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4.46 pm
Mr. Malcolm Moss (North-East Cambridgeshire) (Con): It is a great pleasure to follow my neighbour and colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson). We share a long boundary, and the boundary changes for the next election mean that a significant portion of my constituency will be passed over to him.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough on securing this debate, and on the remarkable tour de force to which he treated the House. His speech was thorough, wide-ranging and detailed. He was speaking on behalf of his constituents, as shall I in my remarks. We are both lucky that this Adjournment debate has begun so early. I do not wish to cause the Minister to have a late dinner, but I relish the fact that I do not have to rush to fit my observations into half an hour. I shall be as brief as possible, but I hope that the Minister will be able to give an ample response.
We are dealing with a very important matter, for all the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough set out. Every week, our constituents tell us that they perceive a problem and they want their elected representatives to do something about it. If we tell them that we cannot do very much because these are EU rules, that the EU has been enlarged and these people are entitled to come here, our constituents are not interested in such fine points.
Mr. Vara: Does my hon. Friend agree that when we try to explain that the problem arises from EU regulations, our constituents say that we should have fought for the interests of Britain when the deals were negotiated?
Mr. Moss: My hon. Friend makes an excellent and valid point. The Conservative Administration joined the single market, which ensured that there would be free movement of labour and people. However, the present Government missed a trick in the enlargement negotiations when they did not make absolutely certain that we could control the flow of migrant workers. Other countries managed it much more efficiently and better than we have done.
Such criticism could indeed be levelled at the Government, because they underestimated the whole problem. They underestimated not only the numbers who would come, but the type of migrant worker who would come. The accepted knowledge at the time was that they would be single people, that they would be fairly transient and temporary, and that they would come to work for a period and then go home. That is not the case; there is no such evidence in my constituency. From listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough, we know that it is certainly not the case in Peterborough either—or, I suspect, in North-West Cambridgeshire.
My speech and that of my hon. Friend will, no doubt, hit our local papers and, no doubt, our political opponents will say, as they did the last time that I spoke on this issue, “Ah, they’re playing the racist card again.” This is nothing to do with racism. We are the same race as our friends from Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and other places in eastern Europe. We are almost the same people. The difference is that they speak a different language, so we cannot communicate with them. They also have very different cultures, which, of course, in every-day community life, are an abrasive front in the contact between indigenous peoples in our small towns and cities and the migrant community.
Of course, as my hon. Friend rightly pointed out, the Government are finally waking up to the problem, but three years too late. The burden has been carried by local communities, such as mine and those in Peterborough, for all these years, and only now do we find—this is to be encouraged—that some Ministers are speaking up about the problems. The Minister for Immigration and Asylum recognised the difficulties and the fact that, to quote my hon. Friend, some communities in this country are deeply unsettled as a result of migration from eastern Europe.
The Labour party chairman was also quoted by my hon. Friend as saying that there are now difficulties in our communities. Only the other day, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government said that migrant workers must learn English. That is a bit rich after all this time and all the problems that are associated with providing translation services to people who turn up to GP surgeries, for example. Those people know their rights, and they insist that the doctors and nurses bring in translators. That has been going on for years, and no one has done anything about it.
I recently visited my local citizens advice bureau, which wrote back to me after our meeting to say that it has become a port of call for migrants who have been abused by rogue gangmasters, and that the issues that they
“bring to the Bureau relate largely to employment and housing rights plus entitlement to benefits”—
“Employment and housing are often linked as the gangmasters supply both the jobs and the accommodation, much of which”,
as my hon. Friend has pointed out,
“is deeply unsatisfactory.”
“We need access to interpreters and translators and the translation of benefit and tax credit forms into other European languages. Our own funding does not allow us to pay for these services and we feel that more should be provided by central Government.”
Armed with that letter, I wrote to a Minister, only to be told that the funding for CABs was flexible enough to cope with those new pressures: end of story—no help, no recognition of the problem, so my local CAB soldiers on.
