Immigration Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to address four aspects of this complex Bill. The first is the importance of the pull factor in immigration and how best the Government should tackle it. Clause 55 gives the Secretary of State powers through subordinate regulations in the form of statutory instruments, of course, to,

“require certain employers to pay an immigration skills charge for each skilled worker from outside the EEA that they sponsor”.

It is good to see some explicit recognition by the Government that the shortage of skills in our domestic jobs market acts as a powerful incentive for employers to recruit from abroad, thus pulling immigrants into Britain. There has been too much emphasis on in-work benefits acting as a pull factor without the Government providing the evidence that this is a key incentive driving large numbers of immigrants. But our media are full of stories about shortages of skills within the UK, resulting in searches for qualified workers from overseas. Frank Field MP has just called for a crash programme to train young British unemployed people in building skills to supply the labour we desperately need to build more houses rather than, he argues, importing workers from abroad who in turn will require more houses to live in.

We read every week about the desperate shortage of nurses, with reports that hospital trusts want to recruit an additional 6,000 nurses from outside the EEA. The Commons Home Affairs Committee recently commented that the Government’s tier 2 migrant cap, “could have been responsible for a crisis in nurse recruitment”. I saw another recent story that the UK faces so wide a gap between supply and demand for long-distance lorry drivers that there are doubts that assembly plants, shops and supermarkets will be able to maintain the flow of supplies in peak periods. And we all know about the continuing shortage of youngsters with computer skills within the UK.

The Government’s answer to this in Clause 55 is to impose a charge on employers recruiting from outside the EEA in the hope of pushing companies to invest more in training. It is not clear whether hospital trusts recruiting nurses or doctors from outside the EEA will be expected to pay this charge, and perhaps the Minister could clarify whether public sector employers, including universities, will be included in the imposition of such charges. The implications for universities appointing academic staff from outside the EEA could be significant. But the underlying problem with this approach is that it ignores the problems of the English education system; it is particularly a problem in northern England, as we heard at Question Time today, in failing to motivate students or provide them with the skills the market needs. Cuts in further education and proposals that in future student nurses in England will be expected to pay for their training act as disincentives to acquiring the skills the country needs. There seems to be a complete absence of co-ordination across Government on this as the Home Office tightens controls on immigrants with skills while the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Department for Education and others cut back on training for those already here.

I have worked in Bradford with a social housing association which runs, as part of its social responsibility agenda, a superb apprenticeship scheme for the various building trades which is enormously oversubscribed. But then, another arm of government is making it harder for social housing associations to contribute to their communities in ways like this. Unless the Government take responsibility for the failings in our education and training systems, and their funding that contributes to the long-term skills shortages which drive inward immigration, they have no hope of reducing the determination of companies and public sector employers to recruit directly from abroad. I have told the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, that Migration Watch should be campaigning for a massive government training programme for the domestic unskilled and unemployed.

My second point is about fees. Clause 59, and Schedule 12, provide powers to charge fees for services that were previously provided without charge, and for any services provided in connection with marriages. Again, this seems to be an example of the Government pursuing entirely contradictory policies. They are strongly in favour of marriage, as we have read in successive manifestos, but determined to charge for them in the future. Fees, as anyone familiar with taxation knows, are regressive: the poor pay more, in effect, than the rich. Imposition of fees will make the business of marriage more expensive for the poor. Is that the Government’s deliberate intention? Do the Conservatives regard marriage as important for the well-to-do, worthy even of offering tax concessions to encourage, but not worth investing public money into for those already marginal in our society?

My third point is about border security—Clauses 44 and 45. These focus on civil airlines and airport operators, although Clause 45 also deals with private vessels, of which there are a great many crossing to and fro across the English Channel, and up and down the Bay of Biscay. When I briefly answered on policing and anti-terrorism issues for the coalition Government in this House, I was struck by the unavoidably transnational nature of serious crime, including drug-smuggling, and the frequent use of private aircraft and private airstrips and heliports in pursuit of illegal activities. I am struck by the apparent absence of reference to private airstrips and helicopter landing pads in this clause, and in Schedule 10. Is it assumed that these are used only by the rich, and can therefore be left outside our tighter border controls?

The Minister may know that I have asked specific Questions about Brecqhou helicopters, which fly the Barclay brothers to and fro from within the UK border control area—devolved in the case of Brecqhou to the Guernsey authorities, which I understand are strongly discouraged from ever setting foot on the island—and various parts of continental Europe. Do the owners of a newspaper that campaigns for the defence of British sovereignty from continental encroachment themselves live outside the reach of British sovereignty, while benefiting from free movement within the UK? Are there others, including Russian oligarchs and Gulf royalty with homes across southern England, who fly from private helipads beyond border controls? Are we moving towards one set of border controls for ordinary people, and a far lighter regime for the super-rich? I hope the Minister will be able to assure us that controls on private flights and landing strips will also be tightened. We cannot be sure that,

“Persons excluded from the United Kingdom”—

in Clause 46 might not be smuggled in by such means, as well as other illegal immigrants and undesirables.

My fourth point is about the impact of the tiered visa system on patterns of movement into and out of the country. The Minister will know that I have recently been concerned with a personal issue in this area, related to spouse visas for talented young Britons seeking to return to the UK after some years of study and work abroad. In the context of this issue, which I do not, of course, wish to discuss further here, I did some comparative investigation of the situation that faces British citizens who have gone abroad for graduate study, as many of us have done in recent years—I used to encourage my brighter students to do so—most often to the United States of America, and then wish to return to the UK to take up employment.

