Examination of Witnesses (Questions 439
- 459)
TUESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2007
Sir Simon Milton, Councillor Colin Barrow, Mr Andrew
Blake-Herbert, Mr Mick Gallagher and Ms Tracy Turner
Q439 Chairman:
Good afternoon, welcome to this Committee and to our inquiry on
the economic impacts of immigration. I wonder if I could start
by reminding you and reminding ourselves that we need to speak
up, speak clearly and relatively slowly, and then we get an accurate
record of what everybody has said. Also, I wonder if you could
briefly introduce yourselves so that we have that on the record,
as to who has come to give evidence. I do not know whether you
want to make an opening statement or whether we can go straight
on with the questions. If I may say so, it is not necessary that
all five of you answer every question, unless you feel it necessary;
we want to get the flavour of what you have got to say in the
most effective way we can. Would you like to quickly introduce
yourselves and then we will get on with the questions.
Mr Blake-Herbert: I am Andrew Blake-Herbert.
I am the Director of Finance and Property from Slough Borough
Council.
Councillor Barrow: I am Colin Barrow, Deputy
Leader of Westminster City Council.
Sir Simon Milton: I am Simon Milton. I am Chairman
of the Local Government Association. I also happen to be leader
of Westminster City Council, but I will do my best to let my colleague
field the Westminster questions.
Ms Turner: I am Tracy Turner. I am Director
for Communities at Uttlesford District Council, but I am here
representing the SOLACE (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives
and Senior Managers) Migrant Workers Group.
Mr Gallagher: I am Mick Gallagher, Chief Executive
of Boston Borough Council.
Q440 Chairman:
Fine. A number of London councils have said that they have lost
out unfairly in financial terms, due to the recent revisions by
the Office of National Statistics to estimates of the number of
migrants in their areas. Can you say what is wrong with these
revised estimates and whether any councils have benefited rather
than suffered from them?
Sir Simon Milton: The overall view in London
is that London's population has been under-estimated. The population
estimates were reduced by the Office of National Statistics by
110,000 overall, which does not accord with the views of London
councils and what they are experiencing on the ground. The evidence
is variable across the capital city and those who have certainly
recorded adverse impacts include Waltham Forest, Barking, Dagenham,
Newham, Croydon, Westminster (which you will hear about), but
some councils have actually recorded increases and gains from
the revisions, and those include Hounslow, Lewisham, Sutton and
Southwark. However, because of changes in the formula grant system
which the Government has just announced, all of those population
gains by those boroughs have been eradicated because they are
all going to be on the funding floor for other reasons. So they
have made no gain at all from the recognition that their population
has increased.
Councillor Barrow: The evidence of the Office
of National Statistics is being questioned by a whole range of
voices—the Audit Commission, the Statistics Commission,
the Governor of the Bank of England, all suggesting that these
estimates significantly under-estimate the scale of international
migration particularly. I can talk at length about the problems
with individual survey mechanisms, but suffice it to say at this
stage that there are two classes of people who live in quite substantial
numbers in Westminster whom the government statistics either do
not recognise for the purposes of funding or do not recognise
at all. Those are the people who say to the nice lady with the
clipboard that they do not intend to stay here for longer than
12 months; those people are not counted for the purposes of funding
local authorities. The other group of people, much more difficult
to measure, are people who are illegal immigrants, and we know
from Home Office information that there are very substantial numbers
of those. It is Westminster's experience that very substantial
numbers of those people are attracted to a major centre of population
with a very substantial grey and indeed black economy in which
they can work and live in some way. So we believe that these particular
egregious errors in the counting have a disproportionate impact
on London, have a disproportionate impact on large centres of
population and have a disproportionate impact on Westminster in
particular.
Q441 Chairman:
Can I just follow that up? Are those classes of people who are
not counted the explanation as to why the numbers are different,
or are they over and above the numbers?
Sir Simon Milton: Over and above.
Q442 Chairman:
They are over and above the numbers that are different.
Councillor Barrow: To assist you, the numbers
in question in Westminster, we believe—because we commissioned
independent research to look at this—are 13,000 people staying
for less than 12 months and 11,000 illegal immigrants. This is
an independent ethnographic survey; about 10% of Westminster's
population.
Q443 Chairman:
That would be over and above your share of the 100,000.
Councillor Barrow: Yes.
Q444 Chairman:
How much is your share of the 100,000?
Councillor Barrow: We cannot be precise about
that, but it could easily be 10%.
