International Development
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
The Secretary of State for International Development (Anne-Marie Trevelyan)
My apologies: I am short on voice today, about which many in the House will no doubt be very relieved. The Government’s 2019 spending review allocated sufficient funding to ensure that the UK can deliver on our commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance in 2020-21. Thanks to this Government’s focus on a strong economy, we can deliver on this commitment, improving the lives of millions in developing countries—for example, by giving more than 14 million children access to a decent education, immunising 56 million children and supporting 52 million to access clean water and better sanitation in the past two years alone.
[Official Report, 4 March 2020, Vol. 672, c. 819.]
Letter of correction from the Secretary of State for International Development, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan):
An error has been identified in my response I gave to the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard).
The correct response should have been:
Oral Answers to Questions
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Priti Patel
My hon. Friend is right to raise this important issue. Education is crucial in the camps but also in the region. In both Jordan and Lebanon we have helped to support more than 200,000 children to have access to education. The UK, once again, is leading the way to enable more and more children to go to school in the region.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
International Development
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
Oral Answers to Questions
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(7 years, 11 months ago)
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Rory Stewart
As I have said, DFID is focusing on health and education, but the Foreign Office has legal support programmes. This issue goes to the heart of the Israeli planning system and involves controversies with the Israeli Attorney General. As my hon. Friend says, it is very difficult to obtain planning permission, which is one of the reasons why settlements are built and demolitions then take place.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
[Official Report, 8 February 2017, Vol. 621, c. 2MC.]Rory Stewart
The British taxpayer has not funded any structures that have been demolished by the Israeli Government. The European Union has funded structures that have been demolished by the Israeli Government, but so far it has not decided to seek compensation.
Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill
Tommy Sheppard ExcerptsTuesday 10th January 2017
(7 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Commons Consideration of Lords Amendments as at 10 January 2017 - (10 Jan 2017)
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
I shall speak in support of a number of the measures on the amendment paper, but first I want to make a couple of comments about the political context in which this debate is taking place. I turned on the television over the weekend to see on the tickertape at the bottom of the news channel screen the information that our Government had stopped funding a girl band in Africa. I was shocked by this—I did not realise we were funding girl bands or bands of any other kind in Africa or elsewhere—so I thought I would look into the matter a little more. Of course, on doing so, I discovered that that was not the story at all.
The story was loosely based on a project in Ethiopia called Girl Effect, which is a huge programme that is aimed at empowering young women throughout that country. It has 500 direct participants and more than 10,000 participants online, and it operates from 8,000 schools throughout the country. It is designed to use music and performing arts to give young women in that country confidence so that they can take part in Ethiopian political and social life. It is undeniably a good thing. It was set up by DFID in 2011, and every time that DFID has reviewed it, it has been given an A* rating. It is exactly the type of project that we should be supporting, but it is unusual and unconventional. It is not the same as handing out food to people who are starving, so the case needs to be made for it. We also need to be aware of how these things can be caricatured and used to argue against the provisions that we are talking about today.
That entire Girl Effect project was described in the Daily Mail as the British Government funding the equivalent of the Spice Girls. The implication was quite clear: millions of pounds of our taxpayers’ money was being used not to feed the poor, the starving or the illiterate, but to fund five young women and turn them into rich pop stars. That was not true. The reporting was a good example of what we might call fake news—I believe that that is the term used these days. It was connected to reality by the thinnest threads of truth, yet for many people reading the Daily Mail and the other papers that took up the story, or looking at the tickertape along the bottom of their screen, it created the impression that they were given.
Lots of people, including some in this Chamber who ran to the press to comment on that story, will use these caricatures to denigrate and oppose any foreign aid activity by this country. They use the ridiculous argument that we should be spending money at home before we spend it abroad, as though the poverty and inequality in this country, which we must tackle, was on a par with the hell in sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty, oppression and the daily grind are the normal way of existence for the mass of people in those countries. Knowing that those caricatures exist and that we need to be careful about how we present these arguments brings me to the new clauses and amendments before us today.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman makes a good case, but considering that a third of all Ethiopian girls do not go to school, would it not be better for female empowerment if the money were spent on giving them an education? Would that not be more empowering than promoting a pop group?
