23
Examination of witnesses
David Goodhart, Alp Mehmet and Shaina Sangha.
Q89 The Chair: Welcome to the seventh meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee. Before we start, I am going to ask our three witnesses to kindly introduce themselves.
Shaina Sangha: Good morning, I am Shaina Sangha, a researcher at the Institute for Government working on, among other things, asylum and immigration policy. The IfG is an independent think tank working to make Government more effective.
Alp Mehmet: I am Alp Mehmet. I am a first-generation migrant. I was an immigration officer in the 1970s. I was a diplomat after that. I have been chairman of Migration Watch for the last seven years, and I was vice-chairman for 10 years before that.
David Goodhart: My name is David Goodhart. I am head of demography at the think tank Policy Exchange. I am a former commissioner of the EHRC. I have written a few books; the most successful is one about populism called The Road to Somewhere where I coined the terms the “anywheres” and the “somewheres”.
The Chair: Thank you all very much. It is great to have you. We will kick off with Baroness Cash.
Q90 Baroness Cash: Thank you all for coming today. This is a quite sweeping question, but an important one to set us off. I would like to know what your impression is of the Government’s intent behind their recent policy proposals. What do you think they are trying to do, and do you think they will have the desired effect?
Shaina Sangha: There are three that come to mind: first, to reduce pull factors, making the UK a more attractive destination for asylum seekers in particular. There is also the idea of introducing the concept of contribution to asylum policy, and going further on that on regular migration policy. There is also a consistency of approach.
On pull factors, the best evidence that we have is quite out of date and very partial. For example, the Home Office’s most in-depth evidence on this is from 2002. We do not have much detailed knowledge of what motivates asylum seekers to come to the country. While you can mount a technical argument about making it harder to get settlement here, for example, this policy does not and probably cannot change some of the fundamental reasons why people come to the UK—for example, shared language, family ties and the innate reputation of the UK.
On contribution, based on the Government’s intentions, the protection work and study route is one way of addressing the large gap in economic output between asylum seekers, regular migrants and people born in the UK. Anything that pushes asylum seekers down these paths is probably worth trying, though others will have views on whether potential contribution is a legitimate factor when looking at people in need.
Finally, consistency of approach applies in particular to reunification rights. These are currently more generous in most cases for asylum seekers than some economic migrants or even some British citizens. These entitlements create distortions and perverse incentives through the system. For example, lots of students come to the UK and, as their student visas come to expiry, they apply for asylum. That would be considered a bit of a manipulation of the rules. On some of the specifics, it seems like the Government are addressing their concerns through policy.
Alp Mehmet: “Control, reduce and encourage integration” is the way I see the proposals. There is a lot of reference to what happened in the last four years or so. I think the problem originates long before that. We have had something like 5 million migrants coming here over the last 10 to 12 years. Net migration since 2012 is 2.5 million. There is lots happening. I will come back to some of these issues. For now, I think that is all I will say.
David Goodhart: There is a lot of continuity between this Government’s approach and the last Government’s approach. There is a recognition from both main parties that immigration has been too high for too long, and it is having a massive impact on our politics. It is obviously partly responsible for the rise of Reform, which challenges both the main parties. There are obviously differences between the two parties—Rwanda is one, attitudes to the ECHR is another—but there is continuity in terms of essentially, as Alp said, wanting a kind of immigration pause from the very high levels, particularly in the last few years and, of course, wanting to stop the boats, which is a daily affront to what most people regard as the duties of any state to control its borders.
We have had two main immigration events in the last year. We had the May White Paper—the famous “island of strangers” White Paper—that continued the restrictionism on legal immigration that the Conservatives introduced and added elements to it as well. A lot of people, including me, were somewhat sceptical about whether they meant what they said, but they clearly did. Social care visas were stopped, and indefinite leave to remain—settlement—was extended. The kind of default settlement period was increased from five years to 10 years. Then, in November, we had Shabana Mahmood’s statement on asylum, which was, again, much more restrictive. It borrowed, to some extent, from the Danish experience, and said that refugee status should be temporary and reviewed every 30 months. You know the story.
The Government are trying to lower levels. They are trying to readjust the British economy, which has become overdependent on immigrant labour. They are trying to stop the boats and clear the asylum backlog. They want to end refugees in hotels and increase returns. It has been a mixed picture on all those things.
Q91 Lord Dubs: Can we just turn to the Home Office as a department? Do you believe the Home Office could effectively oversee the proposed changes? Can it really check people’s status every two and a half years? Is that possible?
David Goodhart: Was it Glyn Williams, a former Home Office senior official, who said that the department is being sort of set up to fail again? The requirements for Home Office labour of checking tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people every 30 months is going to be absolutely enormous. It may not be impossible. The broader question of whether we need a separate department of immigration and integration is a very valid one. It is something that crops up every now and then. The Home Office just has too much to do.
Alp Mehmet: I think not, sadly. In my former department, I do not think the mechanism is there at the moment. The resources are not there and, at the ground level, the training and capacity are not there to initiate the first part of the decision-making process. Unless resources are increased considerably and, indeed, the sort of individual who is dealing with casework changes, then I fancy not. Of course, we no longer have any means of identifying who leaves the country, which is a significant gap in what we are able to do.
Shaina Sangha: I am more optimistic. If you go down a manual route of the kind that happens during initial assessments, I would be very nervous. As the other expert witnesses have spoken about, a lot of resource would be required.
If you took an automated route, I would be much more positive about the potential for this to work. Digital transformation at the Home Office is a bright spot in an otherwise pretty gloomy government picture. In November, it launched the Atlas casework system and decommissioned its long-running CID system, its legacy database. By all accounts, that should help, but it is very early days, so I cannot make any assessment on its success so far.
