ANY QUOTES MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well the Prime Minister will make a speech tomorrow about immigration. He’ll reveal plans to keep migrant families off waiting lists for council houses until they have lived here probably for up to five years. So is this just tough talk? In a moment I’ll speak to the Immigration Minister, Mark Harper and we’ll also be hearing from the Shadow Immigration Minister, Chris Bryant. Well let’s say a very good morning to the Immigration Minister, Mark Harper, who joins me now. Well first of all, pre-echoing I suppose the Prime Minister’s speech, well it has been long trailed you are thinking down these lines particularly with reference to migrants from Romania and Bulgaria, that in some way they will have limits on what they can claim when they get here.

MARK HARPER: Well these rules will apply to everybody but I think it’s worth saying, just listening to your introduction, of course we’ve introduced tough changes over the last three years, nearly three years since we’ve been in power and we’ve seen the net migration coming to the United Kingdom reduced by a third so it isn’t just tough talk, we’ve actually had tough policies, a firm but fair system that have encouraged the best and the brightest to come to the UK and the Prime Minister will be setting out further steps that we’re going to take when he makes his speech tomorrow.

DM: But when it comes to members of the European Union, after a certain amount of time because of single markets they’re allowed to come here, as many of them as they like.

MARK HARPER: Well they are not allowed to come here to do … there are certain rules about what they can come here to do, they have to be coming here to work, to look for work, be self-sufficient or students and it is worth remembering of course that actually it is only a third of people that come to Britain come from elsewhere in the EU, actually most people that come to Britain are actually coming from outside the EU which is worth saying I think just to put it into context but what we want to do is to make sure that if people are coming from other European Union countries that they’re coming here to work and to pay taxes and to contribute and we don’t want them thinking that they are going to get a hand out from the tax payer and that’s why we’re looking at tightening the rules still further which is why for example the point that you made about housing, we want to make sure that people don’t come here with an expectation that they can jump the housing queue when they haven’t been here for very long at all.

DM: So that will apply to all nationalities?

MH: Yes it will and what we want to do is have local councils set a residence test so that people with more of a connection to the local area are able to go first on a housing waiting list. That’s one of the issues that really upsets people when they see somebody arrive in the country and they appear to get better treatment than people that have been there a long time so that is one of the things we’re setting out, we want to set out further changes to our benefit system and make sure that if you compare us to other European countries, we want to be amongst the toughest so that people that are coming to Britain are coming to work and to contribute and to pay their own way, they’re not coming here to live their life off the taxpayer.

DM: What about other restrictions, access to the NHS, paying for instance to see a GP, is that being considered?

MH: Well those are things we’re looking at, yes, the committee that I’m chairing, the Prime Minister has asked me to chair of Minister across government is looking at the benefit system, it’s working with colleagues to look at access to the health service, to education, to housing which I’ve just talked about, is looking to make sure that if people are coming to Britain we want the best and the brightest to come from around the world but we want them to come here to work, contribute and work hard just like we want British citizens to do and we want to make sure our rules are amongst the toughest in the world.

DM: I mean, you say though, you’re doing an awful lot of thinking here but one area that you must have been thinking about is the numbers, but not getting any clearer on it. We had that figure didn’t we of 13,000, talking about Romania and Bulgaria but then of course that was instantly rubbished by Eric Pickles who said he had no confidence in those figures so how many do you think it might be, how many people might come?

MH: Well what we’ve said is, the last government got involved in this business of trying to have speculative forecasts about how many people might come from various European countries and they got it hopelessly wrong. What we did was we sought some advice from our expert committee, the Migration Advisory Committee, to say actually is it possible to forecast this number at all? They gave us some very clear advice that said no, it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be helpful to even try because there were eight other European countries, including some very large ones like France and Germany, that are also taking off those transitional controls at the same time and if you look at what commentators have said, there are a huge range of forecasts. I think what we ought to be doing, which we are, is getting on and looking at the policy changes we can make so that people that do come to Britain are coming here to work and to contribute and I think if that’s why they come to Britain, I think that’s what the public want to see, that people are coming and making a contribution and not taking.

DM: But the public also want some idea, and presumably also the services that will be accessed if they stay her for five years or more, will want to know as well. I mean we’ve got this figure, haven’t we, of 250,000 from Migration Watch over five years, is that anywhere close?

MH: Well the problem is, Dermot, people don’t really know. If you look at the range of forecasts that people have published, they are very broad. Getting into speculation, because frankly that’s what it would be, that’s what our expert committee said, you wouldn’t be getting an accurate forecast, you’d be doing what the last government did which is making up a number which would then prove to be wholly inaccurate and frankly that would damage the credibility of the system. It’s better to be straight with people and to say we’re toughening up the rules, we’re making sure that people can only come to Britain if they want to work hard and contribute and pay taxes, we’re making sure that if you compare us to our European competitors we’ve got a tough system so that people won’t come here in preference to elsewhere if they don’t want to work. I think that’s what people want us to do. Getting involved in speculation that proves to be wholly inaccurate, that was a mistake the last government made and we’re not about to repeat it.

