Yemen

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Mark Reckless

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. It is important that all neighbouring countries that have any influence over the various parties involved in Yemen should exert that influence to encourage the warring factions to come back to the table. I hope that Iran will heed that advice, so that we can move towards getting the partnership agreement back in place.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)]

The right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) showed considerable personal courage in visiting Yemen, as do our ambassador and her diplomatic staff and the other UK nationals there. Will the Minister visit Yemen if the security situation allows?

Police Federation Reform (Normington Report)

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Mark Reckless

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I pay tribute to many of my colleagues for their comments. The words “change” and “reform” have been used a lot in this debate and I want to focus not on specific events, but on how the force needs to evolve. The Police Federation is made up of different levels, including constables, sergeants and inspectors, who make up the majority of the police force. If change is to come about, they must embrace it.

In a fast-changing world, I think we would all call ourselves reformers, but there are, perhaps, two kinds: those who want reform and those who want reform but not now. I wonder which category the Police Federation falls into. If we observe any major traffic incident, we will see that the efficiency and ease with which all three of our blue-light services work together—the gold-silver-bronze command structure—is extremely impressive. However, if the incident is more complex and involves other agencies or wider geographical areas—such as the tragedies at King’s Cross, the events at Buncefield, the 2007 floods and the 7/7 terrorist attacks—an altogether more complicated wiring diagram is relied upon, which attempts to link together organisations, agencies and Government Departments by using complex processes and protocols that have been built over decades, but that urgently need to be updated. They are so embedded that successive Governments have been reluctant to address them.

The Police Federation must appreciate that there are cultural and technical shortcomings that affect the ability of different constabularies to work together and with other agencies. Even today, different voice procedures are used in the 43 constabularies in different parts of the country. When Cobra sits, decision making is swift, as we have seen over the past few days, but when it breaks there are 43 separate police forces, 46 separate fire services and hundreds of local authorities running separate independent local resilience forums without any formal co-ordination from above.

We can all be very proud of the London 2012 Olympics. It was the largest and most complex event the nation has ever hosted and it was incident free, thanks to the years of preparation for a time-limited event and the additional resources and structures that have now largely been dismantled. The federation needs to appreciate that. I hope it will start to appreciate that there are strategic, operational and financial efficiencies to be gained from not only simpler and stronger ministerial leadership, but the streamlining of policy formulation and unambiguous inter-agency operational command at both national and local levels.

The federation recognises and is in fact involved in the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme, designed to improve joint doctrine. The federation must appreciate that if a forum such as JESIP needed to be created, there is something wrong with the way in which our emergency services work together. Given the types of natural and man-made threats we now face, it is time to overhaul our resilience capability, from the local resilience forums—the basic emergency decision-making units found in every county—all the way to Cobra at the top.

[Mark Reckless]

Will my hon. Friend explain what specific role he sees the Police Federation playing in assisting that process?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) answers that, may I say to him that this debate is about the Normington report on reform of the Police Federation and that the debate on the police was yesterday? He needs to focus on the Normington report and not every so often in a sentence say, “Police Federation,” to make himself in order.

Immigration (Bulgaria and Romania)

Debate between Tobias Ellwood and Mark Reckless

Thursday 19th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to work under your chairmanship today, Ms Dorries.

I am delighted to participate in this important debate. It has been very interesting so far and I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in response to many of the points that have been made. However, a myth can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on, so I welcome the opportunity this debate gives to add some facts and figures, and indeed corrections, to some of the quite barmy assumptions that have been made in the wider debate—not necessarily here today—that then get repeated and seem to gain credence.

I wish to challenge a couple of the points that have been made already today. My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell), who is no longer in his place, suggested that we should adopt Switzerland’s immigration policy, or that our relationship with the EU should be that of Switzerland. Well, read any of the Swiss newspapers or visit Switzerland, and guess what the key issue is for the Swiss? It is immigration, and the numbers of immigrants into that country are proportionally much higher than they are for the UK.

The right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) is also no longer in his place; I do not know why people decided to depart just as I got to my feet. He made some interesting points about jobs. That issue needs to be clarified, because it is very much the case that Romanians and Bulgarians can work here. First, they have the right to travel here visa-free and, secondly, they can indeed work here, whether they are self-employed, have particular expertise—as doctors, nurses and so forth—or participate in agricultural work. There are restrictions in place, of course, for temporary work permits, and there are quota schemes, to allow low-skilled workers to come here too. I understand that the biggest group of foreign nationals who helped to build the Olympic stadium actually came from Romania. Apparently, there were more Romanians working on that stadium than people of any other nationality.

