Breathing Space Scheme

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Andrew Turner

Wednesday 29th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hollobone]

Thank God for the Church of England—that’s all I can say. I hope that that scheme, which my right hon. Friend is right to highlight, is rolled out across the country into non-Church schools, too. We need to take advantage of best practice, and it sounds to me like the Church of England is doing that. There must be lenders out there that are examples of best practice and already give their customers breathing space, but we have not heard mention of them today. I would like to see their names up in lights as examples for others to follow. I close by commending my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood for her sterling efforts on the issue.

[Mr Andrew Turner (in the Chair)]

The first two Front-Bench speakers may now have an extra minute each. I call Kirsty Blackman.

Foreign National Offenders

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Andrew Turner

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hollobone]

I do think we should get the situation sorted out once and for all. I pray in aid the excellent report by the right hon. Gentleman’s previous Committee, which looked into the issue. I quote, I think, from that report:

“The public would expect our membership of the EU to make it easier to deport European offenders, but this is clearly not the case, and we continue to keep thousands of these criminals at great and unnecessary expense.”

There is in place an EU prisoner transfer directive, which means that countries can compulsorily return prisoners to their country of origin within the European Union. The last time we managed to wheedle a figure out of Her Majesty’s Government on how many EU nationals we had returned to their country of origin, I think the number was 101—pathetically low. Legislation, in the form of that directive, exists with which to do that, but we are simply not getting on with it. Perhaps the Minister in his response will confirm how many EU nationals are in our prisons, how many we have returned to their country of origin, and why we are not sending thousands more of these individuals back.

I have to tell the House that, beside EU nationals, there are representatives of 160 nations from around the world in Her Majesty’s prisons. Not only are we a cosmopolitan society at large, we are also a cosmopolitan city in Her Majesty’s jails.

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

Would my hon. Friend also like to elicit the numbers for Jamaica? I believe they are the highest in the world.

[Mr Hollobone]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. The figure I have for Jamaica is 567, and I, like him, would like the Minister to update us.

In a minute, I will come to a list of shame, of those countries that have the most foreign national offenders in our prisons.

EU Immigration

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Andrew Turner

Thursday 5th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered immigration from the EU.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) for attending; this is a bigger audience than I normally get, and I will do my best to cope with it. EU immigration is a very important issue for my constituents, so I am most grateful to Mr Speaker and the Chairman of Ways and Means for granting me permission to hold this debate. I am sure that its timing is appreciated by everyone present this afternoon.

Immigration is an important issue for my constituents—it is the number one issue on the doorstep. It is now, in the run-up to the EU referendum on 23 June, but it has been for many years. Simply put, the problem is that the number of people coming into our country, both from outside the European Union and from inside it, is simply too great for our country or indeed my constituency to cope with.

Hon. Members will recall that when we joined the European Union on 1 January 1973, immigration from the then Common Market was not an issue. We joined an association of trading partners. That was the decision taken at the time, rightly or wrongly, but the number of Common Market citizens coming to the United Kingdom was relatively small and easy for the country to cope with. Indeed, the flow of United Kingdom citizens into the Common Market area was also small. But we are now in a different world, in which our membership of what was then the Common Market morphed into the European Community and now the European Union—if we stay in, no doubt, it will become the united states of Europe. Immigration is happening on a simply unprecedented scale and we are not able to cope with the numbers coming to our shores from the European Union. That is a big problem, because we have absolutely no control over it.

Immigration has been a big issue for some time, but my attention was drawn to the scale of the problem when it was revealed just a few weeks ago that, although official figures from the Home Office state that 257,000 EU migrants arrived in our country last year, 630,000 EU citizens were issued with British national insurance numbers over the same period. My alarm at the scale of those numbers was intensified by the disparity between the two. My constituents and I are extremely worried that the official Government statistics on the number of people coming to our shores from the European Union are simply not true. If the discrepancy between the two figures cannot somehow be reconciled, we are underestimating the numbers coming into this country by a significant margin. The number of migrants living in the UK may have been undercounted by a quarter of a million over the past five years. If that is true, the British public need to be told. Unless we have some faith in the official statistics given by Her Majesty’s Government, widespread alarm could grow that the scale of the problem we are facing is far bigger than we had estimated.

