A transcript of a speech given by the Prime Minister in East London on immigration on 31 March 2010.
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My abiding ambition for Britain is that it is a fair society – fair to the hard working, decent majority who play by the rules and do their best.
Fairness means fairness in the way we run and the way people are treated in the NHS, fairness in the way we create the best opportunities for jobs, and fairness in the way we run our schools, our care of the elderly, and our housing policies.
And when we talk of fairness it is right to talk of immigration and address people’s worries and concerns.
This isn’t abstract – it’s about how we engage with and answer the concerns of care workers, people in the building trade, cleaners and janitors, people who work in shops. It’s about the hard-pressed, hard-working majority – about the questions people ask themselves on their sofa once they’ve put the kids to bed.
The question of who comes to Britain, and what they have to do to earn that privilege, is something that should be the subject of open and responsible debate.
But how we conduct this debate is as important as the debate itself.
I believe we are, as a country, proud of our values, our history of liberty, tolerance and fairness. We are proud that as a nation we have offered shelter to those who are fleeing torture and persecution. And we are proud too of the immense contribution – economic, social and cultural – that newcomers to Britain have offered down the years in making Britain the place that it is.
And I hope and believe there’s something of a consensus among the mainstream of British politics in the sense that none of us agree with those who would bring down the shutters around Britain entirely; and none of us agree with those who think all immigration is always a bad thing, or who want to use immigration to stoke community tensions.
And so I call on all those in the mainstream of our politics to stand together in the coming weeks and present a united front against those who don’t value the diverse and outward looking Britain that we stand for; and against those who want to end immigration simply because they just don’t like migrants.
No mainstream party wants to bring an end to immigration altogether – the debate is over how to control it, about what level it should be and how we achieve that. And I believe that the control of immigration is best achieved by the policies that we are pursuing and developing in the light of our experience and the changing economic circumstances.
But I know also that this is not just about technical questions of what is the best policy – immigration understandably and legitimately generates strong feelings right across our communities. I know how people worry that immigration might be changing their neighbourhoods. They would worry if immigration was putting pressure on schools, hospitals and housing; and they question whether immigration might undermine their wages or might harm the job prospects of their children.
They question whether migrants are getting ahead of them in the queue for housing; or sometimes they ask us whether the nature of our communities is changing at a pace that’s simply too rapid.
And I know people think it’s unfair when it feels as though some can take advantage of the freedoms and opportunities we offer in Britain without making a fair contribution or playing by the rules. So do I.
These are the concerns of the mainstream majority and people have a right to talk about what these issues mean for them. As politicians in that mainstream, in the centre ground of British politics, we have a duty to listen and engage with these big issues – because if we don’t people will listen to whoever does.
It is important that this is a national conversation where we say the same things to British citizens that we say to migrants. Where our national speeches are matched by what is said on the doorstep.
So this morning – I want to address people’s concerns head on. I want to explain how we are controlling immigration, and how with the new measures we are introducing we will continue to control immigration fairly in the years to come.
First I want to set out how through our Points Based System we are controlling who comes here much more effectively than the alternative of an arbitrary quota on the number of migrants – and how our targeted approach, with the Points Based System, allows us to select only the high-skilled people we need to fill the critical skills gaps in our economy. This is the responsible approach to controlling migration.
I want to set out also how by investing now in the skills of people here in Britain, we can ensure that local men and women increasingly fill the remaining skills gaps in our economy. So as the economy grows and our skills develop the need for immigration in those sectors is reduced.
Second, I want to explain how we are supporting communities to deal with the pressures migration can bring, especially on our public services.
Third, I want to set out how alongside a more controlled migration system we are actively stepping up our enforcement against illegal workers and the employers who hire them – and against all those who fail to play by the rules.
And finally, because we believe settling in Britain is a privilege and not a right, I will set out how we plan to break the automatic link between being here for a set period and being able to settle or gain citizenship – and instead require newcomers to earn the right to stay.
Because this is what controlling immigration means in a fairer Britain.
Let me address each of these points in turn. But before I do, let’s start with the facts about immigration in Britain. Because if we are going to have a responsible debate we need to be clear about what is actually happening.
Immigration is not a new phenomenon. For centuries Britain has been a beacon of enterprise and freedom to which people in other lands have been drawn. 50 thousand French Protestants came to Britain during the 17th and 18th centuries, many settling here in Spitalfields.
From the late 19th century, tens of thousands of European Jews came – again many choosing to settle in Spitalfields and the Whitechapel area.
