Examination of Witnesses (Questions 411
- 419)
TUESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2007
Dr Heaven Crawley, Professor Allan Findlay and Dr
Neil Jarman
Q411 Chairman:
You are very welcome to our session this afternoon, and I am sure
you are going to give us some helpful information. I am reminded
to say to you at the beginning of each session, but as much to
ourselves as to you, if we speak up and speak relatively slowly
we stand a much better chance of getting an accurate record of
what is said. It would be helpful if we start with you each just
to briefly introduce yourselves so that that is on the record.
I do not know whether you want to make some opening statement,
or whether you are happy to go straight on with questions.
Professor Findlay: I have a very brief opening
statement.
Q412 Chairman:
If you would just introduce yourselves and make your brief opening
statement, we will get on with the questions.
Professor Findlay: My name is Professor Alan
Findlay; I am at the University of Dundee and population and migration
research is my main focus of interest. My brief opening statement
is simply to first of all say that I do think the regional dimension
of migration is important and I am impressed and pleased that
this group is meeting to think about this issue. Scotland, as
part of the United Kingdom, is distinctive in two ways, and I
just want to mention these two ways. One is that obviously having
a devolved government makes it distinctive, but that Government
has a distinct policy on migration, called Fresh Talent—which
we will discuss perhaps later—and in relationship to that,
the Government's economic strategy announced that it had a policy
on population, which has got migration implications. That is the
first point I wish to make. The second general statement is that
perhaps distinctive from the rest of the United Kingdom I would
argue that there is a wider public recognition that migration
could make an economic contribution. It is hard to provide distinct
evidence of public support for that, but I would just mention
that last week the Scottish Government and the ESRC[7]
had a conference on the topic and this made front page headlines
in the national Scottish press. For example, in The Herald
we have: "Scotland will need 20,000 migrants a year"
and the first sentence reads: "Scotland needs to attract
20,000 immigrants a year to save the economy," so while there
is of course a range of opinion about migration to Scotland, there
is perhaps a wider public recognition of potential contribution
from migration. Thank you very much.
Q413 Chairman:
I really wanted all of you to introduce yourselves to start off
with; would you both like to?
Dr Jarman: Neil Jarman from the Institute for
Conflict Research in Belfast. We are an independent non-governmental
organisation and have been working on migration issues for the
last five or six years.
Dr Crawley: My name is Heaven Crawley. I am
from the Centre for Migration Policy Research at Swansea University.
We are also a migration research and policy analysis institute,
working on not only issues to do with migration into Wales but
also international migration issues more generally.
Q414 Chairman:
If I may pick up on the Scottish question to start off with, you
say that Scotland has a policy to attract migrant workers. How
successful has this policy been, is there an optimal number of
migrants or rate of population growth that Scotland is trying
to achieve?
Professor Findlay: To judge the success of a
policy, you have to understand what its goals are. Therefore I
would suggest that it is important to distinguish the starting
point of the policy from its current position. The starting point
was in 2004 when the previous Scottish Executive announced that
it wished a Fresh Talent policy to be introduced as part of a
range of measures associated with anxiety over demographic decline
in Scotland, which had been projected. After the election of the
Scottish National Party-led government, which is now in power
in Edinburgh, there has been a reaffirmation of the importance
of Fresh Talent, but the emphasis or the direction or the goal
has been linked much more to economic issues, and I think that
is important. Again, if I can just quote from the statement made
by the Scottish Government in its government economic strategy,
it says "Previous approaches have acknowledged that Scotland's
demographic challenge must be addressed. It is clear that Scotland
requires a more ambitious target for population growth. Therefore,
our target for Scotland is to match average European (EU-15) population
growth over the period from 2007 to 2017." That statement,
that target, is set relative to economic goals, so we have a policy
and I now want to answer your question directly in terms of the
success. Of course it is possible to look at the policy relative
to population trends. In 2004, when the policy was announced,
Scotland was facing a rapid demographic decline when you looked
at the projections. Of course, today the most recent estimates
and projections for population announced by the General Registrar's
Office for Scotland, show that over the next 30 years it is projected
to have the highest population that it has ever had historically.
Nobody would suggest that that turnaround is associated solely
with the Fresh Talent policy. How then can we judge the success
or otherwise of the goal set in 2004? I would suggest that perhaps
there are two ways that we might do that and the first would be
to think of the policy as a communication strategy, sending a
message which is positive about migration and Scotland. There
have been a range of evaluations of the policy which were published
last year, including one by Rogerson and others, which suggested
that perhaps as a communication strategy it has been effective,
and there is certainly some evidence, taken from three of the
countries which have been important to Scotland, that people's
attitudes to Scotland as a destination have been affected by the
work of the Relocation Advisory Service, which is part of the
Fresh Talent initiative. The second way in which we might think
about this is not in terms of front end effects of the communication
strategy, but rather whether the policy is achieving either the
demographic or economic goals which I have alluded to. It is quite
hard at this point to draw conclusions—although there are
a number of studies that are underway—about the demographic
effect because, to be effective, one would need to show that the
increase in migration that has taken place is resulting in permanent
settlement and integration rather than the circulation of population,
and it is too soon to determine that difference, and, secondly,
it is too soon to determine the economic impact in terms of the
value added to the economy, because that will become most evident
from the students who have been encouraged to stay for two years
after their studies, as part of the Fresh Talent policy. It will
become evident in another two years time whether that has been
successful, but it is too soon to judge. Thank you.
