UK Population Growth

Debate between Baroness Neville-Rolfe and Lord Green of Deddington

Monday 4th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The projections do not break the individual categories down in that way. They are, as the noble Lord probably knows, put together by expert panels and they are projections. They look quite a lot at the last 10 years, as well as at what else might be happening. I emphasise the point that they do not attempt to account for the impact of future policy changes.

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, the figures show that immigration will account for 92% of our population increase in the next 15 years. That is five times the population of Birmingham, our own second-largest city. Furthermore, in the 20 years since the 2001 census, the Muslim population of England and Wales has more than doubled from 1.6 million to 3.9 million. These are very large numbers and, if that rate were to continue, it would surely have a considerable impact on social cohesion. When will the Government face up to the situation and take effective action to reduce the scale of immigration, which is having such a massive, unspoken impact on our society?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord. As I have explained, the Government are clear that the immigration figures are too high and have taken a series of actions, including stopping care workers bringing dependants, limiting the dependants coming in as the families of non-PhD or research-based students, changing the minimum income for family visas and increasing the earnings threshold. These changes will take time to have an effect, but the noble Lord is of course right to point to the changes that have happened over the last few years and produced an unacceptable situation.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Baroness Neville-Rolfe and Lord Green of Deddington

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 30th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, this amendment is in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, and my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, and I express my warm appreciation for their support. I leave it to others to speak to other amendments in this group.

It is a great pleasure to open the Report stage of this important Bill. I start by thanking my noble friend the Minister for her recurrent courtesy and helpfulness and for the full answers that she gave in Committee to most of the technical questions that I posed.

I always believe that enforcement of the law is as important as the laws themselves, so the key question is why the enforcement of UK national Immigration Rules has been so spectacularly unsuccessful for many decades under Governments of all parties. Perhaps surprisingly, it is if anything becoming even less successful. Part of the story is well set out in the Public Accounts Committee report published since the noble Lord, Lord Green, referred to its work in Committee. The PAC is a respected cross-party collection of the brightest and most experienced MPs. It is a devastating report, published as recently as 14 September. I quote from paragraph 4:

“We heard that the Department does not know how many people are living or working in the UK without permission, and the Department admitted its frustration at not knowing this figure.”


Put simply, many people come here for reasons that do not entitle them to enter the country and if they are formally found not to be entitled to be here, the authorities are unsuccessful in removing them in a large proportion of cases. I am referring to tens of thousands of people. Also very disturbing is the gradual increase in numbers coming across the channel in rickety boats and tiny inflatables, dodging the big ships, whenever the weather allows. In 2020 the recorded number is well over 5,000, which is more than double the 2019 figure. As I said in Committee at the beginning of this month, 416 migrants exploited fine weather to make the crossing in one day, arriving all along the south coast. Migrants are risking, and in some cases losing, their lives because the authorities are known to be useless at enforcing the law, and the biggest beneficiaries are the traffickers.

Late legal challenges are also undermining efforts to remove migrants who have no right to remain, with flights that are cancelled and then bad headlines that encourage yet more attempts to enter the UK illegally. The public are bemused. Why cannot we, like the vast majority of countries in the world, implement our own rules effectively? It is a major scandal, though a reader of the parliamentary reports of discussions in this House would need to be very alert to detect it.

My proposal is quite simple. Since the Government—indeed, as I explained, many Governments of different persuasions for a very long time—have not managed to fulfil their obligations satisfactorily in this respect, I suggest that they be put on report, literally. Given the unsatisfactory record, we should not allow matters to dip below the radar. We need to have the facts before us and have a light shone upon them, giving the Government every opportunity to explain regularly how they are making the progress that most of the country wants.

Of course, we all have individual cases where we want to see generous Immigration Rules and enforcement—staff for our businesses or domestic workers, attracting lower wages than we might pay to British equivalents; reliable-looking tenants; or daughters-in-law awaiting visas—but the aggregate is very damaging to the public trust, as we have seen in the north of England. The fact that it is easy to travel across the world very cheaply nowadays attracts many people who want to live and work in the UK. They come because we make people from everywhere welcome in our society; have strong, well-enforced laws on equality and modern slavery; and provide generous education, healthcare and housing for migrants as well as to natives. The pull factor is huge, putting pressure on enforcement and compliance with the law.