Tommy Sheppard
I do not want to have a big discussion about the project, but I will respond by saying that we should do both. Of course we should also try to put money into formal education, but the importance of that project was that it understood that digital communication was a much more effective way of reaching young people in Ethiopia than the bricks and mortar of a formal educational establishment. It also understood that music and lyrics can sometimes be better than formal texts at getting through to people, educating them and inspiring them with big ideas. That is true in this country as well. Those things have contributed to the social education of young women in Ethiopia. As I said, the Department for International Development itself said that the project was worth supporting.
The important point in all these debates is that we can win public support for foreign aid and rally the public behind the 0.7% contribution, provided that we are transparent about what we are doing, and that we demonstrate at every turn that the people who are getting the money are those who really need it. It is therefore important that those criteria are demonstrated through the work of CDC Group and others, and that evidence is produced.
I am not sure which amendments and new clauses will be pressed to a Division, but I will vote for whichever ones are, because they would all strengthen the Bill. In my 20 months in this Chamber, this is the first time that I have seen a Bill come back on Report without a single Government amendment. I find that surprising. I know that the Bill is concise and brief, but given the concerns that were expressed on Second Reading about the work of CDC Group, I would have thought that the Bill could have been tightened up a little. I hope that the Government will consider supporting some of the new clauses and amendments because they would make the Bill more efficacious in achieving its objectives.
New clause 6 states that before CDC Group gets a major uplift in funding, the case will have to be made that it is meeting the sustainable development goals and tackling poverty and inequality in the country in which the money is deployed. Let me put it another way. If a project was not tackling poverty or combating inequality, and not contributing to achieving the sustainable development goals, why on earth should we fund it? When it comes to prioritising when money is tight, we have to make sure that it is spent on what it is supposed to be spent on.
On Second Reading we discussed some of the—shall we say?—past mistakes in a number of CDC’s decisions. We talked about the shopping malls, luxury hotels and other inappropriate projects in which CDC Group invested, and we were assured—by the Minister of State, I think—that those things were in the past, that we had learned from them and that they would not be repeated in the future. Well, if that is the case, what is the difficulty in building such a provision into the Bill so that when CDC gets a budget uplift, it will have an obligation to demonstrate that what that uplift is spent on will contribute to meeting these goals and fulfilling these criteria? That is self-evidently a way of ensuring that we do not rely on hope by instead writing down what, as a matter of policy, we want.
Amendments 3 and 4, to which I have put my name, would link an uplift in CDC Group’s funds to the overall ODA budget. It is important to look at doing that; the formula that has been suggested is not onerous and is perfectly achievable. There is an idea abroad that what might be happening is the outsourcing or privatisation of our foreign aid activity, and that pre-eminence is given to a market approach. We will have problems if that impression is not countered, because the truth of the matter is that there is a role for spending public money to try to support the creation of a small business sector in developing countries, to invest in such sectors and to create jobs, but let us not kid ourselves. The vast bulk of our priority aid should be directed at people who need it in order to combat the malnutrition, illiteracy, poverty and starvation that are present throughout such countries. That cannot be done by setting up a small business; it needs to be done through direct state and NGO intervention. That is why we should make it clear that the vast bulk of our foreign aid effort will remain in that sphere.
Although CDC Group and the market have a contribution to make, particularly in countries that are some stages along the process of development, that will not be the primary way in which we do things. I commend amendments 3 and 4 to the House because if we were to agree to them, we would strengthen the Bill and demonstrate to people what our intentions really are: to ensure that the hard-earned taxes that they pay—people politically agree that a small slice should be deployed for foreign aid—are spent doing the things that they want to be done. Those things are combating poverty and inequality in the developing world, and making sure that we get to a more equal world society, which of course is in our long-term interest, too.
Commonwealth Development Corporation Bill
Tommy Sheppard ExcerptsTuesday 29th November 2016
(8 years ago)
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Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field). It is quite pleasant to be in the Chamber listening to the debate, because even though we appear to have differences over tactics and policies, there does seem to be some agreement on the overall objectives that we are trying to achieve, and I very much welcome that.
