Mark Harper
Main Page: Mark Harper (Conservative - Forest of Dean)Department Debates - View all Mark Harper's debates with the Home Office
Immigration Bill
Mark Harper Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on raising some very important points about which she spoke with great knowledge, and I respect her decision on this important but difficult matter. If I may, I will not follow her down that avenue, as I want to make a more general speech about the importance of the Bill.
Several comments have been made in the House today about why there seems to be an immigration Bill every two years. It is a fair point, but it is perhaps worth saying that it has been some time since Governments have felt able to deal with this matter in a serious way. It is inevitably a long march in a civilised country when we have to take steps to remedy something that has gone very badly wrong for our country. I welcome the Bill as a further step forward along that path in this Government’s determined effort to get immigration down to a sensible level that is acceptable to the public and above all serves the interests of our country.
I warmly congratulate my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and my hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration on their relentless focus on what needs to be done to restore long-overdue order in our immigration system. Let us not forget why we are here today. Regrettably, the dysfunctional Labour Government lost control of our borders. Net foreign immigration on their watch was nearly 4 million, while roughly 1 million British citizens left in that period. This is an extraordinary scale of immigration, absolutely without parallel in our history. We now face the massive task of integrating these huge numbers into our society.
The Balanced Migration group, which I co-chair with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), is especially concerned about the impact on our population of continued immigration on anything like this scale. On current projections, based on net migration of 200,000 a year, immigration will account for two thirds of our population growth—not, incidentally, one half, as the BBC repeatedly and erroneously tells us. Such immigration would add a further 5 million people to our population in the next 15 years. This is completely unacceptable to the British public. According to a recent opinion poll, two thirds of the public want to see drastic action to reduce immigration and three quarters of the population want to see it reduced.
The Government have already had considerable success, for which they have not been given due credit. Non-EU migration—that part of the equation which is subject to Government action—has been substantially reduced from 217,000 in 2010 to 157,000 in 2012. This has been achieved without constraining access for business to the skilled migrants that it needs if it and we are to prosper. There are no limits on the transfer of international staff. The only cap is on work permits, and only half the 20,700 available work permits have been taken up. There is much to be done to improve delivery, but the policy is clearly right. Nor has there been any significant effect on our universities, which have seen student visa applications increase by 10% between 2010 and 2012. As I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms), the fall in student numbers has been at the colleges where much of the abuse of the system had been taking place.
It is sometimes claimed that the Government are sending out mixed messages; in one week they are encouraging business and tourism, in another they are clamping down on immigration. In fact, there is no contradiction between encouraging legal migration and discouraging abuse of the system, as is the purpose of this excellent Bill. It is right that we should seek to encourage tourists, business visitors and genuine students, while reducing the scale of permanent migration. That is how we in this country should reap the benefits of a globalised world, while ensuring that we are not, as a nation, overwhelmed by it. It is that fear which drives so many people’s anxiety about immigration.
The Bill tackles a long-standing weakness in our immigration system—namely, the relative ease with which those who originally come quite legitimately can stay on illegally once their visa has expired. These overstayers frequently work below the minimum wage. Those who do so undercut the wages of British workers. They also allow unscrupulous employers to undercut employers who offer decent wages and conditions. Overstayers also add to the pressure on our public services, so it is right that they should be firmly but fairly discouraged from staying on. An important consequence of such illegal immigration is the added pressure that it generates on our housing, which already faces a crisis. I therefore welcome the proposal in the Bill for landlords to carry out checks similar to those now required of employers, although I recognise that the nuts and bolts may need some examination. I note the points that the hon. Member for Lewisham East made in this regard.
The proposals to close off access to driving licences and to bank accounts to those who have no right to be here are entirely sensible and I hope they will be widely supported. I remain concerned, however, that we still await news of any effective measures to ensure that our national health service is no longer wide open to all comers, whether or not they have contributed to its enormous costs. The proposals in the Bill are, to put it mildly, extremely modest.
