Non-EU Citizens: Income Threshold

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the organisers of the petition on their achievement in getting 100,000 signatures from all across the UK. I note that more than 100 people in my constituency have signed it.

I believe that the petition has got one thing wrong: the Government have form when it comes to discriminating against low earners. For instance, such discrimination is part and parcel of the restriction on the right of people earning less than £18,600 a year to bring a non-EU spouse into this country. That not only restricts the right to family life of many people on low incomes but disproportionately affects women, young people, those from more deprived areas of the UK and workers in lower-waged sectors of the economy.

I am sure I will be echoing the concerns of other Members in saying that we need to keep driving home the message that the Government’s attitude towards the management of immigration is wrong-headed. The measure that we are debating today will do yet more damage to their reputation and that of the UK. Its message was well summarised in an online headline, which said: “Britain To Foreign Workers: If You Don’t Make $50,000 A Year, Please Leave”.

The Government’s response to the petition illustrates their attitude and the tone in which they conduct this debate. They talk of “uncontrolled mass immigration” making it difficult to maintain social cohesion, putting pressure on public services and driving down wages for people on low incomes, yet this measure deals only with people entering the UK to take up a graduate-level job, many of whom come here to work in vital public services in which there are considerable skills shortages. Despite the fact that some of those services are on shortage occupation lists and will not be affected in the short term, it is concerning to see what a high proportion of them attract salaries of less than £35,000. That suggests that the bar is set too high.

[Margaret Ferrier]

The National Union of Journalists has concerns that the income threshold will have a huge impact on media workers, including people employed at the BBC World Service. Does my hon. Friend share those concerns?

[Kirsten Oswald]

I do. The measures could cause difficulties in many sectors, including the one that my hon. Friend mentions.

This policy seems to be more about portraying an image than the effect that it will have. Even its proponents admit that it will have little, if any, effect on the actual level of immigration to the UK. In its initial report on this topic, the Migration Advisory Committee said that

“it is likely that, to some extent, migrants prevented from staying beyond five years will be replaced by new migrants.”

[Paul Scully]

Does the hon. Lady not consider 40,000 fewer people coming to the UK to be a reasonably significant reduction?

[Kirsten Oswald]

I point the hon. Gentleman to what I said before; there will be churn, with people coming in and out of the UK.

The Migration Advisory Committee went on to say that

“the impact on the UK migrant stock of applying a pay criterion will probably be lower than…estimates suggest.”

Indeed, the Home Office’s own impact assessment talks of the policy potentially leading to a “churn of migrant inflows”.

Many commentators have expressed reservations about applying such a simplistic measure as a single pay benchmark to the granting of settlement. Many of the consultees see the need for greater flexibility than is reflected in the Government’s policy. Perhaps not surprisingly, I find myself in agreement with the Scottish Government, who, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) said, have criticised the crude use of wage levels, because many essential occupations are not necessarily well paid. In addition, as the Scottish Government and others have pointed out, there are significantly different wage levels across the UK. In most cases, people with the same occupation and the same skill level are paid different amounts in London, for instance, compared with other parts of the UK.

The Migration Advisory Committee report on the impact of the policy highlights the fact that only London has a mean wage for graduate occupations that is higher than the UK average. All other nations and regions are below the average—in some cases considerably so. The spread from the mean graduate wage in London to that in Wales is more than £15,000, and it is difficult to see how a standard wage requirement of £35,000 for tier 2 applicants for residence can meet the needs of all areas. The notion that there is a single UK economy and demography, which can be managed by one-size-fits-all policies, is a fiction that should have been abandoned long ago. Of course, it is possible to construct models and reports that treat the UK as a single economic entity, but that does not make the whole UK the appropriate level at which to apply policy change. It is a long hard struggle to get this House to recognise that.

Since devolution, Scottish Administrations, regardless of party, have highlighted that our demographic experience does not match that of the rest of the UK. No country with which Scotland shares either a land or sea border has seen such low population growth, but as with other issues of particular interest to Scotland, this place has shown a long-term lack of interest in the causes of that relative decline. In 2000, Scotland’s population was lower than it had been in 1970. By contrast, the rest of the UK, Ireland, Norway and Iceland had all experienced significant population growth over that period. The coincidence of a booming oil industry off Scotland’s shores with population stagnation represented gross mismanagement of Scotland’s economic potential. Other parts of the UK, outwith London and the south-east, have experienced similar problems.

It was disappointing to see just how little consideration the Migration Advisory Committee gave to the regional impact of the policy. When we see that the committee contains seven members, none of whom are based north of Birmingham, we perhaps get some idea of their perspective. With three of the committee members either currently working at the London School of Economics or having studied there, it begins to look like a committee with a particular outlook and remit. With the growing level of devolution of economic decision making across the nations, regions and even the cities of the UK, there is no justification for such an influential committee reflecting so narrow a perspective on such a vital topic as immigration policy.

