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

Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[David Duguid]

I had heard that it was even higher than that; I think it is 90%.

James Porter: I know it is very high. This affects not just soft fruit and veg, but other areas of agriculture.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

Q You said that you felt that the £30,000 earnings threshold was not a realistic number. You have spoken about the temporary agricultural workers scheme, but could you give me a sense of what the impact of a £30,000 threshold would be more generally across the agricultural and associated sectors? Is it really fair to describe people who earn less than that as low skilled?

James Porter: I do not like “low skilled” as a term. I told the MAC in Edinburgh a couple of years ago that I did not like it. I understand what they are trying to get at, but although you do not need an academic degree to do a lot of these jobs, they require quite a high level of skill and experience to learn. I prefer the term “manually skilled”. That might be a better one.

If you look across agriculture in general, I do not know the exact numbers, but there are a lot of people working in agriculture from the EU right now who would be earning less than £30,000. It is not just my industry. Perhaps you are not all from rural constituencies, so you are not aware of where agriculture is or the details on soft fruit and veg. Is it worth giving you a little bit of background on it?

[The Chair]

Yes, I think that would be very useful.

James Porter: If you take soft fruit, wages in soft fruit have gone up from £3.60 in 1999 to £8.21 currently, and they are due to go up again in April to around £8.51, I think. Our top 10% to 15% of pickers will earn £10 to £12 an hour. They will get holiday pay and they will get overtime after 48 hours—of time and a half, not time and a quarter—because we have the Scottish Agricultural Wages Board. They pay national insurance. They pay tax. To me, they are a big asset to the country as a whole. We struggle a little bit with this idea that they are not contributing. They are contributing, although they might well be below the £30,000 limit.

Wages have gone up significantly in the last 15 to 20 years. If I look back to that initial period, wages were 22% of turnover, but they are currently 48%. The reason for that is that we are not getting paid a penny more for a punnet of strawberries than we were 25 years ago. It was £2 a punnet when I came home from university in 1993, and it is still £2 a punnet, so we are caught between a rock and a hard place. I really do not begrudge these people—it is about 50:50 men and women—their coin, because they have earned it; I used to pick strawberries and it is hard work. But it is very hard for us to keep innovating and developing our industry and increasing our yields. We cannot go on like that forever. It is very difficult.

We spend a lot of money on innovation. We are not shy of spending money on polytunnels. Most of our crops are now on tabletops, which is a significant capital investment. We are now starting to put in gutters, which will recycle and reuse water. We have spent a lot of money on trying to reduce pesticides. We use a lot of natural predators and natural biopesticides. We are doing a lot of things to improve, invest and innovate. Yields have gone up from 10 tonnes a hectare on average to around 22 tonnes a hectare now. It is difficult. I do not think it is fair to call us low productivity or low investment, or to say that we are just sitting on our hands and not bothering to try to improve the situation or make things more efficient. We really are.

--- Later in debate ---

[Afzal Khan]

Q Finally, what concerns do you have about the ability of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU to accumulate social security rights if we leave the EU without a deal? Clause 5 of the Bill grants Henry VIII powers to the Secretary of State to make broad changes to social security co-ordination. Do you think those rights can be gained without primary legislation?

Professor Peers: Again, it might be more useful to have some kind of statutory protection, at least of basic things such as acquired rights to social security as of Brexit day; obviously, British pensioners or would-be pensioners in the EU would be interested in that, as well as EU citizens who live or have lived here and might return to their original home on retirement. That would be useful as well.

Of course, this is more complicated, because a separate Act has recently passed Parliament that sets out separate powers to negotiate on social security. In this case, with social security, the Commission has proposed EU legislation—I think at the urging of member states—to keep acquired rights in relation to social security on the EU side. Depending on the details of how that gets negotiated, obviously very quickly, on the EU side, that might be something it would be useful to match.