Migration Watch, which is the respected body of choice for the independent analysis of migration figures, has done a report comparing the migration figures with population estimates for migrants born in the group of eastern European countries known as the A8 nations—the nations that joined the European Union in 2004. The report shows that between 2010 and 2015, the population born in the A8 countries and living in the UK increased by an average of 90,000 a year, but during the same period estimated net migration and the official statistics from the A8 countries averaged only 40,000. That is a difference of more than 50,000 a year. The chairman of Migration Watch UK, the respected Lord Green of Deddington, said:

“This analysis casts serious doubt on the accuracy of our immigration figures.”

The row over the numbers has been stirred by the fact that Her Majesty’s Government refused freedom of information requests at the end of last year that would have clarified the situation. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that some 919,000 EU migrants have arrived in Britain since June 2010, but in that same time—over the past six years—some 2.2 million national insurance numbers have been issued to EU migrants. That official figure, 919,000, is worth dwelling on for a moment. The spokesman for Her Majesty’s Opposition, the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), might like to note that when the Labour party was in government and the A8 countries were admitted to the European Union, we were reliably told by the Minister at the time that only 13,000 A8 migrants were expected to come to our shores. We are now approaching 1 million and counting.

The gap in the numbers is extremely disturbing. I understand that, having resisted for several months, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agreed in April to pass information to the Office for National Statistics to examine whether the numbers might be reconciled, and that the Office for National Statistics is now processing the information and plans to release a reconciliation on 26 May. Will the Minister confirm whether that is his understanding of the process and that we can expect the reconciliation numbers to be published on 26 May? It is important that the numbers are released before the referendum on 23 June; otherwise, the British people might make the decision on our ongoing membership of the European Union without all the requisite information.

Of the national insurance numbers issued, I understand that some 209,000 were given to Romanians and Bulgarians, yet officially only 55,000 Romanians and Bulgarians settled here last year. Those numbers are extremely worrying for my constituents and for the country. We may now have reached a total of some 450,000 Romanian and Bulgarian nationals living in the United Kingdom. When we debated the number of Romanians and Bulgarians expected to come to this country after their countries’ accession, we were told that projections of half a million people coming from those two countries were simply fanciful and scaremongering and that we should know better. We have had debates in this very Chamber in which those dangers were highlighted.

If it is true that we now have 450,000 Romanians and Bulgarians in this country, an apology from Her Majesty’s Government would be most welcome, because those of us who have been trying for some time to alert the Government to the dangers of the scale of migration have frankly been ignored. The British people will not put up with this for much longer. Also, it is a breach of a key Government promise that EU migrants coming to this country must have a job offer, because, in November 2014, the Prime Minister said:

“We want EU jobseekers to have a job offer before they come here”.

EU migrants are coming to this country without a job offer and getting national insurance numbers, yet our official statistics are not recognising those people properly.

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

It occurs to me that the Prime Minister actually said the people from overseas would be here for up to six months when they were looking for work. Which was correct? Was it the people overseas telling me that or was it the Prime Minister?

[Mr Hollobone]

I would like to know the answer to that question as well. I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for posing it. Perhaps the Minister will clarify when he responds at the end of the debate, because my hon. Friend makes an extremely important point.

We have had an attempt to reform how Britain’s membership of the European Union works. The Prime Minister has concluded some form of minor renegotiation of our terms of membership, which, surprisingly and increasingly, members of the Government do not seem to talk much about, but apparently this reform has given us special status in the EU, despite the fact that in the official communiqué about the supposed renegotiation, the term “special status” is nowhere mentioned. It is my contention that the proposed minor reforms to benefit entitlements for EU migrants will not slow the intake of EU migrants to our shores at all.

A report this week says that only 6% of such migrants would be affected by the proposals, and I would suggest that the very welcome increase in the national minimum wage and the new national living wage will act as a far greater magnet for workers to come here from other European Union countries. Increasingly, even more than now, the United Kingdom will be seen to be the land of milk and honey with not only the strongest growth rate in the European Union, but now a national living wage well above what many could hope to earn in their own poorer countries within the European Union.

