26
Justice and Home Affairs Committee
Corrected oral evidence: Settlement, citizenship and integration
Tuesday 25 November 2025
10.35 am
Members present: Lord Foster of Bath (The Chair); Lord Bach; Baroness Buscombe; Baroness Cash; Lord Dubs; Lord Filkin; Lord Henley; Baroness Hughes of Stretford; Baroness Prashar; Lord Tope.
Also present: Lord Anderson of Ipswich.
Evidence Session No. 1 Heard in Public Questions 1 - 21
Witnesses
I: Sunder Katwala, Director, British Future; Professor Alan Manning, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics.
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Examination of witnesses
Sunder Katwala and Professor Alan Manning.
Q1 The Chair: Thank you all very much indeed. We are on our very first evidence session for this committee’s inquiry into citizenship, integration and immigration issues. We are absolutely delighted that we have two expert witnesses to kick us off. Just for the record, I would be very grateful if you could each introduce yourselves. Sunder, could you start?
Sunder Katwala: I am Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, which is a non-partisan think tank that looks at issues of identity, immigration and integration in the interests of trying to find common ground.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Alan?
Professor Alan Manning: I am a professor of economics at the LSE and also an ex-chair of the Migration Advisory Committee.
The Chair: Thank you. Can we start with you, Alan? You have a new book, which has a longer title but basically starts by saying that the whole issue is very hard. Why is it hard?
Professor Alan Manning: There are two reasons. The first is that our world is very unequal. That means that there are many more people who want to move to a high-income country such as the UK than are realistically going to be admitted. That tension in numbers is at the heart of almost all the difficult issues we face in migration policy.
The second reason is that a migration policy really means just saying yes to some people who want to migrate and no to other people. Often, that process involves very difficult and uncomfortable trade-offs between who we help and who we do not. Because it is so uncomfortable, we sometimes do not face up to those choices. We pretend it is not really happening.
The Chair: The first half of the title of your book is Why Immigration Policy is Hard and the second half of the title is And How to Make it Better, so I assume that you think you have answers to the problems that you have described, which we will perhaps come on to in our subsequent questions. But can we be confident that, at the end of our inquiry, there will be some good news that we can bring?
Professor Alan Manning: You can be confident that there is some good news. I am afraid that I am not going to pretend that you will be able to solve absolutely all the difficult issues but, yes, we can do much better than we do. Our discussion is just too binary: is immigration good or bad? It then also ends up very polarised as well. It is not the only issue in our society currently that is very polarised but it is one of the most prominent ones. Moving away from that binary, polarised discussion is part of making things better.
Q2 The Chair: We will explore all that during our inquiry, with the two of you and other witnesses. To get us going, Sunder, one of the things that has already been raised with us in the various informal discussions we have had is that it seems to be unclear whether past policy-making has been entirely reacting to problems. Currently, it might be argued that it is to do with the number of people coming over on dangerous boats, for example, or the shortage of housing. Are there examples where Governments in the past have been positive rather than just reacting?
Sunder Katwala: Immigration policy often is reactive to events, but settlement and citizenship policy is perhaps more reactive because it is, in a way, on the undercard of the immigration debate, for the reasons that Alan has just given you. The primary debates are: who do we let in? Who gets a visa? Who gets to come? How do they come? What number should we be letting in? That can crowd out the debate about what we think should happen 12 months, three years, five years and six years later. That can get crowded out by just, “What would that change to the number we let in?” rather than, “What do we want to happen at that point?”
On citizenship policy, you got the big reforms of the Thatcher Government in 1981, and the new Labour Governments did things in the early 2000s with tests and ceremonies and so on. That was the last bit of proactive policy-making about this.
There other things happened. The Windrush scandal was the unintended consequences of 1971 and 1972, and what you did not know then and how it affects you half a century later. Policy had to deal with what Brexit meant and had to create new settlement rules for people who had come under free movement—that was a specific challenge.
Sometimes, there are proactive policies such as the Hong Kong scheme, which was a new policy. But generally, these are reactive-to-events policies, and it seems difficult to get the citizenship, settlement and broader integration agenda to looked at on its merits rather than as a subsection of immigration numbers.
The Chair: Leaving aside more recent events, which I know Lord Tope will pick up in a minute, and just looking back at the history, you have raised, if you like, a negative—the Windrush scandal—and on the other hand, a positive, in the proactive Hong Kong scheme. Presumably, you would accept that what we said about Ukrainian refugees would be another positive. Can you think of anything positive that has been done by any Government or Minister in recent years, which rather than being about a particular group was a genuinely proactive good move that was not in response to an immediate crisis?
Sunder Katwala: They tend to be in response to events. Letting the Ugandan Asians in was a very brave thing to do in the early 1970s. The post-Brexit reforms are an opportunity to step back and say, “What are we trying to design? What are the principles? What do we mean to do here?” But you now have the unintended consequences. For a while, there was a calmer moment—in a way, a slightly depolarised moment—of, “If we’ve got control, we can decide what to do with it”, but you now have a political debate in which different people for different reasons think that things are not in control.
Q3 Lord Tope: The Chair has just given me an intro. I think you were referring to the Home Secretary’s announcements last week of a lot of new proposals, apparently based on the Danish system. There are a lot of fairly obvious differences between the United Kingdom and Denmark. Can you tell us what you think the merits of the proposals are as far as the UK is concerned?
Professor Alan Manning: Let me start from the top. Some change is needed on our asylum and refugee policy, because numbers, while not necessarily particularly high by international standards, have been growing quite fast, and because the labour market outcomes of refugees are not very good, this ends up costing the taxpayer money over and above the better-publicised money that is paid while they are claiming asylum.
Some change was needed and policy can make some difference. Denmark has lower numbers and that is in part because of its policies. There are other countries as well. For example, when Sweden moved from offering Syrians temporary to permanent residence in 2013, that clearly led to an increase in the number of Syrians going to Sweden more than other countries. But where it gets hard is that I am not sure we can say with any great degree of confidence that the policies that have been proposed are necessarily going to have the desired effect, because often the policy is not the most important factor driving numbers.
Sunder Katwala: There are a number of premises behind why the Government are proposing what they are proposing. One is that we are now the “destination of choice in Europe”, as the Home Secretary says in the foreword to the policy paper, because we have a more “generous” offer than other countries, and it is because of that offer that asylum seekers are choosing to come to the UK, and changing that offer will make fewer of them do so.
Those are all quite shaky premises, and the logic between them can fall at many steps. We are not the destination of choice in Europe. We get one-10th of the asylum claims. We are fifth in the overall numbers. We are 17th by head of population. We are not as low as Denmark, but we are in the middle, not at the top.
In some aspects, some of our rules are sometimes more generous, or have been on family reunion, but in other ways they are less generous, such as the money that people get and the work rights they have while they are claiming asylum. It is a mixed picture, and there is relatively little evidence that people know about those things and that they are the drivers.
Therefore, if you want more control over the channel, which I think is rather important to have, changing these things probably will not do that. These reforms are very similar to, though mildly tougher than, the 2022 reforms by Priti Patel. Those reforms—30 months’ temporary protection—were not really followed through on very much, because the Government then said in 2023 that the answer is to hear no claims at all. Hearing no claims at all did not affect pull factors.
There were then changes in the terms and conditions of settlement after three years or 15 years, which is probably quite a marginal factor. It is more likely that you would get control if the irregular route was futile and a regular route was accessible. Denmark marketed itself as being the toughest for 10 years. There might be some free-rider advantage in doing that but it is a different geography, it has a different language and it has different flows.
There is a risk that we put the capacity of the Home Office into things that will not reduce the flows when putting the capacity elsewhere might have more chance.
Lord Tope: So you are not optimistic that the policies are going to work and achieve their objective?
Sunder Katwala: I would be more optimistic about the deal that we have with France, and the principle underneath that we could expand it to other countries and could get, ideally, a probability of return for the irregular route—not a 7% chance but, ideally, a guarantee of return. The only way to get a guarantee of return is to make a very significant offer to take the number of refugees that the European countries think is our fair share through a controlled route. They might then take everyone back. You could close it in three to six months. The Biden Administration, before Trump came in, had a remarkable success at the border but far too late. It got a 75% fall three-and-a-half years into his administration, having struggled from very high flows. It was through a combination of large, accessible routes and quite tough controls outside those routes by co-operation with the other Governments. Another way to deter everybody would be to find some remote island where you would say you were sending everybody and send them there. It is very hard to do that in practice, even if you ethically thought you should, which many people obviously would not.
Lord Tope: Thank you. Alan, do you think it will work? Would you like to add to that?
Professor Alan Manning: I do not think it is guaranteed to work; I am probably inclined to think it might have more effect than Sunder does. One of the problems in this area is that the policy is hard. It is very easy to criticise what is done but what would you do instead? I agree with Sunder that the agreement with France is the most critical thing, but at the same time less than half our asylum claims currently are people coming on small boats so there is another aspect of the problem. I think it might have a bit more effect but it is also at the mercy of events in the world over which we have very little control.
Q4 The Chair: Just before we move on and start to look at individual elements, I am still struggling to get what your thinking is. We have discussed already the distinction between proactive and reactive approaches to policy-making, and I was really taken by the quote from Omar Hammoud Gallego from Durham University. He argued that: “British politicians, particularly since the Brexit referendum, have treated migration policy as a tool for symbolic policymaking. Rather than pursuing evidence-based, practical solutions, they have prioritised headline-grabbing rhetoric aimed at shoring up electoral support”. Do you think the latest announcements by the Home Secretary are shoring up electoral support, or are they practical solutions based on evidence? Alan?
Professor Alan Manning: Actually, I disagree with that quote. I think asylum and small boats do get too much attention but, at the same time, there is a risk of going too far in the other direction and trivialising the scale of the problem at the moment. Numbers are at historic highs for the UK. They are rising quite fast. Given that, I think the Government are being a bit more proactive than reactive and we do need to think about changing things.
I do not think the Home Secretary was right to say we are the destination of choice—that was sort of hyperbolic—but we have numbers rising to levels currently above what they peaked at over 20 years ago. We felt we needed to have policies to reduce numbers then, and they are continuing to rise now. I guess later this week we will see the latest numbers. I do not know what they are going to look like. I disagree with the quote. As to the electoral prospects of this, I do not know whether it is going to be plus or minus. There are arguments in both directions.
Sunder Katwala: The biggest secret in British society and British politics is the scale of the fall in immigration in recent years. Everyone knows that immigration was at record levels under the last Government. Few people know that we have seen record levels in the overall fall; most people do not know that has happened and do not think that has happened. We have had Governments making promises they cannot keep on targets. You have the irony now of a Government who have exceeded expectations on overall numbers and nobody has heard about it. I think that shows us that the visible lack of control of boats in the channel and hotels are driving the politics. Asylum will now be one-eighth of immigration, not one-25th, because the numbers have changed.
If you wanted secure, stable support for refugee protection in this country I think the visible lack of control would be a problem, especially when we have localised it to hotels. It is something to grip. I agree with Alan about that. What gets control? What maintains compassion as well as control? What unlocks the contribution of the people you had? What forms of co-operation mean that everybody gets to operate their responsibilities? That is where the pressure to respond to the public can be difficult.
Just in terms of these policies, obviously we have had the new Home Secretary for a couple of months and so far—and your inquiry and other evidence will do it—there has not been as much collecting of data on what would work. What will the impacts be? What will we do for integration? There has been more on: how do we show we get it? It is important for politicians to get it, but that has perhaps been the dominant driver.
Q5 Baroness Hughes of Stretford: I have two questions and you started to answer the first one. You are both sceptical to some extent as to whether these policies would work. Do you have any kind of priority policy position which would be effective to be included in the Government’s proposals? Secondly, I wonder how far you think that these issues come down to a question of policy—for instance, how long you have to wait for settlement and all the rest of it. How far do they depend on effective implementation of the policy you have got? In other words, if we had an effective Border Force and Home Office that knew where people were, that returned people effectively and efficiently at the right time, that did not end up with huge waiting lists of people milling around in the community, so to speak, how far do you think that of itself would be a positive impact in having control of the system? Sunder, do you want to go first?
Sunder Katwala: In terms of what to prioritise, it is also a question of what the objective is. An objective of controlling so we have managed flows is different from an objective of reducing so we get the lowest share of people or compete with Denmark to have the lowest group. You could put those together—
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: They are linked.
Sunder Katwala: Yes, they can be linked. For example, a control policy where you had a large, controlled route would not reduce the numbers but would get more control. That would not be supported by people who wanted many fewer people to come. They would need to do more deterrence and find ways to deter and refuse. The integration and citizenship and settlement policies could just be signalling about whether to come or not. But they are also real things that affect people when they have been here five years, six years, nine years, 15 years, and so on. There might be some trade-offs between the signalling you hope to do and what you hope to do later. You can exhort people to acquire language skills, get jobs and so on. You can also support them to do it. In asylum and refugee policy, you might expect the Government to be more hands on in integration issues than they would be with work migration, where they would set rules and expectations and so on. But if we are going to unlock the contribution of refugees and their families, they might need more support than people who are not asylum seekers and refugees.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Alan, did you have any quick comments?
Professor Alan Manning: An important part of good policy is managing things properly. Allowing big backlogs to build up in the asylum system is not a good idea. Why do we have a big backlog at the moment? In part, it is because we just stopped processing after the previous Government made some policies that just stopped processing. I do not think that serves anybody’s interests. If you are going to have immigration laws and some people do not have the right to be in the country, you have to say that you are taking steps to remove them. But I think it is unrealistic to expect that that is terribly easy. Some people think Governments are only incompetent or unwilling if they do not do that. But to remove someone, another country has to agree to take them back. You said the Home Office does not know where people are; it does not. But if you have a group of people who do not want to be found, it just is not easy. There is no system which makes it easy to find out where people are, really. I think the illusion of total control is dangerous; so is pretending you have no control at all.