I recognise that we cannot and should not look to medical staff to carry out what are essentially immigration functions. That is why we have suggested that joint Home Office/Department of Health offices should be established entirely separately from GP practices in order to decide on eligibility. We keep being told that there is no evidence of significant abuse of the NHS. That is simply because there are no effective checks in place. If we were to turn off all the speed cameras, there would be no evidence of any significant speeding. So, with the exception of this important lacuna concerning the NHS, I warmly congratulate my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and my hon. Friend the Minister—
The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. I would like to draw to his attention the detailed, independent and peer-reviewed research that our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health published this morning, which shows that the NHS fails to collect some £500 million a year. We are not proposing to withhold treatment from people, but trying simply to ensure that people who are not entitled to free health care make a fair contribution towards it.
Nicholas Soames
I have seen that, and I welcome the appointment of a senior figure as chairman of the NHS body that will look further into this. I simply say that if my hon. Friend really thinks that the amount of money involved is only £500 million, he is well wide of the mark. Part of my group’s concern about that paper is that it simply does not go far enough. It makes too many heroic assumptions on the most enormous margins, and I and the right hon. Member for Birkenhead will be making available to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and my hon. Friend the Minister further important details from the NHS that we have been given and which show that these figures are well south of the figures that need to be dealt with.
As I say, having regard to that important lacuna in the Bill, I nevertheless wish to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and my hon. Friend the Minister on their courageous and successful efforts to tackle one of the foremost concerns of the British public. I wish my right hon. Friend every continued success as a Conservative Government move towards a system that has the confidence of the public.
Pamela Nash (Airdrie and Shotts) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on Second Reading. The debate has been, and will continue to be, wide ranging, but I shall restrict my comments to three specific matters, the first of which is the potential unintended consequences of the immigration health charge.
Clauses 33 and 34 introduce the immigration health charge, but offer no clarity on the administration or policing of it. That leaves the presumption and fear that checks will be in place before people access primary care, even if there are no measures to that effect in the Bill. I am concerned that that will create serious risks to public health, including an increase in HIV infection. That is not only my view, but the view of many charities and organisations working in the field that have contacted me, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on HIV and AIDS. They have serious concerns.
Currently, 100,000 people living in this country have HIV, a quarter of whom are undiagnosed. Half of new infections are passed by people who are undiagnosed. Evidence shows that the migrant communities are less likely to go to sexual health or specialist clinics to be tested because of the increased stigma for them and their communities. They are much more likely to go to a general practitioner because it is not as obvious that they are attending to be tested—the stigma is not related to GPs.
My fear is that any sort of barrier erected between migrant communities and GPs and primary care access will be another contribution to the shameful increase in HIV infection in this country in recent years. GPs carrying out any sort of immigration check sends out the wrong message entirely. I urge the Government to listen to the experts. I have a lot of information and letters on the subject to show that the measures could have a grave effect on tackling infection numbers and late diagnoses in migrant communities in the UK.
Mr Harper
To reassure the hon. Lady before she continues, nothing in the Bill refers to GPs. Even the proposals my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health has set out today make it clear that provision for public health conditions such as HIV will remain free for everybody, because that is the right thing for public health purposes, as she has set out.
Pamela Nash
I appreciate the Minister’s intervention, but the fact is that there is no clarity in the Bill—it leaves that fear for communities seeking primary care. If they believe they will be kicked out of the country for going to the doctor, they might not go and therefore might not be tested.
Public health experts agree that increasing the offer of HIV testing to a wide range of facilities is key to tackling the UK epidemic in all communities. In addition, the purpose of primary care is to assess the broadest range of health needs and identify how best to meet them. Anything that delays or prevents anyone with an infectious disease from seeking medical advice denies them the opportunity to be diagnosed and increases the chance of them passing on the infection to someone else. Someone on HIV treatment is 96% less likely to transmit it to others. Therefore, the Bill clearly risks unlimited and unintended consequences to UK public health.
