Home Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Post-Brexit migration policy, HC 857
Tuesday 26 June 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 26 June 2018.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Kirstene Hair; Stuart C. McDonald; Alex Norris; Douglas Ross.
Questions 317–409
Witnesses
I: Phoebe Griffith, Associate Director for Migration, Integration and Communities, Institute for Public Policy Research; Professor Jonathan Portes, Economics and Public Policy, King’s College London and Senior Fellow, UK in a Changing Europe; and Stephen Clarke, Senior Economic Analyst, Resolution Foundation.
II: Lord Green of Deddington, Chairman, Migration Watch; and David Goodhart, Head of Demography, Immigration and Integration, Policy Exchange.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Phoebe Griffith, Professor Jonathan Portes and Stephen Clarke.
Q317 Chair: I welcome our panel today to the Home Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into post-Brexit migration policy options. My apologies to the panel for the late start of the session as a result of the vote. Can I ask each of you to introduce yourselves and say which organisation you are from?
Stephen Clarke: I am Stephen Clarke. I am the Senior Economic Analyst at the Resolution Foundation. We are an independent, non-partisan think-tank that focuses on improving lives for people on low to middle incomes.
Phoebe Griffith: My name is Phoebe Griffith. I am Associate Director at the Institute for Public Policy Research and I lead our work on immigration and integration.
Professor Portes: I am Jonathan Portes. I am Professor of Economics and Public Policy at King’s College London and I am also Senior Fellow at UK in a Changing Europe, which is an ESRC-funded research network looking at Brexit.
Q318 Chair: Thank you very much. Can I ask you two quick opening questions? The first is: what do you think the relationship will be in practice between immigration and trade in the future partnership negotiations? The second is: what do you think the Government’s approach to immigration should be as part of the Brexit negotiations? If we could take each of those questions in turn as a quick overview, because we will then get into some of the detail of those issues.
Stephen Clarke: I think the key thing on immigration and trade, which perhaps has not been clear on either side yet, is exactly what price either is going to pay for market access. Until that is clear, it is very difficult to know what the UK Government are willing to trade off in access for migration against market access for trade. On the EU side, it is also not really clear how much they value freedom of movement and how much they are willing to trade off that against access to the EU market for goods and services. That is where I see the key thing coming up and I honestly don’t see that necessarily happening until well within the transition period.
Phoebe Griffith: My response is similar. We don’t really know yet what the trade-off will be between market access and greater control over the flow of workers and migrants from the European Union. That is partly because of the phase we are at in the negotiations. We are still establishing what the withdrawal agreement is and we still need to determine what the future agreement will look like. However, we do know that the EU has a very clear position and it is pretty binary. The position is that access to the single market will be conditional on the UK maintaining freedom of movement and that the opposite is also the case, that without freedom of movement, access to the single market will be significantly curtailed. We believe that there is a spirit for compromise positions. It is something that IPPR has explored and something that we think the Government should prioritise.
Q319 Chair: Can you pause on that and I will come back to the second question? Professor Portes, the first question on what you think the relationship will be between trade and immigration in the negotiations? I am going to come back to the second question.
Professor Portes: I think it is pretty much a binary choice: either we stick to our red lines—we are out of the single market, customs union, ECJ, and so on, in which case there is no particular reason for either side to have a really deep relationship on labour mobility issues; there will be some labour mobility addressed but it will be Canada-plus type issues more than anything else—or our red lines are softened and blurred, as the Government are showing some signs of doing, in which case we are into the question of to what extent can free movement be modified within the constraints of a single market. As you know, I have written a paper on that and Phoebe has written on this. I think there are some possible modifications but we have to choose which of those spaces we are negotiating in.
Q320 Chair: Phoebe, I stopped you in mid-flow, so carry on with what you think the compromise options might be.
Phoebe Griffith: We have identified four in a report called “Striking the Right Deal”. The first is an option that is the sectoral preference agreement, which is an agreement that the Swiss have secured that would enable UK residents to have a head start in the labour market whereby for a period—it is quite short in the case of Switzerland of about 10 days—they will have the ability to have access to job advertisements exclusively. Temporary controls is another option and I know the Committee is considering that quite seriously. That option is important because there is some precedent, not least the one that the UK negotiated in advance of the referendum in relation to benefits. But it is also an option that has been applied to, for example, new EU member states post accession. I know that Jonathan will talk about some of the options of enabling workers to come to the UK on the condition that they have a job offer. I think that is a very important option and should definitely be considered.
The final option, which is the no compromise option, is to export the rules that we apply currently to non-EU migrants and apply them to EU migrants. That is not really a compromise option although you could calibrate it in ways that would give EU migrants some kind of advantages within the UK labour market. None of those options is perfect; they all have downsides. The downsides tend to relate to the level of negotiability and also to the extent to which they respond to the British public’s desire to see more control over our borders.
Professor Portes: I agree with Phoebe. As I said, we have to recognise which space we are negotiating in. If we are negotiating in the single market space there are options, as Phoebe said and as in my paper. There are options that are largely based on the Swiss approach, which could provide some degree of preference for UK residents in sectors or regions or areas where there was evidence of labour market pressure. That seems to me to be something that the Commission will not like particularly, but equally it has swallowed it once and, in the interests of the greater good, member states might be prepared to swallow it again. There are lots of things we can do within the current rules, given the administrative systems and capacity to do them in requiring people to go back if they have not found a job in three months or six months or whatever it is. There are various things we could do with benefits, building on what the previous Prime Minister negotiated, which of course is now moot because it was conditional on us staying in the EU. There are quite a lot of options.
What I don’t think is viable is what some people who supported EEA-type membership think, the straightforward emergency brake option where we simply shut the doors after a certain number of people come in for the country as a whole. I think that that is unlikely to be negotiable because it almost inevitably will become too politicised on both sides. It would be very difficult for any UK Government not to put it on and it would be very difficult for any UK Government, having put it on, to take it off again. The Commission and other member states will know that and will hence look from their point of view as if they are simply allowing us to have three of the four freedoms without the fourth, which is not in the single market. I think there is a big question. That is why we are much more in the space—if we go down this road—of looking at a Swiss-style approach and various modifications and tweaks of what the current rules would allow us.
Q321 Chair: You talk about temporary targeted controls. What do you envisage those being and how do you think they would work?
Professor Portes: I would envisage them working as Phoebe said. Suppose it was the case that in the north-east we observed that unemployment was more than 2% higher than the national average, that jobseekers were taking longer to get jobs and that there was a significant influx of EU workers into relatively low-skilled, low-paid jobs. You would have some sort of objective determination that that constituted labour market pressure and you would say to people that employers are no longer able to hire EU workers for a job below a certain salary threshold or perhaps even that employers would have to go to the Jobcentre first and get people who had been resident in the UK for six months or a year. The point for me at this stage, because we are not nearly at it, is not precisely the detail. It is the principle that these would be targeted, that they would be based on objective criteria; those criteria would presumably be evaluated by the Migration Advisory Committee in some form or other.
I think that would provide comfort to all sides that this was based on some objective indicators of labour market pressure rather than being driven by politics on either side. It seems to me that that is key to making this an acceptable outcome.
Q322 Chair: How would it work for whether or not people would have to get a job before they came?
Professor Portes: I am sceptical that this means anything very much in an era when I can go home from this hearing and set up an employment agency tonight. I can offer jobs to people from Poland tomorrow morning and they can be on a plane by next week and I can then subcontract or recontract them to an employer in your constituency. Structuring it so that having a job offer before you come is a precondition of coming seems to me simply an invitation to creating agencies that facilitate people having a job before they come. You could do it if you wanted to but it strikes me as not meaning anything very much. It is unlikely to mean a huge amount in practice. It might, I could be wrong about this, I admit, but I am a bit sceptical that it would change very much of the labour market dynamics that you are worried about.
Stephen Clarke: I don’t have a huge amount to add about the various options that have been described. As the time comes, we can make decisions on how much we want to preference EU nationals in any future system, to what extent we want to have tests based on sectors or skill levels and qualifications and so on. One thing I would add is that the game is almost just as important as the end goal at the moment.
We did a survey of firms about a year ago where we asked them what they thought would happen, what they would like to happen and what they might do if they couldn’t access the levels of EU migrant labour they are accessing currently, and these are firms that employ lots of EU migrants. Most of them said they expected free movement to continue or they expected everyone with a job offer to be able to migrate, and that was the overwhelming majority. Given the sense that there is quite a lot of unpreparedness out there, I think it is really important for at least the broad-brush strokes of the future system to be emerging a lot quicker than they are currently are.
There is a number of possible endpoints we might get to and it probably does depend on some of the decisions on trade and our relationship with the single market, but getting there could be hugely disruptive. That could be just as concerning as the endpoint for economic performance and the labour market. That is something that perhaps is not discussed enough.
Q323 Alex Norris: Looking at the impact of EU migration so far, what impact do migrants have on public service provision in this country? An obvious example would be school places, NHS waiting lists, all the old favourites.
Chair: By the way, don’t feel the need to answer every one of our questions if somebody else on the panel has said the points you were going to make.
Phoebe Griffith: I am going to give a very inconclusive answer because I don’t think it is black and white. There has to be a positive outcome to have a young, economically active population come to work in a country. We have competitiveness in certain key global industries in the UK, not least tech innovation, which relies on its global reputation, and the higher education sector as well. My experience of doing research in more disadvantaged parts of the UK shows that the arrival of EU workers has helped resurrect high streets, helped boost the local economy and it has provided a lifeline for key sectors like agriculture. It has also led to savings in the public purse in the form of ready trained health workers who have been arriving in greater numbers in the UK at the expense of other taxpayers. Those are all in the plus column.
