My Lords, the immigration skills charge is a major innovation in UK immigration policy and very difficult to debate this late in the evening. Since Committee, however, I have had representations from the British Medical Association, Oxford and Cambridge universities, Universities UK, the Russell group and a very large number of other research institutes which regard this as a very important issue. I hope that the Minister will be able to provide at least some information, because we have not had any communication from him since we raised questions in Committee, nor have we had any letters. There is a real problem here of how we address a major innovation which the Royal Society, on behalf of the national academies, says will cost universities £25 million a year merely to deal with short-term secondees from foreign universities working on two-year post-doctoral fellowships in British universities. This is a serious issue to have to discuss late at night.
The idea was first floated by the Prime Minister in a speech last June. He stated that he would ask the Migration Advisory Committee to report on the subject. The Migration Advisory Committee reported on 20 January this year, after the Commons considered the Bill and had spent five minutes at the end of its Committee stage discussing this clause. In other words, it was not considered properly at all in the Commons. The Government have not yet had time to respond to the MAC report. The chairman of the MAC will be giving a briefing to parliamentarians on this issue tomorrow, the day after we have completed our Committee and Report stages. We raised a number of questions in our short Committee stage to which Ministers, as I have just said, have not responded.
The Minister, in responding in Committee could assure us only that,
“details about the rate and scope of the immigration skills charge will be set out in regulations to be laid before the introduction of the charge. At that point there will be an opportunity for an informed debate on the details ... There are likely to be legal implications of introducing exemptions”.
I understand that to mean that the Government do not think they necessarily can introduce exemptions from the charge for some sectors. He went on:
“the Government need time fully to consider the evidence about the likely impact … and whether any exemptions should be applied”.—[Official Report, 9/2/16; col. GC 174.]
I am told there are discussions under way with representatives of the universities and the medical profession and that various suggestions of ways forward have been hinted at but nothing has been made available to Parliament to guide any scrutiny of the proposals. Those consulted are not yet happy with the Government’s responses. Yet Clause 88(4) sets out that:
“Section 80 comes into force at the end of the period of two months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed”.
That is far earlier than most other provisions of the Bill. So much for the Prime Minister’s proposal last June that:
“As we improve the training of British workers, we should—over time—be able to lower the number of skilled workers we have to bring in from elsewhere”.
So much for the Minister’s comment in Committee that,
“the Government need time fully to consider the evidence”.
The immigration skills charge is to be rushed into effect before the beginning of the next school and university year—I assume deliberately—to catch recruitment from outside the EU of teachers and academics for the 2016-17 year. I cannot see how either House of Parliament will have time or opportunity to consider the necessary detailed regulations that will be required between May and July this year, or how the Home Office, BIS, the Department for Education and the Department of Health will be able to agree by then what those regulations should spell out.
Amendment 151A seeks to delete subsection (4) of Clause 88. If the Minister cannot provide a justification for this rush to implementation, we may wish to return to this question at Third Reading.
I stand shoulder to shoulder with the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, in accepting that the failure to train sufficient British citizens in skills in demand is one of the most powerful pull factors in UK immigration. When hospital trusts announce that they need to recruit 15,000 nurses from outside the EU, head teachers are searching Australia, west Africa and Asia for maths teachers, and when IT companies are forced by shortage of skills within Britain to look for recruits in India, large numbers of additional migrants are pulled into the UK. That represents a long-term failure of labour market policy stretching back over several Governments. Net migration, as we all recognise, will not fall until vital parts of both the private and the public sector are able to train enough skilled workers from within the UK workforce.
The promise of 3 million apprenticeships by 2020 should do much to close that gap, if the Government are successful in hitting the target. But we do not yet know enough about the apprenticeship scheme either. I read the Grayling public affairs comment on last Thursday’s Budget, which warned that,
“a current lack of policy clarity and consistency … may undermine the government’s target of 3m apprenticeships … With so little information available, employers will rightly be concerned about how the … system will work”.
Last June, the Prime Minister stated that improvement in training would come first, and then reduction in skilled immigration, but here we are presented with charges to reduce skilled immigration before the training scheme has been set up. We are promised an institute for apprenticeships from April 2017, the details of which also remain unclear. The skills charge is supposed to flow towards funding a scheme which will not be in operation for 12 to 18 months after it is imposed.
Of course, many skilled jobs are not subject to apprenticeships within the UK. Nurses are not apprentices and teachers are not apprentices. University researchers and teachers come with advanced degrees, not apprenticeship qualifications. Logically, therefore, such professions should be exempt from the levy. However, the Minister suggested in Committee that there may be legal problems with this. Can he confirm whether the Government see this as a universal charge on all entrants under tier 2 visas or whether exemptions for health and education, for example, are envisaged? The idea of charging Health Education England for visas for overseas doctors coming here for advanced training,
or hospital trusts for recruiting nurses, seems absurd—funding them with one hand and fining them with another.
There is a large air of unjoined-up government about all this. We have just had announcements from other Ministers about extending maths teaching in schools, and the whole apprenticeship scheme depends on finding additional teachers in specialist subjects and skills. But there has been no announcement about a crash scheme for training extra teachers in maths or IT within Britain, no more than there has been any announcement on an emergency scheme to train more British citizens as nurses. Are we going to search for extra teachers from around the world and then penalise the schools and FE colleges that take them on?
Imposition of the charge on universities would be even more damaging, as many of those who have been in touch with me have argued. I am sure that they have sent similar briefings to other Peers. The global standing of British universities depends on the global circulation of academic researchers and teachers, with British citizens studying for advanced degrees abroad and experts from other countries researching and teaching here. Do the Government really want to discourage our universities from international exchange? Would they be happy if other advanced countries outside Europe followed this example and imposed penalties on British researchers whom they invited to join their research teams? None of us yet knows enough about the implications of what the Government are proposing in this highly permissive clause, and I see no sign that the Government understand the implications either. We cannot leave such important issues to regulations that have clearly not yet been drafted. I beg to move.