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Points-Based Immigration System

The hon. Lady makes a fair point; in fact, she makes the Minister's point—I am glad that a Liberal Democrat Member is agreeing with Labour. It is, of course, desirable for people to have a level of English that enables them to integrate into our society and to avoid being exploited. However, I ask the Minister to look very carefully at the needs of the industry, and to set that level of English taking into account the context that there is a community that can support people as they come in and that those people will be able to pick up and learn the language as they progress. Many Members—highly educated though we may be—might find it very difficult if there were a requirement that, before we emigrated to China, in order to fulfil our job requirements we had to know Mandarin or Cantonese. We might find it a good deal easier if we were allowed to go to that country and pick up the language by ear. The Minister and his officials should reflect on that. I turn to the subject of low-skilled workers, and our discussion of that with the Minister during his opening remarks. The Department seems to believe that cleaning jobs, sous-chef posts and more menial jobs than first or second chef can be filled by low-skilled labour and that that low-skilled labour must be supplied within the EU context, by eastern European citizens. In practice, an eastern European operating in a south-Asian or Chinese kitchen would need a working knowledge of one of the south-Asian or Chinese languages. That would imply that, far from being low-skilled, such a person would need to have a very high skill level; they would need the linguistic skill to operate in that environment. That is one of the reasons why the requirements of the tier need revisiting. I want briefly to reinforce the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East about the raids on Bangladeshi and Chinese restaurants, most notably last October's raid in Chinatown, and about the press involvement in, and high public profile of, the raids. The Home Office is responsible not only for immigration control, but for race relations in this country—indeed, it has passed laws against incitement to racial hatred. I hope that it is conscious that the publicity generated by those raids has resulted in many cases of racial abuse against the communities involved, and that it will be mindful of the need to ensure racial harmony in any further attempts to secure, quite properly, immigration controls in this country through reasonable checks on the credentials of people who are working here. This is not simply a debate about the catering industry, although it has sometimes seemed that way this afternoon. Therefore, I also want briefly to discuss the 38,450 work permits for IT jobs in the UK that were issued to non-EU residents last year—the figure is more than double that of five years ago—some 82 per cent. of which went to the Indian community. India's IT exports have been one of the startling success stories of India's economic performance in the past two decades. India's software and business processing exports are valued at about $40 billion a year, and the UK's imports of computer and information services were worth about £2.7 billion in 2006, the last full year for which figures are available. I am confident that the Minister will be conscious of the remarks made by Kamal Nath, the Indian Trade Minister, about the new points-based system, and its possible impact on the software industry and on IT executives who travel backwards and forwards between India and the UK.