In the minus column there is evidence that it has provided a lifeline—I am not saying it is a cause—for certain sectors of our labour market that have underperformed in skills and training, for example. Free movement and the access to EU workers has probably enabled some industries to not grapple with some very longstanding and deep weaknesses. The construction industry is probably one important case in point, as is the health service. In some contexts, it has worked in tandem with an economic model that has relied quite heavily on low wages and low productivity. I would never suggest that this is the rule but certainly in parts of the Midlands, for example, there is evidence to suggest that there is a correlation between a certain economic model and high levels of dependence on EU workers.
Stephen Clarke: The evidence is that EEA migrants make a net positive contribution to public finances. There is no doubt about that. The effects on things like schools and the health service, from a purely funding perspective, are positive. That perhaps disguises some geographical variation in the sense that at times of relatively rapid migration to certain areas public finance resources may not be able to be spread to those areas as quickly, but that may be more of a response of policy and how we invest and spend public money rather than anything to do with migration itself.
On wages and the labour market, the evidence is relatively clear that it is wrong to say there has been absolutely no impact of migration on wages in the UK labour market, but it is also equally wrong to say that migration can explain in any significant way the declines in real wages we have seen on and off over the last decade or so. I think you had Alan Manning speak to you a couple of months ago. The consensus on this, which I think the MAC also agrees with, is that there may be some small, minor effects at the bottom of the labour market in a negative sense and some small, minor positive effects at the top, but on average there is no effect on wages. I think that is where we are. The thing about schools and hospitals is probably harder to analyse, geographically at least.
Professor Portes: I broadly agree with that. On the public services, I agree with what Phoebe and Stephen said about the overall positive impact of young people who come to work. On the pressure at local levels, rather surprisingly we do have some geographical evidence and it is not as negative as I think any of us would have expected. This is in my written evidence. It is not the case that higher immigration is associated locally with greater NHS waiting times, if anything slightly the opposite. There is no correlation. In schools, the number of pupils with English as a second language is not negatively correlated with school performance and it is not negatively correlated with the performance of English-speaking pupils. For eastern European pupils, there is even some evidence of a positive impact on the performance of English-speaking pupils. Even at a local level it is quite difficult to identify any negative effects, although of course there may be some that are not in the data.
Q324 Chair: Is there any research on terms and conditions as opposed to wages?
Stephen Clarke: There is evidence based on surveys of employers and why they employ EU migrants—you may say they would never say it—and there does not seem to be any sense that they are doing it because they get lower terms and conditions. I don’t know, and others may do, if there is any kind of quantitative analysis of whether or not you have a correlation or any kind of causal relationship between the prevalence of zero-hours contracts or things like that and areas that have seen a large increase in migration. I don’t know if others on the panel know but I am not aware of that. At least it doesn’t seem that the preference is based on the willingness of EU nationals to accept lower terms and conditions.
Q325 Alex Norris: Professor Portes, drawing on your written information, which was really useful, you conclude that there is not an overall impact on wages of immigration—I think the period was 1997 to 2005—but that there was a downward pressure on the wages at the bottom of the distribution, so lower than the 20 percentile in which category many in my community fall. What was the impact on that?
Professor Portes: I should preface this by saying that the Migration Advisory Committee has commissioned a number of pieces of research, including on wages, productivity, training and so on—and I am doing one of them—which will be published in September, so we will know quite a bit more. The most recent rigorous paper we have on wages is that by Steve Nickell and Jumana Saleheen, then at the Bank of England, that showed a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of immigrants in a sector was for workers in the low-skilled service sector associated with a little over 1% fall in wages. Ten percentage points is absolutely huge. It is larger than the increase that was observed over the period of their entire study. Based on that, you can calculate—and this is what I did and I checked with the authors and they agreed—that that translates, over the entire period of the study, to a little less than a 1% fall relative to the counterfactual in the wages of people in the low-skilled service sector.
Q326 Alex Norris: In real terms?
Professor Portes: Yes, in real terms. I have forgotten what the real increase was over the period, because it was long period, but instead of a real increase of 10% they got a real increase of 9% or whatever it was.
Q327 Stuart C. McDonald: Professor Portes, you put forward that at least some of your solutions are designed in a way that would allow continued membership, essentially, of the single market, by tweaking free movement of people. Is there a political challenge there and would that satisfy members of the public who want to control immigration?
Professor Portes: That is a good question, which I think you know that I am not able to answer, partly because it is not my expertise but partly because, frankly, I don’t think we will know until we try it. It is really up to you guys in this building to decide what the UK’s negotiating strategy is overall and whether we think this is the way we want to go down. My job is simply to say if you think this might be viable politically and in Europe, this is the way you might go about it. I am not sure I can say more than that.
Phoebe Griffith: My view, given that I am a non-academic, is that we do need to come back with something from the negotiations. I think the status quo will not be enough to satisfy the public’s concerns about immigration control. However, the analysis we have carried out suggests that the public’s expectations are quite pragmatic. Only one in 10 of British people, according to the British Election Study, expect that we will be in full control of our border. I think where the public appetite lies is in that we are more for compromise rather than we are all or nothing.
Q328 Stuart C. McDonald: Professor Portes, in passing you referred to whether or not there would be challenges in negotiating such a deal with Europe. Do you think your model of registration and a time on it for securing work would have any implications for EU negotiators? Is there any problem with that being—
Professor Portes: Registration is not really a problem because, as you know, EU countries do it. The Swiss-type approach where we would impose controls on who was allowed to take up a job would have to be negotiated and I think that is where you might or might not find it difficult to negotiate.
Q329 Stuart C. McDonald: On the practicalities for the Home Office, would you envisage that as bring a simpler step than some of the alternatives that have been posited?
Professor Portes: The sorts of things that are outlined in Phoebe’s paper or in mine would be challenging for the Home Office. Assuming the withdrawal agreement is signed, we have got until 2021, so I think they are not unfeasible but they would be challenging, yes. Equally, applying something that looks anything like the current non-EU system to EU migration in future is probably even more challenging for the Home Office. One way or another they will have to do quite a lot of work.
Q330 Stuart C. McDonald: That brings me to another issue. I think, Phoebe Griffith, you referred to negotiability and public acceptability as factors as to which particular options are really viable. But is there not a factor, Stephen Clarke, of the practicalities of what the Home Office is going to be able to do between now and January 2021 in particular? What would you say about business’s ability to adapt over a short period of time? Does that have an influence on what the end state is or are we looking at something that is going to be a process and we might not get to that end state for 10 years?
Stephen Clarke: It is conceivable. My point was getting there is just as important, almost, and given that if there is a desirable end state, depending on negotiations, it is probably better. We know that leaving the European Union and revising how we treat immigrants from the European Union will necessarily, or at least in my opinion, mean that we have to reconsider our non-EEA immigration system. Given that we are doing that; I think doing it well rather than necessarily doing it quick is probably a priority.
Q331 Stuart C. McDonald: Does that then shape how you approach negotiations? What is the point of trying to negotiate a deal that means that we have in theory the ability to apply the same rules to EU nationals as we do for non-EU nationals even though the Home Office is not in a position to do that in 2021? You negotiate yourself out of membership of the single market or even access to the single market in order to achieve something in immigration that you can’t practically implement. Is it possible to have some sort of long-term transition deal?
Phoebe Griffith: The reality is that one of the big advantages of free movement is that it was relatively easy to manage. Everything that you look at is going to add cost and bureaucracy to the system. How far you are prepared to go down that line and how much you are prepared to invest in it is basically a political decision. To some extent the British public has given the Government a mandate to spend more and be more in control as a result, but that will come with trade-offs and we will have to decide what those trade-offs might be.
Q332 Stuart C. McDonald: Professor Portes, you did not seem particularly taken with the idea of the emergency brake safeguard that sometimes is applied within the EEA and you talked about the political pressure there would be on the Government to apply it on almost a permanent basis. Norway has had that option and the evidence that we had was that it feels under immense pressure from other members of the EU not to apply it because of the retaliatory measures that would develop. Would that be something similar for the UK?
Professor Portes: Yes. The other reason why it does not seem to me to be a particularly good option for the UK is because the UK Government, if we tried to secure it, would be caught between strong political pressure to apply it and then strong pressure from the EU not to apply it or only to apply it for a very limited period and then to take it off, which would be very difficult politically. I don’t think it adds up politically for anybody. The only reason it works for Norway is because they don’t use it and their domestic politics are such that they don’t really feel that they have to use it. That doesn’t seem to be the case for us.
Q333 Stuart C. McDonald: One of our previous witnesses, as you are probably aware, was advocating having some sort of objective criteria that you would have to show exists. You seem to suggest that that might also be—
Professor Portes: I think that is much easier to do objectively and in a way that is technocratic and hence, hopefully, acceptable and politically sellable to both sides if you do it at a local level or a regional level or a sectoral level. It seems to me much easier for both sides, politically here for the UK Government and for the EU, to say, “There is a problem with low wage workers in the north-east. Brits are not getting a fair chance. We are going to put on these controls. We will take them off when wages rise or unemployment falls” as opposed to saying, “Sorry, the UK has had 50,000 people from Europe so far this year. We are full up. We are stopping and we are going to take it off at some future date”. That does not seem to me to be—
Q334 Stuart C. McDonald: Moving away from tweaks to slightly more fundamental reform, if the relationship was shaping up to be something along the lines of a free trade agreement or an association agreement, which seems to be a term that is becoming quite fashionable, how would that influence the range of post-Brexit migration options we might see on the agenda?
Stephen Clarke: Looking around the world, there are various models that have been proposed. I am not a trade expert but there are not many trade deals out there that involve particularly deep rules around the immigration of individuals. When CETA was signed with Canada, Canadian commentators hailed it—at least in Canada and North America—as having some of the most far-reaching implications for the immigration of professionals between Canada and the EU, and yet if you look at what it is in that, it is absolutely nothing compared to free movement. I am sceptical of how much a free trade agreement would come with any of that. We might end up with a situation in which there was some marginal preference for those from the EEA under a free trade agreement but based on free trade agreements that are around now, I cannot see that being particularly deep.
