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Managed Migration

As the hon. Gentleman comments from a sedentary position, I strongly recommend that the Minister confines his dining out over the next few months to restaurants where there is a properly qualified chef. On the wider question of access to the skills advisory board, some ethnic minority groups feel that they have no easy means of obtaining representation on it. A measure to address that would improve their confidence in the system, which is rather less than the Minister’s. [Interruption.] Yes, I am aware that the Minister met them last week. I have spoken to them since that meeting with the Minister, and I can only repeat that he is more confident in his proposals than they are. It is worth pausing on the role assigned to the skills advisory board, especially in relation to how much detailed planning and predicting it is expected to do. It will not just have a national responsibility to identify shortages, but will be expected to pick up shortages in each region. It will therefore be required to say how many extra workers are needed in each sector in each region of the country. That sounds perilously close to the kind of micro-management of the job market by Whitehall that has failed so badly in the past. I hope that Ministers are planning to avoid that, and we would welcome early publication of guidelines for the SAB so that we can consider in detail what it will be expected to achieve. The hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) made the point about the sudden drop in demand for IT specialists in 2000, which caught everyone in the labour-predicting industry by surprise. If something like that happened again, the SAB would need to be flexible enough to pick that up on a national and regional level. It is being set a high hurdle.