Q6 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Sunder, you alluded to the fact that 20 or more years ago, the number of unofficial, illegal channel crossings was extremely high, almost as high as it is today. My understanding is that that problem was solved by our then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and the French Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, getting together and removing the Jungle camp at Sangatte and the numbers came right down. Are there any lessons we could learn from that historic experience? I recognise that in those days it was not small boats; it was people hanging on to the bottom of Eurostar trains and coming across in lorries. Of course, there is still an element of that now. Are there any lessons that we should perhaps be aware of now?
Sunder Katwala: There are a couple of different instincts. One is that rough deterrents, control measures and refusal will put people off. We tried that at scale in 2023-24. The hotels come from not processing as a signal. The other instinct, which was in the example you gave, is that you can have co-operation. It is an irony, in a way, that if you close more clandestine routes, you get more visible routes. But you want the control and not just the lack of visibility. That is a question about how co-operation works.
There are three different things you might try to do. You might try to persuade people that they should not want to come; that it will be too dangerous, or that they should go somewhere else—messaging or signalling to tell them that it is going to be very dangerous. You can tell them they will not be processed. You can try to tackle the gangs as a criminal issue—slash the dinghies and so on. But there is a very low supply of new dinghies—the entry of them is quite low—given the cost.
So, it looks like we should be trying to remove the market as well and think about the dynamics of that market. As I said, the evidence from a 75% fall in the US was that having an authorised route that was accessible—with enforcement of the other route—could close the other route if the smuggling fee you were paying was not there. Once that route is entrenched, it looks very hard to close it just through criminalisation.
I am sure that you would use all the toolkit, but we have had Governments who have tended to say, “We’ll give ourselves a safe route for refugees again, as we have for Syrians. We’ll have that as a prize once we’ve solved the problem. I think you have to use the controlled route as one of your tools of control if you are going to solve the problem.
Co-operation can work if you are not someone who wants to pull out of all the international conventions and treaties. If you can show that they can work rather than that they constrain you, that would be an easier thing to sell to the general public
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Professor Manning, do you have anything to add?
Professor Alan Manning: Not really. I agree with Sunder that international co-operation is the way in which these kinds of issues have been dealt with historically. There are quite a few examples where they have been dealt with successfully. What is a bit harder for the UK is that we need to come to terms with the fact that for many years everybody thought the channel was a big barrier to getting to the UK. Now, everybody realises that it is not, and that genie is not going back in the bottle.
Secondly, most of the agreements that have worked have often been between richer, bigger, more powerful countries and a country that is less powerful. Here, we are trying to have an agreement with France, which is a peer country and has its own interests and internal politics. That adds a little bit of complication to our current situation. But I am not a diplomat, so I cannot really deal with that.
Q7 Baroness Buscombe: The Government are proposing linking “contribution” to settlement and citizenship. Is this the right approach? If so, what is the correct form and level of contribution?
I also have a supplementary but very much related question. Given what has just been discussed in relation to the huge numbers, surely it is not just the numbers but the fact that the public are much more aware than, say, 20 years ago of what is going on, are wondering who these people and where they are going, what all the different cultures are, “Do they integrate?” et cetera, and that is creating a fear factor that was not necessarily there 20 years ago? Should there be more flexibility around the system? At the moment, for example, unemployment is growing and is set to grow more. This is not necessarily a moment when people are comfortable about more people coming.
What is the contribution, should it be more flexible, and how do we reassure the public? Would you like to start, Sunder?
Sunder Katwala: I think that with ideas about contribution, the visibility of contribution and seeing it happen can help to reassure. Overall, attitudes are not currently tougher than they were 20 years ago, 40 years ago, or even 50 years ago. You can go back to each of those points. If you look at 2001 to 2005, we were having a very heated debate about asylum, likewise if you go back to the previous era and the politics of Enoch Powell and so on. This is a recurring debate.
Overall, despite the high media and political statements, attitudes are a little bit softer, but they are more polarised because there have been quite big generational shifts in attitude. People with different political views, of different ages, and with different levels of contact with diversity have quite distinct attitudes. So we have a more polarised debate than perhaps we used to have, rather than simply a tougher one.
Contribution can really matter. If we paid more attention to integration and citizenship, it could be a bridging theme, because this is not just a legal status; it is also an active act of belonging—choosing to belong, going through the rights and responsibilities and being seen to do so. That is why we invented the optics of citizenship ceremonies. They are meaningful as a rite of passage for people who take them.
The Government have had the view that settlement is too automatic and that it should not just be about not breaking the law. People do not particularly think about settlement as distinct from citizenship. They probably know about citizenship. Settlement is quite a technical thing.
The idea that there are rights and responsibilities and you should show that you want to belong—you need to learn the language and make a commitment—all makes a lot of sense. The issues then, around what terms you design, how long you have to wait to do that, whether that incentivises it and makes it special, are contested details, but contribution can help, because it can be reassuring to see people choosing to make a commitment to the society that they have decided they want to be permanently part of.
Baroness Buscombe: The degree of contribution?
Sunder Katwala: The degree of contribution is a complicated thing to get right. In the new proposals, they seem to say that earning £51,000 is definitely contribution because there will be net fiscal contribution at that point. It looks like it is going to be hard to work out what the other ways are to show your contribution. The Government say that working in public services is contribution. They are not sure how else to show contribution and ask people for contribution. We then risk saying, “Well, if you’re not earning £51,000 or working in public services, we’ll let you stay eventually”, which is a bit grudging, rather than perhaps designing the right ways to do it. Getting the design right is a challenge.
Baroness Buscombe: Earning £51,000 does not make you a net contributor to the tax system. You are still drawing from public services. Professor Manning, what do you think?
Professor Alan Manning: The general principle that settlement should be a privilege not a right, and “We are giving you something; you should give us something in return”, is a decent principle. I agree with Sunder that what that means in practice is more difficult.
The proposals for earned settlement that came out last week do not change things for new entrants under the current work migration rules and family migration rules. They do not change things as much as both the supporters and opponents of the proposals say. I suspect that if you crunched the numbers you would find that many people will still be eligible for settlement after five years rather than the headline 10 years.
There are big changes on refugees and especially on those who entered the UK without authorisation. That is where the big changes are.
When we talk about settlement, there is one group who I worry quite a lot about. Settlement is tied to eligibility for welfare benefits. Many of these families will have children, and one of the consequences is that those children without eligibility for welfare benefits will grow up, in effect, in some of the poorest households in the UK. Obviously we cannot ask for contribution from children. Is it then right for the contribution of the parents to be judged by that of the children?
This came across in the managed earned settlement document last week. The Government asked for views on how children should we treated in the current system, and that is one of the big questions we need to pay more attention to.