My concerns on behalf of my constituents about the dodgy statistics being used by the Government to count the number of people coming here and about the inadequacy of the supposed renegotiation that the Prime Minister has concluded were added to by further talk about the future admission of Turkey to the European Union. The more I have researched this subject on behalf of my constituents in Kettering, the more alarmed I have become. Yesterday, perhaps anticipating remarks that might be made during this debate, the Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee:

“I would say very clearly to people, if your vote in this referendum is being influenced by considerations about Turkish membership of the EU, don’t think about it... It’s not an issue in this referendum and it shouldn’t be.”

He went on to say that it would not happen for “decades”. I contend that that is simply not the case. Indeed, it is official Government policy to encourage Turkish membership and accession to the European Union. Were Turkey ever to join, the concerns we have now about the present level of immigration to this country from the European Union would be magnified several times over. Perhaps I can give the House some figures that demonstrate the scale of the potential challenge we face.

The A8 countries that joined in 2004 comprise Poland, with 38.5 million people; the Czech Republic, with 10.5 million; Hungary, 10 million; Slovakia, 5.5 million; Lithuania, 3 million; Slovenia and Latvia, with 2 million each; and Estonia, with 1.3 million. Mr Pritchard, you are probably the only person in this room to have visited all those countries, given your reputation for wanting to see international issues at first hand. I know that your reputation precedes you in many of those nations. If we add up all the A8 countries, the figure comes to 72.8 million people. That is the number of people who joined the European Union when the A8 countries joined in 2004.

There are 75 million people in Turkey. The figure is slightly smaller than Germany’s population of 80 million and bigger than the populations of France with 66 million, ourselves with 65 million, and Italy with 61 million. In addition, Turkey would be the poorest member of the European Union. Its GDP per capita is $9,500 per year compared with Poland’s—the biggest of the A8 countries —$13,400 per year and our $43,800 per year. Those 75 million Turkish people are more numerous than us and poorer than us. Most of them are Muslim and they have a different culture. Were those people to emigrate to our shores at the same rate as people from the A8 countries have done, it would transform communities in this country up and down the land, yet it is the official policy of Her Majesty’s Government to actively encourage Turkey to join the European Union.

In Kettering, there are 74,000 registered electors; 4,000 of them are EU citizens, most of whom come from the A8 accession countries. Were Turkey to join the European Union—given that it is poorer than any of the A8 and more numerous than all the A8 combined—we can expect, within five to 10 years of Turkish accession, 4,000 Turkish people in Kettering. I am sure you know many Turkish people, Mr Pritchard; I know several, some of whom live in Kettering and are a great asset to the local community. They are hard-working, diligent, family people. The problem is not their ethnicity, their language or their culture; it is the number that could come to our shores.

If a little borough such as Kettering can expect to have 4,000 Turkish people in short order, imagine what would happen in some of our larger towns and cities. There would be an influx with which we would simply not be able to cope. We are finding it difficult to absorb 1 million migrants—that is the official statistic. It could be double that once the true figures are revealed from the accession A8 eastern European countries. Were we to get immigration on a similar scale from Turkey, this country would be transformed and, I would suggest, not for the better.

London is currently the biggest city in the European Union, with 8.5 million people. Istanbul has 14 million people, and only 3% of Turkey is actually in Europe. Turkey’s accession would extend the borders of the European Union to the borders of Syria, Iraq and Iran, and we know that Turkey’s borders are not secure, which is one of the reasons why we have the troubles that we do with ISIS in Syria. Imagine if Frontex, the EU border force, were put in charge of the Turkish border with Syria, Iraq and Iran. I suggest that there is simply no way that Britain’s future would be safer and more secure as a member of a European Union with such external frontiers.

The Prime Minister said in his remarks to the Liaison Committee that he did not expect Turkish accession for decades, yet Her Majesty’s Government are providing millions of pounds to Turkey to help it to prepare for entry to the European Union. Other accession countries are also in the queue: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia; and the EU has agreed to an instrument for pre-accession assistance to pay money to those countries to facilitate their becoming EU nation states. The UK’s share of that money is £1.2 billion between 2014 and 2020, which is a rate of £170 million each year. That annual sum is the equivalent of half the NHS cancer drugs fund managed by NHS England. It would pay for child benefit for 157,000 children. It would pay for 27,000 state pensions. I know that this will interest my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis): it would treble the UK Government’s dedicated pothole action fund. Those are very large sums of money, which we are giving to the accession states, yet the Prime Minister tells us that accession will not happen for decades. Well, both sides of the argument cannot be right. Either Turkey is not going to join—in which case, why are we spending all this money?—or it is going to, in which case the British people are not being told the whole truth.

