Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 30th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Masham of Ilton (CB) [V]]

My Lords, in supporting Amendment 3, I congratulate the movers. However, I hope that the Government will realise that we are now in a social care crisis and that we should face up to the challenges now. There is a serious shortage of live-in carers to help disabled people, due to the combination of coronavirus and Brexit. Good social care takes the pressure off the NHS.

Many elderly and disabled people are at serious risk because they have had their benefits cut. Coupled with shrinking local authority budgets, the workforce is under pressure exactly when it is needed most. Also, the vast proportion of migrant employees in social care will be ineligible to work in the UK ,as most care workers’ earnings do not meet the threshold for the new skilled visa, as has been mentioned several times.

I wish Amendment 3 good luck.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I was not able to take part in Committee because of the all-consuming HS2 Committee, along with the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, who I see is in his place. However, I sat in on part of the debate and heard the remarks of the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, a very formidable pair when they debate these issues. It is rather like facing Federer and Djokovic at the same time, because of their very stringent remarks. In a conversation outside the Chamber, I said to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, that from what I had heard, I thought that he rather had a point. We all know where we want to be with social care. We want a well-paid and well-motivated workforce. We all know, sadly, where we are, and as he said in his previous remarks and repeated today, it is a question of the transition, of how we get from where we are to where we want to be.

Two things have happened since the previous debate. First, we had a report yesterday from the Migration Advisory Committee, which, as I am sure that the Minister will say when she winds up, is particularly concerned by the problem we face of a sudden end to the situation we are facing today, a precipice, before we reach any better solution. Incidentally, the MAC’s report covers 650 pages; I hope that when the Home Office look at some of these reports it cuts down the bulk. I do not know whether Ministers read all these reports, but it has become pretty much impossible. We are almost beyond despair when we see such a bulky product.

The second thing to have happened since the previous debate is the Chancellor’s Statement last Thursday. He flagged up in detail the situation which we all have been facing regarding unemployment, and finally put some numbers on it, pointing out that with the withdrawal of the very supportive job system that he has at the moment, we may well be looking at an additional 2 million unemployed people. At the moment, there are an estimated 122,000 vacancies in the social care sector, but surely it is not beyond the wit of God to find among those 2 million people some who might help in the social care sector. Indeed, it is likely that they will be exactly the sort of people who could care for people—they are people from the retail sector and from the hospitality sector. Some of them may not have exactly the right aptitudes and attitudes, as the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said—a nightclub bouncer might not be exactly the right person to go into the social care sector—but many will have exactly the human skills that we are looking for. If you cannot find 122,000 people from that additional 2 million unemployed, you really are not trying.

It is fair to say that many of the companies in this area who manage the care homes are a motley crew. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in the previous debate, made the point that many of the private equity companies got into this area and—sad to say—piled up debt on many of these companies and have sought a way out without too much care for the social consequences or the effect on their clients. That is a fair point, which I am worried about as well, but there are also many good companies in this area, trying to do good work, who really care about their clients and are trying to find a way forward. Therefore, we should give them the opportunity of recruiting from among those British people who may become unemployed.

As for the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, that this is a sector that overall is controlled by the Government, that is fair, but none the less the Government are providing £1.5 billion of extra money for the sector through additional local authority subvention. There is also the Skills for Care programme, which is ongoing. This all indicates that there may be additional support for a company which is trying to do the right thing.

The MAC also said in its report that immigration is not the answer in the long term, and I do not think it should be. It highlights that, all too often, we have looked at recruitment difficulties and said that we must import from abroad, rather than looking at it the other way around, at what the problems are and how we can recruit, train and pay properly the people in this country before we look abroad. Indeed, I had the advantage of a personal chat about this with Professor Bell, the new chair of the MAC, and he made a very interesting point. He said that, in other countries with an equivalent of the Migration Advisory Committee, its reports do not just go to the Home Office, as they do here, but in the first instance to the education, business and health departments, with the implication “What are you doing to solve the problems of recruitment yourselves, before we even consider going abroad for further support?” Traditionally, we have too easily looked at this the wrong way around.

