I thank my noble friend Lady Ludford and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for their support.
Earlier the Minister spoke about the teams of people working hard on drafting legislation, so if the Government felt moved to accept the spirit, if not the content, of this amendment then the drafting of the immigration Bill may be made simpler.
The amendment essentially reproduces an amendment to the Trade Bill which was passed in your Lordships’ House. As your Lordships will remember, it never went any further because it was never put in the next stage to the other place. With that in mind I shall keep my comments to a relative minimum. I beg noble Lords’ indulgence as I shall talk a little about some of the statistics that I related to that amendment last time. If we look at the statistics about economic migrants from the Migration Advisory Committee in autumn 2018, it found that migrants had little or no impact on the overall employment or unemployment of the UK-born workforce. Migration was not a detriment to the wages of UK-born workers. The MAC noted that migrants had a positive effect on productivity and innovation and that EEA migrants contributed more than they consumed in health services and social care.
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If nothing else, I am moving this amendment to ask the Government where they think they are going to get the workforce to meet the targets that we saw in the Queen’s Speech. By their own admission, those Bills and their targets are ambitious. They will take a lot of people. Simply looking at the NHS, social care and the provision of universal fibre and broadband, those take an awful lot of people. The level of immigration has been cited as one of the reasons why people have become disaffected with government and the United Kingdom, but the MAC figures refute the reality behind that. What has been behind that is that immigration has been used by people. Coupled with chronic political neglect in certain areas, the impression that immigration is creating a problem has grown.
I could go on and talk about the stupidity of the Government’s position that wrongly conflates someone’s salary with the contribution they make to the United Kingdom. I could explain that £30,000 in Leominster is a bit different from £30,000 in Westminster, and I could remind Ministers that on their figures, based on the most recent immigration White Paper, the UK would be worse off, with GDP falling by nearly 1%, but perhaps we can go into those details another day.
This afternoon we talked about there being no regression. It is very clear that this is regression. It is regression of UK citizens’ rights. Do not take my word for it. The highly respected European Union Committee of your Lordships’ House puts it clearly:
“While the Political Declaration proposes some mitigations, they will not change this significant restriction upon the freedoms currently enjoyed by UK citizens.”
This Bill not only restrict the freedoms of British citizens but leads to us having fewer good people to do the things we need to do. No sensible country which has successfully drawn on the talent of the whole of the continent would slam the door closed. No country would shut out people whom we need in social care, healthcare and all the other areas. Today’s figures on the success of the British tech start-ups are a direct result of the fact that we have been a magnet for the best people in Europe. The highly successful creative and media industry is about all the people we have been able to attract to this country, many of whom are paid less than £30,000 per annum. Free movement has benefited the whole country. This amendment sets out a means by which the UK can continue to reap those benefits. I beg to move.