The Bill may increase the risk that we will fail to tackle HIV in our communities, and it may also be costly. According to the Department of Health’s review of overseas visitors charging policy, referred to in the explanatory notes, a comparison of the administration costs of the current system with the amount actually recovered showed that it barely broke even. The Home Secretary failed to address that point, and I hope that the Minister will do so in his closing remarks. The new system may not be cheaper and we may fail to reclaim any money.
According to the review, in order to recoup the money and achieve the Government’s aims, the NHS structure would need to be radically changed. It said:
“Only a fundamentally different system and supporting processes would enable significant new revenue to be realised.”
I would be grateful if the Minister provided more clarity about the administration of the proposals and the collection of the money from those who have entered the country.
I am also concerned about the effect that the proposals will have on reciprocal arrangements with other countries, which has not really been mentioned today. The Bill refers to our EEA partners, but we have arrangements with 27 countries that are not in the EEA, including Australia and New Zealand. Many of our students go backpacking in those countries or to work on short-term visas, and they access health care free of charge, like the people who come here from those countries. Can the Minister clarify how the Bill will affect reciprocal arrangements? Has he had discussions with representatives of those countries? Will we have new reciprocal agreements, or will they not be affected?
The final area of concern is the devolved aspects of the Bill, which I mentioned in an intervention earlier. I am surprised by how vague this issue is in the Bill. There is no detail on how charges for devolved public services will be made, or on how landlord checks will work in the devolved nations.
Mr Harper
I do not wish to interrupt the hon. Lady again, but the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) has—inadvertently, I am sure—misled the House. What he says is simply not true. I wrote to several Ministers in the Scottish Government, and my officials liaised with their officials over the summer, before the publication of the Bill.
Pamela Nash
I thank the Minister for that intervention. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) was extremely animated and angry earlier—understandably so—about some of the aspects of the Bill, but when I asked about the SNP’s position, he simply replied that he remained to be convinced, instead of saying that it opposed it. I ask the Minister to provide some clarity about the discussions and agreements reached with the Scottish Government and the devolved Administrations in Wales and Northern Ireland. What impact assessment has been conducted on the cross-border issues that the Bill could bring about?
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I am glad to be able to speak about the Bill. I have taken an interest in immigration policy for very many years, first as an administrative trainee in the Home Office, and secondly as somebody who year on year is in the top 10 of MPs processing immigration casework. I have also, of course, taken an interest because I represent a constituency with very many immigrants from all over the world, and, finally, because I am the child of immigrants. I say from my knowledge and experience of the immigration system that it is bedevilled by poor administration and rushed and incoherent legislation, motivated by short-term political advantage—and I do not except the Labour party from that. I am afraid that this Bill is more of the same.
I say right at the beginning that there are many details in the Bill that I agree with—which is not surprising, because some of it merely puts into legislation matters that were regulations under the Labour Administration—but I deplore the rhetoric and I deplore the political direction of travel. I remind the House that immigration as an issue has been freighted with emotion since the days of Enoch Powell, and since those days immigration has been a synonym for black, Asian and foreign-looking people—for “the other”. Any Member of the House who pretends that immigrant, immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric does not have that underlying narrative in British politics is being naive.
If people do not believe me, I urge them to read the report of the royal commission on alien immigration in 1903 and the subsequent Aliens Act 1905, which deal with exactly the ideas that those on the Government Front Bench are trying to push forward today. What people say about east European migrants today is what was said about east African migrants in the ’60s, what was said about west Indian migrants, what was said about Jewish migrants to the east end after the first world war, and what was said about Irish migrants in the 19th century: driving down wages; living in terrible housing conditions; assaulting our women. It is always the same narrative, which should be a clue to the House that it is always the same issue.