Mention has been made of the British Medical Association’s briefing, which we have all seen today. Once again, it makes the same mistake by talking about how we must import people to help with the obvious problems of recruitment in various sectors, from doctors and nurses to social care workers, but there are two remarkable omissions in that briefing. First, there is no mention of manpower planning in the NHS. Yet, as my noble friend Lord Lilley pointed out in a previous debate on this subject, 43% of those who apply for a nursing course are turned away. I cannot believe that 43% of those who apply are inadequate for the job, but they are being turned away for some reason. Equally, we do not know the situation with doctors, where there are similar figures. But, none the less, we should look at manpower planning as a whole in the NHS sector.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 6, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, and to which I and my noble friend Lord Horam—a fount of experience and common sense, as we heard in his earlier comments on social care—have added our names. Of course, the noble Lord is an esteemed expert in the field; there is no greater expert on some of these matters.

As the noble Lord said, the amendment calls for a limit on the total number of EEA and Swiss migrants coming into the UK for employment each calendar year. In practice, this would involve a limit on all immigration for employment. There is clearly a serious risk of the numbers getting very large indeed, as we have heard, if we do not find a way to control immigration more directly. We have to get this right or we will feel the result in public anger in years to come. Effectively leaving the number of migrants to the interests of employers, as is now proposed, is one-sided and inappropriate. It would make it impossible to plan properly for the investment we will need, given the scale of the dynamic change we will see. We will need additional houses, schools, hospitals, GP surgeries and transport facilities; we debated that in Committee but I do not think that anybody disagreed about the need for public investment to deal with the demographic change.

I know that we have the Migration Advisory Committee to help us and that, unlike SAGE, it includes economists; indeed, it is dominated by them. However, as I have already said, I fear that it is too focused on attracting talent from abroad in the employer’s interest; indeed, the Minister’s statement today heightens that fear. It is odd for me to speak against what might be seen as my own interest as a director—I refer to my interests in the register—but we are dealing with difficult economic dynamics and sensitive points of politics in what is already one of the most crowded countries in Europe. As the noble Lord, Lord Green, said, this is not an economic matter alone. Fairness is very important.

I believe that we need as many jobs as possible for those already in the UK, particularly given the extension of the Covid restrictions and the resulting rise in unemployment, which, sadly, will grow further. We also need a greater incentive for employers to train in the skills that we require in a more digital, flexible world. I therefore very much welcome the fact that a revolution in skills was at the heart of the Prime Minister’s welcome announcement yesterday. However, as the noble Lord said, it is not too late for the Government to look carefully at the arrangements they have made and perhaps change them in the light of the Covid tsunami.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, it has been obvious during these debates on the immigration Bill that there are two clear points of view. One is that we should carry on roughly with the status quo, which primarily reflects the interests of business. The other view, which perhaps supports workers’ interests, is that we need more control than we have now and a lower level of immigration. My point is a simple one: both points of view can be accommodated. I hate to use the phrase, “We can have our cake and eat it” because it has been somewhat devalued by our Prime Minister. None the less, the fact is that we can do that if we think this through carefully.

The supporters of the existing immigration policy, at a fairly high level, want to have freedom of movement for academics, creative people, entrepreneurs, engineers and all the valuable people we need in our society and contribute so much. For example, it was recently pointed out that nearly 50% of the Nobel prizes won by people in the UK have been won by people who originated abroad. However, to get that element in society, you do not need to have a net immigration level of over 350,000 a year. It can all be done on a net immigration level of 50,000, 70,000 or less than 100,000, which we had for decades before the Blair Labour Government opened the gates in the early part of this century.

Therefore, the problem with the large-scale immigration that we have had for the last 15 or 20 years, as has been pointed out by my noble friend Lord Hodgson, is that it affects the quality of life, puts a huge strain on resources, has a big environmental and social impact and affects jobs and wages. Even the MAC has pointed out that people on low wages have had them reduced by 5% in real terms over the last few years. It even led to the biggest tragedy of all for people who are remainers, like myself—Brexit. The casual treatment of people’s views on immigration was a clear factor in the referendum and certainly a decisive view of those who voted for Brexit. In other words, the liberals and middle-class people who wanted more immigration dug their own grave over the referendum.

The way out of this dilemma is absolutely clear, as has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington. It is to have a cap at a reasonable level. You could then accommodate the people who want to bring in the creative artists, entrepreneurs, businesspeople and so forth without having the numbers that are objected to by the workers and the bulk of people in this country.