Q445 Lord Skidelsky:
What are the costs of the illegal, the anonymous, the people who
you do not know are there, for which an additional grant might
be justified?
Councillor Barrow: There is one obvious category,
which is that they all generate waste; it is impossible to live
in any area without generating a proportionate part of that. 13%
of the students in our schools are definitely refugees, they are
in the refugee category, so while those are not in the numbers
that I have just referred to because they are, by the nature of
counting, legal, there will be a correlation between the number
of refugees coming to this part of the world and the number of
short term and illegal migrants coming to this part of the world.
We do not have responsibility for housing, except in extreme circumstances
such as those of asylum seekers, where there is a substantial
funding gap. Of course, the impact on the rest of the public sector
is much greater than it is on local authorities—these people
use A&E, for example, or come to the attention of the police
in the appropriate proportions.
Sir Simon Milton: Local authority budgets are
fixed and so we have to manage with what we have got, so we do
not have figures to answer your question where I can give you
a precise breakdown of the costs because we just absorb those
costs and spread what we have much more thinly. There is no doubt
that there is additional cost and if additional money was there
it would go towards making services better for everybody.
Q446 Lord Lawson of Blaby:
Whilst we are on the subject of statistics it is widely agreed
by everybody that the statistics are a complete mess. The Office
of National Statistics, as you know, told us that the local councils
actually have quite a lot of useful immigration data which, if
it could be put together, would help to get an accurate statistical
picture, but because different councils use different methods
there is nothing they can do about it. First of all, do you have
this extra information? Is the ONS right that they cannot take
it on board because of the different methods you use and, if they
are right about that, what are you, and in particular what is
the Local Government Association, doing to put all the statistics
on a comparable basis so that they can be made use of?
Sir Simon Milton: That was a slightly disingenuous
answer you had, if I may say so. It is certainly true that councils
hold administrative data such as electoral registers; however,
the reason councils invest in finding more information for their
localities is in order to plan services for their localities more
effectively, not to be part of some national count. If that were
to be required we would clearly have to do that differently, but
actually the wealth of administrative data, which is what we are
talking about, is not necessarily held at the local level but
at the national level—I am talking about things like the
national pupils census, national insurance number registrations,
housing benefit records. All of these things are held nationally:
there are currently, I am told, legal impediments to the information
being shared more widely, but if you were to aggregate the national
and the local administrative data, you would start to build a
much richer picture of what was going on at a local level. None
of those administrative records are in and of themselves adequate
proxies for population count, but aggregated together, as I say,
you do get a clearer picture which allows you to cross-reference
against the ONS national counts and to see whether they make sense
or not.
Mr Blake-Herbert: As an example for one of those,
the Office for National Statistics refuse to use child benefit
data because they say it is an under-count of the number of children
living in an area. But actually the Office for National Statistics
currently estimate there are less children living in Slough than
the number of children receiving child benefit in Slough. So if
some of those national data sources could be used as part of a
quality assurance exercise around figures, that would certainly
give local authorities far more feeling in terms of how accurate
and how robust the figures were.
Q447 Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market:
The Local Government Association recently urged the Government
to set up a £250 million a year migration contingency fund
to deal with the effects of the pressures on public services.
Presumably that was based on some idea of cost to the local authorities?
Is that correct and, if not, what was it based on? Could I also
ask you to say whether there is any difference between rural and
urban areas? It is striking on the map that was provided by the
Local Government Association that in East Anglia and Lincolnshire
there is a very high proportion of immigrants, and I would be
interested in Mr Gallagher's response on that last part.
Sir Simon Milton: The £250 million was
based on an estimate by local authorities, if you like, a best
but conservative guess as to the additional cost. We do not have
an accurate figure, for the reason I explained to Lord Skidelsky,
which is that we simply have to manage the demand within our fixed
budgets and we do not ask people their nationality; we actually
record people's ethnicity for the purposes of ensuring fairness
not their nationality. We therefore do not have that information.
The figure was actually 1% of the revenue support grant that comes
to local authorities, so our view was that our population was
certainly undercounted by 1%, and that would be a fair sum of
money to put forward as a fund which councils that were experiencing
particular pressures which were not captured by the figures could
make bids for. The problem with statistics is two-fold. It is
both the quantum—are we measuring accurately how many people
are coming into the country?—and that is something you could
probably do something about. But more specifically following that,
it is the distribution—where do they go once they are here?
