Rights of EU Nationals

Matt Warman Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

It is with some trepidation that I rise to speak in this debate; my constituency has seen, proportionally, more EU migration than any other in the country. Drawn by the UK’s relatively high minimum wages, literally tens of thousands of people have come from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere to Boston and to Lincolnshire more generally in search of better lives, more money and greater prospects. They were drawn here by the rights mentioned in this debate. They may not be able to vote for us in this House, but, as I have said here before, we should all be keenly aware that those people are our constituents wherever they were born and whatever passport they hold.

Those new communities are in many cases home to model citizens; head pupils in schools in Boston are now from a diverse range of communities in a way that they were not in previous years. In schools, children show that children treat children equally, whatever their nationality. Done wrong, immigration, wherever it is from, leads to talk of “them” and “us”; done properly, “them” becomes “us”.

Boston’s agricultural economy relies on migrant labour from eastern Europe just as in previous centuries it relied on labour from the midlands, Ireland or Portugal. We have a lower rate of empty shops than the comparable national average because new communities come not just to work in our fields, but to set up their own firms, and to improve their lot. They come to do all that, and they are able to do all that, because of the rights that we are talking about in this debate. Done right, the town benefits from all of this.

When it comes to today’s motion, I hope that Europe will see the benefits that British people bring to the continent and grant them the right to stay after the UK leaves the EU, and then the UK can do likewise. In many ways, Boston and Skegness’s continued economic growth depends on that reciprocity. That basic equality seems to be uncontroversial; it should be straightforward.

I wish to talk a little bit about why there are parts of this country, my own included, where we have got migration badly wrong, making debates such as this too shrill, too partisan and frankly sometimes too difficult to attract genuine contributions. With hindsight, the expansion of Europe to far poorer economies than our own was inevitably going to draw large numbers of people to areas where labour was abundant and very often casual. The Government of the day bungled the figures; we did not see changes coming and we failed to invest in local public services to keep pace with demands for schools, hospitals, GPs, and even housing and roads.

Today, while Boston still needs the bypass that has been on the drawing board for 100 years, schools have caught up but the NHS has not, and that raises tensions and causes debates such as this. No longer required to have a job before travelling to the UK, many people were tempted by inaccurate representations of life in the UK, and found themselves doing desperately hard work in freezing fields before returning home to a rented room unfit for human habitation in which they were allowed to occupy the bed only when it was their turn. Boston’s work in tackling rogue landlords has been rightly lauded in this House, but migration has worsened a problem that the Government should have foreseen. The consequences of those poor housing conditions has led to tensions, such as street drinking, antisocial behaviour and violent crime. Some Bostonians ask what those add to an historic town that was once a port second only to London.

Fast forward to 2016 and Boston is called—wrongly in my view—the least integrated town in the country by Policy Exchange. That report is wrong because it does not measure recent work done on street drinking, rogue landlords, and community integration, but it is talking about a real problem. Some constituents have asked me why everyone should be allowed to stay.

The solution to these issues is not to blindly pretend that every aspect of Boston or Britain is either better or worse for migration. There are a host of opportunities that we must seize and a host of nettles that we must grasp if we are ever to make these debates more sensible. We should depoliticise debates such as this and treat people like people.

I want to close by reading a few comments that were posted on my own Facebook wall. I went to see a superb new agricultural development that will create around 100 new jobs. Underneath the photographs some of my constituents wrote: “We all know who will be filling the labour requirements here”; “We shall see how many locals get a job”; “They don’t employ English. I got told that when I went for a job, so I didn’t even get an application form so it won’t be local people.”

When we get immigration wrong, we divide our country, we divide our towns and we foster radical parties that bring out the worst in good people. We end up having debates such as this. There is no easy way to encourage integration, especially when predominantly young men work in my constituency’s fields, largely in groups from their own countries, and go out in their precious leisure time with little motivation to integrate. But if we are to sensibly conclude debates such as this, we should have a care to those concerns just as much as we do to the rights of migrant workers, whether we are speaking of a Briton in Spain or a Lithuanian in Boston.