In my previous speech, I praised the pamphlet produced by my noble friend Lord Hodgson, who looked at the issue in totality in relation to the demographic trends and population. I will now quote from another pamphlet that was brought out a lot less recently: Beyond the Net Migration Target, by the Onward think tank. The author is Will Tanner, who was a special adviser in the Cameron Government to Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary. He states:

“We recommend that the Government moves to a detailed and transparent Sustainable Immigration Plan, which would set out ministers’ objectives for the level and composition of migration and be updated on a rolling basis every year… This type of detailed approach is commonplace in other countries… For example, Australia has an annual planning program, where it sets the number of permanent visas in the budget each year.”


Tanner sets out what happens in Australia. For example, from 2019 to 2020, they planned to have 30,000 employer sponsored visas and skilled independent visas to the tune of 18,652. All this is set out in an annual budget decided between the various departments and stakeholders concerned, brought to their Parliament, debated and settled, and they have another look at it the following year. It is all perfectly transparent, above board and very democratic. The same thing happens in Canada and New Zealand. All these people are very experienced in dealing with this problem of immigration.

There it is: it can be dealt with by the simple methods already extant in other countries. I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that this is the way forward to meet both these objectives: those of the people who understand the value of a limited amount of immigration and those who do not want the high level of immigration that we have had over the last 20 years. Both sides can have what they want, and I present this to my noble friend as one of the answers to the way forward. It is a very simple pamphlet and, unlike the 650 pages of the MAC report, at 21 pages it is very readable. I hope that she can take this on board and present it to the Home Office as a very sensible way forward.

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[Lord Horam (Con)]

Will the noble Lord give way?

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

No. I cannot.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

But on the last group—

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

No. In their contributions, the noble Lords, Lord Horam and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, referred to think-tank reports. I will be interested in the reports from those think tanks. I should declare that I am the treasurer of a think tank—the Fabian Society—but I am a bit concerned about these bodies because, unlike the Fabian Society, a lot of them are quite opaque. We do not know who funds them, where the money comes from or who is behind these reports, so I would be a bit more interested in what those bodies had to say if we knew who paid for what. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, will speak on the next group, so maybe he can tell us who funded the report to which he has referred many times. I will be interested to hear that.

The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, made an important point about the number of EU migrants coming to the UK. In fact, that number has fallen. I carefully read the debate in Committee on this and on many points I found myself in agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, and I have heard nothing so far in the debate to persuade me otherwise.

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[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment, to which I have added my name. Indeed, of the three proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Green, this is the one I have most hope of the Government accepting, in the context of the narrow EU-EEA focus of the Bill. I find it extraordinary that we should be thinking of dropping the long-standing requirement that jobs be advertised in the UK before overseas recruitment takes place. This will encourage employers, especially big employers, to recruit overseas without even trying the home market. We already have the benefit of the pool of 3.8 million or so EU citizens who have applied for the EU settlement scheme. Thanks to coronavirus, UK jobs are being lost everywhere, from the high street to our wonderful arts and entertainment industries.

In earlier discussions, defending the decision to dispense with the labour market test and the 28 days of domestic advertising it lays down, the Minister put a lot of emphasis on the salary thresholds and the immigration skills charge. I am not against the points-based system, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, seemed to suggest; however, with my experience of a number of industries, I think the thresholds look much too low, especially post-Covid. The skills charge has to be set against the recruitment fees that might have to be paid in the more demanding UK market. I appreciate, of course, that there will be scope to flex these numbers going forward—that seems to be what the Minister has been saying—however, I think this particular change is especially unwise.

While I do not rule out special arrangements for agriculture, mentioned earlier by my noble friend Lord Naseby, and for health workers—although the latter steals training and talent from countries that sometimes badly need it—we need our jobs to go to the home team wherever possible. We need a mechanism to encourage training, especially in the social care sector, which is crying out for suitable people, as my noble friend Lord Horam explained so eloquently in relation to Amendment 3. We are embarking on a skills revolution in the UK, and a jobs-first pledge, by advertising at home, should be part of our prospectus.

As I have said before, I am puzzled that trade unions such as USDAW, who I have worked so well with and who have done such a fine job in retail, are not strongly supporting the retention of some form of labour market test.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

This is about the resident labour market test and I find it quite astonishing, like my noble friends who have spoken to the amendment, that this should be removed at the point when we are entering a period of huge unemployment, as predicted by the Chancellor in his Statement only a few days ago. It is completely astonishing that that should be the case at the moment.