Even if we do not have a ring-fenced agreement on all these issues, which would be ideal, would it not be helpful for everyone concerned to at least match the arrangements on social security and acquired rights? Perhaps that could be a statutory commitment and the Minister could come along and adopt a statutory instrument to match whatever the EU legislation is at the end of the day, which will not be too long from now, I think. That would be a good way to look at it going forward.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

Q Professor Peers, you have written a lot about free movement, including that of UK citizens in the EU27. A former constituent of mine contacted me recently about the situation in Austria; the Austrian Government have just published their scheme for expats, and it is €210 per person for a long-term residence permit, which seemed to me quite an extraordinary amount of money. Can you set out your concerns for UK citizens in the EU27 during this period?

Professor Peers: Yes. There are a number of concerns. First, it would have been better either to have a ring-fenced agreement covering people on both sides and cutting out that part of the withdrawal agreement, which is not particularly controversial, or to have EU legislation similar to the social security proposal that has already been tabled, which unilaterally and uniformly protects UK citizens’ rights across the whole European Union. For whatever reason, the Commission did not go ahead with that, but it would have been far better to have done that.

What we have instead is different countries doing different things. Some aspects of UK citizens’ rights in the EU27 are governed by EU law on non-EU citizens, and long-term residence is an example of that, but there are parallel national laws on long-term residence too. I do not know the details of the Austrian law offhand, but the EU law on long-term residence has case law saying that you should not impose disproportionate fees, so someone might want to challenge the €210 as a disproportionate fee. However, if that is a national law on long-term residence, you do not have an EU law argument about it, so there will be a lot of non-uniform degrees of protection of UK citizens.

It would be better to have standard rules, because a lot of those citizens would be looking at national long-term residence; EU long-term residence is not necessarily used that much. Some of them will face the difficulties of paying high fees. There may of course be other difficulties in applying. There may be earnings thresholds, or other criteria to be met in relation to health insurance or being employed and so on, to get long-term resident status under national law. Those could be difficult to meet.

There might be issues to do with family reunion. Certainly if the family member has not been registered yet, or if they come after Brexit day, different rules might apply to them. It might be quite challenging to bring families in, or have them to stay. If there is a separation or divorce that could raise issues, and people would be in a more difficult position than they would under EU legislation.

Anyone who does not yet have the right to long-term residence could be in an even more difficult position, depending on how restrictive national law is in relation to how they qualify for the right to stay. Would they be given something like pre-settled status, which we will have in the UK, on the basis that they are on their way to getting long-term resident status, or, instead, a short-term permit? It might be that that could not be renewed, or could not be renewed on the same basis, or would not let the person change jobs, or would not let a student look for work—all things that people would have as an acquired right if the withdrawal agreement is passed.

People who are not registered under the national system for registering foreign citizens will have difficulty in any event. They might have difficulties for that reason alone with qualifying under a national system of getting residence permits. If they do not get a residence permit at some point, their life will be more difficult in terms of travel, access to benefits or whatever it might be.

Those points are a broad indication. They will be different in each country and the details will differ, but they give a broad idea of the sorts of problems UK citizens might face.

[Kate Green]

Q I would like to follow up on Afzal Khan’s questions about social security. I think you said that one way in which the Government might want to use the powers in clause 5 would be to mirror any changes that the EU might make, to ensure that there would be a continuing set of reciprocal arrangements. However, the explanatory notes to the Bill say:

“This clause allows the Government (and/or, where appropriate, a devolved authority) to make regulations to implement any new policies regarding co-ordination of social security.”

Do you think that might be too broad a power for the Government to have?

Professor Peers: It does seem like an awfully broad power, yes. It would be useful, I think, for Parliament to insist on some sort of statutory limits or guidelines in primary legislation as to how the Government might use their power. One of them could be a requirement, or a push, at least, towards mirroring whatever the EU ends up with, since we know the plan is to have EU legislation on this issue, and it does seem likely to go through, as member states wanted it. That would be one way forward.

I do not know whether there are other issues as well, that Parliament might want to constrain the Government on, somewhat; but it seems like a reasonable argument, that the Government should not have unlimited powers and some constraints should be set by primary legislation.