Accession (Immigration and Worker Registration) (Revocation, Savings and Consequential Provisions) Regulations 2011

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

To resolve that this House regrets the lack of detailed information contained in the explanatory memorandum on the Accession (Immigration and Worker Registration) (Revocation, Savings and Consequential Provisions) Regulations 2011 (SI 2011/544).

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, the regulations before the House tonight revoke the Accession (Immigration and Worker Registration) Regulations 2004, which regulate access to the UK labour market by nationals of eight of the states that acceded to the European Union in 2004. This is required because the treaty governing the accession of those states to the EU provided that existing member states may restrict such access to the labour market for up to seven years following accession, and this period expires on 30 April 2011.

The UK signed up to the right to the free movement of people within the EU, as codified in the EU directive 2004/38/EC, which included provision for free movement of workers within the territory of member states and the European Economic Area. Since the expansion of the EU on 1 May 2004, the UK has accepted immigrants from central and eastern Europe, Malta and Cyprus. There are restrictions on the benefits that members of those countries can claim, which are covered by the worker registration scheme. The significance of that is that the consequence of revoking the regulations, as we are doing tonight, is the closure of the worker registration scheme.

The scheme was introduced in the UK as a transitional measure to monitor accession states nationals’ access to the UK labour market. The scheme did not place any restrictions on the access of nationals of accession states to the labour market in terms of numerical ceilings, resident labour market test or a skills test, but it did make employment subject to a requirement that workers register their employment under the scheme within one month of starting work. Workers ceased to be subject to the requirement to register after 12 months of continuous employment in the UK in accordance with the 2004 regulations.

The reason that I have sought a debate on the regulations is to seek from the Government an assessment of their impact. This matter was raised by the Merits Committee in its 26th report. In that report, the committee drew this statutory instrument to the special attention of the House. The Explanatory Memorandum to the SI states:

“The impact on business, charities or voluntary bodies is negligible. The lifting of the registration requirement imposes no additional costs on business, charities or voluntary bodies and means that employers will no longer need to be compliant with the requirement to ensure that an accession State worker requiring registration has registered their employment … The impact on the public sector is that the UK Border Agency will no longer incur the cost of administering the Worker Registration Scheme. This impact is negligible for the public sector because these costs were recovered though the fee charged for applications”.

We are informed in the Explanatory Memorandum that no impact assessment has been prepared.

The Explanatory Memorandum is silent on assessing the impact of the termination of the worker registration scheme on the benefits system. That is what particularly caught the eye of the Merits Committee, to which I pay tribute for the thoroughness of its work and the help that it gives Members of your Lordships' House in understanding what are sometimes the mysteries of statutory instruments. It will be seen from the 26th report that the Merits Committee followed that comment up in correspondence with the Department for Work and Pensions. That response is helpfully published as Appendix 1 to the 26th report, which states that the DWP says that,

“over 11,000 claims from nationals of the eight countries for income-based Job Seeker’s Allowance were refused last year, but which may have succeeded with the end of the WRS and the transitional arrangements under the Accession Treaty”.

The Merits Committee informs us that,

“DWP say they are still working on the potential costs following the end of the WRS … DWP also say that rules are in place to prevent abuse and they have an expert team scrutinising the quality and consistency of decision making on claims from nationals of the eight countries”.

As the Merits Committee comments, it is disappointing that the Department for Work and Pensions is still working on the potential costs following the end of the worker registration scheme.

This debate is an opportunity, first, to encourage the noble Baroness’s department to be more forthcoming in its impact assessments in future. Secondly, I hope that the noble Baroness will update us and the House on whether the DWP has made any further progress in its work in analysing the potential costs following the end of the worker registration scheme. I beg to move.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, this statutory instrument was drawn to the attention of the House because of the public policy likely to be of interest to it, not because of a defective Explanatory Memorandum. It is not so long ago that we had no Explanatory Memoranda to orders, only Explanatory Notes, which still exist but which are much narrower, technical and often, I must say, opaque. It has only been since 2004, when the Merits Committee was formed, that we have had this type of assistance. I should declare that I am a member of the Merits Committee at present. I should like to take this opportunity to congratulate the committee's advisers, Jane White and Grant Oliver, who pursue with a quiet doggedness issues which arise on too many of the literally thousands of SIs which come before us: things such as lack of reporting on the outcome of consultation, and very often the late presentation of an order so that there is no proper time to investigate before it comes into force.

It should go without saying—although I had better say it—that accountability and access to what the Government do is of the utmost importance. Transparency may be a little overworked as a term, but the concept is not. Information must be available and accessible, not least to avoid any suggestion that what we have—this is not my term, although I wish it was—is not evidence-based policy but policy-based evidence. The Explanatory Memorandum is important, because it is a public document, but I think that this Explanatory Memorandum is clear. It is detailed within its own terms. Perhaps it would be good to have an impact assessment to accompany statutory instruments, but, as things are at the moment, that is not usual.

My greater concern is the usual—the importance of joining up different parts of government. The SI comes from the Home Office; it was announced by the noble Baroness. Her statement dealt with the procedures affecting people coming into the UK from the accession states, not the wider impact. The report notes with disappointment that the DWP has not provided an estimate of associated costs. It had seven years to do so. I cannot resist the basic arithmetic, which tells us when six of those seven years were.

The noble Lord has raised a number of interesting questions, and I will, to an extent, repeat them. Given the time that there has been, why have the Government not sought to develop a more accurate measure of the likely numbers? The noble Lord referred to the 11,000—it may be almost 12,000—claims rejected in the past calendar year which apparently would have succeeded with the ending of the transitional arrangements. How confident are the Government that those figures are close to being accurate? How will they seek to verify them? Newspaper articles use the figure of more than 100,000 migrants. If I were to ask the Minister whether she knows where the newspapers got the figure of 100,000 from, that would probably be an unfair question, because we all know that newspapers are not necessarily the most accurate reporters.

Have the Government worked out the cost of the increased access to benefits? It would be helpful if the Minister would say a little about the Jobcentre Plus team to which the noble Lord referred. Is it dealing with just these accession state nationals? I hope not, as I hope this is all in a wider context. I also hope that it is not just the DWP but, for instance, BIS or Communities that have considered the implications of this change. I am not suggesting that they have not.

The point of the transitional arrangements was to monitor accession state nationals’ access to the UK labour market. We are told that by paragraph 7(2) of the Explanatory Memorandum. What was the result?

The best argument for a full Explanatory Memorandum dealing with the impacts is yesterday’s Daily Express, whose front page screamed, “Migrants Flood Back to Britain”. I know the reluctance to let the facts get in the way of a good story, but perhaps fuller Explanatory Memoranda on this sort of issue would assist in ensuring accuracy rather than raising the temperature so unnecessarily and unpleasantly.

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In the light of my explanations, particularly of the difficulty in attempting to quantify uncertain migrant flows and demand for benefits and thus the Government’s unwillingness to mislead the House with information that could appear to be helpful but that could turn out to have a spurious solidity, I hope that the noble Lord will not press the Motion.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I am very glad to respond to this short debate tonight.

I think the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, is absolutely right about the powerful help that we receive from the publication of Explanatory Memorandums. She will be aware that I was the first chairman of the Merits Select Committee. When we first met, relying simply on Explanatory Notes proved very insufficient, so the publications of EMs for all statutory instruments has been very helpful. I very much agree with her comments about the argument for very full Explanatory Memorandums. I certainly support that, and I certainly endorse her comments about the work of the Merits Select Committee. It is very difficult for Members of this House to scrutinise statutory instruments properly without the kind of help that we receive from the Select Committee. I am very grateful to it for the work that it does, and I sympathise with the noble Baroness for the no doubt weekly delivery of statutory instruments that have to be read.

At the end of her speech, the noble Baroness referred to six out of seven years, the implication being that if the DWP had had seven years I ought to accept responsibility for six-sevenths of the failure to produce the figures. It is, of course, in the final year that one expects most of the work to be done, which falls under different management.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, for explaining the difficulty in achieving reliable budget figures. I understand the particular challenges that face the DWP, particularly in the light of the data protection issues that she mentioned, and I certainly fully accept the complexity of these matters, but I think that the Explanatory Memorandum would have benefited from the kind of explanation that she gave tonight. The problem is that the EM was silent; paragraph 10(2) simply describes the impact on the public sector as negligible. It would have been helpful if reference had been made to the potential cost of the benefits, and it would have been entirely acceptable to have said that it was not possible at this point to quantify that cost for the reasons that the noble Baroness gave.

I hope that this debate has been helpful and that when the Home Office comes with further SIs, as no doubt it will—it always does—it takes that particular point to heart. I am glad to have raised the matters contained in this statutory instrument tonight, and I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion withdrawn.