We are giving each year for this fund £9 million to Albania, yet Albania has some of the nastiest criminals in the whole European Union. I am afraid that, along with lots of immigrants from the EU to this country, we are also importing a wave of crime. There are 472 Albanian nationals currently serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure in our prisons. Albania is in fifth place in the list of countries that have exported their criminals to this country. Albania, with 472 people in our jails, has a population of 3 million. Poland has a population of 38 million, and there are 951 Polish nationals in our prisons. Albania in particular has a problem with organised crime, and it has come, and is coming, our way. Albanian mafia gangs are believed to be largely behind sex trafficking and immigrant smuggling, as well as working with Turkish gangs that control the heroin trade in the United Kingdom. I am sure that the Minister will want to help the House by giving us more details about the extent to which crime from Turkey and Albania is already on the streets of London.

Vice squad officers estimate that Albanians now control more than 75% of this country’s brothels and that their operations in London’s Soho alone are worth more than £15 million a year. They are said to be present in every big city in Britain, after fighting off rival criminals in turf wars. Hon. Members will know from the number of Romanians and Bulgarians in our prisons and the number of arrests made of Romanians and Bulgarians that we have already imported a wave of crime from EU-entrant countries. I and my constituents are worried about that wave of crime being magnified with new entrant countries if they include Albania and Turkey.

We are giving £2 billion to the accession countries to encourage them to join the European Union. On top of that financial assistance, which would be better spent on health services in our constituencies, we now have a visa-free area all the way from Calais to the Syrian border, because the EU Commission in its wisdom has proposed visa-free access for 75 million Turkish citizens, to the Schengen area. That is part of a co-ordinated, accelerated move towards Turkish accession to the European Union. The Commission has also proposed visa-free access for Kosovo. The problem with Schengen is that, although it makes it easy for people to travel across the Schengen area without having to show their passports, criminals can now pass from the Syrian border to the French coast at Calais without being intercepted. Ronald Noble, the former Secretary General of Interpol, has said that the Schengen system

“is effectively an international passport-free zone for terrorists to execute attacks on the Continent and make their escape... Leading up to these latest attacks, none of those countries systematically screened passports or verified the identities of those crossing borders by land or at seaports or airports. This is like hanging a sign welcoming terrorists to Europe. And they have been accepting the invitation”.

With the wave of immigration, we now have visa-free travel for citizens of non-EU-member states across the Schengen area, all the way to the English channel. I suggest that that endangers our security.

The Lord Chancellor, who is a wise man and who has been ahead of the curve on the issue, has said that the wave of immigration hitting our shores, which is set to get worse if we stay in the European Union, is a direct and serious threat to public services in the United Kingdom. To give one example, GP registrations have increased in this country by 1.5 million in the past three years alone.

It is commonly assumed that the crisis in our accident and emergency departments is caused by new migrants not actually registering with their GPs at all, but going straight to A&E whenever something goes wrong, thus clogging up the system for everyone else. That is just one example of the pressure on our public services. Another would be schools. It is not now uncommon for primary schools to have lots of children whose first language is not English. That puts a great strain not only on the number of school places but on the resources that schools must find to provide the requisite education for our youngsters.

Not only has the EU bent rules to create a visa-free zone from Syria to the English channel, but I contend that many of the people in that zone will end up as migrants to these shores in the fullness of time. It is all very well for the Germans to grant asylum to 1 million Syrians, but in five years’ time those 1 million Syrians will be able to get EU passports and to come to this country, with London in particular acting as a magnet. While we remain in the European Union we have no control on the numbers coming to our shores.

