Immigration

Lord Newby Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, for initiating this debate. The recent general election is the first in my political lifetime in which the party leaders have spent much time publically discussing immigration. I am afraid that that debate generated a lot more heat than light. Today’s debate gives us a much better chance of a measured discussion of an extremely complicated question.

Harking back to the general election, I am tempted to take up the involvement of the noble Baroness, Lady Gardner of Parkes, in the amnesty issue. However, I would like to speak briefly about three aspects: first, highly skilled immigration; secondly, students; and, thirdly, less highly skilled immigrants.

The issue of highly skilled immigrants has dominated this debate. We clearly need a much more sophisticated approach than that currently being adopted by the Government. A small number of people here have a disproportionately significant impact on our economic life. We have been given a number of examples of how the cap doesn’t fit. I will give two more, from the oil and gas sector. Tata currently employs 38 non-EU nationals in Aberdeen, which is less than 5 per cent of its UK staff but they are hugely important people. It has been allocated two certificates of sponsorship for the period ending next April. This is undermining its ability to continue basing its geoscience research centre in Aberdeen because the centre is dependent on being able to recruit the most highly skilled and specialist people in this field, wherever they come from around the world. Shell finds itself facing exactly the same problems. Its inability to bring in non-EU citizens for specialist positions is leading it to consider whether it should move some of its specialist functions, possibly to the Netherlands where it already has its headquarters.

These problems are not just in one or two sectors. We need to recruit people for some key country and language specialisms from outside the UK if we are to improve our competitiveness. China, Japan and India are just three such countries. The importance of this, and the significance of the problem, was borne out by the recent Think London FDI barometer, conducted in May and June this year. Of those companies from the Asia-Pacific region, 89 per cent said that the immigration cap was likely adversely to affect their business over the months ahead. The cap does not fit, and it must change.

The noble Lord, Lord Ryder, and the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, have spoken eloquently about the need for the best academics to come in to the country. I echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, on the importance of students from around the world. We have a comparative advantage over much of the rest of the world. We often talk about shifting the balance away from financial services. Promoting our academic sector is one way in which we can do this. An example of how far our attractiveness reaches was impressed upon me by a British Council description of a recent poll in Chile in which students were asked where they would like to go if they could study abroad. While 28 per cent said that they would like to go to the US, 27.5 per cent said that they would like to come here. Chile is on the other side of the planet, a country where English is not the language. Yet we are hugely important to it, and need to build on that strength rather than undermine it.

Less-skilled immigrants from the EU and elsewhere —by far the largest group—are, in a sense, a bigger issue. Unemployment in London is currently 9.1 per cent, the second highest in the English regions. However, within London there are huge numbers of immigrants from the entire world doing jobs that could relatively easily be done by Londoners. This principle applies to a greater or lesser extent elsewhere, but in London it is particularly stark. It was brought home to me a couple of weeks ago. Within a couple of hours, I first bought a sandwich at a branch of Pret a Manger in which every member of staff was non-UK born, and then had a meeting with the policy director of Gingerbread, the charity that works with one-parent families. He talked about the vital need for part-time work for single mothers. I am not suggesting that every single mother goes to work at Pret a Manger between 10 am and 2 pm, but the retail sector has huge potential for that group that is not being exploited. The Government and employers should be looking at how we can fill some vacancies through better training of people who are currently looking for work.

Another sector to which relatively large numbers of people come, particularly from the Far East, is the care sector, where the easy option is to import care assistants from the Philippines. I wish the large healthcare providers, in both the public and the private sectors, but possibly particularly in the private sector, would spend more time ensuring that they recruit more local people, who need only an NVQ-level qualification to be able to do the job.

Immigration can and does bring great benefits to the UK. It has to be managed but, with a more nuanced and rigorous approach by government, there is no reason why that cannot be successfully done.