Immigration

Debate between Mike Freer and Mark Tami

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mike Freer]

I accept what the right hon. Gentleman says. We need a long-term strategy to develop the necessary skills. We can already provide the technical skills, but the training in our British universities cannot provide a knowledge of foreign markets. There is a difference between training someone in the latest Sri Lankan IT software, which we can do, and teaching them the nuances of how to access the decision makers in the Chinese economy, which we cannot. There is a big difference between the two.

I understand that the Government might be thinking of relaxing their stance on visa extensions. The company has an Indian graduate who can no longer get a visa extension. The company will lose his skills and his contribution. I ask the Minister to think again, and perhaps to assess companies on a case-by-case basis to see whether an extension could be granted because of the contribution that certain individuals make.

[Mark Tami]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. Bearing in mind all the problems that he rightly suggests could pile up, does he agree that the company in question and others like it might wonder whether the UK is really the right place to be? Might they not decide to offshore their whole business and work from somewhere else?

[Mike Freer]

I would hate to put words into the mouth of the company’s chief executive, but I doubt that that would happen. The mainstay of the UK operation involves not only administration but design, and its design capability is based in Finchley. The manufacturing already takes place offshore. I am talking about a very small number of specifically skilled individuals, and under the Government’s proposals, the company would no longer be able to recruit such people. So it would not recruit at all, it would not recruit locally because of the lack of that nuanced knowledge of the foreign markets, or one or two individuals would be recruited offshore. All three scenarios would be damaging to the UK economy.

I support the Government’s attempts to control immigration, and I support the right hon. Gentleman’s motion, but I want gently to ask the Minister whether the Government will consider introducing some form of mechanism under which global companies that are struggling and can prove that they cannot recruit the necessary skills in the UK can seek a remedy whereby they recruit offshore graduates for a period of time— perhaps one or two years, or longer—provided that they could make the economic case for so doing. I ask the Minister gently whether we can have a flexible policy, rather than a rigid cap.