I remind Government Members who think that they can get away with all this anti-immigrant rhetoric and not pay an electoral price that the Republicans in the United States thought that. They went to town with anti- Hispanic, illegal migrant rhetoric; they thought that anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric was a huge vote winner. But at the election they found that perfectly legal migrants ran, not walked, away from Republicans. Not just Hispanic migrants but Chinese, Japanese, Indian migrants—every migrant community—voted in unprecedented numbers for the Democrats, in what was a difficult election for them in many ways, because when people of immigrant descent hear that anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric they think, “Actually, they are talking about me, my dad, my mum, my auntie, the people on the landing.” Government Members should not think that they can continue down this anti-illegal immigrant path and not pay a price with the votes of the children and grandchildren of migrants. The danger with the Bill is not just that it will create the hostile environment for illegal immigrants that the Home Secretary was boasting of, but that it will tend to create a hostile environment for all of us of immigrant descent and our children.
I know as much about the UK Border Agency and abuse of the system as anyone. I worked in the Home Office and I knew about Croydon. People say that the Government inherited a shambolic immigration department from the Labour party, but as long as I have known the immigration department it has been dysfunctional and shambolic, and there are systemic reasons for that. It was always seen as an outpost of the Home Office in Whitehall and no one wanted to work there, so it was allowed to remain in a welter of administrative confusion. I bow to no one in my knowledge and my disapproval of the chaos, unfairness, inefficiency and poor administration of the immigration department. I also know—this has not been mentioned—of the abuses practised on my constituents by so-called immigration advisers. People talk about abuses of the system, but they are often triggered not by people who are simply looking for a better life for their family but by a class of so-called immigration advisers who systematically rip them off. My constituents come to me years later and I have to try to pick up the pieces of a case that was mishandled right from the beginning by people motivated only by profit.
I agree with what my long-standing friend and colleague, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), said about administrative problems, and I give him every credit for his work on the matter over the years. I also agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) said about people who are left in limbo, even though they are here legally, because the UKBA has not sent them their paperwork. There are systemic problems with the UKBA, but that does not justify trying to turn doctors and landlords into immigration officers on wheels. We need to deal with what is wrong with the administration before we ask untrained people to pursue matters that the Government and a state agency should deal with.
I want to say a word about what people hear on the doorstep, which keeps coming up in this debate. I hear about that from Government Members, and I am afraid that I hear about it from some hon. Friends. First, let us kill the myth that Labour had an open-door policy on migration. I have an office with filing cabinets stacked full of files about the thousands of cases that I dealt with year on year under a Labour Government. There was the issue of the miscalculation of the number of people coming from the eastern European accession countries—no one denies that—but if there was an open door, why did so many of my constituents have to wait years and years, divided from their family, to bring their children in? There was no open door. Far from apologising, the Labour party should make that point more clearly and more often.
What do we hear on the doorstep? I can believe that Members hear people complaining about immigrants. I have the children of West Indians complaining to me about eastern European migrants. However, in an economic downturn people always complain about the other, and want to blame the other for their economic circumstances. Of course we as politicians should deal with the underlying issues when people complain, whether about a lack of housing or job insecurity, but we must not allow public policy to be driven by people who are frightened of the changes they see around them, of economic insecurity and of the fact that the so-called upturn is not helping their living standards. We are now in danger of passing yet another ill thought-out Bill to go on the pile that has been heaped up since the 1960s.
Let us not forget that much of what we hear on the doorstep about immigration is simply not based on fact. It may be easy to say to people, “Oh, yes, you’re so right, we’re going to have fewer of them; we’re going to do this; we’re going to do that”, but politicians should deal with the facts first rather than pander all the time to urban myth, which leads to a downward spiral of rhetoric.
Turning to the content of the Bill, other Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), have dealt with the issue of landlords. Even landlords’ organisations are against the Bill. Richard Lambert, the chief executive officer of the National Landlords Association, has said:
“Existing referencing will pick up immigration issues anyway”.
Gavin Smart of the Chartered Institute of Housing has said that the measures will
“make it much harder for non-British people to access housing even when they have a legal right to live in the UK. Checking immigration status is complicated so landlords may shy away from letting to anyone who appears not to be British.”
That is landlords speaking. The effect of the Bill will be that when people such as my son and the children of some of my colleagues go to see a flat, they will be told that the flat is taken. Landlords will not want to take the chance of letting to someone who “might be” an illegal immigrant. I do not believe Ministers understand how it feels to knock on a door and be told, blatantly wrongly, that the flat or room is taken. That is what will happen as a consequence of the Bill.
Ministers like to give the idea that the problems in accident and emergency and the health service are caused by illegal immigrants. That is quite extraordinary. Even if their figures are true—I believe that they are scare figures based on the assumption that every person who comes here and gets treatment came only for the treatment in the first place—we are still not talking about the systemic reasons for problems in the NHS.
My mother was of that generation of West Indian women who came here in the ’60s to build the health service. Whether people like it or not, without immigrants we would not have an NHS. For as long as I am in this House, I will not allow Members to get up and say without challenge that the NHS’s problems are caused by immigrant workers. I owe that at least to my parents’ generation.
Also, there is already legislation about people who are not legally entitled to NHS health care. Why do the Government not get on with collecting money under that legislation, rather than introducing new legislation to do the same thing? It is because they are trying to make a political point and pander to UKIP voters.
We have already heard that 60% of successful appeals are due to administrative error. Why can we not move towards a more robust system for making decisions, rather than cutting people’s appeal rights, which currently are the only guarantee they have of some kind of recourse against administrative error? There is also the way the Bill would undermine article 8 of the European convention on human rights, the right to family life.
In drawing my remarks to a close, let me say this: it is simply not true that immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are responsible for the current pressures on public services. To say that, or to imply it, is to slight the millions of people of immigrant descent who keep all our public services, not just the health service, going, and they will take it as such.
It is also not true, as some people seek to imply, that immigrants cause low wages. That has been the anti-immigration attack since the 19th century. Immigrants do not cause low wages; predatory employers, insufficient workplace protection and weakened trade unions do that. That was true in the 19th century when people accused the Irish of driving down wages, and it is true today when people make the self-same accusation against the eastern European community.
Mr Harper
I just want to draw the hon. Lady’s attention to a quote from the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas), who is now the Labour party’s policy co-ordinator. At the end of 2010, just after the Labour Government had been kicked out of office, he wrote:
“At the macro-economic level, we’ve been using migration to introduce a covert 21st century incomes policy.”
It is people on her side of the House who think that the previous Government used migration to keep down wages, not people on the Government side.
Ms Abbott
People on my side of the House say a lot of things, but I do not necessarily agree with them. As Labour Front Benchers have pointed out, the Bill does not address the labour market issues properly.
We have to be honest about what the anti-immigration narrative in British politics has always been about. The Bill has more to do with political advantage, with demonstrating to UKIP supporters that the Government are cracking down on immigrants, as with the racist van, and with Lynton Crosby’s dividing-line politics than it has to do with good administration. I will believe the Government on immigration when they come forward with practical policies to improve the working of the UK Border Agency and when I see them cracking down on the employers who benefit by employing people off the books.
This is a very difficult issue, and it is confused by all sorts of urban myths, fears and worries. Generally speaking, immigrants are not the most popular group of people in politics today. Not a day goes by when we do not open the tabloid newspapers and read about some immigrant woman living in an eight-bedroom house in Knightsbridge paid for by the British taxpayer. The test for this House is how we deal with difficult subjects and speak up for people who are not necessarily popular or liked and who do not have a voice. By any test, this Bill is about short-term political advantage. It is of no real benefit to Britons, black or white, or would-be immigrants, black or white. Nobody on the Opposition Benches believes that people who are not entitled to NHS care should be able to get it for free, or that we should have a completely open-door immigration policy. We believe in speaking the truth about immigration, because if some people do not do that, we will see a race to the bottom, both in rhetoric and political practice.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
I oppose the Bill and will vote against it because I think that it will be defined, in practice, as a racist Bill and that that will have implications for society. I believe that the Bill is the result of electoral positioning; it is not about good governance or the long-term interests of the country. I fear for our long-term interests if we are to be governed by prejudice in this way. I abhor the society that the Bill seeks to create.
