Anne Main welcomes a debate on migration into the EU and says it should be up to the British people to decide the pace of immigration into the UK and that can only happen if we control of our borders, which cannot be done as members of the European Union.  

Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con): Thank you, Mr Rosindell, for calling me to speak. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today.

This debate should focus on immigration and not necessarily on refugee status, because we are talking about people who wish to make a home in our country and not necessarily those who are fleeing persecution. I will therefore confine my remarks more to immigration than to refugees. I say to the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) that I would not base my views simply on what turns up in my postbag. Many surveys carried out regularly by reputable companies have shown that migration and population control is an important concern of the British public.

Joanna Cherry: Will the hon. Lady give way?

Mrs Main: No, I will not. The hon. and learned Lady had 10 minutes, and there are many people wishing to speak.

We should be talking about immigration, which includes some people with refugee status but also a large number of people who come to this country either because of their membership of the EU or because they are coming here as economic migrants. My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway) made a powerful and well informed set of comments, based on having been in the camps, not just on people writing to him in his postbag.

If this issue was not such a concern to the British public, I do not believe that even now our Prime Minister would be trying to thrash out some deal that allays the fears of the British public about our loss of control over immigration into this country as a result of our membership of the EU.

It is telling that Mr Manuel Barroso said last night in an interview that what we are trying to achieve is a form of control on immigration through benefits packages, and that his view is that that will make no difference whatsoever. I share that view, because I do not believe that people necessarily come here because they have been lured by benefits. I believe that many people come here because they wish to work. They wish to take advantage of the opportunities that this country offers and of a better economic future for themselves and their family, and there is better healthcare here, and indeed better package as a whole. Whether we can afford for a large number of people to come into this country—a number that the British public would like to see reduced—is a different debate, but I do not believe that the benefits package that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister might achieve by 18 February, however well secured, will make a jot of difference to immigration. Indeed, when my right hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration responds to this debate, I would like to hear whether he thinks such a package will make a jot of difference.

It is interesting that England—not the UK—is the second most crowded country in the European Union, if we exclude the island state of Malta, and the ninth most crowded country in the world when the city and island states are excluded. That contributes to the British public’s perception of whether, and how much, immigration into the UK is a good or bad thing.

I speak as someone with a highly desirable constituency that is surrounded by green-belt land, although it does have areas of multiple deprivation. I can assure the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West that how many houses are built to accommodate newly formed households is a source of concern, and we should look it straight in the face. These are not separate issues, they are all interlinked.

Government household projections show that in England—not Scotland, obviously—we will need to build enough housing to accommodate the additional 273,000 households a year between 2012 and 2037, which is a total of five million homes. That is a vast number of houses and it means sacrifices to things such as the green belt, which many of us have to consider as constituency MPs. It also means that there are huge pressures on jobs in certain areas, and it is no good whingeing about jobs not being available to British workers. I seem to remember Her Majesty’s Opposition saying, “British jobs for British workers”, and the reason they say such things is that they know the British public are concerned about these things.

Currently, there are 2.1—

Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab): Will the hon. Lady give way?

Mrs Main: I will give way briefly to the hon. Lady, because I do not wish to take too long.

Pat Glass: Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the great strengths of this country has been its ability to absorb and to integrate hundreds of thousands of people over the centuries? They have included who have come here to work, my family being one of them. Those people came here to work, paid their taxes, raised their children, fought for this country and died for this country.

Mrs Main: I completely agree with the hon. Lady, but it should be up to this country to decide the numbers. I do not disagree at all with what she has said; she is absolutely right. However, the British public tell me that they wish to be in control of those numbers. They also say that to many opinion pollsters, and I believe it is why the Prime Minister is currently negotiating. If they wish to make those numbers even greater, that is the decision of the British public; it should not be a decision imposed by an unelected bureaucrat in Brussels.

In total, 41.5% of the 5 million workers here who were not born in the UK were born in the EU, and most were originally from outside the EU, so some people do cross the EU and come through that route. There are currently 2.1 million EU-born workers in Britain. That accounts for a large number of people who are working and paying their taxes in this country.

British workers say that they are worried about their jobs. It is estimated that only 982,000 of the jobs that have been created recently have been for British workers. We are creating jobs and making opportunities, and that is why immigration is a big pull to our country—we are not the basket case that some EU economies are. They have not got the jobs to offer. I do not blame people for looking for jobs, but the British public expect us to discuss this issue robustly.

What number of people can we accommodate in housing? Where are we going to plan the additional housing that is needed to support and house those workers? House prices are rising because of supply and demand. In areas such as mine, which are near enough to London to commute to it, it is not a surprise that house prices are exorbitantly high, with an average house price of nearly £500,000. It is because of the pressures on getting on the housing ladder.

We are really being unfair to the British public if we do not look at the two sides of the same coin. Overall we are a prosperous country—although some areas of the country are struggling, there are no two ways about it—that offers opportunities to people in less fortunate situations. However, if those people are attracted to our country to take up the jobs that are being created as a result of our prosperity and the Government’s long-term economic plan, we have to accept that they will need housing, services and all that comes with it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham is absolutely right to have secured this debate, but we are tinkering around the edges of the issue if we are looking at red cards and a benefits-based policy. I do not suspect at all that migrants are drawn to this country because they wish to claim a few pounds in benefits. I believe that they want to come for the opportunities that I have described, and it is up to us—as it is to countries such as Australia—to decide at what pace that immigration takes place, how we can accommodate it and the numbers involved in that immigration. We can do that only when we regain control of our borders, which of course we can do only when we leave the European Union and all the constraints that it brings with it.

3.9 pm

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Earlier intervention in the same debate

Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con): My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. We must talk about these issues. He will be aware that in TheTimes and YouGov poll in January 2016—it was very recent—six out of 10 people put immigration and asylum as one of the top three troubling factors facing the country today, so if we do not talk about that as politicians in this place, we are letting our country down.

Mr Holloway: Absolutely. I read an excellent piece in The Guardian, I think, by Nick Cohen, who said that if we really want to help people who find themselves in difficulties, we have to understand that there is a difference between economic migrants and asylum seekers. Indeed, the vast majority of people who come to live in this country are the former. A friend told me earlier that 90% are economic migrants and 8% are asylum seekers.

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