Draft Immigration (Health Charge) (Amendment) Order 2016

Richard Arkless Excerpts

Monday 29th February 2016 General Committees

[Richard Arkless (Dumfries and Galloway) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey.

As we have heard, this amendment removes the exemption that benefits citizens from Australia and New Zealand when they come to our country by allowing them not to pay an up-front contribution to use our NHS. Until now, residents from both countries were exempt from the surcharge, due to reciprocal arrangements between them and the UK, which has allowed citizens of one country to use healthcare services in the other country for free. Exemptions are made for services with a fee, such as dental treatment and prescription medicine.

In principle, the Scottish Government welcome overseas visitors and migrants who are in the country for legitimate purposes—not only to contribute to our workforce and economy, but to contribute to our diversity and our vibrancy as a nation. We oppose this amendment on that and many other bases. We also think it impinges on Scottish Government competencies over health, although the Government have been very clear that they see this measure as an immigration statutory instrument.

We see the UK Government rationale as flawed in that respect, in dealing with expected costs for treating migrants in the UK’s NHS. However, the Government have only recent begun collecting data on how different nationalities use the NHS, and we are not really aware at the moment of the costs that we are trying to save, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East said.

The UK Government have been trying to reduce net migration. Despite that, however, it has risen to more than 100,000 a year under this Prime Minister, and further plans to increase work visa thresholds to £35,000 will put another seemingly immovable impediment in front of people trying to visit this country for legitimate reasons.

We in the SNP and Scottish Government say that the overall net contribution of migrants outweighs the transfers made to them during their stay here. We think there is not a cost to be legitimately saved. We say that the people who come here and benefit from the exemption from the surcharge are contributing more than they are taking out of the system. On that basis, and in particular because I am informed that the Scottish Government only found out about this statutory instrument by chance, we want to make our objections very clear and oppose the amendment.