Like many Members, I represent a diverse, multicultural constituency. My west London constituency contains Heathrow and two detention centres, Harmondsworth and Colnbrook. I am often the last representative voice that detainees have recourse to before they are removed from the country. I have been visiting Harmondsworth for nearly 40 years. I remember when it was just a couple of Nissen huts with a dozen people in them. There are now two prison-like institutions that detain 1,000 people, most of whom have committed no crime whatever.
For many, the migrant’s story is one of desperation. People come from war zones or, like my Irish grandfather, areas of poverty simply to work and lift themselves out of poverty. I am fearful of what the Bill will do to the society that greets those people. In effect, it begins to echo some of the pass laws of apartheid South Africa. It is a society—
John McDonnell
No, I want to get this on the record. It is a society that echoes those pass laws, a society in which people can be confronted—stopped in the street—and asked for their documentation.
John McDonnell
No, I want to get this on the record. It is society in which people can be asked for their documentation to prove their identity and status.
Under the Bill, immigration officers will be able to use physical force for all their powers. I have been involved in cases that concern the exercise of physical force. In one case a person was killed, and in others people have been seriously injured as a result of the physical force used in removals. Time and again, concerns have been expressed to the Government about the lack of training for those staff and about the brutality that has taken place as a result, and yet in this Bill we are extending the use of physical force to all immigration officers in exercising their powers.
Many fear, and I do too, that with the removal of the directions notices, so there is no clear process of informing people when they are to leave the country and what their destination is, we are going back to the process of dawn raids where vans turn up and drag people and families out of their homes. One of the first cases I dealt with after being elected as a Member of Parliament involved an elderly lady who came to my constituency surgery because the family next to her had been dragged out of their house at 6 o’clock in the morning, children and all. She went into the house, obtained the children’s teddy bears and followed the van to Harmondsworth so the children at least had their toys. Is that the society we are returning to as a result of this proposed legislation?
I believe that the Bill will result in the escalation of detention. It will make it more difficult to challenge detention, to obtain bail and to secure appeals. As was said earlier, a third of appeals usually win, with nearly 50% winning entry clearance appeals. The Bill will mean that more people will be detained.
What is detention like? I refer people to the report of the independent monitoring board of Harmondsworth. These are volunteers appointed by the Minister, reporting to the Minister. Its latest report, from April 2013, is worth reading. It says that many people handle detention stoically, but that many others suffer intense distress. Many are mentally ill. They self-harm. We have had suicide attempts time and again in Harmondsworth and in Colnbrook. At the last count, last year 125 people were assessed under rule 35 by doctors who found that their health was suffering so badly that they should not be detained. Many Members know what rule 35 is: it means that the person should automatically be released. Of the 125 people so designated by doctors in Harmondsworth last year, only 12 were released. One was released because of ill-health, went to Hillingdon hospital and died soon after. That is what detention means. That is the type of suffering the Bill will increase, yet 20% of people in the detention centre get released back into the community. Some have been detained for a long time. I refer back to the report published in April. Two of those people had been detained since 2008, and 38 had been detained for more than a year. For many people, detention is not just a short-term measure before removal.
I am concerned about what the Bill will mean for the wider community. Nearly 50% of my constituents are black or people of colour. The Bill will mean that any person who is black, is of colour or who just looks foreign will be challenged. They will be challenged by bank managers and landlords, and by the vicar if they want to get married. They will also be challenged if they apply for legal aid. I find that offensive. I voted against identity cards in this House when my own Government brought them forward. The Bill will yet again bring the process of ID cards forward. There will be no ID cards for white people; it will be ID cards for black people, people of colour, or people who look slightly foreign or who have a foreign accent. That is what the Bill will do.
I find it offensive that the Bill will push more people to the margins. In my constituency, I have enough problems with Rachmanite landlords as it is, with people living in appalling overcrowded conditions and being charged too much. The Bill will create a shadow market, where people who are unable to secure accommodation through some landlords will have to go to others with higher rents. There will be a system of blackmail for those rents by those landlords.