As far as I can recall this is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) said, the first opportunity we have had in this Parliament to discuss the wider strategic direction of the Department. I welcome the fact that the Government have achieved the 0.7% target. I commend them for doing so and providing an example to the rest of the world, particularly to our partner nations, to encourage them to do better with their aid budgets. Now that the Secretary of State is back in her place, I congratulate her and welcome her conversion to supporting her Department’s aims, rather than continuing with her previous attitude.
I was first exposed to the idea of international development as a kid at school in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when my mum was an enthusiastic participant in Christian Aid Week. I remember her spending a lot of time trying to raise money for Christian Aid to support projects in southern and eastern Africa. That was a long time ago, when I was very young, but I thought it was remarkable that, despite the fact that many people in my community lived in straitened circumstances, there was a common decency—people understood that there were always others who were worse off and that they had a common humanitarian responsibility to make some effort to assist, no matter how small.
Even in those days, there were critics of aid—of Christian Aid, Oxfam and all the others—who took a less selfless and more parsimonious attitude. Their criticism was twofold. They questioned whether the aid was actually going to the people in the destination countries who needed it most, and there was a continual suggestion that the people working in aid and organising the efforts were lining their own pockets.
Many of our NGOs—Christian Aid, Oxfam and others—have had to work for the last 40 years under the veil of those accusations. They make quite sure that they can counter those accusations and demonstrate that they are directly involved in projects in the countries that need it and that they work with the people in those countries to achieve sustainable development. They have also had to make public details of their organisation and cut their administrative costs to the core, so that they can demonstrate that they are delivering the maximum number of pennies per pound for the purposes for which that money was given.
I commend all those NGOs for doing so, but here is the problem with the CDC that we need to address. This does not apply to the majority of the projects in which the CDC is engaged, and it is not the CDC’s objective, but in quite a few cases, and not just occasional instances, public money—taxpayers’ money—has been used for purposes that people such as my mum would have difficulty comprehending. How can we justify, for example, the use of $3.5 million to support the development of a gated community in El Salvador for the super-rich? How can we justify the development in Nairobi of the Garden City Village and the shopping malls—$24 million, in that instance? How can we justify the development in Mauritius of the ocean village, with apartments costing a minimum of half a million dollars? It is difficult to hold those examples up and say that we are doing the right thing.
We need to make sure that that does not happen again. I have had arguments with people who justify such projects on the basis of the trickle-down theory. They say, “It may be a five-star hotel in an area of desperate deprivation, but look at the jobs that are being created.” Anyone who seriously thinks that an investment of $20 million or $30 million to create 50 low-paid service jobs in a hotel is an efficient use of aid money needs to re-examine their priorities. Let us assume that we do not have to engage with that neo-con argument.
I am not simply talking about things not being achieved; the situation is worse than that. By spending money on such projects and making mistakes with them, we may replicate and ingrain some of the structural problems that prevent us from raising the lot of the mass of the population in the first place. We need to be absolutely clear that such projects should not be some sort of international welfare scheme for capitalism, where we allow people to get super-rich while the poorest stay where they are or, in relative terms, possibly become even worse off.
In that context, I want to mention the whole question of salaries and remuneration within the CDC. This is not to criticise or castigate any individual in any way, but I thought the Secretary of State did well to keep a straight face earlier in the debate when she talked about the chief executive’s salary being reduced to just £300,000 per year. Most people would question whether it is right that someone leading an organisation whose ostensible role is to combat global poverty should get that level of reward in that job. I accept that part of the game is to play the private equity markets and to try to lever in funds, and we need to let people play such games. However, I welcome the education from the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), who described the renationalisation of a part of government that was privatised under the Blair Administration. That was right because, while these people are engaged in private equity schemes and trying to play capitalism at its highest level, they should remain public servants. Their ethos and their remuneration—how they are rewarded—should be as part of the Government operation that is working for such people on behalf of this Parliament. They should not be cut loose and allowed to pretend that they can operate like private bankers. I very much hope that we can have a solid look at the level of remuneration that operates in the CDC.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) has mentioned, yesterday’s National Audit Office report says a number of things. I was struck by the fact that it says—the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield remarked that people working in the organisation looked over their shoulder with some apprehension when the Department’s officers came to call—there is a need to clarify that the Department should not be involved in individual project decisions and should distance itself. I agree: you do not own a dog and then bark yourself. If we are to hire people to do the job, particularly where it entails taking risks, we should let them get on and do it. I accept that, but the corollary is that we need to be much more hands-on in determining the strategy within which they operate and about the objectives that they are trying to achieve with their individual decisions. I therefore think it is probably putting the cart before the horse to have a discussion on this Bill before we have seen the CDC’s strategy for 2017 to 2021, which I presume is in preparation somewhere. Will the Minister tell us in his response whether we will be able to look at the strategy when it comes to the House?
