Chris Huhne

Tory immigration policy worst of both worlds – Huhne

The Liberal Democrats will today call for tougher immigration control in densely populated areas like London and the South East while allowing more migrants elsewhere.

In a keynote speech to Policy Exchange today, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Huhne will say that an overall national limit of the sort proposed by the Tories would be too lax in London and the South East and too tough in Scotland.

Commenting, Chris Huhne said:

“Immigration is vital to our economy but lots of people are worried by the issue because of Labour’s catastrophic mismanagement of the system.

“If we are to make the case for a liberal immigration policy, we have to give the public confidence that the flow is properly managed and the pace of change is reasonable.

“The Liberal Democrats are the only party offering a hard-headed assessment of the needs of different regions and parts of the economy.

“We need a system that makes migrants go to those areas that most need them.

“The Tory policy of pulling up the drawbridge because we have reached an arbitrary national limit would bring in the worst of all worlds.

“Immigrants would continue to crowd into the most populous parts of the country – making the policy too lax for the South East of England and too tight for Scotland.”

Notes to Editors

The text of Chris Huhne’s speech to Policy Exchange – Immigration: what has gone wrong? – is below. Tickets to the event are restricted – to apply for a place, please email events@policyexchange.org.uk

Check against delivery

Let me start with some facts that show, in my view, that something has gone seriously wrong with our immigration policy. In the latest Ipsos MORI ‘Issues Facing Britain’ poll, immigration is second only to our ailing economy in what people think are the most important issues facing Britain today. More important than crime. More important than jobs. More important than the NHS. A third of people say so. This is an extraordinary verdict on Labour’s immigration policy, because ten times as many people today believe immigration to be the most important issue facing Britain as believed that when Labour came to power. In 1997, only 3% of people thought immigration key. Nor is this an effect of the recession: in fact, there has been a slight fall in concern since two years ago although it remains at very high levels.For anyone like me, committed to an open, tolerant and liberal society, this is damning testimony of Labour’s failure to inspire public confidence in managing immigration.

In one way, the news is even worse because it is not just Labour that takes the blame. An ICM poll revealed that two thirds of the British public believe that none of the mainstream parties have credible policies on immigration. What is certainly true is that politicians from all sides have been too unwilling to listen to concerns about immigration and to talk about it. Too scared to talk about the elephant in the room for fear of being labelled a racist or losing votes. But leaders who fail to address the most important concerns of their people run the risk of losing their own credibility. And it is that loss of trust and credibility that creates space for extremists and bigots.

So we have to deal with the arguments head on, and we particularly have to admit to failures. Both Labour and the Tories have failed on immigration. They have both been responsible for what can only be described as catastrophic mismanagement. But we in the Liberal Democrats have to take our share of the blame too. We haven’t failed on policy, as I will explain later. But we have failed to make the case for a liberal immigration policy as long as it is well-managed, and I mean by well-managed that the consequences can be predicted and justified. The public’s trust is at stake. This country’s historic liberalism on immigration is at stake.

So let me start with a case that would until recently have been widely accepted as self-evident. We have always had a tolerant attitude towards migration. We are a nation of sea-farers, and the sea is the motorway of history. We have built our culture on trade, openness and tolerance. We are a commercial people who buy cheap and sell dear, and do not seek to offend because, if we do, we may put off our customers and curtail our profits. We are rightly proud of Britain being an open, welcoming country. The legacy of our historic openness is our language, the greatest artefact of our civilisation. Containing three times as many words as French or Russian, twice as many as Spanish, the sheer richness of English vocabulary tells us of all the global influences that have been imprinted on a nation where the most remote village is just 70 miles from the sea. If you want to be pure and distant, head for the Swiss Alpine valleys. We don’t do remote in these islands. We do Jutes, Celts, Picts, Angles, Vikings, Saxons, Romans, Normans, Huguenots, Germans, Jews, Afro-Caribbeans, Kashmiris, Punjabis, Cantonese, Gujaratis, Poles, Lithuanians.And that’s just the half of it. The British are truly people of the world.

