Home Affairs

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Blunkett]

There are all sorts of practical ways in which we could assist universities to ensure that people in those circumstances leave the country after graduating, such as the possibility of returning part of the fee. My right hon. Friend has strong and, I think, reasonable arguments to make on this issue, but I do not agree with him on some issues.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned targets and suggested that, in principle, they are not wrong, but that the Government’s target—of reducing net migration to tens of thousands—was wrong. I think he mentioned a figure of 100,000. If he agrees with targets in principle, but disagrees with the target set by the Government, what does he think is the right target for net migration?

[Mr Blunkett]

I did not actually say that I agreed with targets, but in one perverse way I do. The points system that I started to introduce before I left the Home Office at the end of 2004, and how it is used now to bring in the skills that we need from outside the European Union, are themselves targets, by the very nature of the way in which they are set, the advice that is taken from the independent commission and the way that we respond. Part of the difficulty that we have been debating—and it gets tangled up with the issue of whether we should be in or out of the European Union—is the nature of free movement.

[Mark Pritchard]

The Leader of the Opposition has apologised to the British people, who want to see net migration come down. It is not just the policy of the coalition Government: it is the British people who want to see net migration come down. Non-EU migration has come down. EU migration is still a challenge, and it is one that the Government will face as the Prime Minister renegotiates power back from Europe—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman has been a Member for a long time and he knows that interventions are not an opportunity to make a speech—he can always add his name to the list—but are supposed to be brief.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Huppert]

I think it unlikely that the hon. Gentleman and I will ever reach agreement on this issue—we certainly have not yet. There are concerns but we have to fix the problems it causes, not attack the fundamental basis. The hon. Gentleman can have a look at studies—I do not have the reference immediately to hand—by University College London, for example, that show the fiscal benefits from EU migration. The trend is badly wrong and is being followed by far too many people.

[Mark Pritchard]

The hon. Gentleman is an academic; he deals in facts. He mentions tacking to the right because of UKIP. Is it not a fact that there was a manifesto commitment by the Conservative party to reduce net migration to tens of thousands? That was in 2010 when UKIP was at 3% in the national poll. It is now at 12%. I am afraid the facts do not bear out his comments.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is correct on that point: it is true that the Conservative party had a commitment to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. I did not think that that was a good idea at the time. It is very hard to see how it can be implemented. Part of the problem is that the only way to implement it—the Select Committee on Home Affairs has criticised this specifically —is to adjust some of the measures until we see very disproportionate changes in some areas. He is right that the Conservatives have been consistent. We saw a larger number of Conservative Members signing amendments to try to stop Romanians and Bulgarians coming into the country than we saw Romanians and Bulgarians flooding into the country, which seems to be the wrong way around.

It is not just Conservatives. I was interested to see that even the National Union of Students specifically passed a motion that called on the Labour party to stop pandering to “anti-migrant politics.” That is something I hope the Labour party will live up to.

I was not planning to spend all my time talking about migration because I wanted to talk more broadly about the Queen’s Speech and where we are four years into this Government. The Government started in a difficult position. The right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough was keen to say that the finances were not the fault of the last Government. We can have that interesting discussion, but there is no doubt that in 2010, this country was in a difficult situation. One pound in every £4 the Government spent had to be borrowed. Whether we accept the right hon. Gentleman’s case that everything was fantastic and it was just unfortunate, or whether we take the view that it was in some sense the fault of the Labour Government over 13 years, it was a difficult time. I would not have chosen the first opportunity for my party to be in government to be at a time when, as the former Chief Secretary said, there was no money left.

Where are we now? We see a growing economy with unemployment substantially reduced. In my constituency, unemployment has gone down by some 40%. I welcome that; more people in employment, and in full-time employment. That is a great success and there are successes in other areas, such as renewable energy. Relevant to home affairs, the main subject for today, crime is down consistently. I welcome that. Every year that we debate police funding there has been a suggestion that crime is about to start shooting upwards. Every year it continues to go down.

We have made some progress on something very dear to my heart: civil liberties. That was what got me involved in politics. Before I came here, I was on the national council of Liberty. We have dealt with the Government’s storing of the DNA of innocent people on central databases. We have got rid of authoritarian identity cards. It is a great pleasure to see the Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims in his place. The first Bill from the Government passed by the House got rid of identity cards, which were expensive, intrusive and unnecessary. [Interruption.] We see that the Labour party continues to want to bring in identity cards at great expense. It is a shame, as the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said, that the only thing Labour has apologised for is their immigration policy and not many other measures.

