Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz]

It is intense, but I think we can deal with such issues. It is right that in the first wave of enlargement, a million people came, but a lot of those people have returned. We will come on to benefits later, but what upsets people more than anything else is the issue of those who, for example, claim benefits in the United Kingdom—38,000 from the EU—yet their children live in other EU countries. There are simple changes that we could make to satisfy our constituents, because I do not believe that the Romanians and Bulgarians who will come to this country are coming to go on benefits. They are coming to work. The migration process is for that purpose. Last week, the Select Committee had before it the chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee. We specifically asked Sir David Metcalf whether the Government asked him and his committee to conduct research into the number of people coming into this country after 31 December. He specifically said no. He said that they are set their homework by the Government, and the Government did not ask them to do that. I think that that is big mistake. We have estimates of annual migration that vary from 10,000, according to the Bulgarian ambassador; 20,000, according to the Romanian ambassador; and 50,000, according to Migration Watch. We have such problems because the Government were not prepared to ask the very body they established.

[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

On the issue of changing the benefits system, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is difficult to contemplate the Government making changes when, at the moment, they do not even have data on the nationality of individual claimants? Back in January this year, I was told in answer to a parliamentary question that the UK’s benefit payment systems do not record details of claimants’ nationality. The most basic information is not being sought by the Government.

[Keith Vaz]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman; he is absolutely right. That is why we wanted the Migration Advisory Committee to assist.

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[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

The pleasure of serving under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries, is matched only by my joy at listening to the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) when he opened the debate. I was also heartened by the contributions from the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone).

It says a lot that no Liberal Democrat MPs are present to debate this important issue. Not one of them could be bothered to turn up to the debate. They have gone on holiday a day earlier rather than talk about the most important issue on our constituents’ minds. At least the Labour party has one right hon. Member present on the Back Benches, and of course a presence on the Front Bench. There are 16 Conservative Members of Parliament here, because we listen to the concerns of our constituents and we know that this is an important issue.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend agree that perhaps the Liberal Democrats are not here because they know that in the quad—the extraordinary way in which the coalition is run—they have an effective veto? There is no need for them to come, because they know that they have a stranglehold over Government policy.

[Mr Hollobone]

That may well be right. I am sure my hon. Friend agrees that in a debate on a subject of such importance, some Liberal Democrat Members should have been present, not only to tell us their views but to listen to those of other Members of Parliament. Parliament is here to debate such issues, whether we agree with each other or not. By not turning up at all, Liberal Democrats are effectively refusing to engage with this important question.

Let me put my cards firmly on the table. I am not a supporter of our membership of the European Union. I believe that we should leave, and I support the Conservative party’s call for a referendum to give my constituents and others across the land their say about whether we should remain members. It represented a catastrophic loss of confidence in the nation’s future in the 1960s and 1970s that we decided to join the then Common Market, which mutated into the European Economic Community, the European Community and finally the European Union.

An individual would have to be in at least their mid-50s to have been able to take part in the referendum in 1975 on whether we should remain members, so a whole generation of the British public have never had their say on the matter. I am four-square behind the Conservative party manifesto promise to give the British people a say in 2017 on whether we should stay in or get out. I will vote to leave. I do not believe that renegotiation will work. I am not entirely convinced that Her Majesty’s Government will take the renegotiation as seriously as they should, but more or less nothing that could be achieved in the renegotiation would convince me that Britain was better off in the European Union. One reason for that is the cost; our annual membership fee is £10 billion and rising. Over the course of the coalition Government’s term, our total membership subscription will be almost twice what it was under the final term of the previous Labour Government. Our membership fee is simply too expensive. The other big reason why I will vote to leave is the reason we are here today.