Q335 Stuart C. McDonald: Professor Portes, you referred to a possible Canada-plus agreement but would something along those lines not have significant problems in particular for industries dependent on low-skilled migrant workers?
Professor Portes: Let me start by saying I agree with what Stephen said, that if we are in the realms of negotiating a free trade agreement, a Canada-minus or a Canada-plus, it is likely to have some provisions relating to the mobility of highly-skilled professionals, intercompany transfers, business visits and so on, probably quite significant ones and probably more than there is in the current agreement, but it still will not add up to a big immigration policy from, I think, your point of view or the point of view of the public.
That does not mean, however—and this is the big choice for the UK—that we cannot unilaterally decide to have a considerably more liberal regime for EU citizens than we do for non-EU citizens. That is a policy choice for us and there are quite good arguments on both sides of that, as to what we do in our policy.
Q336 Stuart C. McDonald: Would that not be slightly strange? You negotiate a free trade agreement with the European Union that does not really say much in giving EU nationals preference. Presumably the quid pro quo of that is that your access to the single market is not as good as it would have been if you had negotiated it. Then unilaterally you decide to give them much more generous treatment. What would be the point of not having it in the treaty itself?
Professor Portes: This is speculation because we are not at this stage in negotiations but it is not clear to me that offering preferential access to EU citizens post-Brexit, short of free movement, is necessarily a negotiating card for us. If we go to the French and the Poles and say, “We do not accept the four freedoms, we are out of the single market and we do not accept your view that these are the rules and we must play by them, but we are quite prepared to take your bankers, your construction workers, your doctors and your nuclear physicists. What are you going to give us in return for that?”, why should they give us anything in return for that? It might well be in our interests to say exactly that but I am not sure why we would not just do that unilaterally or bilaterally with individual member states. Remember, of course, we have different immigration rules, not for migration for work purposes but for visa rules. We have some countries where we apply visas and some countries where we do not. That is not on the basis of a treaty necessarily, as opposed to deciding unilaterally that it is in our interests to allow Americans to come here without visas and not to allow Indians to come here without visas. Those are choices that we have chosen to make.
There is another layer to your question, which is that it would be politically painful on both sides of the Channel to negotiate something that it is in between freedom of movement and non-preferential. This is not going to be an easy negotiation anyway. It may end up being easier for both sides to say, “We will do things bilaterally or unilaterally, outside the framework of the treaty”.
Q337 Stuart C. McDonald: Phoebe Griffith, you comment on some of the businesses we can speak to or get evidence from that are most concerned about what the system might look like afterwards. Some of the evidence we have had, in particular from small and medium-sized enterprises but also just businesses who employ so-called low-skilled workers, has been that they are concerned that the non-EU system does not cater for their needs just now. If a free trade relationship is being negotiated, is there a significant danger for these businesses and sectors in particular that they are going to struggle to access lower-skilled migrants in future?
Phoebe Griffith: There are sectors in the labour market that are disproportionately dependent on EU workers and some of them are of strategic importance. For example, the logistics and distribution sector is highly dependent on EU workers and if you think about the trajectory of our economy becoming much more dependent on online shopping, for example, the repercussions will not just affect that sector but will cause shockwaves that cost the economy.
However, that does not mean that those sectors do not need to look long and hard at their practices. If there is one opportunity that we face at the moment it is to ask employers to think a little bit harder about some of their practices, certainly among employers who are, for example, not paying as much as they could do. For some it might be a very tough choice but for others there could be much more that could be done to ensure that the terms and conditions that are on offer or the levels of pay and security that are on offer are improved. We should be asking those questions of employers.
Certainly we should be asking those questions very hard if we get to the point of offering, for example, certain sectors of the economy access to guest worker schemes. That should be made very conditional on them being able to demonstrate that even once they have hit quite a high benchmark in their practices around wages, skills and terms and conditions, they are still struggling to recruit. Then they should maybe have concessions within the immigration system.
Q338 Stuart C. McDonald: Can I ask what you think about that, Professor Portes, that the answer for these sectors and businesses is to look at their own practices and that should solve all their issues of access to low-skilled workers?
Professor Portes: They should be doing that anyway and Government should be pursuing policies to do that anyway. As we know, the biggest single problem facing the UK economy for the last decade has been our very poor productivity performance. We can be reasonably clear, as with low wages, that immigration is not a primary or indeed a significant cause of that. As I said, there will be research forthcoming on that in due course but having reviewed the literature—it is in my written evidence—I do not see there is any evidence to suggest that. That is a problem we have to solve anyway.
I do agree with Phoebe that within that there may be some low-wage, low-productivity sectors where immigration has enabled them to get by without doing things that they otherwise should have done or that Government otherwise should have been forcing them to. I do agree with that.
More broadly though, I would caution against the idea that ending free movement and moving to a system where we either apply the non-EU system to EU migrants or we have some new system that allows skilled EU migrants or EU migrants in some sectors will not cause large problems, not just for low-wage, low-skilled sectors but for many other sectors as well. The higher education sector that I work in is very dependent on EU nationals. That is not just the professors. The researchers that I hire to work with me on research are generally from elsewhere in the EU. It is true in the tech sector in London and it is true in the finance sector. Moving to a system where we had anything like the sort of current bureaucracy, visa application fees and all the rest of it that are required to hire people from outside the EU would be pretty disastrous for all of those, and these are not low-wage, low-productivity sectors.
Whether the answer to that is to have a new system that is much more liberal, less restrictive, less bureaucratic, less expensive and more user-friendly for all immigrants, whether they are from outside or inside Europe, or whether you have some sort of much more light-touch scheme for Europeans, does depend on the wider strategy both towards the negations and towards the UK’s economic future more broadly.
Q339 Kirstene Hair: I want to look at regional migration policy and first of all, ask Phoebe Griffith if you think there is indeed scope for a regional immigration policy? You have noted or IPPR have noted before that it would present a new set of logistical challenges. Could you also outline what you believe those challenges might be?
Phoebe Griffith: In general, IPPR has been a leading proponent for a more regionalised approach to immigration and part of the reason is that we think the immigration system should focus much more on addressing some structural problems in the UK economy, one of those being the geographic imbalances that are reflected in immigration flows. The flows of the most skilled types of migration are disproportionately towards London and the south-east. Levels of skilled migration to, for example, the north-east of England, are tiny in relation to that. It is a question of fairness that we address this, to ensure that levels of immigration to parts of the UK that would really benefit from, for example, more foreign investment, more skilled migration and more entrepreneurship could capitalise on the system and, to some extent, be given a leg up in the system. That could be done relatively simply.
Q340 Kirstene Hair: You said that it would present a new set of logistical challenges. That is what the IPPR had suggested.
Phoebe Griffith: We set out the logistical challenges and we clarify—
Kirstene Hair: What would they be?
Phoebe Griffith: Well, there is a challenge around enforcement that employers are very concerned about. Our view is that that is manageable in the context of the current system in relation to non-EU migration, given that migrants from outside the European Union have to be sponsored by an employer. The criteria would have to be extended around visas to include a regional component in the way that, at the moment, employers are expected to ensure that migrants leave the UK once their visa expires, employers will also need to ensure that migrants comply with the terms of their regional visa.
I do not know if we have been misquoted but we have spent quite a lot of time thinking about the logistical challenges and trying to come up with some of the solutions. We think a regional system is possible. It would require, for example, having different wage expectations on migrants going to parts of the UK that are, for example, trying to attract migrants. At the moment we apply quite a high wage threshold to non-EU migrants applying for tier 2 visas. That threshold could be brought down. Likewise, the threshold for investors coming from outside the EU could also be lowered in order to incentivise that category of migrants to opt for parts of the UK that are seeing lower levels of growth, for example.
Q341 Kirstene Hair: You mention enforcement and an additional level of bureaucracy. There is also, for example, what we see in Canada, where there are issues whereby they have access to a certain region but they may abuse that in some form by then going into another region of that particular country. Do you think that would also pose a risk here?
Phoebe Griffith: It is a risk. The evidence I have seen from Canada is that with quite limited levels of enforcement, people tend to comply with the terms of their visas, particularly when those visas are applied to very highly-skilled migrants, and the reason is that those highly-skilled migrants are often very dependent on having the ability to travel and to apply for jobs on a global level. Compromising their ability to return to the UK is quite a significant obstacle for them to, for example, abscond and not comply with the terms of their visa. If initially we were to apply a regional set of criteria to highly-skilled ie tier 2 immigration, you are likely to see quite high levels of compliance.
Obviously there is a risk and in order to assess the risk what we are increasingly proposing is that we pilot it in the way that it has piloted in Scotland. Unfortunately, that pilot was discontinued before we saw the full results of a more regionalised or more devolved approach to immigration.
Q342 Kirstene Hair: When we look at public support for a differentiated immigration policy, 63% of Scots say, for example, that they are happy with the system as it is. Do you not think that having public support for implementing a regional system, as I know you are a proponent of, is quite important for it to operate?
Phoebe Griffith: We looked at that data. This is going to sound like quite an academic way of approaching that but I think it is a question of how you ask that question. The way we have asked it in a city in Sunderland is different. It is, “If we were to ensure that immigration policy was tied to our local industrial strategy, would you support there being conditions within the visa system to allow people to come to Sunderland specifically?” When you tie in those more regionalised approaches to a wider economic strategy in relation to growth, for example, we find that there are much higher levels of public support. When the question is tied to, “Do you want to bring down immigration and do you think regional migration is the right way to do that?” then obviously you will get a very different answer.