You will hear from Boston about the huge surge of population they
have had which is not being measured effectively but which I think
would make them justified in saying that they need some additional
grant to meet their needs.
Q448 Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market:
Your map gives some indication of where the difficulty is.
Sir Simon Milton: It does, yes.
Mr Gallagher: To follow that point up, we have
experienced what we consider to be a significant growth that has
been completely under-represented. Going back to the statistics
issue, we have tried to use some reliable statistical indicators
to measure the growth and we have used GP registrations, for example,
which we feel is a particularly reliable indicator because most
people register with a new GP when they settle in a community.
Our latest figures on GP representations are 79,000 as opposed
to an officially recorded population total of 58,300 in Boston,
so we could be up to 20,000 more people living and working in
Boston as a result of the growth. Another reliable indicator that
we have been using as well is to look at the numbers of children
in schools, particularly children speaking English as a second
language, and in some of our primary schools the figures are as
high as 50% of children with English as a second language, a lot
average around about 35%, and they are now consistent statistics
over a period of time. That suggests that, although some people
move on, there is a hard core of probably 15,000 to 20,000 people
in Boston now. To echo what Sir Simon has said, to try and determine
what the cost of that is in financial terms is extremely difficult,
other than using crude measures basically. If you say that Boston's
population has grown roughly by a quarter to a third and then
you use the Government's funding formula for its Revenue Support
Grant, we can do a fairly crude calculation of how much more resource
we would need to address an increase of between 25 and 33%. That
would be a significant amount of money for Boston, but done very
crudely, so you have to treat that with a degree of caution because
it is very, very difficult to actually know who you have got living
in the community at any one time, where they are and the kind
of services that they are accessing.
Mr Blake-Herbert: Could I just add a slightly
different angle to that? It is not just about the costs of new
migrants, it is also about the formula and how that works for
local authorities. For example, as Sir Simon mentioned, it is
about the allocation once they arrive in the country and where
people go to, and it can be migration from Putney or from Poland
in terms of that impact. For example, at the last census Slough
was the ninth fastest-growing population in the country. Based
on the current formula used by the Office for National Statistics,
it has gone to being the second fastest-declining population in
the country. Based on everything we see, all of our data sources
and all of our knowledge, that is a nonsense—the population
is continuing to grow as we see in everything that we are doing
in providing support. But because the population is supposedly
falling, we are actually losing money. That is one of the key
issues.
Q449 Lord Best:
Can you say what differences there are with the latest wave of
A8 migrants compared with their predecessors and what public services,
in particular, have seen greater demand as a result of the recent
waves of immigrants, probably not the Portuguese in your communities,
but the A8 elsewhere.
Sir Simon Milton: The predominant age group
of A8s coming over is 18 to 34. The main service impacts have
been on language provision and, interestingly, the Government
wants us to spend less on translation and interpretation at the
same time as reducing funding for English language classes—so
I am not sure how that works—also housing and, in particular,
the cost to councils of inspecting HMOs (houses in multiple occupation)
which is where most A8 migrants start when they come to this country,
though they may move on. We have real concerns about very poor
quality housing being used to house workers, whether it be in
caravans and mobile homes or in buildings where they are crammed
in hostel-style, sleeping in shifts in the same room, in the same
beds. That requires, for health and safety purposes, councils
to be quite proactive in investigating what is going on. After
that, there is a range of other services which are impacted, including
obviously the turnover in schools which you have heard about.
Child protection is one that you do not immediately expect, but
where children are brought over and there are child protection
issues it is very expensive because there is no record or history
of the child and the family in this country; you have to go to
their country of origin, through their social services system,
to access the kind of information you need. So even though the
numbers may not be great, the costs per case are very high and
then there are issues to do with health services which you have
also heard.
Councillor Barrow: If I may add a small point—this
is a probably an area with which Lord Best will be familiar—there
is a considerable degree of competition for rented housing accommodation,
in which pool the city council also fishes for its own social
housing provision, so it makes it much more expensive—it
is an indirect effect, not a direct cost. There are specific costs:
in Westminster's case, for parental care costs for unaccompanied
asylum seeker children we see around £1 million; we see £1
million for destitute asylum seekers; we see translation costs
that are very high—120 first languages spoken in schools,
as Sir Simon has mentioned. If we were to follow capitation, then
we would receive formula grant of an additional £18 million.