We have got rid of control orders and the idea of internal exile without trial. Even yesterday, however, we heard the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) complaining that the Government have stopped people being exiled inside this country without having a trial. We have improved libel laws, provided same-sex marriage and ended child detention as a standard thing for immigration purposes, putting that into law recently. We have ended discrimination against illegitimate children who used not to be able to inherit their citizenship if they were unfortunate enough to have been born too early. We have done many things. But there is more still to do. I look forward to doing much of it.

The right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), in her address on the Gracious Speech, said that the Conservatives had been held back by their coalition partners. I am very proud that we have stopped many things where we have disagreed. There are a number of things that we have simply not allowed to happen: for-profit schools; firing at will; the removal of housing benefit from the under-25s. There are a number of things that we have stopped.

However, it is not just a question of the things the Conservatives have been prevented from doing. There are things we have done, and things we would like to do that we have been prevented from doing because of the Conservatives. These include the mansion tax, to make sure that the richer in society pay more towards our finances, electoral reform and House of Lords reform. They also include getting more housing built, and environmental measures have been blocked. On reviewing surveillance post-Snowden, we have seen very little movement from the Home Office; indeed, we have no idea what the status is of the data retention directive rules. We would like to go further: to strengthen the Information Commissioner’s office and extend freedom of information. We want to have more evidence-informed policy so that when the expert advisers to the Government say that something is inappropriate and disproportionate, we do not see the Conservative party interpreting that to mean that it should go ahead with it or, indeed, the Labour party backing it. There is much more that we would like to do.

But there is good stuff coming. There is very good stuff in the Queen’s Speech where we have been able to agree and show that coalitions can work, and that two very different parties can find areas on which we agree.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jackson]

That is a fair question, but many of them are older and are very unlikely to need to go to accident and emergency or their maternity unit. Many of them are unlikely to be putting their grandchildren in primary schools, too. There is a balance to be struck between the use of public services and the resources needed.

I accept that the hon. Gentleman might have touched on an important issue in that there are hot spots in respect of such demands, however. In my constituency we have food processing, agriculture, horticulture, packaging and logistics, and younger people will come over with their partners and have children and there will be a big strain on schools, but I accept that might not be the case in the west country or the south of England. It will only be the case in hot spots. One of the things that the Government need to do is reboot the migration impact forum, specifically to assist local authorities. One issue is the number of children who come into a school but are gone at the end of the academic year, for instance. The Government need to look at this.

The Government also need to ensure that everyone who comes to this country is properly exercising their treaty obligations. That is all we are asking. We need to do some work on contributory pensions with the Germans and other key partners.

[Mark Pritchard]

Is it not clear today that, should there be a breakaway Scotland, it would have to endure uncontrolled immigration while England, post a renegotiation with Europe under the Prime Minister, would have controlled immigration?

[Mr Jackson]

My hon. Friend makes a pertinent point, although it is a hypothetical situation, as I think the people of Scotland are sensible enough to vote the right way on 18 September and reject the narrow chauvinistic nationalism of the Scottish National party. They know which side their bread is buttered on, and they will remain part of our great United Kingdom.

I strongly welcome the Modern Slavery Bill. We in Peterborough and the fens have seen some very unpleasant, distressing and nasty cases of modern slavery around agriculture and horticulture. We have seen the ghastly conditions some people have been forced to live in, the way they have been physically maltreated and assaulted, the way they have been lied to and traduced and cajoled into a terrible lifestyle—a twilight world of abuse—by some pretty unscrupulous criminal gangs. One of the enduring legacies of our Government, which we will proudly defend our record on next May, is this Modern Slavery Bill, because we believe politics is in many respects a moral imperative, and, for us, if we rescue even one person from this ghastly twilight world, we will have succeeded.

I therefore think it is right that we are targeting individuals, but we need to look at the poor conditions that some of those individuals are housed in, too. We need to look at section 215 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, which some local authorities are using to tidy up neighbourhoods that are affected by these slum houses.

I pay tribute to Anthony Steen, the former Member for Totnes, for the fantastic work that he has done over the years. He was leading, encouraging and proselytising on this issue eight years ago, before it became fashionable. He has done a great job, and I hope that the Bill will be a testament to him. We have made good progress in this area, but there is more to do. The watchwords of the legislation should be “tough but fair”. We need better collaborative working with other European Union countries and better inter-agency working. The Bill represents an excellent start, and the Ministers involved should be very proud of their efforts.