Contribution
I will deal with those points in order. On the question of population, the ONS is clear that net migration is likely to fuel a rise in the UK population to 72.5 million by 2032. For most of my childhood and adolescence, the population was somewhere around 57 million, 58 million or 59 million. We have never at any point in our history had a population of anything like 72.5 million. The growth has been dramatic, taking place within a generation and a half. We can never build infrastructure to cope with that kind of growth. No Government could. It is not about whether the Government are Labour or Conservative or from a fringe party—by that I mean the Liberal Democrats, of course—it is about the public service being funded in a feasible and tenable way.
Of course it is true that many of the people who come into the country do great things, and of course it is true that our population has people from all kinds of places of origin who contribute immensely to our wellbeing and welfare. However, the truth is that the healthcare visa scheme was a palpable and absolute failure. If we look at the number of vacancies in that sector during the period I have described, it barely moved. It fell slightly, but by nothing like the number of people who were brought in. That leaves the question: what are these people doing now, and what did they do shortly after they arrived? My estimation is that many of them never intended to work in the healthcare sector and were brought into the country by businesses which never intended to work in it either. That is just one example of how the arguments about the economy and the value to the economy need to be re-examined and challenged.
I spoke earlier about the economic cost that people bring as well as value; what I did not mention, and must also be considered, is the displacement effect that migration has on investment in skills. When I was skills Minister, I helped to rejuvenate the apprenticeship system—under my stewardship we built the biggest number of apprenticeships we have ever had in modern times. I did that because I believed in investing in vocational, practical and technical competencies, not only to fulfil economic need, but because many people’s aptitudes, tastes and talents take them in that direction. However, if we say to businesses, “There is no need to invest in training or recruitment and retention, because you can bring people in from abroad to do those jobs”, what possible incentive is there for them to eat into the number of people who find themselves outside the labour market?
I feel particularly for young people. The number of so-called NEETs—those not in education, employment or training—is stubbornly high and has gone up to around 1 million now. Those 16 to 24-year-olds deserve better than a system that says, “We won’t train you; stay on benefits, because there is someone elsewhere who will do the job you might be trained to carry out.” That is not good Government. It is not reasonable or responsible.
We have to displace immigration and invest in skills, rather than the opposite—exactly what we have been doing for so long under successive Governments. Hon. Members will notice that I make no apology for the record of previous Conservative Governments. I am being absolutely frank: this has been a failure by the whole of the political establishment. Indeed much of that establishment, drawn as it is from the liberal classes, misunderstands the argument entirely. The hon. Member for Lichfield boldly and accurately drew attention to the gulf between the views and opinions of a very large number of our constituents and those who populate organisations such as the Migration Advisory Committee —it is a murky group; I never know quite who is on it or how they got there, but they certainly do not seem terribly sensitive to the kind of arguments that the hon. Gentleman advanced when he talked about the frustration and fears that people feel about the scale of migration for economic reasons.
Let me also say something about the social consequences. The hon. Gentleman, in his opening remarks, touched on the fact that societies work when they cohere—when they have a shared sense of belonging that draws people together and mitigates the differences that inevitably prevail in a free society. That shared sense of belonging is itself dependent on change being relatively gradual. Of course, everywhere changes, and our individual lives change too. We can cope with so much change in a human span, yet we have seen towns and parts of cities in our country alter beyond recognition. It is hard to reconcile that with the maintenance of that sense of belonging.
We need to be able to absorb people, and we need to be able to welcome those people, knowing there is something for them to integrate into. Yet, in some parts of Britain, there is a precious little left to integrate into. It is not fair to the indigenous population, nor is it fair to the incoming people, because it cheats them of their chance to gain that sense of belonging, that sense of Britishness, that the hon. Gentleman rightly identified as critical to our communal wellbeing. He is right that some people are frightened to say that. I have never been on the Clapham omnibus—you might have been, Dr Huq—but I can imagine what the people on it are like, because they are probably rather like the people on the Spalding omnibus, or even the Boston omnibus.