Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —[Steve McCabe.]

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise an issue of major importance to my Constituency and surrounding areas. I am delighted to see on the Treasury Bench the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, Joan Ryan. We got on well during the proceedings on the UK Borders Bill a few months ago and I hope that we have a fruitful debate today. I am also delighted that my hon. Friends the Members for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss) and for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) have been able to join me for the debate today.

The Minister might be aware that I was lucky enough to secure an Adjournment Debate in July last year on community cohesion in Cambridgeshire. It was a similar debate to this one, although not exactly the same. I hope that this debate will focus on how a national policy has been implemented without thought for the consequences for a small number of communities, in terms of the delivery of public services, adequate financial provision, local governance and the impact on community cohesion. I want to talk briefly about the policy of unprecedented large-scale migration from within the European Union, especially in the context of the lack of reliable data on which to base funding decisions, and of the impact on Peterborough. I will make several key suggestions, to which I hope that the Minister will give due consideration.

It is vital to revisit the larger political issues arising from the Government's decision to allow unrestricted migration into the United Kingdom from the eight accession countries to the European Union in May 2004. I want to make a few general observations on that. One is that, in future, we should avoid a situation in which we know so little about the people entering the United Kingdom that we fail to predict their likely numbers with any degree of accuracy. In this case, we were out by a factor of about 50. We were therefore unable to amend public policy accordingly.

It is self-evident that when a wealthy country such as the United Kingdom opens its borders to countries whose income per head is hugely lower than ours—Latvia, for example, has an income per head 40 per cent. lower than the UK average—large-scale migration will result. How did the Government fail to see that that would happen, given the obligation under the EU free movement directive for countries such as the UK to provide benefits to migrants that would exceed the real level of wages in their own country?

It bears repeating that the Government's estimate of the likely level of migration at the time, which was reiterated by the Prime Minister, was between 13,000 and 15,000. That estimate has been dwarfed by the actual numbers. According to figures released in July last year, 427,000 migrants from EU member states have registered to work here since May 2004, and most reliable estimates put the figure at between 600,000 and 700,000.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

I would be delighted to give way to my neighbour.

I am grateful to my neighbour for giving way. Does he agree that we are simply talking about figures that the Government are aware of, and that most commentators agree that a large number of people are not in the estimate system? The actual figures are therefore much larger.

My hon. Friend makes a characteristically succinct and important point. I will discuss the demonstrable flaws in the workers registration scheme in a moment, particularly in respect of dependent adults and dependent children of EU migrants, and the impact of that on the delivery of public services in Peterborough and beyond. I thank my hon. Friend for his helpful Intervention.

In the eastern region, the most recent figures obtained via the workers registration scheme to March 2007 put the number of migrant workers there at 68,020. The eastern region has received the third largest number of EU migrants after the south-east and London. Peterborough officially has the highest figures, recorded at 7,915, representing one in eight of the total for the whole eastern region, which comprises Hertfordshire, Essex, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. The figure is higher than that for migrant hot spots such as Luton, which has received 6,980 migrant workers, or for places such as Fenland, King's Lynn and Breckland. I shall say more on the specific issues relating to Peterborough later.

The East of England Development Agency's report "Migrant Workers in the East of England" estimates that between 50,000 and 80,000 migrant workers are currently resident. In the eastern region, 20,743 new national insurance numbers were issued in 2005, 27,827 in 2006, and 3,276 in the first quarter of 2007. In Peterborough, 3,320 new national insurance numbers were issued in 2005, and 5,080 in 2006—more than 8,000 in just two years, in a small city that, according to the 2001 population census, has only 156,000 citizens.

It is clear, however, that we simply do not know how many migrant workers are in the United Kingdom. The Government's worker registration scheme is seriously flawed. It fails to monitor the total number of people in the country or the number of migrants claiming benefits. It fails to capture details of those who are self-employed, those who are posted workers or the number of dependants and non-workers who have migrated to the United Kingdom.

The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, Mr. Denham, said last August:

"The number of people at the local level is often estimated at between two or three times the number the Government thinks are on the Worker Registration Scheme".

Figures from the Office for National Statistics international passenger survey show that more than 4.5 million citizens from the A8 countries—the accession countries—have visited the United Kingdom since May 2004, compared with just 1.4 million in the two years between 2002 and 2004. That figure seems incompatible even with the estimate of 700,000 new EU migrants in the UK to date.

I will now turn to the issue of benefits. In February 2004, the then Home Secretary, Mr. Blunkett promised:

"we will require accession nationals to be able to support themselves. If they are unable to do so, they will lose any right of residence and will have to return to their own country."—[ Hansard, 23 February 2004; Vol. 418, c. 24.]

In practice, that is simply not the case. If we compare benefit claims by EU migrants in the United Kingdom in a random period since May 2004—for example, the second quarter of 2005 to the second quarter of 2006—we find that tax credit claims have risen from 1,781 to more than 14,000, child benefit claims from 5,021 to 27,280, and income-based jobseeker's allowance claims from 35 to 564. That is historical data, and the figures are liable to be higher still this year. Overall, the number of successful benefit claims during that period increased from 6,853 to 42,057.

The worker registration scheme does limit migrants' access to welfare, but not for all benefits, and only for one year. The debate is not primarily about EU directives or welfare benefits. There is a strong case to be made, however, for the Government to revisit or even amend the 2004 free movement directive, as it applies to the United Kingdom. The Government maintain that they have an appropriately robust policy and a special quota scheme for agricultural workers from January this year, with respect to Romanian and Bulgarian economic migrants. In practice, that claim is dubious. There are no border checks, the individuals only have to show an up-to-date ID card, and they are entitled to stay as "visitors" for up to three months. There is little, however, to prevent them from disappearing into the twilight world of the black economy, of unscrupulous landlords and of gangmasters.

Many commentators cite, with platitudinous generalities, the contribution that European Union migrants make to the United Kingdom economy. It is possible that they make a positive net contribution by making up for skills shortages and filling the Treasury coffers with taxes, but the evidence is far from clear; it is patchy and inconclusive.

The Ernst and Young ITEM Club report, which is often quoted by Ministers, is fundamentally flawed in that it fails to take into account the fiscal impact of contingent family dependants of EU migrants. Between May 2004 and August 2006, no fewer than 36,235 dependants of EU8 migrants were registered under the auspices of the Accession Monitoring Report. Moreover, Lord Turner's Pensions Commission has already rejected as spurious the argument that the new work force will somehow assist in "easing the pensions burden". Where the ITEM Club and Lord Turner agree is on the impact that EU migrants can have in the localised Labour market—

"the downward pressure the new workers exert on real wages".

I shall return to that later, with particular reference to my Constituency.

It is a moot point whether the new work force do make a positive as opposed to a negative financial contribution to the economy. According to the Access Monitoring Report, 78 per cent. of registered workers earn between £4.50 and £5.99 per hour. That gives annual earnings of £11,800. In 2005, the average earnings of the employed working population overall were £22,000. Thus the earnings of A8 migrant workers were just over half those of the United Kingdom employed population as a whole. Measured by earnings per worker, the productivity of the A8 workers is therefore extremely low. However, they support just 17 dependants for every 100 workers, compared to 110 dependants for every 100 workers in the UK population as a whole. Average earnings per head are therefore about £10,000 for A8 registered workers and their dependants, compared to around £10,500 for UK employees and their dependants. That implies that their contribution to gross domestic product per head for the economy as a whole is probably slightly negative.

Output per migrant worker is also poor, as the workers are engaged mainly in low-productivity and low-value-added services and activities. If their productivity stays constant and the number of dependants increases, their contribution to increased GDP per head will become more negative. Their GDP and fiscal contributions would be reduced further if they had filled positions that resulted in UK workers remaining unemployed. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the number of people unemployed has increased by 280,000 over the last year, and it seems reasonable to assume that some of that increase results from A8 migration.

