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Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for that ruling. I will therefore briefly refer to those aspects, which relate back to issues that we were discussing. The Government have promised an Australian-style points system as their way to limit immigration. At least, that is how they presented such a system at the election. Of course, the Australian-style points system included a numerical limit and a system of taking the immigrants with the maximum number of points up to that limit. That is how it operated. The idea of the points system without that numerical limit makes little sense. My right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary asked rhetorically—I was almost tempted to intervene at that stage—how a points system would work without an annual limit. We know how, because the Government have already put one in place. It is called the highly skilled migrant programme. They assess the points needed to be granted permission to enter this country. They set up the system; they set a level of points; and they found that they got a disappointingly low number of applicants. So what did they do? They reduced the number of points that people needed to be allowed into the country, until they got a welcome increase. Indeed, they were swamped by the increase, and they are now six months behind in processing applications. When the Government establish a points system, they manipulate the points to increase the number of people coming to this country—not, as they implied at the election, to reduce the number of people coming here. I am therefore extremely suspicious of any such proposals, unless a quantitative limit is imposed. I hope that the Government will progress that proposal, if not during consideration in Committee, subsequently by secondary legislation, and that they will progress their promise to introduce an independent commission to establish to what extent we need large-scale immigration into this country from an economic point of view. I am confident that such a commission would work if it were genuinely independent, not employer based, as the Government rather laughingly suggest. Employers will always want to employ cheap labour from abroad; there will be a demand for that. There is an almost limitless supply of people whom they could bring in from abroad in almost any profession, except possibly those that depend on fluency in the English language and familiarity with our systems, and employ at lower rates of pay than they need to provide for people from this country. Therefore, one wants a commission to be established that will make the assessment on a economic basis, rather than on a desire to undercut the pay levels of the people who are already here. One way or another, we need to hear from the Government the reasons why they put any limit on immigration. We can then establish what that limit logically should be. We can then determine how the terms and tightening of the rules on appeals and so on in the Bill will apply at that limit, and in doing so, I, like everyone else, would want those rules applied as humanely, sensitively and rapidly as possible to minimise the harshness and damage that was highlighted so eloquently earlier in the debate by my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire.