Treasury and Work and Pensions

By contrast with the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), in this Queen’s Speech debate I want to contest the terms of our debate on security. I will talk about economic elements affecting security and insecurity in communities such as mine. I want to discuss whether the new, independent statistical system will give us a new entry point into issues such as the massive demographic change in poorer parts of urban communities. That change is driven by movements of people, especially A8 European nationals. My comments will be in contrast to the calibration of the security agenda in the Queen’s Speech, which is driven by the terror agenda, migration, and issues to do with criminality. Anyone who went to my constituency and asked about security and insecurity would get stuck into three issues straight away. The first is housing insecurity and pressures on the demand for low-cost social housing units. The second is labour market insecurities, and in particular the perceived race to the bottom caused by the deregulation of labour markets, and driven by patterns of migration. The third is access to quality health care, partly as a consequence of primary care cuts. However, the overriding element contributing to insecurity is the community’s inability to comprehend the sheer velocity of change caused by patterns of migration to our borough. That raises big issues of public policy, resource allocation and the economics of the Queen’s Speech, as set out today. I am interested in the independent statistical system, and I am keen to raise a few issues on class, migration and race. I regularly ask the Office for National Statistics what the population of my borough is, and it regularly tells me that it is 164,000, and has been since 2001. Our borough has the lowest-cost housing in Greater London, and as a consequence it exerts a magnetic pull, in terms of migration within the city’s boundaries. In addition—this is a classic hallmark of patterns of migration to cities—migrant communities have moved into the lowest-cost housing market in search of low-cost housing. The cumulative effect is that the population is growing dramatically, but that occurs off the radar of public policy-making, which remains attached to an increasingly out-of-date census formula. The only statistical series that begin to catch such movements of people are the education rolls. From 2003 until 2005-06, the story shows that the white population in our community was dropping by about 3 or 4 per cent. a year. If there was a pro rata effect across the whole borough, whose population is between 160,000 and 170,000, the change in ethnicity—from white, indigenous English to black African families—would be between 4,000 and 5,000. Analysis of the education rolls shows an expansion in the head count of the population, too. There are massive movements of people in terms of both the qualitative make-up of the community and the total head count, yet the state is attached to a census formula that gives a completely different picture of the communities we represent. That has huge implications in communities such as mine, where there are enduring inequalities in health and access to public services, as well as long-term legacies owing to poverty and social immobility. The population is growing faster in real terms than the state is refinancing public services. As a consequence, we can make a strong case that things are in decline in real terms, because the social wage is in decline, especially when analysed alongside the effects of patterns of migration and labour market deregulation. It will be interesting to see whether the independent statistical system will be able to grapple with such issues in future. I realise that there are the beginnings of a central locus of analysis in relation to the future comprehensive spending review, but I want to throw out a few questions about how we can reconcile that with the real-time demographic picture, especially in the poorer urban communities that take the strain of massive population flows. How can we adjust public policy making so that we go with the grain of those movements rather than simply offering diminishing returns in our understanding of, and investment in, those communities, because of the increasing rupture between the formal apparatus of state decision making and the reality of population flows? ONS analysis shows that the rate of population growth at present is the fastest since the 1960s, despite residents leaving at record levels. By June 2005, the population of the UK was about 60.2 million; in the preceding year, growth was 0.6 per cent., or 375,000 net. In cities such as London, the poorest communities take the strain of such increases. The global challenge in respect of migration posed in the Queen’s Speech is to deal with those issues in a public policy agenda that explicitly tries to confront patterns of inequality and the problems of social cohesion. Only on the basis of modern, real-time demography can we begin to deal with such issues through investment in education or health, or helping local authorities in their strategy for managing changes in the community to ensure social cohesion. I shall give some examples of the effects of labour market movements to show why such policies would be important in helping communities such as mine. As I said, there has been a massive change in the qualitative make-up of the population, as well as the total number. Many new residents are employed by employment agencies, which has caused real pressures at the bottom of the labour market. At one of my surgeries a few weeks ago, the first case involved some residents who came to see me about east European gang workers being paid £15 a day on a public contract. As that is substantially below the minimum wage, they were rightly concerned about the consequential effects on broader labour market conditions in the area. The fifth case involved a roofer whose hourly wage rate had dropped £2.50 in six months. The penultimate case that night was a guy who wanted to know what I could do about the shed opposite his house. I found out that the person had put a cooker in the shed at the bottom of his garden and rented it out to eight east European guys who were hot-bedding in it. They were in a labour gang employed on contracts in the local community. I raise those issues to show how demographic movements have consequential effects on other forms of economic activity in communities such as mine, especially in the labour market. Putting that alongside the consumption of public services can create real, material tensions in respect of the allocation of resources and labour market competition in some of the more challenging parts of cities such as London. Such material conditions account for part of the rise of the far right, which seeks to pit community against community. However, the real issue is whether a mature debate on the Queen’s Speech and the Government’s economic strategy can actually build a real-time demographic picture of communities such as mine, and offer both resource allocation solutions that anticipate population movements and a labour market strategy that stops the contemporary race to the bottom, which creates and fuels real tensions. When my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk talked about the temporary workers directive and raised concerns about the blocking minority in Brussels, he was right on the money. The type of policy remedy that I suggested is critical to supply different footings for the labour market economy to neutralise the seductive messages of the far right, which argues that competition at the bottom of the labour market is racialising the community owing to the threat posed by A8 migrants. I am, of course, aware of some of the debates in the European Community about the 12-month threshold, but such policy initiatives are critical if the Government are to be proactive in choking off the downward pressures at the bottom of the labour market, which fuel difficulties and tensions in communities such as mine, creating a breeding-ground for political extremism.