I can speak a lot more about resourcing issues. Although it is tricky, because there is no standardised route for coming to the country, you can create the technical infrastructure to account for edge cases. The Home Office, to its credit, has already brought all migrants on to the eVisa scheme, which is quite a stunning feat. It is basically digital ID and I am pretty confident, having spoken to other people, that you can create a back end to check against status and have automatic checks every two and a half years. For example, on asylum, if someone’s origin country is no longer on the FCDO list of unsafe countries, you can change their visa status. You can also make it more complicated.
My nervousness about an automated route is that the centralisation of the Home Office means that, although the Secretary of State should not use their time on individual cases, they can and they do. I do not know the extent to which it is prevalent, but it is certainly more so than is the case in another very big operational department—for example, the DWP. The risk is that, if something goes wrong with an automated system, the Secretary of State is the only person who has to shoulder all the responsibility, because you cannot really blame technical infrastructure. They might can the entire system entirely, which would not prove that the system is not working but there would be a great temptation to do that.
Although I think that digital automation is more feasible than a manual approach, certainly now versus a few years ago, the centralising and reactive impulse of the Home Office means that you would need some fortitude from your Secretary of State to go through the whole automated route, even though that is probably the only feasible route to deliver this type of change.
Lord Dubs: David touched on this but I will ask it in full. Do responsibilities such as immigration, integration and citizenship fit in well in the Home Office, given its other responsibilities? What are the implications for policy formulation, following on from what you said, David, about the Home Office? Should these things be in the Home Office at all?
David Goodhart: The Home Office has already had a lot of the justice area stripped out from it, but it still feels as though it has too many areas of responsibility, and areas of responsibility that are often incredibly political, very emotional and very quick to create headlines in newspapers. There is a sense in the Home Office of always dealing with the crises. I have always thought there was a case for a completely separate immigration and integration department. I know that this is something we will come on to later but, for a society to be able to take integration seriously, it would help if there was at least one department of state that was able to concentrate on it a great deal.
Lord Dubs: What do you think, Alp?
Alp Mehmet: In reorganising any government department you are starting almost from ground zero and it takes so long. I just wonder whether or not we are in the sort of position where we should now reorganise. We should be tackling the problem rather than worrying about the structure that is in place to deal with it.
In the days when you were a Minister, Lord Dubs, the Home Office did a great deal more and covered a much wider area than it does now and, I would argue, did it rather well. As to whether the Home Office should be responsible for integration, again, being subjective about this, I wonder whether it should go much wider than that and that there should be a great deal more involvement with integration than the Home Office talking to people and ticking boxes.
Integration—I would argue assimilation—should be an integral part of our way of life, our school system and everything. That is a tall order. I do not think we can introduce that overnight.
Shaina Sangha: Certainly, immigration should be a cross-government endeavour—it intersects with the priorities of lots of different departments and there needs to be more coherent brokering there. There are many international models that you could look at. I do not have much detail on them but some countries use arm’s-length bodies, some countries use separate departments, and in some it sits in their equivalent of the DBT, for example.
The IFG’s position is that now is not the time for a massive machinery-of-government change in this area. The bar has to be very high to dismantle a department’s function, and although I would say that in some ways the bar may well have been met, because policing and public safety is overlooked in ministerial priorities for resourcing within the department—for example, the police White Paper is a year late; I think we can probably guess why—the trouble for the Home Office is that this issue is so politically salient that the Secretary of State has no real incentive to focus on other issues.
One proposal that the IFG has put out is an immigration plan, which would be a bit like a spending review for immigration. It would be co-owned by the Home Office and the Cabinet Office and would be a way of focusing minds across Government. You would be able to deliver on government policy but would not have the situation we often have now, which is that the Home Office is just trying to get the number down and is frequently in conflict with the priorities of other departments.
The machinery-of-government change is very expensive, and you would need a very clear alternative plan to do something such as this. It is not a cure-all and, as I think Mr Mehmet said, there are probably other issues you could try to address first and, if you really cannot grip the issue any other way, maybe then you go down the path of changing departmental functions.
Q92 Baroness Buscombe: Shaina, I am not asking for a response to this but I am interested, so perhaps you could come back on it in question 4. You mentioned the Department for Work and Pensions, which of course has a big research department which it spends a lot on and there is a lot of useful research there that could be helpful to the Home Office. I am not sure it uses it. I will park that for now.
Alp, I do not want to press you too hard, but in answer to your first question from Lord Dubs, you said something like, “The people involved in this have not necessarily got their hearts in it”. Do you mean the people who work at the Home Office are not necessarily totally engaged? I would love you to expand a little bit on that.
Alp Mehmet: No, Baroness, that is not what I intended to say. If that is what was heard, then certainly not. Again, to a certain extent being subjective about it, I was referring and thinking back to what used to happen and could again happen: that interpersonal contact between official and passenger, as we used to call them, and dealing with casework. The whole process has been downgraded in a way. The final decision has been gradually pushed up in a way that makes it very inefficient and unnecessarily lengthy as a process. I would give greater discretion, in the way that people lower down the chain had many years ago, and allow them to make the initial decision before it is countersigned or examined by someone more senior.
Baroness Buscombe: That is very helpful; thank you.
Q93 Lord Bach: I think you have answered my first question, Alp, which was about what you meant by—your exact phrase—the sort of individual who does casework. I want to understand what you meant by that when you were arguing that the Home Office could continue if it did that thing. What does that actually mean? Then I have a very quick second question. You talk about the police White Paper and you say, “Guess why?” You are hinting that the Home Office has got too much on, but another possible reason could be that, when the White Paper does come out, it will be extremely radical in terms of police areas. I just wondered what exactly you meant by those phrases.
Alp Mehmet: I will take it in two parts. First, when an individual arrives at the border, what used to happen is that an official would ask them a few questions. On the basis of the response, an initial decision would be taken. Nine and a half times out of 10—95% of the time—the decision was to admit the individual. Occasionally there was something about the individual that prompted further questioning but, even after further questioning, very few were actually refused. That is not possible now for the simple reason that there is not really that initial contact with individuals.
