Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420
- 438)
TUESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2007
Dr Heaven Crawley, Professor Allan Findlay and Dr
Neil Jarman
Q420 Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach:
Do you think that immigration should be a matter for a devolved
government? There were hints, I felt, in what you were saying
that you almost wanted to go there and I would love to hear what
your answer is.
Dr Jarman: I would argue that there needs to
be some role for the devolved administrations in setting migration
policy, and I think Northern Ireland has a case for a distinctive
policy, different again from the Scottish and the Welsh situation.
We have not got a policy as such at the moment; we have got a
reaction to a process which has been set in place by private business,
partly because we have not had a devolved administration over
recent years and so we are playing some sense of catch-up and
reacting to the changes resulting from migration. Northern Ireland
has a couple of specific factors which will make it distinctive:
one is the fact that it is coming out of conflict and the economy
is beginning to boom, and that is having potential scope for development
which was not there a few years ago. The second one is that we
are the only part of the UK that has a land border, and if the
policy in the Republic is different from the UK policy that will
have an impact on Northern Ireland. Already people at times are
coming to Ireland and are not necessarily coming to Northern Ireland
or the Republic; they are coming to Ireland, and they are not
completely sure until they arrive. We have issues of people crossing
backwards and forwards across the border, we have emerging issues
of businesses responding to the economic boom in Dublin, relocating
to the North to meet the economic boom, particularly in construction
in the North, but perhaps still employing people out of the Republic
but employing them in Northern Ireland. So there are distinctive
matters emerging in Northern Ireland, but it is a rapidly changing
situation and we are struggling to keep up and get on top of it.
At the moment we are following it, we are not getting in front
of it and setting the ground out; we are beginning to try and
do that and the Department of Employment in Northern Ireland has
recently developed a working group and started to develop an action
plan and a strategic plan, but it is still very much in the process
of catch-up.
Lord Lawson of Blaby: Can I just follow
that up? Lord Griffiths is right, this was very much what seemed
to emerge from Professor Findlay's answers as well as yours, but
of course the consequence is that he would have to have border
controls, quite strict border controls, say between Scotland and
England.
Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach: And England and
Wales.
Chairman: Hang on a minute, we are not
having a debate between ourselves, we are here to ask the witnesses
questions. We are getting a long way behind the clock if we are
not careful; Lord Vallance, did you want to ask a question?
Q421 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Just a quick one for clarification to Professor Findlay. In setting
its demographic targets in its economic plan, which you mentioned,
does the Scottish Government classify movement of people into
Scotland from the rest of the UK as immigration and, if not, what?
Professor Findlay: The statement I read simply
reflects what has been published in the Government's economic
strategy and it does not say there distinctly whether that policy
relates to movement from the rest of Europe, the rest of Britain
or the rest of the world; that is the short answer to your question.
I cannot answer on behalf of the Scottish Government but I can
explain to the Committee what has been stated publicly.
Q422 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
Further to that, does not the English immigration in the end constitute
about 10% of the Scottish population? That seems so significant
it would have to be addressed, would it not?
Professor Findlay: It is not quite as high as
10%. The last time I looked at the figure it was 8%, but it is
a significant proportion of the Scottish population. I am not
sure about the inference of your comment, but what is more significant
for Scotland—
Q423 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
If I could clarify, the inference would be that Dr Crawley said
there was mainly a retirement population that went to Wales. Would
you not have a lot of young English people moving into Scotland
to help rebuild the economy there?
Professor Findlay: We have a lot of young English
people moving to Scotland at present and retirement is a minority
part of the flow from south of the border, but I would emphasise
there is also a significant net inflow of Scots-born people who
have been living in England to Scotland during the last five years,
and the interesting evidence is that those people are largely
less than 35 years of age, so they are mostly young people who
are returning from the rest of the United Kingdom to Scotland.
Dr Jarman: In Northern Ireland, figures published
last week showed that there had been 30,000 new migrants into
Northern Ireland last year and something like 12,500 of those
had come from England, Scotland and Wales. What you have seen
in the Republic is that as the economy grows you have not only
an inflow from foreign nations but also aflow of returnees or
second generation Irish, and I think you might see some of that
in Northern Ireland. There appear to be people who have come in
moving from England, that are actually the people who have moved
out from previous years and are moving back or they are siblings
or are descendants, given that Northern Ireland has been a net
exporter of population for a long time and they have been a net
export of population for a long time.