The other point I want to make is about transparency. In 2013, three quarters of all the money going through the CDC’s accounts went to fund projects in the top 20 least transparent countries, where we are trying to improve things. Back when we discussed the Panama papers earlier in the year, the then Prime Minister and Government were very explicit about how we would try to clean up this mess and about how Britain would lead a campaign for financial transparency throughout the world. The absence of such transparency of course creates the conditions for illegality and for corruption in many of the target countries that we are trying to get aid to. I presume that that attitude has not changed and that we are still trying to lead a campaign for financial transparency. I therefore think it is very important, through the realm of the CDC, to make sure that when we try to lever in deals in these countries, we do so in a completely transparent way. We could start by making a commitment that the CDC will pay all the taxes due on projects in the countries in which it operates. We should also make sure that we use whatever pressure we can apply through third parties to advance the campaign for transparency.
That is pretty much all I have to say, except that we still live in a world where we have tremendous challenges and problems of extreme poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy. I accept the need to play international capitalism at its own game and to try to lever in funds—to operate in the way that the CDC has been doing—but the end objectives must always be to make that situation better: eradicating poverty, combating illiteracy, eradicating disease. When we come back to look at the strategy document, we must set ourselves the challenge of making sure that everything the CDC does—every project it gets involved in—can, at the end of the day, be justified by attaining those objectives.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Priti Patel
My hon. Friend raises an important point about the destruction of cultural and heritage sites around the world. I have been clear that, in funding international organisations, we wish to see reform in the system to make sure that money is spent in the right way. We will continue to deliver value for money. DFID will publish the reviews that reflect on UNESCO towards the end of the month and he will see the approach we are taking.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
Rory Stewart
The Department remains entirely committed to the following principles. First, anything we do must encourage a two-state solution by ensuring that the Palestinian people are served with proper services. Secondly, we must make sure that the money goes in the right way to the right people. That is all about auditing, vetting and making sure that the real beneficiaries are there. Of course we will ensure that the review is done as efficiently as possible to serve the interests of the Palestinian people and the stability of the region.
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend for raising an issue that is very important for everybody in the House. Certainly the Government will do all they can to support police and crime commissioners such as Roger Hirst, who is already doing an excellent job in Essex. Since 2009, knife crime figures have fallen overall, but I recognise my hon. Friend’s concerns. That is why the Home Office has been supporting police forces such as Essex in conducting weeks of action against knives under Operation Sceptre. We have legislated to ban dangerous knives, including zombie knives. We are putting tough sentences in place and making sure that offenders are punished. We should send a very clear message that we will not tolerate knife crime in this country.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
The Prime Minister
I am happy to say to the hon. Gentleman that our special relationship with the United States is, I think, very important to both the United States and the United Kingdom. We will continue to build on it, as was clear from the conversation that I had with President-elect Trump shortly after his election, and of course we want to ensure the dignity of our citizens. It is up to the United States what rules it puts in place for entry across its borders, but we will ensure that the special relationship continues, and does so in the interests of both the UK and the US.
Non-EU Citizens: Income Threshold
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
I am delighted to speak in this debate, but like my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), I wish the attendance was rather better. I do not want to score any political points, but I do think that a fairly nasty and pernicious little proposal is being put forward and it is incumbent on us all to encourage our colleagues to take this a little more seriously and show more interest in it.
Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Tommy Sheppard
I will of course. Perhaps a meeting is going on that I do not know about.
