UK Borders Bill

I will be extremely brief. Many of us have thought for a long time that we should find a way to have a more sensible and informed discussion of what is potentially an extremely toxic issue. We are discussing this Bill against the background of a dramatic increase in population projected over the next generation—a growth of about 7 million or more, of which the majority will come from migration. That is unprecedented. That is a huge task for a society to adjust to and digest, so the key is to ensure that we look at the issue in the round and take sensible decisions on border controls and migration policy generally, based on the best evidence about what is good for this country. The levels that we are talking about, and the components of them, may be extremely good or they may be extremely bad—or perhaps somewhere between the two, which I suspect is the case. What I am sure about is that we have to do better in finding the mechanism to enable us—in government, in Parliament and among the public—to have better discussion of these matters than we have had before. I am pretty sure that when the Bill was announced, the Home Secretary told me that we were going to have an immigration commission to look at these issues in the round. I welcomed that, as I had argued for it for a long time. I tabled two early-day motions on the subject, and others supported them. The point was to put all the issues together—what the economy needs in terms of skills, but also the effect on wage levels, public services, social cohesion and all the other things that bear on decisions on migration and border policy. I see that there is no such body in the Bill. Instead, we have what is called a migration advisory committee, which is to be a non-statutory, non-departmental public body that will offer advice, I am told, on the skills needed in particular sections of the economy. If that is the case, we are missing an opportunity to remedy the deficiencies that have been pointed out by the national statistician, even in terms of the figures that we are dealing with. We cannot make good policy unless we have good population and migration figures, but we do not have them. Nor can we make sensible policy decisions unless we put all the issues about economic activity, skills shortages, wage levels, public services and social cohesion into the same pot and try to make sense of them. We could then make some informed decisions on that basis. We are to have a migration advisory committee, a migration impacts forum and a national statistics centre for demography, and we already have a commission on integration. I believe, however, that the time has come to put all those bodies together to form a serious commission that could advise the Government, and all of us, on all matters relating to immigration and population. I had hoped that such a provision would be in the Bill, because of what the Home Secretary had said. I still hope that in the course of the Bill’s passage to the other place and back, we shall manage not to lose the opportunity to establish a body of that kind.