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Migrant Workers (Regularisation)

Yes, I have certainly seen examples of that. A lot of those people are effectively settled: they have houses and families, and they pay rent or have mortgages. However, they have no security. Employers, particularly large ones, are starting to carry out more systematic checks on people’s right to work, so the people whom I have mentioned may lose their right to work at any time. The Home Office knows that lots of people are in that situation; that is precisely why it has included data-sharing proposals in the latest UK Borders Bill—to allow checks between records from the Inland Revenue and those from the Home Office and throw up those examples. There are also people in a completely different situation. They are in the moonlight economy, have no national insurance number and work for employers who know very well what they are doing. Such people are most open to the worst forms of exploitation; I shall not repeat what has been said about that. They cannot enforce any employment rights whatever—not the minimum wage, not working conditions; all that goes by the board. That has an impact on other people working in the same industry or similar areas of work; I do not accept the argument that it does not. If, as the Home Office says, we are to have a crackdown on illegal working—if we are to try systematically to discover employers that knowingly employ people illegally and if we are to cross-check Inland Revenue records with the Home Office’s and throw up all those people—what will then be done? I have never heard a single word from the Home Office, which knows the numbers involved, about how it intends to deal with the issue. I have heard arguments against our proposed regularisation scheme, but have never heard a single positive word about what will actually be done. If there are, as we suspect, up to 500,000 people, plus dependents, in the situation that I have described, the absolute reality is that they are not all going to be removed. That is a simple fact; it would be absolutely impossible. At the current rate of removals, doing so would take 25 years. Even if that rate were stepped up, lots and lots of people would be thrown up but would end up not being removed. What would happen to them? Would they just be left destitute? Some will be if we carry on doing nothing. They would lose their jobs, they could not claim benefits and they could not get another job. They have families, and rent to pay and so on. Are we going to leave them destitute? Is that the policy? Frankly, that would be a non-starter and would not work. If the Home Office is going to argue that it will not go for a systematic regularisation scheme, it has to produce some other systematic way to deal with those people. It is no good simply saying that we will deal with them individually, because we know what will happen. We know the size of the backlog in the Home Office, and how long it takes. People come to see us who have put in applications 18 months or two years ago that are still sitting in the Home Office and not being dealt with. Saying that we will deal with the problem by dealing with these people individually is unreal. The only way in which we can deal fairly with the problem is through a regularisation scheme, whether it is one of the proposed schemes or something else—we can argue about the details of what it should be. I do not believe that the proposed approach would necessarily be a magnet if it was properly dealt with and a one-off. Italy was mentioned, but it has notoriously lax border controls and so it is not comparable. If the Home Office make the border controls work, and make some things work better—such as when people are able to get a national insurance number when they do not have the right to one—and if a regularisation scheme is combined with the introduction of the sort of controls proposed by the Home Office, I do not see any reason why such a process should become a magnet. Let me conclude by returning to an earlier point. If we are going to go for the rogue employers and throw up all those individual cases, what does the Home Office propose to do? I ask the Minister, please, not to tell me that it will consider each individual case as it arises, because that will be a recipe for chaos. There is only one sensible way in which to deal with the situation, which is through a clear, one-off regularisation scheme that allows people to know where they stand. People can then behave as citizens rather than living all the time without knowing whether they will be out of a job and with no money next week.