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Points-Based Immigration System

The way to stop that, Mr. Deputy Speaker, is for me to be more ruthless when it comes to refusing interventions. In the past 10 minutes, I have come to realise that I am much more comfortable with the House of Lords report than are those who want to criticise what I am saying. We all agree that that Committee is full of very distinguished economists: it looked at the evidence, and by and large I agree with its conclusions. Like other hon. Members, the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne) is trying to find the bits in the 1,000 pages of evidence that he agrees with. He says that those bits are right but that, for the rest of it, the House of Lords does not agree with him. I am happy to say that I think that it is an extremely good report. It took evidence from many distinguished economists with all sorts of differing views, and arrived at a perfectly balanced set of conclusions. The Government should read the report seriously, and act on it. Their key policy recommendation is extremely close to the one that we have made. The House of Lords report, like all the other evidence, shows that immigration can and does benefit this country in economic terms—it does the same in cultural terms, although we are not debating that today—but only if it is properly controlled. The Government are making rather overblown claims about the PBS to hide their long-term failure to control the immigration system. They have lost public confidence, and thereby caused unnecessary anxiety. The House of Lords report makes the general economic point that I have outlined, but also refutes the Government's claim that immigration has generated fiscal benefits. It makes the good point that estimates of the fiscal impacts are critically dependent on who counts as an immigrant, or a descendant of one. The report therefore renders invalid the Government's claim in that respect. I think that the House accepts that the Government's policy on immigration is rather confused, and that they are having to hide behind rhetoric. One reason for that is that the quality of statistical information on which Ministers base their decisions is lamentable. That is simply not good enough for such a serious and important policy area. I suspect that the Minister agrees, as he has tried to institute changes to how statistics are collected and analysed. It is too little and too late, but better now than never. The Statistics Commission told the House of Lords Committee that about £100 billion a year is distributed to the public sector using formulae that are directly affected by migration estimates. That is a colossal sum, and hugely important to local government in particular, but it is based on figures that are pretty dodgy. Indeed, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, told the Committee quite straightforwardly:"““We just do not know how big the population of the United Kingdom is.””" That makes it difficult for the Monetary Policy Committee to asses potential output, predict inflation and set interest rates.