As I pointed out earlier, the migrants are not just single people who are accommodated in houses in multiple occupation, but families who are increasingly moving into our communities for permanent settlement. These people are welcome. They are welcome in our factories.
They work hard. They have terrific reputations. Many of them are positive attributes to the community. But the mere fact that families are now coming into our communities is creating a burden, particularly in relation to the provision of services.
I would like to highlight the problem, as I see it, in the local education system. I toured some of my schools recently and I was surprised by the number of children who speak English as an additional language—EAL as it is called—not only in secondary schools, but primarily in primary and infant schools. I take my hat off to teachers for the fantastic work that they do. They have embraced the problem and have not moaned or castigated anybody; they have just got on with the job, because these are children. They do not see them as foreign children; they see them as children who need to be educated in the best possible way given the resources available.
Some of the head teachers—in particular, Lesley Mardle of the Nene infant school—have sat down with their staff and written protocols. They have written down a way to embrace the local community, liaise with parents and make sure that both sides understand what is needed. That protocol is being adopted by the LEA—Cambridgeshire county council—as a blueprint for the way in which to face up to such difficulties.
Mr. Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con): Will my hon. Friend pay tribute to Catholic schools around the country, which are embracing the Polish community? In my constituency, St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic secondary school is taking the initiative in engaging with those communities and helping them to feel at home. It is employing local people who can help with language teaching to enable people to integrate.
Mr. Moss: I am sure that that is indeed true. I am not just talking about my schools; I am sure that schools in other areas, particularly Catholic schools, are doing the same thing. The Catholic church in Wisbech in my constituency is overjoyed at the congregation that it gets from the Polish community. It has two sittings on a Sunday simply to accommodate people. In fact, there is quite a joke about that. The first time the Poles arrived, they looked at the town and went to the biggest church, which of course is the parish church, which would have been the Catholic church before Henry VIII got stuck into it. So, all these Poles turned up at the Church of England church and the vicar was absolutely overjoyed. His congregation must have multiplied overnight by a factor of about eight. Then they realised that they were in the wrong place and duly found the Catholic church on the other side of town.
I have done some research as a result of my findings in my local schools. I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough that we cannot really rely on the figures because they always lag behind the situation on the ground, but this year there are some 2,176 EAL learners in primary schools and 1,862 in secondary schools in Cambridgeshire. That is a significant rise on the 2006 figures, which were 1,840 in primary schools and 1,263 in secondary schools. In my main town of Wisbech, in North-East Cambridgeshire, which has seen the largest proportion of migrant workers, there are 314 EAL learners in primary schools and 161 in secondary schools.
In Wisbech, most of those EAL learners are concentrated at the Nene infants school, which I have already mentioned, as well as at Orchards school, Peckover school, the Queens school and, to a lesser degree, the Clarkson infants school. As I have said, those schools have been proactive in welcoming the new arrivals, providing them with access to the curriculum, and recruiting and training support staff for them. However, in my correspondence with them, the officers responsible for children’s services at the county council have confirmed that the county is financially stretched when it comes to coping with the large influx.
More Government support and funding are needed to recognise that. In 2004 the Department for Education and Skills reduced the Cambridgeshire ethnic minority achievement grant by some 30 per cent. Furthermore, it appears that an extra £400,000, which was announced in late 2006 and earmarked to address the increasing number of EAL learners, has now been allocated for central training at a national level, rather than moving down to the coal face for local authority use where the difficulties are experienced.
As my hon. Friend said, there are assimilation problems. It is no good the Minister saying when she replies to the debate, “We know you have a problem, but there are other parts of the country with even bigger problems,” meaning that the Government are likely to direct the resources primarily to areas where there are huge numbers of population involved or, dare I say it, where their own Members of Parliament are affected. I know that the Minister does not like that, but it is true. How many hospitals are the Government closing in areas where there are Labour Members of Parliament, as opposed to areas where there are Conservative Members of Parliament? [Interruption.] I hear the tutting from the Whip. In my day Whips were supposed to be quiet.