In October 2006, Migrationwatch UK published a detailed paper entitled "Economic contribution of A8 migrants". I hope that the Minister will not grimace too much, given that the Minister for Immigration and Asylum prayed in aid Migrationwatch during recent discussions on the UK Borders Bill, including the Third Reading debate. The report states:

"We conclude that, although immigration of people to fill low-paid positions may have limited...impact in the short-term, it is a highly negative strategy for the longer-term as it lowers productivity, will probably lower GDP per head and will lead to a fiscal deficit as the workers are joined by more dependants...In addition it will add to the strains on the country's environment, infrastructure and public services."

I now turn to the kernel of the issue: the flawed system for estimating the EU migrant population entering the United Kingdom, and for estimating where those people are settled in residence, even if only for a very short period. To its credit, the Office for National Statistics has conceded those weaknesses. Karen Dunnell, the national statistician, wrote in May 2006:

"There is now broad agreement that available estimates of migrant numbers are inadequate for managing the economy, policies and services."

In the same month, the chairman of the Statistics Commission, Professor David Rhind, wrote:

"It is clear to us that this is not a problem that can simply be left at the door of the ONS...The development of policy on immigration, monitoring the impact of current policies, and the provision of services targeted at immigrant communities may all be adversely affected by weak data."

It would not be prudent to rehearse all the arguments on analysing population statistics that have been made so powerfully by local officers and elected members of local authorities, and Members of the House, especially my hon. Friend Mr. Hands, who raised the matter in a Westminster Hall debate on 1 November last year. I pay tribute to Slough borough council for the enormous amount of work that it has done in analysing ONS population data, the under-counting of the migrant population in the borough, and the financial implications for local taxpayers and service users in its report, published in July 2006, entitled "There's no accounting for some people".

In a nutshell, and before I move on to discuss Peterborough specifically, methodologies urgently need revision, as the Minister will know. The ONS uses sub-national population projections to predict the population for each year up to 25 years into the future. The sub-national population projection for each year is calculated by ageing the population of the previous year. That is done by applying local fertility and mortality rates to calculate the projected number of births and deaths. The figure is adjusted for migration into and out of the area. Crucially, the population figures for the financial year 2007-08 use the 2003 mid-year population estimates as a starting point, but those figures are seriously flawed as the mid-2003 statistics take no account of the huge increase in inward migration following the accession of the A8 countries in May 2004; and if the original population figure or the projections are wrong, the Government's move to multi-year financial settlements—a move that is welcome to local authorities in many other respects—will seriously compound the original error.

That brings me to my constituency of Peterborough. It has a long history of welcoming and embracing newcomers, whether they are Pakistani, Italian, Irish or Portuguese. My constituents and I admire folk who want to make a new life for themselves and their families, and who are prepared to work hard and take part in—and become part of—the community. However, they also have a strong sense of fair play and they believe that the Government have a responsibility and duty to make provision for the wide-ranging ramifications of their policies.

Peterborough is a regional centre for food processing and packaging, horticulture and agriculture, and it has therefore attracted a low-wage and low-skill work force. However, although the literal and figurative fruits of that work force's labour are generated in neighbouring areas, the work force uses the services of Peterborough city council and other agencies. Ministers will know that almost 8,000 EU migrants have settled in the Peterborough area since May 2004. That is the largest number for any area in the eastern region—and that is based on flawed figures. Between 2002 and 2005, no fewer than 2,185 asylum seekers were dispersed to the city under the auspices of the National Asylum Support Service, but that was done without proper consultation with local people and, it would seem, without any accountability to this House. There was certainly no accountability to the elected representatives of Peterborough city council and others. That is Peterborough's burden, borne with good grace and forbearance. However, there is only so much hospitality that can be proffered.

Does my hon. Friend agree that if migrant communities are encouraged to go to a specific area by central Government, who fail to provide the necessary financial back-up, there is unnecessary resentment among the host community, which sometimes leads to disastrous consequences for harmonious race relations in the medium to long term?

The House will know that my hon. Friend is an assiduous representative of the neighbouring Constituency. Indeed, we share the city of Peterborough, so he will know that we have been extraordinarily fortunate as we have not been subject to the scourge of political extremism under the colours of the British National party and others who seek to stir up problems over community cohesion and racial tension. We have not gone the way of Burnley, Oldham, Bradford and other places, so he has made a telling point.

That burden is borne by my constituents. The matter may be unimportant to residents of Greater London, who may not have the same cultural affinity with the place where they live as Peterborians do. Londoners may move to another part of London or take another job, so they do not have that sense of loyalty to an area, and they certainly do not identify with a particular place. However, people in Peterborough, particularly long-term residents, identify strongly with the place where they live. They sometimes tell me that they regret what they regard as the degradation of their locality. That is not the same thing as scapegoating newcomers to the city, and they have every right to make their concerns known to their elected representatives on the city council and to their Member of Parliament.

The ONS mid-year population estimate for the city of Peterborough for 2006 is 161,000—up from 158,800 in 2003, which is a projected 1 per cent. rise. It is as if the 8,000 EU migrant workers, together with their children and adult dependants, did not exist. Because the revenue support grant awarded by the Treasury through the Department for Communities and Local Government to Peterborough city council is so dependent on accurate population statistics, the efficacy and rigour, or otherwise, of the methodology is vital. Even the East of England regional assembly concedes that the number of EU migrants in the city may be as high as 16,000. If that is true, the indicative rise in population between 2003 and 2007 is likely to be in excess of 10 per cent., but the Government's grant allocation is based on an increase of 3.7 per cent. between 2001 and 2007, leaving a cash shortfall of £3 million to £4 million, which is a huge amount for a medium-sized unitary authority with a revenue budget in the current financial year of £217 million. When the Lithuanian ambassador, Mr. Vygaudas Ušackas, visited the city before Christmas, he conceded that 1,200 Lithuanians and their families were living in Peterborough, and they are certainly not the largest national group to have come to Peterborough and the eastern region

I want to touch briefly on the practical, everyday ramifications of migration, which has proceeded with breathtaking speed in just three years, bringing unprecedented numbers. The impact has been experienced in particular in the New England and Millfield areas of the city, particularly the North, Central and Park wards. Housing is the biggest problem. Since 2004, the rules on houses in multiple occupation have been liberalised, so only larger HMOs are subject to regular inspection. We must look again at the Housing Act 2004 and the Environmental Protection Act 1990. The biggest problem in the city stems from HMOs, and particularly from overcrowding.

It is not uncommon for 10 or a dozen young men to live in one small terraced house in these areas, sometimes in desperate conditions and prey to Rachmanite landlords. That can cause problems with refuse collection and rodent infestation, as well as health and safety issues and neighbour disputes. A Cambridgeshire constabulary report published last year entitled "Policing Peterborough" drew attention to issues such as summary eviction, violence and sexual assault against women in HMOs, petty robbery and disputes within households, dangerous fire safety issues and neighbourhood tension to do with lifestyle and noise.

Let me share an experience that I and my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Cambridgeshire had on a visit last October with the regulatory authorities. We visited a restaurant in the Central ward, where a hot-bunking system was operating in the basement: half a dozen or more bunks in a tiny room were set aside for migrant workers. It was a pitiful sight: dirty, small, unpleasant bunks with rosaries and candles. They were a disgrace to modern society, and to all of us who were elected in the name of the people to represent our constituents in this House. However, that is what is happening in Peterborough, and in many other parts of the country as well.