[Mr Joe Benton in the Chair]

I am not arguing that more or fewer Romanians and Bulgarians should come here. I am simply saying that this important aspect of the debate on immigration needs to be considered in a sensible and measured way. We need to have a policy that is not determined by fear. I genuinely worry that the debate around immigration—to mention this is to slip slightly into a bigger debate on whether we should be in or out of the EU—has become very binary. It is the little Englanders, if you like, versus the multicultural open-door approach, but I would argue that in many cases that does not apply, by any stretch of the imagination.

[Mark Reckless]

First, little Englanders versus the multilateral open-door people—I do not know if the hon. Gentleman puts himself in the second category, but if he does I wonder if it more a sign of his own narcissism than anything else.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

Again, I am invited to wander away from the debate about immigration, into the wider, albeit important, debate about the virtues of the EU. What would happen if we went down my hon. Friend’s route and left the EU? If he thinks for a second that the countries remaining in Europe would leave tariffs as they are or allow us to have similar tariffs to Switzerland, and so on, he is wrong. We would then be seen as the competition and France would be first to say, “Let’s make it tougher for Britain to participate or trade with us.” That is exactly what would happen.

There is a notion that we can somehow say no to the EU or park the matter to one side and look to the emerging markets. Let us take one huge example. We tried to sell the Eurofighter to India, a close Commonwealth country, but it went with the French Rafale aircraft instead. It is not so simple to say, “Let’s ignore the EU” and suddenly embrace the Commonwealth, which we anticipate would have closer relationships with us.

[Mark Reckless]

Of course, my hon. Friend’s example may reflect the wisdom or otherwise of naming products we are trying to export with the “Euro” prefix. More worryingly, it is preposterous to say that tariffs would go up, when Germany sells more to us than it does to any other country in the world, including France. The EU is treaty bound to negotiate a free trade agreement with any state that needs it.

[Mr Ellwood]

I do not think the name of the aircraft was the precursor of the deal falling through or the reason why it did so. I could have said “Typhoon”, as my hon. Friend is aware.

The majority would agree with the approach that I have spelled out, but fundamental flaws, out-of-date practices and British schoolboy errors have allowed a scale of migration into the UK over one decade that is incomparable with the spikes in migration on this island in all its history, as I mentioned earlier. That is what concerns my constituents and those of other hon. Members.

Let us look at some of those mistakes. Like other hon. Members, I am sorry that there are now no Labour Back Benchers—[Interruption.] I am sorry; apart from the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), who was not here at the beginning, there are none here to put the case. And there is not a single Lib Dem here, either.

Under Labour, in 2004, there was a deliberate policy of uncontrolled migration, resulting in more than 1 million people coming from central and eastern Europe, who now live here. Why? Because the UK completely opted out of the transitional controls on new EU member states. Britain was the only country to do so, ignoring the right to impose a seven-year ban before new citizens could come and work here. We were almost all alone in Europe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. Aside from the administrative errors, pressures on housing, benefits and health services, and so on, as he implies, the scale of migration in the last decade has challenged the very Britishness of some communities—what defines us: our values; our culture; who we are. Of course, that is an evolving thing and measured migration can be absorbed into it, but when overloaded—when diasporas move here on such a large scale—there is such an impact that it can be unmanaged, in that sense, and have a negative impact on those who are already here.

Let us not slip away from what Labour did in the last decade that was so wrong. It introduced eight Acts of Parliament, but it had no control over immigration despite those and illegal immigrants were free to abuse our state services. Migration from non-EU member states also increased during that time. Indeed, twice as many came from non-EU countries as EU countries. I hope that the Minister will confirm that that is so.

In the five years leading up to the economic downturn—this is the real message—more than 90% of the increase in employment was accounted for by foreign nationals. We were creating jobs in this country and giving them to people from overseas. That cannot be right. To put that another way, one in 10 new jobs was given to a British person. I am pleased to say that that is not the case today with the 1.1 million new private sector jobs that have been created. To compound matters, employers targeted eastern European countries, to pay less than the minimum wage. In 2009, for example, 2,000 firms were fined for doing this. Thanks to stricter rules, that figure has now fallen.

Another area of abuse was student visas, and we felt the impact in Bournemouth too. Bogus students were attending bogus colleges, but, thankfully, that has also now stopped. International education is clearly important, with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills estimating that it is worth £8 billion. It is important to get our approach right, and given the importance of language schools to Bournemouth, people there expect us to.

Arguably, Labour’s biggest failure was failing to inspire a younger generation to work. Thanks to the something-for-nothing culture, a skills gap developed. If it does not pay to work, or if British people lack the necessary skills, that creates a huge space in our labour market for people from overseas to fill. We cannot blame people for wanting to come here and work hard, but the real answer lies in training our own people to fill these jobs. If we add to that the way in which the benefits system was abused, we can see why we ended up with the mess we inherited in 2010.

