keith Vaz]

I shall make some progress and if there is time, I shall certainly give way again.

There is a more fundamental issue here—that of freedom of movement. One cannot have freedom of movement without movement, which is why I think the fundamental issue is our presence in the European Union and what we are prepared to take, as far as the negotiations are concerned, should the Government win the next election and should the Prime Minister start on his discussions with EU colleagues. At the end of the day, we need to have a fundamental discussion about that, and if it means changing treaties, so be it. That is why I favour a referendum on our membership of the EU, because this issue is a sideline. I will probably—most likely—be on the other side to the vast majority of those in here, but I am saying that I want the right to make that case. I think that this is a village story at the moment for Westminster. Why can the people not have a say on the whole issue of freedom of movement? We can discuss Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and what will happen when Turkey becomes a member of the EU, but at the end of the day, that is one of the fundamental issues that we need to address.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Keith Vaz]

I will for the last time, yes.

[Andrew Bridgen]

I totally agree that the people want an EU referendum. From what he said, I take it that the right hon. Gentleman will be voting Conservative at the next election.

[Keith Vaz]

No. I will not be voting Conservative. I shall be voting for myself and hopefully, I will still be the Labour candidate at the next election. However, I hope to be able to persuade the leader of the Labour party and others of the necessity to hold a referendum on the day of the next general election and not afterwards, because frankly, by then it will be too late. We should put something of that importance to the British people.

Finally, there are so many issues that need to be resolved before 31 December. Only yesterday, in one of the courts in Lincoln, Judge Sean Morris talked about the fact that it is now taking up to seven months for criminal records to be provided for those who come from Romania, who are subject to prosecution in our courts. Before the cut-off date of 31 December, so many issues need to be resolved that have not been resolved. We should have resolved those earlier, rather than leaving it to the very last minute. The Government should think carefully about how they will proceed after 31 December and see whether, because I do not believe for a moment that there will be any further opportunities to discuss this issue—of course, because Parliament is rising shortly—we should revisit some of the issues that have not been resolved and try to resolve them as quickly as possible.

I shall end where I began. We are in the EU and we have good relations with the two countries. We welcome people who come to this country from Romania and Bulgaria as equal EU citizens, but we want them to play their part fully in the life of our country. If they are to be treated as equal EU citizens, and if there are problems with the way in which the system operates, we need to sort those out for the next time.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries, and to follow the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who, as usual, is speaking good sense. I was delighted to hear a shift in his position on the EU; up to now, he has been entirely against us coming out of the EU, and he has moved to being probably against us coming out. That is really good news.

[Keith Vaz]

I will definitely be on the other side from the hon. Gentleman on the issue.

[Mr Bone]

I am surprised that the right hon. Gentleman has prejudged my position on the referendum; I want entirely to hear what our Prime Minister achieves.

I am delighted that the excellent Minister for Immigration is here. The only thing I have to say about that is that we know that the Government have decided to give that Member of Parliament the most difficult area to deal with—the one that they are in trouble on. It is good to see him here, but it is a worry that the Government are relying not on getting the problem sorted out, but on having a very able Minister defend an absolutely impossible position.

One of the cornerstones and key strengths of the coalition is its tough stance on cutting immigration, which Labour allowed to soar to eye-watering levels. In 2010, we pledged to

“take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s—tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands.”

That is a common-sense policy, with overwhelming support. After a decade of Labour incompetence on the issue, it is long overdue.

The progress that we have made on cutting immigration to date is testament to the efforts of the Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). I strongly believe that lifting the restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants would jeopardise all the good work we have done, not only on getting immigration down, but on building new homes, improving public services and lowering unemployment.

Bulgaria’s new ambassador to the UK has claimed that hardly any Bulgarians want to move to the UK once restrictions are lifted, and that, more than anything, the change will hurt their economy. If that is the case, he should welcome continued restrictions. Government figures show that although overall immigration is down, eastern European immigration is bucking the trend, and is increasing. The number of people from Romania and Bulgaria settling in the UK has risen sharply, up from 37 in 2011 to 2,177 in 2012. Clearly, if the restrictions are lifted, those figures will increase dramatically, making them completely incompatible with the Government’s aim to reduce immigration.

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[Mr Bone]

I am grateful for that intervention; my hon. Friend makes a very good point. He is right to say that Bulgarians and Romanians can come here if they satisfy the current requirements. I am absolutely in favour of continuing with that. The problem—it is a good point that he brings up, and it is one that I was moving on to—is that in Bulgaria the minimum wage is 73p an hour, and in Romania it is 79p, but in the UK the minimum wage is £6.31 for over-21s—nearly 10 times more than in Romania and Bulgaria. Bulgaria and Romania are two of the poorest members of the EU and do experience, I am afraid, levels of corruption. In 2010, gross domestic product per capita was £3,929 in Bulgaria and £4,682 in Romania, compared with Britain’s £22,426. Furthermore, there are 1.5 million people seeking work in Bulgaria and Romania.

It undoubtedly makes economic sense for individuals from these countries to migrate to the UK, regardless of whether they have the skills that we require. By lifting current restrictions, we leave ourselves wide open to a new wave of economic refugees, hoping to reap the rewards that this country has to offer. Those are pull factors that clearly cannot be addressed by reforming what benefits are available to immigrants. The UK is a fantastic place to live, and that is something to be proud of. Reforming the benefits system can only do so much; it cannot go far enough on its own when the fundamental issue is the lack of control that we appear to have over our borders.