We heard in Committee about the work of the Migration Advisory Committee. It produces reports but its prime focus is on the appropriate level of migration from an employer point of view and to improve our labour market. It does not have, and does not see itself as having, a brief to advise on the scale of illegal immigration; nor are its members experts on the level of compliance with Immigration Rules, the effectiveness across the agencies involved, value for money or overall expenditure and resourcing in this important area. I believe that a report could fill that gap. Indeed, the Minister might want to consider the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in Committee and ask the MAC, from its expert perspective, to recommend improvements to the policing of the immigration system.

Given the awkward history of enforcement, which I have to say goes back to my own time in home affairs at Downing Street in the 1990s, I can well believe that our proposal for a report six months after the passage of the Bill might seem unpalatable to Ministers and their civil servants, who are all trying to do their best. However, I urge them to consider our proposal afresh. The Government publish many reports every year; I agreed to a number of reports in Bills over the years as a Minister, and they are currently being suggested in this House in respect of both trade and agriculture. The requirement need not necessarily be provided in this Bill but a legislative requirement would provide a useful element of parliamentary scrutiny. It would make effective action more likely and help the Secretary of State to do a better job. The report could be repeated subsequently to see how successful measures had been. We would certainly revisit a report of that kind in the private sector, where I have spent many years. I very much look forward to hearing from my noble friend the Minister. I beg to move.

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am glad to support this useful and well-timed amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. As she has so clearly described, enforcement has long been one of the weakest points in our immigration system. Despite that, it has faced an 11% real-terms reduction in its budget since 2015-16. The Home Office says that it

“continually looks for ways to reduce costs, so as to improve efficiency and deliver better value … for taxpayers.”

However, as the noble Baroness mentioned, since our Committee stage the Public Accounts Committee has published its report on immigration enforcement. It pointed out that the returns of those who have no right to be in the UK are “plummeting”. The report also criticises the Home Office for having provided the public with no information at all about the scale of illegal immigration for 15 years and points out that the Home Office

“failed to complete 62% of the returns it planned from immigration detention in 2019, compared to 56% in 2018.”

This may of course reflect the ever more strident behaviour of the legal arm of the immigration lobby, some of whom use late and sometimes spurious asylum claims to frustrate removals. Nevertheless, the performance of the Home Office can hardly be described as “better value for money”. Recent official statistics reveal that the number of failed asylum seekers who are subject to removal has doubled from 20,000 in 2014 to over 40,000 now. Clearly, more resources must be diverted to the task of removal, and those resources must be more efficiently targeted and implemented with determination.

Let me also make this point: it is important that the officials themselves should feel supported by the public, as indeed they are. We should avoid constant negative criticism—I hope that I have not done too much of it—as these officials are carrying out an important and difficult task. They need and deserve to be affirmed. After all, they are following due process and enforcing the rule of law, thus making an important contribution to the order that we cherish as part of our civil society. A report to Parliament on enforcement following up on the PAC report, as proposed in this amendment, would be a valuable next step.

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[Lord Green of Deddington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, in Committee, the Minister quoted extensively from the Migration Advisory Committee. She said that the MAC had reported that it was “sceptical about how effective” the labour market test would be in giving settled workers the first opportunity to fill jobs—I think she just mentioned that again. She went on to quote the MAC saying,

“We think it likely that the bureaucratic costs of”—


a labour market test—

“outweigh any economic benefit”.

Her third quote was that the MAC thought it

“important to have protection against employers using migrants to under-cut UK-born workers.”

It continued:

“The best protection is a robust approach to salary thresholds and the Immigration Skills Charge”. —[Official Report, 9/9/20; col. 844.]


Those are the technicalities.

I have checked those quotations. They came from the MAC final report on EEA migration in the UK, dated September 2018. This report specifically recommended that there should be no change in the £30,000 general salary threshold that was in effect at the time—yes, no change. So those quotations have clearly been stripped of their original context.

If the Government are now keen to invoke the MAC, they might wish to note the committee’s previous findings. In February 2012, it said that increasing exemptions from the labour market test would mean:

“Resident employees stand to lose out from increased labour market competition.”