For those who enter on conditions—admitted with limited leave—at some point, someone back at the Home Office will look at a piece of paper and there will be an application to remain further or to change status. There will be an application in the offing. The individuals who are dealing with that do it on paper. I believe that a properly trained, committed individual should be prepared to take an initial decision, overseen by someone more senior. That would make a huge difference to the flow and the number of cases that there are. That is the casework, where an individual makes a decision on the basis of the paper before them.
In the days when I was an immigration officer, it was quiet at ports during the winter, so we would be sent out to work at the Home Office. Sometimes the Home Office would come to us. Dover Castle, for example, was set up as a point where casework was done. We as immigration officers were used to making decisions on the spot instead of, on the face of it, dealing with a case by saying, “I will send a letter out to the individual to find out what this is about”, and setting the file aside to bring up in a month’s time. On the face of it, that is the case dealt with and completed, but it is not. All it does is just build up more and more people. I am arguing for individuals to be properly trained to have the ability to make a decision at the outset or at the earliest possible point.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Just picking up on that, are you saying that you are prepared to countenance decision-makers making decisions on the basis of incomplete information, because that is what may be available, in your terms, at the outset?
Alp Mehmet: No, that is not what I am saying. Not incomplete—
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: So what is the alternative?
Alp Mehmet: What I am saying is that decisions could be taken much sooner, and I am afraid that the culture is such that there is a tendency to delay decision-making, partly because there is so much of a palaver when it comes to actually refusing—or indeed admitting, allowing and giving permission. It works both ways. That decision could be taken a lot sooner. That is all I am saying.
David Goodhart: There is a bit of an elephant in the room here. There is an ideological dimension to this. If you think of the average London-based graduate and their worldview today compared to 30 or 40 years ago, it is very much more liberal and finds the whole idea of stopping people coming into the country a little bit unsavoury. I do not think that would have been true in Alp’s era, but I think it is true today. There is some survey evidence to back this up.
Most government departments have a vested interest in the most open possible border, whether it is Education, which wants higher education provided by international students or part-funded by international students, or Health, which wants more people coming in to do social care. The Foreign Office always tends to be pro immigration. There is a kind of Whitehall pro-immigration bias, and I think that has seeped even into the Home Office in recent years in a way that would not have been the case 20 or 30 years ago.
Alp Mehmet: Possibly. I would argue: do the job.
Shaina Sangha: As a London-based graduate, I would say that part of the issue with the Home Office is that, where a couple of decades ago people making initial casework decisions were more senior—SEO or HEO—now the majority of these roles are filled by executive officers, which are very junior and the pay and morale are very poor. If you look at the Civil Service people survey, for example, engagement is really bad. It makes it very hard to recruit people and to keep them. That possibly has an effect on the type of person that you get in these jobs, but I have no idea. Eighty per cent of the department’s headcount is taken up by immigration and 70% is taken up by operations, so it is a very large resource.
The Home Office employs very junior people. It is not that they come to the wrong decisions; they just may take a little longer to get there in most cases. You have to hire people with more experience. In Switzerland, for example, the equivalent position for initial assessments is a grade 7 equivalent and usually has some legal background as well. You are asking people to make quite complicated decisions.
Q94 Lord Filkin: As you know, our inquiry is into settlement, citizenship and integration. Could I start with David and ask the question: what do you think the next census should ask, relevant to that?
David Goodhart: What should it ask? I am not sure it should really ask anything in relation to settlement. It is not really the place, is it?
Lord Filkin: I said three things: settlement, citizenship and integration. You are on record, I think, as saying that it should ask questions about religious affiliation. Is that correct?
David Goodhart: Well, it already does, does it not? I think the census asks about religious affiliation.
Lord Filkin: You are saying no change is needed, is that correct?
David Goodhart: Well, integration is a huge issue. To be honest, I had not really thought about whether the census is the place to ask people about their connections with people of different religious or ethnic backgrounds to them. It could be quite a useful place to ask that, but it is mainly trying to establish objective facts about people, and integration is not really an objective thing. It is a felt thing and an emotional thing. It is a thing that is difficult to describe, which is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to talk coherently about it. Perhaps a question about what kind of connections people have with people outside their own core ethnic or religious group would be quite a useful thing to have in a census.
Lord Filkin: The general gist is that it is not a very big issue, from what I have understood from you.
David Goodhart: It is a massive issue, but I am wondering whether the census is the place to investigate it.
Lord Filkin: The census changes are not a big issue; that is what I inferred from what you said.
David Goodhart: Yes. As I said, I had not really thought about it. It may be that the census could be used more to probe into that area. I am not sure quite how one would frame the question, but it is a good question.
Lord Filkin: Thank you. Alp?
Alp Mehmet: What do you think we need to find out that we do not already know that can be properly sought in the census?
Lord Filkin: Unfortunately, the rules of the game are that we ask you the questions, rather than you ask us.
Alp Mehmet: But if I had a sense of that, then I would give you, perhaps, a different answer. I agree with David. I am not sure that the census is the appropriate space to ask people questions about integration, beyond “Where were you born?” and “Where were your parents born?”. All this, I am pretty sure, is asked already.
Lord Filkin: That is fine.
Shaina Sangha: The IfG has not done any work in this area, unfortunately, so I do not have anything to add.
Lord Filkin: That often does not stop our witnesses venturing a view, but never mind.
Q95 Baroness Hughes of Stretford: We would like to understand, and wonder if you can help us to understand better, how the Home Office monitors those on the different sorts of visa—student, spouse, worker, et cetera—and how it ensures compliance and prevents overstaying. To add to that, in terms of your thinking, I am interested in the fact that there has been no effective analysis of data on people leaving the country for five years at least, and therefore no real knowledge of who is still here, and what impact that has on the processes of monitoring visas and ensuring compliance if we do not know who is here.
Alp Mehmet: In short, it leaves us with inadequate information on which to make overall, overarching decisions on the whole thing. It has been rather longer than five years that we have really had the inability. From the days when John Major was Prime Minister, we stopped checking people on their way out. But, having said that, it was always a survey. There has never been a system in place or a mechanism for linking the person leaving with whatever the Home Office may have about them.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: I am sorry, I should say something, just so that I am correct. I thought we stopped analysing airline data in relation to people leaving in 2020. That is our understanding.