During the 1930s, we gave around 40 thousand Jews from Austria and Germany sanctuary within our shores, in addition to 50 thousand from Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Many joined the British armed forces. Around ten thousand polish Jews fought under British command at the battle of Monte Cassino alongside my friend and predecessor as Labour chancellor Denis Healey. And after the Second World War, all of them became eligible to settle here under the Polish Resettlement Act of 1947, Britain’s first major immigration law.
With the end of the British Empire, many came here from former colonies. West Indians arrived after the war, followed by Indians and Pakistanis after their countries gained independence in 1947 – and after the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, and again after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, and from their diasporas in east Africa when they were persecuted there.
This history of migration is not just a British phenomenon. Far from it. In the hundred years after 1820, 60 million people – equivalent to the entire population of the United Kingdom today – left Europe for the new world. By the mid-1970s almost one million North Africans had migrated to France, and just over one million Turks have migrated to Germany in recent decades.
Now let me turn to the facts about immigration in Britain today.
The numbers of asylum claims, once the stuff of daily headlines, are back down to the levels of the early 1990s – we are down to 13th in the EU in relative terms – and the costs of asylum support to the taxpayer have halved in the last six years.
Net inward migration has also fallen. In the twelve months to December 2007, net inward migration as measured by the ONS long term international migration series was 233 thousand. In the twelve months to December 2008 it was 163 thousand.
We don’t yet have the long term migration figures for the twelve months to the end of 2009.
However, we do have provisional figures for the twelve months to June 2009, based on the international passenger survey, which constitutes the largest part of the long term inward migration figures. On IPS figures, in the twelve months to June 2007, net inward migration was 170 thousand. In the 12 months to June 2008 it was 168 thousand. And in the 12 months to June 2009 it was 147 thousand.
There is only one conclusion from all the published data that’s available and it is this: over this period net inward migration has fallen.
This doesn’t mean immigration isn’t an issue. It is. That’s why I am talking about it today. But we should not allow people to scaremonger with unsubstantiated claims about rising net inward migration today.
Perhaps we should also acknowledge, as a matter of fact, that migration within the European Union is a two way street.
Around 1 million citizens of other EU countries are now living and working in Britain – but there are also around 1 million Britons living and working in the rest of the EU, making the most of the opportunities and new horizons that EU membership brings.
No major party has a different position on migration inside the EU going forwards. There have been disagreements in the past – for example over whether to impose temporary restrictions on eastern European migrants in 2004. But recent research published by the institute of fiscal studies has the first detailed analysis of the contribution to our economy of the eastern Europeans who came to Britain in the last few years – showing that in every year their net contribution was positive – and that even after 5 years here they are over 50 per cent less likely than British people to receive benefits or tax credits and over 40 per cent less likely to live in social housing. They pay 5 per cent more than their share of tax, and account for a third less than their share of the costs of public services.
With immigration from outside the European Union, the challenge is to control immigration while filling our skills gaps. It is this control which our new Points Based System is, in fact, designed to achieve.
Let me explain. As working people locally are able to acquire the skills needed for the jobs available, the numbers who will come in under the points system can be substantially reduced. By improving the employment skills of the UK population, businesses here will be able to employ local workers to compete in the global economy – and therefore reduce the need for immigration.
That’s the foundation of our new Australian style Points Based System. And we are strengthening the links between the Points Based System and our skills policy. Critically and continually assessing our specific needs for high-skilled migrants to fill the key skill gaps in our economy
Where there are insufficient skills – but only after that is proven – we do give businesses the power to select these migrants for the time being so that our economy moves forward. But we reduce the need for them in the longer term by training local people. This is the responsible and effective way to control immigration.
The starting point then is that under the points system we have no need to allow in migrants who have no skills to offer. My message is simple: we do not need more unskilled workers brought in under the Points Based System.
Now let me describe what we are doing in each of the five tiers of the points based system:
Tier 1 covers the highest skilled individuals who we believe will make the greatest contribution to the economy. These 30 thousand people from around the world are the professionals who we most want and most need to attract to Britain. Firms want them to come and need them for some of their vital work.
Tier 2 – is where the existing UK labour market is, as yet, not meeting the current demand for special categories of skilled workers. And where, for a time, we still need to secure migrants to fill these crucial skill gaps. Some of these people are specialists like IT workers or engineers brought in by multinationals based here in Britain. Others are people coming to fill jobs which require skills in short supply in the UK’s own workforce.
Because of our actions to train the UK workforce – we are able to reduce the number of people coming under tier 2. Specific skills needed by employers are advertised in job centre plus for four weeks and increasingly filled by local people. The 30,000 who employers hire from abroad come here only after the jobs have been advertised locally in jobcentre plus for 4 weeks.
And we are succeeding. A fall from 99 thousand in 2007 to 81 thousand in 2008, to 63 thousand in 2009 for tier 2 or equivalents on the previous system.
