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

Lord Paddick Excerpts

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

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, I have received requests to speak after the Minister from the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister talks about the existing 12-month wait before someone can apply to work—and then only in shortage occupations—as being to protect the resident workforce. Yet a House of Commons Library document published in January this year shows 100,000 vacancies in the social care sector, and rising. Can the Minister justify his statement that it is necessary in order to protect the resident workforce?

The Minister also said it was very unlikely that there would be refugees from an EU country. Is he not aware of the situation in Poland, where they are declaring LGBT-free zones in cities and provinces, with the Government ramping-up hate speech against LGBT people and the Law and Justice party leader saying that LGBT people are a

“threat to Polish identity, to our nation, to its existence and thus to the Polish state”?

Finally, the Minister talked about the pull factor of allowing refugees to work. A number of noble Lords said that there was no evidence of a pull factor. Indeed, the Minister was asked to provide evidence if he was going to deploy that argument. Perhaps he can comply with that request and provide the evidence to support his assertion.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I will deal with the third question first. I am afraid the evidence will flow from the review that I mentioned in my response, which will of course come to your Lordships’ House once it is done, taking into account the additional work of the Migration Advisory Committee and the review of the report by the Lift the Ban coalition.

On restricting the right to work to the shortage occupation list, as I said in my reply, it is right to restrict access to work to British citizens and others lawfully resident, including those already granted asylum. We do that under the reception conditions directive of 2003. The shortage occupation list is based on expert advice from the Migration Advisory Committee. I thought we had a useful debate yesterday on social care. If there are shortages in that sector, that is something that the Migration Advisory Committee is well placed to advise on and to dispassionately provide advice to government. The list can be updated accordingly.

Finally, on the point about Poland and LGBT rights, I do not want to reopen debates from the referendum, but I remember being told quite powerfully when I was campaigning to leave that it was the EU that somehow had created or guaranteed rights for LGBT people across Europe. I thought that was wrong then and I am surprised to hear the noble Lord raising it today. Poland is a prosperous, developed country. It is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. If the EU is good at doing the job that campaigners said it was during the referendum, it will enforce those rights. Unless that changes, we do not see a reason to change our assessment of EU member states such as Poland.