Immigration

Stephen Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

This is an important debate. The House will be aware that for much of the last century, and certainly under Governments who have approached the issue of immigration responsibly, the United Kingdom has taken a twin-track approach to the issue, limiting the number of those entering the country to appropriate levels while ensuring that new arrivals are properly integrated into British society. That approach worked very well until, perhaps, 1997, when—as Members in all parts of the House will know—net migration began to rise sharply, remaining high throughout the duration of both the Blair and Brown Governments. It is principally that rise that has led to the significant public concern to which the motion refers.

As the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) observed at the beginning of the debate, this is all about numbers. The fact remains, for those of us who are concerned about immigration into this country, that the figures are very stark. As the House has already heard today, provisional figures for net migration during 2009 indicate an influx of approximately 196,000. That is a great number of people, enough to fill the Emirates stadium—which I visit on many Saturdays—three times over with some to spare. It is a figure that many, including me—and, as we heard earlier, the Minister and the Government—regard as unsustainable. It is unsustainable both in terms of the integration into this country of those who are coming here and in terms of the pressure that this level of net immigration has placed on our public services at a time of considerable economic uncertainty.

As a number of Members have observed in the debate, this is not only an important point, but it is, perhaps, the crux of the issue. All of us have recently gone through a general election, and all of us have therefore heard on the doorsteps in our constituencies quite how important the issue of immigration is to our constituents. Indeed, it was not just an important issue at the general election; it is an important issue today, as the contents of all of our postbags testify.

I therefore congratulate the right hon. Member for Birkenhead—and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), who unfortunately is unable to be here today—on securing the debate. I also congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on the work it has done in ensuring that this important issue is discussed—for, as I now understand, the first time within the living memory of any Member of this Parliament. That might not be quite as bad a situation as my hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) suggested in his remarks, but it is none the less very bad. Perhaps for the first time in a generation, we are having a proper debate in this country, without labels like “racist” and “racism” being bandied around, about what sort of immigration we want, what sort of country we wish to live in, and how we are to deal with what will be an increasingly important issue during the course of the 21st century as the world becomes ever flatter.

The important question is not, perhaps, merely one of numbers. It is, rather, how we as a society can maximise the benefits that immigration brings while minimising the strain on our public services, which have been stretched to breaking point by the uncontrolled immigration presided over by the last Labour Government, and which the previous Prime Minister and his predecessor permitted to occur.

The current Government are, in my judgment, entirely right to say we cannot, and should not, entirely halt immigration into this country. However, we have to bring down net immigration to a level that is reasonable, sustainable and capable of being supported by our constituents. We need to take this approach not just because, as a number of Members have said, we have always been a tolerant and reasonable society, but more because it is in our own interests to continue to attract the best and brightest to study and work in the United Kingdom, while ensuring that we do not place an unacceptable strain on our resources or overburden our peculiarly welcoming nature as a society.

These issues are particularly acute in my constituency of Sleaford and North Hykeham. To those of us who live in rural Britain, their significance is obvious. For communities like mine, an influx of migrants can increase the population in ways that existing public services find it difficult to cope with, and that serve to foment resentment and lead to the rise of extremist politics—a rise which all Members of this House would deplore. The last Labour Government, with their focus on urban, rather than rural, Britain, wholly failed to understand or grapple with that aspect when they came to consider the question of immigration.

Going forward, we must ensure that those entering this country to work provide skills that we do not have in our own work force. We have heard something of that in the debate, and we need to ensure that it is the case, particularly at a time when we are trying to get our own people into work as the size of the public sector reduces and unemployment rears its head again. The whole House will appreciate, and as is evident from this debate does appreciate, the benefits of workers from other countries filling the skills gaps in our economy. As other hon. Members have said, those gaps were too often created by the previous Government’s poor policies on higher education.

However, what we need to do throughout is to look closely at why those rushing to this country are willing to fill vacancies for which they say they have the skills, while those within this country who might already have those skills are not willing to fill those vacancies. In general terms it would be difficult to disagree with the proposition that the best way to boost our economy must be to incentivise the people already in the country—the people who are already British—to learn new skills, rather than to bring skills in from overseas and possibly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) hinted, to depress the wages of United Kingdom workers artificially as a result.

For all those reasons, what we have heard from the Minister today has been very welcome. I support the introduction of a limit on non-European economic area immigration, as I believe do most in the House. Reducing the number of immigrants from hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands about which the Government are talking seems vital to ensure that we have a proper balance between the economic benefits of immigration and the sustainable use of our public services.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wish to raise, once again, the point of immigration from the European Union and whether it is realistic just to focus on immigration from outside the EEA or whether we have to look at our treaty obligations to the EU. I know that my hon. and learned Friend is a member of the European Scrutiny Committee and pays close attention to these matters.

[Stephen Phillips]

Of course I must tell the House that my hon. Friend knows that because he serves on the same Committee, and this is indeed an issue about which he and I are concerned. He knows the current position, as indeed does the whole House, which results from our treaty obligations arising out of our membership of the European Union. There is very little we can do—it might be nothing—about migration from existing EU countries. As he is aware, this has become a difficulty in our country as a result of the limits that other EU members imposed on migration from new EU countries. The previous Government decided not to impose those limits here and, as a result, there was considerable resentment in our constituencies as migrants who might have headed for France or Germany made for the United Kingdom when the states of which they were citizens joined the European Union. This is perhaps not the focus of today’s debate, but there is no doubt that as and when further states join the EU, the Government of the day will have to grapple with this issue properly. They will have to show a courage that was not displayed by the previous Government to ensure that limits are placed on those who can come from new member states of the EU to this country. I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention and I believe that he and I agree on this matter, as I suspect many Members of this House now do.

The points-based system has, to some extent, if not largely, failed to provide sufficient control over immigration to bring numbers down, as demonstrated by not only the figures to which I have alluded, but the position that prevailed under the previous Government for the majority of their time in power. In terms of social cohesion, we simply cannot afford not to have effective immigration controls in place in an increasingly globalised world. All in this House—I believe this is common ground on both sides—have a responsibility to restore the public’s faith in the immigration system by ensuring that those conditions are in place.

The lack of faith that we have witnessed among the public and our constituents has made it all too easy for people to blame new arrivals for social problems in their communities. Effective controls will allow us to face down those from the right and the out-and-out racists and to defeat the all-too-often expressed views that immigrants are a danger to our society—a view that is wholly inconsistent with the past, with the tolerant nature of our society, with the needs of a 21st century Britain and with our need to trade in a globalised economy and an ever-flatter world.

I believe that it is crucial that we should achieve in this Parliament a sustainable level of immigration. We had under the previous Government what often appeared to be—even if it was not—an open-door policy. I was heartened to hear the hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) say that nobody on either side of the House any longer believes that to be appropriate. For my part, I have nothing but praise for how the Government have begun to address the entire issue—for the first time, I believe, in more than a decade—in an open and responsible way that shows that we are listening to the concerns of our constituents and of the British people and that ensures that we are dealing with the porous borders and the open-door immigration policy of the last Labour Government. For that reason, and for all those that I have given in my speech, I intend to support the motion.