UK Borders Bill

I am not sure how to follow the speech made by the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies), but I found it thoroughly enjoyable, although he gave us a bit too much information, as Mrs. Davies might agree. Many of the ideas in the Bill are rational, as the Government are seeking to restore the integrity of the system, and many of the ideas come from the work of the Select Committee on Home Affairs. I welcome the comments made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) and my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard), and agree with many of the points that they raised. I shall deal with a couple of aspects of the Bill, and particularly the consequences of clauses 23 and 24, which seek to clamp down on the employment of illegal workers. At the outset, I should state that it is correct to clamp down on employers who abuse migrant labour, because shocking stories of such abuse abound in every constituency. Later I shall mention a couple of cases of such abuses that I have been told about in my constituency. However, like my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow, I am concerned about the effects of the clauses on some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Section 21 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 introduced a new offence of knowingly employing an illegal worker, and it provided associated powers to obtain a warrant to enter and search premises to arrest an individual. Clause 23 introduces an express power of arrest, and clause 24 puts in place a new regime of penalties for knowingly employing an illegal worker. It also introduces an express power to search a firm’s personnel records. On the face of it, the clauses might help to stop the abuse of people at work. Overall, the Government’s strategy is pretty clear: there is the general ““fit for purpose”” review of the Home Office, the introduction of the points-based migration system and the introduction of ID cards; also, the tough language of clampdowns is used when migration is discussed. Now, the Government are bearing down ever more systematically on those employing unregularised migrants. In general, we are witnessing a total overhaul of the immigration system, not least because the subject tops people’s concerns in poll after poll on their overall priorities for Government activity. The clauses are the next pieces to be put on the board in the overhaul of the Home Office. The obvious question is why the problem was not dealt with before. Presumably, the answer lies in the Home Office’s history of chaos, but I posit that there might also be something to the idea that in the past a blind eye was turned to tacit illegal employment. That is partially accounted for by the fact that migrant labour is seen as a key element in building our north America-style flexible labour markets. I have travelled around the country a fair bit in the past couple of months, and I have seen case after case of appalling abuse of migrant labour. There is no doubt that the issue resonates and touches raw nerves in many communities. It is almost the outstanding issue for public policy debate, so I welcome the initiatives in the Bill to regularise some of the employment of illegal workers. In my community, I use the same three examples time and again to demonstrate the way in which illegal migrants have pushed down local pay rates, have been chronically abused by landlords, and are being employed at less than the minimum wage. I came across all three case studies on the same day. The first concerned one of a gang of Lithuanian migrants who were employed under a public contract for £15 a day. The second case involved a roofer who came to see me, who said that his hourly pay rate had fallen by £2.50 in the preceding six months. The third case concerned a bloke who had put an oven in his shed and hired it out, so that a gang of east European migrant workers could hot-bed it at the bottom of his garden. Those are little stories that resonate across the country, and everyone has their own local examples of such chronic abuses by employers of some of the most abused workers in the country. I therefore understand the Government’s objectives in introducing the measures. However, it is difficult to get a clear, empirical picture of the patterns and the effects of migration in this country. The Office for National Statistics estimates that the total population was in the order of 60.2 million for 2005, and that has gone up by 375,000, net. Some 235,000 of that increase is made up by net migration. Alongside that, it is a commonly accepted statistic that there are about 600,000 A8 nationals. As was mentioned earlier, there were some 450,000 failed applications for asylum, and that figure does not include the dependants. In any analysis of the effects of illegal migration, we should add people who are trafficked, over-stayers and students who are still in the system. Earlier today, I referred to the Greater London authority’s estimate that there are 320,000 unregularised migrants in London alone. That figure, too, does not include dependants. My borough in east London has a total population of 174,000, so if we accept the figure of 320,000, it means that there are enough people with no formal status in the city to make up a large London borough. Many of those people are the most exploited in our society. They are abused by employers, landlords—every MP in the country will have countless stories of such abuses in their constituency—and criminals. We have many local examples of crime in which no come-back is provided by the authorities, because the migrant’s status is so ambiguous. They are therefore preyed on by criminal gangs. That is the right background against which to consider the consequences of clauses 23 and 24. In London, the obvious consequence of bearing down on employers who abuse migrant workers who have no status in this country will be to push tens of thousands of workers out of their illegal work. Many of those workers have been here for years, and many have dependants. One could argue that the city is dependent on migrant flows of labour. No one knows how many people would be affected, but arguably tens of thousands of people in London would be turfed out of work. How those people will survive remains a mystery to me. I see many cases involving people—and their children—who have no status in this country and who have been here for many years, just as my hon. Friend said about his constituency of Walthamstow, which is down the road from mine. Those people may be barely surviving at subsistence level, because they work illegally at very low rates of pay. Will the Bill deal with just one part of the problem—illegal working—while creating another problem for councils and public policy makers, across the country but especially in poorer urban communities, which bear a disproportionate strain as a result of the migration of illegal groups? Many people do not have a visible work profile because of their illegality. Will a consequence of the Bill be to force people out of the shadows, through sheer destitution? Is it not time to address the issue of people who are already here, but who are undocumented? Deportation will not be a remedy if literally tens of thousands of people are to be turfed out of work, to appear on the radar of public policy makers.