Lindsay Hoyle
Main Page: Lindsay Hoyle (Speaker - Chorley)Department Debates - View all Lindsay Hoyle's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
(11 years ago)
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Several hon. Members
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. A great many Members wish to speak, and it would be helpful if speakers could show some restraint.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. We need short interventions, because they are taking up a lot of time and many more Members wish to speak.
Mr Jones
I would be intrigued to know which piece of health legislation would not be covered by the proposal. Again, I think that it is simply one of the issues that have been trumpeted by certain Members on the deregulatory wing of the Conservative party, who have clearly been prevented from pursuing the worst excesses of Beecroft by the Liberal Democrats. I just think it is complete nonsense.
On immigration, I consider the announcements in the Queen’s Speech to be a knee-jerk reaction from the Prime Minister to the threat he sees from his Back Benchers and from the UK Independence party. We have heard a lot of strong language about a crackdown on migrants, and in relation not only to migration but to access to health care and benefits. I understand that a ministerial group on immigration has been meeting, but it has not yet come up with a great deal because most of the plans that have been put forward have been blocked. The Health Secretary has been saying that we have a problem with health tourism, but he cannot tell us how much it costs.
The only real legislation put forward on immigration is secondary legislation that will enshrine the rules on deporting foreign prisoners and on getting private landlords somehow to check whether their tenants are entitled to be in the country. The first one is already law and so will affect nothing, and I do not see how the second can work without some type of registration scheme. Also, it will not apply to the bulk of immigration in this country, which it is threatened will come from Romania and Bulgaria, because that will be perfectly legal.
It is interesting that Nigel Farage says that he is now the heir to Thatcher. I remind Members that it was Margaret Thatcher who signed the Single European Act in 1986, which allowed the free transfer of labour across Europe. These proposals will have no effect. The Prime Minister is trying to act tough, but in practice he can do very little about the transfer of EU migrants. In many ways that transfer of labour has been good for British people, because many people in the north-east who were made redundant when the shipyards closed now work all over Europe, making a contribution not only to the economy of those countries but here.
My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse referred to the fact that we are at the fag-end of this Parliament. I have to say that the Business Secretary looked very unhappy this morning. He reminds me a little of the father of the bride at a shotgun wedding who is now going round saying, “I told you it wouldn’t last very long.” The Prime Minister obviously has a problem with his children on the Back Benches who are now in open revolt. It will be very interesting to see how it all ends. The lack in this Queen’s Speech of a positive economic stimulus over the next two years will add to the misery that is being faced day in, day out by many thousands of people in this country, many in my constituency.
Dr Offord
As I said earlier—I think the hon. Lady has deliberately decided not to understand what I said—this involves elective and semi-elective surgery and other cases. Sometimes people come into the country when they are pregnant and decide to have their child here. If that is a possibility, they should be prevented from coming here. Secondly, and most importantly, they should be forced to have their own insurance policy. I cannot say whether the hon. Lady has been abroad, but I know that if I go to India or New York and find myself in an accident requiring medical attention, I will receive a wallet biopsy from the ambulance man, which will determine the type of treatment I get. [Interruption.] All we are seeking is the same for this country; it is about fairness. It is not about denying people medical treatment; it is about fairness. [Interruption.] I am going to move on. [Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. We need the debate to be conducted through the Chair rather than to have cross-channel discussions. I understand that the debate is getting a little tense, but I am sure we can get back to where we need to be on the Queen’s Speech.
Dr Offord
I bow to your superior knowledge, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I want to move on to discuss other aspects of immigration and what I would like to see in the Government’s legislative programme. We heard earlier about people entering this country from the EU and migrant countries and about the problems they have caused. I have a lot of problems with this in my constituency. In Edgware, for example, several people living in garages told me that they could not afford to go home. On a recent ward visit to Watford Way in Hendon, one of my constituents and I went to an old commercial garage in which scores of people were living rough. These were people who beg locally and they were visibly east European. I spoke to some of them who claimed that they did not have the money to get back home. Funds are available, however, and I should like them to make use of them, because their current lifestyle is unacceptable. That is the face of Labour’s immigration policy in the last decade: people sleeping in garages in my constituency.