Frontex, the seriously discredited EU border force, which is clearly struggling to maintain the security of Europe’s borders, has said that the expansion of the visa-free area will increase the pressure on our borders. A recent Frontex report noted:

“The number of persons aiming to get to the UK with fraudulent document significantly increased (+70%) compared to 2014. This trend is mostly attributable to the increasing number of Albanian nationals often misusing Italian and Greek ID cards followed by Ukrainian nationals abusing authentic Polish ID cards”.

There we have it. Members do not have to believe me: Frontex, the EU’s border force, says that there has been a 70% increase in the number of people using false documentation to try to get into the United Kingdom.

[Mr Andrew Turner]

Will my hon. Friend repeat what he just said about the ability of people with no UK passport to come into this country because they have a German passport, which they can become a holder of very quickly?

[Mr Hollobone]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight that issue. Many other EU countries do not have the rigorous rules on the issuance of passports that we have. For example, in Romania, there are lots of Moldovans. Moldova is not in the European Union; it is next door to Romania and used to be part of Romania, but it is no longer. Lots of Moldovans qualify for EU passports because they are the grandparents of Romanian citizens. They are not EU citizens, but with their EU passport they are able to waltz into the United Kingdom and we are unable to do anything about it. Were we a free, independent and sovereign nation once again, we could say, “No, you’re not allowed into this country,” because we could set new rules. While we are a member of the European Union and the European Court oversees our border policy, we do not have that right.

The migration crisis is already having an impact on the forces that we have at our disposal to control our borders. The UK Border Force runs five seaborne cutters to protect Britain’s shores from immigration from the European Union. At any one time, one is under repair, which leaves four others. Two have been sent to help out with the migration crisis between Greece and Turkey, which leaves just two to patrol Britain’s territorial waters. Members will be as shocked as I am to learn that official Home Office statistics show that 67,500 small planes and boats enter Britain each year unchecked. At least, that is what the Home Office tells us. That is an alarming number of incursions into British airspace and British territorial waters. Reducing the number of seaborne cutters available to intercept such vessels clearly weakens our borders.

This week, the situation relating to our borders and to people coming to this country from the EU was made even worse by new European Union rules on the Dublin regulations. The Dublin regulations say that, if a person claims asylum in an EU nation state and then goes to another EU nation state, the second country can send them back to the first. That is the way the system is meant to work, except that it does not work with Greece, because its system is meant to be so badly run that sending an individual back to that country after they have been intercepted here breaches their human rights. That is despite the fact that tens of thousands of our citizens go to Greece on holiday every year.

Under the Dublin regulations, we have been sending back only 1% of the asylum seekers who reach our shores. That is pretty pathetic, but the European Commission is now changing the regulations and will give us no guarantee that Britain will be able to maintain even the current regulations should we decide to stay in the European Union. I seek further clarification from the Minister on that point, because my constituents are concerned not only about the volume of legal immigration to this country, but about people abusing the asylum system to come to our shores.

Immigration

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Andrew Turner

Wednesday 11th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Turner]

That is entirely up to the Governments of those countries. I feel that they should have the right to determine that issue for themselves, just as we should for our country.

The Government must try to deal with the concerns of many British people and, indeed, many settled and integrated migrant communities—those who recognise that we simply cannot retain an open-door policy for all current EU citizens. We need a more nuanced policy that is controlled by our elected Government and that works in the interests of the British nation.

In 1973, we signed up to the treaty of Rome, which established the free movement of people across the then common market. Let me be frank: it was a rich man’s club, and the number of people coming to the UK was small. In 1975, net migration was 3,000. Since then, the club has expanded to places such as Croatia, where the average wage is a 10th of that in the UK. It is hardly surprising that people there want to move to the more prosperous parts of the EU.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, which I am following closely and enjoying immensely. Is he as concerned as I am that large numbers of non-EU citizens are now entitled to EU passports and therefore entitled to come to this country? Up to 3 million people from Moldova, for example, can access Romanian passports and will be able to come here from 1 January.

[Mr Turner]

I did not know about that, but I certainly believe it.

Figures published just last week show that net migration unexpectedly jumped to 182,000 in the year to June 2013, due in part to a rise in prospective workers coming from Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.

