Examination of Witnesses (Questions 212
- 219)
TUESDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2007
Dr Stephen Drinkwater and Dr Bridget Anderson
Q212 Chairman:
Good afternoon and thank you very much for coming along and helping
us with our inquiry. I am told on all occasions to say to the
witnesses and to remind ourselves that it is helpful if we speak
up and speak relatively slowly so that we get an accurate report
of what you have to say. We have a number of questions to ask
you. Are you happy to go straight into the questions or do you
want to say something in advance before we start?
Dr Anderson: May I say something to start? It
is really important when we are looking at analysing immigration
to have a clear definition of what is meant by "migrant"
or "immigrant". It seems to me that sometimes there
is a degree of slippage and confusion, particularly between "foreign
born" and "foreign national" and that, furthermore,
when we hear talk of "second generation", there is actually
a need to unpack how helpful that is in understanding the impact
of immigration since in large-scale datasets you really are only
going to pick up ethnic minorities. In the labour-force survey,
for example, you do not ask for your parents' country of birth,
you ask about ethnicity. Therefore some of the statements that
can be made about the impact of immigration in terms of second
generation can be rather confused since the picture is somewhat
partial. It is also important because actually different people
have different understandings of what is meant by a "migrant"
or an "immigrant" and it is important to be clear about
that. For example, while the Government quite often use "foreign
born"—certainly in their evidence they referred to
"foreign born"—employers, when they are talking
about how marvellous the work ethic is of migrant workers, typically
really mean relatively recent arrivals. They are not really talking
about foreign-born people per se. I just wanted to call
for a degree of rigour about what is meant by the term.
Q213 Chairman:
We have those around us who will make sure that we keep to that
rigour when we come to writing our report but I am grateful to
you for having drawn that to our attention. May I start? Migrants
presumably come to the UK to earn higher wages. Could you talk
us through some examples or data that show how much more Central
and Eastern European migrants can earn here than in their home
countries? Are there any other factors that attract migrant workers
to the United Kingdom?
Dr Drinkwater: Obviously, a number of data sources
are available and the estimates do vary between them. Some recent
Eurostat statistics from 2005 indicate that annual salaries in
the UK are round about four times as high as they are in countries
such as Poland and the Czech Republic, and in the Baltic States
they are even lower than that, whereas the highest of the A8 countries
was in Slovenia which was just under £10,000 a year compared
with an average of about £22,000 in the UK. That is in terms
of gross wages. There are also differences in terms of taxes as
well and social security contributions which also tend to be higher
in the accession countries.
Dr Anderson: Could I maybe challenge the "presumably"
just a little bit; "presumably, they come for higher wages"?
We also have to move beyond the conventional image of the labour
migrant if we are looking at the impact of immigration as a whole.
For example, there are many people who come over as spouses who
then work in the labour market; there are working holidaymakers,
large numbers of students. So the picture of the economic migrant
can sometimes be rather stereotyped. In research that we have
conducted at COMPAS what we have found was that, yes, wages matter,
but also actually, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe,
people were coming also for experience, to have fun, to see what
life was like. Of course, I am not saying that that would be the
same for migrants who have travelled long distances from other
countries but we need to complicate the picture a little.
Dr Drinkwater: We have done some research as
well in Surrey in terms both of in-depth interviews plus fairly
large-scale questionnaires which also indicate that lifestyle
desires are important issues in terms of young migrants from Central
and Eastern Europe. So it is not just wages, especially as they
tend to work in relatively low-skilled jobs, certainly initially
when they enter the UK labour market.
Q214 Lord Skidelsky:
There are so many ambiguities in the statement "four times
as high" without further elaboration. What is the basis of
comparison? Is it market exchange rates? Is it PPP? Is it post-tax?
Is it pre-tax?
Dr Drinkwater: It is gross wages.
Q215 Lord Skidelsky:
It is gross wages.
Dr Drinkwater: The figures were from Eurostat
converted into pounds. They do vary. The data which have been
converted into PPPs actually show that the differences are smaller,
but if you look at those, again they are roughly four times as
high in terms of the nominal differences, but then when you adjust
for purchasing power, that comes down to about three times, in
terms of Poland, and obviously the Polish account for about 70%
of the most recent migrants from the A8.
Q216 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Can we stick with low wage sectors just for a moment? Do some
employers have a particular demand for migrant labour in these
sectors or even for particular migrant groups or nationalities?
If so, why? What sort of characteristics or skills are they looking
for?