Again, in 2015, it said that the labour market tests

“help protect the domestic workforce from being displaced or replaced by migrant workers”.

Whatever it said most recently and in whatever context, it has clearly consistently recognised the impact of a labour market test. In the light of those previous recommendations and the lack of any subsequent detailed work by either the MAC or the Home Office to consider the potential displacement impact, the complete abolition of the labour market test is of considerable concern.

The context in which these proposals are now being considered, of rising unemployment, which a number of noble Lords have mentioned, and increasing youth unemployment, surely requires the Home Office to commission some serious analysis before implementing what could be a drastic step.

Further, the MAC, and worse still the Government, completely ignore the fact that widespread concerns about the abolition of the test are not just about economics. Other noble Lords have mentioned the importance of fairness. These matters are about fairness and perceptions of fairness. That explains why, as I mentioned in Committee, 77% of the public believe that employers should prioritise the hiring of UK workers.

At this point, I should like to recall that this amendment was powerfully supported in Committee by the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, both basing themselves on their experience of these matters at very senior levels of industry.

It is now obvious that the Government are struggling to justify a complete failure to give British workers an opportunity even to apply for jobs that are to be offered overseas. What this comes down to is whether the Government are going to cave in to the convenience of business or give British workers a fair chance. Which is it to be? Or have they already decided against British workers?

Finally, I notice that both the Labour and Liberal Democrat spokespersons avoided taking a view on this matter in Committee. They seemed to be unsighted. Perhaps they will take the opportunity of Report to clarify their positions. I beg to move.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment, to which I have added my name. Indeed, of the three proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Green, this is the one I have most hope of the Government accepting, in the context of the narrow EU-EEA focus of the Bill. I find it extraordinary that we should be thinking of dropping the long-standing requirement that jobs be advertised in the UK before overseas recruitment takes place. This will encourage employers, especially big employers, to recruit overseas without even trying the home market. We already have the benefit of the pool of 3.8 million or so EU citizens who have applied for the EU settlement scheme. Thanks to coronavirus, UK jobs are being lost everywhere, from the high street to our wonderful arts and entertainment industries.

In earlier discussions, defending the decision to dispense with the labour market test and the 28 days of domestic advertising it lays down, the Minister put a lot of emphasis on the salary thresholds and the immigration skills charge. I am not against the points-based system, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, seemed to suggest; however, with my experience of a number of industries, I think the thresholds look much too low, especially post-Covid. The skills charge has to be set against the recruitment fees that might have to be paid in the more demanding UK market. I appreciate, of course, that there will be scope to flex these numbers going forward—that seems to be what the Minister has been saying—however, I think this particular change is especially unwise.

While I do not rule out special arrangements for agriculture, mentioned earlier by my noble friend Lord Naseby, and for health workers—although the latter steals training and talent from countries that sometimes badly need it—we need our jobs to go to the home team wherever possible. We need a mechanism to encourage training, especially in the social care sector, which is crying out for suitable people, as my noble friend Lord Horam explained so eloquently in relation to Amendment 3. We are embarking on a skills revolution in the UK, and a jobs-first pledge, by advertising at home, should be part of our prospectus.

As I have said before, I am puzzled that trade unions such as USDAW, who I have worked so well with and who have done such a fine job in retail, are not strongly supporting the retention of some form of labour market test.

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[Lord Green of Deddington (CB) [V]]

Noble Lords will be glad to hear that this is the last of my amendments. I realise that I have not declared my non-financial interest as president of Migration Watch UK, but I think that that is very well known in the House.

I retabled this amendment because the prospects for young British workers are getting substantially worse as the Covid crisis intensifies, yet the Government seem to be set on a policy that can only make matters even worse for this very important section of our workforce and, indeed, our society. I just cannot understand how they feel that they can brush this matter aside.

The Minister sent a letter to all Peers on 15 September after the second day of Committee. In it she said that, although some of the questions raised in the debate were outside the scope of the Bill—which they were—she has sought to answer them as fully as possible, and I am grateful for that. The annexe to that letter set out the current arrangements for the new labour market entrants from overseas so as to allow noble Lords to “compare and contrast” them with the new proposals. Unfortunately—I say this with care—the effect of this is unintentionally, I am sure, misleading.