What if people cannot get a roof over their heads? Where do they go? They go to the streets. This is an immigration policy of destitution, isn’t it? Let us be frank about that. If people cannot get a roof over their heads, they go on to the street or are forced out of the country. I deal with many people who would like to leave the country, but cannot even get their papers out of the black hole of the Home Office.
The banks, the landlords, the driving licence agency and so on will be only the first step in this process of introduction of these pass laws. We know from leaks from the Department for Education, which were exposed in The Guardian earlier this year, that the Government wanted to introduce this sort of system by having teachers check the nationality of their pupils.
John McDonnell
No. I am not giving way.
What happens now for people who are sick? They go to their GPs, and, yes, they will be treated, but what about the next stage as a result of this Bill? This is the first step. Charges are being introduced and people will be checked to see whether they have a visa and have paid the charge, but the next step will inevitably involve GPs. What happens if nurses and doctors want to fulfil their Hippocratic oath? Will they be fined or imprisoned as landlords will be?
I am concerned about the society we are creating, and about the premise on which the Bill is being introduced. When it comes to the reality, as MP after MP will demonstrate—particularly London MPs—a documentation check will take place, but many of our constituents have no documentation, and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said, many have not applied for passports. Others live chaotic lives, and many, as a result of going through the system, have mental health problems and do not have control of their documentation. As I have said time and again, that is a result of not even being able to get their papers back from the Home Office.
The Bill will create a society that is lacking in compassion, brutal, and lacking in humanity and respect for civil liberties, a two-tier apartheid society that flies in the face of, and is incompatible with, everything that British people associate with their country: compassion, rights, mutual respect, and, yes, support for the underdog. The Bill is derived from the gutter politics of Lynton Crosby; it is an attack on immigrants because supposedly that plays well in British politics. I think that is a fundamental misjudgment of the British people, their values and their decency. I will vote against the Bill because I believe that bringing it forward in this House degrades this House.
The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)
In the limited time available—the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) could not help taking slightly more than half the time left—I will do my best to deal with as many of the points raised as I can. I welcome the contributions from Members on both sides of the House in what has been a good debate. I listened carefully and shall try to deal with the main issues.
Listening to the right hon. Gentleman, one would never know that Labour left behind a legacy of 450,000 asylum cases, border checks that were frequently relaxed to deal with queues and out-of-control net migration—and the latter was not just from eastern European countries; under Labour, twice as many people arrived from outside the EU as from within it—and of course it was that record which made our constituents rightly concerned about the issue, as many of my hon. Friends said.
The Government are firmly on the side of the vast majority of law-abiding migrants who play by the rules and contribute much to our society. We have a proud history of lawful migration, and this Government will continue to welcome the best and brightest to the country—
Mr Harper
No, I want to deal with some of the points. I listened to the debate, and if the hon. Gentleman will give me the opportunity, I will deal with the points raised.
The Government will continue to welcome the best and the brightest, be they skilled workers, the number of which is increasing, or students going to our universities, whose number is also increasing. For those who have overstayed their visa or were never here lawfully in the first place, however, there must be consequences for unlawful behaviour.
Mr Harper
No, let me make some progress.
We always prefer migrants who have had an application refused or who have overstayed to do the right thing and leave the UK under their own steam, and we will promote that compliant behaviour, but the Government want to put the law squarely on the side of people who respect the law, not those who break it. The Bill will deliver several important reforms to do that, cutting the number of immigration appeal rights, enabling us to require foreign criminals—not migrants in general—to leave the UK before appealing, ending the abuse of article 8 and introducing important measures to prevent illegal migrants from accessing services or the labour market.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) has made his point—he wants to get in—but it is up to the Minister to give way, and quite obviously he wants to make some progress.
Mr Harper
I am trying to do justice to the many Members who spoke in the debate, including the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart).