Alp Mehmet: Unfortunately that is inadequate. It is not possible to use that—it is not being used—in order to link it to people here. We may establish who is leaving, but we do not know who is overstaying and who is here without permission.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Because the information about who is leaving is not linked back to individual cases about who is still here—is that what you are saying?
Alp Mehmet: Absolutely, there is no mechanism for doing that.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Okay. Can you help us understand what exactly the Home Office do in relation to monitoring and compliance?
Shaina Sangha: Just briefly, on the points that Mr Mehmet raised, the methodological issues are mainly around emigration—people leaving the country. In fairness to the NAO, the reason that we have had really big revisions on net migration in the last few years is partly because we have been transitioning to a more effective system, using eGates when you go through the airport, for example. Sorry, it is not the NAO, the ONS. We are getting towards better data, but we have always had problems with migration data in the large revisions that you see.
In terms of tracking immigrants that have arrived in the country, we actually have a fairly robust system. Mainly, that is through the UK’s digital immigration system—the combination of the eVisa and the digital ID that everyone gets. What the Home Office can see is the entry and exit dates, the visa expiry, changes in personal information and information about overstaying.
I can speak a bit more about how that applies to people on different types of visa, but the Home Office has automatic alerts and compliance triggers when people have abused their visas in any one way. I can speak about what the attempts are to prevent visa abuse by different categories and some of the enforcement tools.
Q96 The Chair: I am sorry to interrupt. That would be very helpful to the committee but, rather than going through it in detail now, if you would be willing to write to us with some urgency on that, that would be enormously helpful. I am sorry to interrupt, Baroness Hughes, but I want to be absolutely clear from what you are saying. You are saying that the NAO is getting better because we are using the data of people leaving more effectively than we did in the past. The question, however, is: is that data being used to particularly check on an individual and whether he or she has overstayed, or to check that, since they do not appear on that data, they have overstayed and therefore need to be found? Our understanding is that those two things do not happen. Yes, we are getting more data about the number of people leaving, but the linking of that to visa data does not take place. Am I correct?
Shaina Sangha: I am so sorry, I misspoke. It is not the NAO; it is the ONS.
The Chair: Sorry, I was wrong as well.
Shaina Sangha: I do not know for sure. I can find out and write to you on whether or not it is exactly linked up. But what I am saying is that there are systems in place to understand whether or not a visa is being abused or whether or not someone is overstaying their visa. There is no degree of guesswork there, because we just have automatic flags in the system. I do not think the Home Office knows whether someone who has abused their visa left on a plane yesterday.
The Chair: Again, I was sorry to interrupt Baroness Hughes. Lord Anderson?
Q97 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Thank you very much, Lord Chairman. I am still on the question of counting, but with rather a wider lens. I was looking at a piece that Sam Freedman wrote just before Christmas. He made the point that net migration is “already down to pre-Brexit levels”. He said that it “looks very likely … numbers keep falling following further restrictions introduced by this government. It’s even possible we’ll see net emigration at some point in the next few years”. My question to all three of you, very briefly, is: do you agree?
Shaina Sangha: Sam Freedman is actually a senior fellow at the IfG, so I also read his blog. Again, with the caveat that revisions are often pretty substantial, and considering also that the Government have gone quite far in tightening policy, forecasts indicate that we will see a significant drop in people coming into the country. It is harder to predict people leaving, especially if it is, for example, British citizens. It is always quite hard to discern what people’s motivations are for leaving, and you cannot stop people from leaving the country, whereas you can, to an extent, stop people from coming in.
I think net emigration is probably less likely because, post Brexit, the types of visas that people come into the UK on mean that people stay a lot longer here as workers than was the case before 2016. In general, migration patterns are such that people stay longer. But there is a lot of caveating there.
Alp Mehmet: Just to follow up on that, there is argument among those of us who are involved in this issue about what is likely to happen with net migration. I have seen nothing persuasive or convincing that says net migration is going to fall to zero. I would point to the inflow, as well as the overall net migration figure, which was 900,000 at the last count.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: His point is that it is now down to about 200,000.
Alp Mehmet: No, the inflow, the immigration, is at 900,000. When you look at the inflow and the categories of people coming in—students, work, family—the evidence is not there that it will continue falling. We are now at 200,000 net, which is massive.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: I think perhaps the other point you are making is that if we are looking at integration and settlement, then the net figure is not necessarily the most relevant one and we should be looking at the number of people coming in who will need to settle and integrate. Is that a fair expression of what you are saying?
Alp Mehmet: I think that there is greater relevance than perhaps was once considered. The net migration of non-EU and non-UK nationals is still a third of a million, and those are the very people we are most interested in with regard to integration.
David Goodhart: Aiming even for net zero for several years would not be a bad thing at all, given the extraordinary changes we have had in the demography of the country. You only have to go back to the turn of the century, 2000, when about 90% of the population was white British; it is now below 70%. We have seen extraordinary changes. That means that many towns and cities, obviously including the one we are sitting in, are majority minority, and more will head in that direction. In many places that has gone relatively smoothly, but in many places there are clearly frictions involved. We need a pause.
I also read Sam Freedman’s blog and I am a fan of his in some respects, but he represents a kind of pro-immigration bias found among part of the commentariat—a bias based on what is now a false assumption of the economic benefits of high levels of immigration. We have had very high immigration for the last 20 years, during which time the economy has never performed worse. We now have data. A lot of the OBR figures are based on very short-term snapshots of the contribution to the economy, which show that in the very short term, say over a five-year period, a new worker will contribute to the economy—they will be earning an income, paying taxes and so on—but if you look over a lifetime, and the Migration Advisory Committee has been doing work on the lifetime benefit or disbenefit to the country, massive costs are emerging. That is one of the reasons why postponing indefinite leave to remain has become such a big issue. There are billions and billions and billions in costs coming down the road from relatively low-skill people coming into this country.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: So, if he is right, it is not necessarily a bad thing.