Dr Crawley: Just as a point of clarity, I did
not want to imply that the migration across the border into Wales
had been exclusively retirement migration, but it is often of
people at a different stage in their career so it is the older
cohort rather than the under-25 cohort.
Q424 Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market:
My question does not relate to English migrants to Scotland or
to Northern Ireland, nor indeed to returning nationals to those
countries. I really want to relate to the A2 and A8 countries.
Professor Findlay already described the different employment and
demographic needs of Scotland and we have heard a little bit from
Wales and Northern Ireland. Do you think that because of the different
nature of the employment patterns compared to England, the recruitment
practices or employment practices of employers differ in relation
to encouraging people from A8 and A2 countries and does it also
lead to a difference in educational offerings? We are going to
hear evidence in the next session of how a lot of the migrants
from A2 and A8 countries coming to England have actually not stayed
very long and many of them are over-qualified for the jobs that
they do.
Professor Findlay: That is a very interesting
question . I am sure that every region of the United Kingdom,
because of the distinctive nature of the regional economies, employ
people with distinctive characteristics. Therefore, it is natural
that Scotland, with a significant proportion of its economy linked
to rural activities, particularly agriculture, fisheries and food
processing, has a distinctive type of labour demand, and that
labour demand has always been met in a distinctive fashion. In
recent times, referring to the A8 countries, that has meant that
in Scotland gangmasters—or labour recruiters, as they actually
prefer to be called—have been very significant. There are
260 suppliers on the gangmasters register supplying labour to
Scotland at this point in time.
Q425 Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market:
That is also true in England.
Professor Findlay: Yes, but my point was that
proportionately that is a more important channelling mechanism,
and the significance is that initially when the EU-A8 countries
joined, quite a number of the wave of migrants came through those
channels. The interviews that I have undertaken recently with
gangmasters show that over time that pattern has been changing,
with more people now arriving independently in the United Kingdom
and then coming to those labour recruiters in the regions to find
work through their services, so it is a slight change in that
pattern over time, which I think is very interesting and important.
That is significant because it suggests that perhaps regions which
are further away from the South East are now receiving migrants
directly from the A8 rather than through the channelling device
of the recruitment agents.
Dr Jarman: In respect of Northern Ireland that
is probably even more the case. Certainly in the early days we
were talking primarily of recruitment agencies acting as middle
men, or of employers going out to trade fairs and the like and
recruiting in the countries. Increasingly it appears that that
process is now self-sustaining and that there are enough informal
networks in place in Northern Ireland to pass the information
back across, and people come and then they get a job once they
are here. The fact that in the last year you can fly from Belfast
to four cities in Poland is one of those factors. I travelled
from a provincial city in Poland a few weeks ago and I was what
I took to be the only non-Pole on that flight and it was like
families saying goodbye to each other at the airport. On the other
point you make about language issues, our research suggests that
for a significant proportion of the people that we have spoken
to, economic matters were not their primary reason for coming
to Northern Ireland. Learning English and improving their English
language skills was a significant factor. Therefore they were
prepared to take low quality jobs or jobs that they were over-skilled
to do because they only expected to do it for a short period of
time; and then they would move on, either to the UK or to the
States or to somewhere else with their improved language, so that
for them the money was not the big issue and they were prepared
to put up with the hardships for a short space of time if it meant
improving their English.
Q426 Chairman:
Can I just say to everybody, including the people on this side,
that we are getting very severely behind the clock. Can we keep
our questions short and our answers short otherwise we will not
manage to get through all the questions?
