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Points-Based Immigration System

It is always enlightening to hear the Minister describe and defend the Government's immigration policies; as ever, the imperturbable was defending the indefensible. Before I go on to investigate the gaping chasm between the world and the immigration system described by the Minister and the world in which the people of this country live, I should express some sympathy for him, because he has an impossible job. I say that not because it is impossible to run an efficient immigration system in this country, although I do not underestimate the challenge, but because he must claim, as he did at the start of his speech, that everything that the Government are doing on immigration, such as the introduction of the points-based system, is a radical, once-in-a-generation change. He must do that without admitting that the need for the change is the failure of his Government's immigration policies over the past 10 years. The Minister's introductory remarks were the latest example of a faintly absurd level of hype that the Government attribute to every change they make in the immigration system. When the Home Secretary launched the points-based system, she said that it was"““part of the biggest changes to British immigration policy for a generation.””" This afternoon, the Minister, perhaps outbidding his line manager, said that over the next year the Government will deliver the biggest shake-up of the immigration system for more than 45 years. I shall return to the detailed virtues and vices of the points-based system in a moment, but we must ask why this bad analysis is so prevalent. The problem is that in their early years, this Government adopted a policy based on a straightforward analytical fallacy: they said that immigration was good for the economy and therefore the more of it there was, the better it would be for the British economy. Many of the problems we face in immigration, strains on our public services and, worse still, community cohesion in this country, have their root in the faulty analysis that the Government adopted in their early years in power. The House of Lords report to which the Minister kindly referred pointed that out as well as anyone has done. It is worth this House remembering that the report was produced by a cross-party House of Lords Committee containing Labour ex-Ministers, distinguished economists, such as Professor Richard Layard, and, indeed, Adair Turner, whom the Prime Minister employed as his adviser on pensions. Thus, the report cannot be dismissed. To do him credit, the Minister did not do so. He said that he thought that the analysis was good, but he took objection to some of the press coverage. I would be happy to ignore completely what the press made of the report, because the report itself was excoriating about the analysis that the Government apply to immigration and, in particular, about the policies that they have adopted. Indeed, rather gratifyingly, the distinguished cross-party Committee said that we needed precisely the cap for which I have been arguing, and against which the Minister has been arguing for the past 10 minutes.