Fifteen years ago there was very little difficulty or delay in bringing those whom such people had married, while abroad, back with them. Now it is a lengthy and costly process. I was particularly shocked by the case of a British citizen who had married a Japanese fellow student while in the USA; his wife was refused entry and forced to hire lawyers to support an appeal. I was more deeply shocked by the comment from a young man I have known since he was an undergraduate, now equipped with a mathematics PhD from a top US university, and married to an American with a similar PhD from the same university. He told me that he is now unlikely to return to the UK because the sense of hostility that faces non-British applicants makes him feel, “that my wife and my children would be unwelcome in my own country”. How much talent are we going to lose in the next generation if that impression spreads across talented expatriates outside the EEA? Exchanges with postgraduates currently within the USA have suggested to me that that feeling is already widespread.

The Tier 1 (Investor) Visa, on the other hand, welcomes those who are willing to bring over £2 million with them into the UK to buy a house in central London, for example. So we open our arms to the super-rich of Russia, China, Malaysia and the Gulf states, looking for somewhere to invest funds they may or may not have accumulated through means that are legal in this country, while raising obstacles to British citizens who have improved their skills and developed their reputations by studying and working abroad. The Tier 1 (Investor) Visa is worthy of a tax haven, not a self-respecting sovereign country; it fits in with a housing regime which promotes sales of newly-built homes in London to overseas buyers before they have been offered to British citizens, and allows them to be bought through anonymous offshore companies.

I note that the Bill has no proposals to tighten controls on Tier 1 visas. If raising fees for marriage is appropriate to this Bill, then transparency of ownership for non-commercial property within the UK must also be entirely appropriate to add. Are the Conservative Government really determined, with Mayor Boris Johnson’s support, to build a country fit for foreign money-launderers to live in? One law for the poor, again, and another for the rich. It seems easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Great Britain than for the young and talented to go through the eye of UK border controls.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, when we debate Bills in Committee and on Report, we are liable to be accused of making Second Reading speeches. Now that this is Second Reading, perhaps I will be forgiven for making one. I will look at the wider issues of immigration that are of course referred to in this Bill, which addresses some of the problems.

I support my noble friend the Minister’s view that we have benefited enormously from immigration into this country in the past and that we welcome immigrants to this country. However, it is a question of numbers. We cannot get away from numbers. The noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, just said that we have already made a modest 1% contribution to the refugee crisis taking place. To put that in context, that small number of Syrian refugees we are taking in is in addition to the 330,000 immigrants who came legally into this country in the last year. That contrasts rather forcibly with the undertakings that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister made that immigration should be limited to 100,000 a year—or to tens of thousands. Despite the number of times that that commitment has been made, we seem never to have met the 100,000 target. That is a problem.

We now face an immigration crisis across Europe of proportions never seen before. These are very large numbers of people indeed. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, referred to Germany as being the conscience of Europe. Angela Merkel may well have been moved with compassion when she said that Germany would take 900,000 Syrian refugees, but I suspect she has regretted that remark ever since. She created enormous problems within her own party. Indeed, I would have thought that that remark was extremely ill-advised if she did not want to see the renaissance of extreme right-wing parties in Germany in future.

My noble friend Lord Horam referred to my right honourable friend the Home Secretary’s remarks at the Tory Party conference. The problem is that, if immigration is in too large numbers, it creates very serious stresses in the home nation. This is something we cannot overlook. At the moment we suffer from a major crisis in housing—in particular, in affordable housing. We are not building enough. This is a problem we have with our existing population. If we take in very large numbers of immigrants, they are almost invariably in greater need of affordable housing than the resident population in this country. That creates enormous resentment. This may well be one reason why UKIP has had a certain amount of electoral success in areas traditionally regarded as bastions of the Labour Party. We cannot overlook this, as my noble friend Lord Horam said. Immigration is a very high priority in the views of the people of this country. We cannot take unlimited numbers of people. I come back to what I said originally: it is a question of numbers.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord in a Second Reading speech. I entirely agree with him that we have a housing shortage. Might he possibly address the question of how we will overcome that shortage when we have such a remarkable lack of skilled labour to build houses within this country? Is there not a real problem that a major housebuilding programme now would draw in a very large number of people from abroad to build those houses?

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, knows very well that it is a question not only of the shortage of skilled bricklayers and people who can build houses, but also of the enormous shortage of land on which you can build. This is all to do with our planning laws and is a much more complicated issue than just a question of the shortage of people.

If we control immigration and have a system of allowing in the people with the skills we need, I do not have any problem with that. The problem is if we allow very large numbers of people in who do not have those skills. That is a totally different issue. It is what puts enormous pressure on all our services at the moment. It is not only housing, which is the most obvious issue. The National Health Service seems to be creaking under the demands pressed on it at the moment. Our infrastructure and education are also under great pressure. With all these things, if you have enormous numbers of immigrants coming in, the pressure on public services inevitably grows and that creates resentment and difficulty.

With the EU referendum coming up, I refer to the question of European immigration. As we know, EU citizens are allowed into this country. We apparently do some survey to find out how many there are of them. The figures for last year were 330,000. That is net immigration, netted off against those going out. It is reckoned that about half that number are EU citizens—some 150,000. At the same time, some reports came out recently about 2 million EU citizens applying for national insurance numbers over a period of four years. That is an average of half a million per year. I know we are not comparing like with like here, but it seems that you must do something to reconcile these two numbers. You have half a million EU citizens applying for national insurance while, in theory because of the surveys we do, we had only 150,000 come into this country last year. I believe the number may be even bigger this year. When my noble friend comes to sum up, I would be grateful if he could confirm that 2 million EU citizens applied for national insurance numbers over the past four years. How does he reconcile that with the number of EU migrants that are supposed to have come to live here? We need statistics.

I also support the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, in saying that we need to know what the Government estimate to be the number of illegal immigrants in this country. If we do not have that number, it is extremely difficult to assess whether this Bill has been a success or failure in reducing that number.