Keir Starmer
I let that comment go the first time, but hon. Members will see on the screen that in the main Chamber at the moment there is a debate on a Home Office Bill, in which very many of my colleagues are down to speak. It is unfortunate that there is a clash, but it is not fair to read into that a lack of interest in this debate. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) has seen the screen and realised that that Bill is now being debated in the main Chamber.
Tommy Sheppard
I thank the hon. and learned Gentleman for his point. As I said, I am genuinely not trying to score a political point. I am simply saying that we need to encourage colleagues to take more interest in this debate, this subject and this proposal in particular.
Since my election to the House, I have discovered that this is a place rich in irony, and I have been overloaded with it today. I have come to this debate from Portcullis House, where I was at an exhibition of scientists, engineers and technologists, who are trying to show Parliament pioneering work in which they are involved. I met three young people working at Edinburgh University on doctorates. One was from England, one from Italy and one from the United States of America. I am fairly confident that if this little proposal goes through, we will have to say to Laura Underwood, who is pioneering clean water technology at the University of Edinburgh, that if she is successful in discovering something new in that technology, she will not be welcome to stay in this country and realise that and get a job to develop it unless she is earning more than £35,000 a year, which in a first-time job, when someone has just graduated, is pretty near impossible. If some people in the House get their way and we manage to pull out of and turn our backs on the European Union, down the line we would have to say something similar to Enrico Anderlini, who is working on developing new forms of wave technology—that he would not be welcome here as an Italian unless he was earning £35,000 a year, which for a young 20-something is pretty hard to do. It is very ironic indeed that I should come from that gathering to discuss a policy that seems to be set up to put a major hurdle in front of such people.
I am here today because more than 1,000 of my constituents have signed this petition and because many people have written to me, giving examples of what the proposal will mean for them as individuals. I think—I welcome some of the comments so far—that we need to change the whole way in which we debate immigration in this country and we need to start in this Chamber by setting the pace and setting an example of how that should be done. Immigration is undeniably a good thing for our economy; it is a good thing for our communities, and it is a good thing for humanity and the individuals who are involved in that process. If we had not had immigration or migration over the centuries, this world would be a much more miserable and unliveable place than it is today, so I would be glad if we could at least try to couch the debate in positive terms.
I note the statistic that has been thrown up in the debate that net migration—this is seen as a horrible thing—was about one third of a million people last year. I thought to myself on the train down this morning, “Well, how much is that really?” It is about one in every 200 people in the United Kingdom, so in a town of, say, 20,000 people, it would mean that 100 people have come over the last year to live in that place. I cannot square that statistic with the thoughts in some people’s minds about our being overrun by alien hordes or alien cultures and the country’s being swamped by migrants. That is clearly ludicrous, so we could at least get a sense of perspective.
I understand that in some communities, among some of our citizens, there is deep apprehension about migration. I understand in particular that many of the people who are living at the margins of society and who feel themselves to have very little are susceptible to the argument that says, “You can’t afford to be generous to people from elsewhere in the world. You need to be hard-faced about this and turn your backs on these people.” I do not agree with that approach, but I can understand why some people will develop it. It concerns me that we have politicians who want to manipulate that prejudice and who, rather than confronting with evidence the assumptions on which it is based, pander to it and try to use it for political capital. That is all of us going to hell in a handcart if we do not pull back from that general direction.
Although I can understand that type of feeling when it comes to whether we should take tens of thousands of refugees fleeing warzones in the third world, I cannot for one minute understand that when it comes to the question of tier 2 visas. Tier 2 visas, let us remind ourselves, are given to people who are coming to work here in a job that has already been advertised locally and that no one living in the area wants to take, so how that can be described as anything other than a positive benefit and contribution to our economy and our community, I do not know.
I want to question—the Minister will perhaps answer this—the rationale, the logic, behind saying that people have to earn a certain amount of money, a certain salary, to be able to come here, but a different amount of money, a different salary, to be able to stay here. That seems ludicrous; and the £35,000 a year figure is arbitrary. I need to hear the justification for it, because it certainly does not work in my constituency—in my city. It takes no account whatever of regional variations within the United Kingdom in employment and in salaries. Whereas there might be places in the middle of London where £35,000 is regarded as some sort of miserly salary, I can tell hon. Members that it is regarded as a very good salary indeed in my constituency. If we set that as the limit, all that will do is further imbalance the UK economy towards London and the south-east and those areas that are already sucking the lifeblood out of it, so I would caution people when thinking about trying to manipulate migration to this country so that it favours London and the south-east rather than the rest of the country.