What matters is the proportionality of the migrant worker population. I have small towns in my constituency—Wisbech, March, Whittlesey and Chatteris. Wisbech is particularly influenced by the problem because it has the larger number of food processing and packaging industries. It is to those industries, as my hon. Friend said, that the low-paid worker is attracted. The problem is the little town centre being taken over by people who do not speak English, resulting in a feeling of alienation or pressure. As my hon. Friend pointed out, there are problems in the community in accepting an influx of people who are not seen by my constituents as clearly and obviously making a big effort to assimilate. On that count, those with children are making a much bigger effort, and a more successful effort, than those without.
As my hon. Friend observed, we now have houses in multiple occupation, but the law does not deal with the problem effectively. When I speak to my council about it, officials say that they know what they should be doing, but they do not know where those houses are. Unless people complain and they go and investigate, they do not know which houses to take action on. In some cases officials turn up at the time that shifts are changing over. They find only three or four people in the house, but of course another three or four are working. There are eight people living in the house, as officials would find if only they went at the right time—but they do not, because like other people they
finish work at 5 or 5.30 pm. We are not addressing the problem and it is only a matter of time before there is a serious fire and loss of life at a house in my constituency. It will not be because the council has not been warned.
One of the problems that the CAB put to me, which I have looked into in more detail, is the fact that most of the migrant worker labour is organised by gangmasters—or agencies, as they call themselves. The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 relates only to food processing and packaging. We had a ten-minute Bill today which sought to extend it to cover constructions workers. It should be all-embracing, so that any worker who is involved in finding work through a gangmaster or an agency comes within the remit of the Act. The regulatory body should be given more money, more teeth and more power to step in, because there is, as my hon. Friend rightly pointed out, a great deal of abuse by companies in respect the new labour force.
Of course, the gangmasters have bought a great deal of the housing stock so they control the accommodation of the workers. When the payroll comes to the gangmaster from the company, he or she deducts huge amounts of money for accommodation before the migrant worker is paid. It is a massive abuse and no one seems to be doing anything about it. That is a tragedy. If those workers are welcome in our society and are doing the work that we want them to do, what kind of society do they think they have come to when they are exploited in that way? Much needs to be done. The unions have written several papers to the Government supporting the rights of workers in that predicament.
Not only do the gangmasters charge exorbitant rents to the people on their books, but, by buying up properties, they have made house prices rise much more quickly. There is only a limited supply and those people are grabbing whatever they can. They can put three, four, five or more people into them at high rents, so they can afford to pay above the market price for the house. That has affected not only the house price market, but the level of rents in my communities. I now find myself receiving people regularly at my surgeries who cannot afford to pay rent in the private sector. Rents are so far above the rent allowance that is provided that those people cannot go into the private rented sector. Therefore, the council waiting list is increasing all the time and, of course, we are not building anything like enough houses for rent in the public sector. There is an increasing housing problem and increasing resentment on the part of people in the local community that they cannot get a council house and cannot afford to rent privately.
That is a growing problem. People come to my surgeries and rightly look me in the eye and say, “What are you going to do about it?” It is only in debates such as this that we can make those points. I hope that the Minister will take on board some of those points and actively seek, through her Department, to do something about them. I recognise that this is a multi-issue situation. There are overlapping problems for various Departments to look at. It is probably not possible for one Minister or one Department to solve all of them in one go, but co-ordination is needed to ensure that people are talking to each other in the right way.
The people who seem to be benefiting from the situation are, as my hon. Friend pointed out, the companies that are taking on labour exclusively through gangmasters and agencies. As each new wave of migrants comes in, the pressure is on the existing worker to take a slightly lower wage—because if he or she does not do the job at that rate, there are plenty of people who have just come into the country who will. Therefore, there are problems on that front, too, and they are beginning to stir up problems within the migrant worker communities, as well as between the migrant workers and the indigenous community. The gangmasters are milking the system. Not all of them are unscrupulous and rogues, but many are, so we need to tighten up the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act to ensure that there is real discipline and that the regulatory authority steps in to ensure that those people are receiving at least the minimum wage, if not more.
