Queen’s Speech

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare a non-financial interest as president of Migration Watch, and remind the House that Migration Watch speaks for 30 million adults in the UK who wish to see immigration reduced. Eighteen million of them wish to see it reduced “by a lot”. For comparison, only about 5.5 million wish to see an increase, so they are outnumbered by rather more than five to one. The views of this very large majority are seldom represented in this House, so I shall focus on that very subject.

The critical test for the immigration Bill foreshadowed in the Queen’s Speech is whether it will achieve a serious reduction in the currently excessive levels of immigration. It is common ground that immigration on a modest scale is a welcome part of an open economy and society. I concur of course with the contributions earlier of the noble Lords, Lord Horam and Lord Hodgson. However, at its present level, immigration is adding, directly and indirectly, 1 million to the population of the UK every three years. One effect of this is to generate a need for 240 homes in England every day. These are extraordinarily large numbers which are not given enough attention.

Yet, despite the scale of immigration, there is no convincing evidence that immigration has increased the UK’s GDP per head, nor that it has increased productivity, which, as noble Lords will know, has been pretty flat for 10 years despite massive levels of immigration.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, told us today that the Government would deliver on the points-based system which has been promised for many years. Actually, although he does not seem to know it, we have had such a system since 2009. Unfortunately, it failed to ensure that so-called highly skilled workers went into highly skilled jobs. It also led to massive abuse of study visas. Noble Lords will remember that just part of the clean-up operation took several years and involved the closure of nearly 1,000 bogus colleges—this was an extraordinary degree of incompetence. Noble Lords may also have noted the remarks made by Mrs Theresa May in the other place last week, when she urged the new Home Secretary to look carefully at the lessons that have been learned about points-based systems. She should know.

What is this new system? The Government have been coy about the details, but they seem to have chosen the label “Australian” because it sounds tough and is therefore popular with focus groups. However, they will now have discovered that the Australian system is very complex and—whisper it—depends heavily on caps on all work-related routes, yet no mention of a cap has passed the lips of the Home Office.

It seems that the Government intend to build on the White Paper which they slipped out just before Christmas. That envisaged reducing the skill level from degree to A-level and “consulting” on the present salary level of £30,000. However, as the consultation is almost entirely with industry—surprise, surprise—a figure as low as £21,000 might emerge. According to our calculations, a salary level of that kind would expose up to 9 million UK jobs to new or increased international competition. That changes according to the level of salary that one puts in, but they are the kind of numbers we are talking about.

Cue an astonishing silence from Labour, the party of the workers, and from the trade unions, which one might think would be interested in looking out for the interests of potential recruits from the UK. Meanwhile—no surprise—businesses are on the warpath to achieve the lowest possible requirements and the largest possible flow.

Finally, will this system pass the test of achieving a serious reduction? It almost certainly will not. I am not sure it is even intended. This Government must pause and think. Their proposed immigration policy could very well lead to yet further increases in net migration. We are currently at a 10-year average of a quarter of a million a year; it has even touched in the past a third of a million. Under these proposals, it might very well go even higher.

I conclude with this thought: if, for whatever reason, Brexit does not turn out well—perish the thought—and if that is followed by continued mass immigration, the Conservative Party will have dealt its own future a massive blow.