David Goodhart: Absolutely.
Alp Mehmet: Also, on the lifetime cost that David refers to, Professor Alan Manning, former chairman of the MAC, has suggested that the costs for lower-paid, lower-skilled migrants is between £150,000 and £200,000 over a lifetime. When we are talking about 10 million people, that is massive.
Q98 Baroness Hughes of Stretford: I have a final question on some of the detail of the Home Office activity. We understand that, certainly more recently, proactive Home Office enforcement activity, particularly around work visas through businesses, has been quite active. Would you say that is the case, and is that the case with other sorts of visas? Does the Home Office go out and seek information and do checks in relation to, say, marriage visas, work visas, student visas and so on?
Shaina Sangha: On work visas, you will always have employers who do not observe the laws, but anyone who starts work in the UK has to go through a visa check. That is standard.
On student visas, we have a sponsor reporting system, and I think the new proposals add additional penalties as well. The Government are also consulting on adding international student levies to clamp down on “visa mills”. Fairly good work is being done there and it looks fairly positive that that route will become less open to abuse in the next few years.
On spouse and partner visas, we have data sharing between departments. For example, the NHS flags breaches if it looks like a marriage is not legitimate. There is probably more work to be done there—that is a harder one to do because it is very hard to determine whether or not someone is actually in a relationship.
David Goodhart: I defer to Shaina on all those details about how the visa system is overseen. But I remember, when I was looking at the Home Office in more detail a few years ago on the question of failed asylum seekers, there was a system—I am not sure whether this is still the case—where failed asylum seekers were meant to check in with the Home Office every three months, or maybe even every month. It was a very laissez-faire system and many of them just stopped doing so, and there was no way for the Home Office to check whether they were still living at the address they had previously given.
The Chair: I just want to say to everyone—our guests and members of the committee—that several members want to ask additional questions, but we have a large number of issues that we need to cover, so I am going to move us on. I apologise to those colleagues who I know are desperate to ask questions.
The one we really need to develop in more detail is the issue of the costs. Given that we are going to talk about integration in a couple of questions, that may be the area where it could be brought in. I am also going to ask witnesses to be really tight with their answers, please. We will give you plenty of opportunity to write to us with more detail, but if we do not move on, I am afraid we are not going to get through some other very important topics, which will be started off by Baroness Prashar.
Q99 Baroness Prashar: Thank you very much indeed, Chairman. My question is about integration. What role should settlement and citizenship policy play in integration? I will start with you, David, because you have written about it.
David Goodhart: Have I?
Baroness Prashar: You have. A long time ago. You may have forgotten.
David Goodhart: I have always thought that it would be preferable if settlement and citizenship were better combined. As you know, once somebody has achieved indefinite leave to remain—settlement—they can apply for citizenship a year later. But they do not have to. There are now hundreds of thousands—actually, if you include EU citizens, probably millions—of people who are, in the technical use of the term, denizens, meaning they have, in essence, all the rights of citizenship but do not have the potentially beneficial symbolic integrationist aspect of actually being a citizen with a passport.
There is a case for saying that the default position, if you are applying for settlement, should be that you automatically apply for citizenship too. Now, of course, that does raise issues with some countries that do not permit dual citizenship, and there should be exemptions for people who have a very good case for not being a citizen. The Labour Government way back at the beginning of the century introduced all those important and useful changes: the citizenship ceremony, the language tests, the citizenship test and so on. Although they are often mocked, those are important symbolic actions. We want as many people who are settled here as possible—who are going to be living here permanently—to have that extra commitment to the country that being a citizen represents.
Alp Mehmet: First, being given settled status is tantamount to being given citizenship; it invariably follows. Once an Indian national, for example, or a Pakistani national, as Commonwealth citizens, have their settlement status, there is not a great deal more that they can acquire by getting another citizenship. I would point to that. Secondly, if you look at the applications for indefinite leave to remain for settlement over the 2001 to 2004 period, no one was refused. Once you apply for citizenship, it automatically follows. One can argue: what is the point of these tests and questions asking people what they know about Magna Carta and the rest of it? Frankly, there should be more rigorous tests as to whether or not someone is genuinely ready to call themselves a British citizen. If they are not, I would refuse it.
Shaina Sangha: I do not have much to add, especially in the interests of keeping to time, other than to say that the Government’s recent policy changes place much more of an emphasis on contribution, language skills and integration on the pathway to settlement and citizenship, which is sort of the reverse of the question as formulated. So yes, work is being done in this area.
David Goodhart: At present, the costs of becoming a citizen are far too high. If one was to make it the default position, the costs of citizenship should be either waived completely or brought down dramatically. The one difference between being a denizen and a citizen is the right to vote in general elections. That is very important. You become a full political citizen when you go through the citizenship process, although it is true that if you are a Commonwealth citizen you have that right automatically, so it does not necessarily apply to people from India or Pakistan.
Baroness Prashar: We have talked about the process, but what do you mean by integration? What is your understanding of it?
David Goodhart: Well, that is a very big one.
Baroness Prashar: Briefly.
David Goodhart: I mean someone who comfortably fits into the broad, common norms of the society; someone who is able, not necessarily immediately, to speak fluent, idiomatic English and mix easily with members of the ancestral majority as well as with people from other ethnic and religious backgrounds; someone who is part of the common endeavour and the team that is the nation, and feels a degree of emotional citizenship. That is important.
The Chair: If you would not mind, Baroness Prashar, I am going to move to Lord Tope, and we will develop these issues.
Q100 Lord Tope: How do we effectively integrate those migrating to the UK? Do we have an integration strategy? If we did have one, what would it look like?
