If I had known the hon. Gentleman was going to raise such nonsense, I would not have let him intervene in the first place.
Let me move on to some of the remaining elements of the Bill. People who come to Britain and then abuse British law should not expect to stay here, and Labour has previously supported action to ensure that article 8 of the European convention on human rights is properly interpreted in cases involving foreign criminals. We also believe that appeals should be speeded up—serious cases that go to Strasbourg certainly take far too long.
The measures in the Bill do not deal with those issues, however, and instead it appears that the Government want to abolish appeals for whole categories of immigration cases because they cannot cope with the fact that they get so many decisions wrong in the first place. There are genuine and serious concerns about that approach because it turned out that the Government got it wrong in 50% of entry clearance cases that went to appeal. In managed migration cases that went to appeal, they got it wrong in 49% of decisions. In the majority of those cases the problem was Home Office error, so why not just put a bit of effort into getting the decision right in the first place? If those appeal rights are removed, many cases will cite human rights grounds to get an appeal and more cases will go to judicial review. The Government’s own impact assessment shows that that could cost £100 million, halving any savings the Home Secretary might hope to make.
The real gap in the Bill is that is says nothing about the exploitation of immigration in the workplace. There is nothing to deal with employers who take on illegal migrant workers or to tackle the exploitation of legal migration by the undercutting of wages and conditions in the local labour market. There is nothing to deal with the lack of enforcement of the minimum wage, or employers who use loopholes in the minimum wage to overcharge workers for overcrowded accommodation and offset that against their pay. There is nothing to deal with agencies that recruit only from overseas and exclude local workers from their books, or employers who recruit for some shifts only from certain nationalities.
All those practices are bad for everyone—they are bad for migrant workers who are exploited, bad for local workers who are undercut, bad for other businesses that are undermined and bad for our economy, which continues to depend on low-skilled migration being exploited in that way. The Government are doing nothing. The Labour party will set out amendments to give councils powers of enforcement on the minimum wage, close loopholes and tackle irresponsible agencies, and I hope the Government will support those measures.
The Bill does not do what the Government claim it does. Some of the measures are sensible, some are confused, and some are of serious concern. They claim it tackles illegal immigration, but it does nothing of the sort. It fails to do enough to tackle the serious problems. The Opposition will not oppose the Bill as we believe it should go to Committee so we can amend and reform it, use the opportunity to introduce better and fairer controls to deal with the Government’s failures, and make immigration work for all.