Immigration and Social Security Coordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Nick Thomas-Symonds and Kate Green

Thursday 28th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I beg to move amendment 26, in clause 5, page 4, line 21, at end insert—

“(11) The power to make regulations under subsection (1) may not be used to make regulations removing Title I, Title II or Chapter 1 of Title III of Regulation (EC) No 883/2004.”

This amendment would prevent the Secretary of State from making regulations which might remove the ability of British citizens and EEA nationals to aggregate pension rights and social security benefits.

Good morning, Mr Stringer. It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair again.

The amendment is intended to limit the extent to which the Government can make changes to social security provision by delegated legislation after Brexit. I place on the record my thanks to the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, to British in Europe and to Justice, whose evidence I drew on heavily for this amendment.

By virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, EU regulations relating to social security co-ordination —the so-called co-ordination regulations—will be converted into domestic law on exit day. The co-ordination regulations provide a reciprocal framework to protect the social security rights of people moving between European economic area states.

The co-ordination regulations do not create a single, harmonised system of social security benefits, nor do they guarantee a general right to such benefits. Instead, they ensure that individuals who move to another EEA state are covered by the social security legislation of only one country at a time and are therefore liable to make contributions only in one country; that a person will have the same rights and obligations of the member state in which they are covered, under the equality principle in social security co-ordination; that periods of insurance, employment or residence in other member states can be taken into account when determining a person’s eligibility for benefits, under the concept of aggregation; and that a person can receive benefits to which they are entitled from one member state even if they are resident in another. Those features are important for labour mobility and as a simple matter of equity, because people who have worked and contributed have a reasonable expectation of entitlement to the social security benefits that they have paid in for. I am concerned that clause 5 could be used to undermine those legitimate expectations.

The co-ordination regulations cover only social security benefits that provide cover against certain categories of social risk, such as sickness, maternity, paternity, unemployment and old age. Some non-contributory benefits fall within the regulations, but cannot be exported. Benefits that are categorised as social and medical assistance are not covered at all; my understanding is that they include universal credit, even though universal credit contains some contributory elements, so I ask the Minister in passing whether he might like to use clause 5 to address that apparent injustice.

The co-ordination regulations also confer on those who have a European health insurance card a right to access medically necessary state-provided healthcare during a temporary stay in any other EEA state. The home member state is normally required to reimburse the host country for the cost of the treatment. Will the Minister place on the record the Government’s intentions in relation to the European health insurance card, both in the event of no deal and in the post-transition period if a Brexit deal is negotiated?

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

The issue of European health insurance is one that many people have raised concerns about. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be good to hear something very definitive from the Minister today to put those concerns about uncertainty at rest?

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

Debate between Nick Thomas-Symonds and Kate Green

Tuesday 26th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The personal assistants employed by disabled people help with tasks such as travel, writing and communications, in addition to providing personal care. They come with a variety of skills, which are very much dependent on the unique needs of the disabled person. They are a growing workforce within the wider social care workforce, particularly as more disabled people live independently and are in need of personalised support to enable them to learn, work and live their own lives.

Personal assistants are partially or wholly funded by the state, either from personal social care budgets or from personal health budgets. Direct payments—personal social care budgets—were first introduced for adults in 1997 by the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996, and for older people in 2000. The Care Act 2014 made it mandatory for local authorities to provide direct payments to individuals who needed and were eligible to receive them.

In 2015, the Department of Health defined a direct payment as follows:

“A payment of money from the local authority to either the person needing care and support, or to someone else acting on their behalf, to pay for the cost of arranging all or part of their own support. This ensures the adult can take full control over their own care.”

That gives considerable discretion to the person in receipt of the budget as to how they deploy it, but many people use it, in whole or in part, to employ a personal assistant to enable them to live an independent life.

After a fairly slow start, the number of people receiving direct payments increased rapidly, from 65,000 in 2008 to 235,000 in 2014. Many of those adults chose directly to employ their own staff rather than use traditional adult social care services. Skills for Care estimates that, by 2016, around 70,000 of the 235,000 adults and older people receiving a direct payment employed their own staff directly, creating around 145,000 personal assistant jobs between them. Until that point, however, relatively little was known about the make-up of that part of the adult social care sector workforce.

Skills for Care has conducted new research into this subject, and we now know that there are approximately 200,000 personal assistants working in the UK. That figure is based on information from the national minimum dataset collected by Skills for Care and on the number of people in England using personal health budgets to employ personal assistants. We also know that, in 2018, 8% of the total social care workforce were non-UK nationals. The exact figures for personal assistants are not known, but it is fair to assume that a similar percentage applies.

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

I commend my hon. Friend on the speech she is making. Does she agree that, although the issue of personal assistants is important, there is the wider issue of the impact on the care sector as a whole of a minimum threshold of £30,000 per annum?

[Kate Green]

Indeed I do. Research by Global Future, for example, points starkly to the gap in the social care workforce today, the growth of that gap as a consequence of demographic change, and the potential implications of the proposals in the Government’s White Paper. I will say a little more about that in a moment, and colleagues may wish to expand on it, too.

In respect of personal assistants, if we assume that the percentage of that workforce mirrors that of the social care workforce as a whole, we could assume that perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 are non-UK nationals, including European economic area nationals. That covers only personal assistants employed to provide social care; I have no information on the breakdown by nationality of personal assistants employed by holders of personal health budgets. However, there are a total of 42,000 personal assistants employed by holders of personal health budgets, which might suggest, if the proportion of non-UK nationals is similar to that in social care, a further 3,000 to 4,000 people.

My amendment seeks to address the concern about the ongoing ability of disabled people to recruit this important workforce after Brexit if the proposals in the Minister’s White Paper, particularly those relating to the salary threshold, came into effect. Wherever personal assistants are employed, they are a vital resource for disabled people, whose lives would be very difficult without them—especially, for example, those who live in isolated rural communities where it is difficult to get end-to-end social care.

Many—perhaps the vast majority or even all—of these personal assistants earn way less than £30,000 per year. Typically, many will earn only half that. As I have said, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen pointed out, the sector as a whole already faces severe pressure. Skills for Care says there are approximately 110,000 unfilled vacancies in the sector at any one time. Global Future’s research points to growing pressures as a result of a changing demographic, which, combined with the provisions of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, this Bill and the proposals in the White Paper, could lead to a shortfall in the workforce of perhaps 400,000 by 2026, including a shortfall in the number of personal assistants. At the present rate of recruitment it would take us 20 years to make up that gap.

This workforce was considered in detail by the Migration Advisory Committee in the report it published last year. While acknowledging the shortfall, the MAC suggested that it could be made up in a number of different ways were access not available to EEA nationals to fill vacancies in the labour force—for example, by persuading former care workers to come back into the sector or by improving retention rates.

However, MAC also says that if the fundamental problem of recruitment and retention in the sector relates to pay and conditions, the only way we can use alternatives to recruiting non-UK nationals—indeed, even if we are recruiting EEA nationals—lies in improving pay and conditions across the sector, which will require substantial funding from the Government. In any event, it would take an heroic effort by the Government and the sector to fill that workforce gap without access to EEA nationals, not least as this demographic time bomb is ticking right here, right now.

For disabled people who employ personal assistants, this could be disastrous. They need committed, skilled carers. They need continuity of care; they cannot afford to have people coming in and out of the workforce. They need certainty and reliability. Therefore, there are real concerns that, if a skills threshold were imposed or, most importantly for this amendment, if a salary threshold of £30,000 applied, they might be forced to look to fill vacancies using people on short-term work visas who would not have the skills or be able to provide the continuity of care.

Governments of all colours have long supported the concept of personal budgets as a facilitative means to support independent living for disabled people. It would be a crying shame if the ambitions that the Government set out in their White Paper and the provisions of this Bill worked against that aim. I hope the Minister will, in the course of our debate, be able to offer some words of reassurance to personal assistants and, most importantly, to the disabled people who employ them.

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

Debate between Nick Thomas-Symonds and Kate Green

Thursday 14th February 2019 Public Bill Committees

[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.