The Chair: That is very helpful and it is an issue we will certainly be picking up.
Q8 Lord Filkin: Alan, in your introductory remarks, you said something that surprised me—that the labour market outcomes of migrants, or maybe asylum seekers, were not particularly good and that the net economic contribution compared to what it costs taxpayers was not particularly beneficial. I may be roughly paraphrasing but that was the gist of what I understood. That surprised me greatly because I had rather assumed that the participation rate in the labour market was pretty high for what is often younger males rather than retired people. Could you expand on that a little bit?
Professor Alan Manning: I was talking specifically about people who have come on humanitarian routes. They have low employment rates and quite low earnings when they are in work. They improve a bit the longer they have been in the country—they adjust—but they are still not particularly good. There are a number of reasons for this. Many of these people simply do not have very high levels of education. Obviously, some do, and I am generalising here, but on average the current flow is not particularly well educated. Their education may well have been disrupted by conflict in the countries they are coming from and so on. They just do not have skills and it is quite hard to reskill people after a certain age. They will also have problems with language skills and may well face discrimination in the labour market. Many of them may also have traumas from their experience and we know that Brits with mental health issues tend not to do so well in the labour market. It is a combination of all these factors. We are not particularly unusual. This is true in pretty much every European country.
Q9 Baroness Cash: I would like to ask about a change in attitudes to immigration, integration and citizenship and how that has shifted, if it has. It is the oldest question in philosophy teaching: do you sacrifice one person to save three who might die when the train is coming? The question that interests me here is why we are seeing this shift in debate because of our own resources and our ability to take care of the people who are already here. We have a shortage of housing. The NHS is on its knees. We have increasing unemployment and so on. I just wanted to understand from your perspective whether the Overton window has moved and whether those aspects are driving that in any way.
Sunder Katwala: The Overton window—what is considered to be inside or outside the political mainstream—has shifted over the last couple of years. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest it is shifting faster in the media and political debate than in general public debate. That is not to say that general public attitudes are not tough—they are mixed and tough and nuanced. One thing we have said, and Alan notes this in his book, is that many people are balancers on immigration. If we asked the median voter at the school gate, they would say there are pressures of immigration and gains of immigration. When it is high, it is difficult for housing. It is good for the NHS, and the universities do well of it, if you have a local university. There are challenges to manage the pressures and gains. They would like control of asylum. They do not like boats. They would not like to pull out of all the treaties. That is most people.
But some people are not balancers at both ends of the debate, especially at the toughest end, and these people are much more vocal and much more visible. They are more likely to email their MP, phone in to a phone-in, go online and talk about this. To that extent, then, you get a volume of debate from both flanks, but especially the toughest flank. About one-sixth of people have broadly what I would call rejectionist views. They would shut the borders if they could. Some of those people have really toxic views underneath the rejectionist views such as: “Is violence legitimate on protests, or do I mean British-born minorities too?” That is a not all the one-sixth, but the least possible.
The median citizen would like lower numbers but is reluctant to cut any of the work or study routes and wants control of refugees. They see the dilemmas the politicians see. I think we have a more polarised debate because people’s views by education, age and their political perspective are increasingly different these days. You almost get one-third of society wanting a much tougher approach than we are getting from Governments, and one-third of society feeling a bit unheard when we have a much tougher debate. That is a harder thing to bridge. But over the whole period, Governments have always struggled to get consent for the levels of immigration we have had.
Professor Alan Manning: I would just like to thank Sunder for the word “balancers”, which I drew on in this book, but which comes from him originally. I will give an example on humanitarian migration. Most people in Britain feel that we should help people, but they also understand that the problems in the rest of the world are so big that we cannot solve all of them ourselves. We need to do our bit; but there are limits to what our bit is. When we are doing our bit, we want to make sure that the help goes to the people we feel are most in need of it. People worry at the moment whether that is the case. They want to feel they have more control for humanitarian migration to have more legitimacy than it does at the moment, when it all appears—not without reason—to be somewhat chaotic.
Baroness Cash: Neither of you has really touched on resources. Maybe there just is not polling or research to talk about this. But if your child has cancer and cannot get treatment and is on a wait list, is that informing this? We have had 2 million extra users of the NHS.
Sunder Katwala: That is a very tough view—that there is too much immigration and we need to slow it all down or stop it if we could. They would say too many people are taking resources but also that they are not integrating: “They do not want to be us, and if we try and talk about it, we get closed down too quickly”. If people believe all those things, it is going to be really hard for a political system to do that.
Is it fair for me and my children as well? If you manage resources well around health services, school places and so on—demographic change— you can do quite well with that. Housing is a real pressure. Migration overall, not just asylum, is about half the pressure for new housing. If new housing is not keeping pace with that, then the pressure on resources is real.
On the whole, I would say the evidence suggests that the do-people-become-us-or-not point—the sort of emotional point—is as powerful or more powerful as the resources point. But if you feel under pressure with the resources point, that is going to matter to you. There is a class and education aspect to who feels they are gaining and who feels under pressure. I think the sort of integration-citizenship-belonging point is as important as the resources point.
Professor Alan Manning: Can I add something to that? At the moment, people do feel they are struggling. Economic growth has been very low and I think people’s generosity towards others is probably linked to how well they feel they are doing. I would draw an analogy perhaps with the international development budget. We spend a certain amount of money helping people in need in the world but that budget is sort of fixed. Some people say it is too high, some say it is too low, but it is sort of fixed. Then we decide within that who is most deserving of help, recognising that we cannot solve every problem in the world. But when we come to humanitarian migration, in particular the current asylum refugee system, there is not really that cap on how much we are going to help. It is driven by how many people come here and claim asylum and so on. That also contributes to people’s discomfort, in particular, with the asylum and refugee system.
Q10 Lord Dubs: Could we have a look at the pathways to citizenship for refugees and asylum seekers and how they differ from other migrants? Is it right that there should be different pathways? How do they differ?
Sunder Katwala: Under the new proposals, were they to go through in the form indicated, with visa work migration, we are looking at lots of people for five years if they are high earners in high-skilled visas and jobs, and many other people in 10 years. It looks as if refugees are starting at 10, if they are settlement refugees. In the 2002 reforms, it did not make the distinction; settlement refugees got the same rules as everyone else. They are starting at the outside, but they might be at 20 years and even 30 years has been mentioned. Some of that will be applied to people who are three or four years in, who might have got settlement next year. They might now be told it is 15 years.
There is a bridging offer from the Government. It does not look like people can come down beyond 10 years unless the Government intend that. They are then saying, “We don’t want people to not know if they are settled for 20 years”. There are two aspects to that. One is that if Eritrea is safe after three years, six years, nine years, 12 years, 15 years or even 18 years, we might say “Go back” 15 years after they arrived. That obviously puts question marks over your integration and settlement, and also you do not know whether you are settled for that whole period.
