Migration

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

As a co-sponsor of the debate, I thank the Backbench Business Committee, and I echo virtually everything said by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden). We debate immigration quite a lot in this Chamber, but mostly the latest disaster or controversial piece of immigration legislation. Occasionally, it would be good to look at how we can fashion immigration policy that suits all of us, in the round and over the long term, in so much as it can.

Perhaps the title of the debate should be “Governments’ policies on migration”, because it is not just about this Government: all Governments have problems with migration. It goes up and down. This is an attempt at a measured debate on an issue where we often do not have measured debates, so I am grateful to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton for starting the debate in a very measured way.

The subject is topical, but when is immigration not topical? The net figure of 606,000 people coming to the UK was recently announced, but it is always a mistake to be guided by a net figure, and it is certainly a mistake to have a net migration target. The problem with a net migration target is that we have control, in as much as we do, over only one side of the equation; we have no control over the number of people who choose to leave. If a Government are running the country so brilliantly that nobody wants to leave, clearly the number of people coming here is going to outstrip the number of people leaving. It is a something of a false figure, which I will come back to in a minute. We know the figure is so high because of certain groups of people who are here for very good reasons.

The latest figures on small boats are catching up with last year’s figures, as we discussed with the Home Secretary at the Home Affairs Committee yet again yesterday. Recent forecasts from Italy predict that 400,000 people will seek to enter Italy from Africa this year, which is four times the level of 2022. Some 80,000 people have entered so far this year, and that figure was from a few weeks ago. Obviously, that will have an impact on the rest of Europe, including the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister recently attended a European Political Community summit in Moldova, which discussed more transnational approaches to migration; we need to see far more such approaches.

Most of us would agree, alas, that the migration system is pretty broken, has been for some time and shows little chance of getting fixed any time soon. It has been largely characterised by a series of short-term crises: a record number of people on small boats coming across the channel; the overwhelming of processing centres such as Manston; the fact that 9,000 of the 15,000 Afghan nationals who were legally, and quite rightly, airlifted from Kabul almost two years ago are still inappropriately housed in hotels; the pressure on hotel accommodation; the shortage of labour in the hospitality industry, the care sector and other areas, which the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton mentioned; the Windrush scandal; and pressure on the Home Office, which is a fairly dysfunctional Department. All of that gets conflated into the single issue of an immigration crisis.

However, the issue is not just about irregular immigration, but about regular migration levels and about how we decide the skills we want, how we hand out those visas —I entirely concur with the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton about the overpricing of visas in many areas—and how we fashion our points system. We need workforce planning and we need to consider the sustainability of how we deal with the increased population, including the pressures on homes for people who have already lived here for some time. The whole sustainability issue and the availability of services is hugely complex.

I want to touch on three main areas: irregular migration, migration policy for planned migration and the global issue, which will probably be the biggest single challenge that we and many other western nations will face.

First, on irregular migration, we know the figures. We know there has been a move to small boats because of the huge success, frankly, of Border Force and British agencies, working with French agencies, around Eurotunnel, ferries and lorries. It is now very difficult to get across the channel covertly in the back of a lorry, which is why people have moved to using small boats. Whatever we think about migration policy—whatever we think about the number of asylum seekers we should or could be taking in this country—paying a people smuggler to cross the busiest shipping lane in the world is the worst possible way to gain access to the United Kingdom. We absolutely must do more to clamp down on it, which is why the Government’s policy, whether controversial or not, is singularly aimed at cutting off that dangerous and criminal supplier.

The first problem is this. We are continuing to subsidise the French police force, to the tune of, now, half a billion pounds, but although they are intercepting more migrants before they get into the boats—the interception rate is now about 54%, which is great—the trouble is that they do not arrest those migrants, they do not detain them, and they are there again the following night and the night after that, with a new boat every time, and they only have to get lucky once. Until we can reach an agreement with the French that they will detain those migrants and scrutinise their status in France itself and then take action, or that if migrants are intercepted in the channel by Border Force or air agencies they can be taken back to France if that is where they started, our problem will remain.

We have not been able to reach an agreement with the French, but there are ways in which progress could be made. Several of us have had discussions with French politicians who see some merit in such an agreement, and I think there are negotiations that could be had, but that is not happening, although it is the long-term, sustainable solution to the problem of the boats. Why would someone pay €4,000 to a people smuggler for what is effectively a round trip, ending up back in France?

Secondly, there is the issue of processing in the United Kingdom, which is far too slow. As we discovered yesterday in the Home Affairs Committee, even given the increase in resources and staff it will take longer than until the end of the year to deal with the legacy backlog, let alone all the people who have come in since June last year. We must become much more efficient. I am glad that the Minister mentioned various new schemes and projects that the Home Office is undertaking, but we need to double up on that; perhaps he will give some more details later.

Thirdly, there is the issue of returns agreements. There are those who think that everything was rosy before Brexit. I am not going to blame Brexit for any of this—indeed, I remain a fan of Brexit—but in the last year of our full membership of the European Union, under the Dublin regulations we attempted to return to the EU 8,500 migrants who did not have a case for being in the UK, and the EU accepted 105 of them; that is 1.2%. So it was not working in the first place, when we were in the EU. Last year, only 215 of the 45,755 migrants who came here irregularly were deported. We have to do a lot better, because we know how problematic it is when certain countries simply will not take back migrants who have left those countries and applied for asylum here.

