Migration Policy and the Economy

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the effect of the Government’s migration policy on the economy.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie, and to see the Minister in her place. We had a crossing of paths in Gloucestershire when she stood as our police and crime commissioner candidate in 2012. She was not successful on that occasion, but Gloucestershire’s loss is very much the House’s and the Home Office’s gain. It is also a pleasure to see the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) here to speak for the Opposition. I will be happy to take interventions from hon. Members and listen to their contributions.

To summarise what I plan to say, my proposition is that migration can be good for Britain if it makes all of us richer, not just the people who have come here to work. It can benefit the public finances and help with the budget deficit, but only if the people coming have sufficient skills and earn a sufficiently high salary. After we have left the European Union, we should treat people who come to Britain from the European Union in the same way as people from elsewhere in the world. Anything else would be indefensible. The system should be based on people’s skills and what they can contribute to the country, not where they are from. That will also make a tremendous difference to our efforts to strike trade deals around the world. That is the nub of my argument; I will now set it out in more detail.

I will talk primarily about migrants who come here to work or to look for work; I will not cover people who come here seeking refugee status, for family reunion or as students, although I will touch briefly on students towards the close of my remarks. I want to be clear that migrants who come to Britain with the right skills are to be welcomed: they come here, they do valuable jobs and they can benefit our economy as well as themselves. However, we should also consider our primary responsibility to the people who elect us to this place and ensure that our migration system benefits not only the people who come here, but the people who are here already.

When we debate the performance of the economy, the measure that we most commonly look at is the growth of GDP—the size of the economy—which has been positive since the Conservatives came to power soon after the economic crash, but we should also look closely at GDP per head, which is the size of the economy adjusted for the fact that there are more people in Britain. Perhaps that is something the Minister can pass on to colleagues in the Treasury. Of course not all population growth is to do with migration, but according to the Migration Observatory, just over half the population increase between 1992 and 2015 was due to migration. That is quite a significant amount. The rest was to do with things such as the ageing population. GDP growth per head in the time that we have been in office is about 0.75% per year lower than GDP growth, and over a considerable period that makes a significant difference to how well off we are. We need to ensure that the people coming here contribute to the extent that they are not just making themselves better off, but increasing GDP per head. It is important to make British citizens better off as well.

I want to flag up how migration relates to the conversation we are having about productivity performance, which has been somewhat disappointing since the financial crash. The Chancellor spent a fair bit of time on that in last week’s Budget, which we voted on last night. I do not want to overstate my case, because the academic research shows that there is no single cause of what some of the academic literature calls the “productivity puzzle”. A lot of bright, smart people—far brighter and smarter than me—are not entirely certain what is at the root of it, but I posit that at least one aspect of productivity is to do with migration.

If we say to businesses that there is effectively an unlimited supply of all different sorts of labour that can come from the European Union and that can be hired relatively cheaply, it does not make much sense for those employers to invest significant capital sums in their business for the latest technology and labour-saving innovations that could help their existing workforce to become and stay more productive. If we were to say to employees that after an appropriate adjustment period that unlimited supply of labour from across the European Union will no longer be available, employers would look at investing capital into their businesses and at different and smarter ways to do things that would improve the productivity of their existing workforce. That would make Britain more competitive and deliver the only sustainable way to drive up wages in the public and private sectors: increasing productivity.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Ind)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Harper]

I give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke).

[Charlie Elphicke]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful argument. Is not the nub of his case that importing cheap labour from overseas disincentivises businesses from investing not just in kit, but in improving the skills of their employees and our workforce?

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. This is a big issue in his constituency of Dover, one of the gateway parts of our country.

It is perfectly right for us to look at what people can pay; we have rules in Britain about paying the national living wage. However, research done by the Bank of England in its staff working paper, “The impact of immigration on occupational wages: evidence from Britain”, concludes that although there is not an impact at the higher end of the skills spectrum,

“in the semi/unskilled services sector…a 10 percentage point rise in the proportion of immigrants is associated with a 2 percent reduction in pay.”

