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Immigration

My right hon. Friend makes a pertinent point. He pre-empts what I am going to say next. We have talked in this debate about the importance of controlling the supply side of immigration by stopping people who wish to come to this country from doing so. It is also important to deal with the demand side of the equation. Our welfare system—that is rather a neat and organised way of describing the mess that we inherited—costs us £194 billion a year. It pays hundreds of thousands of people not to work and keeps them trapped in dependency and on welfare because it is not worth their while working. Is it any wonder, therefore, that employers need to plug the labour gap by importing people to take the jobs that people on welfare cannot or will not take? It is economic madness to pay people not to work while importing labour and placing a strain on our infrastructure in so doing. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that we need measures such as apprenticeships to get our indigenous young people into work, and we also need to ensure that the welfare system, the Work programme and universal credit get young people and those who are long-term unemployed into work. That will choke off demand from employers for imported labour. The checks at our ports and airports and the other rules that the Minister for Immigration has put in place will also choke off the supply side of uncontrolled immigration. I believe that the Government have got the balance right. The message that the Prime Minister gave during the general election campaign, when he said that he wanted to deal with immigration so that it was no longer an issue for the British people, showed sound judgment. I look forward to hearing what the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), has to say, and I hope that he will say it in such terms as to give the British people confidence that the Government are going to take control of the issue so that it does not lie dormant, untouched and taboo, as it did for so many years.