Immigration has been of enormous benefit to us – economically and culturally. Our schools, our hospitals, our businesses are better thanks to thousands of people who’ve come here from overseas. Immigrants are not any old people. They are people who take risks to up sticks and move country. Who have belief in themselves, and ambition for their families, and a dedication to their country of destination. Immigrants make an enormous contribution to British life. From the heart surgeon, Sir Magdi Yacoub, to the Phillipino nurse on the local hospital night ward; from England’s best batsman, Kevin Pietersen, to your neighbour’s Estonian cleaner. Joseph Conrad wrote English so perfect that it could only have been his second language as a Pole. Sir Tom Stoppard is one of our finest dramatists, and was born a Czech. Britain would grind to a halt without the hard work, talent and creativity of people who have washed up on our shores in the hope of a better life.

So we need to make the case for immigration, because it is an essential part of what it means to be a self-confident Briton. But it has to be a case for an immigration system that delivers some semblance of the objectives that have been set out. There has to be some connection between the rhetoric and the reality, and that is why public concern has mounted. We have had two decades of appalling mismanagement and staggering incompetence from both Labour and the Tories.In the last ten years, the average annual net immigration from outside Europe is 173,000. That compares with 52,000 a year in the previous decade. In addition, we took the brave decision to open up our labour market to central and eastern European member states before any other EU country except Sweden and Ireland. Germany, France and Italy continue to impose transitional border controls on Polish, Czech and other immigration. Whitehall predicted that 52,000 new entrants would come. The actual number was 766,000. That is an overshoot of 1,373 per cent, which makes this quite possibly one of the worst Government forecasts in history.

Because there has been such a large unplanned influx of foreign workers, we have failed to plan for the social consequences. In many areas, there has been undue strain on our public services and on housing. In London’s Haringey, the numbers registering for an NHS doctor are 7 per cent higher than the population predicted by the census on which public spending allocations are based.In some districts, pay rates have been adversely affected. That was the case in Southampton, where building trades saw skilled rates slashed. In other areas, there has been resentment at the allocation of social housing. These unintended consequences have bred resentments which in turn make it harder for people to integrate. If you want, as I do, to sustain a consensus for a liberal immigration policy, the public has to have confidence that we are properly managing the flow to ensure that the pace of change is acceptable and reasonable. That areas of destination have the resources to provide sound public services.

Let me turn now to another area of mismanagement. We simply do not have adequate border security. Quite apart from EU migration, and legal migration from outside the EU, illegal immigration is far too high. We don’t know how many people are living illegally in Britain. It is unlikely to be less than half a million. We count people in but we don’t even bother to count people out. We don’t know who is here and who is not. We issue two million temporary visas every year and we don’t check if people leave when they are supposed to do so. Illegal over-stayers on student visas are the biggest loophole in the system, but it cannot be closed without exit checks. And remember that those exit checks were abolished in a fit of absent-mindedness by the Conservatives in 1994, because they thought that they were not value for money. It left our immigration system in tatters. Labour got rid of the remaining checks in 1998. Result? Welcome, visa overstayers. We have not been able to limit immigration to legal migration for more than a decade. It is time to reverse the Tories’ big mistake. At long last, Labour are beginning to do so with the e-borders scheme. But even now, only two-thirds of the people leaving the country can be checked. The Liberal Democrats would reintroduce exit checks immediately.

In theory, we could compensate for the difficulties of policing our frontier by tougher action within Britain. When 192 million people come in and out of our airports every year, immigration control at the border is no easy matter. But the Government has been little better at internal control. Employers who hire illegal immigrants are guilty of simple exploitation. They should be investigated, prosecuted and convicted. Yet the Government has brought just 114 employers to the courts on criminal charges of immigration breaches since 1997. Yes, there are now more flexible civil penalties. But a real deterrent is criminal prosecution, not a small slap on the wrist. We need a national border force with police powers to enforce frontier control, and tough enforcement of visas within the country by checking employers.

