Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

Steve Barclay Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend was my successor as Minister for Europe, and I do not know whether he had the chance to look at any other documents, but whatever the debates and the arguments were, we were where we were. Bearing in mind that we were in that position, let us not repeat the same mistake.

The estimates of the number of people coming here after 31 December range from 10,000, according to the Romanian ambassador and research commissioned in Romania, to 50,000, according to Migration Watch, as the hon. Member for The Wrekin correctly said. That is a big difference—about 40,000 people. We need to look at that as the central part of our debate about Romania and Bulgaria.

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman seemed to say that the questions that should have been put were not put, while the shadow Minister says that a detailed report actually set all these things out but was ignored. Those two positions are clearly contradictory. Why is that?

[Keith Vaz]

Not really, because I finished being Minister for Europe in 2001, and enlargement took place in 2004, so I do not know what report he is referring to. As the hon. Gentleman will find out when he serves in government and then ceases to be in government, Ministers are not prepared to share their reports with former Ministers, unfortunately—perhaps we should ensure that that changes.

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[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The petition that generated such a response focused on the desire to extend for a further five years the restrictions in place. I very much support that objective while recognising the constraints in European law and the realpolitik of renegotiation that applies to the discussions held by the Minister.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) spoke for many when he referred to the great concern and the need for a more muscular and robust response. My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) gave a good example of the sheer scale of new national insurance numbers that are being applied. I represent the adjacent constituency in the fens, and can attest to the pace and scale of migration that he highlighted and how that was not mirrored in census data or the funding formula under the previous or current Governments to address school funding for those for whom English is a second language. That backdrop frames our debate today and generates the concern that has led many to sign the petition.

I also recognise that in those renegotiations we need to be cognisant of the fact that many British people are benefiting from the rules allowing them to work elsewhere in Europe—even though that is not, in most cases, in Bulgaria and Romania—and that often, welfare reform issues are mixed up with immigration issues. Many in the farming community rely on seasonal workers and say that without them, the rural economy would suffer seriously. In other areas and in other debates, we need to address why such businesses are so reliant on labour from elsewhere in the EU at a time when others are not working. Sometimes we conflate different issues within the subject matter of the petition being signed.

The underlying concern behind the petition is one that I very much share, but I would like to broaden the discussion a little. Today’s debate has focused very much on low-skilled workers, but the difficulties with the free movement of labour and the automatic right to work are not confined to such workers. For example, it was in my constituency that David Gray was unlawfully killed by Dr Ubani, an EU-qualified doctor who could not speak English. He gave Mr Gray an overdose that killed him, and yet, as a doctor, he had the automatic right to work in the UK without passing any language test. For five years, we have been told that we can do nothing about that loophole, as the General Medical Council now calls it, because of EU law. When I raised the matter after being elected to the House—one of the first things that I did was campaign on the issue—I was constantly told that nothing could be done because of EU law, even though the French managed to have a workable system that generated language tests.

I simply highlight that case because I welcome the fact that the Government are fixing the problem, but also because it illustrates that the issue is not only confined to low-skilled workers. It is not just low-skilled workers who will come from Bulgaria and Romania. Where there are issues, for example, with doctors and their ability to speak English, those should be addressed. That case also highlights the risk-averse nature of much of the legal advice one often receives from Whitehall, which says to Ministers, “We cannot do things”. That is not a true representation of what EU law allows. It does allow the more robust approach that my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex spoke about.

[Mark Pritchard]

My hon. Friend raises an important point on the principle of always testing, because however expert the legal advice that is given by Government lawyers, it should always be tested and re-tested. He also makes an important point about those with higher skills. He may or may not be aware that, for example, veterinary surgeons coming into this country—of whom there are many from the EU—are not required to take an oral or written English test, and the same problems that he has highlighted arise with some of those vets.

[Stephen Barclay]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. In terms of veterinary science, I was not aware of that pertinent point. Of course, all Members welcome people with skills joining the UK economy and the benefits that they bring, but the specific point is about the speed with which officials are willing to react to the regulatory risks that arise—whether from a vet, a doctor or from others—and their willingness as part of the renegotiation to take on some of the sacred cows of EU law and what it is alleged that treaties require us to do.

I put on record my thanks to the Minister for the specific action that he is taking on the pull factors. A tremendous amount of work, on which he is leading, is being undertaken across Departments, and it is particularly important. The issue is often discussed through the prism of the British perspective. In common with my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), as a member of the Public Accounts Committee, I am concerned about the impact that much of that inward migration has on taxpayers—a burden is placed on the taxpayer, on our benefits system, or on our NHS, particularly from those who have not contributed.

The other reason why I think the Government’s action on pull factors is so important is that, often, the most vulnerable people in the community that I represent have been misled—they have been mis-sold too. A ruse that operates in an area such as Wisbech involves people being promised a job and accommodation if they come and work in the farming community. When they arrive, the gangmasters, who are often illegal, say, “This week, we only have work for two days, and next week, we only have work for three days. The week after, we only have one day.” What modest savings people might have are exhausted very quickly. The gangmasters will then lend them money, because it is very difficult for someone who perhaps has borrowed money from family members to face the embarrassment or even the immediate financial difficulty of going home. Therefore, these illegal gangmasters get people into the UK on a false promise, then abuse them by getting them into debt, and from there, they have control—“You must buy our counterfeit goods. You must come in the minibus and pay a high daily fee.”

What is scandalous is that many of the most vulnerable people in our community are affected. They are not voters, nor are they visible, and often, where they are subject to crime, it is not reported, so the police then have difficulty, saying “Should we take action and fund work on this? It is not reported crime.” I note that the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee is here, and I hope that he and his Committee might address the issue of known crime that is not reported and is affecting many of the most vulnerable, and how resources are used, because that is a tension in itself.

The pull factors are bringing people here who are then being abused. The debate is focused through a British prism—travelling to Bulgaria and Romania and telling people that they should not come here because they will not be eligible for some of the benefits that they think they might be is very much about defending the taxpayer. It is right and proper that we do that, but I put the case that such intervention is often in the interests of those who might be persuaded to come here, because they are misled into doing so and then are subject to the illegal gangmasters who abuse the process.

Although we welcome tighter action and controls within the scope of the law—I commend the Minister’s work on the pull factors—the main thrust of my remarks relates to those who are here. In a sense, that may be slightly counter-intuitive, because the Bulgarians and Romanians are not yet here, but we know that they will be. If one looks at what has happened so far, there has been a failure across agencies to take action on the abuses to which people are subject once they are here.

For that reason, I have been working closely, as the Minister will be aware, with the Home Secretary and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs on the multi-agency task force that we have now set up in the fens. The issues apply not only to Wisbech, which I represent, but to Boston and Peterborough, where my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough faces such problems, and to Spalding, King’s Lynn and other places across the fens. The issues are so often seen as urban, as city issues, when the concentration in certain rural communities is out of scale and out of proportion with the communities that are absorbing them. The work of the multi-agency task force is extremely important. It is at an early stage—I ask the Minister to meet me in a couple of months for us to review progress—but I would like to draw three specific points to his attention and that of Chamber.

The first relates to houses in multiple occupation. The automatic registering of HMOs only applies if there are three storeys. That may be an issue in London, but in the fens, most of the accommodation is not on three storeys. In one example, 22 people were living in a bungalow. The census just does not reflect that, and that then feeds into many of the issues about antisocial behaviour, because if lots of people are living in one house, where do they go? They tend to go and have a drink on the street. That upsets neighbours. It creates problems such as that of urinating in public places. It just is intimidating to many people to see gangs of people, even if they are acting lawfully.

In my view, there has been a failure by agencies to take on the issue of houses in multiple occupation. There has been a licence system more recently in Peterborough. We do not still have one in fenland; I believe that we should. This is not just an issue for London and other cities; it is an issue that is acute in North East Cambridgeshire, and the sums of money involved are not inconsiderable. Some hon. Members might think that the more people there are in a house, the less the landlord will get, but that is not the case. The going rate in Wisbech is £50 per person; the more they have in, the more they get.