Q343 Kirstene Hair: There is, as you said, for example, in Australia where workers will move between one region and another. For example, to suggest that Sunderland has a different immigration policy that is aligned to the industry strategy is all fine and well but it does not take into account the wider implications that could be brought about if we did have a regional policy.
Phoebe Griffith: Yes, it could be a big enough challenge not to go ahead with it. Because it can unlock a better conversation around immigration—let us face it, our conversation around immigration remains very crude—it is something that we should explore much more deeply. Some of the enforcement challenges need to be put in perspective remembering the first point I made, that immigration could be quite a powerful tool to address some of the geographical imbalances, and secondly the fact that our evidence suggests it could be a way of fostering a more constructive and evidence-based debate around immigration. It is definitely an option that we should consider, particularly in light of the fact that we already have quite a tightly enforced system in relation to non-EU migration and that we are talking about skilled migrants who would have a lot to lose were they not to comply with the terms of their visas. It is definitely an approach that we should—
Q344 Kirstene Hair: That is not to say it would not happen because it does obviously happen in other countries.
Phoebe Griffith: It does happen but not to the extent that I think we hear.
Stephen Clarke: If I could just say something, I have some sceptical points on the regional approach. There are three issues. From an administrative point of view, it would not necessarily be very difficult and it would not necessarily need a visa—you could just have a national insurance number that was tied to a region—but that would involve enforcement by firms primarily, which we know might be an issue. We might come on to discussing that.
Then there is the political issue, which is how you decide which regions and how much. Yes, Scotland is the example people use but Scotland is unlike the north-east. Who is going to decide, the North-East Assembly? There are challenges politically there.
Then finally from a labour market point of view there are a few concerns. First of all, we did some research into movement of jobs around the UK and one of the findings was that mobility of workers across the UK has declined over the last decade or so. As a result, a lot of our labour market mobility, at least geographically, comes from migrant workers. Migrants account for about one-quarter, if not one-third, of regional job-to-job moves, up from about 10% a decade ago, and that definitely understates how mobile migrants are because we do not track short-term migrants. We do not know very well where migrants are moving to anyway.
Given that the UK seems to have a problem with at least geographic mobility of its labour market and that migrants are providing quite a lot of that mobility, to restrict mobility for migrants to a certain area might have some limiting economic benefits and might drive some perverse incentives as well. If you are a low-wage employer, you are on the borders of Scotland and you think you can hop across to access all this labour, perhaps you are going to get some of that. I can see the argument that you might try to regenerate areas that may not have done too well but I think the evidence is that those are the types of areas where public support for migration is lowest. I am not sure about that.
Q345 Chair: Professor Portes, do you want to come in on that?
Professor Portes: I broadly agree with Phoebe. I think that abuse is unlikely to be a significant concern. It is perfectly feasible within the current system and while Stephen does identify some of the issues, they are outweighed by the advantages that Phoebe sets out.
Q346 Douglas Ross: Can I come on to a point that Phoebe Griffith made in response to questioning here? Can I just check, are you saying that if an opinion poll does not match what you would like it to you say the question is wrong?
Phoebe Griffith: How you ask a question influences how people answer it. I am not saying—
Douglas Ross: If we had asked the other question that you were suggesting had been asked elsewhere you would agree with that opinion polling but because the question does not suit or the answer does not suit your argument, you say the question is wrong and people are not intelligent enough to—
Phoebe Griffith: No, I am saying exactly the opposite. My view is that people’s opinions on immigration are very nuanced and, as I said before, quite pragmatic. If you frame a question as a “more or less” you are going to get a certain type of answer. However, if you spend time with people and, for example, talk about the potential benefits of having a more regionalised system because it might help you attract investors from abroad and then you evolve a conversation, you are likely to have a much more informed and rounded debate.
Q347 Douglas Ross: Given that question has not been asked in Scotland and the question that has been asked has given quite a clear result, it is slightly insulting to see that because you do not like the answer then the question must be wrong. The alternative that you are proposing has not been asked in Scotland and you do not know it would not provide the same result.
Phoebe Griffith: It might be insulting to the people who designed that survey. I am not sure it is insulting to the people who answered the question.
Q348 Douglas Ross: It is if you are saying their opinions would change fundamentally if you just change the wording of the question.
Phoebe Griffith: My position on the immigration debate has always been that we have a very crude debate around a very complex issue, an issue that relates to every facet of our economy and our labour market. The way we tend to have this debate is, “Should we have more or less people coming to the UK?” when in fact what we should be thinking about is, “What do we want to do to become a more prosperous country and how can immigration policy help us to do that?” If regional migration proves to be a solution to, for example, the deep regional inequalities that affect the UK, it should be something that we can have a mature debate with the British public about. Regardless of the survey question, that is a more important way forward.
Q349 Douglas Ross: Can I ask the panel for your view on the Government’s current arrangements for non-EEA migrants?
Professor Portes: I will start. We have seen just how damaging and poorly conceived they are in the recent operation of the caps for tier 2 visas. This was a policy that was, from the very beginning, designed to be self economically damaging in the sense that we have a set of criteria that say, “If you earn more than X and/or you are working in such an occupation and an employer offers you a job, we think you are likely to be economically beneficial to the country and you should be allowed to be hired”. The Government then set a cap on this for 20,000 for no particularly good reason and it was always the case—I said this back in 2011 when it was introduced—that either you do not hit the cap, in which case it is utterly pointless and makes no difference to anything, or you will hit the cap, in which case you will be, by definition, keeping out people who we have already said meet all the qualifications to be economically beneficial to the UK.
That of course is what has happened in the last six months. As a result, we have had NHS hospitals turning away doctors that they had hired for vacancies they need to treat patients and we have had firms in the City having to withdraw job offers they had made. This is an illustration of the economically damaging impacts of policy that was poorly designed, poorly conceived and did not pay any attention to the basic economics of how you ought to run an immigration policy.
Q350 Douglas Ross: A number of our witnesses have come forward and articulated similar points but no one has been able to pin down why, just at the turn of this year, we hit the cap. It had only been reached once before, and then in the last six months. Whether the cap was right or not—you are saying if it was not reached it was a problem and if it was that was a problem—why was it only reached once in several years up until the turn of this year and then every month since then?
Professor Portes: The reason it had not been reached up until now is because the other restrictions, the criteria I described, are very strict. Overlay that on to a very expensive, bureaucratic and time-consuming process—
Q351 Douglas Ross: It did not change just at the turn of the year.
Professor Portes: No, it did not. You are absolutely right. There is a very interesting question as to why it has changed.
One of the consequences of having that very strict system—again, the tightening of the rules that was brought in in 2010 and 2011—was that employers said, “Maybe we would ideally like to hire a professor or a doctor from India or the US but it is very complicated, very expensive and we might not get the visa in the end. However, we can hire one who is almost as good from the EU. There is absolutely no bureaucracy or cost whatsoever. They can be on a plane, we can interview them tomorrow and they can take the job whenever they like”. They did that and there was a shift from non-EU migration to EU migration.
Then, of course, what has happened since Brexit is that we have seen a very sharp fall in EU migration, not because we have changed the policy—free movement is still the policy—but because the UK has for various reasons, which we can go into, become a less attractive destination for people coming from the EU. As a consequence—
Q352 Douglas Ross: Eighteen months after Brexit?
Professor Portes: It takes a while for these things. This is for skilled workers.
Q353 Douglas Ross: You think it is just a timing issue that it took 18 months for that breach to happen?
Professor Portes: We do not have enough disaggregated data from the Home Office to be absolutely sure but it seems to be pretty intuitively plausible given we have seen a very significant fall in EU migration.
We are talking here about skilled workers. We are not talking about low-skilled worker where someone decides, “We need an extra 100 workers next Friday. Get on to the agency and see if you can get them in the door”. We are talking about people who come and teach at King’s, where the lead time is typically six or nine months at least, or people who come to work in an NHS hospital. You have to advertise the vacancy, you have to determine that the vacancy is not going to be filled by a EU or a UK national to justify going through the tier 2 route, go through all the NHS bureaucracy to do that and then advertise. I do not think the 18-month lag is that surprising in this case. It is reasonably consistent with what we see in the net migration figures, which took a while to react, again as you would expect.
The most obvious and likely explanation is that the reduction in EU migration has displaced demand into non-EU migration but we cannot be certain of that yet.
Q354 Douglas Ross: Anyone else? What further do you think the UK Government should do to address this? There have obviously been changes with the tier 2. What is your take on those changes that have been announced and what further do you think they need to do with the non-EEA migration?
Professor Portes: Those were a good start. The first thing, obviously, is do not have a cap. There is no need for a cap. You simply decide who should be allowed to come, who should not and what the conditions are. Exactly what further liberalisation you make does depend on some of the issues we were talking about before, the wider issues of what happens to EU migration post-Brexit, but I think the Migration Advisory Committee will have quite a lot to say about this.
Broadly, I would simply say that you should liberalise some of the requirements but probably more importantly—and this is something the Home Secretary has clearly made a statement of intent on—you want to change the culture of how the Home Office approaches this if the objective of immigration policy, as Phoebe has said, is to make the country a more prosperous and productive place, and particularly the objective of the policies we adopt towards skilled economic migrants. We are not talking here about refugees, where there are a whole bunch of other human rights and humanitarian concerns; we are talking about economic drivers. If that is the primary consideration then you want a system that is reasonably user-friendly, gives clear decisions reasonably quickly and is not just not too expensive but not too bureaucratic. Having a culture that says, “Given the rules, does this person fit within them and do we want them to come to the country because they are going to make the country more prosperous?” as opposed to, “Can we find a way of rejecting this application?” is probably the most important thing.