Let me turn now to the issue of legal migration and how much there should be. The misjudgement of the impact of EU enlargement is now past history. Some of the immigrants are going home. We have not made the same mistake again with either Romania or Bulgaria: we will open our borders at the same time as Germany, France and the rest. So there should be no sudden surges from the existence of free movement within the EU, and we benefit enormously from that freedom. You do not have to be an aficionado of “Aufwiedersehen, pet” to realise how many British people take advantage of the opportunity to work and live in other member states. Indeed, more British people live in other EU countries than EU immigrants live here.

The real issue is then migration from outside the European Union. The Government has effectively closed down many of the old routes of primary immigration to two: either people have skills which our economy needs – and I will turn to this in a minute – or they want to come here to study and should then leave again. I believe it is a great benefit to us that people want to come here to study. We make friends for life, and usually friends in high places when they return to their own countries. President Bill Clinton was an Oxford Rhodes scholar, and he was one of many. This is also extraordinarily important in maintaining the global reputation of our higher education and research institutions, so it concerns me that the Government should be quite so heavy-handed and insensitive about student visas. Surely we should be capable of distinguishing between people who come here as students who have an enormous incentive to stay – perhaps because their countries are so poor – and a Japanese person who wants to come to learn English and is very unlikely to fail to return. Yet ministers are now insisting that we cannot offer basic language courses. It would be better to be more liberal about visas, and more thorough about enforcing returns through exit checks.

What about skilled migration? Should we, as the Conservatives want, set a further national cap on non-EU immigration so that we tighten the numbers who are entering this country to work in a shortage occupation? I am sceptical. It seems to me that the Conservative Party’s policy is risible. It has been written by focus group, rather than based on fact. In a bid to look tough, the Conservatives have undergone an unlikely conversion to socialist planning. Their proposed annual cap on immigration is about as flexible and workable as Soviet Gosplan’s quota for the production of left shoes. Market economies vary in unplanned and flexible ways. If you just pull up the drawbridge at some point in the year because you have reached some arbitrary limit, what damage will you do to business?When I was in the City, I had to hire an Arabic-speaking economist with a political knowledge of the middle east. If I had been unable to do so, we would have employed fewer British people as salesmen, cleaners and IT support. The only people who can now come here from outside the EU are those with skills that we need. What if we need Japanese sushi chefs or American aviation engineers or Russian-speaking economists? If they are not able to be hired, there are likely to be fewer jobs for British workers, not more. Would the Conservatives really stop Arsenal from signing Andrey Arshavin in the transfer window, or Chelsea from signing Didier Drogba, just because they had reached some pre-ordained limit? It’s a gimmick, not a serious policy.

The other Conservative mistake is shared by Labour, and it is to treat Britain as a single entity, with exactly the same population and skills needs in every area. Labour’s points-based system was a step in the right direction after years of negligence on immigration but it is still a one-size-fits-all approach which ignores the different economic needs of the regions and nations of this country. The big South East of England – London and its Veneto – is now the most densely populated part of Europe. It’s more crowded than the Netherlands. In the South East, we are reaching the population limits of environmental sustainability. There is less water per head in the South East than in Syria or the Sudan. It’s so bad that Thames Water want to build a Saudi-style desalination plant, creating fresh water by heating up salt water until the salt is left behind. This is madness in an era of climate change.

By contrast, some areas are crying out for population growth to help their economy grow. Take Scotland, for example. All the mainstream parties are agreed on the need for immigration, even the Tories. The Conservative MSP Gavin Brown has called for “positive net migration to fill our shortages at all skill levels.”But one question David Cameron and his team cannot answer is how a national limit can be appropriate for both the South East and Scotland. In reality, it would merely bring in the worst of all worlds. Most immigrants would head for the most populous and attractive parts of the country, so the policy would be too lax for the South East of England and too tight for Scotland.