I have given you three examples which are £3 million and
then there might be some more in the form of these indirect costs
in relation to housing. So it is not an implausible number that
Westminster alone might justifiably claim 6 or 7% cent of the
£250 million fund. The second point to make about A8s in
particular is that fewer come with their families than previous
groups of migrants; that puts pressure on housing but relieves
the pressure on the other family-based services.
Mr Gallagher: Can I make a point of clarification
on the question that you asked because there is a slightly different
experience in Boston. Initially it was the Portuguese community
that started to take jobs in the agricultural industry about five
years ago, but they have been displaced by A8s now in a significant
way, and there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that there are
raised tensions now within the settled Portuguese community because
they were displaced from accommodation and from their jobs when
people from the A8 countries accepted the minimum wage and indeed,
in some cases, below the minimum wage levels and effectively took
their jobs. We are experiencing an increased settlement of people
from the A8 countries and, even though they are young, they are
now settling in the community. We have had many children born
recently as well to people who are now staying within the community.
So although it is a younger age group they are staying and they
are having families; you can see the evidence of that with the
increase in schools population as well.
Ms Turner: One of the other effects is that
because they are predominantly young, highly skilled, independent
people they have a different pattern of usage of council services;
for instance, for county councils, they are a heavy user of library
services, particularly internet provision and reading materials
but less so for other county services. The other side of the education
provision is that new migration is actually keeping the small
village schools going in areas where the roll was falling off
to a point where the school was unstable, but is now able to continue.
It has pros and cons.
Mr Blake-Herbert: If I can pick up one or two
points there from Slough's perspective, one is about schools and
migrants coming in. They are coming here and they are coming here
to make a difference. In fact, for the second year running now,
we have had the tenth best GCSE results in the country and that
is despite, from the September intakes, having over 60 Somali
and 90 Polish children each year for the last three years taking
up places. As part of that, the secondary schools can refuse to
take children without an assessment. A lot of the children who
are arriving are coming without academic records, so one of the
things we have found we have had to put in place is an assessment
centre. Every child whose first language is not English goes through
the assessment centre for a week and comes out at the other end
of it with an academic record to enable the secondary school to
take the children in, to be able to stream them and enable them
to provide the right support so that they do not disrupt the rest
of the class when they go in. That has been a key part, but falls
as a cost to the council to provide. The second part, just picking
up on one of the earlier comments, is about houses in multiple
occupation. In terms of our funding, we are funded to pick up
and look at houses in multiple occupation that are three storeys
or higher. That is what we are funded to do and support, and in
Slough in the last 18 months we have had over 1050 two-storey
HMO's set up, what are in effect three bedroom semi-detached homes,
becoming houses in multiple occupation. To get together a team
to be able to go through and be able to inspect those and register
them, to protect in terms of health and safety and well-being,
both the individuals in them and the surrounding properties, will
take a considerable sum.
Q450 Lord Kingsdown:
Do you have any evidence of negative impacts from recent immigration
on pre-existing migrant groups and ethnic minorities? You said
something a little earlier about the Portuguese community and
a problem there.
Mr Gallagher: Yes, we have experienced that
to some extent. A lot of it is anecdotal evidence, but clearly
there was a displacement of the Portuguese community when people
arrived from the A8 countries and there have been some raised
tensions on a minor scale within the local community about that.
Councillor Barrow: If I could add just a small
point, we have a very diverse community as it is and so the impact
is always going to be much smaller in Westminster because in a
way that is what people expect of the centre of town. So the racial
divisions that might arise out of that sort of thing or the impact
on existing communities that might arise, will not arise. The
only thing is, if we are sitting here saying that we do not quite
understand the impact of migration, then there are going to be
certain elements in the community that are not going to understand
it either, deliberately or accidentally, and so if public sector
services are rationed in any respect, there will be people who
will blame the wrong people for doing that. That is a danger of
which there is considerable anecdotal but not very much hard evidence.
Sir Simon Milton: I would only say that actually
we should look on the positive side of this and recognise that
this country has absorbed a scale of immigration that we have
never seen before, and there have not been widespread problems
between communities, we have somehow managed pretty well and I
think that is something we should be proud of. Of course there
are localised hotspots, but on the whole I think this country
has done pretty well coping with what we have had.
Mr Gallagher: Could I add to that by saying
that I fully support that point, that we concentrate on problems
and issues but there are benefits and opportunities to a community
like Boston that was not a very ethnically diverse community and
now the diversity has significantly grown, and the benefits that
that is bringing to the community. We have people now who, once
they have arrived to work in the agricultural industry, are now
moving out of that; we are having new businesses set up and people
are making a real contribution to the economy. We need to keep
in mind that whilst there are great pressures on local authorities
in trying to deal with this, there are many benefits and opportunities
to develop communities like Boston that have not previously enjoyed
those levels of diversity.
Chairman: I have no guarantee what questions
my colleagues will ask, but some of the questions I see in front
of me look as if they have been partially answered already. I
have no doubt my colleagues will ask them in a way to get more
information if there is any, but you do not need to repeat what
you have already said. Lord Skidelsky.
Q451 Lord Skidelsky:
Some of these points have been dealt with, but it is again a question
of the impact of the costs of migration, the cost to local authorities
of community cohesion and you have really answered that. I would
like to ask about a specific cost for information; are local councils
funded to provide English language training for what I think of
as a typical A8 migrant, 18 to 34, single, no children? What English
language training is being provided, what are the responsibilities
of local authorities in that respect and is there a private sector
provision, are they charged, are they subsidised? I do not know.
Mr Blake-Herbert: In terms of migrants arriving
in the country they are not entitled to any benefits or any support
for a minimum of 12 months, until they have worked here and demonstrated
they have worked here in that way. So local authorities are not
funded to support English language teaching of any nature. In
fact the funding for that comes down through the Learning and
Skills Council, as it was, as part of that process. But there
is a responsibility on local authorities to provide and support
the communities that live within its boundaries and to do that
in the right way. Picking up on some of the impacts of recent
migration, in Slough we have seen impacts on the lowest skilled
parts of our communities in terms of employment rates, both in
Pakistani males and Indian females. One of the things Slough Council
does is support a number of local groups that provide skills training
in the English language as part of that. But when there is a lack
of funding available—and councillors have to make very tough
decisions about the budgets—it is not areas such as child
protection which they look at cutting, because they cannot; it
is the other parts of the budget, the non-statutory parts, which
have to be looked at and have to be looked at very carefully.
So when the statistics are inaccurate and when they are not keeping
pace with the real numbers on the ground and therefore the funding
that is coming through is not coming through at a sufficient level,
or in Slough's case is actually being cut year on year, it means
members have got very hard decisions to make about those services
which can then impact on community cohesion. It is well-recognised
by community cohesion experts that when varying communities appear
to be fighting for limited resources and there appears to be preferential
treatment, cohesion issues can arise.
Ms Turner: One of the other issues is that migration
is now affecting rural district councils that have not previously
seen anything like this at all and do not have the black and minority
ethnic diversity that has certainly been seen in a lot of the
established city centres. Those districts are now finding it very,
very useful to work with other public sector partners within their
local strategic partnerships and it is through those partnerships
that they are really addressing some of the information needs
and service needs in a multi-agency forum, in a joined-up way
as much as they can, sharing information, really getting to grips
with issues like English language provision and public service
provision et cetera. One of the interesting partners which some
of the councils are pulling into these discussions are trade unions
who can access funds themselves to supplement business English
within local firms.
Q452 Lord Skidelsky:
I do not feel I have had an answer to my specific question. If
I am a Polish migrant and I want to learn English, do I have to
pay or do I get it provided free by whatever group is funded to
do so?
Sir Simon Milton: It is a mixed pattern. There
are some subsidised courses but they are being cut back, so the
answer to your question is that you are very likely to have to
pay.
Mr Blake-Herbert: Certainly within the first
12 months you are not entitled, within the first 12 months of
arrival you would have to pay for those courses.
Mr Gallagher: In Boston, for example, it is
the FE college that provides those courses, but they are having
their subsidy cut. So to echo what my colleagues have said, that
is either met by the individual or by the employers, and some
employers are very good at meeting those costs but others are
not, and in fact some employers are not very good at even persuading
people to take English language courses at the local college as
well. So there are negative impacts either way there. Learning
the language is the fast track to the integration process, but
some people are actually being deprived of the opportunity to
learn the language and then the college is struggling to provide
courses because the subsidies are being cut.
Q453 Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach:
I feel I am getting a picture which is emerging, but there are
two different aspects and I do not quite understand how they match.