Separately, I would also restore some version of the post-study work route. It seems to me totally bizarre to say to somebody, “Right, you qualify for a student visa. You can come here and you can spend your money here. By definition your English is good, by definition you are skilled”—for a Government Minister to say we want people to come here to study and then we want them to go home seems to me to be completely crazy. Why do we not say, “Come here, study and then obviously if you want to go home, fine. Probably most of you will. But if you want to have the opportunity of working here, you are likely to meet most of the criteria around skills, English, integration and general compatibility with the UK economy and labour market that we want in immigrants, so we ought to find a way of allowing you to stay on”?
Stephen Clarke: Just to add to the point that Jonathan made, we carried out some analysis a year ago looking at what the implications would be for the Shortage Occupation List should there be a significant decline in EU migration. We ran an unfeasible thought experiment where we dropped almost all of the EU migrants out of the labour force and ran the Migration Advisory Committee’s model criteria to identify shortage occupations and we found that the Shortage Occupation List would probably double.
Again, our thought experiment was unrealistic but it at least gets you thinking that we might have been hiding a lot of shortage by having free movement and when free movement declines, either because we choose to reduce it through changes in migration policy or because economic winds in the world shift and the UK becomes less attractive for a host of reasons, you might then uncover some of these shortages in sectors that EEA migrants were filling. It would be interesting, if we do get more data on this, if in future the cap is hit and it is not just the NHS responsible but it is perhaps other sectors as well.
Phoebe Griffith: I agree with both the other speakers. One point though. We should be a little bit smarter about the way we look at immigration policy. While I agree that it is important not to cut ourselves off from the global market in talent and skills, we also need to send quite a strong signal to employers that access to that pool of talent should be made conditional on employers playing a much more active role in investing in skills and productivity. One of the proposals we have put forward is for the creation of a trusted sponsor scheme, which is something that we apply to universities, and to shift the emphasis when we apply it to employers from crudely enforcing the terms of visas to demonstrating a certain level of good corporate social responsibility in relation to, for example, their domestic workers. For example, employers who can demonstrate that they pay the living wage and that they are investing in apprenticeships and other skills training should be put at the front of the list when applying for tier 2 visas irrespective of whether or not they are on the Shortage Occupation List.
Q355 Chair: Do you think there is any option that would be worth exploring that would keep free movement for some groups of people, for example for high-skilled or tier 2 equivalents from EU countries or from tier 1 equivalents from EU countries?
Phoebe Griffith: That is perfectly within our means. What would be the constraining factor, whether this would be negotiable or whether—
Chair: Yes. If you assume that this is in the free trade agreement set of options as opposed to the single market set of options, and you were designing an immigration system either to get better trade advantages or to get the easiest-to-manage immigration system as part of a future trade agreement, do you see any merit in a system that would involve restrictions in some areas but free movement in others or for other groups?
Professor Portes: What does “free movement” mean here, Yvette? Say King’s wants to hire a professor. You can say you have free movement of professors. We still have to prove that she is a professor, that she is Bulgarian, presumably that she is coming to be a professor and not a security guard because that would be a low-skilled, low-paid occupation, and we would presumably have to monitor the terms. It is not free movement, is it? It is just a light-touch visa scheme.
Q356 Chair: To be honest, that is what I am asking. Is there any system that you could envisage being workable that, for example, would say that employers would only have to carry on with the existing level of requirements that they have on EU citizens for some kinds of occupations, some skill levels or some salary levels? Do you think that would be remotely workable? Are there any advantages to it or not?
Phoebe Griffith: One disadvantage is that the track record of very targeted, highly-skilled schemes is quite mixed. Certainly Germany’s experience trying to recruit IT workers from outside the European Union has proved quite unsuccessful and the levels of take-up have been very low, which to me suggests that the whole context of where and how you launch these schemes is taken into account by the people you are trying to attract, especially very mobile people who have lots of options. Whether we would see the levels of take-up we would in the context of movement is doubtful.
Q357 Chair: Getting quickly back to the labour market options, obviously we will wait for the MAC responses on quite what the impact on the labour market is of different levels and kinds of EU migration but there has been considerable concern raised at the anecdotal level or the small, local level, say between two firms on either side of a motorway where one clearly has much worse terms and conditions and has much higher levels of non-UK workers. We had it raised as part of our previous inquiry around Sports Direct, for example, the level of overseas recruitment being linked to terms and conditions and so on. If you were trying to address that issue, are there labour market reforms that you could use within the existing framework?
For example, we have heard about Switzerland having 10% of employers being inspected each year. We have heard about different approaches to wage determination in Norway, Sweden and Scandinavian countries. There are obviously wider debates about posted workers or about agency workers, going back your point, Professor Portes, earlier on about the way in which agencies might subvert different kinds of things. Are there opportunities in those kinds of reforms, potentially very radical or potentially small changes that you think could have an impact on the way in which migration happens and is managed?
Stephen Clarke: I like to separate the two issues, the enforcement of the current rules that we have and perhaps the new regulations or new rules that we would like to create. In terms of what we currently have, undoubtedly there is a connection in the public’s mind—and it is backed up by some cases like Morecombe Bay and others—that we as a country have a system of labour market enforcement that is based on tribunals, not generally based on executive enforcement. Given that approach, one where there is not a lot of collectivisation any more and union density is quite low, there might be more prospect for labour market abuses in this country than perhaps in more regulated countries.
Improving enforcement is something we should do. The current moves, David Metcalfe’s appointment and some of the increased funding to his bodies, are very welcome. We should pursue enforcement further where we can, particularly around things like holiday pay and self-employment, where unfortunately, because of our tribunal system, it is up to the courts to decide if someone if self-employed in the Uber case and so on. More could be done in enforcement and clarifying the law around that. That would have an effect both benefiting natives and migrant workers. I would wholeheartedly recommend that. It might help assuage public concerns but it might not solve them.
On the separate issue, regulation, we have advocated for different labour market regulations around zero-hours contracts, the Swedish derogation and things like that for agencies but it is important to maybe decide as a country that we want to do that because we think it is a good thing, not necessarily because we think that there are lots of migrants coming over here and taking advantage of the kind of labour market we have. We should put to the British public that we want to improve the labour market for everyone here. As I said, I do not know how much evidence there is that the migration we have seen over the last decade has been driven by that. It has been driven by the fact that the UK is a flexible labour market, which has benefits for migrants and natives as well. Also downsides.
Q358 Chair: Is there anything you would put forward as something that might be a good idea and that would incidentally have an impact in terms of exploitation of immigration?
Stephen Clarke: Yes. We have argued that you should give everyone who is on a zero-hours contract the right to a contract representing the hours they have worked if they have been at a firm for three months. We could do that. We would not ban them but we would not just allow the right to request to be voluntary. We would ban the Swedish derogation. These are things that we at the Resolution talk a lot about. We would definitely clarify the position around self-employment. We think it is not up to the courts, it is up to the Government. We know that the Taylor review is looking at these things and the Government are going to respond. We would argue that there are regulatory steps we need to take to improve the situation in the UK labour market and it might have some benefits in people’s perceptions of migration but it ultimately should be done because we think it is a good thing for workers in this country.
Phoebe Griffith: It could have a substantive effect on people’s perceptions. What people have reacted to is the fact that they have felt that the impacts of migration have been left to chance and that there has been quite a hands-off approach when instances such as labour market abuse have taken place. My view would be that you are looking at concrete solutions.
There is a lot of talk at the moment around the level of expense involved in our immigration system. I believe the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders is about to carry out a review on the issue. The evidence suggests that we are escalating the fees that we charge migrants. Where those fees end up is open to question. A very visible, very tangible thing we could be focusing on is investing those fees, for example, in ensuring that local authorities and others have the resource to ensure labour market regulations are being respected by employers, particularly in areas like Derby—you mentioned Sports Direct—which have seen quite considerable levels of immigration. I believe that the issue around Sports Direct was resolved as a consequence of a meeting between the chief executive and the leader of the council. If that is what you are expecting to happen in every case, it is a recipe for low levels of public trust in the system.
I would definitely encourage a much more thorough look at how much we are charging and where those funds are being spent. The enforcement of labour market rules would be a good candidate for more investment.
Professor Portes: I agree, particularly with Stephen. Zero-hours contracts is a start but self-employment is a much bigger issue. Our system of taxing and regulating self-employment in this country is clearly completely broken, not through anyone’s fault in particular. It just was invented for a different time. It is welcome that the courts are taking up the challenge because nobody else does but really it should be public policy that deals with it.
Chair: Great. Thank you very much. Can I thank you all for your evidence this afternoon? We appreciate it. Thank you. We will move on to our second panel.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Lord Green of Deddington and David Goodhart.
Q359 Chair: I welcome our second panel and apologise for the delay in calling you this afternoon. We appreciate your time. Could I ask you both to introduce yourselves?
Lord Green: Lord Green, Chairman of Migration Watch. Quite well known, I think.
David Goodhart: My name is David Goodhart. I work part-time at the think-tank Policy Exchange, where I run a unit called the Demography, Immigration and Integration Unit. I have written about issues to do with immigration for 10 years or so now. I wrote a book called “The British Dream” on post-war immigration.
Lord Green: Also well known.
Q360 Chair: I will start by asking you the two questions I asked the previous panel to start off with. First of all, what do you see as being the relationship between immigration and trade as part of the Brexit negotiations? Secondly, what approach do you think the Government should be taking to post-Brexit migration? I will ask you for a short overview in answer to each before we start the more detailed questions.
Lord Green: Question one: there should be no link. There is no purpose and no useful negotiating mileage on it, as Professor Portes has said. On the second point—
Q361 Chair: I will come to the second point. David Goodhart, just on the first question first?
David Goodhart: I agree. If we just have a straightforward free trade agreement, then there is no reason why immigration should be a factor at all. It is not, as far as I am aware, in any other free trade agreements that the EU has.
