Josh Newbury

Absolutely—I agree with the right hon. Gentleman on that point. Those of us who have had high levels of house building see that, and I am sure that is reflected in areas with high levels of immigration. We need proper planning wherever there is a rapid growth in population, and I worry that that has not been happening for a very long time. GP registrations are a particular pressure point. I recently had a roundtable with all the general practices in my area, and I was told that they are at capacity—over capacity, in many cases—and that further house building is coming down the line. They worry that we do not have forward planning in the NHS, which is often slow to catch up. I say that having worked for an NHS commissioner in a past life. We must acknowledge that we need to do far better on that point. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield said, a key reason for the high levels of immigration is the unchecked issuing of work visas, particularly in sectors with high vacancies such as social care. That is why I welcome the Government’s commitment to finally link up immigration policies and our national strategy for education and skills. Only that will ensure that British people have opportunities to upskill, reskill and access those jobs—in some cases, they currently do not feel able to do so. That will also put a greater onus on employers to ensure that they use work visas for vacancies that genuinely cannot be filled by our workforce. An early priority identified by the Deputy Prime Minister, the Education Secretary and the Home Secretary is social care, and it is not hard to see why. In many ways, social care epitomises the issues we are facing with immigration and workforce planning: we have an ageing population, so demand for the sector’s services is exploding; pay is generally low, especially given the importance of the work; the wider terms and conditions are not appealing for many young people starting their careers; and there are often no opportunities for skills training. Last Friday, I was given a greater insight into the challenges of the care sector when I visited CSPC Healthcare and heard about the challenges it has seen in the sector for the 12 years that it has been operating. It provides domiciliary care in my constituency and across Staffordshire and the west midlands. It told me quite a lot, most of which I will save for a future debate on social care, but one thing it said that struck me was that many agencies, particularly those working with overseas recruitment agencies, are sponsoring huge numbers of work visas, only for those workers to find that the amount of work they were promised is not there when they come into the country, are bused out to a particular town and dropped off. That is exploitative and quite frankly an outrage if immigration figures are being artificially inflated when our economy does not need all those staff. That highlights the reforms we need for the immigration system and our skills and workforce planning. The question that must follow all that is: would suspending all immigration for five years really solve all those problems? Our economy relies on workers from abroad to fill gaps in our workforce and in sustaining our vital public services, so I fear that a complete shutdown would risk huge consequences. In particular, we know that our NHS will always rely on workers coming to make their home here and contributing to those great institutions. Having worked in our NHS in a past life, I know that skilled staff from other countries, most of them European and Commonwealth nations, are critical to keeping the health service alive. We will always benefit from international skills and talent to keep us globally competitive, but importantly, immigration must never be used as an alternative to training or tackling workforce problems here at home. The previous Government’s reliance on overseas workers, teamed with a failure to invest in skills here in the UK, left us with an immigration system that is neither properly controlled nor managed, resulting in net migration of almost 1 million people. Regardless of our stance on immigration control, surely we can all agree that that is unsustainable practically, financially, environmentally, or on whatever grounds we care to look at. The decade of decline in skills training, particularly vocational skills in the sectors with the greatest need, saw employers unable to fill vacancies and therefore with no choice but to either do the nation serious economic damage or face eye-watering net migration figures. The work that Skills England is doing with the Migration Advisory Committee will show us the occupation shortages, which will ensure that people can access the skills training they need to fill vacancies in those sectors, raising growth sustainability across the country and stopping reliance on overseas recruitment. I will finish with a point on dependants and a point on the practicalities of halting immigration for five years. As has been mentioned, dependants have been a key component of rising levels of immigration for many years, especially in visa categories where levels were previously very low, such as students. I absolutely sympathise with the view that our points-based immigration system needs to focus on bringing the most economically productive workers into the UK. However, we must also acknowledge that some of the highest skilled, most productive workers, just like British workers, have care responsibilities. Surely we do not want to shut out people purely because they have children or have to care for a sick or elderly parent, for example. What we need is a common-sense approach to dependants. Should a student be able to bring their whole family over with them when they study? In my opinion, no. Should a single mother with three children, who wants to work as a nurse in our NHS, be welcomed? Yes. I think the vast majority of the public support that pragmatic view. I sympathise with what I assume are the motivations of the creator of this petition: giving the UK breathing space to rebuild our infrastructure, which has been so damaged by the age of austerity, a pandemic and huge levels of net migration. But the reality is that halting immigration for several years, or even months, would simply create huge pent-up demand for visas for that period of zero migration. During that time, presumably people would still be allowed to leave the country, raising the possibility of a mass shortage in our workforce. Then, if immigration were allowed again at some point in the future, the tidal wave of applications would almost completely overwhelm not only our visa system but the infrastructure that we are most concerned about. A total stop of immigration would therefore be counterproductive to tackling the impacts that underpin this petition and so much of our national conversation around immigration. To conclude, I hope that the openness and robustness of debate we have seen today will continue. Closing down the debate around immigration with name-calling and demonisation, from whatever perspective, will close down the chance of getting to a point where we are able to address all the issues we have touched on. I welcome the Government’s choice to grasp the nettle of reforming our skills system and linking it to where job vacancies are, and I hope we can continue that debate in the months and years to come.