I am pleased to see the changes the Government have introduced. When passed into law, the Immigration Bill will upgrade the previously dysfunctional UK Border Agency, making it easier to send offenders back overseas. It will also cut the abuse of the appeals process, which originally had, I think, 17 different stages that could be put to appeal. In addition, it will oblige temporary immigrants seeking to stay longer than six months to pay a surcharge on their visa to cover NHS costs, should they use the health service. Finally, it will tackle sham marriages, to which more than 10,000 visa applications were linked every year.

As the Prime Minister announced last week, we are building a welfare system that encourages work and that is not so accessible to migrants, so no one can come to this country and expect to get out-of-work benefits immediately. We will not pay those benefits for the first three months. If, after those three months, an EU national needs benefits, we will no longer pay them indefinitely. Migrants will also be able to claim for only a maximum of six months unless they can prove they have a genuine prospect of employment. In addition, there will be a minimum earnings threshold, and if migrants do not pass the test, access to benefits such as income support will be cut. Finally, newly arrived EU jobseekers will not be able to claim housing benefit.

Those are welcome changes. If people are not here to work, or if they are begging or sleeping rough, they will be removed. They will be barred from re-entry for 12 months, unless they can prove there is a proper reason for them to be here, such as a job. Such steps have already been taken by other countries, such as Holland and Germany.

As we have seen, the Government’s policies are having an impact, with a drop in net migration of more than one third. Immigration from outside the EU is now at its lowest level for 14 years. With the new measures I have described, however, that drop will continue.

[Mark Reckless]

My hon. Friend refers to a drop in net immigration of more than a third. Is he sure his figures are up to date?

[Mr Ellwood]

The best person to clarify that will be the Minister, but those are the figures that I have been presented with. Indeed, they were put forward by the Home Secretary when the Immigration Bill was read for the Third time a couple of weeks ago.

To return to a point on which I think there will be more common ground, given what my hon. Friends have already said, the EU needs to change. It needs to recognise that its rules are out of date. There is a disparity between the income per head of joining members and that of other member states. It is so large that it is not surprising that some people will choose to abandon their own country and move to a richer one.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Reckless]

And of course the Minister, and his predecessor from Kent, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green), who also put forward that case.

Although the Government have taken a lot of action on immigration, much of which is in the detail of what has been done—I credit both Ministers for their work in that area—I am concerned that in several key areas we have relaxed what we should have done and perhaps originally intended to do. One such area was the number of people whom we allow in on inter-company transfers. When the Prime Minister went to India, he came under pressure, from Liberal Democrats and the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, to put in place this loophole whereby people with incomes of down to the £24,000 or £30,000 level are allowed to come in for a certain period but then leave, and other people come in and also earn below the proper cap for inter-company transfers. That has put people in the IT industry in particular under intense pressure in terms of holding down wages in that sector and, I fear, has also increased the number of people in the country.

Another area is post-study work, which expanded under the Labour Government. As far as I can see, anyone can come here and do any course, and then stay on and work afterwards, or indeed while they are doing the course, with few if any questions asked. I was delighted when the Home Office said that it would get rid of that, but unfortunately it was then watered down under pressure from universities and, as ever, the Liberal Democrats. I would love to hear from the Minister whether they signed up to that policy, and whether it is a Government policy.

We then said that anyone who comes here and gets a degree from a university can stay on and work. We are subsidising our university sector through our immigration policy. The Government go on as though everyone else does it, but they do not. I studied in America, and it is difficult to stay on there afterwards. I think only Australia has a more obviously generous system than we do. Our universities should compete on the basis of their academic excellence, not on the basis of “If you come and study with us rather than with some other competitor, you’ll be able to stay on and work in the British labour market, and potentially stay on for ever thereafter.” The fact that we have allowed that loophole makes net migration higher than it otherwise would be, and we are further from hitting our target.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) said that we have cut net migration by more than a third. I am afraid that his figures are significantly out of date, if indeed they had a solid basis when produced. He referred to a couple of weeks ago, “on Third Reading of the Immigration Bill”, which he may be aware has not actually happened yet.

[Mr Ellwood]

I said Second Reading.

[Mark Reckless]

I believe you said Third Reading. We shall see what the record says.

However, Third Reading has been delayed. It will not happen till the new year, although we do not know when. Perhaps the Minister can tell us that as well. Many of us think that it would be sensible to have a debate, or indeed a vote, on the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley before the restrictions are lifted on 1 January rather than afterwards.

At the moment, the latest figures, up to June 2013, give 182,000 as the net migration figure, compared with the figure for 2009-10, the year before the election in which the coalition Government came to power, when it was 214,000. So net migration has been cut by just under 15%, which is barely one seventh, not more than one third, but I promised my constituents that if they elected me—if they had a Conservative or perhaps at least a Conservative-led Government—we would deliver on our promise to cut immigration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands.