David Goodhart: No, we do not really have an integration strategy. To the extent that we do have one, I guess it is symbolised by the processes that people have to go through in order to gain citizenship. Integration is an extremely difficult thing to talk about and legislate for in a liberal society, and one of the points of a liberal society is that you do not actually have to conform to the common norms of society. Clearly, a society works better when the vast majority of people do sign up to common norms but, so long as people obey the law and pay their taxes, in a liberal society there is not very much you can do, which is why the debates about integration so often go round in circles. If we want to remain a liberal society, and I think most of us do, then the ability to enforce the emotional citizenship I was just talking about is very limited.
There are things that can be done that have not yet been done. The level of language ability required before you become a citizen could be quite a lot higher. There is a case for, except in exceptional circumstances, requiring all public bodies to publish and speak only in English. There was a trend many decades ago where it was thought a good thing to publish NHS literature and so on in lots of different languages. I think that is not a good thing; it is a symbol of the balkanisation of our society. Now, obviously, there have to be exceptions for that.
Measuring the degree of integration and segregation in different places and publishing it was something that Trevor Phillips suggested a few years ago. Every few years, all local authorities should publish the data—we know it from the census—on where people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds live. There would then be a huge incentive on all local authorities not to be the most segregated local authority in the country. Obviously, some places are going to start in a tougher position than others.
We have a serious issue of segregation in schools. An increasing number of schools have no white British pupils at all or are dominated by a single ethnicity. We now have 30 communities in this country with at least 100,000 people—30 different national ethnic groups. It means they have their own institutions. With modern media, you can stay in touch with your home country. A lot of things have been leaning against integration in recent years. I welcome the fact that you are chewing this over. I assume you are leaning in favour of the integration story. It is a very difficult one. A liberal society places very strict limits on what you can do, so it is almost a matter more of nudges than of hard policy.
Alp Mehmet: I would argue that five years is not really long enough to regard yourself as being integrated, and certainly not assimilated.
The Home Secretary referred to integration in her foreword to last November’s proposals. She says that “for some in our country today, this broad patriotism”—she refers to her family, and her father coming here and becoming a Brummie; well, great—“is narrowing. Divides are growing. The goal of building a greater Britain is giving way to the lure of a littler England”. I was disappointed in that remark, and I do not think that is encouraging integration. It is not about the Government putting in place a process which, like a sausage factory, produces Brits at the end of it. That is not the way it should happen. It is a two-way process. It is a two-way street. Immigrants have to want to integrate. They have to want to be a part of the country. I am afraid that that is not always the case.
I would say that integration is one thing, but being given a British passport and citizenship is very different. I am not sure that, after five years—I am not saying it should not be issued—you can judge whether a person is, in fact, British.
The Chair: We will come to the issue of the five years. Anything to add, Shaina?
Shaina Sangha: I have just a small point, which I am sure the committee is considering. There is a trade-off between the types of immigration that might be considered more economically desirable. There are people staying here when they are young for a short period of time, not able to use resources or not needing to use resources up very much and then leaving, versus the type of integration that you are talking about. That is just something to be aware of: depending on the type of immigration, more or less integration is likely. If you spend less time here, you just will be less integrated into the community.
Q101 The Chair: That is why, in an earlier question from Baroness Prashar, we were looking at the issue of the settlement route and the role that that can play in integration, and the wider issue where there is an immigration policy.
I put to you as a suggestion that the role of the Home Office, if it continues to do it, in terms of the settlement route, should be one that addresses the issues—whether five years is long enough we will come on to in a second—of helping the person seeking settlement to be in a position to easily integrate, i.e. during that period of time, to learn about cultural issues, whatever. Then, subsequently, once you have got your settlement, whether it is ILR or even citizenship, you are then a member of the society, the culture and the communities in which you live. That is then a job for a different department. That is the job, in our current structure, for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. There are, within that department, Ministers with responsibility for community cohesion. I used to be one for a period of time. I think that is the model. We would be interested to see whether that makes sense to you in the light of what you have been saying—just very briefly; a yes or no will do. David?
David Goodhart: I had forgotten the fact that integration is not even in the Home Office. Obviously, the two things should be connected. Going back to the 1960s and 1970s, we had a much more laissez-faire, multiculturalist approach; “Come here and be yourself” was essentially what people were saying. That has turned out to be a recipe for majority resentment and balkanisation of communities. I think there is now an acceptance that that does not really work. It would help if there was a single department that had a real focus on it connected to immigration, as you say.
Alp Mehmet: I agree with David.
Shaina Sangha: I do not want to comment.
The Chair: Lord Anderson will get you to comment on another issue, however.
Q102 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: Thank you. The Government are consulting on whether their proposal for a longer standard settlement period should be made retrospective. We are getting a lot of correspondence from people—for example, people who are three or four years into the skilled-worker pathway—who say that this promotes insecurity. They say it will not do anything about the pull factor because they have already been pulled here. More fundamentally, they say that it feels unfair. I am interested in your views on this retrospectivity issue. Is it something the Government should be doing? If so, under what conditions?
Alp Mehmet: It depends on what is meant by retrospective action. If we are referring to individuals who are already here but will not complete their five years, I do not see that as being retrospective. If the rules change, there is absolutely no reason why it should not apply to them as well. In fact, I would urge that that happens.
David Goodhart: This is partly a response to the really exceptional circumstances of the immigration of the last few years—the so-called Boriswave—when some 5 million people came in over a four-year period. We have a particular problem there.
The proposal to extend the settlement period to 10 years for people who have come in legally on visas of various kinds is justifiable. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has spoken about allowing people to qualify over a shorter period of time if they qualify in various ways, including if they do not use the welfare state, if they earn above a certain amount, and she talked about volunteering—I do not think that would be such a good idea; volunteering is too easy to game.
A better idea, and actually this is a point about the broader integration issue, would be that somebody who is applying for settlement should get two British citizens from a different ethnic or religious group to them—a neighbour or a friend—to write a letter of recommendation, as it were. That could be a useful measure.
