Immigration

Stephen Pound Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this debate, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) on introducing it. Like him, I welcome the change in tone that has occurred in raising and debating the subject of immigration. In 2005, I wrote a pamphlet on the subject entitled “Too much of a good thing? Towards a balanced approach to immigration”. I was immediately assailed by my political opponents in my constituency and accused in the local press of being racist. That was before they had read anything that I had said. In those days, simply raising the subject was deemed to be racist, but I am happy to say that when they read what I had said they withdrew their remarks, because I was manifestly not racist. I am glad that we have moved on, and that we can now discuss such matters.

For much of my adult life—this is probably not true of most hon. Members in the Chamber—I have lived in parts of London that have strong immigrant populations, and cheek by jowl with people who had emigrated to this country. As a result, I knew from working with people of immigrant origin, and from knowing them as friends and neighbours and worshipping in the same churches, that the caricature of immigrants often portrayed in the media is often the very reverse of the truth. Far from being scroungers, criminals and a threat to society, the majority of them are decent, hard-working, law-abiding people who want to make a positive contribution to the community.

So I began with a bias in favour of immigration. I became involved in the subject and was prompted to write the pamphlet only because I was investigating the housing issue in Hertfordshire. I was intrigued as to why housing targets were constantly raised. When I inquired why, I was told by the great and the good and by the officials in local authorities and planning authorities that there were two reasons that we needed constantly to build more houses. The first was declining household size, and that was true. On average, if there were an unchanged population in Hertfordshire, we would need 0.5% more houses every year because household sizes are declining by 0.5% each year.

The second reason I was given was that there was an inflow into the south-east from the rest of the country. I looked into that, and I found it to be untrue. It was what we would call, in places other than this, a lie. In fact, there was a net outflow of people from the south-east of England to the rest of the United Kingdom. There was, however, a net inflow into London, particularly, from abroad. In 17 statements to the House on housing made by the previous Government, the impact of international migration on demand for housing was never once mentioned. That was the nature of our debate. We were pretending that the phenomenon was not happening, even though everyone could observe that it was.

As far as my constituency was concerned, people were moving to London from abroad and occupying houses—because they were allocated them, because they had bought them or because they had rented them—that would otherwise have been occupied by the people already resident in London. Those people therefore moved out to Hertfordshire and the rest of the home counties, and we had to build houses for them.

When I looked into the matter further, I found that 80% of the expected population growth and more than 40% of new household formation in this country was the result of net immigration from abroad. That is why we have a housing crisis in this country. That is why housing waiting lists have increased so dramatically over the past 10 or 15 years. That is also why so many of our constituents link housing with immigration. They do not dislike immigrants. Like me, they probably know them and live with them—we are all human beings; we are all children of the same God and I hope that we all get on with each other—but they know that if there is a net inflow into the country and we are not building as many houses as there are people coming in, that will result in a housing crisis and the people who are already here will have to bear the brunt of it in due course. I therefore wrote about that and thought about it purely in those terms.

I went on to look at the economic benefits that were alleged to result from large-scale immigration into this country. I found that the debate on those supposed benefits was depressingly superficial. It consisted of slogans rather than analysis. When I looked at the analysis that had been seriously carried out into the economic benefits that flow from immigration, I could find no major study that believed there to be any substantial net gain to an economy from large-scale net immigration. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood), who is no longer in his place, mentioned certain publications by the Institute for Public Policy Research that were in favour of immigration, but I shall quote from a document that the institute published entitled “The Politics of Migration”. It contains an essay by Mark Kleinman, in which he states:

“There is not a compelling long-term case for increased immigration purely in terms of economic benefits.”

I could quote from many other studies that reached the same conclusion. According to some, there might be a mild economic benefit if we ignore all the housing and infrastructure problems, or according to others, there might be a small net loss. The idea that we can substantially improve the well-being of this country through large-scale immigration is simply unsubstantiated by any major study.

This does not mean that we should have no immigration. My analogy is that immigration is much more like a lubricant than a fuel. Without lubrication, a car would suffer severe damage, but once it has enough lubrication, adding more will not make it go better; it might even cause problems. Likewise, stopping all immigration would damage the economy, but encouraging more immigration beyond a certain point will not make those already here any better off. I challenge anyone to rebut that basic thesis. We need a modest amount of to-and-fro among people, with some moving here, others returning or moving elsewhere, but we do not need a substantial net increase in our population through immigration.

I shall deal with just one economic argument—the issue of skilled workers. The debate in this area is particularly superficial. It is widely assumed that allowing any skilled workers into the country must always be beneficial to the well-being of those already here, but that is not necessarily so. The only way to raise the living standards of our existing population over time is to increase the level of skills and the proportion of our population that has those skills, expertise and experience. Importing skills from abroad is often a substitute for doing that and discourages it. This is not the only reason, but it has contributed to the fact that this country has a less skilled population than many of our competitors, including Germany, France, Japan and America. A smaller proportion of our population has qualifications below degree level than almost any of our competitors.