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[Mr Ellwood]

The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me, because in trying to make his point, he brackets me. I am trying to say that we should not have these brackets, but unfortunately the way that the arguments often go is that people get shunted, one way or another, into these brackets. I am saying that they are wrong and it does not help the debate about what we are focusing on today, which is immigration and dealing with the prospect of what will happen on 1 January with Bulgaria and Romania. I would like to have a more cognitive debate, a more measured debate, and less one that is based either on fear or emotion. Consequently I apologise to my hon. Friend if in any way he felt offended by what I said.

Managed migration certainly has enormous benefits: for education; for business; and for filling the gaps in the labour market, which have been mentioned already.

[Mr Chope]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Ellwood]

I will just finish this point. However, the key word is “managed”. I am looking around the Chamber and—Ms Dorries, you seem to have changed. [Laughter.] I am looking around the Chamber and I think that we would all agree, bar possibly the Front-Bench spokesmen, that migration has not been managed well, particularly during the last decade.

I give way to my hon. Friend from a neighbouring constituency.

[Mr Chope]

I was going to take up the same point about the issue of “managed” migration. Is not the issue that we face, in dealing with our constituents’ concerns about immigration, that at the moment we as a country are not in a position where we can manage our own borders and decide who can come to our country, and who can stay and receive benefits. Surely we should be emphasising that, as a sovereign country, we should be able to determine these issues ourselves and not have solutions to them imposed on us by the European Union?

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I listened to his contribution earlier too. I was making the point that, during the past decade, huge mistakes have been made—I will discuss them shortly—but now there are measures in place to rectify that situation.

I am honoured to represent Bournemouth East, a wonderful part of Great Britain that very much reflects the national approach to running a liberal, open, free market economy. As a seaside town, we are reliant on both domestic and overseas visitors. We are served by an international airport and we have a university that is internationally recognised as one of the best in the world for digital and creative arts. We attract international businesses. JP Morgan, a US bank, and one of the biggest banks, is the largest employer in Bournemouth; our water company is run by a Malaysian company; our Yellow Buses transport company is French-owned; and, yes, the football club is owned by a Russian. Our tourism sector is huge. We are heavily reliant on overseas workers to do the jobs many British people refuse to do, because the dog’s breakfast of our benefits system has perverse incentives, resulting in people being worse off if they gain part-time employment. That left gaps in the employment market that needed to be filled.

I worry that, unless our debate on immigration is measured, rational and, of course, resolute, the unintended consequence of leaping to solutions, such as those calls we heard today to leave the EU, will damage or possibly kill off genuine international interest in inward-investment opportunities, as well as export prospects and British influence abroad. The perception will prevail—indeed, it will be promoted by other countries that are competing against us—that Britain is not open for business.

We should not forget our heritage and who we are. We are a nation with a rich history of immigration, as my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark), who is sadly no longer in his place, articulated in a previous immigration debate. This island has been invaded, or settled in other forms, by Angles, Jutes and Norsemen in the dark ages, Normans, Jews and Huguenots in the middle ages, Italians and Irishmen in the 1800s and, more recently, people from the Caribbean and the Asian sector, as well. Our monarchy was, on more than one occasion, short of an obvious candidate for the top job, and we invited outsiders to fill that post, such as William and Mary of Orange, for example, or George I, Queen Anne having no surviving children. We need to be honest about our past.

We have also taken more than a shine to emigrating to all corners of the globe in the past 600 years. Britain has prospered, since the war, thanks to expanding trade links with Europe, and British and European security has improved, thanks to Britain championing the case for bringing nations that languished behind the iron curtain into NATO and the EU. We have been one of the strongest supporters of the single market. Naturally, our concerns about Bulgaria and Romania will be repeated when, in due course, Turkey, Ukraine and Bosnia hopefully enter the wider market. It is in our interests that the European market should grow, for all our citizens and businesses to have the opportunity to work in other European countries.

It is no coincidence that our attitude to being international now means that 80% of the cars that we produce are exported, 50% of them into the EU. That would not happen if we did not have the approach to internationalism that we have today.