It is justified because of the massive cost. We have had a huge amount of relatively low-skill, low-productivity immigration, and we have a massive bill coming down the road from that, so extending it is absolutely necessary.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: And that bill would be reduced by extending it?
David Goodhart: Yes, because at the moment, as you know, if you do not have settlement, then you have to pay to be in the country. You have to pay the NHS surcharge of around £1,500 every 30 months. If we were to stick to five years, it would have a serious impact on our fiscal situation.
Shaina Sangha: You should be extremely careful about any type of retrospective action in any policy area when individuals have already made informed decisions. It creates uncertainty and lack of trust, which probably does not help your integration objectives among certain communities. It could be perceived as undermining the law. It is probably especially harmful for prospective migrants of a sort of higher quality—the type you might want to see more of in the UK—because they tend to have better access to information and if they see that changes are happening through retrospective action they might well be put off.
In previous policy, there are not many examples of the Government doing retrospective action, especially of a kind that would affect so many people. The one I found was the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Act 2013, which affected 300,000 people, was retroactive, and was very controversial. Doing that on immigration would be even more so.
As much as the Government might not like the situation they are in—and it is not the fault of this Government necessarily that there has been a lot of immigration since 2020—you cannot really go back on things and make the situation better in that way.
David Goodhart: Can I just add one tiny thing? The American green card is a possible example. You could keep the settlement period at roughly the same five-year length and people could get settlement but not automatically get access to the welfare state, social housing, the ability to bring in family members and so on. You could phase it, which would partly deal with the economic cost problem while giving people confidence. If you have settled status here, you have a much more confident attitude in your workplace, to your landlord and so on, so that might be one way of thinking about it.
Q103 Lord Bach: My question is about citizenship. The general question is one that would take days to answer—is citizenship more important to the individual, to society or to the state?—so I will leave that and come to the role that citizenship fees play. David has already expressed his view that they are ridiculously high in this country and we have had lots of evidence from witnesses to suggest they are. What is the view of you other two?
Alp Mehmet: As with overseas students, there is a danger that migrants in certain positions are regarded as a cash cow, whether it is £1,700, £250 or £500. I do not think it is in paying for the bureaucratic bit, which is costly. It should probably not be as much as it is for certain families, but for some families, frankly, it is a drop in the ocean. It probably is too high, but it is not necessarily wrong.
Shaina Sangha: We have not done much research in this area, but I agree with Mr Mehmet that citizenship fees are quite a money-spinner for the Treasury at the moment—and beyond recouping some money from people, what does it do?
David Goodhart: There are easier ways of raising money for the Treasury—reopen the North Sea.
Q104 Baroness Buscombe: I want to ask about the impacts of current migration patterns on public services. You have referred to the massive costs over a lifetime, which is one thing. There is also the impact of the rate and rapidity of immigration on our public services. One is financial and the other is just the number of people accessing them. I do not know whether we have data on this, but we would love to hear that. We know that the Government do not have a definition of net contributors to the tax system, for example, in relation to the costs. The assumption is that everyone who comes legally contributes, even if they may not. David, you are nodding.
David Goodhart: What are the impacts? When populations expand, particularly those that may have particular dependence on public services—people in the bottom half of the income spectrum, which is certainly the case with the recent wave of immigration—there will clearly be extra pressures.
You did not ask about this, but this is one of the reasons why there is a case for an extra census. Policy Exchange, as you may know, produced a paper on the case for a short-term census because the demography of the country has changed so fast—not waiting until 2031. Services and local authorities get funding from the Treasury partly on the basis of census information, so there is a case for a temporary census—not a full census, but a 10% sample as happened in 1966, interestingly, partly because of anxieties about the movement of people from north to south putting pressure on services and housing in the south. There is a strong case for it.
There are two elements to this. There is the contribution of immigrants to public services as well. About 20% of people who work for the NHS were born abroad—25% of nurses and nearly 40% of doctors. We are an international outlier and it is rather scandalous that we often take people as nurses and doctors from much poorer countries. About a third of academics are international migrants and about 10% to 12% of teachers. A lot of these jobs must be made more attractive for people who are already in the country. So long as immigration remains too open, even in areas which are relatively popular, such as social care or medicine, you have the prospect—I think they are beginning to change the rules now—of lots of UK citizens who train as doctors and then cannot get jobs because there are so many doctors coming from abroad.
Baroness Buscombe: I think they are beginning to change that now.
David Goodhart: Yes, there is something on that. We have become overdependent in many sectors, most dramatically in health and social care, and these jobs have to be made more attractive for people who are already here.
Alp Mehmet: It is all about scale. Whichever way you look at it, if you have a net 4.5 million people arriving in 12 or 13 years and 2.5 million arriving in the last four years added to our population, the implications for housing, the NHS and GP surgeries are phenomenal. If for no other reason, we therefore have to be sensible about reducing the numbers. This is not about race or ethnicity—it is nothing like that—but just in the interests of not only us who are already here but those who are coming. The numbers have to be reduced because their impact is across the board.
Q105 Baroness Buscombe: Pre Brexit, many people came here—I do not know how many—from different EU countries or used them as a route to come here, say from South America via Spain. Do we in our numbers include all those people who stayed? Do we know how many people stayed after Brexit?
David Goodhart: It was about 5 million under the EU settlement scheme.
Alp Mehmet: If you look at the EU settlement scheme, it was probably just over 5 million, whereas, interestingly, the Government thought it was only around 3.5 million. Perhaps this suggests that David is right in calling for an emergency census. David knows that I disagree with this, for two reasons. First, the 2021 census cost £900 million. It takes so long to put in place and devise, and I just think it is an unnecessary cost. David referred to the 1966 census in the middle of that decade. I am told by Professor David Coleman, who knows a thing or two about censuses, that it was a waste of time and did not really tell us anything very much. If we were to put in place a census for 2029, it would be a couple of years before we had any information from it anyway.