The document provides extracts from the current rules that appear to show that new entrants can already be admitted at a similar low-salary level to that proposed with the rather clear implication that little will change. However, no mention is made of at least two fundamental changes that would indeed make a clear difference.

First, the new proposals will allow not just graduates to come and earn £20,000 or so a year, as at present; they will also allow young migrants to come to do A-level jobs for the same money, thus enormously increasing the numbers of those—from all over the world—for whom £20,000 for an A-level job will indeed be an attractive salary. One could perhaps add that many will have families already here who will encourage them and that this can lead to settlement. However, the Government’s own impact assessment states:

“Setting the new entrant salary threshold at 30 per cent below the experienced threshold is estimated to reduce salary thresholds for 55 high-skilled occupations but increase it for 16 high-skilled occupations.”


Secondly, I stress again that there will be no cap under the points-based system; that is quite clear at the moment—they are not putting in a cap. Therefore, the numbers of young people recruited will be constrained only by employer demand. Furthermore, the removal of the labour market tests means that employers can go abroad directly, whether or not willing candidates might be available in the UK. Noble Lords might remember that, some years ago, a factory in Northampton that makes sandwiches brought in a plane of 250 people to work there; they were not necessarily young workers, but they were brought in en masse. I checked later with the Minister responsible and found that that firm had not even been in touch with the local jobcentre.

That is just one example of the way employers have brought in—and could well do so in the future under the new conditions—significant numbers of young workers who would directly take the jobs of our own young workers. Therefore, taken as a whole, the annexe to the noble Baroness’s letter, although described as a response, does not actually answer any of the points I raised. Rather, it confirms that the position is in fact very much as I described it.

In a nutshell, this is a wholesale revision of the so-called new entrant route, to the considerable disadvantage of our own young people. I had hoped that it would be called out in the responses from the Opposition Front Benches, but I have no great hope of that in the light of what they have just been saying. Therefore, I await the Minister’s response again, and I beg to move.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to this amendment, with which I have much sympathy. It seems surprising that we are offering a new entrant route, allowing employers to pay a third less than the headline rate, particularly as those with A-levels will now be able to come in as well as graduates, as the noble Lord, Lord Green, has just explained.

As a businesswoman with experience in quite a number of sectors, the going rates for the points-based system already look low and are likely to make overseas migrants attractive. That is especially true for the various professionals in the paper that my noble friend the Minister has helpfully circulated. That would be good news, for example, for US banks and legal firms in London, which should be employing local talent and not necessarily bringing it in from abroad.

Moreover, I think that the coronavirus will have had a dampening effect on some wage rates, so I think these numbers may already be out of date and, of course, it is important, as the Minister said, that the MAC keeps them under review very regularly. I hope I am wrong, but everybody has been saying that the tsunami of the coronavirus is likely to change the labour market.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Baroness Neville-Rolfe and Lord Green of Deddington

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 9th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, Amendment 26 is tabled in my name and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, who regrets that he cannot be present to speak to it.

This amendment is absolutely central to our future immigration regime. It calls for an annual limit on work permits that would be granted to EU, EEA and Swiss nationals. Like other amendments, it is confined to these nationals for technical reasons; that is, what the Bill purports to deal with. However, in practice, any such limits applied to EU workers would have to be extended in some form to the rest of the world. The amendment is central because, in the absence of a cap on work permits, the numbers granted could run very rapidly out of control

This is for three reasons. First, a very large number of UK jobs will be open to new or increased international competition. We estimate that the number is of the order of 7 million. Secondly, the number of potential applicants is huge. We made a careful estimate but one confined just to the 15 main countries outside the EU which have been producing work permit applications in the past. That produced—wait for it—nearly 600 million people who would qualify for a work permit, provided that they have the required level of English, although that level has not yet been specified. From the EU, a further 50 million or 60 million people would also technically meet the requirements. Of course, they are obviously not all going to come, but the point is that a large number of people are in the age group with the qualifications that are required. Thirdly, there would be a great incentive for employers to go for cheap, competent, non-unionised workers, as indeed we saw when east European workers were allowed to come to Britain with no transition period.