I particularly enjoyed the remarks from my hon. Friends the Members for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) and for Crawley (Henry Smith), all of whose constituencies I have had the opportunity to visit in my current role, and the contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), from whom I am sure I will receive an invitation in due course.
The right hon. Member for Delyn is right about the issues that we will not have a chance to debate in the remaining seven minutes; I want us to have a good debate in Committee and to go through the issues in detail, and I am confident that when we lay out our aims, we will take Members with us, having first tested their concerns. We want the Bill to leave Committee and this House in good shape. As Members will know from my previous roles and challenges, I do not think we should leave it to the other place to put Bills in good shape. I want to ensure it leaves this House in good shape, and I look forward to the debate in Committee to do so.
In the time remaining, I shall try to deal with some of the issues raised. A number of Members raised important points about the proposals on health. To be clear, we are not talking about denying access to health care. We are talking about making sure that those who have no right to free health care have to make a contribution towards it. One of the points raised by the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Pamela Nash) was about public health and access to health for HIV treatment. I intervened on her to say that public health access will still be available for free. What I did not remember at the time was that this Government abolished treatment charges for HIV for overseas visitors exactly to protect the sorts of public health concerns she raised.
We are talking about making sure people pay a fair share. For those temporary migrants coming to Britain either to work or to study, we will collect the money before they come into the UK. It will go into the Consolidated Fund, and it is well above my pay grade, Mr Deputy Speaker, to tell colleagues in the Treasury how to do public spending. But if money is then distributed, any funds that go to the NHS in England will of course be distributed to the devolved Administrations in the usual way according to the Barnett consequentials. I hope that that is clear. We are not proposing to change the way in which the devolved Administrations can charge under the overseas visitors arrangements. Those aspects of charging are of course devolved. We will talk to the devolved administrations to make sure that there are no unforeseen consequences from different parts of the UK having different regimes for visitor charging.
As I said earlier in response to the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), these are significant sums of money. She asked my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary how much we thought was not collected from health tourists. In the report that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health published today, we say that we think that between £20 million and £100 million is the cost of deliberate health tourism for urgent treatment and between £50 million and £200 million for regular visitors taking advantage. Clearly there is a range, but this is an independent report that has been peer-reviewed and it is the best information we have. The hon. Lady is right; it is not a massive proportion of the overall NHS budget but £500 million that we are not collecting is a significant sum and it would make a real difference if we were able to collect it.
The Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), made some points about landlords, and we will test those issues in Committee. He also referred to e-Borders. He deserves a reasonable reply since he shared the blame around with the previous Government. We do already collect a significant amount of information on those coming into Britain and those leaving and we are working on improving that. I know that he will continue to question my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and myself when we appear in front of his Committee.
The hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) and I do not always agree, but she made an important point about refugees. The reason I think it is important to deal with people who have no right to be in Britain is that I want Britain to continue to be a welcoming place for those genuinely fleeing persecution. I fundamentally believe that we will only carry the public with us and have the public support a system where we protect genuine refugees—those fleeing persecution—if where we decide someone does not need our protection, and an independent judge does not think they need protection, those people leave the UK. By the way, we are not removing appeal rights for those where there is a fundamental right involved. If they abuse our hospitality by trying every trick in the book to stay here, they are damaging the interests of genuine migrants. It is our duty to make sure we do that.
Mr Harper
I do not have time to deal with the hon. Gentleman’s points.
There were many issues around appeal. Administrative review is a better way to deal with caseworking errors than forcing someone through the appeals system. I also listened very carefully to the genuine concerns raised about landlords. There will be a chance in Committee to deal with the practical implications of that. We have thought through the issues that colleagues have raised and we will be able to deal adequately with them in Committee and take colleagues with us. If there are things that we have not thought about, we can deal with those. I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) dealt with that issue very well.
I am looking forward to debating the issues in Committee. The Bill continues our reforms of the immigration system, and it will ensure that the public’s expectations of a fair system are delivered. I commend the Bill to the House.
Question put, That the Bill be now read a Second time.