Sometimes the landlord does not even know what is happening. Sometimes the landlord has rented the house to a couple of people and is living away and is not aware that it is being used as an HMO. Some of the letting agencies are breaking the law, because they are under a duty to conduct a review every six months, but they do not do so; and again, officials tend not to act. There is also an abuse in relation to council tax. There is an abuse in relation to the tax on that revenue that is being paid. However, Government tend to see this as a rural issue. It is a bit too far from the desks in Whitehall. There are not too many national journalists reporting it.

[Mr George Howarth (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is making a very interesting point and making it very fluently, but perhaps he could relate it back to Bulgaria and Romania.

[Stephen Barclay]

Mr Howarth, you bring me on to the crux of the point. We already have a concentration of HMOs in Wisbech and the fens. That situation will only become more acute when Bulgarian and Romanian people come into those areas. We know that there is already a concentration within certain communities that are ill equipped to deal with it. I welcome what the Minister is doing to try to prevent people from coming in and to persuade, in relation to the pull factors, those who are coming in with, perhaps, a misguided view. I would love him to be 100% successful, but we know that despite his best efforts there will be an inflow of people from those countries and we are still not taking action on the problem that is here now, so let us get on with it. Let us attack it now in order to ease the pressure when those from Bulgaria and Romania come in.

I come now to my second point. Many people from Bulgaria and Romania will come in with vehicles that are registered in their country. Under the law, they have six months in which they can drive on our roads before the vehicles have to be registered. The House may not be aware of how many people were prosecuted last year for not registering their vehicle after six months. It was zero—not one. The Government seem to be under the impression—I note this for the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee—that every single person from eastern Europe who came in under the previous accession registered their vehicle after six months and not one of them continued to drive on the roads without doing that. Surgery cases that frequently come before me suggest that that might not be the case in my constituency, and logic would suggest that it is not the case. My point is this. There are constraints on what we can do under EU law and what we can renegotiate, but in terms of Bulgarians and Romanians coming into the country, we can at least show their neighbours, the British people, that the laws have been applied equally to them, because if my constituents have to MOT, license and insure their car but they see a rickety vehicle that does not look roadworthy and that they strongly suspect is not registered and they see a Government who never take action to prosecute someone for that, that feeds into the sense of grievance that all are not being treated equally. That is an issue that the Government need to tackle ahead of further migration from Bulgaria and Romania. It is not a big point, but I make it for illustrative purposes.

[Mr Hollobone]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on raising that point. I think that actually it is a big point and it is one that I have raised myself on the Floor of the House. We are potentially talking about tens of thousands of vehicles on our roads illegally. The purpose of the rules is to ensure that a vehicle is taxed, insured and roadworthy so that the driver can be prosecuted for any speeding or parking offences. All the rest of us have to comply with them. It is quite clear that tens of thousands of EU nationals are getting away with it.

[Stephen Barclay]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I have raised the point repeatedly with Ministers; I certainly was not trying to belittle it. The point that I was trying to make was that where we have legal powers already, to what extent are we using them? Are we using them to the full? My hon. Friend is right: the estimate that I saw suggested that there are about 15,000 illegal vehicles currently on the road. That has implications if they are in an accident; are they traceable? There is a lost economy issue. Our garages would be getting business from MOT-ing them. The insurers would be generating revenue from them. I make the point for illustrative purposes: it raises a wider point about unfairness within a community, which is not conducive to cohesion.

[Keith Vaz]

I have not come across that point before and I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising it. Is he saying that it applies only to Romanian and Bulgarian citizens who are currently in this country, or is it a wider issue involving other EU nationals?

