Yasmin Qureshi

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I welcome the Minister to his new Department. I worked with him when he was in the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government; he listened, and I got £20 million for the regeneration of Farnworth in my constituency. I hope he is in a listening mood today and will do what we are asking him to do. It is an absolute privilege to speak in this debate on behalf of many families who have come to the United Kingdom either under the British national overseas visa scheme or on work permits to work in our country, often in areas that are difficult to recruit for—for example, the social care sector. With an ageing population, such jobs are unfilled, as are roles in the IT sector and many other industries. On Friday, I met the Salford Hongkongers group. They explained to us why many of them left Hong Kong, fleeing from persecution. They have been working hard, as my hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey) mentioned, and they make a great contribution to our economy, as, of course, have others who have come to work in the social care sector, where the jobs are not the nicest and the pay is often not great either. They are all working very hard. What they have in common is that when they made the decision to come to the United Kingdom, they believed in certain fundamental rules, one of which was that after five years they would be able to apply for indefinite leave to remain. Of course, it was not guaranteed that they would get leave, because there are other criteria to satisfy—such as having worked for five years, meeting a certain level of pay and being of good character—but at least they knew what they were working towards. I urge the Government and the Minister to reconsider the proposed changes—we do not yet know exactly what those changes are—for two reasons. It is manifestly unfair to change the rules for people who came on the basis of what they understood the rules to be. Retrospective legislation is always bad legislation. It has been done occasionally, but normally only in a state of immediate national emergency. I do not think this situation falls into that category, by any description,. For me, being British is about knowing the laws, knowing the rules and abiding by them. That is exactly what these people have done.