I was extremely concerned to read an interview apparently given by the Prime Minister to The Daily Telegraph in which he seems—perhaps I am wrong—to set aside that target. He seems to accept, or at least suggest, that the immigration target might not be hit, because we are taking in more people from the European Union. If we are not going to hit the target, as we promised our electors we would, we should change policy to ensure that we do hit it, either by getting rid of loopholes for Indian IT workers, post-study work or numerous others I could mention, or by taking some action on EU immigration.

I am pleased to say that at least some action is taking place. The change on benefits to three months is sensible, and I am pleased that it will be introduced before 1 January. It shows that Government can work on such things quickly when they want to. It is a shame that the same has not happened with regard to the Immigration Bill. We need the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley.

We have talked about estimates. To quote the Minister in The House magazine—I hope that this is accurate; I am sure it is—

“We consulted the Migration Advisory Committee on that question, and it advised us that making an estimate was not practical because of the number of variables, so we have not done so.”

The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee mentioned that point and asked Professor Sir David Metcalf:

“If Ministers had said to you, ‘Sir David, could you please give us some estimates about the number of people coming in after 31 December?’, you would have happily obliged?”

He answered:

“Yes, that is the role of the Migration Advisory Committee…if we were tasked by the Government to make such an estimate, it would be absolutely our job to do that, yes”.

But that estimate did not come.

I do not know what the numbers will be. I look forward to my trip to Luton on 1 January. Perhaps the Victoria coach station will also be another big point of entry. We can talk to some of those people and ask them whether they will be employed, or whether they purport to be self-employed, as they have had to do in most cases before. That will give us some interesting answers.

The big difference is that respectable, proper employment agencies can now go out and recruit proactively in Romania and Bulgaria. They can go to employers and offer them the service of bringing in people, often highly skilled people prepared to work hard, sometimes for much lower wages than people here, although we have a minimum wage in the formal sector. We do not know how large that sum will be; the Government have not given us an estimate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) made many strong points. I do not share his confidence or certainty that the numbers will be very large, but it is certainly possible, and we should have had a strategy to deal with that and prevent large numbers from coming here. It is good that we now have policemen from Scotland Yard out in particular villages in Romania to spread the message, but when the Select Committee went to Bucharest, I did not see any evidence of such a strategy.

Indeed, I said to Martin Harris, the excellent ambassador there, “What are you doing to reduce the numbers likely to come after 1 January?” He looked at me as though he had misheard or misunderstood what I had said and answered, “That’s not our job.” I said, “How do you mean? You work for the Government.” He said, “There’s free movement. Under EU law, they’re allowed to come. It’s not my role to reduce the numbers. I haven’t had any instructions to that effect.” He was managing the process and explaining things to both sides, but he did not see it as his role in any way, or think that it was Government policy, to try to hold down the numbers of people coming.

There has been more evidence over the last weeks, and possibly months, that that is the policy, and I hope it succeeds. If it does not succeed, and if the Migration Watch numbers are coming from Romania and Bulgaria, it is difficult to see how we will hit the net migration target, as I promised my constituents we would. I hope that we will hit it, and that we will see action to do so.

My hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley tabled his amendment, and then the Minister came to the Select Committee and told us that the amendment was illegal. I found that comment extraordinary. It is an amendment to primary legislation. For a Minister to come to the House and say that an amendment to primary legislation is unlawful comes close to contempt of the House, although I do not accuse him of that. It is this House that sets the law, and the Government who are bound by the law as determined by this Parliament, yet he seems to think that some other law might be higher and bind him in a way that the law of this Parliament does not.

The Minister has a reason for thinking that. The ministerial code says:

“The Ministerial Code should be read alongside the coalition agreement and the background of the overarching duty on Ministers to comply with the law including international law and treaty obligations”,

but in this country, our constitution has always been dualist in its approach to international law. International law binds, and binds Ministers, only to the extent that it is also the law of the land as passed by Parliament. If the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley succeeds, that will be the law that binds Ministers, not any previous agreement they may have happened to enter into with their counterparts overseas, except to the extent that that is part of our domestic law.

On that issue, the Thoburn case of the metric martyrs, involving Lord Justice Laws, is often quoted, but in my view, my hon. Friend’s amendment is consistent with that principle. It suggests that there are some bits of legislation that we have passed that are not to be repealed by accident; we must be express and clear that we intend to do so. However, my hon. Friend’s amendment refers to the European Union accession treaties. It would make no sense for him to add “notwithstanding the European Communities Act 1972”, because those European Union treaties flow from that Act.

If my hon. Friend, as the promoter of that amendment, says clearly that it is intended to have that effect, and if those Members who vote for it succeed, as I hope, in amending the legislation to include it and put it into law, that will be the law. The Minister, like anyone else, will be bound to apply that law, as will our judges. If Romanians and Bulgarians come to this country and take employment contrary to that law, we will look to the courts to enforce it. We made a promise to our constituents to cut immigration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands per year. We must keep that promise.