My Lords, I am moving again an amendment which we moved in Committee which we consider to be key and ought to be in the Bill. Clauses 43 and 44 deal with the issue of work and would, first, streamline the processes by which an employer can object to or appeal against a civil penalty by requiring employers to raise an objection to the Secretary of State before making an appeal to the civil court. Secondly, it would make it easier to enforce unpaid civil penalty debts in the civil courts.
Immigration is a welcome and important part of our life and our country’s success over the years owes much to the people who have come here from around the world and have helped to make it a better place. However, we are all aware of the fact that immigration can bring with it certain pressures and certain difficulties for our communities. The Bill does not include any of the important work-related measures which we have been calling for, and we tabled a number of amendments for Committee stage as a means of raising these issues. Amendment 53 has the aim of ending the practice of some recruitment agencies excluding local workers.
To state what I hope is obvious, many or most recruitment agencies are a great asset to the communities in which they work, helping employers and potential employees find work, and keeping local economies in
particular ticking over. However, there has been a problem with some employment agencies effectively taking on only foreign workers and excluding British people from their books.
That has become more of an issue because, over the past couple of decades there has been a significant growth in agency employment; I understand that the figures show a 500% increase in agency workers between the mid-1980s and 2007. A look at the figures shows that migrants are increasingly overrepresented within agency work, particularly at the lower end, with A8 accession country migrants constituting the largest single group of agency workers. In some sectors—the meat and poultry processing industry, for example—there are examples which have come to light of British workers facing difficulty registering for work with some agencies which exclusively supply migrant workers, generally eastern European nationals.
We have the evidence of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which conducted a major survey in 2010 and found that one-third of agencies confirmed that they had acted unlawfully in sometimes supplying workers by judging what nationality the processing firm would prefer, or responding to direct requests often based on stereotypes about the perceived dependability of particular nationalities. There has been the example of an organisation advertising cleaning services with a message saying that it has a thorough vetting system for all its cleaners, and then going on to say that they all come from Poland and that several of them have had extensive cleaning experience in the United Kingdom. In 2010, we had the case of a British supermarket supplier accused of discriminating against local workers after insisting that new recruits had to speak fluent Polish. The firm, I believe, was one of Asda’s biggest suppliers—it was not Asda itself—and it maintained that the requirement was necessary to ensure that all employees could understand the same instructions. The condition was included in an e-mail advert sent out on behalf of the firm and dispatched to hundreds of potential applicants on that particular agency’s books. The advert read:
“Immediate factory work available! If you are available or have any friends available, work is starting tomorrow for induction training. Ongoing factory work (meat production) for 4-5 months, shifts are 7am-5pm or 9am-7pm. Transport provided. Applicants must speak Polish”.
The latter sentence would appear to indicate that it was asked for a certain category of potential employee, since I do not know that Polish is spoken very much in this country, apart from among Polish people.