Member

The Minister will correct me if I have got this wrong: the point of the immigration skills charge is to increase the cost of importing people and to challenge employers to invest in training the domestic workforce, rather than default to importing people from overseas. I cannot for the life of me see why you would decide to exempt the health service. If you do that, it means that the health service is more likely to import people than train them. It is a very significant employer; we spend around 40% of public spending on the health service and it employs upwards of a million people. It does not seem very sensible to exempt it from the immigration skills charge.