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Fiona Mactaggart: I thank the hon. Member for Woking and the members of the Committee for allowing me this opportunity to explain the Government's position on the draft Council decision. I hope that I can reassure hon. Members about our overall immigration policy and the effect of this measure.
David Cairns (Greenock and Inverclyde) (Lab): For the record, does my hon. Friend recall the hon. Member for Woking saying that Opposition Members were so outraged by the measure that they proposed to vote against it? Could she speculate on how that might be possible, given that there are absolutely no members of the Committee on the Conservative Benches?
Fiona Mactaggart: My hon. Friend makes a perfectly reasonable point about the authenticity of the outrage that has been communicated to us.
One aspect of the history of what we are discussing is the fact that, in government, successive parties have recognised that there are areas in which there is a need for majority voting to make things work. Margaret Thatcher agreed an important QMV extension in the Single European Act, and John Major did likewise at Maastricht. However, those actions have consistently been belied by the words of the Conservative party in such a way that it is difficult to say that what it says on the tin is what is done by that party.
Nevertheless, let us get back to the issue of our overall immigration policy, which the hon. Gentleman started with. To sum up, he suggested that our policy was irresponsible, but he is wrong. Let me describe the situation that existed when we came to power. The Conservative Government had decided on the basis not of evidence, but of bloody-mindedness—I am sorry; that is probably not a very parliamentary phrase—that they would use a computer program to deal with immigration policy. They said that it would work and that they would reduce public expenditure by cutting the number of officials. With no announcement, they abandoned the recording—that is all it ever used to be—of departures and made it into something that happened when people had nothing else to do. As a result of their operation of the immigration control system, we were not properly counting people out, our computer was unable to count people in, and staff in the immigration and nationality directorate did not have enough chairs to sit on, let alone to work on.
The Labour Government have got matters under control. There have been fewer applications for asylum over the past year than there were when the
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leader of the Conservative Party was Home Secretary. Having been through a bulge, we have now halved the number of applications for asylum.
Mr. Malins: Does the Minister accept—she has, I think, no option but to do so—that there are estimated to be more than 250,000 failed asylum seekers in the country? Indeed, the Home Secretary was terribly rude about the performance of his immediate predecessor.
The Chairman: Order. I sincerely hope that we will not have a debate about personal situations of current and past Home Secretaries. Will hon. Members please stick to the agenda?
Fiona Mactaggart: I referred to the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), because I wanted to remind the hon. Gentleman that the then Home Secretary was left trying to operate a Dublin arrangement that was doomed to failure by the way in which the Conservative Government had negotiated it. It needed to be renegotiated in order to work. The mechanisms that could have made it work effectively simply were not in place because of the Conservative Government's inadequate, laissez-faire attitude to negotiations and resources.
When my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary says that the point about illegal immigration is that nobody knows how many illegal migrants there are in the United Kingdom, that is simply a truism. Nobody knows how many there are precisely because they are illegal. It is not the kind of law-breaking that people report automatically. If someone is burgled, they report it to the police and the British crime survey, and there is an obvious victim. People who breach immigration law do not produce an instant and obvious victim in the same way. That is why Britain, in common with every other country, finds it difficult to say precisely how many people are in breach of immigration law. That is why we have put in place the asylum registration card system, the Eurodac fingerprint base and so on. As a result, we can know what is happening, which was not the case before. It is also one reason why we are introducing an identity card. Without it, we would be doomed to remain unable to assess the scale of illegal migration with absolute confidence.
Mr. Malins: They are all going to apply for one, are they?
Fiona Mactaggart: If we have a system of identity cards and require people resident in the United Kingdom for three months or more to possess one, there will be a check measure. We will be able to ensure that people hold identity cards and are entitled to do so. That will give us a much better picture and a much better control mechanism than anything that the hon. Gentleman's party, whose members are so eagerly supporting him by their absence, is able to offer.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the scale of migration. One of the points that I should like to confirm to the Committee is that we have a legal migration system that is designed to meet the skills gap
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in the UK economy.Unless we are able to create such a system, our economy will fail to fulfil its ability to grow faster than our main competitors, to succeed much more than when the Conservative party was in control, and to provide employment opportunities for British people. In those circumstances, we need to create opportunities for migration for work.
Let us take a simple example. When the Conservative party was in power, it did not train people to fill some of our public service needs. Indeed, it took the election of a Labour Government to open the first new medical and dental schools for a quarter of a century.
Mr. Malins: Will the Minister specifically comment on the report in The Sunday Times yesterday about the proposed additional 14 million migrants before 2053?
Fiona Mactaggart: I cannot, because I did not read it. The hon. Gentleman did not give me notice of his concerns; I will write to him when I have had time to read it.We can confidently reassure the Committee about the opportunities that QMV will create for Britain. I would resist the hon. Gentleman's suggestion that this issue has not been debated properly. On 14 October, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary spoke at length on the Floor of the House about the Council and specifically about the matters before us today. I accept that we are having this debate very close to the deadline, but that deadline is set by the Dutch presidency, not by the Government.
The move to QMV and co-decision for the range of EU immigration measures that we have debated today is not new. It has been with us since Amsterdam. Decision making under unanimity in a Council of 15 was slow. Eurodac took one year and 153 days. That was a year and a half when we were unable to use fingerprint technology to return people who had made a claim in other countries because it had not been agreed. The Council now comprises 25 member states—nearly twice as many. Does that mean that it will take nearly twice as long to determine an issue? It could easily do so. We could wait three years for a technical decision such as that on Eurodac.
We must make decision making more effective and faster. There is a strong reason why an individual member state should not be allowed to block measures that are important to the majority. That is why we believe that QMV can be more effective. Because the UK has particular issues—we are an island and it is essential that we keep control of our borders—we have our frontiers protocol that gives us the right to operate our own border controls. As I explained earlier, there is no question that the United Kingdom will lose control of our asylum and immigration policies through a move to QMV. The opt-in protocol remains. It is not under threat; it will not be eroded.
The hon. Gentleman is concerned that, because the opt-in has to operate either within three months of the initiation of a policy or after a policy, we will either be kidnapped into policies that we cannot support or we will not have influence on policies. We will make sure that those things do not happen. There are two ways in which we can do so: first, we can choose not to opt
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in to policies when there is a risk of those things happening; secondly, we can use the influence that we discussed earlier—such as our technical advances and our relations with countries outside the EU—to shape policies.
We have preserved our opportunity not to have to be part of policies. The hon. Gentleman described a situation with regard to asylum policy that might occur. That is one of the reasons why the fundamental instrument of asylum policy is an international treaty—the 1951 Geneva convention—that is agreed to by countries throughout the world. There is a strong reason for there to be a universal standard for asylum; that is why the Geneva convention is the universal international standard for asylum. It is a matter of great regret that the hon. Gentleman's party has
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started talking about opting out of it, because there is no doubt that if there were not a world standard for asylum, the risk that he describes would affect Britain and other countries.
This measure is beneficial to the UK. Where we opt in to EU immigration and asylum measures, it is important that the decision-making procedures are as efficient as possible. This proposal allows for that.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the Committee takes note of European Union document No. 15130/04 and COR 1; notes that the draft Council Decision is one of the final steps in the arrangements to move asylum and immigration measures to QMV and co-decision, as agreed at Amsterdam and Nice; and supports the Government's position that the procedure will provide for more efficient decision-making in the Council.
Committee rose at seven minutes past Five o'clock.
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