The chair of the Labour party, the Minister without Portfolio, Hazel Blears, has correctly—and bravely, in my opinion—drawn attention to some of the pressures on community cohesion which arise, including a feeling of resentment and injustice, particularly among host communities, when immigration and migration are not managed coherently and with equanimity. The Audit Commission report of January 2007, "Crossing Borders", recognised officially community tensions centring on issues including street drinking, parking disputes and antisocial behaviour. Likewise, even the Minister for Immigration and Asylum was quoted in The Daily Telegraph in April this year as having said:

"Here are a set of changes which...have deeply unsettled the country".

On housing, it is worth mentioning that the ONS mid-2005 dwelling stock estimate for the three wards of Park, Central and North showed that there has been no increase in housing stock in the North ward in the last six years and only a 1 per cent. increase in Park and Central wards. Overcrowding is a natural consequence of there being too few properties and a huge rise in population. I should also point out to the Minister that more than 6,000 people are on the Peterborough city council housing waiting list.

This week, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government rightly bemoaned the lack of integration by some communities in the United Kingdom, and the increasing use of interpretation and translation services, the costs of which amount to more than £100 million on current estimates. Although her comments are welcome, they come at least three years too late. In the last financial year, Peterborough city council spent £121,000 on that area of work and Cambridgeshire constabulary spent £800,000 on the same part of its budget, including the specialist "language line" facility. Nationally, more than £21 million has been spent by police forces on translation and interpretation. We have not even taken into account the costs of this area of work in respect of the Courts Service, local NHS trusts and other agencies such as Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

Policing has become a more challenging and difficult undertaking in Peterborough. While the vast Majority of newcomers are decent and law abiding, it is indisputable that their influx—I use that word although I know it causes some consternation—has had an impact on crime, particularly involving motor vehicles. My hon. Friend Mr. Hayes has drawn my attention to the issue of uninsured and untaxed cars, which is a problem in his constituency.

Drink-driving figures in the Peterborough area rose by 42 per cent. in 2005 and by 25 per cent. in 2006. Of course, as most of the EU migrants in the city are young men, they are also the victims of crime—often, the perpetrators are from other ethnic or cultural groups—be they Portuguese, Pakistani or others. The primary care trust reports significant pressures on certain GP practices in the city—I have seen evidence of that myself at the Thistlemoor road practice in New England, and at the Millfield practice—on the accident and emergency department at Peterborough district hospital, and on maternity services.

Similarly, schools such as Fulbridge junior school, in Keeton road, Peterborough—its head, Iain Erskine, has shown great leadership—Beeches primary school, Queen's Drive infants school, which is just round the corner from where I live, and Gladstone primary school are having to deal with severe pressures in educating young children new to the United Kingdom and to the area, with varied cultural norms, whose first language is not English. Sixty immigrant children were enrolled just last September at Fulbridge junior school—fully 10 per cent. of the entire school roll. The resource implications are a significant challenge to both the school and the local education authority. The ethnic minority achievement grant available from the Department for Education and Skills, although welcome, simply fails to keep pace with the increase in numbers.

I want to dwell on another important issue that is serving to strain the previously harmonious nature of community relations in Peterborough: the economic impact, especially on the labour market—particularly the low-wage, low-skill sector—of such a geographically concentrated and numerous new migrant work force. At a recent conference addressing the impact of migrant workers on the Scottish economy, the deputy director of CBI Scotland said:

"We cannot fall into the trap of thinking that immigration is the sole solution to the skills problems we face. It is not an alternative to upskilling our indigenous workforce, nor should immigration be seen as an alternative to labour market policies that target those on incapacity and unemployment benefits and help them back to work. Developing the skills and abilities of the existing and future working population must be a priority."

There is a consensus on this issue. Dave Moxham, deputy director of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, supported this position, saying that

"instead of migrant workers being targeted in low skill occupations, their qualifications should be properly accredited, their language skills improved and they should be encouraged to seek out better skilled occupations higher up the jobs ladder where there is a great deal of demand. Our concern is that employers use migrant workers because they pay minimum wage, with poor terms and conditions...We are looking to business to show social responsibility by employing indigenous workers in the lower skilled jobs and we are encouraged that the CBI is aware of that issue".

There are big, well-known companies in the east midlands and the eastern region that are exploiting migrant workers and are happy to do so until they get caught.

We have certainly seen an impact in this sector in my constituency. Between 2001 and 2006, inexplicably, youth unemployment rose from 8 per cent. to 14.1 per cent. The number of people claiming jobseeker's allowance and incapacity benefit is rising month on month, and 1,500 people in the Peterborough constituency are now not in education, employment or training. That is happening in a local economy that is part of the Stansted-Cambridge-Peterborough growth corridor, which is officially recognised by the ONS as one of the fastest growing areas in the whole of England and Wales.

Sadly, we see instances of unscrupulous employers exploiting migrant workers, physically mistreating them, depriving them of their rights and undercutting wages. That fuels those workers' own resentment, which cannot be good, but the corollary is that it fuels the resentment of those whom they have displaced: the less well-educated and the less highly skilled in the host communities. That provides fertile ground for extremists and their apologists. As Professor Ted Cantle, who chaired the inquiry into the riots in the north of England in 2001, said last year:

"Community tensions are sometimes caused by the perception of competition between groups over resources...The Government needs to look with some urgency at funding areas appropriately where statistics are not keeping pace with what is happening on the ground."

That is not happening in my constituency. Peterborough city council and other agencies and stakeholders are being made to pick up the tab for a policy over which they have no control, and to cope with pressures on local public service provision and strains on community cohesion. That is neither right nor fair on my constituents. It puts at risk all that we have achieved in our city since Councillor Charles Swift, then the Labour leader of the city council, proudly welcomed the Vietnamese boat people to Peterborough more than 25 years ago.

The city council is having to use scarce resources, via a service level agreement with Cambridgeshire county council, to prepare a similar case to that of Slough about the disparity between migrant population undercount and the revenue support grant funding. It is using national insurance registrations and data from the early years team. I hope that the work done by local authorities such as Barking and Dagenham, the City of Westminster, Telford and Wrekin, Slough and others will result in a complete review of the ONS methodology in that area, under the auspices of the improving migration statistics taskforce, which will report later this year. In addition, the Greater Peterborough partnership has also asked for a study to examine what the population of the area is likely to look like in the longer term, so that it can plan effectively.

I have some suggestions for the Minister about changes in policy. We need a proper review of the methodology of the ONS in respect of the collection of migrant data. We need to consider such issues as house price increases, household size, GP registration, council tax receipts and, prosaic as it may seem, sewage flows. None of those issues is taken into account when the ONS considers population growth, especially in the migration hotspots. We also need to consider the general fertility rate in each local area to get a truer picture of the situation and be able to react with more alacrity to the change of circumstances.

Andrew Blake-Herbert, the strategic director of finance and property for Slough, has this to say about the area:

"Slough has a number of particular characteristics that make its population hard to count: it has a highly mobile population which is becoming more ethnically diverse; it is densely populated; its economy is strong and growing and its housing market is experiencing unprecedented demand."

He could have been talking about Peterborough. We need an urgent review and financial audit of public service delivery in the migrant hotspots such as Luton, Breckland, Fenland and others, where the pressure on public services is greater.

We also need to consider the efficiency or otherwise of the workers registration scheme. The university of Surrey centre for research on nationality, ethnicity and multiculturalism—a well-respected institution—postulated last year that for various reasons, not least its bureaucratic nature, the undercount on that scheme is probably some 36 per cent. In summer last year, the official figure was 427,000, so the true figure was probably nearer 525,000—a huge difference.

We also need a points system based on contemporaneous economic data from a regional analysis. That is done in Australia and it cannot be beyond the wit of Government to consider what jobs are available and what skills and training are needed in each region of the UK and change the workers registration scheme accordingly through a points system for all 27 countries. I ask the Minister to make specific reference to that in her response.

I am proud of my constituency. It is the epitome of middle England. My constituents were told that mass migration brings in taxes and increases the national wealth. Not unreasonably, they want a fair share of that wealth. I record with sadness the fact that people constantly tell me, "Peterborough is not the city that we grew up in. It's full of foreigners, and we're moving out."

I end with an anecdote reported in the Financial Times magazine of 12 May. The family of Councillor John Holdich has been in civic life in Peterborough for more than 50 years. He is a well-known figure, the Cabinet member for housing, and he was approached by an elderly resident as he walked along a street in New England. His story goes:

"One little lady came up to me in the street. She looked like somebody out of "Last of the Summer Wine". She said to me, "Do you speak English?" and I said, "Yes". She said, "That makes two of us in the whole street."

Peterborough has borne a burden for three years. It is time that the Government lived up to their rhetoric and helped the people whom I represent share that burden. My constituents deserve nothing less.

It is a great pleasure to follow my neighbour and colleague, my hon. Friend Mr. Jackson. We share a long boundary, and the boundary changes for the next election mean that a significant portion of my Constituency will be passed over to him.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough on securing this debate, and on the remarkable tour de force to which he treated the House. His speech was thorough, wide-ranging and detailed. He was speaking on behalf of his constituents, as shall I in my remarks. We are both lucky that this Adjournment Debate has begun so early. I do not wish to cause the Minister to have a late dinner, but I relish the fact that I do not have to rush to fit my observations into half an hour. I shall be as brief as possible, but I hope that the Minister will be able to give an ample response.

We are dealing with a very important matter, for all the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough set out. Every week, our constituents tell us that they perceive a problem and they want their elected representatives to do something about it. If we tell them that we cannot do very much because these are EU rules, that the EU has been enlarged and these people are entitled to come here, our constituents are not interested in such fine points.

Does my hon. Friend agree that when we try to explain that the problem arises from EU regulations, our constituents say that we should have fought for the interests of Britain when the deals were negotiated?

My hon. Friend makes an excellent and valid point. The Conservative Administration joined the single market, which ensured that there would be free movement of labour and people. However, the present Government missed a trick in the enlargement negotiations when they did not make absolutely certain that we could control the flow of migrant workers. Other countries managed it much more efficiently and better than we have done.

Such criticism could indeed be levelled at the Government, because they underestimated the whole problem. They underestimated not only the numbers who would come, but the type of migrant worker who would come. The accepted knowledge at the time was that they would be single people, that they would be fairly transient and temporary, and that they would come to work for a period and then go home. That is not the case; there is no such evidence in my Constituency. From listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough, we know that it is certainly not the case in Peterborough either—or, I suspect, in North-West Cambridgeshire.

My speech and that of my hon. Friend will, no doubt, hit our local papers and, no doubt, our political opponents will say, as they did the last time that I spoke on this issue, "Ah, they're playing the racist card again." This is nothing to do with racism. We are the same race as our friends from Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and other places in eastern Europe. We are almost the same people. The difference is that they speak a different language, so we cannot communicate with them. They also have very different cultures, which, of course, in every-day community life, are an abrasive front in the contact between indigenous peoples in our small towns and cities and the migrant community.

Of course, as my hon. Friend rightly pointed out, the Government are finally waking up to the problem, but three years too late. The burden has been carried by local communities, such as mine and those in Peterborough, for all these years, and only now do we find—this is to be encouraged—that some Ministers are speaking up about the problems. The Minister for Immigration and Asylum recognised the difficulties and the fact that, to quote my hon. Friend, some communities in this country are deeply unsettled as a result of migration from eastern Europe.

The Labour party chairman was also quoted by my hon. Friend as saying that there are now difficulties in our communities. Only the other day, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government said that migrant workers must learn English. That is a bit rich after all this time and all the problems that are associated with providing translation services to people who turn up to GP surgeries, for example. Those people know their rights, and they insist that the doctors and nurses bring in translators. That has been going on for years, and no one has done anything about it.

I recently visited my local citizens advice bureau, which wrote back to me after our meeting to say that it has become a port of call for migrants who have been abused by rogue gangmasters, and that the issues that they

"bring to the Bureau relate largely to employment and housing rights plus entitlement to benefits"— nothing new there.

It continued:

"Employment and housing are often linked as the gangmasters supply both the jobs and the accommodation, much of which", as my hon. Friend has pointed out,

"is deeply unsatisfactory."

Those at the CAB say:

"We need access to interpreters and translators and the translation of benefit and tax credit forms into other European languages. Our own funding does not allow us to pay for these services and we feel that more should be provided by central Government."

Armed with that letter, I wrote to a Minister, only to be told that the funding for CABs was flexible enough to cope with those new pressures: end of story—no help, no recognition of the problem, so my local CAB soldiers on.

As I pointed out earlier, the migrants are not just single people who are accommodated in houses in multiple occupation, but families who are increasingly moving into our communities for permanent settlement. These people are welcome. They are welcome in our factories. They work hard. They have terrific reputations. Many of them are positive attributes to the community. But the mere fact that families are now coming into our communities is creating a burden, particularly in relation to the provision of services.

I would like to highlight the problem, as I see it, in the local education system. I toured some of my schools recently and I was surprised by the number of children who speak English as an additional language—EAL as it is called—not only in secondary schools, but primarily in primary and infant schools. I take my hat off to teachers for the fantastic work that they do. They have embraced the problem and have not moaned or castigated anybody; they have just got on with the job, because these are children. They do not see them as foreign children; they see them as children who need to be educated in the best possible way given the resources available.

Some of the head teachers—in particular, Lesley Mardle of the Nene infant school—have sat down with their staff and written protocols. They have written down a way to embrace the local community, liaise with parents and make sure that both sides understand what is needed. That protocol is being adopted by the LEA—Cambridgeshire county council—as a blueprint for the way in which to face up to such difficulties.

Will my hon. Friend pay tribute to Catholic schools around the country, which are embracing the Polish community? In my Constituency, St. Augustine's Roman Catholic secondary school is taking the initiative in engaging with those communities and helping them to feel at home. It is employing local people who can help with language teaching to enable people to integrate.

I am sure that that is indeed true. I am not just talking about my schools; I am sure that schools in other areas, particularly Catholic schools, are doing the same thing. The Catholic church in Wisbech in my Constituency is overjoyed at the congregation that it gets from the Polish community. It has two sittings on a Sunday simply to accommodate people. In fact, there is quite a joke about that. The first time the Poles arrived, they looked at the town and went to the biggest church, which of course is the parish church, which would have been the Catholic church before Henry VIII got stuck into it. So, all these Poles turned up at the Church of England church and the vicar was absolutely overjoyed. His congregation must have multiplied overnight by a factor of about eight. Then they realised that they were in the wrong place and duly found the Catholic church on the other side of town.

I have done some research as a result of my findings in my local schools. I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough that we cannot really rely on the figures because they always lag behind the situation on the ground, but this year there are some 2,176 EAL learners in primary schools and 1,862 in secondary schools in Cambridgeshire. That is a significant rise on the 2006 figures, which were 1,840 in primary schools and 1,263 in secondary schools. In my main town of Wisbech, in North-East Cambridgeshire, which has seen the largest proportion of migrant workers, there are 314 EAL learners in primary schools and 161 in secondary schools.

In Wisbech, most of those EAL learners are concentrated at the Nene infants school, which I have already mentioned, as well as at Orchards school, Peckover school, the Queens school and, to a lesser degree, the Clarkson infants school. As I have said, those schools have been proactive in welcoming the new arrivals, providing them with access to the curriculum, and recruiting and training support staff for them. However, in my correspondence with them, the officers responsible for children's services at the county council have confirmed that the county is financially stretched when it comes to coping with the large influx.

More Government support and funding are needed to recognise that. In 2004 the Department for Education and Skills reduced the Cambridgeshire ethnic minority achievement grant by some 30 per cent. Furthermore, it appears that an extra £400,000, which was announced in late 2006 and earmarked to address the increasing number of EAL learners, has now been allocated for central training at a national level, rather than moving down to the coal face for local authority use where the difficulties are experienced.

As my hon. Friend said, there are assimilation problems. It is no good the Minister saying when she replies to the debate, "We know you have a problem, but there are other parts of the country with even bigger problems," meaning that the Government are likely to direct the resources primarily to areas where there are huge numbers of population involved or, dare I say it, where their own Members of Parliament are affected. I know that the Minister does not like that, but it is true. How many hospitals are the Government closing in areas where there are Labour Members of Parliament, as opposed to areas where there are Conservative Members of Parliament? [Interruption.] I hear the tutting from the Whip. In my day Whips were supposed to be quiet.

What matters is the proportionality of the migrant worker population. I have small towns in my constituency—Wisbech, March, Whittlesey and Chatteris. Wisbech is particularly influenced by the problem because it has the larger number of food processing and packaging industries. It is to those industries, as my hon. Friend said, that the low-paid worker is attracted. The problem is the little town centre being taken over by people who do not speak English, resulting in a feeling of alienation or pressure. As my hon. Friend pointed out, there are problems in the community in accepting an influx of people who are not seen by my constituents as clearly and obviously making a big effort to assimilate. On that count, those with children are making a much bigger effort, and a more successful effort, than those without.

As my hon. Friend observed, we now have houses in multiple occupation, but the law does not deal with the problem effectively. When I speak to my council about it, officials say that they know what they should be doing, but they do not know where those houses are. Unless people complain and they go and investigate, they do not know which houses to take action on. In some cases officials turn up at the time that shifts are changing over. They find only three or four people in the house, but of course another three or four are working. There are eight people living in the house, as officials would find if only they went at the right time—but they do not, because like other people they finish work at 5 or 5.30 pm. We are not addressing the problem and it is only a matter of time before there is a serious fire and loss of life at a house in my constituency. It will not be because the council has not been warned.

One of the problems that the CAB put to me, which I have looked into in more detail, is the fact that most of the migrant worker labour is organised by gangmasters—or agencies, as they call themselves. The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 relates only to food processing and packaging. We had a ten-minute Bill today which sought to extend it to cover constructions workers. It should be all-embracing, so that any worker who is involved in finding work through a gangmaster or an agency comes within the remit of the Act. The regulatory body should be given more money, more teeth and more power to step in, because there is, as my hon. Friend rightly pointed out, a great deal of abuse by companies in respect the new labour force.

Of course, the gangmasters have bought a great deal of the housing stock so they control the accommodation of the workers. When the payroll comes to the gangmaster from the company, he or she deducts huge amounts of money for accommodation before the migrant worker is paid. It is a massive abuse and no one seems to be doing anything about it. That is a tragedy. If those workers are welcome in our society and are doing the work that we want them to do, what kind of society do they think they have come to when they are exploited in that way? Much needs to be done. The unions have written several papers to the Government supporting the rights of workers in that predicament.

Not only do the gangmasters charge exorbitant rents to the people on their books, but, by buying up properties, they have made house prices rise much more quickly. There is only a limited supply and those people are grabbing whatever they can. They can put three, four, five or more people into them at high rents, so they can afford to pay above the market price for the house. That has affected not only the house price market, but the level of rents in my communities. I now find myself receiving people regularly at my surgeries who cannot afford to pay rent in the private sector. Rents are so far above the rent allowance that is provided that those people cannot go into the private rented sector. Therefore, the council waiting list is increasing all the time and, of course, we are not building anything like enough houses for rent in the public sector. There is an increasing housing problem and increasing resentment on the part of people in the local community that they cannot get a council house and cannot afford to rent privately.

That is a growing problem. People come to my surgeries and rightly look me in the eye and say, "What are you going to do about it?" It is only in debates such as this that we can make those points. I hope that the Minister will take on board some of those points and actively seek, through her Department, to do something about them. I recognise that this is a multi-issue situation. There are overlapping problems for various Departments to look at. It is probably not possible for one Minister or one Department to solve all of them in one go, but co-ordination is needed to ensure that people are talking to each other in the right way.

The people who seem to be benefiting from the situation are, as my hon. Friend pointed out, the companies that are taking on labour exclusively through gangmasters and agencies. As each new wave of migrants comes in, the pressure is on the existing worker to take a slightly lower wage—because if he or she does not do the job at that rate, there are plenty of people who have just come into the country who will. Therefore, there are problems on that front, too, and they are beginning to stir up problems within the migrant worker communities, as well as between the migrant workers and the indigenous community. The gangmasters are milking the system. Not all of them are unscrupulous and rogues, but many are, so we need to tighten up the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act to ensure that there is real discipline and that the regulatory authority steps in to ensure that those people are receiving at least the minimum wage, if not more.

If the companies are benefiting, their shareholders are benefiting. What are they doing in return? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can see. They might say that they pay the business rate. Well, that goes into a central pot. If they are making extra profit, no doubt they will lose that anyway if they are multinationals, so I cannot see what those people are giving back to the local community. They are just milking the low-wage migrant worker and not putting anything back into the community. They are as responsible as anyone else for the problems that we face. They need to ensure that wages are at the right level and that their workers are looked after.

Someone came to my surgery and said, "My daughter went to an agency to get a job and was told by the gangmaster, 'If you don't speak Polish I can't put you on the assembly line, because they all speak Polish, they won't accept you, and you won't be able to communicate with them in any way.'" If that is happening, it is no wonder that youth unemployment is on the rise. Local people cannot now get jobs in the factories in which historically they worked. I have tried each and every way to find a solution to the problem. As far as I am aware, in the past five or six years no new company or organisation has arrived in my constituency. There has been some expansion in jobs, but not a great deal. Five or six years ago such low-paid jobs were done by local people; now, they are done by migrant workers.

Where have the indigenous population gone? These are people who do not have cars and cannot travel to Peterborough or Cambridge to find a job, so where are they in the local community? I table questions about invalidity benefit, jobseeker's allowance and so on, but there seems to be no correlation that defines where those displaced workers have gone. Many may have been women who were part-time and are now sitting at home or working in the black economy—nobody benefits from that—or are unemployed so that the income into that household has diminished. Let us not kid ourselves: there is displacement. It is no good saying—we hear this argument all the time—"They're coming in to do the jobs our people don't want to do." In my constituency, they are doing jobs that my people did a few years ago. I am not saying that everything should change—we cannot go back—but I want the Minister to understand that the people who have been displaced deeply resent what has happened to them.

Nevertheless, there is some hope on the horizon and there are positive things to say. Only the other week, I opened the office of a new private enterprise—small at this stage, but I hope that it will grow—called Cambridgeshire Training and Consultancy Ltd., which has opened up a facility to teach English to migrant workers. It is a private enterprise and receives no grant from anywhere, so it is charging migrant workers who are prepared to pay to learn English. Not all migrant workers are a problem—many want to learn English and to get on. It advised me today that it is extending its services to give advice on the law and what the local police would expect of somebody.

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful case, as one would expect from such an experienced Member who has been in the House for 20 years. As regards teaching English in my Constituency, Peterborough college of adult education and Peterborough regional college were completely full and many times oversubscribed last September. At the same time, the local authority, the police and others are being prevailed on to spend thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money on translation and interpretation services. Does he agree that that is a perverse situation?

I do indeed. I suspect that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has come to the same conclusion, namely, that it would be far better to invest in English language courses at further education colleges and other places instead of having these huge translation costs. There are not many people we can call on, and it is very expensive. Worse than that, as there are not many of them, it takes time to arrange to bring someone in, which delays the whole process of giving advice and helping these people with the information that they need. So I take my hat off to the small company and I wish it luck. It has no public funding as such, although it has approached various bodies and made applications for funding. We could encourage such activity within the training remit, and I believe that the migrant community would respond positively to that.

We have had a lengthy debate and it is time for the Under-Secretary to make a fist of replying to some of the points. I do not want to leave the impression that all is lost, or to be alarmist and say that the breakdown of the social fabric is imminent. That may eventually happen if we do not tackle some of the problems, but there is time to face up to them and allocate resources. Understanding is also vital. Teachers, citizens advice bureaux and people in local authorities are soldiering on, doing their best and wanting to do more, but without the resources to deliver.

If we want people to assimilate, remain in this country for the longer term and be part of our society and contribute to it, we have a responsibility not only to be welcoming, but to provide facilities to make the transition as easy and quick as possible.

I congratulate Mr. Jackson on securing the debate. The issues that he raised are important and I am pleased that we had a substantial amount of time in which to cover them. I thank him for his gracious comments about our useful discussions when we served together on the Committee stage of the UK Borders Bill. That was a fine example of good scrutiny. The Bill that left for the other place was well served by our work in Committee and on Report. It relates to some of the issues that the hon. Gentleman mentioned today.

I also thank the hon. Gentleman for the calm and considered way in which he made his points. He obviously put a great deal of work into preparing his remarks, and that has been helpful. Let me comment at the outset on something that he said at the end of his contribution. It is not my view that it is racist to discuss matters of migration and immigration—the Home Secretary said that, or words to that effect, many months ago. We should bear that in mind. I am therefore happy to have the debate. However, I complimented the hon. Gentleman on the presentation of his contribution because that is important, and I bear in mind his remarks about extremist parties, not least the British National party.

I regret the fact that the hon. Members for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) and for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr. Goodwill), who made interventions, are no longer present—I hoped that they might be able to remain to hear some of the responses. However, I hope that they will avail themselves of Hansard later.

I thank Mr. Moss, who made a valuable contribution to the debate. He is right to say that the issues that the hon. Member for Peterborough raised ranged across several Departments. For that reason, I am not in a position to cover all the subject matter and detail that have been presented to the House today. Those issues of cross-departmental working and agencies working together in local areas are important. Many of the issues raised about migrant communities—their possible transitional impacts and matters of integration, for example—obviously require a multi-agency and cross-Government response. I will talk later about some of the relevant developments that are well past the pipeline and on the verge of springing into life. I hope that that will help to provide answers to some of the points that hon. Gentlemen have raised.

I visited Peterborough just a few weeks ago when I saw the new passport interview centre. It was the first time that I had ever visited Peterborough and I must say that I thought it a very nice town centre with a very pleasant feel and nice atmosphere. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on representing such a nice place.

Migration from the European Union has certainly brought significant benefits to the United Kingdom, in terms of its contribution to our labour market and economy as well as to the diversity and vibrancy of our culture. Recent expansion of the EU has seen an increase in the numbers coming to the UK and a corresponding increase in the benefits that this brings. However, although we believe that migration is of benefit to the UK, the public rightly expect it to be managed and controlled. We have therefore taken a considered approach to the way in which nationals from the accession states can access our labour market. Our approach allows us to monitor the impacts and use the information to inform future policy areas.

I am aware that Conservative Members were not suggesting that migration brought no benefits or that there should be no migration. It is important to take a balanced view. Hon. Gentlemen made some valid points, but I do not agree with what they said on some other issues. I hope that we can explore that a little further.

On the monitoring of migration from accession states, the UK Government have set up two schemes to manage the migration of workers. The hon. Member for Peterborough has already mentioned the worker registration scheme, which applies to the eight states that acceded in 2004. That requires workers to register their employment and it restricts their access to benefits. Those arrangements were right for the time and have delivered major economic benefits, with nationals from those countries contributing billions to the economy.

The worker registration scheme is effective at providing a profile of those A8 nationals who joined our labour market as employees and at restricting access to income-related benefits. The scheme provides information at an aggregate level on the profile of A8 nationals coming to the UK for employment. It gives us a profile of their age, gender, dependants, the sectors that they register to work in, occupations, hours of working, wages, intended length of stay and geographical distribution. It does not—nor was it intended to—provide information on the stock of migrants in the country, because it does not count those leaving or the number of self-employed migrants.

The WRS restricts access to income-based benefits—income-based jobseeker's allowance, income support, pension credit, housing or council tax benefit, tax credit and homelessness assistance. It is actually very effective in restricting access to benefits. Only 130,030 of all those who have registered with the WRS—that is, some 632,285, as the hon. Member for Peterborough said—have applied for tax-funded, income-related benefits. Of those applications, 2,648 have been allowed. That is important information, because it is important to keep these matters in perspective. It would be wrong to give the impression that large numbers of people were accessing benefits, because that is not the case. We need to give our constituents that reassurance.

The hon. Gentleman made a point about the number of people coming in, and it is probably appropriate to say something about that. He referred to the underestimate, and mentioned a figure of between 13,000 and 15,000. This point has been raised before; indeed, I have addressed it before in an Adjournment Debate in Westminster Hall. Those figures were never part of an official Home Office estimate. They were the result of one piece of research undertaken by University college London, among a number of others, that helped to inform the Government's decision on the free movement of workers. That is why those pieces of research were submitted. However, that was not official Home Office research, and those were not figures that we developed. I understand that University college London developed them on the basis of a view that other member states would not restrict access, which explains why there is such a difference.

The WRS tells us about those who are coming into this country from the A8 accession states to work but, as hon. Members know, we do not know how many are leaving to return home. We do not have that kind of information because in 1994 the embarkation controls were, to all intents and purposes, cancelled. Obviously, we are working towards being able to count in and count out all the people who enter and leave the United Kingdom, through the strengthening of our borders and through the development of programmes such as e-Borders. Those are important developments that I believe are well supported by Opposition Members.

I take it from what the Minister has just been saying that the Government have the means to track these migrant workers who are on the registration scheme, in terms not only of the work that they take on but of any benefits that they draw, or may seek to draw further down the line. I would like confirmation that we have the facility to determine that, say, X per cent. of those on the scheme have drawn benefits. I should also like to raise a couple of points relating to my Constituency.

First, a family with children were allowed to rent a housing association property and, of course, received housing benefit from the local council—much to the indignation of the person who was berating me about it in my surgery. When I contacted the council, I was told that they were perfectly entitled to do this, and that the council could not differentiate between a worker in that situation and someone who had been local for some time. Secondly, a complaint reached me that a Slovakian family were drawing housing benefit for private rent. Will the Minister confirm that both those situations are normal in the current climate?

As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, if someone presents themselves to claim a benefit, an interview takes place in which information is exchanged. If the person is not entitled to that benefit, they will not receive it. On tracking, as I have said, we do not have figures on people who have left, so we are not able to track people out. We need to be able to do that, so we are working to develop that capability as quickly as possible.

The Minister is proceeding in a typically reasonable way to answer the point that my hon. Friend Mr. Moss and I have highlighted. Given that she has sought to disavow the university of London study on the likely number of EU migrants who came to the UK, does she agree that it is quite an admission that the Government had no empirical or academic evidence whatever to predict the number of EU migrants who would come to the UK? Had such research taken place under the auspices of the Government, it would have assisted them—and any Government, of any party—to direct public policy towards those local authorities that have experienced such issues and pressure points.

I did not say that we had no information—I am not sure that it can be called evidence, as projections are not what I would refer to as evidence. Clearly, pieces of work were done to inform the decisions, and Ministers received that work, and requested some of it, from our policy officials. As I have said, we think that we made the right decision about the A8. We stand by that decision and the benefits that it has brought to our economy. That is not to say that situations do not change, or that we do not need to take account of transitional impacts; I fully acknowledge that that is the case.

I do not think that the admission is strange—we do not have a crystal ball. Obviously, looking ahead, a lot of work is going on, as it did in relation to the accession of Bulgaria and Romania. In that case, we made the right decisions about restricting access to our labour market. The information that we can get, not least from the worker registration scheme, which does provide some evidence, enables us to do that better. The decision about the A2 was not taken because we thought that we got it wrong on the A8; we think that we got it right. The benefit to our economy is evidence of that. Some three years have passed since the A8 accession, and it is now evident that we have a growing population and more older people in the work force. It was therefore right to take a different decision in relation to the A2 accession.

I beg the House's indulgence, as my next point, in respect of EU migrants with criminal records, will be slightly controversial. The Minister was mentioned in dispatches not long ago, in The Sunday Times, for drawing to her officials' attention—perhaps it was the other way round—that 45,000 people who had criminal convictions or were engaged in some criminal activity were likely to come into this country from Romania and Bulgaria. Does she regret the Government's decision not to take part in the pilot project to share criminal records data between some European Union countries? Is she in a mood to be the sinner repenting on that issue?

rose—

Order. I think that we are in danger of straying from the particular to the general. The debate is supposed to be about Peterborough and Cambridgeshire, but it seems to be moving on to a national basis. I merely issue that cautionary word.

I will certainly take note of your cautionary word, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Members have raised the issue of crime in relation to Peterborough and Cambridgeshire, and I trust that anyone who commits a crime in this country will feel the full force of the law wherever their origin and whatever their status.

Following the accession of Bulgaria and Romania, safeguards were introduced in relation to issues such as those raised by the hon. Member for Peterborough. That was unprecedented in the European Union, but we believe that it was the right decision at the time. As the hon. Gentleman will know, we are working hard with our European Union partners to bring about greater co-operation on exchange of data. I am not talking about access to data on a hit/no hit basis; I am talking about protecting the privacy of our citizens, while also affording them greater protection by ensuring that information—which is one of the most important tools that we can give our police and law enforcement agencies—can be exchanged. I am afraid that crime knows no borders, and we must be able to allow our law enforcement agencies to work together across borders. Such measures will undoubtedly benefit the hon. Gentleman's constituents, and those of the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire.

I have described the workers registration scheme as one of the ways in which we monitor workers from EU accession states. There is another scheme covering workers from Bulgaria and Romania. As I have said, it was decided that while we assessed the implications of the accession of the A8 countries, it would be desirable to impose greater limits on workers from Bulgaria and Romania. It is right for the Government to respond when issues relating to transitional impacts are raised, not least by Opposition Members. I draw no distinction between listening to my hon. Friends and listening to Opposition Members who raise matters about which they are concerned on behalf of their constituents, and the services and infrastructure that support life in their constituencies—and frankly, I resent the remarks of the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire, which were rather out of keeping with the tone of our exchange. I dispute them as well. I think it behoves any Government to serve all the people, whoever their Member of Parliament may be and to whatever party that Member of Parliament may belong. I am pleased to be able to work with Members across the Chamber on issues such as this, and I think it important that we are able to do so. It is important to our constituencies as well.

Having received a mild rebuke from the Minister, I should point out that I prefaced my remarks with the word "may". I said "they may", not "they will".

That is a useful clarification, for which I thank the hon. Gentleman.

Low-skilled A2 workers have been restricted to existing quota schemes to fill vacancies in the agricultural and food-processing sectors. I point out to the hon. Member for Peterborough that we cannot introduce a points-based system for European Union states. We may as well be completely open about that, because it is a fact, and he knows it. He knows that that is related to the point that the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire made about freedom of movement and freedom of labour. Those policies did not just somehow leap into being 10 years ago, and it is not just Government Members since 1997 who signed up to them. As the hon. Member for North-East Cambridgeshire pointed out, freedom of movement and freedom of labour are policies that the Conservative Government signed up to, and that we support.

I also point out to the hon. Member for Peterborough that his view may not reflect his party's view, or the view of his Front-Bench colleagues. The free movement directive was transposed into UK law by the Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2006, which came into force on 30 April 2006. His party did not pray against the regulations, so I can only assume that if it does not go so far as to support the regulations, at least it does not oppose them. Perhaps he wants to raise those points with his Front-Bench colleagues, rather than with me.

The Minister is now encouraging me, on the political front, to make sure that she does not get away with all sorts of things in Hansard. She said that we did not pray against the regulations, but she will admit that they were introduced as a statutory instrument that was dealt with under the negative procedure, of which hundreds are printed every day. I would not for one moment say that my Front-Bench colleagues missed the regulations, but given that the issue is important, praying against a statutory instrument is not quite the same as having a debate under the affirmative procedure, or a debate on the Floor of the House.

The original Bill that included the power to introduce the statutory instrument, subject to negative procedure, was common legislation that passed through the House. Legislation was passed in a similar way by the hon. Gentleman's party, in the many years in which it was in government. I do not accept what he said; he is talking about a procedure of the House that is not seen to be inappropriate or inadequate. On many days of the week, we find ourselves in Committee Rooms off the Committee Corridor dealing with statutory instruments that have been prayed against by his party, so I think that my point is valid, and that his comments on the issue are not.

I am touched that the Minister believes that my Front-Bench colleagues hang on my every word when it comes to formulation of EU and home affairs policy. On a serious note, she must agree that there is intrinsic merit in the suggestion, because it involves the exact system that was applied in respect of citizens from outside the European economic area who seek to come to the United Kingdom. That system was lauded by the Minister for Immigration and Asylum. If the scheme can work for non-EU citizens, it must have inherent merit, notwithstanding the possible legal issues.

The hon. Gentleman invites me to go well beyond the subject of the debate, but the points-based system, which I will come to, is an important development for all our constituents, including his. It applies to third countries—those outside the EEA—and we do not have the same relationship with those countries as we do with countries in the EU. There is not the same level of reciprocity, in terms of our citizens having free movement and free access to labour. Many of our citizens go to EU countries and avail themselves of those rights, just as there are EU citizens who come here. It is not a comparable situation, and I do not accept the merit of what the hon. Gentleman says, because I think that our relationship with the European Union is crucial to our country and to our economy.

We should not seek to turn the clock back on that relationship but, as I said, I support the proposition that the public expect migration to be controlled to meet our needs. The Government must endeavour to control it.

In introducing a points-based system for third countries—we have limited Bulgarian and Romanian workers to agricultural and low-skilled work and removed the right of third-country workers to come in and fill those jobs on the accession of the A2—we have demonstrated our ability to deal with migration from third countries and accommodated the fact that we have a different relationship with European Union countries. Knowing that there would be an increase in low-skilled workers from Bulgaria and Romania, we restricted the employment that they could take to agricultural and food processing work. Meanwhile, we removed the right of third countries to fill those roles. That is a good way to manage migration, and it demonstrates an important way forward.

The schemes in the agricultural and food processing sectors are necessary, as I said, and we may continue to need them. It is right that we should monitor them to ensure their continuing relevance. We will therefore undertake a cross-Government review of the restrictions on A2 nationals to inform our future approach. On accession, citizens of new member states gain the right to free movement within all EU states. The terms of accession mean that member states cannot impose more stringent terms and conditions on individuals than existed before accession. We believe that such a proposal is neither viable nor desirable, and that accession is managed most effectively by using the type of schemes that we have implemented. Our approach to EU accession, in conjunction with the points-based system for migration from outside the EU, will ensure that the UK continues to have a labour market that supports economic growth.

The hon. Member for Peterborough raised the issue of statistics and the need to improve the data. The Labour Force Survey is the principal source of employment statistics, information on the UK household population and breakdown by country of birth. From October 2007, following the introduction of modernised labour force survey processing systems, the Office for National Statistics plans to release improved data, consistent with the latest population estimates, which we all welcome. When calculating the formula grant allocations, the Department for Communities and Local Government uses the best data available that treat all authorities consistently. Population projections and estimates are produced by the ONS, which always focuses on ways in which it can improve those statistics. The improvement to the labour force survey processing systems will assist with that. The calculation of sub-national population projections and population estimates is a matter for the ONS, and queries about their derivation and accuracy must be addressed to it directly. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will do that, if he has not already done it.

I should like to respond to what the hon. Members for Peterborough and for North-East Cambridgeshire said about community cohesion, as it is an issue that we take seriously. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government set up the Commission on Integration and Cohesion under the chairmanship of Dara Singh, the chief executive of Ealing council. We expect the commission's report tomorrow, and we await it with great interest. I am heartened by what Mr. Singh has already said about the importance of a shared language and sense of identity. We in the Home Office have done much to promote that by introducing the new requirements on people seeking to settle here, that they are able to speak English and know something about life in the UK, and by introducing citizenship ceremonies. I can tell Members from my own experience of attending such a ceremony that they are uplifting and moving occasions which do a great deal to instil a sense of shared identity and an appreciation of the privilege of UK citizenship.

It is important that we move from a requirement to speak English for citizenship to a requirement to speak English for those wishing to settle here. If we expand it in that way, we will bring many more people into the net. There has been much evidence to show the importance of speaking the language, not least in respect of employment opportunities. In that context, my comments are of relevance to all migrants, not only those from EU accession states.

We are aware that impacts arise from large-scale migration, and in order better to understand them we have decided to set up a migration impacts forum. I hope that it will address some of the points made about the need to work across Government and in a multi-agency manner, and the need for local agencies and local government to be able to talk directly to central Government on such matters.

The migration impacts forum will have a fourfold task. It will consider information from its members about the social benefits of migration and any transitional impacts or adjustment requirements that might derive from migration. It will identify and share good practice in managing such transitional or adjustment requirements. It will bring together existing evidence about the impacts of migration. It will also suggest areas for Government research on the impacts of migration. Therefore, it will address a number of the concerns of the hon. Member for Peterborough.

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way; she has been extremely generous in allowing interventions. What she says is good news, but she uses the word "will". Should I take it from that that the body will be formed at some point in the future, or is it up and running? If it is not, when will it be formed?

That is a valid question. The migration impacts forum's first meeting will be on 21 June, which is next week, at which the rest of the forum's membership will be agreed. It is moving forward rapidly. We expect it to work in partnership with the migration advisory committee, in that it will learn from the committee's information and advice to Government regarding skills shortages and gaps, and what we need from where in respect of migration. The MAC and the MIF working together will be an important development in managing the issues raised in the debate and in enabling us to manage migration and meet our needs in that regard.

We have invited senior and experienced public service providers and representatives of other key sectors of the economy to be members of the forum. Their expertise will cover policing and law and order, health and social care, housing—which has been much mentioned—and education. There will also be senior figures from the TUC, the CBI, the Government offices for the regions and the voluntary sector. We also intend to ensure that at least one representative is based in each of the countries and regions of the United Kingdom, and that local authorities are engaged.

The forum will meet quarterly and will be chaired by my hon. Friends the Minister for Immigration and Asylum and the Minister for Local Government, who has responsibility for communities; that is an example of important cross-Government working. As I have said, the forum will meet for the first time on 21 June, when we will announce its membership. Its work will be in the public domain and we believe that it will provide a major contribution to the important debate on the impacts of large-scale migration on our communities and public services. I am glad that Opposition Members welcome that important development.

We have announced plans for the transformation of the Border and Immigration Agency—the immigration and nationality directorate, as was. Part of the transformation process has involved the recent appointment of six new regional directors, who will have real authority, freedom and flexibility to improve performance and local accountability. That will give local communities a much stronger sense of how the agency is performing and how decisions affect people in their area. The directors will focus on delivering joined-up immigration services and will lead joint working with other services agencies at a local level. That is a very important development in ensuring that impacts at local level really are known about, considered and taken into account.

I want to mention a project that the hon. Member for Peterborough might have referred to in previous debates. Peterborough city council, which runs a new arrivals project, successfully applied in 2004 to the Treasury's invest to save initiative. It secured funding of some £2.2 million from 2004-05 to 2006-07, so the funding is still current. The project aimed to create a new model for managing new arrivals in the city, with a net saving to the national and local economy, and to deliver long-term benefits to agencies and communities engaged in this process. Nine individual projects were established to contribute to the integration of new arrivals and increased cohesion in the city. They focused on a resource centre for new arrivals, interpretation and translation, information and computer technology, citizenship and orientation training, training in awareness, education, celebration events in schools, and enhanced health and community capacity. We should congratulate Peterborough city council on its success in bidding for that money and putting those projects into action. Given what the hon. Gentleman has said, they have been needed and have served a good purpose.

The Minister prompts me to pay great tribute to the manager of the New Link project in Lincoln road, Leonie McCarthy, who also happens to be a member of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion. She has done a fantastic job. I record for the House's benefit that we have spent a very difficult six months securing ongoing revenue funding for New Link. We were told, as elected Members of Parliament and councillors, that it was one-off funding that would not continue past 1 April 2007. It has taken the Intervention of the East of England Development Agency to continue that funding. I do not want to rain on the Minister's parade, but securing that funding in order to carry on the superb work of New Link has been like pulling teeth.

I am very pleased that the one-off funding enabled all this to be put in train, and I congratulate New Link on securing further funding. A very thorough process always has to be gone through in securing revenue funding, because public money has to be well spent and spent where there is need. However, I congratulate the project and the city council on securing the funding and making that provision.

We have implemented a comprehensive regime that provides for the effective management of migration from the EU in terms of access to the labour market and benefits. Illegal working has been mentioned and I hope that the hon. Gentlemen who have spoken will appreciate that we are increasing enforcement and bearing down on illegal employers and illegal migrants. We have increased sanctions, especially for knowingly employing illegal workers. Some small employers just have chaotic systems, but others knowingly employ illegal workers. The significant sanctions will include unlimited fines and up to two years' imprisonment, because that activity brings great harm to all, not least to the person illegally employed, who is unlikely to have decent health and safety provision or decent wages.

I hope that the hon. Gentlemen will also support our Biometric identity documents—or ID cards—for foreigners, which we hope to introduce in 2008. They will make it possible for employers to be more certain about the legal status of those whom they employ, and give them much less excuse for employing illegal immigrants. The documents will also make it possible for us to identify people who are here illegally and/or attempting to work illegally.

In conjunction with my hon. Friend the Minister for Local Government, we are assessing and managing the impact of large-scale migration to the UK. Our approach ensures that migration brings maximum benefits to the United Kingdom. I thank the hon. Gentlemen for their thoughtful contributions and I am sure that the debate will continue, as it is of some importance to our constituents.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at one minute past Six o'clock.