David Goodhart: We have been discussing huge areas of calculation by the state. We are a country without ID cards and without a household register. We depend too much on the census. I think that we should have ID cards, and we should have a household register, but we do not. We know so little about the people who are in the country, or who are moving across the border. As we were saying, the Government thought that 3.5 million EU citizens were going to sign up—we had 5.5 million.
Baroness Buscombe: And they were only the people who signed up to national insurance, and so on. There may be others who did not sign up to anything who are still here.
David Goodhart: We are in a fog. The more data we can have about what is actually happening in our country, the better. To Alp’s point, this is a 10% sample. It is an emergency census. It is not like £900 million; it might be something like £150 million. This is small change in the modern state.
Shaina Sangha: To your original question about the impact on public services, I would emphasise that it is very easy to cherry-pick statistics in this area. The larger point to make is that we do not know: when it comes to tax and spend, most studies do not tend to have access to administrative tax status. The amount of tax that migrants pay is a guesstimate. We definitely do not capture how much anyone, including migrants, spends in consumption and therefore through VAT, or how much they contribute in terms of their business profit, for example. At the start of their immigration journey, you would imagine that their use of services would be quite low, because there are lots of restrictions on which services they can use. They have to pay an NHS surcharge, et cetera. There is also some evidence that immigrants underuse healthcare relative to their proportion of the population. It really depends on the service that you are talking about. Basically, it is a very mixed picture.
In general, when looking at burden or contribution, you have to bear in mind the relationship between age, employment and earnings. If you change the mix of immigrants, their relative contribution or burden on the country changes quite significantly. Immigrants do use benefits when they become entitled to them, but not necessarily at a greater rate than people born here, once you control for socioeconomic circumstances. Again, that is about the mix. The length of stay matters; women immigrants tend to be less employed than British-born women, whereas the opposite is true for male immigrants to the country. There are just so many factors at play, and any sort of blanket statement about the lifetime cost of an immigrant to the state is mistaken.
I would say, however—Professor Alan Manning has made this point—that one fault in a lot of the calculations is that we might look at their use of services in a very imperfect way. We do not necessarily consider the cost, for example, when an immigrant walks on the road, but that represents road degradation. If you do not continue to increase investment to match population growth on public sector capital assets, those will degrade. That is a political choice, to an extent. It is not always the case that more migrants arrive and therefore services have to get worse. It is about how you spread the money.
Q106 Baroness Buscombe: Do we have any data on things such as housing impact?
David Goodhart: For social housing in London, 50% of the heads of households are born outside the country. Social housing in London represents a £20 billion subsidy relative to private sector rentals, I think.
Shaina Sangha: That is because London is more ethnically diverse than pretty much anywhere else in the UK, so that is part of the statistic. When you control for socioeconomic status, migrants are actually less likely to use social housing.
Baroness Buscombe: What about the West Midlands?
Shaina Sangha: I do not have that data. I am speaking on a national level. Subsidised housing is always a problem and always represents a cost to the state if there is any increase in demand, but it is not all just on migrants’ backs.
David Goodhart: In terms of the cost-benefit analysis of our immigration, the economic consensus is shifting, particularly in relation to the recent wave which has been relatively low-skill immigration. The Migration Advisory Committee has calculated that just the people coming in on spousal visas in 2022-23 will cost the country £5 billion over a lifetime. According to the Migration Advisory Committee, care workers who brought one spouse and one child between 2001 and 2004 are going to cost the country £20 billion over a lifetime. We are talking about very large sums of money.
Q107 Baroness Cash: As my colleagues know, I am obsessed with the data, so how we assess cost is very interesting to me. I am also interested in a couple of comments, including one made by David, about the rate. We are looking at integration citizenship. When it comes to the rate of immigration and the pressure on resources, we are hearing that the data is very difficult to collate. You seem to have sources, though, David. How do we, as a committee, best understand the cost to society, and how much does the rate of immigration impact on that assessment?
Alp Mehmet: I am not sure that it is entirely about social housing.
Baroness Cash: That is not what I was asking, sorry.
Alp Mehmet: No, but this goes back to what was said earlier. If you have, as we did, 750,000 people added to our population up to mid-2025, those three-quarters of a million will need 300,000 homes. Whether those homes are provided by the private sector or by local authorities, you still need roofs over those people’s heads. We sometimes overlook that.
David Goodhart: There are two issues: economic issues and congestion issues. The argument has shifted on the economics, as large-scale immigration always used to be thought of as an economic positive. I think that is now questioned much more, particularly the kind of immigration we have had in recent years, which has been less European. Then there are the congestion issues and the cultural “feel of your neighbourhood” issue. Is it changing too fast, when we have this extraordinary demographic change?
We are heading towards being a majority minority society in the 2060s; London, Leicester, Luton and Birmingham are already majority minority cities. In some areas, this happens completely without friction; in other places it does not. People want the familiar—both members of the ethnic majority and minorities. You hear Caribbeans in Brixton complaining about all these affluent white hipsters buying their way into what has become their corner of London. It might not be everybody, but a lot of people prioritise stability and predictability in their lives. If your high street and neighbourhood are suddenly full of people who do not speak your language and the shops are focused on a particular minority group, people are alienated by it. It is one of the divisions in British politics at the moment: is it legitimate to feel discomfited by that change? A lot of people in liberal Britain say that it is not, and that it is nativist, bigoted or racist. I would say that it is a legitimate human response to over-rapid change.
The Chair: I am sorry, but we are going to have to bring this to an end. Thank you, all three of you, for not only the information you have given us but your perspective on it. To use your phrase, David, we are in a fog, not least in terms of the data available, whether that be on the cost, the net cost, the net numbers or individuals following up on people evading visas.
We simply do not have enough information to make decisions. The idea of an emergency census was very helpful and we will certainly consider it. There have been a number of areas on which I can see you have been frustrated and have not been able to say some of the things I know you wanted to. As we are moving towards the final stages of our inquiry, can I please ask all three of you to contact us as a matter of some urgency if there are further bits of information that you think we need, in light of the way we have questioned you. On behalf of the committee, thank you all very much indeed.