The proposal also demonstrates no recognition of different industries. A constituent wrote to me and said, “This seems to indicate that the Secretary of State has a value system behind this—that they view some jobs as more important than others and that if someone is working in banking or finance and earning a good salary, they are regarded as inherently more valuable and someone we would want more than someone who is working in a lower-paid job in our public services or in the arts and creative industries.”
I want to make the point in particular about the arts and creative industries. This issue is particularly relevant to a city such as Edinburgh, a metropolitan, bustling city with people from all over the world, doing all sorts of exciting things and fuelling our great festivals. Many people in this Chamber will have attended those festivals and enjoyed them. That is partly because it is a welcoming place to come and we do not say to people, “To practise the arts here, you have to be in a job earning £35,000 a year, or you can’t do it.” As soon as we begin to do that, not only will that culture begin to ebb away and things will get that much duller, less creative and less exciting as a result, but other cities, in other countries, will directly benefit from that because people will go elsewhere.
Of all the petitions that I have ever seen come to this House, this one is the most eminently reasonable. If we read what the petitioners want, we see that they are not saying, “Oh, throw out the Government’s immigration policy.” They are not even saying, “Overturn and throw out the concept of having to reach a salary threshold before people can get indefinite leave to remain.” They are saying, “Press the pause button. Take a look at this again, and wait to get some evidence in particular about whether a different limit should apply to different industries.” I cannot for the life of me see anything more reasonable than that, and I think that not only should we consider it, as we do in these debates in Westminster Hall; I hope that the Minister will say that the Government will consider it to the extent that they will think again and go away and amend this policy.
Richard Harrington
If employers want long-term employees, they will have to concentrate on training them here. In the short term, the hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely right.
The Government consulted on reforming the rules for settlement in 2011, as we do not believe that there should be an automatic link between coming to the UK to work temporarily and staying permanently. That is common in most countries: there is a difference between temporary work and permanent settlement rights.
The minimum earnings threshold was set following advice from the Migration Advisory Committee. The main purpose of the tier 2 category is to support the UK economy, not to provide migrants with a route to settlement. While the MAC considered a number of alternative criteria, such as age or qualifications, it advised—this is where some hon. Members would have disagreed with it—that the strongest indicator of economic value is salary, and those migrants earning more than a given amount are more likely to make the biggest contributions to the UK economy in future. There may be exceptions to that, but fundamentally I believe that in the majority of situations, that is the case.
Tier 2 is reserved for those filling graduate-level jobs; that is what it is for. The figure of £35,000 a year was not invented by politicians from nowhere; it was worked out professionally by the MAC to be equivalent to the median UK pay in skilled jobs that qualified for tier 2 at the time of the MAC’s consultation in 2011. Hon. Members should be aware that the most recent research that the MAC has carried out means that the equivalent figure today would be £39,000.
The MAC has also identified evidence of a wage premium for migrant workers with specialist skills that are in short supply. On average, tier 2 migrants—that is, general migrants—earn an extra £3,000 per annum compared with UK workers with similar characteristics.
However, the Government recognise that salary is not always the strongest measure of the importance of a job, a point made very strongly by many Scottish National party Members who have spoken today. I thank all the SNP Members who are here for coming to this debate, because without them there would be comparatively few Members here. The hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) made the point that this debate unfortunately coincides with a Second Reading debate on the Policing and Crime Bill, but I still thank the SNP Members for coming to this debate.
Within tier 2, there are exemptions for migrants working in a PhD-level occupation, for example, university researchers, and for those working in recognised shortage occupations. The hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) gave the example of a university researcher in the field of clean water technology and said that she would have to leave her job. As I say, there are exemptions for PhD-level occupations—
Richard Harrington
Yes—after-PhD-level occupations. Therefore, that person would be exempt.