The whole issue has been discussed ad nauseam in the House of Lords, and will be back in this House next month in the form of the Illegal Migration Bill. There is of course the controversial situation surrounding the Rwanda flights, on which we are expecting a judgment soon. It is an apparently extreme solution, but what else can we do unilaterally if we do not have the agreement of our neighbours to take people back? We know it can be a deterrent, because when the Select Committee went to Calais in January and spoke to many of the officials in charge of the operations there, they said that when the Rwanda scheme was announced there was a big surge in the number of migrants approaching the French authorities about regularising their status in France, because they did not want to risk being put on a plane to Rwanda; but it has not happened yet, so the deterrent effect has subsided. That is why the scheme is so important, controversial though it may be.

I think we should be doing much more—and I have supported cross-party amendments on this in the past—to make better use of the migrants who have come to the UK and are having their claims processed. It is a complete waste of time and labour that they are not allowed to work in a properly organised way, certainly after a few months here, when we have so many labour shortages.

Then there is the foreign aid issue. It annoys me when we are accused of being far less generous than other countries in granting asylum claims, when last year France had something like 150,000 asylum applications—more than this country—but granted only a third of them. They were much tougher; indeed, many European countries do not accept any asylum applications from Albania at all. The Committee has just produced a report asking why on earth we should be taking so many Albanian asylum applications, other than in, say, trafficking cases.

This country also has one of the most generous foreign aid programmes, which supports refugees closer to the homes from which they have had to flee, as any of us who have been to places such as the Zaatari camp in Jordan will know. At one stage there were 85,000 Syrian refugees there, and we were one of the biggest donors to the camp. Something like 90% of the children there were receiving an education in schools that were funded by our taxpayers, and that were often staffed by teachers from Britain or those trained by British authorities. Those people just wanted to go back to Syria as soon as it was safe to do so, rather than come to the UK or another European country, so we should always consider the huge number of refugees we support overseas, no less generously than we do those for whom it is more appropriate to come to the UK.

We have to decide what sort of immigration system we want—who we want coming into the country—now that we have the power to fashion our own policy more than we did when we were part of the European Union. Of the 606,000 net who came to the UK last year, 174,200 were from Ukraine. Nobody is going to argue with the merits of that. Some 160,700 were from Hong Kong. Again, most people would see a justified case for that. I fear, as somebody who has been sanctioned by China and knows a little more about this, that that number will only rise. There is a big Hong Kong Chinese population in this country. They are more easily assimilated through existing links—family links and others—they tend to be very entrepreneurial, setting up businesses after studying here, and they really add to the economic prospects of this country.

Then there are the 155,000-plus dependants who came in—largely Indian nationals—and the many dependants who came on the back of foreign students. Is that where we should be prioritising an increase in population? We want foreign students to come to this country. We want them to study successfully here and then perhaps stay successfully here, contributing to the economy, setting up businesses and, with their expertise and skills, adding to the UK economy, but are valuable places in our creaking infrastructure being taken up by the dependants who seem to come with them? The Government are now looking at that issue.

We must also recognise that we have a very varied workforce, and that is a good thing. Some 20% of the UK workforce was born abroad, and that figure is likely to rise. That is a good thing, as long as we can integrate, and sustain and provide services and employment for everybody to benefit from, but we do have problems. Some 45,000 seasonal farm workers have been brought into this country, and that figure has increased, but we still have a shortfall of 40,000. We have a problem with our own British citizens working in the rural economy. Only 8,000 British citizens signed up for the Pick for Britain campaign jobs. We have a million job vacancies in the United Kingdom. We need to have a grown-up debate about how we fill those vacancies, because surely we want people who will do those jobs well and are appropriate for them. They are going to earn, pay tax and contribute to the economic wealth of the country.

Germany is desperately trying to recruit graduates and blue-collar workers under its points-based system. The trouble is that that is taking a lot of skilled health workers from places such as Albania, which is making Albania less and less sustainable, as the economy collapses in that country. Canada wants 1.5 million more migrants by 2025, and South Korea is bringing in 110,000 lower-skilled migrants.

In this country we completely fetishise the numbers. For me, it is not just about the numbers, although the numbers have to be sustainable—I know there are big pressures on housing, particularly in the south-east of England, in my part of the world—but it is really about control. It is about making sure that we welcome the people who are most appropriately accommodated in this country and who can most contribute to the well- being and economic prospects of this country. It is about controlling who comes here, rather than just raw numbers.

The last consideration is the global context, because the problem, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, is that 19 countries are facing the highest number of ecological threats over the next 30 years. A total of 2.1 billion people live in countries that lack the resilience to deal with the expected major ecological changes over the next 30 years, and a large proportion of them are from sub-Sahel Africa, from countries that are among the most unstable and have some of the highest birth rates.

Those people are on the move. The birth rate in European countries, Japan and elsewhere is falling, so we have to decide what will be the long-term future of global migration. We can only do that in collaboration with other countries. Do we want African countries to thrive and to have economies that can sustain their own population and that can adapt to take advantage of climate change by generating energy, or whatever it may be? Can we invest in some of those countries, or will we see people increasingly coming to these shores? How would we deal with that?

Mr Deputy Speaker, I am sure you would like me to shut up now, but this is a hugely complex situation that requires a long-term plan and a long-term vision, in collaboration with our neighbours. Without that, we risk going from one crisis to another, and nobody benefits from that.

[Several hon. Members rose—]