Given the importance of demography, and particularly the impact of work-related migration on the economic future of all parts of the UK, it is vital that a wider perspective is brought to bear on this issue. Perhaps the UK Government will live up to their promise of treating devolved Administrations with respect and put the question of immigration rules and the make-up of the Migration Advisory Committee on the agenda of the Joint Ministerial Committee. I would welcome confirmation from the Minister that he and his colleagues in the Department will consider that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Harrington]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for making that point and he correctly said that nurses have been mentioned several times already. So I shall respond to his point and the points made by several other hon. Members about the same subject. Basically, they were worried that an occupation’s position in the list was temporary and it could be withdrawn from the list at any time, which does not give people any certainty—the very points that the right hon. Gentleman just made.

The MAC, which Members should remember is not a political committee but an independent committee that operates very analytically with skilled staff who study data from the Office for National Statistics and any other data that are available, has just conducted a review of nursing, and the Government will consider that report carefully. We do not know what it says yet, because the MAC has not published its review. There was an interim measure and the change took effect in time for the December 2015 allocation of the certificates of sponsorship, which means that applications for nursing posts are prioritised.

In its latest investment plan, which was published at the end of last year, Health Education England—I am afraid that I do not have the relevant statistics for Scotland—proposed further increases in the number of nursing training places in 2016-17. So there is a lot of forecasting on this subject—the number arrived at is not just an arbitrary one—and there has been a full report.

At this juncture, I feel that I should consider the point about the regional salary thresholds, which hon. Members from Scotland discussed very eloquently. In its November 2011 report on the settlement threshold, the MAC could not see a clear case for differentiation on a regional basis. Its argument, and therefore the Government’s argument, as we have adopted it, was that having a single threshold provides clarity and simplicity for applicants and sponsors. The minimum salary requirements for occupations in tier 2 are for the most part set using annual surveys of hours and earnings. The data generated are very sophisticated and UK-wide, and therefore take account of salary levels throughout the regions.

[Kirsten Oswald]

Although I understand what the Minister is saying, does he not accept that this averaging does not take account of the needs of Scotland? Scotland needs an immigration policy that welcomes world-class talent from abroad, but in this case this ideological policy is doing more harm than good to our business sector.

[Richard Harrington]

I clearly disagree with the hon. Lady about that, and I have just said that the way the statistics are worked out includes all the regional variations, so the MAC is not just taking numbers that suit London and the south-east, as was the implication of many hon. Members’ contributions.

The Government clearly agree that those who have helped to fill vital skill shortages in the UK should be able to do so. The subject of skills and skill shortages was mentioned—particularly eloquently, if I may say so—by the shadow Minister. He said that upskilling was very important, because why would employers need to bring workers in from abroad if there are people here with the relevant skills? I think that we would all agree about that.

The Government have done a lot about skills. My previous Government role was as the Prime Minister’s apprenticeship adviser.

[Richard Harrington]

I disagree very much with the hon. Gentleman on that point; I do not think that the Government’s skills policy has been a failure at all. The number of apprentices is increasing significantly, and with the new apprenticeship levy, whereby larger companies have to pay a percentage of their payroll to fund training programmes, we will see a very significant upskilling of the workforce. I have seen many, many examples of this type of training going on in all parts of the country. Nevertheless, as usual the shadow Minister made a very considered point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam gave the curry industry as an example of an industry with skills shortages. Both he and I have been involved in our constituencies with the owners of curry restaurants; it is probably fair to say that my hon. Friend is more of an expert on the hotter variations of curry in those restaurants than I am. The curry industry has lobbied Government very extensively on the fact that it cannot bring in chefs from Bangladesh or other places in the Indian subcontinent, saying that it is a problem.

However, there is beginning to be a significant amount of training for such chefs, and so I think that we will see, as time goes on, exactly the point that we have been making today—namely, that the answer is making the industry, and people who want to be in it, put the resources, the effort, the money and the skills into training people to fulfil these roles. That is of benefit to everyone, particularly the industry itself. All of us realise the contribution of the curry industry to the country as a whole, and, from my personal experience I know that that is true from the north of Scotland down to the south-west of England.

[Kirsten Oswald]

My point is not about curry. Although the Minister says that he sees things improving, last year the skills shortage in Britain worsened for a fourth consecutive year—Britain was one of the most severely affected countries in Europe—so his arguments do not stack up. We still have people who should be able to work here being sent away.

[Andrew Rosindell in the Chair]

[Richard Harrington]

I agree that a lot of work needs to be done on the skills shortage. The Government set a target of, I think, 3 million new apprentices for this Parliament. The courses are good and the standards high. The effect of the apprenticeship levy will, in the end, come through and companies will start to employ people from here rather than having to get skilled people from abroad.

Just to finish on curry, the industry has had access to numerous transitional immigration routes in the past—the key worker scheme in the 1990s and the sector-based scheme in the early 2000s—but I argue that a flow of lower-skilled migrant labour militates against the industry taking action itself. I am sure that the curry industry, which is a bastion of small enterprise in the whole of the United Kingdom, will rise to the challenge, in a short period, of training its own staff. I think it has a rosy future.

In the end, the curry business is a good example. We want to nurture more home-grown talent and encourage young people in this country who want to pursue a skilled career, and that means the restaurant sector offering training to attract and recruit resident workers to meet its staffing needs.

I would like to make an additional point, if I may, Ms Vaz—