I mention that to show hon. Members that the £35,000 figure is not just an arbitrary amount; there are proper exemptions. The shortage occupation list includes nurses, as has been said, several healthcare professional categories, many engineers, many roles in the creative sector and some teachers.
The exemption extends to those in jobs that have been on the shortage occupation list at any time in the preceding six years. That guards against occupations being returned to shortage and provides reassurance to workers in those occupations against future changes to the list.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Swayne
I welcome the hon. Gentleman to the Front Bench. It is important to put our money where our mouth is, and £44 million to the UNHCR is an important part of the answer. It is vital to work with the UNHCR and the Norwegian Refugee Council, and to lobby the host Government. Unfortunately I do not rule Lebanon.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
5. What recent assessment she has made of the humanitarian situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Desmond Swayne)
Some 2.3 million people in Gaza and the west bank have insecure access to food, and 1.4 million are in need of water, sanitation and hygiene. This month 58 Palestinians and eight Israelis have been killed, and 7,042 Palestinians and 70 Israelis have been injured.
Tommy Sheppard
I have a related question on Gaza, if I may. What assessment has been made of the destruction of UK-funded facilities in Gaza by the bombing of the Israeli air force? It seems that we provide facilities, either directly or through the UN, but then those facilities get bombed and we have to provide them again. What can be done to stop that tragic merry-go-round, and will the Minister work with colleagues to try to persuade the Israeli Government to have a more proportionate response in Gaza and to stop hindering the relief effort?
Mr Speaker
I am sorry but these questions are too long. We are very short of time—we need pithy inquiries.
Justine Greening
We have chosen to focus more work on helping fragile and failing states, tackling instability and helping people affected by conflict. It is not just the right thing to do for those people and their countries; it is also a way of keeping our own country safe, secure and prosperous.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
T4. On 15 October, Human Rights Watch published a report on the deteriorating situation in Nepal. It documents more than 45 deaths in recent months and in particular criticises the Nepali police. Given that the Department is funding the Nepali police, will Ministers read the report and give a considered response to its findings?
Justine Greening
The hon. Gentleman raises an extremely important point. Our work alongside the Nepali police has been important in providing the conditions for us to ensure that humanitarian support can get to people affected by the earthquake, but he is right to raise concerns, and we will of course respond to them.
Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean and Europe
Tommy Sheppard Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
I rise as a member of an Opposition party in this House and in support of a motion that is the collective endeavour of six Opposition parties. I ask the Government Members sitting opposite to consider the approach we are taking this afternoon. It is normally the Opposition’s job to harry and harass the Government, and even to expose and embarrass them, when they get the opportunity to do so. This afternoon we have laid aside those conventions and are not engaging in what is the normal practice in this place.
Instead, we are adopting a different approach. To use an American phrase, we are “reaching out” and trying to find a consensus with Government Members, because on this occasion our desire to see this country make a bigger contribution to the humanitarian effort that is required to face this crisis is greater than our desire to score political points. I ask the Government Members here to reflect on that and consider an appropriate response.
There are now six Conservative Members in attendance, and fewer than 30 have participated over the past four hours. I make that observation not to judge, but to ask them to reflect on whether that is an adequate level of participation and attendance, given the seriousness of the debate. That matters, because when the Division bells ring at 7 o’clock, if 300 of their number come here from their offices and other places in the Palace to vote down the motion in the Lobby, having heard neither the content of the debate, nor the tone with which it has been argued, that will do a disservice to this debate and show contempt for the point we are putting forward. That will reflect very badly on the Government, so I urge Conservative Members not to do that.
There has been much talk about the scale of this crisis, but I still think that many have not quite grasped just what we are dealing with. Since the civil war began in Syria, half the population of 23 million people have had their houses destroyed. Four million of those people are now exiled from their homeland. They are joined by 2.5 million from Iraq, 1.5 million from South Sudan, and many millions of others from other conflicts in the region. There are 9 million people in holding patterns in refugee camps in the middle east. It does not take a mathematician to know that 20,000 can be nothing but a start to tackling that problem, rather than the end point. That is why the motion asks the Government to review that figure, take time and come back in four weeks with a plan to expand it.