It is left to the Liberal Democrats to provide a hard-headed assessment of the needs of different regions and parts of the economy as well as the needs of different industries. We would add a regional element to the points-based system. It should be easier for migrants to get a work permit in areas that want more people. Correspondingly, it should be harder to get a work permit in areas where the population is becoming unsustainable. As happens in Australia and Canada, the system will take account of where immigrants are most needed. Every region and indeed travel-to-work area within a region has different skills shortages. One area might not need any social workers, but another might. There might be a shortage of dentists in one place but not generally. We need a system that reflects those different needs, and provides work permits that entitle people only to work in shortage areas.

The one thing we should not and cannot do is force anyone to live in a particular place. If someone wants to live in Southampton and work in Scotland, they could. But I would submit that it is highly unlikely that many people would opt for that possibility. Certainly for anyone who has experienced the prices of rail travel under Labour. What we can do is specify where people work. As is the case now, migrants would require sponsorship from an employer. The only change that needs to be made is that visas under our system would detail in which region or nation of the UK a migrant can work.

People always tell me that this may well work in Australia or Canada but it’s not going to work in a small island like ours. But the size of the country does not matter. Australia has managed to make the system work for rural areas of New South Wales, where people who have come in under the system have put down roots with their families. But the most important thing is how rigorously the system is enforced. Policing our immigration system doesn’t stop at our borders. Checks must be made on employers to see if they are actually employing who they say they are. If a firm in London is employing someone who can only work elsewhere, they are breaking the law. They are no better than the unscrupulous companies who knowingly hire illegal immigrants with no work permit at all.

Just as unforgiveably, Labour have failed to help new migrants to integrate. Areas like Newham and Haringey have far greater needs than their allocations suggest, as we have seen. Local finance for public services must be based on real populations and real needs. Even worse, English language teaching of those whose English is only a second language has been cut back. This is an extraordinarily short-sighted policy.

Faced with this complexity, the main response of Labour and the Tories is tough rhetoric. Take deportations. Labour and the Tories both blithely promise to deport all the illegal immigrants in Britain. But the truth is that there may be three quarters of a million of such people. With deportations costing an average of £11,000, we’re looking at a bill for £8 billion. I bet they haven’t factored that eye-watering expenditure into their vague plans to tackle public debt. The Liberal Democrats are the only party which is prepared to be realistic about deportations. We would focus deportation efforts on criminals – the drug dealers and people-traffickers who are not welcome in this country – and on recent visa over-stayers. And we would give families, who have been here for ten years, have no criminal record, speak English and who just want to work and pay taxes, the right to earn British citizenship. This would happen after a two year probationary period and undertaking community service. This conditional earned route to citizenship is not easy. It is not an amnesty. But it is a response to a problem that should not be swept under the carpet.

Let me, before I conclude, say a few words about refugees – what certain sections of the press now refer to as asylum-seekers. The distinction with ordinary immigration is crucial. People still arrive here in fear of their lives. We must continue to respect our international obligations under the 1951 refugee convention, and we must do so in a way that removes this essential act of humanitarianism from the vice-like grip of populist criticism. Thanks to the hue and cry about “bogus asylum-seekers”, the process of vetting has become so tough that appeals are very high and successful. Some 70 per cent of asylum claims are rejected, but 23 per cent of those are accepted on appeal. It would simply be better, quicker, fairer and cheaper to introduce a Canadian-style independent agency to make assessments. Just 1 per cent of appeals are overturned under this system. While asylum-seekers wait for their case to be heard, they should be allowed to work rather than live on the edge of destitution. And if they fail in their claim, the process of removal should at least be humane. Incarcerating women with their children in a detention centre like Yarl’s Wood is simply unacceptable, and we should adopt the Swedish model of best practice.

If we are to re-establish a national consensus on liberal immigration policy, as we should, we must restore public trust and faith in the system. In this talk, I have spelled out what I believe to be the essentials of such an approach: a national border force with police powers, the reintroduction of exit checks, more focused deportation, and tougher action against employers are all part of controlling our frontier. The points-based system should be reformed to make the regional dimension crucial. Free movement within the European Union is a given. Sadly, it is far easier to lose trust than to regain it. But the sooner we start, the sooner we will succeed.