We pretend that we can make do by importing skilled people instead, thereby simply leaving large swathes of our population unskilled, with reduced incentives to acquire skills, depression of the wages of people with skills and reduction of the differentials that can be gained from acquiring a skill. That cannot be right. Employers might say, “Ah, I would like to employ some skilled workers from abroad,” but we should be wary of saying that this is a good thing. Employers always like to employ cheap labour. They would like to get cheaper accountants from abroad, cheaper lawyers from abroad, cheaper journalists from abroad—

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

Cheaper MPs!

[Mr Lilley]

And cheaper MPs, says the man from the Pound store. These professions tend to be somewhat immune, in that if one wants to be a journalist or a lawyer, it helps to be English, to understand English law and so forth.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Lilley]

May I make a little more progress?

The hon. Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) mentioned the skill of cooking Bangladeshi meals. There are a large number of unemployed Bangladeshi people in this country, and there are a large number of Bangladeshi restaurants. Why, therefore, do the restaurateurs not train up their staff to acquire these skills? I am afraid that the reason is because they can get staff with such skills more cheaply from the subcontinent. We must say that we want to have well-paid chefs in this country, not depress the pay by importing from abroad.

I want to refer to an aspect of the debate that none of us has mentioned, and that I suspect nobody except me will mention. Indeed, I would not have done so had I not acquired my copy of Prospect magazine yesterday. It is a left-wing magazine, but I am very open-minded so I read even left-wing monthly journals.

[Stephen Pound]

That’s more than we do.

[Mr Lilley]

The hon. Gentleman is one of the few Members of this House who admits to general illiteracy.

The magazine contains a very interesting article by Professor Coleman, a professor of demographics at Oxford university and former consultant to the Government. I have always dealt with immigration in terms of net immigration. I have been concerned about numbers and housing, and so forth. If 200,000 people come here and 100,000 people leave, that is a net change of 100,000. The professor’s article, however, looks at the impact of gross flows on the composition of this country’s population. He observes that projections carried out by the Government Actuary’s Department suggest that if the levels of immigration we inherited from the last Government and factors such as the birth rates of those who come from abroad, as against those of the domestic population, persist into future decades, in 50 years less than 50% of the population of this country will be ethnically British—ethnically English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. That may not matter. If we reduce the level of net immigration into this country to 80,000 from the many tens of thousands, as we promised to do, it will take 70 years before less than half the population of this country are the original, indigenous, ethnic British. If we move towards a position of balanced migration, on which I have supported the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, it will take to the end of the century— 90 years—before the existing British ethnic population is a minority. If there is no immigration and no emigration—that is a rather unlikely eventuality—by the end of the century we will still be 75% ethnic British. All I ask of Members of this House is to consider whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Does it matter if the indigenous population becomes a minority, as has happened in Fiji, where the Fijians now constitute less than half of their population? I do not expect to receive a reply, because that is the sort of question that polite people do not ask. But it is what our constituents are asking and we should face up to it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field). It frightens me, given that he sits on the Labour Benches, how often I agree with his sentiments, not just about immigration but about welfare, education and many other issues.

I am not here just to talk about the immigration chaos of the past 15 years or so, because colleagues on both sides of the House have discussed the human and economic issues. Clearly, this debate is not just about process and numbers. We seem to face a much deeper problem than just the number of people coming to the United Kingdom. This debate is also about how we support, resource and recognise those in charge of protecting our borders. In many ways, the immigration service has become the forgotten service, and that will be the focus of my remarks.

During his Labour party leadership campaign, the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), accepted that Labour’s arguments on immigration had not been good enough. Immigration officers have been telling us that for some time. In May 2009, Mr Mike Whiting wrote a letter to The Times saying that the Labour party’s reforms had

“devastated the visa officer network that successfully operated for many years.”

Then in April 2010, just days after the last Government publicly hardened their stance on immigration, it was revealed that they were also seeking to cut the number of immigration officers. That is despite a quadrupling of immigration on their watch. An e-mail that was leaked at the time stated:

“A Voluntary Early Release Scheme will be launched in selected parts of the UK Border Agency… There is an opportunity to make targeted reductions across the Border Force.”

The e-mail claimed that the policy would not “impact on front-line services”. However, clearly immigration officers are, quite literally, the front line, because they physically guard the borders of the British Isles.

From such evidence a picture slowly emerges. Under the last Government, the immigration service was at best neglected by Ministers, but at worst it was treated with contempt. It was only two years ago that a Labour Home Office Minister, the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who was in the Chamber earlier, described immigration officers in somewhat unparliamentary language. This was reported online by the BBC on 29 November 2008:

“UK immigration officials have been on the receiving end of a four-letter outburst by former Home Office minister”,

the hon. Member for Slough, who

“told a conference of a Labour think tank that the job could corrupt ‘even quite good and moral’ people.”

She apparently then said:

“One of the reasons immigration officers are”

s***s

“is actually because some people cheat and they decide everyone is like that”.