However, something that is moving more centre-stage now is this idea of a free trade agreement but particularly deep, in effect staying in the single market and customs union for industrial goods. This is the Ivan Rogers idea that seems to be acquiring some momentum. That would raise the issue of whether we would then have free movement just in the industrial goods sector, which I do not think would be practical. It would then be a matter of whether the European Union would accept that kind of deal without continuing free movement, although because it is a requirement, I think, of the WTO—it is not even something we would offer—inter-company transfers would continue to function. I advocate that anyway. We should extend inter-company transfer systems to EU corporations. Obviously they have not needed them until now. That might be sufficient to placate any anxieties there would be on the European Union’s side about allowing us to have this continued membership of the single market for industrial goods.
Q362 Chair: Suppose you were pursuing that “single market in goods but not in services” kind of option. Would you see in that frame, as part of the negotiations, not necessarily linked by economic principle to the movement of goods but political negotiations, that in those circumstances, for example, a preferential immigration arrangement for EU citizens might be part of that negotiation or not?
David Goodhart: Yes, I think it could be. It is hard to see quite how it will work but, like I say, intercompany transfers could probably accommodate much of it. That is not, obviously, free movement. Intercompany transfers by definition do not involve permanent residence, would not involve immediate access to the entire social state and so on. It would not be free movement, but there are advantages. I know we are not talking about this, but there are obviously advantages to the European Union in such a deal because we have a massive deficit with them in goods and we have a surplus with them in services. We would be preserving an uninterrupted benefit to them in some ways, but ICTs are not free movement. I hear, talking to Ivan and other people, that the French are very strongly opposed to any such deal without free movement. I think the Germans are perhaps not quite so entrenched in their view. Some smaller countries like The Netherlands and Belgium are quite happy with the idea.
Q363 Chair: Can I ask you each in turn what you think the Government’s approach to post-Brexit migration should be?
Lord Green: I think there is an enormous lacuna. There is total silence from the Government and complete confusion. I think it is partly because they cannot make up their minds and partly that they are perhaps focused on other matters. We have an outline to propose with clear objectives and clear categories, which I would be happy to lay out to you at your convenience, Madam Chairman.
Q364 Chair: Could you give us the top highlights?
Lord Green: The objective is, first, to end free movement so as to control substantially and reduce net migration from the European Union. Let’s keep our eye on that ball because that is fundamental and has not yet been mentioned. Secondly, to retain the ability to recruit highly-skilled migrants from the EU. That speaks for itself. Thirdly, no less important, to maintain and develop the personal, cultural and historical links that we have with Europeans and with European major states. These seem to me the three objectives that we should have. I think that they need a positive presentation and the presentation and the theme should be something like making a success of our departure from the European Union. I could set out half a dozen elements if that would help. It is very simple, really.
Q365 Chair: If you could give it as briefly as it is possible to, it would be helpful.
Lord Green: Yes, indeed. It will be very brief because I know it is a field that you know well. We should start with ease of access for tourists, visitors, business visitors. Indeed, there should be no visas except for those who wish to work. Secondly, I think that we should encourage young people to travel by extending the youth mobility scheme that you know about. Thirdly, we should have measures to encourage EU students. That speaks for itself. Fourthly, we should have measures to maintain access to skilled workers in both directions, that is to say an expansion of tier 2. As you know, the Europeans have the Blue Card system, which is the equivalent, so they can hardly object.
I think that we also need to continue the arrangements for intercompany transfers, ICTs, that David mentioned. We may need a temporary SAWS system for agricultural workers. We may need for temporary period arrangements for people like construction workers who are now rather important in some parts of the UK. We would hope that they would be heavily taxed and become increasingly more expensive.
The final point, and this is crucial, is there should be an end to very large levels of low-paid—lower paid, certainly—migrants from the European Union. I am sure the Committee knows—I hope it knows—that 80% of EU migrants in the last 10 years were lower paid, that is to say they would not have qualified for work permits had they applied for them under tier 2. What that means is that if we get an effective system along the lines I have outlined, there is scope here for a very substantial reduction in the inflow from Europe, of the order of 100,000 from the peak. We do not know what the future—
Q366 Chair: We heard in our previous inquiry a lot of evidence from the social care sector about their difficulty in recruiting. Your scheme, as far as I can see, would prevent them being able to recruit from the EU.
Lord Green: It would certainly discourage it, yes. In a number of fields, there needs to be some counter pressure in order to encourage employers to train and maybe to pay more in order to attract into their particular part of the economy the workers that they need. I realise that that will take time, especially for public authorities, but we have to shift this.
Chair: Who have constrained budgets.
Lord Green: Yes, indeed.
Q367 Chair: Where will the money come from for them to be able to respond in that way?
Lord Green: They might have to be increased.
Q368 Chair: David Goodhart, what would your proposal be?
David Goodhart: I would follow what Andrew said in some of his outline. The bigger point here is that I think that the future of immigration in general, not just with the EU, is to move to a much more temporary system, a kind of humane Gastarbeiter system for the 21st century, if you like. It is the only way of squaring the circle between the democratic anxiety there is about over-rapid social change, over-rapid demographic change, and the desire also of most people in this country to remain an open country, to satisfy at least some of the demands of employers and universities. Temporary is the way to go, and Andrew outlined at least three ways in which we can do that as we end free movement, as I think we should. I do not think that free movement has benefited the country as a whole and our default position should be to move to the same position for EU people as for non-EU people, but then, of course, we introduce many caveats to reflect the fact we have been a member of the European Union for 45 years, that we do have a very special relationship with it, to protect our own interests in some areas and to show goodwill towards the European Union.
As Andrew said, visa-free travel, fast-track permits for high-skilled workers, and these three areas of temporary employment: ICTs, seasonal agricultural workers and the youth mobility scheme. We do have about 50,000 or 60,000 18 to 30s I think it is. Youth is perhaps a little bit of an exaggeration, but we have about 50,000 people a year coming in on the youth mobility scheme and it has worked pretty well. They have been coming for two years. One could even direct people on the youth mobility scheme perhaps to go and do low-paid jobs in the social care sector. Indeed, one proposal I had that Andrew did not mention is to introduce—although, obviously, most of the focus is on making it as frictionless as possible for high-skilled workers to continue to come in, albeit with work permits, and, by the way, certainly Jonathan or—
Chair: I am going to have to interrupt you, I am sorry. The Division bell has gone. We are going to have to pause you there and continue after the Division.
David Goodhart: Okay.
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
On resuming—
Q369 Chair: We are continuing with our evidence session.
David Goodhart: I was talking about the future being temporary and about a fast track for highly skilled. I also came up with this idea—or I didn’t actually; somebody from Fragomen came up with this idea—of antisocial hours visas, which I think is rather a good idea. Although I agree, I think that the object of ending freedom of movement is mainly trying to bear down on low-skilled immigration from the EU.
Nonetheless, one of the reasons why British employers do like people from central and eastern Europe, and indeed often prefer them to domestic workers, is that often people from eastern Europe are used to making more effort for every unit of pay. They come, on the whole, from much lower wage and lower welfare societies and economies. I do not think that the caricature of the lazy British worker is fair or true, but what is very true is that people from central and eastern Europe have come here on their own or at least without family responsibilities. Obviously, some of them do come with family responsibilities, but those who are here on their own without family responsibilities are often very ready to work antisocial hours, evening shifts, night shifts, weekend shifts, whereas most—not all but most—British workers do have family responsibilities and do not want to work at those hours. I think that people would see antisocial hours work permits, even for low-skilled workers, as fair.
Q370 Chair: Why wouldn’t that simply become a route to massive exploitation?
David Goodhart: Why need it be a route to exploitation? You would get whatever extra pay you get for working night shifts or weekend shifts. This is voluntary. You do not have to come on an antisocial hours permit. It is a normal labour market contract. If it was just for one employer, I could see there would be a problem, but it would not be attached to one employer and you would regulate it through the biometric residence permit.
Q371 Alex Norris: What aspect of inward migration do you feel most influenced public opinion?
Lord Green: I think the impact on housing, the impact on health services, and the impact on schools. All of those are felt by people very strongly, particularly in the areas where there has been a large inflow. As it happens, the east European inflows have more impact of that kind because those who have gone to inner cities are going somewhere that is already crowded. Those are the major ones.
Of course, if I could add to that because it is important, if immigration continues at the current level, we are going to have to build a new home every five minutes, day and night, in order to house the new migrant families. This is a massive undertaking and where I live you cannot move for new housing estates popping up all over the place. That is what upsets people.
Q372 Alex Norris: We heard in the previous session that migration is likely to have had limited impact on employment, wages and public services. What was your take when you heard that?
Lord Green: I do not believe it. Indeed, I know it not to be true in respect of the matters I have mentioned. In respect of pay and so on, these effects are very difficult to find because we have a workforce of 30 million. It is very difficult to detect these changes. If you talk to Bob Rowthorn, he says there is just so much statistical noise that you cannot find the impacts.
Chair: We will have to pause again. Lord Green, I know that you are under time constraints. I think you have to leave at 5.00 pm.
Lord Green: I have to leave at 5.00 pm, I am afraid.
Chair: We will race back as rapidly as we can.
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
On resuming—
Chair: We can resume our evidence session.
Q373 Alex Norris: Lord Green, to relate what you have just said about factors that influence public opinion with what you said at the beginning to the Chair about social care, you identified social care as a sector where there could be reverse pressure on employers to say that they need to be employing British workers and one of the ways in which you do that is to pay them more. Much of social care is commissioned by local authorities. In my previous three years to coming here, I was responsible for health and social care in Nottingham. We essentially pay money to social care operators that leads to minimum wage payment because that is all the money that we are funded to do so. Where would the money come into the system so that social care operators would pay more to attract British staff?
