All 3 Lord Lilley contributions to the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020

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Wed 22nd Jul 2020
Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill
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2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading
Mon 7th Sep 2020
Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill
Lords Chamber

Committee stage & Committee stage:Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wed 9th Sep 2020
Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill
Lords Chamber

Committee stage:Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords

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

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Department: Home Office

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

Lord Lilley Excerpts
2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd July 2020

(3 years, 8 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 30 June 2020 - (30 Jun 2020)
Lord Lilley Portrait Lord Lilley (Con) [V]
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My Lords, the two Opposition Front-Bench speeches that we have just heard raise the question, why do we restrict immigration? After all, most immigrants are good, industrious and enterprising people, welcome here as our friends, neighbours and colleagues, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said.

Some immigration is indeed good for the economy, but you can have too much of a good thing. That is why we limit immigration. Immigration is a lubricant for the economy—not, as Tony Blair appeared to believe, its fuel. If you do not lubricate your car, it grinds to a halt; if you stopped all immigration, it would harm the economy. But beyond a certain point, adding more lubricating oil does not make your car go faster, and allowing mass immigration has not made our incomes grow faster—on the contrary.

The British economy suffers from three major weaknesses, all of which have been exacerbated by mass immigration since Tony Blair lifted the lid. First, we have a major housing shortage, yet over the last five years, net immigration has averaged 300,000 people a year. We need to build a city the size of Hull every year just to accommodate those incomers, and more when they have children.

Secondly, our chronic reluctance to train people means that fewer British workers have vocational and technical skills than any of our competitors; yet encouraging employers to recruit from abroad undermines their incentive to train and employees’ incentive to upskill. After Blair opened our borders, training time per worker halved and funding for training fell by 16%. We are told that the NHS needs migrants because Brits do not want to be doctors and nurses. Untrue—there are 10 applicants for every place in a medical school, and we turned away 35,000 applicants for nursing courses last year. The NHS finds it cheaper to import doctors and nurses from poor countries, which need them more than us, rather than train British applicants.

Thirdly, we invest less per head than most of our competitors. A ready supply of cheap labour reduces employers’ incentives to invest in improved productivity, and most skilled immigrants work in low-skilled jobs.

So, we need this Bill to reduce pressure on housing, encourage training in skills and boost investment.

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

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Department: Home Office

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

Lord Lilley Excerpts
Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 7th September 2020

(3 years, 6 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 121-II(Rev) Revised second marshalled list for Committee - (7 Sep 2020)
Baroness Barker Portrait Baroness Barker (LD)
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I want to return to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in his introductory remarks. The important amendment in this group is Amendment 2. All the others could be things that potentially fall out of a review, and so the key is to have that review and then look at the most appropriate way forward.

Many of the issues that have been spoken to in this debate are not new; we have been talking about social care for as long as I have been in the House. We could say many things about the current situation we find ourselves in, and some of the issues are fairly long-standing. One that I talk about a lot, but not many others do, is the fact that there are currently about a million people who are ageing and do not have children. Our health and social care service is predicated on the fact that you have children who will look out for your needs in any health or care setting. We will have 2 million people in that position by 2030. We have, therefore, an acute and growing need for paid social care. Also, at the moment, a number of our biggest care providers are owned by private equity firms, run at very low cost and margins—they are not about to stay in this business if they cannot do that, and to them, it is a business.

At Second Reading, the noble Baroness talked about the need for the United Kingdom to stop colluding in an international trade in low-cost care. I can understand that argument but, at this moment, given where we are, we would be the first affluent western country to take itself out of what is, in effect, an international market in care. No other affluent western country—nor Australia, for that matter—has solved its care problem by suddenly turning off all access to people from other nations. It would be a very bold statement if we were to do that, but noble Lords have today pointed out the dangers of doing so.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is right to argue that, at this moment, there is a case for a review. The Government, if they were not being so ideologically pure on the matter, would want to give themselves flexibility in addressing these issues as they arise. There is no need to do this: it is just government ideology. The Government could bring in a transitionary process, over about five years, that would enable people to get through a period of uncertainty. I therefore commend Amendment 2 to the Minister and ask her to look at some of the other amendments in this group.