People cannot be blamed for wanting a better life. Let me be clear that I do not blame them; I blame the outdated rules of the EU and the previous Labour Government, who sent out the message that anybody and everybody could and should come to the UK if they want. Britain, however, simply cannot provide a better life for everyone who wants to come here. We do not have the infrastructure or jobs to do that.

Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Andrew Turner

Monday 22nd April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hollobone]

I am most grateful for my hon. Friend’s helpful intervention. I praise the work that he does on behalf of his constituents in Peterborough. He has the courage to speak out on these often controversial issues on their behalf. Rightly, he does not mince his words. The situation in his constituency is intolerable. How have we let this happen? We will never have any sensible degree of integration if large numbers of immigrant communities are all in one place. One difficulty with such a large number of people all arriving at the same time is that they do not disperse across the country, but tend to congregate in concentrations, Peterborough being one. Any sensible management of public services, whether schools, hospitals or other local service provision, is difficult under those intolerable pressures.

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is attacking this from the wrong end. It is no good saying, “What happened in 1066? What happened in 2004?”, because what happened then should never have happened. We have to say to the Minister, “You are responsible. You must fix a limit and say, ‘That is the maximum that is allowed, and that is all.’” It does not matter how the rules are fiddled or used to make that happen, but happen it must.

[Mr Hollobone]

I do not think that my hon. Friend and I disagree. I was trying to say that the British public expect, as a minimum from their Government, some sensible estimate of the numbers coming from Romania and Bulgaria. Why would a country open its borders to two foreign countries when it has no idea how many people will come to our shores from those countries? All I am asking, as a starting point, is why do we not use what happened last time to work out our estimate? If we do that, we eventually end up with well over 400,000 Romanians and Bulgarians in this country. I hope I am wrong—I hope those numbers are a huge exaggeration—but the Government are not saying whether I am wrong or right; the Government have no view, and they refuse to take one. The British public expect rather more than that from Her Majesty’s Government.

I agree with my hon. Friend that we have to try to fix the problem, although I do not think it is a problem that can be fixed. We should say, “No, we are not going to have immigration from Romania and Bulgaria.” When the transitional controls end, we should say, “Sorry, we are not going to allow immigration from these two countries.” For those who want to remain in the EU but renegotiate our terms of membership, that would send a firm signal of intent that this country means business.

At the moment, I do not believe that the other EU countries believe we are serious in trying to renegotiate our membership. I feel renegotiation of our membership is doomed to failure. I do not believe the other EU countries will take us seriously—they are going to shuffle about for years and years to put off the day when any new treaty could be signed. We may well be in the same bind in five, six, seven or 10 years’ time. I think we should leave the EU, but for those who want to stay, a firm signal of intent that we mean business in renegotiating our membership would say to the Romanians and the Bulgarians, “We are sorry, but Britain is full and we will not take immigration from your two countries.”

There are very good reasons for saying no, not least crime levels. There is currently a crime wave of bag snatchers and pickpockets on London underground. I am a special constable with the British Transport police, so I know what I am talking about. Eight out of 10 pickpockets on the London underground are Romanian, and I would welcome an intervention from the Romanian ambassador to say, “We recognise that you have a problem here in London with crime levels from our nationals. We are going to try to help address that situation for you.”

Of course, London is a huge magnet. With 7.5 million residents, it is the largest city in western Europe, compared with 3.5 million in Berlin, 3.25 million in Madrid, 2.5 million in Rome and 2 million in Paris. London is one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, and with English as our native language, London is a magnet for millions of people throughout the EU. Romanians or Bulgarians looking for some of their fellow countrymen in the EU are most likely to find them here in London. London is a magnet that attracts people from those two countries.

The very least that Her Majesty’s Government should do is ensure that all European nationals who intend to come to our country and stay for more than three months have to have a residency card. Her Majesty’s Government are allowed to do that under the rules—this point has been put to the Immigration Minister previously, not least in the excellent private Member’s Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), and I have also raised it with him directly on the Floor of the House—and other countries do it, not least Spain. That means those countries have a far better handle on the numbers of other EU nationals coming across their borders, and it would give us a far better handle on where EU nationals are coming from and where they are living in this country. It would also help us with issues such as benefit entitlement, access to services in the national health service, and school places.