Dr Crawley: The situation in Wales is slightly
different again. There is very little evidence about what the
recruitment patterns in Wales are. I think it is true to say that
we are really quite behind in terms of the evidence base although
a lot of research is currently being commissioned to try and find
that out. It is true to say that most accession nationals who
come to Wales are employed in sectors that are not those that
are perceived to be the most important sectors. So, construction,
administration, hospitality, catering—those are the sectors
in which they are working. It is also true that, unlike the rest
of the UK, in Wales migrant workers seem to have an equal footing
in the public sector and in larger companies. So there is also
something slightly different going on there, and again in terms
of language there is something different again, which is of course
that we are moving towards a bilingual situation in Wales, where
there is a move towards Welsh as well as English as being the
language of choice. That has made a difference both to people's
propensity to come to Wales potentially, but also to the kinds
of services that can be offered by way of language training, because
the priority for the Welsh Assembly Government at the moment is
to teach and to have things in Welsh, and that has made a difference.
Q427 Lord Best:
Mine is a question about community cohesion and it is about the
impact of the new wave of migrants and their reception on the
part of existing recent migrants, ethnic minority communities
and the native-born residents. I suppose there is a potential
special ingredient here for Northern Ireland?
Dr Jarman: There are a number of strands to
that and I will take them in reverse order. There has been a rise
in recorded racist incidents over the last five years, a significant
rise, which has included numbers of attacks on Poles, Lithuanians,
Slovaks and the like, so the general growth of the minority ethnic
and national communities has brought with it, or been accompanied
by, an increase in evident racism. There is no real evidence of
any particular problems within the minority ethnic sector in terms
of relationships and certainly in terms of the existing support
agencies working with minority ethnic groups in Northern Ireland;
they have expanded their remit to include Poles and other A8 nationals.
In terms of the populations themselves, we have seen the emergence
of a distinctive Polish community in Northern Ireland with its
own networks and structures around the church and around the support
agencies. We are not yet seeing the same sort of sense of cohesion
of individual communities amongst any of the other minority communities,
the new communities of Lithuanians and Slovaks. People have tried
to find out and approach them, but they are very amorphous and
very disparate, and that may well become an issue at some stage.
We do not know how these communities are going to develop and
establish themselves, and that is an issue more generally, that
we do not actually know what dynamics are going on amongst those,
whether they will actually adhere into distinctive communities,
whether they will be seen as general Eastern Europeans. We know
that there are tensions within some of those areas. We know from
some workplaces that there have been tensions between Poles and
Lithuanians or Czechs and Slovaks, and we know from some of the
interviews that there are animosities amongst them. So to talk
of the A8 as a singular body is problematic for them. They do
not all like each other.
Q428 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
There has obviously been a Protestant sensitivity in some sections
of the community through the demographic balance. Most of the
immigrant countries you mentioned there are Catholic countries.
Is there hostility in sections of the Protestant community to
that influx for that reason?
Dr Jarman: There has been to the extent that
the more readily available housing has been in Protestant working
class communities. That is where the housing has been more readily
available and therefore that is where some of the people have
moved in. There does not seem to be that much of an issue about
whether they are perceived Catholic or not. If you are not a Northern
Ireland Catholic, it is not so important—you can be an English
Catholic, a Polish Catholic. There were in some areas stories
where the Poles were being classified ethnically as Catholic and
the Lithuanians were being classified ethnically as Protestant
by physical types, to map within the local stereotyping. But it
is more a matter that they are not local, so it would not really
matter whether they are a Catholic or Protestant, black or white.
That is where the problem comes, that they are not indigenous
Protestants.
Q429 Chairman:
A quick comment for Wales or Scotland.
Professor Findlay: I do not want to add anything
to the evidence provided in the written comment from Valerie Dickson.
Dr Crawley: There is contradictory evidence
about what is happening in the Welsh setting. Certainly some of
the cities like Cardiff that have had a longer history of migration
seem to have dealt with the issue slightly differently because
they simply have experience of different communities from different
backgrounds working with one another. Some of the more rural areas
which have not had experience of different communities in the
past are having different issues arise. But the contradiction
comes in the fact that when you talk to people on the ground there
are some hostilities and tensions potentially, yet when you hear
about what the local authorities and the police consider to be
happening, they consider generally for people to be getting along
pretty well actually. There are very few tensions and there are
very few hot points and actually, pretty much, people are getting
along.
Q430 Lord Kingsdown:
Have the economic impacts of immigration differed in rural areas
from urban areas?