As recently as this week, we saw members of the Metropolitan police on horseback going to areas around Marble Arch, rounding up people—particularly Bulgarians and Romanians—and checking their identification papers to establish what they are doing, who they are and why they are here. At present, as the House knows, they are not allowed to work, but those restrictions will soon end, and they will have three months in which to demonstrate that they can support themselves. If they cannot do that, the Border Agency will summon them for an interview and ask them what they are doing. If they refuse to turn up, there is nothing that the agency can do. It should be an arrestable offence not to turn up, but it is not, and they can be picked up again in future sweeps. Moreover, they can leave the country and come back again, in which event their three-months time frame will start all over again. The Immigration Bill should address some of those points, and I hope that the Government have heard my plea.
I now want to talk about what will not be in the Bill. The hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick)—who is not in the Chamber at present, but who has been described as “the popular Member for Limehouse—referred to some of the issues that would not be included, but omitted to mention provision for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
Lord Lawson made his position clear at the weekend. Within hours, the Deputy Prime Minister had decided that he knew better than Lord Lawson and, indeed, better than anyone else. He said:
“There are 3 million of our fellow countrymen and women in this country whose jobs rely directly on our participation and role and place in what is after all the largest borderless single market.”
The hon. Member for Preston also gave that figure. I asked him where he had got it, a question that I do not believe he was able to answer.
Mark Hendrick
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that Switzerland and Norway have to abide by all the EU regulations and directives pertaining to the single market, but have no control over or say in them because they are not EU members. While enjoying some of the benefits of being in the single market, they have none of the decision-making powers that membership of the EU confers. If we leave the EU, we will have to start from scratch, and will probably have to do exactly what Norway, in particular, is doing: accept, wholesale—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick) made a 19-minute speech, and has made, I think, five interventions since then. Interventions should not be a way of making another speech. They must be short, because others wish to speak.
Dr Offord
Let me respond briefly to the hon. Gentleman’s point by saying that I think there are certain products that parts of the EU cannot do without. For instance, I know that places such as Italy could not do without Lancashire cheese. I have tasted that very cheese in your room on occasion, Mr Deputy Speaker, during some of your receptions.
Was the Deputy Prime Minister claiming, in his “3 million” statement, that Britain would not negotiate a reciprocal deal to avoid tariffs? I should like to know the answer to that, particularly given that we import more from the EU as a whole than we export to it.
According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, there is
“no reason to suppose that unemployment would rise significantly if the UK were to withdraw from the EU. Withdrawal could cause disruption”
—I acknowledge that—
“but it is most unlikely that export sales to EU markets would cease completely”.
The hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse quoted from The Daily Telegraph. One of the quotes cited the Institute of Directors, which in 2000 came to the opposite conclusion to that of South Bank university. It estimated that there was a net cost to the UK from staying out of the EU of about 1.75% of GDP, which was about £15 billion at the time, but all those figures are completely worthless now as so much has changed since then. We were promised no more boom and bust, but we now realise that that is not the case—it has not been the case for the past couple of years.
All the underlying calculations are simply wrong now, and we no longer know what the true situation would be. I therefore ask the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to commission a cost-benefit analysis on Britain’s continued membership of the EU, to establish what the economic consequences of Britain’s withdrawal would be. I ask it to do that for no other reason than that the Business Secretary said in opening today’s debate that he was interested in dealing with “factoids”, and I would like to see the relevant factoids. I would also like the Deputy Prime Minister to use the correct factoids, instead of scaremongering people into thinking that Britain cannot leave the EU.
There has been some talk about the UK Independence party today, and I, too, will mention it briefly. I believe that in the past couple of weeks UKIP has come to be seen by some as offering a panacea for all the problems of the UK, but I do not believe that is true. I do not think its members and supporters are all fruitcakes, nuts and loops either, and I believe we need to take them on on policy—or, rather, on their lack of policies. I agree with them in some areas, however, and many people voted for UKIP last week not because they want UKIP to be elected, but because they want some of the policies that it raises to be addressed, and they are looking to us to do that. It is wrong for Members on either side of this House to reject UKIP supporters, and it sends out a message that the political class is not listening. Gillian Duffy stated the case well in the 2010 general election, and we ignore it at our peril. I therefore respectfully ask you, Mr Deputy Speaker, to ask Mr Speaker to select the amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), to which I have added my name, so that we can have an opportunity to vote on it next week.