It is also amazing that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has so far not supported such an amendment: it beggars belief, frankly, that the Labour Party spokesman is willing to give this up in such circumstances. I hate to attack—rather, argue—with the noble Lord but he did take me on in our last debate. I will not take long over this but he did ask, “Who is this think tank, Onward?” It is a perfectly reputable, charitable think tank. The point it was making, as am I, is that Australia has had a cap on immigration for years. We have imported half the Australian points-based system but are refusing to import the rest, which is the cap. They say in Australia, “no cap, no control”, and that is why they have a cap.

It is the same in Canada, where they have the same system and it is debated in Parliament. It is all perfectly transparent and its Parliament has a role. It is the same in New Zealand. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, also said that he was worried about the economy, but Australia and Canada have successful economies and caps on immigration; New Zealand has a successful economy. They are all rather more successful than we are, in many respects. I advise the noble Lord, as a true friend—we served together on the Electoral Commission and I really appreciate him as a stalwart Labour man—to think again about this and reposition his party. Believe you me, if the Labour Party does not reposition itself on immigration, I can tell him, it is in real trouble.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment, as the House would expect, but before I get there, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, threw down a challenge and I had better get to that first. I am pleased to be able to tell him that I paid for every single bit of that pamphlet. Every single envelope, stamp, and bit of printing was paid for by me and I am happy to share the receipts and information with him if he wishes. The only time that I used any of the facilities of the House was to distribute the pamphlet, a copy of which went to every Member of your Lordships’ House and every Member of the House of Commons.

I support the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Green, and my noble friends Lady Neville-Rolfe and Lord Horam. I do not want to go over all that again now. In my remarks on Amendment 6, which we have just dealt with, I explained how employers have become addicted to cheap labour from overseas because it is in their commercial interests to do so. As a result, we have become thoughtless and careless about the employment opportunities for our settled population. We have young people locked into zero-hours contracts. We have members of minority communities locked into low-paid, low-prospect jobs. Increasingly, and really seriously because they are a larger part of our population, the over-50s find it hard to get jobs even as we raise the retirement age. A 2018 House of Commons report revealed that 1 million people over 50 would like to work or work more; 14% of 50 year-olds are out of work and 35% of 60 year-olds are out of work. Removing the resident labour market test opens them up to an even greater degree of unemployment risk.

As many noble Lords have said, as the impact of the pandemic makes itself felt, all these problems will get worse. How do we protect and look after our settled population in these circumstances, particularly since these same economic pressures will make employers ever keener to game the system and access cheaper labour from overseas? The first line of protection would have been a cap but we are not going to have it because my noble friend the Minister has told us so. This amendment is a second line of protection, as explained by the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, since the resident labour market test prevents the grosser excesses of undercutting wages by recruiting from overseas.

I apologise to the House for not having been present in Committee, but I have read the debates and, following a point made by my noble friend Lord Horam, I was really astonished by a comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, at col. 843 of Hansard, about the trade unions. Why every union at the Trades Union Congress is not down here supporting this amendment as a way of helping and protecting the working man they seek to represent, absolutely astonishes me. Now, that is for the party opposite to sort out.

The strains that our society will face do not just come from the pandemic. They will come also from the impact of the fourth industrial revolution—from artificial intelligence and robotics, not often mentioned in our debate so far. In those circumstances, policies that will likely result in close to 1,200 people arriving on an average day cannot be sensible.

A key determinant of a person’s self-confidence and sense of self-worth is, undoubtedly, purposeful and secure work. Professor David Blanchflower said in his book Not Working, published last year:

“Unemployment hurts and it hurts a lot.”


The amendment, if the Government accepted it, would help reduce but, sadly, not eliminate that level of hurt, which is why I support it.

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We can argue about the correct consultation and scrutiny process, which is the subject of this amendment. Actually, I agree with some of the sentiments expressed earlier in the debate on Amendment 4, on the lack of parliamentary scrutiny of regulations made under some of the Bill’s provisions. However, I would argue that Parliament is in fact going too far in permitting such a scheme for new entrants on this scale; I do think we could live to rue the day. We are bringing in too many changes at once, and we risk losing control of our borders. This is another change, like the advertising of vacancies at home, that I think the Secretary of State should look at again. I hope that she will reach some of the conclusions that I and our colleagues have reached in looking in detail at these important provisions and the points-based proposals that the Home Office has now helpfully brought forward.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

The contributions to this debate are getting shorter and shorter, and I intend to adhere to that pattern. The simple point I want to make is that this is part of a loosening of the arrangements—I would not call them controls—which were put in place at the beginning of this year and then amplified in July. Of course, since then we have had the coronavirus pandemic. We have the prospect now of an additional two million unemployed, and young people coming into the job market face a very bleak situation. These are not normal times.