Tier 3 covers unskilled workers. This tier is closed and we have no intention of opening it.
Tier 4 covers students. Some are brilliant young men and women learning at our finest universities who, because they have chosen to study here are more likely to stay on and make an important contribution for years to come. Again these are people it is important for us to attract.
However, we need to be tougher on those who want to come under tier 4 and who are studying low-level qualifications, and tougher on bogus colleges. So we have stopped over 140 colleges bringing in students from outside the EU in the last year and tightened the rules reducing the hours students on lower level courses can work each week – it is expected that these changes will see around 40 thousand fewer students coming to the UK in 2010/11 than otherwise would have been the case.
Finally tier 5 cover workers such as visiting musicians and entertainers. These are temporary.
So this is the system we have introduced which gives us the ability to secure the skills we need and to secure our borders against those who are not welcome here. And I believe the responsible way to debate migration – and I believe this is what many companies want to see – is to debate how we can use this system over the coming years to continue to control migration fairly, to reduce the overall need for migration, while continuing to attract the key people who will make the biggest contribution to the growth of our economy.
The debate just isn’t about who will open all the floodgates and who will shut all doors.
Neither of these are responsible options.
It’s actually about the flexibility to access the skilled workers we need when we need them; and to exclude the rest.
It’s about control.
Controlling immigration for a fairer Britain.
Controlled immigration means what it says: the posts based system allowing no unskilled workers to come in from outside the EU and reducing the need for skilled migrants by training local people.
There are some who believe instead that we should have a “cap” on the number of migrants – they call it a “cap” but more accurately it would be a pre-determined quota.
In my view the proposed quota is misleading in terms of its impact on overall immigration; arbitrary as soon as an actual number is put on it; unworkable in practice; and bad for business.
It’s misleading because by exempting from the quota dependents, EU migrants, and students only one in seven people who want to come here would actually be affected by the quota system.
Those who propose the quota are often unclear what the number would be. But a report out this weekend said that under a net migration quota of 40,000, once we have allowed for movements of UK citizens, EU citizens, asylum, and family members – which no major party proposes to stop – there would be only 15,000 places left for work and study. So who would be excluded? The 30,000 highly skilled migrants in tier 1 who help our companies compete in global industries? The 30,000 skilled workers transferring within multinational companies – like Japanese car manufacturers? The 30,000 who employers hire from abroad after advertising in jobcentre plus for 4 weeks? These are the risks of picking an arbitrary figure for a quota.
How would the economy fare in the short term if employers desperately needed to hire someone with a special skill in October, but the quota had been used up in June – exactly the unworkable situation which has occurred time after time in other countries with immigration quotas.
So such a quota would harm the recovery, deny our businesses the resilience to access the skills they need, and by blunting our competitive advantage risk companies relocating abroad.
This is not just my view of the facts before us. The CBI and the British Chambers of Commerce have made clear their preference for a fairer and more resilient system which puts the needs of the economy in the driving seat, not central planners.
The Treasury assesses that migration accounted for around one fifth of trend growth in our economy between 2001 and 2006. But it is central to our future plan for growth that we do even more to reduce our skills gaps and train local people so that we can continue to remove key occupations from the shortage occupation list, those specific jobs which can not be filled by the current UK workforce.
Last week’s report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, identifies more clearly than ever before the skills shortages and bottlenecks holding back British business, bottlenecks often in some of the newest or more specialist occupations that we need to fill by training up local people.
My conclusion from the report is that as our young people and adult workers are trained in the skills we require the need for skilled migrants can in time be substantially reduced without damaging the prospects of British business.
The independent Migration Advisory Committee has just revised the shortage occupation list – and the largest two occupations – chefs and care workers– where at the moment we draw on migrant skills but where soon we will have sufficient local people trained for these jobs will be removed by 2012 and 2014 respectively. This will, of course, be subject to final validation by the independent Migration Advisory Committee.
It is unlikely that we will add new occupations to the shortage list. We have now agreed stronger conditions requiring employers, employer representatives or sector skills councils to provide clear evidence of the actions they are taking to tackle skills shortages, for example making new commitments to provide UK apprenticeships.
And we will strengthen the process for responding to those occupations that are on the list, with plans for upskilling the resident labour force, with a clear role for all the agencies who contribute to the development of new and additional skills in our workforce – agencies, Jobcentre Plus, the skills funding agency, colleges, and with their local knowledge regional development agencies.
So with the development of our points system we are ensuring not only that under the system no unskilled workers come in but that the need for migrant skills is substantially reduced.
So we will maintain control on all five tiers of the Points Based System to ensure that as growth returns we see rising employment, skills and wages, not rising immigration.