Professor Findlay: I think they have in the
Scottish context. The first thing I want to emphasise is that
perhaps rural areas get discussed more, but there are actually
more EU migrants in Glasgow and Edinburgh than in rural areas.
Secondly, in rural areas the economic impacts have been paradoxical
because in the rural economy there have been fewer opportunities
for highly skilled migrants to earn higher wages and yet it is
in the rural areas that the economic benefits, and in fact the
net benefits, have been perhaps the greatest to local businesses,
because it is there that the shortages of skills of particular
labour groups have threatened the future of some of those businesses,
but now with the supply of EU labour that is no longer an issue.
It is in the urban areas, by contrast, that the universities have
provided a flow of students through the Fresh Talent initiative
who may stay on and use those skills in the future, and there
is therefore a possibility of greater benefits and higher wages
to the migrants themselves.
Q431 Chairman:
Northern Ireland and Wales, do you have anything to add after
that?
Dr Crawley: The evidence is less clear in relation
to the urban/rural difference but one of the points about the
Welsh economy that is worth making in this context is that Wales
is a low pay economy generally and that makes quite a significant
difference, so much so that not only do migrant workers but also
the rest of the workforce in Wales earn less than anywhere else
in the UK. Migrant workers can earn around £185 per week
on average in Wales and it is about £336 a week average for
everybody else. So there is an issue here about whether there
is potential for development of a two-tier work force essentially
and whether or not some of the issues that are starting to emerge
about, for example, zero hour contracts that migrant labourers
are being offered, will potentially lead to the polarisation of
the more highly skilled earning relatively well in Wales, which
is a relatively low-skilled economy, but the poorer end losing
out in terms of the low-pay end of the economy.
Dr Jarman: The situation in Northern Ireland
has been that the migration was very diffuse and occurred in all
kinds of areas, so even very small villages from a very early
stage had immigration and a very positive impact in some of the
local economies as was said for Scotland. One of the negatives
has been in terms of perceived rises in house prices or limited
availability of houses in some of the smaller towns in rural areas,
whereas one of the positives has been that it has brought children
in and therefore some of the schools that were threatened in rural
areas are now seeing an influx of pupils from Polish and Lithuanian
backgrounds and therefore they are being less threatened. There
is therefore a seesaw effect in terms of positives and negatives.
Q432 Lord Kingsdown:
It is not very easy to see the picture in rural areas in terms
of casual workers picking fruit and doing things on a short term
basis. What sort of proportion of immigrants into rural areas
are confined to that activity and what sort of proportion are
much more long term occupied?
Dr Jarman: Seasonal agricultural work is not
perceived in Northern Ireland to be one of the significant drivers,
it is lower down the scale. In rural areas it is more working
in the food processing, the agri-industry, meat-processing factories,
that is really where the impetus has been, more in the small urban
centres rather than agricultural food picking. There has been
some around mushroom-picking, that has been one of the sectors
that has been perceived as problematic in terms of exploitation
particularly and it is difficult to access the details of the
information, but generally it has been perceived to be working
more in terms of the urban centres and the smaller industries
in rural areas.
Q433 Lord Skidelsky:
The Government has recently announced that it intends to stop
low-skilled labour immigration from outside the EU. How do you
think that will affect agriculture and the food processing sector
in the three regions we are discussing?
Professor Findlay: That is a very difficult
question to answer because we are talking about the future and
I can only answer in terms of, again, the evidence that I have
gathered personally from gangmasters who supply labour to rural
economies, and they are certainly concerned that over the next
two to three years the number of Eastern European workers who
currently come will diminish as they find higher paid jobs and,
in the absence of an alternative supply of labour, that there
may then be a return to labour shortages and damage to businesses.
Now, of course you might imagine that that might be a good thing
or a negative thing, depending on your perspective. I would like
to divert slightly from your question by also mentioning the urban
economy because in the Scottish context again there is the issue
of whether, in the long run, it is better to have EU labour than
labour from outside the EU, and the evidence there shows that,
for example, Filipino nurses have been more eager to integrate
and to settle and have been trained in English, whereas often
Polish nurses have wanted to travel on and not stay. So the effect
could be rather complex in the Scottish context of passing that
legislation.