There will be a work and study route for refugees if they can get their English to C1 level and show they are studying at a level or working at a level. Alan has already told us that refugees with the right to work might need more support to get that. So, if we are going to have this tiered issue for refugees and the Government do not want people to be waiting 20 years when they are here, we have to put much more attention on how people would qualify for whatever shorter routes are available. At the moment, that kind of support does not exist very much.
Professor Alan Manning: I sort of agree with what Sunder says. Maybe I will go back to my answer to the previous question. Part of this is: if you think we should want to help people who have suffered persecution but there is a limit to how many people we can help, then who are we going to choose to help? If you give permanent settlement, you are helping people who are facing persecution now, but also people who faced persecution in the past and may not necessarily face it if they went back, depending on where they are from.
On the other hand, giving only temporary settlement focuses help much more on people who are facing persecution now. Some of these decisions have been very difficult. Germany in the late 1990s, having had a lot of refugees from the Balkans, only ever gave them temporary protection and forced many of them back. It was quite controversial, particularly around children.
The UK and many other countries are going to face very difficult decisions, possibly quite soon, about Ukrainian refugees and whether to allow them to settle permanently or whether we want people to go back to Ukraine and rebuild Ukraine. These are difficult questions.
The Chair: I know that Lord Henley wants to explore that in a bit more detail in a few minutes. But just before we get there, Lord Filkin has a question.
Q11 Lord Filkin: How are changes to the asylum and immigration policies communicated to those seeking to come to the UK? I think in what you said earlier, you rather implied that, first, they did not really know what the policies were, and, secondly, they did not really have much effect.
I have a supplementary question to that. Are there other good reasons for making these changes, even if they do not affect demand?
Sunder Katwala: In terms of the changes that are designed to get control of the flows, they may or may not appeal to people politically and so on but will appeal to the public in the medium term if they work. Things that people thought sounded good are not going to appeal very much if they do not work.
As for communication, Governments might be communicating to their own society and trying to communicate to the people that they do or do not want to come. Some of that can be a bit performative. They will say, “We’re putting out messages”. A developed-world Government is not going to be the primary way you get your information about that society; you will get your information about that society through social media and online content from your co-nationals.
The message that will work is what actually happens to people you know in your extended family or in your national group. If there is a message that says, “Your claim will never be heard”, but people are in hotels waiting to get their claim heard, the message is not going to be very plausible and people will not be deterred. Whereas it could be the case that people heard that you do not get in at the border these days and you have to go to the application centre and that is how you get in.
There is an academic literature, which Alan alluded to as well, that says, “Nothing ever works”. It is not true. Some things do work. They can work with bad effects; they can work with good effects. But on the whole, the reality of what people hear is happening to most people from their background is more likely to be messaging that lands than communications by a Government targeting asylum seekers on WhatsApp.
Lord Filkin: Sticking with that for a second, that it is the informal social means of communication that will communicate with people who are seeking to—
Sunder Katwala: That is where you get your sense of, “What do I think of Britain or France? Do I want to go there?”
Lord Filkin: Would you then expect that these policy changes, if they were communicated from people who are resident in the UK to people who would like to come in, probably by illegal routes, would have much effect or not?
Sunder Katwala: You have different messages. You also have the traffickers themselves, who will be saying, “Don’t believe it. This will happen. Give me your money”, and so on.
If there was a probability or guarantee of return if you came on the irregular route but there was a different route, you would hear about it within three months. If 50% of people get in and 50% of people do not get in, you would hear both things. What that would do for behaviour is much more up in the air.
Lord Filkin: I assumed that the demand forces of people very much wanting to come here—a safe place with the prospect of work—were so powerful that these issues about whether you have citizenship or not, or whether you have permanent settlement, were unlikely to have a significant effect.
Sunder Katwala: They are quite distant. About four times as many people claim in France as come here, but that is still quite a lot of people who are in France and choose to come here. You might know the English language, or you might have co-national groups and so on. But these points about what will happen in three to six years’ time seem much less significant than “Would I get in or not get in?” That would be a much clearer message, in my view.
Professor Alan Manning: In terms of the effects on numbers, there is a certain amount of what one might call a race to the bottom. People want to reach a high-income country for good reason; it is a safe country and a country with better economic prospects. The question then is: which country? The most important factor is having social connections.
But we have studies that say, for example, when Sweden becomes more generous, Denmark gets fewer claims, and when Denmark becomes harsher, Sweden gets more claims. What one country does affects flows to other countries. You get diversion, even if the overall numbers coming to, say, Europe as a whole are not changing. This is one area where international co-operation is, again, very important, so that you do not get individual countries racing to the bottom, which might benefit each individual country but collectively might make things worse.
One other point I would say is that it is not just about numbers; it is about getting better outcomes for people who arrive. When you are trying to provide incentives for people to integrate better or have better economic outcomes and so on, that can have an effect. But it has to be the case that those incentives are realistic and that the conditions you set are realistic ones. Otherwise, people just give up and do nothing. Again, we have studies where Governments have imposed unrealistic conditions on, for example, getting permanent residence and people then just give up. But we have other studies where they have put more realistic conditions in place and that has induced people to behave in ways that involve better economic and social integration.
The Chair: With apologies to the committee and witnesses, I should have reminded all colleagues that when you speak, if you have any interests to declare, please do so. If anybody has any that they have not declared, find a way before the end of the meeting of putting it on the record.
I turn now to Lord Dubs, briefly, because time is now a bit tight, and then Lord Henley.
Q12 Lord Dubs: In my unscientific questioning in Greece and in Calais, it seemed to me that there was a tremendous pressure in Greece for asylum seekers to say, “Germany is the country we want to go to”. It was similar in France but in France it was the UK. One of the things they said there was, “Because we’ve been fingerprinted on entering the EU, in Greece and Italy, we cannot claim asylum in France any more, so the only country we can go to is the UK. There’s no other option for us”. Have I got that right or was that an unscientific survey?
Sunder Katwala: I think there is something that has been missed. The Government have a piece of logic that says, “Claims have gone up here—and that is not just those coming by boats, Pakistani nationals are claiming when they are already here and so on—and they are going down in Europe. Therefore, it must be our pull factors”. But if you go back a few years, in about a quarter of claims in Europe—about 1 million claims in a year—someone was claiming a second time in another European country. With the fingerprinting system, that will be caught quite quickly and so your second claim, if you have been refused in France, will not be made in Belgium. That might now be an incentive to try to get to the UK because we are not co-operating in that system. That might be an explanation for this change. There are other explanations for the particular national flows. You would want to be inside that system so you had those flags. That might be more important than how much money you paid or the right to work.
Professor Alan Manning: Brexit has made us a court of appeal for failed asylum seekers in the EU. You can have a second bite at the cherry. That is one factor; I am not saying it is the only one. Brexit gave us more control over the managed parts of migration; I am not sure Boris Johnson used that particularly to exercise that much control. But Brexit gave us less control over the unmanaged parts of migration—asylum and refugees—which are the bits that probably trouble people more than the managed bits.
