Business of the House

Philip Davies Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

There will be many opportunities in the coming month to debate matters with the Chancellor, who is regularly in the House. It will be Treasury questions on 10 March and then, of course, he will present the Budget on 18 March. I do not know when the Chancellor intends to present his final conclusions on that, but we will have debates on the Budget so it will be possible to debate what is or is not in the Budget statement in the course of those debates. That will be the best opportunity for the hon. Lady.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

As the Leader of the House knows, many of my constituents are concerned about the level of immigration and the strain that that places upon the NHS, school places and housing, and the effect it has on the overall wages of workers. May we have a debate on immigration to see whether we can address some of those concerns? In such a debate we can count the number of Members who accept the blindingly obvious: that no Government can control the level of immigration while we are a member of the European Union and have free movement of people.

[Mr Hague]

My hon. Friend will be familiar with the plans that the Prime Minister has set out—the Conservative party’s plans for after the general election, to negotiate a better relationship with the EU and a reformed European Union in which it will be possible for this country to take actions that we cannot take now, particularly on welfare payments and other issues relating to immigration. This is, of course, a very important issue, which my hon. Friend has raised regularly. Part of what we are seeing at present is the impact of this country’s having a dramatically stronger economy than the rest of Europe, which is producing more migration into the UK. In that sense it is a problem of success, but it remains an important issue. Although the shadow Leader of the House raised it in earlier questions, she omitted to mention the completely open-door policy of the Labour Government, during which millions of people migrated to the United Kingdom, and we are certainly not going back to those days.