It is astonishing that the Government should continue on a path devised long before Covid-19 came over the horizon and to do so just as millions of our fellow citizens are facing the prospect of unemployment. I remind your Lordships that net migration was back at record levels when we went into lockdown. The Government say that the present cap on numbers will be “suspended”, but it could well take time to restore the cap, especially as they would face heavy pressure from business. Surely it would be much better to start with a cap and adjust it in the light of circumstances.

Finally, I note a most interesting and courageous speech by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, at Second Reading. He said that he does not believe that the proposed system will provide any control. He described it as a

“staging post in a very unstable situation with regard to immigration in the future.”—[Official Report, 22/7/20; col. 2258.]

He is absolutely right and, as I say, he is also courageous. To put it in a nutshell, the Government are heading for a car crash on immigration, and they would be wise to act soon to avoid it. I beg to move.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 26 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, as well as in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts. It is an honour to be associated with—and indeed, sandwiched in the Marshalled List between—two such experts in the field of immigration and demography. Their untiring, perceptive and long-term thinking was reflected in their startling contributions at Second Reading and which, as has been said, were echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis.

This amendment calls for a limit on the total number of EU, EEA and Swiss migrants coming into the UK for employment in each calendar year. I believe that we should go further and apply a cap to all such immigration from all countries, perhaps with specific separate guest worker schemes for agriculture and health workers. There is clearly a serious risk, as the noble Lord, Lord Green, has just explained, of the numbers getting very large indeed if we do not control immigration more directly, and of course if we do not enforce the laws properly.

Effectively leaving the numbers of migrants to the whim and interests of employers, as now proposed, is unnecessarily risky. It would also make it impossible to plan properly for the additional houses, schools and health and transport facilities we would need. The new lower salary thresholds designed to help employers, combined with the apparent attraction of the UK as a place to live and work—as evidenced, sadly, in the channel every day—would result in ever greater numbers of arrivals, especially from third countries outside the EEA.

We need as many jobs as possible for those already in the UK, particularly with the chill winter we must expect following Covid-19, and a greater incentive for employers to train in the skills we need. We are a small island; we need to be careful about the numbers and nature of the people we welcome here. Otherwise we will feel the consequences, including at the ballot box. We have to get this right.

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[Lord Green of Deddington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 27, which is also in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, and the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, who unfortunately cannot be present.

The purpose of this amendment is to restore the clumsily termed “resident labour market test” or, in plain English, to oblige employers to advertise a job first in the UK before recruiting on the international market. This labour market test has been in place for decades and for good reason—namely, to give British workers a fair opportunity to apply for jobs as they arise. Employers did not like this test, because they claimed it involved expense and delay. The Government appear to have caved in, despite the fact that the Migration Advisory Committee has long been critical of some employers for failing to invest in training UK recruits.

It is truly astonishing that, with unemployment heading for several million, there could be any suggestion this requirement be abolished. The public share this view. Opinion polling in May this year found that 77% of the public believe that the Government should ensure employers prioritise the hiring of UK workers rather than turning to more overseas recruitment. Only 8% want to make it easier to hire more people from abroad. I hope the Opposition Benches will take the same view and that the reasonable, indeed fully justified expectations, of British workers will be respected. I beg to move.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment, to which I have added my name.

To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, I want to see more housing, both to help existing UK citizens and to help legal migrants. As noble Lords will recall, I made this point in my Oral Question yesterday. I want arrangements prioritising migration of skilled and scarce workers, but which allow the nation to plan for their housing, GP surgeries, hospitals and schools, the pressure on which is making people angry. This includes Scotland, if you listen to the figures from the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington.

It is particularly extraordinary that we should be thinking of dropping the long-standing requirement that jobs should be advertised in the UK before overseas recruitment occurs. This will encourage employers—especially big employers—to recruit overseas, sometimes without even trying the home market. We already have the benefit of 3.7 million or so EU citizens who have applied for the EU settled status scheme. Due to corona- virus and digital change, employment on the high street and elsewhere is, sadly, falling.

While I do not rule out special arrangements for agriculture and for health workers, we need our jobs to go to the home team wherever possible, whether in engineering, restaurants or universities. That is particularly the case in the wake of Covid-19. Advertising at home first seems a small price for employers to pay. Frankly, I am puzzled that the trade unions are not strongly supporting this.