Dr Anderson: One of the interesting phenomena
about all of these discussions is the emphasis on phrases like
"work ethic" and "reliability" which seem
to crop up in the most scientific of documents. It is important
first of all to remember that when employers are talking about
migrant workers and how lazy British workers are, they are not
necessarily comparing like with like, that very often, again particularly
with Central and Eastern Europeans, you have people with a high
level of education and that kind of person simply would not be
working in food processing if they were British. Also, there is
an important question of retention here. While a lot is spoken
about difficulties in recruitment, actually what receives less
attention is difficulty in retention and very often what you have
with migrant labour is labour that is easier to retain. In a way,
what is the difference between a migrant worker and a British
low-wage flexible worker? Well, if a migrant worker is on a permit,
they cannot leave you and actually I know that was one of the
concerns that employers had with EU enlargement, because it was
going to be much harder to hold on to labour. You can see that
in the concerns that the NFU has for example of how you hold onto
workers who work in the fields. When you are looking at migrant
workers and then thinking about the new migrants, because, as
I said, I quite often feel that that is what employers are talking
about rather than simply foreign born, you have people who have
left their families behind. You have people who are basically
very, very flexible and who do not really care necessarily a whole
lot about work/life balance. That kind of labour is very useful
in certain sectors and that kind of labour can be very hard to
get from the national labour force. If you have to pick your children
up at 3:20, it is going to be much harder to be flexible.
Dr Drinkwater: In terms of particular sectors,
here we are mainly thinking about sectors which are affected by
seasonal considerations such as agriculture and food processing.
So given the nature of the type of migration that we have observed
from the new accession countries, this suits them particularly
well in the sense that they will come over for seasonal periods
or circular migrants as well will come over for certain times
of the year.
Q217 Lord Layard:
Dr Anderson, your work has suggested that social care and services
to private households are very important and not adequately researched.
Could you tell us a bit about the nature of this demand for labour?
What is being offered and what is the role of migrant workers
in particular in these sectors?
Dr Anderson: It is an important sector. We have
an ageing population. We have an attempt to encourage care to
take place in the home rather than in other environments and we
also have the encouragement of women to go out to work, all of
which rather leaves a gap in the household so there is demand
for social care. This work, as we know, tends to be very low-waged
and there is a problem with retention and actually retention matters.
If you have an older person who is being cared for, you cannot
simply substitute an A8 national for a Sri Lankan person, for
example. It also shows the importance of experience and soft skills,
qualities which are quite difficult to capture in the new points-based
system. People quite often want good attitudes and pleasing personality
rather than formally measured skills, so there is a variety of
reasons why migrant labour tends to concentrate in this sector.
In terms of employment conditions, it varies very widely and,
particularly in private households, you can have great employers
and you can have very poor employers. It is really very much up
to the particular individual. One of the interesting findings
of research that I did with employers of migrant carers and migrant
domestic workers was that actually one of the reasons for employing
a migrant was that you can transform a rather unpleasant job into
a golden opportunity by giving it to somebody that you feel is
very poor, is sending their money back to their family and so
on and so forth. If this were a 24-year-old British person, that
relationship would be much harder to manage. It is a very complicated
field, but it is actually extremely important. To return to the
earlier question, what you can see in both social care and private
households but also more broadly in the labour market, even though
employers do not want to say it, is that there is discrimination
on the grounds of country of origin, certainly in private households
that is a strong theme, and it is very difficult for agencies
that are providing that kind of labour to manage. It is, as they
put it, "the great unmentionable" so that is an important
factor too.
Q218 Lord Layard:
Are you saying that although we have 16% of people aged 16 to
25 doing nothing at all in this country, these sectors are not
going to attract them for some reason? Is it essentially the pay
or what is it which is not leading our people to go and meet this
demand?
Dr Anderson: It is pay; it is where it is. If
you are living in a private household or in a nursing home in
the middle of the country, that is not where a young person really
wants to be. There is no career structure. It is one thing to
do it perhaps with a temporary mindset, but if actually you are
thinking "I'm going into this job and I'm going to be there
for a long time", that is not so attractive. It is also about
employer demand. Again, certainly in private households, employer
demand is a factor here.
Q219 Lord Turner of Ecchinswell:
May I ask you then to think, building on what you have said, what
would happen if there were no immigrants? If in ten years' time,
the countries of Eastern Europe are motoring economically and
there is no further flow of people because there are jobs at home
and they prefer being at home and net immigration falls to a small
level, what will happen in these specific social care sectors?
Will we literally have people not cared for or will the wage rate
simply adjust to the level required, people will simply have to
pay more for these services, if at the end of the day, they want
them?
Dr Anderson: The problem with these services
is that it is quite hard for people to pay more. It is quite expensive,
as I am sure many people know; it is quite expensive to pay for
care even at the going, very minimal rate. If there were no immigration,
there really would have to be a big re-think about how social
care and care of the elderly was organised—really big, back
to first premises.
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