[Stephen Barclay]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for the opportunity to clarify my remarks. It is a wider point. If someone brings a vehicle into the United Kingdom from the European Union, they can drive it for six months without it being licensed in the United Kingdom, but after six months it has to be licensed. The difficulty is that the police will say, “We don’t know when the six months started,” yet in the case of a British driver taking their car to Spain, where the same law applies, the burden is on them to prove when the six months started—for example, by showing their tickets for the ferry when they took it across. Again, there is no ownership of the issue, it seems. That is why I think that action is needed.

My third example is one that I have been in discussion with HMRC about, but again it will apply to Bulgaria and Romania when people from those countries migrate. I am referring to counterfeit goods. Often within the migrant community, there is great pressure on those who have come into the country and are in the low-skilled jobs to take, as part of a bundled package of services, counterfeit goods. Again, I think that there has been a tendency in Government to see that as pretty low-level crime, but it is not; it is quite serious. Often there are health consequences from the vodka and other products, such as cigarettes, that are being sold, but also there is a revenue issue. With that in mind, I very much welcome the multi-agency taskforce that the Minister and his colleague the Home Secretary have set up.

In conclusion, I welcome what the Minister and his colleagues are doing in terms of renegotiation. I think that we need to take all the action that we can, although I recognise that there are constraints. There is significant success in his work on the pull factors. I think that there is a cross-Government desire to grip that issue—that is clear—but I urge him to look, in relation to those who are already here, at whether we are using the full range of our legal powers and to demonstrate that ahead of 2014, so that when we do have people coming in from Bulgaria and Romania, we are on the front foot and not simply making existing problems worse by increasing their size.

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[Mr Jackson]

The hon. Gentleman makes a pertinent and sensible point—that is exactly the case. We have worked with local authorities, such as Westminster, Telford and Wrekin, the London borough of Barking and Dagenham and others, and argued for some time that the measurement of population is too prescriptive, too opaque and does not take into account the speed of change in housing tenure and primary and secondary schools, or crime, policing and health, including additions to GP and primary care registers.

That is the background to where we are. I feel a sense of disappointment, not with the Minister, who is competent and capable, but with the lack of preparedness and the lack of an imperative from the Government to tackle the issue. They knew that it would be important to co-ordinate a policy around immigration upon their election in May 2010, yet there is a feeling that they are playing catch-up, chasing their tail and responding to the media or some Back Benchers. It is disappointing.

As hon. Members know, on 31 October 2012 I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill entitled the European Union Free Movement Directive 2004 (Disapplication) Bill. It received a Second Reading, but it has disappeared, as we know often happens, into the ether. Denis MacShane, in his swan song, was the only person who opposed it, with a passionate speech. Only he would have the chutzpah, the day before the Standards and Privileges Committee published its report, to oppose a Bill that was largely supported. I shall not digress, Mr Howarth. The Bill referred to Bulgaria and Romania and said that that the Government do not need to gold-plate the free movement directive. There is sufficient flexibility in respect of Romania and Bulgaria for us to invoke the key parts of the directive, such as public good, public safety, public health and the habitual residence test. We could do what Spain has done, as has been mentioned, and have a registration regime when someone arrives, when they get married, and when they change address or jobs. Those are methods of reducing the pull factor.

It would be churlish and ungrateful of me not to concede that the Government have acted. I thank the Minister for his letter of 9 April, in which he comprehensively outlines the Prime Minister’s and Home Secretary’s intentions for welfare, housing and health. However, I must say that I do not believe that the Home Office officials advising the Minister have looked sufficiently robustly at what we need to do to reassure our constituents that what they see as unfair will not come to pass from January next year. We have a lot more to do on the habitual residence test. We must start collecting the data on how much child tax credit is being remitted to Lithuania, Poland and the Czech Republic.

[Stephen Barclay]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and for the work that he is doing on behalf of not only Peterborough, but the fen region. He repeatedly highlights issues that are pertinent to not only one constituency, but several. With regard to the specific point he is making, would he explore with the Government whether they have had discussions with the British Bankers Association on whether banks are able to track transfers from accounts in the UK to specific countries? In my former career, I worked in financial crime prevention, transaction monitoring and such areas, and I would have thought that Whitehall does not need to struggle with this, because the capability is already there. People can, in fact, track such flows. The information should be available through a quick phone call.