On the one hand Councillor Barrow said, for example, that in terms
of the quality of public services there is anecdotal but not hard
evidence of inadequate services. Mr Gallagher has said that immigration
is being managed well, but on the other hand you are saying there
is a lack of funding which must, I take it, affect the quality
of services and overall, if you look at the polls on immigration,
clearly people would like to see less immigration, and Mr Gallagher
again mentioned that in some schools 50% of the pupils were made
up of immigrants. My question is, if you look at a particular
area like, let us say, primary schools or secondary schools, what
is your feeling about the quality of the service provided to existing
non-immigrants in the community? I think to myself, if I had a
child of seven I would have expected when the child was one or
two that the child would go to a school of a certain size and
so on and have a certain kind of education; now I am living in
East Anglia and suddenly there is an inflow—I cannot believe
somehow that I would not be agitated about that.
Sir Simon Milton: What happens in primary schools—and
colleagues from authorities can confirm this—is that what
schools seek to do is to put in place additional support for children
who do not speak English in order not to disadvantage indigenous
children. You can argue this on two levels: you can either say
that that takes resource which is part of their school budget
which would otherwise have been spent on provision or activities
for indigenous children and therefore they are losing out, or
you could say that even though that extra support is in the classroom
it still cannot help but divert the attention of the teacher from
teaching the whole class scenario, which is what schools are set
out to do. We believe there must be some impact even though schools
are dedicating parts of their budget to hiring additional support
staff in order to not disadvantage the mainstream, if I can use
that generalisation. Does that answer your question, sir?
Lord Skidelsky: It does.
Q454 Chairman:
It is certainly an answer to the question. Is there anybody who
wants to add anything to that?
Councillor Barrow: Just to say that somebody
to assist somebody who comes from Bangladesh to adapt to a school
and teach that child to speak English is going to be probably
a different person from the person who is going to help the Polish
child who is sitting next door to adapt. It is theoretically impossible
and what tends to happen—what happens to my son actually—is
that the whole provision just declines a bit in order to make
sure that everybody can come along with whatever is being provided.
Q455 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
I would just like to ask about the proportion of migrants in the
workforce employed by local councils and in what lines of work
those migrants are concentrated, and how that has impacted on
your provision of public services. Presumably it has helped keep
the wage rates down in the sense that you have got plenty of workers
volunteering who might not have been there before. A second question,
really for Sir Simon and Councillor Barrow; Westminster is noted
for its efficiency and indeed celebrated for the fairly low council
tax that people pay. In a relatively wealthy borough like that,
why not just put up the council tax and solve some of that £18
million problem you have?
Sir Simon Milton: We will deal with Westminster's
council tax at the end. Let us try and get some non-contentious
answers first. Do you want to start, Andrew?
Mr Blake-Herbert: Just picking up on that first
part, I guess my starting point for that is, what is your definition
of a migrant, is it first generation, is it about the recent accession
eight or wider? Certainly in terms of the workforce for Slough,
we have a workforce that matches our community; we have the most
diverse community outside of London, some 37% at the last census,
and across all of the tiers within the council we genuinely have
a workforce that represents the community that we are supporting,
and that is needed as part of making sure we are providing the
right type of people, the right type of services to the communities
that live within our borough.
Q456 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
I have talked to key workers in Slough who say they actually live
in Wales and travel in because they cannot find accommodation
in Slough itself.
Mr Blake-Herbert: They certainly do. We do have
people who travel as far as that to come in and work in the borough.
Sir Simon Milton: Across the public services
as a whole, the biggest area where migrants have made a contribution
to the workforce is in social care and health and the experience
is that they tend to come in at fairly low level jobs and as they
acquire English language skills they then progress to higher paid
jobs within those sectors. In different parts of the public service
you do get interesting little hot spots and so, for example in
London, you will find a very large percentage of Antipodeans working
in the planning service because they happen to have qualifications
which are applicable in this country and they are handling planning
applications all over London. Social care and health are the main
categories, however, and remember that we do not categorise the
workforce by nationality, we only count ethnicity.
Mr Gallagher: I would simply echo what my colleagues
have said, it is mostly in health and social care.
Q457 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
In general, it has helped keep the wage bill down I suspect?
Mr Gallagher: Within the public sector?
Q458 Lord Macdonald of Tradeston:
Yes.
Mr Gallagher: No, I would not say that.
Sir Simon Milton: Public sector wages are set
through national bargaining.
Q459 Lord Best:
But public services are subcontracted quite often.
Sir Simon Milton: Some are, yes.
Councillor Barrow: Our waste contractor is Veolia
and approximately 16% of the people working on the Westminster
waste contract are from A8 countries.
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