Lord Harper (Con)

My Lords, there are two amendments in this group, Amendments 175 and 176, and I will speak briefly to both. On the first, in my spirit today of agreeing with people where I can agree with them, I do not think there is a massive disagreement between us on the link between wage levels and migration; I just think that the amendment that the noble Lord, Lord German, has just moved has got it rather the wrong way round. If we are talking about the labour market generally—I will come on to carers and the social care workforce in a minute—I think we actually start by limiting migration, which then forces employers to think about how they are going to attract the relevant staff and to stop thinking about bringing them into the country as their first resort. There should be some challenge in the system that says to employers, “There are circumstances in which you can import labour from overseas, but you have to jump through some hoops and demonstrate some shortage and some reason why those people cannot be recruited domestically”. I think that that is the right way of approaching it. I just say in passing that when we were in government and I was Immigration Minister and we used to say that, those on the Opposition Benches, both Labour and Liberal Democrat, used to come up with all sorts of reasons why we should just let lots of people in. That was when we were a little bit more robust in controlling migration, when my noble friend Lady May and I were in the Home Office, where we robustly controlled such things. There is a challenge in the social care sector, of course, because a significant amount of the costs that would be borne by an increase in wages are of course not borne by the private sector, in effect, because there is a lot of public money used to pay for this. The thing I have not heard from the Government when they talk about increasing wages in the sector—which may well be the right thing to do—is who is actually going to pay for it because that will drive up the cost of delivering social care, and not just for older people. The noble Lord was right to mention older people, but of course more than half of the public money that is spent on social care is spent on those of working age, so one has to think about both aspects. I do not disagree with him about the link between wages and migration, but where I do not think this amendment is very helpful is that it starts by assuming that you import people as the default and then you have to change the labour market to deal with migration. Actually, we control who comes to the country and we should set some tough rules about who you can bring in. That then drives the market to have to change the wages that it pays people, or the skills that it trains them in, to be able to deal with them. That flows nicely on to the second amendment in this group—I am not quite sure why the noble Lord did not touch on it. Amendment 176 is about exempting NHS workers from the immigration skills charge. I chose to speak after he had spoken as I was hoping he would explain the point of that amendment.