Q13 Lord Henley: As the Chair suggested, I just want to explore the difference between temporary migration, people coming to the UK and then returning to their home country, and permanent migration, people coming and staying. What are the opportunities and risks with granting only temporary asylum?
Sunder Katwala: There is a case for temporary migration for a purpose. Students can be temporary. They can do a bit of post-study work and stay temporary or they can settle. We have some agricultural schemes that are that are temporary. But there are risks to temporary migration, and the conditions tend to be such that it is more open to exploitation. If you are worried about pace of change and churn, then more temporary migration is more-felt change, even if it is the same number of people. One thing that happened in the sort of pre-2016 period is that migration was shifting to being more temporary. Some Poles were staying, some were coming and going, so it felt faster. I think we should be worried about temporary migration when it is not defined for a purpose and is going to work as temporary. Historically, the worst outcomes are when you say it is going to be temporary and it turns out to be permanent. That was why Germany switched from a guest worker system that was meant to be temporary and was not and started to say, “Actually, you can become German”.
While there is case for temporary migration for Ukrainians because they said, “We want to win the war and go home” and the Government said, “We want to know that people are coming home. We will have to invest in it”, you also have to look at the reality of what happens. Hong Kongers were different to Ukrainians. Hong Kongers knew they were coming for life and have been given shorter settlement routes, which is good. The idea that temporary is better because it keeps the numbers down in the end misses where the public are, which is that temporary is quite a transactional deal. We can do this kind of transactional deal—“Come along, obey the rule of law, go home again, do not get too involved with us, we will not get too involved with you”. That is not the same as, “You come here and your children will be British and will grow up alongside us”. I think permanent migration is more reassuring.
The Chair: I am sorry to interrupt Lord Dubs’s question. I completely understand that there might be cases for temporary or permanent, on the other hand. You used the Ukrainian example, which is really interesting. You have people who have come here and many of them would hope to go back—that is not entirely true of all of them—but after a long time. The question is: how long is long? The children that have come with them have become integrated in their schools. They have learned the language. They are well on their way to various exams and qualifications and so on. Is there not that additional problem of something agreed to be temporary ending up being a necessity and becoming permanent?
Sunder Katwala: The history of migration is that people who thought they were temporary often become permanent. The Ukrainian case has a geopolitical context where you want to work with the Ukrainian Government. They want some people to go home. They want to reconstruct the country. They want things to be over. It will be different if you are a young student and have come here and are working this way. It would be different if you met someone here. You have different routes in. Will we let people have family reunion this way where someone can join them? Most people would think on a case-by-case basis—you would not treat the whole group just with one rule and everyone goes back or everyone stays. I am just saying that there is a specific point. There are different reasons why we have agreed. The Ukrainian Government would like to win the war and have their people home and then the reality of the next five or 10 years is that we have to treat people decently and well and design things that are fair.
Professor Alan Manning: I think the parallel to what is likely to happen with the Ukrainians is what happened with refugees from the Balkans in Germany in the late 1990s. Germany only ever gave them temporary protection, then expected them to return once it was safe. It was extremely controversial, and the controversy largely revolved around the children, some of whom had been born in Germany. Some were doing extremely well in school and so on. There were lots of exceptions, but lots of people were returned, including families with children who did not did not really want to go back.
Lord Dubs: I should have said earlier but, in declaring interests, I declare that I am a naturalised British citizen.
Q14 Lord Filkin: Can I just go back to Alan because he said something that was surprising, but quite clear. You were saying that there appeared to be plausible evidence that one of the reasons that our numbers have been rising, while in the rest of continental Europe they had been falling, was because we were not any longer in the fingerprinting system, which meant that access to asylum to the UK was probably the only option for a number of people. Is that strongly evidenced?
Professor Alan Manning: I would not say strongly evidenced but I think there is anecdotal evidence: it seems quite plausible. It is not just about failed asylum claims in Europe; it will be about criminality in Europe as well. We just lost access to that information.
Lord Filkin: Staying with fingerprinting, the solution might be to join the fingerprinting system.
Professor Alan Manning: I am not sure why that was not part of what we tried to negotiate, to be honest.
Lord Filkin: We are not going to reverse Brexit clearly, but I presume we could have that on our shopping list.
Professor Alan Manning: I am not a diplomat but to me that would sound very sensible. Obviously, we would have to give something in return for that.
The Chair: Thank you for that very helpful advice to those of us who are thinking of what we could do on other matters.
Q15 Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Thinking specifically about policy on permanent residence and citizenship and related things such as family reunification which fall into that sphere, can you comment on how you think UK policy now and what has been announced on permanent residency and citizenship compares to other countries? Is that a factor in all the issues we are talking about?
Professor Alan Manning: If we went to 10 years, that is longer than most other countries, although I think Switzerland’s standard time is 10 years. But as I said already, there are a lot of tariff reductions available to work and family migrants so, in practice, it would be a lot less than that. Clearly, the proposed changes on refugees are big. I am afraid other countries are also moving in this direction; countries are not becoming more generous at the moment. This is a bit of a race to the bottom, as I described earlier.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Would you say our current policy has been more favourable generally than other countries’ and that that might be part of what has been called the pull factor?
Professor Alan Manning: It is a bit complicated to say. Quite a lot of studies show that, for example, some countries are more generous to asylum seekers from one country than others. Historically, we were more sympathetic to Albanian asylum seekers than most other European countries. There is evidence that asylum seekers tend to go to the countries where their nationality has a higher acceptance rate. That is fairly consistent. Again, it is not the only factor or the most important factor, but it is one factor.
Sunder Katwala: It is very likely that settlement and citizenship is relatively marginal on asylum decisions but asylum is a relatively small group of the people becoming naturalised citizens, which includes work migration and so on. Our previous rules are quite similar to the centre of gravity of most major democracies. There are there are outliers such as Switzerland at 10 years and Japan, for example, is much more sceptical about the very idea of migration and settlement and citizenship. Countries such as Canada, Australia, Britain and America have tended to see that migrants can become Canadian, Australian, British, American. But five or six years is where most countries are.
One distinction is it is a lot more expensive in Britain than almost anywhere else. It is now £1,700. I could get six quite attractive citizenships—America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, France all together—and still have change from my £1,700. That is because we have been quite agnostic about whether we want to do it or not, then it looks like a captive market and you can ramp up the fees. We are charging about four times what it costs to process in France and Germany. They charge what it costs to process but have rules and conditions around language and so on. To the extent that there is a difference, we are a bit tougher.
This variation by route et cetera is a relatively new thing—other places might do it—and we are not just doing it with five and 10 years; we are doing it with some eye-catching 20 and 30-year points here, and three years if you are a specific group. It might be that other countries will do that, but they have not done that yet. Most countries have the point about learning the language and history to show commitment. Some do that more as a contact sport—go to classes and meet people. It is more expensive to do it like that, but maybe it is a bit more meaningful. We do it slightly in the style of the driving theory test. We very much tick the boxes and say, “Well done, you have done it”.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: I think you are both saying—I am just checking—that the general trend, across certainly a lot of comparable countries to us, is to tighten restrictions on all those issues. Is that fair to say?