Lord Green: The care system is one of the most difficult aspects of this, I agree. One of the things that could happen is that there could be, not necessarily in the care system itself but in the lower-paid economy, much more effort to accommodate the workers and the timetable that they are able to fulfil. We calculated recently that there are 4 million people in the UK who would like to have more hours than they have, so there is a reservoir of underemployment, if I can call it that.
I recall a case in Northampton where a factory that was making sandwiches put out an advertisement, as they are obliged to do. It said any applicant must be able to work any day of the week, days and nights. Well, of course, British workers with families and so on cannot do that. I learnt later that, in fact, that company had not been to the local employment office in order to even seek workers. They brought 250 in a planeload from Hungary. That is an extreme case, but over the economy there are ways in which it will adjust and that will include most sectors.
Q374 Alex Norris: David Goodhart, we have read the system that you offered that was in our research materials. It is quite a specific and clear one around fixed time limits, no right of residence, and the possibility of antisocial hours visas as you talked about. Obviously, such a system would compete with an EU27 system that would not have those same controls. What did your evidence tell you about the elasticity of demand for migrants that would mean that despite having a less favourable immigration system we would still get the migrants that we needed?
David Goodhart: Yes, it is a good question and I have not looked at it. I would say that the wage gap between poorer parts of the European Union and the UK is still very significant, three to three and a half times. It is less than it used to be. There has been a lot of catching up in the last 10 years. You can see people’s sensitivity to that in the way that so many people left after sterling fell 15%.
There is the attraction of English as the global lingua franca, London and Britain generally being considered, even after Brexit, a pretty friendly place and a good place to come to, and I think there would still be very significant demand for these positions. The seasonal agricultural workers scheme was only discontinued in 2014, and there is a lot of pressure now to recontinue it. After 2014 we thought that we could just depend on people from the poorer Bulgaria, Romania and so on doing those agricultural and horticultural jobs. I do not think there will be any problem at all restarting it, and the NFU seemed to think there would be no problem restarting it and having sufficient demand. It may be from slightly different places. It may be from Ukraine rather than Bulgaria and Romania.
Q375 Douglas Ross: There has been a bit of discussion so far about non-EEA migrants and you heard the answers and the responses from the previous panel. What was your take on what they said, particularly on tier 2 and the Government’s response currently to non-EEA migrants?
Lord Green: The short answer is that the only way to deal with non-EU migration is to bear down on each route. There is a whole range of recommendations already made by the Migration Advisory Committee that have not been implemented. The first thing is to implement them but, in addition, we would suggest that we need to take a close look at intercompany transfers, which have been, shall I say, used for a different purpose.
Q376 Douglas Ross: Sorry, we have heard this already because that was an answer you gave earlier. I was just wondering what your response was to the previous panel, who have quite different opinions to you. Are they completely wrong? Is there a middle ground? You have mentioned some of these things and I do not want you to repeat what you have already answered. I was just interested in your reaction to what earlier panellists have said.
Lord Green: My reaction to a lot of what they said was that they do not seem to realise that there is very strong public pressure to reduce these numbers. If you were looking at it from a purely—
Q377 Douglas Ross: Not with the skilled migrants?
Lord Green: No, the skilled migrants, that is fine. You are talking about tier 2?
Douglas Ross: Yes.
Lord Green: Okay. Tier 2 has been moderately successful until recently. It has run into a problem now. It is hard to analyse because the Home Office is not telling us who they have refused. The information available is extremely scarce. I think that we do need a tier 2 for skilled migrants. It does need a cap. The cap may need adjusting, but we do not know enough about it to know what to do. If, as we have recommended, you bring EU into it and you have the same system for both—and I think there is a strong case for that; indeed, it is difficult to argue otherwise—then you would have to choose a new cap or have no cap. That is a matter for the Government. Personally, I would put a cap of 60,000 and see what happens.
Q378 Douglas Ross: Just see what happens?
Lord Green: Yes.
Q379 Douglas Ross: You do not think that is a slightly reckless approach?
Lord Green: No. What happens, happens.
Q380 Douglas Ross: Where have you got 60,000 from?
Lord Green: There is some thinking behind that. Thirty thousand is the present level, but if you look at EU migration in the past, it is of much more of a circular nature. You can look at the numbers and get an order of magnitude of the number of highly-skilled EU migrants, and we have done that.
David Goodhart: I would certainly agree with what Jonathan said about the reason why we are seeing this breach of the 20,000 cap now is because of the delayed effect from skilled EU people leaving.
Q381 Douglas Ross: Sorry, just to check, because of Brexit?
David Goodhart: Yes. In general, I think that they tend to have too rosy a view of the effects of large-scale immigration. Ironically, given that I think that most of the three people who were here earlier would identify as on the left, they take a very employer view. Phoebe was talking about all that matters is prosperity. Well, it is not actually all that matters in a country. Congestion, quality of life, sense of cohesion and stability are things that matter a lot, too. Those things are very much harder to measure, of course.
I do think that one of the reasons why European Union free movement immigration has particularly disturbed people in a way is because it is a completely sui generis form of immigration. Historically, people have either come to a country from outside for very short periods of time—tourists, essentially; they come for a few days or a few weeks—or they have come permanently as immigrants and have committed themselves to that country. Freedom of movement is neither one nor the other, and people think, sometimes wrongly but sometimes rightly, that people have the attitudes of the temporary visitor with all the benefits of the permanent immigrant. I think that is one of the reasons why people have disliked it, as well as the fact that in certain sectors it has clearly undermined national social contracts.
Our biggest manufacturing sector by employment is food manufacturing. One-third of people in food manufacturing are from central and eastern Europe just since 2005. It is extraordinary. In whole sectors of warehousing in the Nottingham area, you go in and they are entirely full of people from central and eastern Europe. People think, “Hang on, what is going on here? Don’t we have national social contracts?”
It is because employers are allowed to do it. You cannot blame them, but they have had a huge free lunch out of free movement. I am surprised that people do not talk about it more, particularly people on the left, but employer spending on training fell 15%, according to Francis Green of UCL, between 2005 and 2011. There are other surveys that find the fall much higher than that, up to 30% in that period. EU free movement is not the only reason for that. If you have free graduates pouring out of universities, why take somebody on at 17 or 18 and train them? British employers have taken advantage of free movement I think in ways that are not complying with good corporate citizenship.
Q382 Douglas Ross: Can I ask how you think a skilled worker should be defined?
David Goodhart: The skilled worker is currently defined as somebody earning £30,000 in a degree-requiring occupation, although it is higher for ICT. I think it is £41,000 or £41,500 for intercompany transfers.
Q383 Douglas Ross: You are happy with that?
David Goodhart: Yes. I think that it could perhaps be slightly higher than £30,000.
Q384 Douglas Ross: If I use a local issue, non-EEA migrants coming over from maybe the Philippines into the inshore fishing industry are deemed as unskilled migrants, yet the job they do is an extremely skilful job that I could not do. Do you not think sometimes we focus far too much on potential salaries rather than looking at skills, which is the wording? I am wondering if the definition is correct or not.
Lord Green: Let me ask you this. If you were properly trained, do you think you could handle these fish?
Douglas Ross: Yes.
Lord Green: Yes. Baroness Wolf looked at this and she found that training outside the workplace between 2000 and 2014 had fallen from 140,000—these are apprenticeships, really—to 20,000. This is one of the impacts of migration from the European Union. They are taking these jobs. If you trained your own people, they could do it.
Q385 Douglas Ross: If they want to be trained to do that, but in many sectors they do not. Do you believe that the skilled workforce are those who are earning £30,000, £40,000, £60,000, or can you have a need for skilled migrants for lower-paid jobs?
David Goodhart: Not necessarily, no. I think that there is a real challenge in making those jobs attractive to the existing workforce in this country. This is something obviously employers have not had to do perhaps since the late 1990s.
Q386 Douglas Ross: If I go back to my example, at the moment they are currently trying to do this. With changes to the immigration policies they cannot get in these Filipino workers to work on boats and the boats are being tied up, having to be sold, businesses going bust. It would suggest that even when there are drastic reactions to this, they cannot get a local workforce to be willing to be trained up.
David Goodhart: There are whole sectors of the economy where people have lost an appetite for that kind of work. The traditions have been lost doing that kind of fishing work.
Q387 Douglas Ross: Do you think that will just come back gradually?
David Goodhart: No, I think that it means we may have to give up on that.
Q388 Douglas Ross: Give up on fishing?
David Goodhart: Not on fishing in its entirety, no, but in certain parts of the country perhaps, yes.
Q389 Chair: What is the evidence that in any of those areas where there have been higher than average levels of overseas recruitment that unemployment in those communities is higher?
David Goodhart: I don’t know.
Lord Green: At that level you cannot find the evidence because, as I mentioned earlier, we have a labour force of 30 million. You cannot detect changes in tiny areas.
Q390 Chair: What is the evidence that the levels of recruitment from abroad has either pushed up unemployment or pushed down wages?
David Goodhart: You talked about this with the previous witnesses. There is some evidence that it has pushed down wages at the bottom end of the spectrum: Steve Nickell’s paper, Bob Rowthorn, John Moore, Bauer.
Q391 Chair: They talked about having pay increases of 9% over several years rather than 10%.
David Goodhart: It is actually 2%. I think Jonathan got that wrong. Yes, you have a 10% rise in the immigrant population and wages are reduced by 2%. I think he said 1%. Yes, it is a factor, I think, not a huge factor. There is an opportunity cost, too. If employers had not been able to bring people in from outside, they would have had to pay more. Wages are starting to rise in agriculture and horticulture.
Q392 Chair: You are not arguing that immigration increases unemployment?
David Goodhart: No, it displaces employment in certain places. This point that we were touching on earlier I think is really interesting, the whole culture, how certain sectors become associated with immigrant labour or European labour. The image of the job becomes less attractive, I think, to local people who might have happily done those jobs a couple of generations before. Whole sectors become stereotyped in a way, “Those are jobs for failures and foreigners, I can’t possibly do that”.