Q415 Lord Lawson of Blaby:
Of course, immigration is not a devolved responsibility, it is
a United Kingdom responsibility, and if I may come back to the
question of the United Kingdom and obviously your particular perspective
of it, what changes if anything to UK immigration policy would
you like to see and what views do you have on the new points-based
system for managing migration to the United Kingdom which the
Government has announced? After you have answered those questions,
but not before, please, how do you think the new structure is
likely to affect migration and what will be its economic impact
on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
Professor Findlay: Would one of my colleagues
like to start? I have an answer for that but I think it is important
that Wales and Northern Ireland have a voice.
Q416 Lord Lawson of Blaby:
Firstly, I would like you to give your response because this is
not a devolved matter; this is a UK matter, and I would like your
response to the questions I asked about the immigration policy
of the UK and, in particular, the new points-based system which
is to be implemented.
Professor Findlay: I will answer on behalf of
the Scottish perspective as I understand it. It clearly is not
a devolved matter and everybody would recognise that issue. Having
said that, I think it is interesting to think about the immigration
policy relative to a Scottish context, which is a matter for Scottish
Government. Clearly, the ways in which the Scottish Government
looks at this is that it is situated in a labour market context
different from the rest of the United Kingdom and that much of
the immigration pattern that it has experienced recently relates
to EU flows rather than flows from outside the EU which should
be the ones that will be affected by the points system. It is
interesting that it is possible to have an approach which is sending
out a message about a regional desire to have migrants, which
is a communication effect, rather than a message which is necessarily
legislated for through immigration policy. Can I turn to your
second question?
Q417 Chairman:
Let us hear from Wales and Northern Ireland.
Dr Jarman: Similarly to Scotland, most of the
immigration into Northern Ireland has been from the European Union—in
fact, the first wave of migration into Northern Ireland was from
Portugal rather than from the A8 countries—that is still
a substantial number within the new migrants. Adding to those
the A8 migrants, that would account for the bulk of immigration
into Northern Ireland, apart from one particular category, which
is recruitment into the health sector, which is dominated by staff
from South Asia and from the Philippines. That may be one area
where there is a constraint on recruitment, because both the public
health service in Northern Ireland and the private health service
have become heavily reliant on immigrant labour. I think the more
general private sector is heavily recruiting from the Eastern
European countries, Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia, and I think
therefore any slack will obviously be taken up by Romanian and
Bulgarian migrants.
Dr Crawley: The situation in Wales is slightly
different again, partly because of Wales' history and its relationship
in terms of the movement of people across the border into England.
Migration into Wales and out of Wales is nothing new, but it has
seen a shift or a step change over recent years, primarily as
a result of A8 accession migration, but not exclusively. For example,
from 2001 there have been reasonably significant numbers of refugees
and asylum seekers dispersed to mostly South Wales in that period,
and then in the period since 2004 we have got around 16,000 migrants
registered under the work scheme but they are very much concentrated
in a limited number of local authority areas. We do not have,
unlike Scotland, a formal, separate system by which labour migrants
are recruited into the Welsh economy as such, but the Welsh Assembly
Government is increasingly beginning to realise that it needs
to address some of the issues that are arising from migrant labour
into Wales and, indeed, the changes that are taking place demographically.
Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, there were really
quite significant numbers of young people moving out of Wales,
often with high levels of education, into England, and that has
really been changed, that trend, as a result of A8 accession migration.
In fact more than one in five of those who are coming to Wales
now through accession migration have degrees, for example. There
are, therefore, quite significant shifts taking place but our
policies in Wales are somewhat behind the Scottish approach and
really, at the moment, are simply in line with what is going on
in the broader UK context.
Q418 Lord Lawson of Blaby:
It is clear, is it not, from what you have already said that in
both Scotland and Northern Ireland the pattern of immigration
is distinctly different from what it is in England, and Wales
is perhaps somewhere between England and the Scottish/Northern
Irish pattern? So it is understandable if the Scottish perspective
is a different one from the English one because the pattern of
immigration is quite different.
Dr Crawley: And also the nature of the government,
of course, is slightly different as well, in terms of the nature
of the government that is setting up the policies and the amount
of autonomy at one level or another that it has in order to determine
its own decisions in that area. Also, it is very difficult to
understand migration to any of these regions without understanding
economic development more generally in those regions, and I think
in particular in the case of Wales, with the growth of Cardiff
and the M4 corridor, that has had a very particular effect in
terms of regeneration of southern Wales in particular, which is
very strongly associated with migration. Again, it is hard to
know what would have happened were it not for that economic growth.
So disentangling some of those benefits and those causal factors
can be very difficult.
Q419 Lord Lawson of Blaby:
Just one quick point of clarification, when you talk about migration
to Wales, do you include migration from England?
Dr Crawley: Not in those particular figures,
but obviously the types of migration from England are different
again. We know that people who migrate from England are more likely
to be older, in their 40s and 50s; they are more likely to be
retirement or end-of-career migrants.
7 Note by witness: Economic and Social Research
Council. Back
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