Lord Lilley Portrait Lord Lilley (Con) [V]
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My Lords, I will focus on Amendments 82 and 93, and particularly their implications for reviewing the need, or otherwise, to recruit nurses and doctors from overseas. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for tabling them.

I suspect, however, that these amendments are based on the common fallacy that the NHS needs to recruit doctors and nurses overseas because supposedly not enough British people want to do these jobs. That is simply untrue. The latest year for which UCAS figures are available is 2019; I apologise to the House for giving out-of-date figures at Second Reading. The most recent figures show that 53,000 young British people applied to train as nurses last year, of whom 20,250 were turned away—that is 43% of applicants, or nearly half of those who applied. UCAS unfortunately does not produce figures on the same basis for those seeking to train as doctors, but it is clear that an even higher proportion of those who apply to medical school are turned away.

This is a double scandal. First, it means that tens of thousands of young Brits who aspire to serve their country as doctors or nurses are refused that chance and have to pursue less attractive options. Secondly, we have to recruit tens of thousands of doctors and nurses from abroad, mostly from countries that are far poorer, have fewer medical staff per head of population, and can ill afford to train people who then migrate to the United Kingdom.

This double scandal is compounded by the way this issue is excluded from the national debate. Why do we allow this situation to persist? We allow effectively unlimited numbers of students to study every subject from art history to zoology. The only subjects where places are numerically restricted are medicine, where they are formally restricted, and nursing, where they are de facto restricted.

I will pass over the political reasons why it may have seemed wise to advocates of mass immigration to invoke the needs of the NHS and nurses and doctors to sanctify their cause. The other reason is nakedly economic: we found it cheaper, in the short term, to employ people trained at the expense of foreign taxpayers, rather than pay to train our own citizens. At the same time, relying on nurses and other health workers from abroad, on whom many other noble Lords have focused, helps to keep wages low. What a paradox it is that many noble Lords who have spoken today and railed against the level of inequality in our country pursue a policy whose prime justification, as they have made clear today, is that it depresses the wages of the lowest-paid people in this country and keeps them below what economists call the domestic market clearing rate—the rate at which we could meet our needs from our own employees.

I was at first minded to support these amendments, but, on looking more closely, I note that one thing the reports that they call on the Government to produce do not cover is the scope for training more of those aspiring to become nurses and doctors in the UK, so that we can end the plundering of foreign health services. That is a very significant omission and shows that there is a blind spot in this discussion, which I hope we will not perpetuate in future debates.

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

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Department: Home Office

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

Lord Lilley Excerpts
Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 9th September 2020

(3 years, 6 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 121-III Third marshalled list for Committee - (9 Sep 2020)
Lord Lilley Portrait Lord Lilley (Con) [V]
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My Lords, I welcome the proposal of an annual cap on the number of people allowed to settle in this country, initially from the EEA but eventually applying to all countries, I hope. It is strange that such a cap has not been included in previous plans to limit immigration.

Successive political leaders from Tony Blair onwards have promised what they describe as an Australian-style points-based system for controlling immigration, but what they have planned has not been an Australian-style system. For most of this century, and indeed earlier, Australia has had a system with an overall cap on the number of visas issued, while allocating those visas on the basis of the points awarded to would-be immigrants. Australia is a vast, underpopulated country that, after the threat of Japanese invasion, decided it needed to increase its population to ensure its security, but even it does not allow everyone who happens to qualify for a certain number of points to settle there with no cap on the numbers.

We are a small, crowded island. It beggars belief that we should introduce a system that would potentially allow almost unlimited numbers of people to come and work and settle here. The number of people coming here from outside the European Union is clearly out of control already. In the last financial year, nearly 90,000 new national insurance numbers were issued to people from India alone—just one country. That is nearly double the number in the previous year and three times the number in the years before that. Of course, it was matched by similar numbers from the rest of Asia combined, not to mention those coming from other continents.

