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

Nic Dakin Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Alison McGovern]

Q The clock is ticking.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

Q You are being very clear, Professor Ryan, that something should be written into the Bill that protects the rights of people who are here at the moment.

Professor Ryan: This is not the only opportunity to do it, but if there is no deal, this may be the best opportunity to do it. That is really what I am saying.

[Nic Dakin]

Q If you were advising the Committee, you would say, “You might as well do it now.”

Professor Ryan: Yes.

[Nic Dakin]

Q To use your words, that would help us in “future-proofing” the Bill and make it less likely that 40 years down the line, there will be a Windrush scandal in relation to this.

Professor Ryan: Yes. The numbers are massive; we are talking about more than 3 million people who potentially have claims. It is not realistic, in my view, to think that they will all come forward and that everyone who needs to prove later on that they made those claims will be able to do so. It is just too large a cohort.

[Nic Dakin]

Q Because of what has happened with Windrush, we should have our eyes open to this problem in a way that perhaps people in the past did not.

Professor Manning: Yes, indeed.

[Nic Dakin]

Q Professor Manning, could I come back to the issue of thresholds? At the moment, £30,000 is the threshold written in, but I think you suggested that the threshold needs to be less than that in certain areas. We talked about care, but we might also talk about something such as butchery in the food sector. Clearly, there is a shortage of those skills, and this could be a way of addressing it over the short term. Immediately, there would be a problem: a £30,000 threshold for something such as butchery would create significant problems in the food sector if you are at an edge.

Professor Manning: I am not sure that is quite right. There is a system of salary thresholds, of which £30,000 is one, but there are others. For example, there is a new entrant rate of £20,800; for NHS staff and teachers, the national pay scales are the relevant salary thresholds. To take the two examples you gave, butchery is one of the medium-skill occupations that we recommend should become eligible for non-EU migrants, but it is one of the lower-paid occupations. We do think that the sector needs to offer more. It is not terribly attractive work, particularly when one is talking about the big food-processing plants; I have visited one. That sector is, again, not paying wages that are competitive in the domestic labour market.

I do not think it is unreasonable to expect it to be able to compete for labour in a tight labour market. We want people to have high-quality jobs, which is partly about high wages but also about good terms and conditions. I do not feel that that sector is fully stepping up to the mark at the moment.

[Nic Dakin]

Q What my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen said about Wales could well be said about the Lincolnshire area I am in, where average salaries are not at £30,000. You are setting a bar at a high level compared with what people are already being paid in those areas. I am with you in terms of pushing up wages. I am happy about that, but it needs to be done in a way that allows business continuity. I am trying to understand how that works.

Professor Manning: Across the piece, if you take the medium-skilled jobs that would be brought within the non-EU system, we recommend the existing salary thresholds. I keep pushing back a bit when anyone says £30,000, and saying that it is actually wider than the £30,000.

Across the piece, our estimate for April 2017—it will be slightly lower now—was that something like 60% of people in those medium-skilled occupations are currently paid less than £30,000 on a full-time basis. We view that as appropriate because, as I said, we want the salary thresholds to be above the average wage.

We want sizeable amounts. We want to be able to say to employers, “Fine. You need migrants, but you have got to pay above the going rate in order to have access to them.” We think the salary thresholds have to be a little bit above at least the minimum—a bit above the average salaries.

[Nic Dakin]

Q A little bit above.

Professor Manning: There is a debate. When I say “a bit above”, I accept that there is a contentious issue about how much above. Some people are saying, “The absolute minimum salary threshold you would consider would be the current average,” and yet some people are talking about salary thresholds that are well below average earnings in many of these sectors.

[Nic Dakin]

Q Going back to care, for example, a little bit above would not get you to £30,000, would it?

Professor Manning: I go back to what I said earlier. When people say, “We have to have migrants,” they only feel as though they have to have migrants because they are not competitive in the domestic labour markets. To work as a care assistant—the main job in social care—does not require formal qualifications.

There are currently quite large numbers of people in the UK who are not in work but who report their last occupation as being in social care. There is a labour supply for social care out there at the moment, but people do not want to work there, because the labour market is quite tight and the terms and conditions are very poor.

[Nic Dakin]

Q That is partly because, at the other end, Government are not putting enough money into the system. There is a bit of a dilemma there, isn’t there?

Professor Manning: We accept that, and we singled it out as a big problem. The issue with financing social care is not just with this Government; it is a long-lasting issue that has not been addressed, and I am not sure it is being particularly addressed at the moment.

There is a risk if you have a carve-out for social care. A good example is Canada, which had a live-in caregiver programme. It was about live-in carers, but it was similar. That programme expanded incredibly rapidly, but as soon as the migrants who had come in under that route had the opportunity to leave the sector, they left the sector because—just as the existing residents found—the terms and conditions were poor and they could get better elsewhere. After 10 years, only something like 10% of workers were still working in care. The Canadian Government shut that programme down last spring, because it did not solve the problem.

Our concern about this is that a carve-out for social care will be a short-term fix. It will stop the real, underlying problems being addressed. It will look successful in the short run, but in the medium to longer run it will not work.

[Maria Caulfield]

Q I want to get your views on clause 1, which will repeal free movement of EU citizens. What effect will that have on overall immigration to the UK?

Professor Manning: I must confess that I am not absolutely sure what clause 1 says.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Q The problem I have is not about enforcement. I do not want people who fail to meet the deadline to be enforced against; I want them to be able to apply and to have their cases processed in time.

Dr Greening: As do we.

[Nic Dakin]

Q I think you were saying earlier that this legislation as it stands, along with the White Paper, is likely to lead to an increase in inward migration. Is that right? That was my understanding.

Dr Greening: Yes.

[Nic Dakin]

Q Given that we are setting a future direction now, what would you like to see in this legislation to make that less likely to happen?

Lord Green: First, it is quite difficult to set out immigration policy in primary legislation. That is why this Bill is drafted as it is. I have, as I say, some sympathy with the Scottish National party in the House of Lords in saying that this is really very wide. We would like to see something pretty close to the existing tier 2 system, with a salary threshold of the order of £30,000, and the shortage occupation list developed. I think that can deal with a number of problems; it already does nurses, and it could do laboratory assistants, for example. We favour the seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme, which has just been mentioned. We suggest that the way to deal with the lesser skilled—if I may use the term, meaning that middle group—is to have temporary visas for semi-skilled workers, limiting them to three years and having an escalating annual cost of £1,000, £2,000 and £3,000, so that there is a financial incentive for employers to train their own people. For the past 10 years, the training of apprentices and so on has gone through the floor, and it has done so because you can take a plumber or whatever from Poland without bothering to train them. We need to make sure that there is a financial incentive for employers of these skills to train British replacements.

[Nic Dakin]

Q So that is how you would tackle the issue of butchery, for example, which I raised earlier?

Lord Green: I am not an expert on butchery, and there will be special cases of various kinds, but for most of these skills we think that would be a sensible approach.

[The Chair]

If no other colleague wishes to ask a question, perhaps we will give the final opportunity to the Minister.