Dr Jarman: In terms of Northern Ireland, it
may have an impact in terms of the unregulated, unrecorded, undocumented
labour. We know that there are substratas around, particularly
Russian, Ukrainian and further east labourers coming in and working
in the grey economy around there, and that might be an area where
we see a re-examination. In Northern Ireland it has been almost
largely ignored over the last four or five years. But it has not
gone away, it is there, and I think the other issue that might
affect it is the border, that people can live in one country and
work in the other. You can work 20 miles across the border, you
can be shunted across the border, so it might depend very much
on how the policy in the Republic of Ireland develops in line
with the UK policy.
Q434 Chairman:
It happens in Wales too if I may say so.
Dr Jarman: Yes.
Dr Crawley: Again, agriculture is a relatively
insignificant aspect of labour migration into Wales; it is much
more in relation to the food processing sectors and the hospitality
and catering sectors that it might have an impact. Again, like
Allan, it is very difficult to predict into the future, and it
is also again important to contextualise what is happening with
migration in the context of what is happening with the Welsh economy
more generally and attempts by the Welsh Assembly Government to
improve skills more generally in the country. Obviously, at the
moment, we have a relatively low skills economy in Wales—that
is the reality—and whilst there are improvements in higher
educational attainment and vocational skills, there are still
improvements that need to be made. If those improvements are made
then, arguably, there will be fewer low-skilled people available
to do those types of jobs. So it is very difficult to know, not
only what is going to happen with labour migration, but also what
is going to happen with other aspects of the system that might
influence the extent to which people might have skilled labour
or unskilled labour available. That will make a difference that
we cannot really predict at this stage.
Q435 Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach:
My question has been touched on in a way by Dr Jarman in relation
to the rural areas. But the question is: in the separate countries
of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, how has immigration affected
the demand for public services, for education and for housing,
and how have the devolved governments in these areas responded
differently than England has?
Dr Jarman: It has had a significant impact on
public services and that has really been where the focus of some
of the policy responses and government responses has been so far.
There have been problems in education. Whilst there have been
some benefits in terms of children coming into schools, there
has been a real strain on teaching English as an additional language
or English language teaching at all levels of the education sector.
So the third level, college level, further and high education
sector, is extremely stretched, to bursting point, in terms of
not being able to supply enough English language classes and schools
are all very heavily stretched. There are a small number of migrants
coming into the public housing sector, but most of them are still
in the private rented sector, so that is not a particular problem,
and we have been coming to grips with different perceptions of
the health service and, in particular, use of accident and emergency
services as opposed to general practitioners or being able to
get access to general practitioners. Part of it has been bringing
the expectations and norms from your own country to a new country
and expecting to proceed as is; there has been a lot of educational
work linking around that, but certainly access to GPs is a problem.
Professor Findlay: I believe that the situation
in Scotland has not been particularly different from in England
in terms of response to public services, but in other respects
I think the Scottish context has been covered very well by the
answer from Northern Ireland.
Dr Crawley: Again, there are very many similarities
and parallels. I suppose the first point to make is that 95% of
accession migrants to Wales have no dependents, and so the issues
around schools, whilst they are significant and growing, are not
of a scale that might possibly be reflected because of that. The
issues around housing appear to be, perhaps, the most significant
ones; again, not in terms of social housing but in terms of the
demand for private rented accommodation. Essentially, that is
where the demand is going. There are discussions and concerns
at the local level that rental house prices have risen by between
50 and 70% in some areas, particularly in areas like Pembrokeshire
and South West Wales where there are already demands for housing
associated with tourism and with second home ownership. Along
with that there are also concerns about the quality of the housing
that has been provided to migrant workers, because there is evidence
of overcrowding and concerns about fatalities arising from the
lack of fire safety and those sorts of issues, and some demand
for homelessness services has arisen in areas like Pembrokeshire.
The concern I suppose is that if the rental market goes up, then
actually landlords will start to buy up private properties in
order to be able to rent them out to a growing rental sector,
and that will have impacts on the market more generally. The other
concern is again in relation to health, that there is simply a
lack of knowledge amongst migrant workers about being able to
access health, so the concerns in this case are less about the
provision and more about the ability of migrants to access the
services which they need, and that is something that often drops
away in these sorts of discussions.