So far as I know, no one knows why this sudden surge has occurred, what jobs these people are working in or where they live, but if we had an annual cap, at the very least such surges would be smoothed out over a number of years, during which we could establish what the driving force was, and, if we decided it was reasonable to continue to allow that number of people to come, to prepare—as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville- Rolfe, said—for the numbers of houses and schools, et cetera, that we would have to build.

Whatever our personal views about the desirability of allowing large numbers of people to settle here, there can be no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the British people would like to see strict limits put on those numbers. This is not a democratic House and your Lordships have made it clear in this debate that they have remarkably little sympathy for the democratic sentiments that the people constantly express. But this country is a democracy, and our laws should reflect the broad wishes of the British people. This amendment would go some way to achieving that.

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Portrait The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
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My Lords, I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Horam, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford.

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Baroness Neville-Rolfe Portrait Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
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My Lords, I strongly support this amendment, to which I have added my name.

To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, I want to see more housing, both to help existing UK citizens and to help legal migrants. As noble Lords will recall, I made this point in my Oral Question yesterday. I want arrangements prioritising migration of skilled and scarce workers, but which allow the nation to plan for their housing, GP surgeries, hospitals and schools, the pressure on which is making people angry. This includes Scotland, if you listen to the figures from the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington.

It is particularly extraordinary that we should be thinking of dropping the long-standing requirement that jobs should be advertised in the UK before overseas recruitment occurs. This will encourage employers—especially big employers—to recruit overseas, sometimes without even trying the home market. We already have the benefit of 3.7 million or so EU citizens who have applied for the EU settled status scheme. Due to corona- virus and digital change, employment on the high street and elsewhere is, sadly, falling.

While I do not rule out special arrangements for agriculture and for health workers, we need our jobs to go to the home team wherever possible, whether in engineering, restaurants or universities. That is particularly the case in the wake of Covid-19. Advertising at home first seems a small price for employers to pay. Frankly, I am puzzled that the trade unions are not strongly supporting this.

Lord Lilley Portrait Lord Lilley (Con) [V]
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I support this amendment, which seeks to restore the resident labour test. As the noble Lord, Lord Green, said, the MAC thought that the pressure from employers to get rid of this test was symptomatic of a reluctance even to train people in this country. To my mind, that anyone should want to get rid of it when we face mass unemployment beggars belief. I understand that it was removed because of pressure from employers, and that, as MAC said, is symptomatic of deeply ingrained attitudes among many British employers that they have no duty to train their workforce, let alone to recruit locally.

As I mentioned in the debates on Amendments 82 and 93, that failure to train is as prevalent in the public sector and the NHS as it is in the private sector. The prevailing attitude in too many British companies is that you should train your own employees only if you cannot recruit people with those skills from abroad. We need to reverse that order of priorities: train your own employees first, and only recruit abroad if for some reason it is impossible to find them locally.

When I served on the Select Committee on Exiting the European Union in the House of Commons, our first visit after the referendum was to Sunderland. We met the great and the good of the business community there: the CBI, the Institute of Directors, the chamber of commerce, the local councils and most of the large employers, though with the notable exception of Nissan. I asked them what their principal concern was about the impact of Brexit. They said, “It may restrict our ability to recruit skilled labour from abroad.”

I was reminded then of a previous visit to that part of the world when, as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, I had gone to see the Nissan plant, which had then been recently established. I had asked the management a rather stupid question: “Do you have any difficulty recruiting skilled workers for your plant?” They were too polite to point out how stupid the question was, but they replied that there were no skilled automobile workers in the north-east of England. They added, “So we train people ourselves. They are very eager to learn and they make excellent workers.”

Recounting that conversation to the employers hosting the Select Committee, I asked them what would have happened if the Japanese had taken the same approach as them. There would be 9,000 Poles working in Nissan’s plant and 9,000 Brits would be tossing hamburgers or on the dole. They looked somewhat shamefaced, as well they might because those British workers recruited locally are now the most productive workers in the whole worldwide Nissan network. We must—and this amendment takes a very small step in that direction— encourage most British firms to show the same faith in British workers as Nissan did a quarter of a century ago.

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Portrait The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
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The noble Lord, Lord Horam, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford.