It is widely accepted that the benefits of migration are largely felt at a national level, but the challenges are experienced locally, where shortage of housing can mean family homes turning into dormitories for migrant workers, accident and emergency departments can become GP waiting rooms, and schools run out of places in mid-year.
Legislation to be debated in the new year will bring in tougher checks to exclude migrants from mainstream benefits and some public services and proposes that they pay charges ‘to help the UK manage the transitional effects of migration’. The sums raised will be distributed through government offices for the regions to help defray the costs of public services for migrants.
This is a barmy proposal. Why? Entitlement checks will themselves be a likely source of racial tension, but that will be exacerbated by the unfairness of the planned new fund. Most of the present transitional effects of migration are a result of EU migrants from the accession countries. Between 2004 and 2005, Slough Jobcentre issued 9,000 new national insurance numbers, only 150 went to British nationals but 41 per cent went to Polish and Dutch nationals. EU migrants are eligible for most benefits. Under EU law they are entitled to child benefit for children who have never even been to Britain, and they may not be charged anything for entering and settling here so they will contribute nothing to the fund.
The cost of the fund will therefore be borne by work permit holders (whose numbers were due to shrink even before the global credit crunch hit our employment market) and the wives, children and elderly dependent relatives of people, many originating from the Indian subcontinent, who have been settled in Britain for a long time. These people are among the poorest in society, with more than half of Britain’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage families in the lowest income quintile. Parents may have worked at two or three low-paid jobs to be able to afford a home large enough to accommodate their family together in Britain. Extra costs will mean that people delay applying further, which can cause problems for children integrating, learning English and so on.
In Slough there are already tensions between the Polish and Pakistani communities. Pakistani landlords are resented by overcrowded Polish tenants and young men of Pakistani heritage often blame the discrimination they face in the job market on the readily available supply of Polish labour. If meeting the costs of services falls unfairly, as it will in this fund proposal, these tensions will worsen.
Perhaps that would be tolerable if the fund were likely to raise the money needed, but the promised ‘tens of millions’ will not go far. Slough has recently experienced a 10 per cent increase in the local birth rate; most of the increase is children of migrants. As a result, the town needs 11 new forms of entry in its primary schools alone; it has funding for only two. £27m capital for the extra places would quickly empty such a fund into just one small town.
And to raise even this much will require huge charges. The total immigration fees from students, work permit holders and family members raised some £180m last year, so even if costs doubled (a wife already pays £1,255, children £515 each) it would be unlikely to provide the capital to meet education expansion in the south-east of England let alone the other costs; Thames Valley Police estimate £1m extra on interpreters.
The fund will falsely raise expectations in councils, schools, police forces and primary care trusts that their extra costs will be met. The plan to distribute it on the basis of ONS figures (which extraordinarily claim that Slough’s population has declined) is doomed to failure.
Migrants pay taxes, and should be entitled to benefit in the same way as other residents. There is a case, if a particular group cost much more, to ask them to contribute – this is how direct charging and insurance works. But this charge is neither voluntary nor universal nor confined only to those who benefit; more than half of the beneficiaries make no contribution at all. The government can only retain the confidence of those who are asked to pay if they are asked to pay on a fair basis.
The people who are expected to pay into this fund know that they represent only a minority of the beneficiaries. There is, however, one respect in which resident Commonwealth citizens are different from EU citizens: they have the right to vote in general elections. If this plan goes ahead, their votes may well be used to protest at this unfair levy.