I do not want to overstate it, but there is certainly some evidence that at the bottom end of the labour market, there is an impact on pay. It is also a question of the availability of labour and saying to employers that they need to think about smarter ways of working, not just assume that they can access an unlimited supply of labour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

That may be true, but if the hon. Lady will allow me, I will say more later about what business thinks and about the opportunities that will arise if we make the change I propose. Then, if she does not think I have covered her point, of course she should feel free to intervene.

[Charlie Elphicke]

My right hon. Friend is being generous in giving way. Will he address ensuring that we can end free movement when we leave the European Union and get the right balance with work permits?

[Mr Harper]

Yes, I will come to that.

It is worth saying that Britain’s unemployment rate of 4.3% is relatively low, compared with 7.5% in the EU as a whole and 8.9% in the euro area. Some countries in Europe have unemployment rates of more than 20%. Our record is very positive, and businesses have created 3 million new jobs since this Government have been in power. I am always careful to say that businesses have created the jobs, because it does not happen automatically. Although we can help to create the conditions, it is businessmen and businesswomen who actually take the risks and start the businesses. In this country there are still 1.4 million unemployed people, as well as a number of people not in the labour market, to whom we should give opportunities. I think that addresses my hon. Friend’s point.

When we leave the EU in March 2019, we will leave the single market and the customs union, and freedom of movement will end. The Government were absolutely right to make a generous offer to EU nationals already in Britain who came here before we triggered article 50. We were not able to make that offer unilaterally, because we had to ensure that we protected the 1 million British citizens elsewhere in the EU, since the British Government’s first responsibility is to defend the interests of British citizens, wherever they may be in the world. In the Chamber today, we will debate an Opposition day motion from the Scottish National party that we should unilaterally make an offer to EU nationals, casting aside the essential interests of British citizens elsewhere in the world.

Unaccompanied Child Refugees: Europe

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Thursday 2nd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Stella Creasy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Indeed, we have seen many reports that suggest that that is precisely the case. When there is no safe passage, that does not stop people coming here; it means that the only passage available is through the traffickers, which we know is unsafe.

Today’s debate is about asking the Minister to ensure that we are being the best of British and that we keep these children safe, because we have a moral obligation to do so. Indeed, it is in the best of our traditions. We hear that the French police will not allow NGO tents, meaning that many children are sleeping without any form of shelter at all, including unaccompanied children as young as nine. We want to hold the French authorities to account, but we must also hold ourselves to account for what we are doing to help.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making a typically powerful speech, as befits an award-winning “Backbencher of the Year”—I congratulate her on that. It is important that we put more pressure on the French authorities to behave properly and treat people well, children in particular.

--- Later in debate ---

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Given that I represent Dover, Calais is literally a few short miles across the water. Indeed, I can see Calais from my bedroom window. It is striking, is it not, to think about the conditions there until a year ago? I am delighted by and proud of the campaign that so many of us fought to get the Jungle dismantled. Over time, the numbers there swelled to some 10,000 people. It was a place of appalling squalor, with no sanitation facilities, no running water, no protection from the cold, and nasty, rickety shacks. The Jungle was frankly a lawless place where people traffickers roamed free, exploiting people.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I visited the Jungle at its height. I agree that it was a far from ideal place, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that the conditions in which almost 1,000 refugees are now living around Calais are far worse?

[Charlie Elphicke]

Conditions for anyone who is living outside without food, shelter and water are appalling, but let us remember what the Jungle was like at that time. Ten thousand destitute people lived in a concentrated area. Many of them had been trafficked there by people who were exploiting and preying on them in furtherance of the evil trade of modern slavery, selling the promise of a better life in Britain. In reality, if the traffickers did get them across the border, it almost invariably resulted in them disappearing from view into a life of exploitation, whether working in a nail bar, growing cannabis or being used as a child criminal. We all know that those and other forms of exploitation went on and go on. It is entirely unacceptable.

That was why it was so important to get rid of the Jungle. It was why it was so important that the French authorities were pressed successfully into helping people to get away from Calais into refugee reception centres with food, shelter, water and sanitation, safe from the traffickers who would exploit them and treat them so shockingly.

[Alan Mak (Havant) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a characteristically powerful case. Does he agree that we should commend the efforts of the British police and security services in tracking down and deterring the people traffickers who prey on vulnerable people from Syria and other regions in crisis?

[Charlie Elphicke]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is the central point that I am just coming to.