Sunder Katwala: In short-term politics, yes. In the long term, there has been a shift to be pro citizenship, if you were not. Canada, Australia and Britain have tended to be pro citizenship. Germany and Italy were like, “We do not really think people become Germans and Italians”, but they shifted towards it. Around the 2000s there was that liberalisation and making it possible for people to be citizens. Now there is a tightening and quite a similar political climate in most countries.
Professor Alan Manning: I agree with that.
Q16 Baroness Prashar: If you want us to declare interests, Chair, I would say that I have been an immigrant to this country for 61 years. I was born a British subject and became a British citizen. In that context, is citizenship a right or a privilege? Should we encourage long-term residents in the UK to seek citizenship?
Sunder Katwala: My father was born a British subject in India just before Indian independence. He has become British, but my mother was born an Irish national and has never become British. But she gets the right to vote in all our general elections anyway, for whatever reason. It is a legal status and a social bond. To most of us, if we were born British before 1981 or born British afterwards to British parents, we experience it as a right. We might say it is a privilege for people when we have to decide whether to admit them or not. If we are saying who we admit and who we do not, you want rather clear and fair rules. Alan mentioned children earlier in another context, but most people in this country do not know that we have not had birthright citizenship since the Thatcher 1981 reforms. They just intuitively imagine that we would. What particularly surprises people is that if the parents are legal residents of the country—but not settled permanent citizens—and have children, the children do not automatically get that.
If we are going to have a much larger group of people in that position, we might want to think about what our intentions are there because people might think that group might have it as a right and not a privilege. If you are the migrant citizen and someone says, “Here are the rules, here are the responsibilities, the language, learn this book, pass this test”, you are quite pleased to do the things people want you to do. You might think it would be good if you were learning things the rest of the citizens knew, but that is a sort of issue about designing it. I think it is right to treat it as special in that way, but it would also be helpful maybe to think about the people becoming naturalised citizens and the 16 and 18 year-olds acquiring the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Maybe we should be doing more about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, not just with the migrant citizens, but with all the people acquiring citizenship.
Baroness Prashar: The White Paper in two places says that: “It has been a longstanding principle that citizenship in the UK, like settlement, is a privilege and not a right”. What do you make of that statement?
Sunder Katwala: As I say, it is kind of right to most of the British-born people and not others. You are being admitted to a political community as a citizen so you need to acquire the rights and responsibilities. We have the right to say yes or no to people, but we should do it in ways that seem fair and decent to people living in our society.
Professor Alan Manning: I agree with that.
Q17 Lord Bach: This is a purely factual question. We have a quotation in the papers before us from, I think, a distinguished academic who talks about British citizenship. He says: “There are no rights that are currently exclusively attached to British citizenship. British citizen status is an empty vessel, barely more than a form of revocable immigration status”. But it is this next sentence that I just want an answer to, and I do not quite get it. He says: “the right to vote is not linked to citizenship or are obligations like serving on a jury”. My understanding—it may be a bit too simplistic—is that one of the few advantages in having citizenship was the right to vote. That quotation seems to suggest it is not.
Sunder Katwala: It is just a quirk of our history. We give Irish citizens the right to vote and Commonwealth citizens the right to vote in general elections, but EU permanent residents with settled status will not have the right to vote unless they acquire it. It would surprise people but we have inherited that from the post-imperial and 1948 laws. Where citizenship does do something on immigration is that settled status is not permanent if you leave for two years or five years. The right to abode—as a right that you keep—is attached to citizenship.
Lord Bach: But not the right to vote. I am really interested in this.
Sunder Katwala: It is just a quirk of Commonwealth and imperial history, primarily.
Lord Bach: It is nothing to do with when someone becomes a citizen?
Sunder Katwala: If I am a Swedish person and become a citizen, I gain the right to vote in a general election. But if I am an Indian person and become a citizen, I was given the right to vote by virtue of the UK and Commonwealth franchise. That is all that is going on. The right to vote is attached to citizenship but some people have it without being citizens.
Lord Bach: That is really helpful.
Professor Alan Manning: I am not a legal expert so I do not want to add anything.
Q18 Lord Filkin: I have a direct question on the access to citizenship and even access to permanent residence requirement of English language. It is pretty obvious that the ability to participate in society is dependent on your ability to speak and understand English. Should we really make that much clearer for all routes towards citizenship and even to some routes towards residence, such as family reunion?
Professor Alan Manning: I am generally in favour of language requirements being important—people who cannot communicate find it harder to understand each other—but there are some groups where it is more difficult. If people choose to come her—for family, work, as students—in some cases it would be right to have higher English language requirements than we have had previously, but it is more difficult with humanitarian migration. Sometimes you have people leaving a situation of immediate crisis and to say, “Wait a minute, you have to wait to learn English”, is not realistic policy. There, providing the help and incentives to learn language once you arrive is important.
Sunder Katwala: I think language is absolutely foundational to full participation in your society—in education, work, civic life and politics. In the post-1948 wave of migration, we did not really value it enough, particularly for a generation of women from south Asian backgrounds. I do not think that that has cascaded across the generations. Those women would be very proud of the educational outcomes of their granddaughters in particular. But we should be doing that now with new migrants.
We have that as quite a clear thing in citizenship and settlement. We could tweak it up, and the Government are thinking about this—whether they want to apply it to other routes or not. You could do that before citizenship and settlement. The changes they are making would make a change from my pretty bad GCSE French and German. I can find my way to the train station or whatever, but I cannot describe my hopes and dreams, except for England winning the World Cup. You could get people to be able to do that kind of abstract discussion. Do we want that or not?
The changes I would introduce are having more emphasis on it earlier than the five- or six-year point; putting more responsibility on the person themselves—and maybe the employers—to show what provision they are making; for asylum seekers and refugees, making sure we have got provision, which we do not have at the moment, for people to get the support and speak the language; and maybe making something of an offer to citizens, such as to join conversation clubs and things such as that.
The Hong Kongers, for example, have high educational qualifications. They need particularly high levels of English to get the kind of graduate jobs they are getting. That is going to be hard, because it is about your confidence in workplace language. There is a very practical, not punitive, case for trying to work out where people would get to improve it. Could the rest of us do more for contact in getting involved in that?
Lord Filkin: I accept your point that you would want to make it possible to learn the language by the sort of mechanisms you have talked about, but I would have thought that for some groups, you have to have a pretty clear incentive.
Sunder Katwala: That is in the current rules.
Lord Filkin: Is it?
Sunder Katwala: Yes. You cannot become a citizen without passing an English language test. We can take it up a level.
Lord Filkin: I was applying that test to permanent residence as well.