Much has been said about the situation in the camps and refugees in Europe; clearly, there is a relationship between the two. The Government are right to consider the question of funding for the camps, because those organising them point to a shortage of funds. There can be no doubt that deteriorating conditions in the camps would be one incentive for people to make the journey into Europe. However, let us not pretend for a moment that well-funded refugee camps in the middle east will be the answer to the crisis that we are facing by itself, because there is a much bigger factor at play that relates to the efficacy of those refugee camps—that is, many of the people who went to them have nowhere to return to. The conflicts that created their situation show no sign of abating. In fact, it is arguable that in some areas, such as Syria, it is going to get worse before it gets better. The homes in which they lived no longer exist. Those communities—those villages and towns—are no longer there. People are now beginning to realise that if they cannot go east they will have to consider going west. That is the powerful driver now at play among the refugee populations in the middle east. Unless we seriously think that the answer to that is to build refugee camps that will hold people for a generation, we need to do an awful lot more thinking about where these people will move on to from the refugee camps.
A lot of people have already taken this decision for themselves. We might well ask what drives a person to take the risks and put themselves and their families into the conditions that we have seen. Why would you even think about getting on a dodgy boat run by a criminal gang where you probably have a one in 20 chance of you and your children drowning en route? Why would you think about being locked into a container and driven for thousands of miles across a continent knowing that you could suffocate in the process? The answer is simple: because the terror in front is not as great as the terror behind. That is why people are driven to take these incredible steps. It is disgraceful for us to get into a situation where our response to the people who have flown that terror and tried to protect their families is to say, “We will not even recognise you in our policy. You stop there, you turn round, and you go back.” As the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) said, that is not an adequate response to the situation. We need a policy that addresses the refugee problem in the round—the people in the camps and the people not in the camps who have now migrated to our continent.
Some Conservative Back Benchers have talked as though the game is to try to prevent the crisis from happening in Europe by containing it in the middle east. I have to say to them that the crisis is already upon us in Europe. It is not only the third of a million people who crossed the Mediterranean this year, but the many hundreds of thousands in the previous few years, that have led us to a situation where we have over 1 million refugees in European Union states looking for a home. It is simply not good enough to turn our back on our European partners and say that we will do nothing about that. We do need to do something about it. I cannot believe that the Prime Minister of this country will go to next week’s meeting of European premiers and say that this country will make no contribution to the plans that Jean-Claude Juncker announced this morning for 120,000 or more permanent resettlements of refugees already within Europe. We have to do something. As I have said, we are not here on this occasion to chastise or berate the Government, but to ask them to take a month to think about this problem and to then come back and lay before this House proper plans to deal with the whole situation.
Mr MacNeil
I heard from the Danish ambassador this lunchtime that last year Denmark—a country the size of Scotland—took 13,000 refugees, 4,000 of whom were from Syria. In the context of what the UK is doing, that shows we could do an awful lot more.
Tommy Sheppard
I agree completely with my hon. Friend. It is worth noting that we are talking about accepting the equivalent of 0.01% of our population as refugees in the face of this crisis, while 25% of Lebanon’s residents are refugees.
My hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) mentioned Alan Kurdi. That image moved the nation’s heart last weekend and has led to a public change of attitude in this country, which is welcome. I concur with my hon. Friend. Is our response to the people who saw that image on their television screens and in their newspapers to say that if that child had not drowned and had survived that journey, he would not be welcome here? Surely we cannot say such a thing with any decency or absence of shame.
I appeal to the Government to think about the manner in which this debate has been conducted and to reflect on and come back with expanded plans. I think that in doing so they will be commended warmly by the people of this country. I think that all of us have been surprised and humbled by the attitude of ordinary people up and down this country. As of the weekend, in just one council ward in my constituency of Edinburgh East, 27 people—probably the equivalent of more than 100 in the constituency as a whole—have rung up to say that they would house a refugee family in their own home, and that was before anybody even asked them to do that. Imagine what the response would be if the Government, local government, the Churches, political leaders and civic leaders said, “Let us rally as a nation and do something to help these people who are in such dire need.” I think that tens of thousands of our citizens would say that we welcome refugees to our country, city and home.