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[Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) on securing this important debate. I share his frustration at not being able to have a debate on the splendid new clause he has tabled on the Immigration Bill prior to the day of reckoning: 1 January 2014. The Government’s failure to organise such a debate is symptomatic of the causes of much cynicism among the public, because there is a big credibility gap between the politicians—the elected representatives—and our electors, who are absolutely of one mind that we must do something to address the problem. The Government, instead of addressing it and facing up to my hon. Friend’s new clause, have decided to defer consideration until the new year.

Those of us who argue that we should continue with transitional arrangements are finding common cause with Romania’s jobs Minister, Mariana Câmpeanu, who was reported in The Sun on Sunday on 15 December as being concerned that Romania has lost 3 million people since joining the European Union, many of whom are its most able and mobile workers. She said that she could do nothing to stop such people leaving for what she described as a “better life”, but she despaired that this country has a benefits system that discourages our people from working.

The same article, which was drawn to my attention in particular because one of the companies mentioned is based in my constituency, describes British companies going to Bucharest to recruit Romanian workers. The example from my constituency is of a company that goes out to recruit heavy goods vehicle or van drivers, because the HGV and van drivers available in this country are not prepared to do the extraordinary out-of-hours work or the one-off. They are prepared only to work the regular 40-hour week, and Romanian workers are much more flexible. If the Minister is not already aware of it, it is worth drawing his attention to a further complication caused by the driver qualification card, which the European Union now demands that professional drivers possess. Many van and HGV drivers in this country do not have it, and they must go through an expensive safety course in order to get one. In Romania, however, almost all of them have the card. The article quotes a taxi driver who says:

“You only have to drive for 10 minutes to pass the test.”

Such people will come to this country with this EU qualification, which will enable them to access work that our own people will not unless they undergo expensive training.

That is another adverse consequence of our membership of the European Union. The challenge for the Minister is how to solve the problems, which are of such concern to our constituents, if we do not leave the European Union. What is being said at the moment is, “Don’t worry; we’re going to change the rules.” My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) was just saying that the Prime Minister had floated a cap on the number of immigrants. That is the point. He has floated the idea, but he knows that he cannot possibly deliver. If there was any doubt about that, why is it that the European Court of Justice is now considering our habitual residence test, which is a modest control over access to benefits? We might hope that the European Union was moderating its view and becoming more reasonable about our country’s rights to decide who should be able to access taxpayer-funded benefits, but there is no evidence on the ground that that is what is happening. In fact, it is quite the reverse.

Meanwhile, as I heard in this room yesterday when I was in the Chair, our constituents are complaining about numbers of rough sleepers and homeless people, shortages of housing and of school places, particularly in primary schools, and pressure on hospitals. We have heard today about the pressure on the criminal detection and enforcement agencies, because of the propensity of certain groups of Romanians to engage in low-level crime. We have problems with building on green-belt land and so on. So many of these problems are associated with the fact that we are allowing this country’s population to rise far faster and to a greater extent than the people want. We are a small island. We are the most densely populated part of the European Union. Enough is enough. We are now facing large numbers of additional people coming to our country and we can do nothing about it.

Most of the figures are fiddled. When one prepares for a debate such as this, one is normally surprised at the information that comes from the brilliant researchers in our House of Commons Library. I will close by drawing attention to the disparity that they have identified between the number of people estimated to have come from Bulgaria and Romania on one criterion—the one that the Government use—which says that net migration averages at fewer than 10,000 since 2007, and on another, which shows that the increase has been 25,000 a year or 148,000 in total over that period. The helpful Library note also refers to a report from July 2012 by the Office for National Statistics and states that

“there is evidence to suggest that estimates of migration flows between 2001 and 2011 may have underestimated the full extent of international migration.”

When the Government say that they are going to reduce net migration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands, they are using figures that probably underestimate by half the actual extent of that migration. Even those figures are not correct.

In responding to the debate, I hope that the excellent Minister will be able to say how he thinks we can sort out these problems quickly, in line with the wishes of the British people and without leaving the European Union.