Sunder Katwala: Yes, you could choose to do that. We did not do it with the settlement scheme for other reasons, but you could do it earlier on other routes. We do it with citizenship at the moment.
Lord Filkin: There would be benefit in doing so, would there not, in terms of the children—
Baroness Buscombe: And the women.
Sunder Katwala: We could set a goal that, if you are going to be in this country for two years, we want universal fluency of people who are sticking around at all. If you are employing in agriculture, shops or something to do with it, you should take some responsibility for making sure that is happening. We should know that you want to do it.
School kids do really well in primary schools. In secondary schools it is a bit tougher, because it is hard to join a class at age 14, especially from a refugee background. Basically, yes, we should require and expect, but we should also think about how we can make more of it happen.
The Chair: On this issue, we have got a number of colleagues who are looking at me, anxious to get in. I am also very conscious of the time. Baroness Buscombe, was your point on this issue or a second point?
Baroness Buscombe: I was just rather alarmed, Sunder, that a little while ago, you were referencing politics in relation to rights versus privileges. Earlier, you were talking about class. I do not understand the focus on politics with this. A lot of English people might have come from families who have lived here for hundreds of years, but they feel it is a huge privilege to be British and English.
Sunder Katwala: It is a privilege, but you get it by right when you are born. We do not check and—
Baroness Buscombe: But we do not talk about rights. Do you see?
Sunder Katwala: I see, okay.
Baroness Buscombe: That is the point I was making, but it is slightly lost in the conversation moving on.
The Chair: Okay, we will try and pick it up. We will hear from Lord Bach and then Lord Anderson. Then we are going to go to our final question from Lord Bach.
Q19 Lord Bach: This specifically arises out of what Lord Filkin was asking about. What you say about language is very important, I agree. I come from Leicester. In my career, I have seen many families coming from the subcontinent, particularly with grandmas, mothers or other relations who have been allowed in and do not speak English, and even today they do not speak English. I agree very much that there should be a better service for such people to learn English. But the fact that they cannot speak English and do not after five or 10 years here, or longer, is regrettable. In some cases, it is almost inevitable, it seems to me.
What would be your comments on the position, for example, of a grandma who comes over from India? She is about 60 to 65. Should she be compelled to learn English? Should her position be weakened because she cannot speak English, or is this just a fact of life?
Lord Filkin: I could not get French citizenship when I was 75 unless I learned French.
Lord Bach: Thank you very much for that. Should we apply that to a 75 year-old grandma who comes from India, for example?
Lord Filkin: Yes. Sorry, we are having a debate. I should shut up
Lord Bach: This is a debate we are going to have ourselves at some stage. But it would be really helpful to have your views about that kind of person. There are plenty of them.
Professor Alan Manning: Currently, our rules on elderly relatives being allowed to come are incredibly strict. In the past, there were quite large numbers. There are now handfuls. I believe—but Sunder may know better—that the rules are waived in circumstances such as those. There may be some people who, for a variety of reasons, we do not think it is feasible for them to learn a language. There are exceptions under the current rules. That is the right approach. For the vast bulk of people who are coming, they are in a position where they could learn English to a standard, which means that, for example, they would not need the help of any translation services when interacting with the British state.
Sunder Katwala: There is a great difference between having some common-sense humanitarian exception for people late in life or disability or health cases. You would not want people saying, “Do not worry about me and the English language requirements, because I am coming to a bit of Leicester where I am not really planning to speak any English”. We do not want that. If we have got newer groups coming to Leicester, you actually want them to engage with this sense of the rights and responsibilities of people from different groups and how we get on together. People who have lived in Leicester for three generations will know that groups from different backgrounds from the subcontinent will get on. You do not want newer groups disrupting that. We saw that three years ago with the disturbances and so on. It is good to have an expectation, and it is going to be important for people if they are in education and in work. If you have got some exceptions for very elderly people, that is fine.
Q20 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: I have a factual question, still on language. I have a son-in-law from South America, in whom I declare an interest and an affection. He is here on a spousal visa, with a five-year pathway to indefinite leave to remain. He needed to take a language test when the visa was renewed after two and a half years. My understanding from him is that he will have to a take a more demanding language test if he is to achieve indefinite leave to remain after five years. Am I to understand from your earlier answers that this is not the case for people who are here on different pathways to indefinite leave? It certainly seems to be the case for people who are here on spousal visas.
Professor Alan Manning: I am hesitant, and I am worried about giving you the wrong answer, so I cannot, off the top of my head, give you the exact answer to that question. It is information that will be available on the government website. I am sorry. I can get back to you on that. It is not that difficult to find out.
The Chair: I am sure we can check it out. Of course, there is also the issue of whether it is going to remain at five years or might have to wait another five years under some of the Government’s current proposals.
Q21 Lord Bach: This is moving on, really. I have an almost peculiar question for Alan about the Migration Advisory Committee. What is the role of that committee in informing and responding to policy? What involvement has it or will it have with the immigration White Paper, the policy paper on asylum and returns, and anything else that may come forward in the next period?
The Chair: Can I just explain to the committee that Professor Manning has to go in a very few minutes, so I will absolutely understand if he gives a brief answer. If you would be kind enough to write to us with anything further, we would be very grateful.
Professor Alan Manning: I think I can be a little late for my next meeting, although that is the notification for it coming in; I am sorry about that. The MAC is a resource the Government can use, but they do not have to. When it makes recommendations, the Government does not have to accept those. In the past, basically, it only took commissions from the Government: the Government asked it questions, and it gave answers. More recently, in its annual report, which probably should be out soon, it chooses its own agenda, so it goes on to some questions itself.
On the particular White Paper and asylum issue, there has been no formal involvement of the MAC in either of those. The civil servants, when they were working on the White Paper, had a number of sessions in which they were talking through possible policy proposals. I know that because I was part of some of those sessions. I know that some of those sessions also had the current MAC chair and deputy chair there, I suspect, in more of an individual capacity than an official one.
On asylum and returns, I do not know anything, but the MAC has traditionally not got involved in asylum. It is made up of economists. It has not got so involved in the humanitarian side of migration. I do not know if that is helpful.
The Chair: Sunder, is there anything you want to comment on?
Sunder Katwala: It is a very good thing that the MAC should have a broader limit. The annual report is very useful because otherwise Governments are avoiding sometimes asking challenging questions. It is helpful to have that broader understanding of this. It is interesting that it has tried to think a bit more about cohesion issues, which can be harder to measure, but we do not have a similar infrastructure to engage with non-labour market questions on broader issues of asylum, refugees, citizenship, integration and so on.
The Chair: We are going to have to draw this to a close. I am enormously grateful to both of you. Thank you so much. As you have already appeared before the committee in the past, you are well aware that we tend to come back to all our witnesses and ask to get more and more. Please feel free to write to us with things that you think we have not really picked up and should have done. I hope you will not mind if we write to you with some further requests for help. In the meantime, for what you have done so far, and in advance of what I know you will do in the future to help us, on behalf of the entire committee, thank you very much.