Q436 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
A question to Professor Findlay, if I may. Scotland has had a
remarkably stable population post-war; if it had grown at the
same rate as England, there might have been a million more Scots.
Could it not be argued that that kind of population stability,
for reasons of conservation and resources and climate change and
so on, is a very desirable equilibrium? Apart from the internal
rebalancing of the demographics for economic efficiencies, do
you think that the growth of population in Scotland is a goal
to be striven for in itself?
Professor Findlay: The Scottish Government's
economic plan said that it is not a goal in and of itself, so
I would answer in that respect and I would return the question,
"why should it be a goal in and of itself?" The concern
in the Scottish context is not that the population has been stable,
but that the population is potentially ageing, with implications
for the labour market, with implications in terms of talent and
education and skills to drive forward towards achieving economic
growth, which I believe is the target that the current government
wants to seek. It is in relationship to that that there is a valid
case for trying to argue for having levers to encourage appropriate
kinds of people to come to Scotland, adding fresh talent, which
would invigorate the regional economy in a way so as to achieve
their goals.
Q437 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Do you have any comments on the Government's submission to this
inquiry, and do you think it reflects what is going on in Scotland,
Northern Ireland and Wales?
Professor Findlay: I felt that the Government's
submission provided a very substantial body of evidence that was
very welcome. I think in the Scottish context there does remain
a concern that perhaps the perspective at national level does
not necessarily reflect the needs of either the Scottish economy
or the aspirations of the Scottish Government as it stands at
present, and there would be concerns perhaps that the points system,
which was referred to earlier, is one which achieves "certain"
goals. We would welcome some aspects of the points system in as
far as it makes quite clear that immigration policy is not based
on racist grounds or selectivity which is questionable. But one
has to ask what aspects of selecting migrants does one want to
emphasise in any system, and one would ask, if one is looking
for people who wish to settle, to what extent does the points
system achieve that as opposed to simply looking for certain labour
market characteristics. That, therefore, becomes a concern.
Q438 Lord Vallance of Tummel:
Are there any additional thoughts from Northern Ireland or Wales?
Dr Jarman: In Northern Ireland, as I said before,
the immigration has been very much driven by the private sector,
the needs of the private sector. My reading generally of British
Government policy is that it is English policy and does not reflect
necessarily or take into account fully the distinctive needs of
some of the more regional areas, and the fact that Northern Ireland
does have a border with the Republic will create other issues
for it. Its economic context as a region coming out of conflict,
with potential for a different form of economic growth, make it
a special distinct case in this situation.
Dr Crawley: I would say, again, that the Government's
submission is a very fair and very well-balanced synopsis of the
available research evidence. It has been a very useful contribution
to that evidence base. But again, I guess, from a Welsh perspective,
it does not necessarily differentiate between different regions,
despite the fact that if you are looking at the economic impacts,
almost by definition the fact that the economics of the regions
and the devolved regions are different, the wage structure of
the economy is different, the skills levels are different, there
must be some differential impacts. Also, it is almost presented
as if economics have a momentum all of their own and that they
are not in any way influenced by the policies, and of course it
is that relationship between the policies and the economics that
leads to certain outcomes. That is one point. The second point
is that it also reflects the questions that were raised earlier
about the tensions between devolved and non-devolved issues, because
the reality is, in a context such as Wales, that there are tensions.
There are certainly tensions around issues such as children because
of course children are a devolved issue insofar as the things
that affect them, like education and health, are the responsibility
of the Welsh Assembly Government, and yet the things that control
immigration status are effectively non-devolved. So there are
tensions that arise and they occur in particular instances around
particular cases. But I think maybe they are reflective of a broader,
underlying problem that may increase in the future as the nature
of the devolved governments and the way in which they start to
operate in their particular spheres of control start to come into
more tension with the wider UK aspirations. We are beginning,
therefore, to see something that might increase in the future
as these devolved powers become stronger.
Chairman: Thank you very much for coming and
helping us with our inquiry and, if I may say so, you have managed
to tell us what is happening and also give us some very wise insights
as to what you think might be happening in the future, which will
of course be very valuable to us as we come to write our report.
Thank you very much indeed.
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