Q393 Douglas Ross: Something happened a generation ago that meant that local people were not taking these jobs, which is why they had to go to these foreign countries. Do you think the fishermen in the Western Isles or the couple that I have in Moray just decided one day, “We have so many local people that will do these jobs, but I tell you what, I’m going to go to the Philippines to get someone else instead”? No, it is because they could not get local people 10 or 15 years ago that they had to go to the Philippines. I do not see this utopia that you seem to believe is going to happen if we stop these routes from non-EEA countries or otherwise that will suddenly be taken up by local communities because—
David Goodhart: It is a very odd way of thinking about it.
Douglas Ross: Sorry, if I can just finish, that was lost, which is why they had to go to these other countries in the first place.
David Goodhart: It is a very odd way of thinking about how to run a company or, indeed, a national economy. If you cannot produce goods at a profit and attract workers at wages and conditions that they are happy with, you should not be in operation. It is as simple as that. I agree the equation has changed slightly in recent times because we have had a significantly more open door to immigration.
Q394 Douglas Ross: What is your experience in manual work?
David Goodhart: Very limited, yes.
Q395 Douglas Ross: I milked cows before I was elected and people do not want to milk cows anymore. They do not want to get up at 2 o’clock in the morning, like I used to do, and milk cows twice a day. It is not that there are people there waiting to take these jobs. A number of people who are milking cows now, doing my former profession, are foreign nationals because people simply do not want to do it. I sit here and I am getting quite annoyed at you just saying it will all be fine or these industries can go out of business. The way you are speaking, if that is going to be the case, we have to stop drinking milk and eating fish.
David Goodhart: It is only since 2005 that we have had I think it is now 7% of the workforce come from eastern Europe, 17% in London. Things were so different before 2005, were they? I do not think they were. I think people will do—
Q396 Douglas Ross: We were taking foreign labour before 2005 to do jobs that people in the UK did not want to do.
David Goodhart: They do not want to do them at the price and at the conditions that they are offered.
Q397 Douglas Ross: The current money people get for a pint or litre of milk is going to suddenly be enough to provide such high wages that people like you, who have no experience in manual work, would suddenly decide to switch from whatever their professional career is to go and milk cows? You think that is going to happen because they are going to make so much money out of this?
David Goodhart: No, I do not think so. No, I do not think they will.
Douglas Ross: No, neither do I.
David Goodhart: There are certain jobs like that that require a tradition and a commitment, and those things can be lost. Traditions in the fishing industry can be lost. I think that in a lot of these areas, certainly in agriculture and horticulture, there are massive opportunities for investment in automation. We are way behind the Japanese. Japan is a country that has effectively no immigration. We are way behind the Japanese in automating in these areas, and that is perfectly possible. Yes, we do just have to make those jobs more attractive.
Q398 Douglas Ross: I am not going to get into a big debate, but I know many dairy farms that have robotic milkers that still require foreign labour to do all the other jobs on the farm.
Lord Green: What you are overlooking is that we have a free market economy that makes adjustments. If you have a very large availability and, indeed, inflow of low-paid workers, they will do the low-paid jobs. If they are not available, adjustments have to be made by the employers, which will include wages. It is interesting that over the last 10 years productivity has been flat. That is not necessarily because of immigration but it is interesting that the two have occurred at a similar time. All these things will adjust themselves as you go along. We have had an extra 2.2 million people coming here in recent years, since 2004.
David Goodhart: Four million net immigration since 2002.
Lord Green: I am sorry, I am talking about EU. Yes, in total it is 4 million. This is having very substantial effects on all the things I have mentioned, our society, our accommodation, all of these things, and people do not want to see it. It seems to me in this building of all buildings that should be a major consideration. Every test of opinion in recent years has shown the same thing and—
Q399 Chair: Is it correct to say that all of your arguments on the case for change are based on your assessment of public opinion as opposed to your assessment of harm to any particular sector of the economy or communities on the basis that there is not actually any evidence, as we discussed before, on unemployment, for example?
Lord Green: You are right to suggest that I pay a great deal of attention to public opinion and what ordinary people feel and say and want done. I think that is very important. It is easily lost in the City and in parts of the media that there are strong feelings that need to be met and dealt with. The economic aspects to a considerable extent will sort themselves because in a free market there are means by which that can happen.
Chair: I am conscious of your time, Lord Green. I am going to ask Kirstene Hair or Stuart McDonald if they have any specific questions for Lord Green before he has to go, and if we can then come back to you, David Goodhart, if that is all right.
Q400 Kirstene Hair: I will be very brief because I understand the time constraint. I wanted to ask about the regional approach to immigration policy. How much do you think there is scope for that and also do you think there are any challenges that might come up against?
Lord Green: The first thing to say is that only 5% of employers are in favour of regional immigration policy. Secondly, it has been tried in other countries like Australia and Canada and has not been very successful. Thirdly, it distorts competition between firms. You can have a firm in one town and 10 miles away a firm in another town but with different ability to employ. I think that it causes confusion and no benefit.
Q401 Kirstene Hair: Do you believe that it might add another level of bureaucracy and there would be more checks and things that would perhaps cost?
Lord Green: It would be a shambles. We have enough trouble as it is, but trying to identify individual workers who are entitled to this, that or the other in a different town would be chaos.
Q402 Stuart C. McDonald: You previously told this Committee that regional variations in migration policy would be a viable possibility.
Lord Green: No, I don’t. I think the market will deal with that. I think that attempts to do it with bureaucracy will fail.
Q403 Stuart C. McDonald: You did not say that or you have changed your mind? Are you saying you did not say that previously? I understand that that is what you told this Committee.
Lord Green: I thought I did say that and certainly only 5% of employers think it is a good idea.
Q404 Stuart C. McDonald: Okay. You have also said that the Canadian system has been chaos, yet the whole course of Canadian migration policy over the last 20 years is to increasingly move from the central federal system to the provincial one precisely because it has worked very well. Why do the Canadians continue to move towards a provincial system if it is such a disaster?
Lord Green: I do not think there has been a move towards a provincial system. I am not aware of it.
Q405 Stuart C. McDonald: The numbers that go through the provincial system have increased year after year after year compared to through the federal system, but that is fine; if you do not have the numbers that is okay as well.
Your last comment was that it would be chaos, but there are a million and one different ways you could implement a provincial system. I could quite happily come up with one that would be chaos, but say, for example, I just said, “You do not have a cap on tier 2 visas in Scotland, you enforce it in exactly the same way as other tier 2 visas”, how would that be chaos?
Lord Green: That is a slightly different point. I think that there are ways in which the situation in Scotland is somewhat different from the UK and there could and should be some adjustments vis-à-vis Scotland for the immigration system, like possibly tier 2. The Migration Advisory Committee can and do advise on that and I would not rule it out, but attempts to have regional systems all over the UK would be chaotic.
Q406 Stuart C. McDonald: You mentioned the youth mobility scheme as a possibility for meeting demand for low-skilled workers. Have you done work to assess how many you could attract by that and whether that would be sufficient to meet employer demand for low-skilled migration?
Lord Green: Sorry, I cannot hear your question.
Stuart C. McDonald: As I understand it, Migration Watch has proposed a youth mobility scheme for EEA nationals. What work have you done to assess how big a scheme that would need to be and how many people you would need to attract under that in order to meet demand for low-skilled labour?
Lord Green: The important thing is to make sure that the requirements are very clear. There is one already, as you know, for Australia and South Korea and so on. One might have to adjust the parameters for that as you went along. The important thing is that it should only be for two years, no access to benefits and no extensions. Provided it was that, I think there is benefit for those who come and benefit for those to whom they come.
Q407 Stuart C. McDonald: Is a youth mobility scheme really going to find people who are wanting to do the jobs described of food manufacturing or fish processing or social care? Hospitality and tourism has traditionally recruited quite a lot from there, but can youth mobility schemes fill a gap with these other jobs?
Lord Green: No, that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to retain the links between young people in Europe and Britain and vice versa. It does not have a particularly economic purpose. If it so happens that the young people work in social care, that will be good but that is not its purpose.
Chair: Lord Green, thank you very much for your time.
Lord Green: If you will excuse me, I am sorry, I really have to go.
Q408 Chair: We appreciate it, and apologies for the votes interrupting the session. David Goodhart, thank you for your patience. Do you want to come back first on the points that Kirstene Hair raised about the regional systems?
David Goodhart: Yes.
Chair: Perhaps on both the points, sorry.
David Goodhart: I guess where it is most relevant in the UK is Scotland, which has very low immigration at the moment and there is an appetite for it, certainly in the political class in Scotland. We have moved on in the internal management of immigration through the biometric residence permit. Employers can check. There is an online checking system for the biometric residence permit, so in principle that could be applied both for the antisocial hours visa and for a regionalisation of employment so that somebody would come to Britain with a work permit that said you could only work in Scotland and that could be checked.
It is true we do not have much of a labour inspectorate, but we do have enforcement teams who go out essentially looking for illegal immigrants but who, in effect, act as a kind of labour inspectorate in that role. If they found somebody working in Leicester with a Scotland-only work permit, there would obviously be consequences. You would need some kind of regulation like that.
Q409 Kirstene Hair: There would be additional cost because of the additional checks that would be required?
David Goodhart: Yes. It is not a huge cost. It is a minor administrative cost for employers.
Chair: Sorry, this Division was unexpected. Given the time and given that we do not know whether there will be more than one vote, David, can we write to you with further questions and further points to make?
David Goodhart: Yes.
Chair: Otherwise I am conscious that you may be kept here waiting for some time in order for us to come back to ask the remaining few questions. Thank you very much for your time this afternoon. We appreciate your time.