If the companies are benefiting, their shareholders are benefiting. What are they doing in return? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can see. They might say that they pay the business rate. Well, that goes into a central pot. If they are making extra profit, no doubt they will lose that anyway if they are multinationals, so I cannot see what those people are giving back to the local community. They are just milking the low-wage migrant worker and not putting anything back into the community. They are as responsible as anyone else for the problems that we face. They need to ensure that wages are at the right level and that their workers are looked after.
Someone came to my surgery and said, “My daughter went to an agency to get a job and was told by the gangmaster, ‘If you don’t speak Polish I can’t put you on the assembly line, because they all speak Polish, they won’t accept you, and you won’t be able to communicate with them in any way.’” If that is happening, it is no wonder that youth unemployment is on the rise. Local people cannot now get jobs in the factories in which historically they worked. I have tried each and every way to find a solution to the problem. As far as I am aware, in the past five or six years no new company or organisation has arrived in my constituency. There has been some expansion in jobs, but not a great deal. Five or six years ago such low-paid jobs were done by local people; now, they are done by migrant workers.
Where have the indigenous population gone? These are people who do not have cars and cannot travel to Peterborough or Cambridge to find a job, so where are they in the local community? I table questions about invalidity benefit, jobseeker’s allowance and so on, but there seems to be no correlation that defines where those displaced workers have gone. Many may have been women who were part-time and are now sitting at home or working in the black economy—nobody benefits from that—or are unemployed so that the income into that household has diminished. Let us not kid ourselves: there is displacement. It is no good saying—we hear this argument all the time—“They’re coming in to do the jobs our people don’t want to do.” In my constituency, they are doing jobs that my people did a few years ago. I am not saying that everything should change—we cannot go back—but I want the Minister to understand that the people who have been displaced deeply resent what has happened to them.
Nevertheless, there is some hope on the horizon and there are positive things to say. Only the other week, I opened the office of a new private enterprise—small at this stage, but I hope that it will grow—called Cambridgeshire Training and Consultancy Ltd., which has opened up a facility to teach English to migrant workers. It is a private enterprise and receives no grant from anywhere, so it is charging migrant workers who are prepared to pay to learn English. Not all migrant workers are a problem—many want to learn English and to get on. It advised me today that it is extending its services to give advice on the law and what the local police would expect of somebody.
Mr. Stewart Jackson: My hon. Friend is making a very powerful case, as one would expect from such an experienced Member who has been in the House for 20 years. As regards teaching English in my constituency, Peterborough college of adult education and Peterborough regional college were completely full and many times oversubscribed last September. At the same time, the local authority, the police and others are being prevailed on to spend thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on translation and interpretation services. Does he agree that that is a perverse situation?
Mr. Moss: I do indeed. I suspect that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has come to the same conclusion, namely, that it would be far better to invest in English language courses at further education colleges and other places instead of having these huge translation costs. There are not many people we can call on, and it is very expensive. Worse than that, as there are not many of them, it takes time to arrange to bring someone in, which delays the whole process of giving advice and helping these people with the information that they need. So I take my hat off to the small company and I wish it luck. It has no public funding as such, although it has approached various bodies and made applications for funding. We could encourage such activity within the training remit, and I believe that the migrant community would respond positively to that.
We have had a lengthy debate and it is time for the Under-Secretary to make a fist of replying to some of the points. I do not want to leave the impression that all is lost, or to be alarmist and say that the breakdown of the social fabric is imminent. That may eventually happen if we do not tackle some of the problems, but there is time to face up to them and allocate resources. Understanding is also vital. Teachers, citizens advice bureaux and people in local authorities are soldiering on, doing their best and wanting to do more, but without the resources to deliver.
If we want people to assimilate, remain in this country for the longer term and be part of our society and contribute to it, we have a responsibility not only to be welcoming, but to provide facilities to make the transition as easy and quick as possible.
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