It was right that we managed to get the Jungle dismantled. It was right that we got so many vulnerable people removed to safer places. It is also right that we have worked tirelessly, on an international basis—Britain, France and countries across Europe—to target the international criminal gangs: the trafficking gangs behind the evil trade of modern slavery and this wicked exploitation.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I dealt with child refugees a long time ago and I have total sympathy for their plight. We have taken about 8,500 people into this country, about half of whom are children. Am I right to assume that all the people who come through that system are tracked, looked after and watched so that they do not just disappear into an underclass?

--- Later in debate ---

[Charlie Elphicke]

I hope that the Minister will address my hon. Friend’s powerful point when he responds to the debate.

We should welcome the fall in the numbers from 10,000 to 1,000, but that is still 1,000 too many. That is why it is right that we keep up pressure on the French Government to do the right thing by acting to ensure that people are not on the streets of Calais. I understand that there are hon. Members who, like me, are deeply concerned about the plight of all refugees across the world. Some 50 million people have been displaced by conflict. We have taken 3,000, but what is the right number of children to take if it is not 3,000? Is it 30,000? Is it 300,000? Should we take all the children from across the whole of Europe or just those who have a connection to Britain?

I think the right policy is that we should do our bit, particularly on reunification. We should hold our heads high for the amount we have been doing across the board, because it is important to remember that we have taken in 20,000 people from Syria directly. That avoids the risk of people making perilous journeys, because many lives have been tragically lost at sea, or as a result of exploitation or mishap, in the journey to Calais. It is also right that we have spent more than £1 billion in aid to provide places of safety close to regions of conflict. It is better to keep people close to their homes and hearts, meaning that they can go home when a conflict ends, rather than in any way to risk incentivising a dangerous journey across the whole of Europe, because we have seen on our television screens how that often ends up in tragedy. We must also remember what we do not see on our television screens: the evil exploitation by traffickers and what they do to these vulnerable and desperate people. That is why I feel so strongly and passionately that we cannot risk a return of the Calais migrant magnet, and that the right thing to do is to help people close to the places of conflict—in theatre. That is why I feel so powerfully that while it is right that we help to do our bit as a country, it is also right that we are strong on Europe and the European Union improving their own border security and the safety of people within their borders. We must make sure that the EU and European countries as a whole do their bit to look after vulnerable people within their borders, as that is their duty and responsibility.

We are doing a lot and we are making a real difference. We have continued to make a real difference across the world. The fact we are helping so much with international aid and development, and in areas close to conflict to keep so many people safe, is something we should be very proud of in this House of Commons. We should also be proud of the work we have done to take vulnerable people into Britain and to reunite families in Britain. If other families can be reunited—if children who have a connection to this country can be brought in, should there be a family in this country with which they should be united—we should do that. There should be a focus on that, so I agree with the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) that we should be looking at reunification of families. However, I do not agree that we can be responsible for all refugees or all children throughout the whole of Europe. We cannot take in every child.

I will tell hon. Members why that is. I get complaints from my constituents in Kent that we have getting on for a quarter of the unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the whole of this country. My constituents are concerned about the pressure on public services that that creates in Kent. It also constrains provision for other Kent residents, which is why it is important that we maintain a sense of balance and fairness. If we are going to be there to care for and to look after these poor children, it is right that we make sure that they are not just left in the county of Kent; the whole country must do its bit. Councils must be encouraged to do their bit to ensure that children are spread across the whole country and that the burden does not fall disproportionately in places such as Kent, which I represent.

Oral Answers to Questions

Charlie Elphicke Excerpts

Monday 16th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Brandon Lewis]

We are working with other countries, which have their own national sovereignty. I was in Italy and Greece over the summer to talk about these programmes, and we are working with the Greek and French authorities to ensure that more children can come over and that we fulfil our duty. Let us bear in mind that when we get to the 480, the United Kingdom will have done more than other European countries, and we should be proud of that.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Will the Minister also look at the distribution of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children? About a quarter of the total are in Kent, but you won’t find many in the metropolitan borough of Wakefield.

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. His county council in Kent is doing some fantastic work, and there are councils around the country making offers to do similar work. It would be good to see more councils coming forward to do that work, and I will be speaking to the Local Government Association this week about that very issue.