The Treasury has responded rapidly and comprehensively to this situation with a major package earlier in the year and the less pronounced package of the last 10 days. What I hope and expect is that the Home Office reacts similarly and recalibrates the ideas it had before the world changed when the coronavirus set in. We really do need it to respond. I do not believe that the Home Office is unfit for purpose, as was once said by a Labour Minister. It has many able civil servants who are perfectly capable of responding to a changing situation, but they need to show it now; otherwise, people will lose faith in the Government.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, one of the weaknesses of the whole Bill is the extent to which the detailed implications are contained in regulations which are only now beginning to emerge. Every Member of your Lordships’ House will be aware that the scrutiny of regulations is much less effective than that of primary legislation; the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, raised that issue in the debate on one of the previous amendments. I should perhaps, just for the record, declare that I am the chairman of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, but I am speaking for myself, not for the committee.

As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, the regulations are unamendable, so the House is left with what I call the “nuclear option” of complete rejection. Unsurprisingly, the House has veered away from that course of action, except on the rarest of occasions. That is one of the reasons why I support the noble Lord, Lord Green, in this case, because he is actually trying to wrest back a bit of control by having some more specific plans built into the Bill. They are necessary for the reasons that he, and indeed my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, laid out. In its way, this amendment is the third and last line of protection in regulating the extent to which the employment opportunities of our settled population can be undermined.

We already know that there is no cap and that we will have no resident labour market test. Therefore, if my noble friend the Minister refuses to accept this amendment—and I fear that if I could glance over her shoulder at her speaking notes, I would see that she might just be going to do that—it is extremely likely that our future levels of immigration will continue, probably in excess of a quarter of a million each year. It may be slightly below what we have now, at 320,000, but it will be well over a quarter of a million each year.

In Committee I chided the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, who has been coming back at me this afternoon, when he refused to back my proposal to establish an office for demographic change, which was a planned idea, independent and transparent, to look at the complexities of these issues in the round—environmental, ecological, societal. It is easy to laugh—the noble Lord is already grinning—but the reality is that there are serious issues around water, land quality and species loss which are all related to how our population is growing. They are not entirely due to it, but they are very largely related.

I said to the noble Lord, I hope, gently, because I do not want to upset him—he is a sensitive soul—that his party had to decide where it stood on demographic growth, of which immigration is a part, because it is an issue that really resonates in the country. We have heard the percentages; 60% to 70% of people are concerned about it. In particular, his party must decide where it stands, or all the possibilities of recovering the red wall, now blue wall, seats will be vanishingly small.

However, it is perfectly fair to say that this is not without dangers for my party. We will face quite significant challenges. If those of us who are concerned about what happens if our population grows by 6 million or 8 million are right, and the package of policies before us continues to allow rapid growth—it is not about whether they are foreigners, black or white, or what their colour is; it is about the number of people—we will have two big challenges. First, a lot of the people who turned the red wall seats into blue wall seats did so because we promised a sustained reduction in the level of immigration. If we do not deliver that, they will feel betrayed and let down.

In parallel with that, every year we will have to build 100,000 houses to accommodate the quarter of a million people likely to arrive. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, says that they pay more in tax than they draw in benefits, but there is a much more complicated issue, with which I will not bore the House this evening, about the capital investment to maintain and extend our roads and structures. They are not covered just by taxes; a much bigger level of capital expenditure is required. He and I can discuss this over a socially distanced cup of coffee, but I will not bore the House with it now.

We will build 100,000 houses a year, and they will be built in our shire counties. These people will not be delighted about it. We know that; housebuilding is intensely unpopular. The coming storm about the planning algorithm, which is now doing the rounds, is just the beginnings of the trouble there will be if we continue down this road. My noble friends Lord Horam and Lady Neville-Rolfe are right. The Government are wrong in believing they have the situation under control.

My noble friend the Minister nobly and loyally marches to the beat of the Home Office drum, which essentially says, “Don’t worry; it will be all right on the night”. I wish I shared the department’s confidence.