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Immigration

Uncharacteristically, I am losing my voice. If it finally runs out, I shall just sit down. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for so clearly setting out the Government's position. He has brought immeasurable good sense to this very difficult portfolio. When I think that 10 years ago, a Labour Minister at the Home Office, Beverley Hughes, described me as being a racist for even having an Adjournment debate on immigration, I can see that we have come a long way. As the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) said, it is important that we can discuss this serious matter in a clear, open, sane and humane way. I regret having to say that over the years of the Labour Government, what was already a problem turned into a really, really serious problem, and this Government now have to put right something that is of great concern to an enormous number of our constituents. In those terms, I warmly welcome this debate and thank the Government for making time for it. That is a clear recognition by them of the widespread public concern about the scale of immigration to the United Kingdom. That concern was illustrated by the remarkable response to a Migrationwatch petition on the Downing street website calling for immigration to be kept below 70 million. One hundred thousand people signed it within a week. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) and I are in touch with the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), the Chairman of the Backbench Business Committee, about how this should be followed up, and we hope to have—indeed, the Committee has said that we can have—a specific debate early next year, after the Government have announced their measures on economic and family migration that are now under consideration. Today, however, I would like to make three broad points: first, that the Government's policy objective is clearly the right one; secondly that migration to Britain can and must be reduced; and thirdly that encouraging the outflow of non-EU migrants who no longer have the right to remain in Britain will be the key to further progress once the first round of measures is in place. I congratulate the Government on their strategic decision to reduce the level of net migration to tens of thousands and on sticking to that objective. This is the first time in British history that any Government have had the courage to establish such a firm objective for immigration. Such an objective is essential. We need to be absolutely clear that after the rapid increase in immigration since 1997—a catastrophic public policy failure—we now face a fundamental choice: either we allow population growth to continue indefinitely, with all that it would imply for our public services, environment and society, or we take the firm and sometimes difficult measures to bring immigration under control. Governments in Britain have traditionally been reluctant to talk about the size of our population lest they be the butt of puerile references to Chinese birth control policy. Nevertheless, we must face the fact that two thirds of our population growth is now a result of immigration. Yet this is the only component that is potentially under Government control. If, therefore, population growth is to be kept within reasonable bounds, immigration simply has to be reduced—and reduced substantially. The most recent population projections from the Office for National Statistics underline that point. It has assumed that immigration will continue at a rate of 200,000 a year—about the average of the past 10 years—but if that level is allowed to continue, the UK population will hit 70 million in about 16 years and will continue rising indefinitely beyond that period. Given that neither of the other two components—the birth rate and the death rate—is likely to change very much in that period, this is a mathematical certainty. It is sometimes claimed that the ONS projections have been unreliable. The immigration lobby dines out on an error that the statisticians made nearly half a century ago at a range of 35 years. Methods have improved greatly since then. Nobody claims perfect accuracy but, in fact, over the past 50 years, and at a 20-year range, the ONS population projections have been accurate to plus or minus 2.5%. The figure of 70 million is not simply a round number; it is a marker by which we can judge the success or otherwise of our immigration policy. It also flags up for the public exactly what is involved. We are talking about an extra 7 million in 16 years, of which 5 million will be a direct or indirect result of immigration. The public are perfectly clear that they do not wish to see a population increase on anything like that scale, and it is therefore absolutely incumbent on the Government to take effective action. In seeking to take such action, the Government have been criticised for choosing net migration as the objective of immigration policy. It is suggested—correctly, of course—that the Government cannot control British emigration or immigration from the European Union. A glance at the numbers, however, shows that those two flows have generally cancelled each other out. It also shows that the real problem stems from an imbalance in migration from outside the European Union. For the last seven years, we have had something like 300,000 such immigrants every year while only 100,000 have left.