The EU states that it has the power to control such reforms—common-sense reforms that are so badly needed to stop the abuse of public services by immigrants whom the EU is apparently forcing on this Government. There are still questions about how far the Immigration Bill can go before it is incompatible with EU law and the free movement of people. We are therefore left in a preposterous scenario in which the EU is trying to control not only who can come into this country, but what they can claim when they get here. It is an outrageous state of affairs, and we, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, need to say that we are ultimately sovereign over our own borders and the laws relating to domestic affairs.

The truth of the matter is that we do not know the extent of the upheaval that the removal of the restrictions will mean for our country, because we do not know how many people will come over. That is exactly the point that the right hon. Member for Leicester East made so powerfully. We learned that lesson from the 2004 influx of Polish immigrants. The Labour Government got it completely wrong and estimated that only 13,000 Poles would arrive; the figure turned out to be more than 100,000 a year at its peak.

Migration Watch UK has estimated that 50,000 immigrants will arrive from Romania and Bulgaria per year over the next five years. People might say, “Well, that’s Migration Watch,” but an independent think-tank, the Democracy Institute, has found to its surprise that

“the most alarming of the forecasts…is actually insufficiently alarmist.”

The institute projects that at least 70,000 immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria will arrive in the UK annually for the next five years, if the restrictions are lifted.

A poll by the BBC—not an organisation favourable to Eurosceptics—found that 1% of Romanians and 4% of Bulgarians said that they were looking for work in the UK. That would translate into 350,000 potential jobseekers in the UK. That is wholly contrary to our policy aims of cutting immigration and protecting the UK’s interests. At a time when we are making real inroads into cutting unemployment, the impact that an influx of immigrants would have on the job market would be detrimental to those looking for work and those on low wages.

[Keith Vaz]

In a very helpful intervention, the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) pointed out that of course Romanians and Bulgarians can at the moment work in this country as self-employed people, and the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) said that he was happy with that. Does he agree that if we were able to speed up the length of time that it took them to get national insurance numbers, that would be one way of ensuring that the system works without having to change it?

[Mr Bone]

I am grateful for that intervention. The simple answer is no. I think that we need to control our own borders. I do not think that we should be tinkering with the mechanisms; we should have complete control of what we do, as I think the right hon. Gentleman said in his concluding remarks.

A recent report on the economic effects of immigration found that those on the lowest wages feel the biggest impact of immigration, as immigration holds back the wages of the least well paid. We should be supporting those hard-working people, not eroding their wages by allowing uncontrolled immigration from countries with such vast economic differences. Moreover, although unemployment is down, youth unemployment is proving stubbornly high. With nearly 1 million under-25s still unemployed, the focus should be on helping them into jobs, not allowing into the job market an inpouring of immigrants who are looking for work.

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[Mr Hanson]

That was, which is why in March of this year my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), on behalf of the official Opposition, suggested the measures that the Prime Minister introduced only yesterday—some 14 days before 31 December, when transitional controls for Romania and Bulgaria expire.

Lest we think that the problem is now solely an Opposition one, let me quote what the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady) said in 2005, on 24 November, in the debate on the accession for Bulgaria and Romania:

“There is broad cross-party agreement on the objective of bringing Bulgaria and Romania into the European Union…The Conservative party has always been an enthusiastic supporter of enlargement, whether that has involved the 10 states that joined last year, or Bulgaria and Romania, or Turkey and Croatia.”

There are no Liberal Democrats present in the Chamber today, but in the same debate the Deputy Prime Minister said:

“I should also like to join in this festival of cross-party consensus, which I trust will be a rare, if valuable occasion.”—[Official Report, 24 November 2005; Vol. 1641, c. 1716-18.]

[Keith Vaz]

My right hon. Friend is taking absolutely the right approach. Another feature of the previous Government, however, was that Ministers constantly went to visit their EU counterparts and engaged in a dialogue about what was happening concerning enlargement. Does he agree that what we should have seen in the run-up to the restrictions being lifted is British Ministers going to see their Romanian and Bulgarian counterparts to look at the push and pull factors and to work out what could be done to assist?

[Mr Hanson]

That would be valuable. We have to have some positive dialogue. Statements have been made in the Chamber today that paint a picture of people from Bulgaria and Romania in one particular category—not all individuals are in the categories referred to today by some hon. Members. We need to look at what measures we can put in place before 31 December, including those the Opposition have suggested in response to the issue.

Members have mentioned a number of issues. There is potentially downward pressure on wages, because of people being undercut. There are recruitment agencies recruiting solely from eastern Europe, which was mentioned again by the hon. Members for Rochester and Strood and for Christchurch (Mr Chope). There are pressures on certain economic markets run by gangmasters with minimum wage, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley); people are coming to this country because they believe that a £4 or £5 an hour wage packet is better than a £2 an hour equivalent wage packet in their home country. Whatever happens on 31 December and whatever numbers of individuals come to the United Kingdom, I therefore want to see a real focus by the Government on enforcement of the minimum wage as a starting point. We need to put some effort in, not only through Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, but by looking at the possibility of giving local authorities the power to enforce the minimum wage, so that we can have greater enforcement, potentially stopping the undercutting of wages that the hon. Gentleman and others have referred to.

We need to look at enforcement of the Equality Act 2010. The hon. Member for Christchurch mentioned recruitment from eastern Europe. It is illegal to recruit individuals based on their race or nationality under that Act, but it is not widely enforced. I have discussed that with the Minister and he has agreed to look at it and refer it to the Equality and Human Rights Commission.