We must also do more to address the concerns that immigration raises within our communities – and I want to ensure that those who worry they don’t have a voice in a rapidly changing society are listened to, and that their needs and fears are addressed.
So we are expanding our connecting communities programme, seeking to give neighbourhoods the confidence that their concerns are being dealt with – whether that is immigration or jobs or anti-social behaviour – and in doing so helping to undermine those who want to divide communities by spreading fear or hatred.
Of course the impact of migration is felt differently by different communities, and we have understood that rapid change can place pressures on housing, local public services including councils, schools, the NHS and police.
Last year we reformed housing allocation policy, empowering local authorities to give greater priority to local people and those who have spent a long time on the waiting list.
Last year the new Migration Impact Fund we set up, paid for by contributions from migrants, contributed £35m to services in areas experiencing change – and this sum of money includes paying for additional enforcement against employers hiring illegal workers. This is what we mean by an immigration policy which is fair as well as controlled.
We are also stepping up our enforcement activity against those who seek to come here illegally. Because I share that sense of unfairness at the thought that people might be able to come to Britain and take advantage of the freedom and opportunities our society offers without playing by the rules or making a fair contribution to our society.
So to those migrants who think they can get away without making a contribution; without respecting our way of life; without honouring the values that make Britain what it is – I have only one message – you are not welcome.
We must be at all times vigilant in seeking out and stopping illegal working. Let me tell you all the changes we are bringing in – the new Border Agency will be even more effective in stopping people at the borders, biometric visas allow illegal migrants to be identified, the new ID cards for foreign nationals are already being issued, allowing employers to identify someone who is not here lawfully, and our new electronic border controls will be counting people in and out from the end of this year. Each of these actions in themselves will radically improve our ability to identify illegals and overstayers – and all of them together will be vital to removing them. Employers will be able to demand to see from every potential worker either a British passport or an ID card, so there will be no excuse for employers who hire illegal labour.
By next year local immigration teams will cover not just some but every communities– working to target gangmasters and rogue employers including those who undercut legitimate employers and depress wages by flouting the minimum wage.
Already in the two years since tough new rules were introduced, over 3,800 penalties have been imposed on employers for hiring illegal workers
And because we believe settlement in Britain is a privilege that must be earned, from next year we are extending the control of the Points Based System so that citizenship or the right to stay permanently will no longer depend solely on time spent here but also on economic contribution, competence in English, and adherence to the law. Access to benefits and social housing will be tightened, saving the taxpayer as much as £3.9 billion over the coming decade.
We know that migrants who are fluent in English are more likely to be employed, and find it easier to integrate. So as well as introducing a pre-entry English test for spouses from next year, we are now ensuring that this test applies to all students below degree and foundation degree level. And we will continue to urge councils and public services to keep funding for translation to the necessary minimum.
Finally – let me be clear. All newcomers to Britain have a responsibility to obey British law. No exceptions. British citizenship is a privilege that must be earned and a privilege that will be denied to those committing serious crimes. As part of the earned citizenship reforms we plan to introduce in July next year, criminality will be assessed in determining whether someone has the right to stay.
And we will continue to deport more foreign criminals year on year as we have done each year for the last four years.
Since August 2008 our position has been that those from outside the EU who commit any crime resulting in a sentence of over one year will be considered for deportation. But we have now toughened our stance towards European criminals so that all those from within the EU who are convicted of sex, drug or violent offences resulting in a sentence of over one year will also be automatically considered for deportation. Last year over 500 EU criminals were deported from the UK.
This is the right approach to determining who comes to live and work in this country.
So ours is a tough hard headed approach because the Points Based System prevents people from coming here unless they have skills we need; and it’s fair because it demands of them that they meet the responsibilities that arise from living here or else they don’t stay.
But it’s also practical and good for our economy. Yes we want to raise the skills of the British workforce, and so reduce further our need for economic migration. A strong skills and employment policy and controlled migration are not polar opposites but essential complements of the same economic strategy for future prosperity. But we’re not going to deny our businesses the skills they need.
So the question is who has the best plan to control immigration – not who can appeal to our worst instincts of nationalism and xenophobia, but who can appeal to our best instincts of a fairer Britain for all the decent hard working families across our country .
By controlling immigration for a fairer Britain – by investing in the skills of our own workforce, and by ensuring our businesses secure highly skilled migrants when they need them while continuing to maintain control of net inward migration.
Or we can opt for an arbitrary and unworkable quota – and deny our businesses the skills they need, damaging our competitiveness and threatening the future prosperity of British businesses and our economies.
This is the practical choice people must make for a better more secure more economically prosperous and socially cohesive Britain –the Britain of fairness and responsibility we all should want to see.
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