[Mr Jackson]

My hon. Friend tempts me down a path that might get me into trouble with the Chairman, but he has put that important and pertinent point on the record.

We do not need to speculate and look into the crystal ball; we know what happened. In 2004, the London School of Economics put together a research paper, which the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) tells us was 85 pages long. The Government seem to have disregarded the paper and to have allowed the media to speculate that the number that would come to this country would be between 13,000 and 15,000, whereas we know that it was well over 1.1 million.

My final point is that we must have a fact-based empirical analysis of how likely we are to have the numbers on which Migration Watch UK is speculating. It is simply not acceptable for the Government to say, “We have no idea, guv. They could go to Stornoway, Lostwithiel, Aldeburgh or Chichester.” We are in government to take decisions. Our Ministers are in government to work for the good of the people who elected all of us, and part of that means using the machinery of government to give people facts and data with which to make decisions. I will not name the Government aide concerned, but I was very patronisingly told last week by a Parliamentary Private Secretary: “Oh, we don’t know any of the facts. We can’t speculate. We’re just going to have to suck it and see.” That is not good enough, and I do not think that my constituents or hon. Members here would expect that to be the position.

I pay tribute to the heroes of the public services in Peterborough, who eight years ago did not see the deluge of unrestricted, unplanned migration coming towards them. The teaching assistants, the teachers, the police officers, the housing officials, and my city council—with which I do not always agree—have done a fantastic job in keeping the lid on what could have been a very difficult situation. I look to the Minister to give us some answers, to tackle this most pressing problem, to keep the faith with our voters, and to reiterate that it is for us and this sovereign Parliament to decide who comes to our country and what they do when they get here.

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[Chris Bryant]

We tend to like opinion polls when we agree with them; if they do not quite agree with us, we dismiss them or we try to reread them in a different way that concurs with our opinion. Sometimes, of course, people ask questions in opinion polls in such a way as to get the answer they want. I am pretty certain the Government have done significant research on this issue. The Foreign Office has already admitted as much in response to a freedom of information request from me, although it said that it is not yet prepared to publish that research. The only reason it is not prepared to give it to me under freedom of information provisions is that it will publish it in the future. That is a somewhat bizarre way of proceeding. Different Ministers have articulated their views about this, but it is a shame that we are not all being treated as the adults we are and that we cannot, therefore, see this material, as Ministers can.

Let me refer to a couple of other issues. First, there is the Labour market.

[Stephen Barclay]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will not, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind, because we have to hear the Minister, and we do not have many Ministers—sorry, many minutes left. We have plenty of Ministers left, but not many minutes.

On unscrupulous employers, we know there are employers who will bring people from countries where labour is cheap, take exorbitant amounts from their wages for substandard accommodation and transport—their daily transport in the UK or their transport from another place in the EU—and still not even pay them the national minimum wage. Those workers are financially bound to their employers and feel they cannot complain, which is one of the problems we have with enforcing the national minimum wage. If there is one issue we could tackle that would most dramatically affect that situation, it is accommodation. Nobody should be living in substandard accommodation. Such a situation leads to the exploitation of workers who come here, and it unfairly undercuts workers here, who have no choice about how much their housing costs will be. The hon. Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Stephen Barclay) was absolutely right that we need to address the issue of houses in multiple occupation, but I think we should have a licensing system for all landlords. We should also extend gangmaster legislation to other areas of employment.

Finally, the national health service was created by British people for British people. It should, as the hon. Member for The Wrekin said, be primarily a national health service for those who have contributed. However, we have to have certain exceptions. Obviously, one is emergencies. Another is notifiable diseases; otherwise, we could have a real problem in some parts of the country with tuberculosis and other diseases. Thirdly, there is mental health. In London, in particular, there is a problem.