That is wrong, wrong, wrong. It seems astonishing that senior Labour figures could trash immigration officers when it was their Government who caused the immigration chaos in the first place.

If those were stand-alone comments, that would be bad enough, but the hon. Lady was backed up by the Labour MEP Claude Moraes, who rounded on immigration officers, complaining about their professional standards. However, they are paid a modest income compared with other parts of the public sector. Their entry-level salary in London is less than £15,000 a year, and during the past 13 years they have suffered a loss not just in working conditions, but in prestige. The symbol of that is that they were not awarded the golden jubilee medal, unlike those in almost every other comparable area of the public sector. That is why I call the immigration service the forgotten service.

As the House will know, eligibility for the Queen’s golden jubilee medal was initially restricted to the armed forces and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Service. It was then extended to include the police, fire and ambulance services, the coastguard, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the mountain rescue service. The right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell), the then Culture Secretary, explained that she had taken that decision because 11 September had highlighted the vital role of the emergency services and the risks that they face. The golden jubilee medal now recognises those who face a potential threat of injury or worse each time they are called out in response to 999 calls. In 2003, the golden jubilee medal was extended to living holders of the Victoria cross and the George cross. In 2005—an election year—Labour took the additional decision to award the golden jubilee medal to public sector prison officers. Speaking to prison officers, Baroness Scotland stated:

“The Prison Service is a key public service, whose greatest achievements often go unseen by the general public. In times of emergencies you rise to the challenge with great skill and professionalism, and these medals recognise that.”

The House will know that such medals have been given out at every coronation ceremony since Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887, and they have a rich civilian history. For example, the recipients of King George V’s silver jubilee medal in 1935 included members of the judiciary, members of the clergy and religious sisterhoods, teachers, physicians and, according to an ancient copy of Hansard, “mail couriers” and “lighthouse tenders”. In 1977, the Queen’s silver jubilee medal was awarded to many other civilian groups, including the police, firemen and women, social workers, health visitors and the civil service.

The key criterion for getting the golden jubilee medal seemed to be that one had risked one’s life for Britain, especially in the face of potential terrorist attacks. Immigration officers do not just protect our borders; they are also on the front line against terrorism. Whenever there has been a crisis, such as when there were hijackers at Stansted airport, it has been immigration officers who have been called on to deal with the resulting emergency. In the attack on Glasgow international airport in 2007, they were first on the scene. In 2001, for instance, two officers serving abroad in Nigeria were attacked with gunfire on their return from work one day. Sadly, that has become an all-too-frequent occurrence. Those are just a few examples of the daily risks and sacrifices that we ask of immigration officers.

To quote Baroness Scotland again, when she announced why the Prison Service was being awarded the golden jubilee medal, she said that it was

“a key public service, whose greatest achievements often go unseen by the general public. In times of emergencies you rise to the challenge with great skill and professionalism”.

Surely that is true of our immigration service too. That is why I have written to the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport asking him to consider awarding immigration officers the diamond jubilee medal in 2012. I have also asked him to consider retrospectively awarding them the golden jubilee medal. The first ever early-day motion that I tabled—early-day motion 114—was on that issue, which was also the subject of the first question that I asked in Parliament.

In conclusion—

[Stephen Pound]

I apologise for interrupting the hon. Gentleman, and I appreciate that he had come to his conclusion. With reference to his earlier comments about my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), may I confirm for the benefit of the House and the way in which things are done here, that he had the courtesy to inform her that he intended to name her in the Chamber this afternoon?

[Robert Halfon]

I did not inform the hon. Lady, because I did not know that I was supposed to do so. I apologise to the House, and I will write a letter of apology to her.

In conclusion, it is bad enough that Labour cut the number of immigration officers, and that at the same time they opened the floodgates and allowed the number of migrants to quadruple, it is bad enough that the previous Government did not always speak of the service with decency and respect, and it is bad enough that every day the immigration service must face the rising threat of terror from extremist bombers and separatists, but it is unacceptable that immigration officers have not been given the recognition they so richly deserve, and have not been awarded the golden jubilee medal. Their work of keeping our borders secure against great odds and on low pay deserves a public honour. Since I started this campaign in Parliament, more than 50 immigration officers have written to me independently, expressing their support. I am proud to say that many of them live in and around my constituency, as they work at Stansted airport.

I shall finish by quoting one of those letters from an official. He said:

“I have served as an Immigration Officer for over 25 years. We play an important role in the fight against terrorism, smuggling, people trafficking, crime and illegal entry.

During my own service I recall officers being called upon to assist with emergencies such as…The Herald of Free Enterprise disaster…The return of hostages from Kuwait…Hostage emergencies at Stansted...Deployments to Kosovo, the Czech Republic and Iraq.

Whilst Prison Officers won their battle to receive the Golden Jubilee medal, nobody considered immigration officers. Not surprisingly we feel we are the Forgotten Service, called upon when needed, cast aside when convenient.”

The immigration service has been forgotten for too long. For the sake of common decency, public sector morale and recognition of that service, I hope that the Government will right this wrong as soon as possible.