DM: Okay, Mr Harper, thank you very much indeed. Mark Harper there, Immigration Minister. We have his Shadow here, Chris Bryant, to respond to some of that. A very good morning to you Mr Bryant.

CHRIS BRYANT: I’m a bit thick with cold.

DM: Keep your distance then! But you’ve got to respond to that, that idea and it’s been said a lot by the government at the moment that under Labour you were a soft touch and you heard Mark Harper there saying you were more or less making some figures up as well.

CB: Well we certainly confess that we got some things wrong, a couple of things in particular. First of all in the last couple of years we did introduce a points based system which meant that anybody who came to this country who had skills that we needed in this country was welcome but people who were coming here as unskilled labour, we didn’t need them and the door was closed to them. We introduced that but we introduced it far too late and we should have done it in our first couple of years. Secondly we know that one of the other things we got wrong was that when countries like Estonia and Hungary and Poland …

DM: In 2004, yes.

CB: Exactly, when they were joining, unlike France and Germany who said I’m sorry, you can’t come and work here until seven years have passed, we said that people could come here on day one and that meant that we were going out on a limb a bit and everybody came here. Now some of what I’ve read in the newspapers today is quite interesting about what the government is saying, I want to see the detail because I don't think it’s a very good way of doing policy. Mark Harper said a couple of weeks at an event I was that he wanted a period of policy stability but what’s happened now is that on Friday we had Nick Clegg saying something, he’s come up with some idea about bonds and today it’s all been briefed to the papers what the Prime Minister is vaguely thinking about but the devil is in the detail and I’ll give you one reason why I think the detail matters. Since the Prime Minister came to power the number of illegal immigrants stopped at our borders has fallen, the number of people absconding from Heathrow has grown and the number of foreign criminals deported has fallen and I think that…

DM: Yes, it’s another dimension isn’t it, of course and there is the number of illegal immigrants unknown already in the country from Labour years and beyond.

CB: Completely unknown and I think one of the things that we’ve got to be able to achieve is knowing who comes in and who leaves. At the moment we have no idea who leaves and so that makes it very difficult, for instance in relation to student numbers, to assess how many have stayed on when they have …

DM: But Mr Bryant, going back to what you were saying, let’s look at that, those number who come from within the European Union who are allowed to come here and about which we can’t do very much apart from I suppose make the environment a little less welcoming than it was under Labour as you admitted. Do you bite on any of what is being said now, this idea of council house waiting lists, you’ve got to prove residency, you’ve got to have been here a while, you’ve got to really deserve it and also perhaps look at access to our public services like the NHS?

CB: But that power is already available to local authorities. If that’s the route that the local authority wants to go down, then they have absolutely every power that they need to be able to go down that route.

DM: And you are happy for them to do that?

CB: We introduced that and so I’m slightly bewildered about what new power the Prime Minister actually thinks he’s introducing and actually Mark Harper was referring there to he wants us to be one of the toughest countries in the world, we already are. In actual fact if you were a Bulgarian or a Romanian who only wanted to come to another country in Europe to claim benefits, you’d be far better off going to Germany or France. Now I’ll tell you one other place where we made a mistake and I think this is really important, I fully understand that many people are concerned about council houses and their availability but that’s because we didn’t build enough council houses and I think where Mrs Thatcher’s government went wildly wrong was it allowed people to buy their council house at a discount, I don’t object to that, but then they refused to allow local authorities to build more council houses. So guess what? We’ve got an enormous shortage of affordable housing and that’s something we’ve got to put right.

DM: One last point on the migration from within the European Union, we don’t seem to have in this country an objection, no mention made of our closest allies from within the European Union, people from the north of Europe, French, Germans, nobody would put any restrictions on them, as many of them can come here and as many of us can go to their countries as we like under the European Union, we liked all that. Is there a slight dollop of something quasi-racist about saying if you’re Romanian or Bulgarian then we don’t like you?

CB: No, I don't think there is but what I do think sometimes is that people forget there’s roughly a million British people living in Spain using public services in Spain and …

DM: Is there? Well we joined the EU and we like the single market and the single market allows free movement of peoples.

CB: And historically it’s been very good for us because we’ve managed to capitalise on those new markets coming into the European Union and make money frankly for British businesses and I hope that’s what British businesses will be doing in relation to Bulgaria and Romania but there’s one thing that I do worry about which is because wages are so low in countries like Bulgaria and Romania, unscrupulous landlords … employers sorry, in this country, have been bringing people from those countries to Britain, putting them up in sub-standard accommodation, ten men to one room kind of thing and then taking the cost of their accommodation out of their wages and not paying them the proper minimum wage. It’s a scandal that for the last two years there hasn’t been a single prosecution in Britain for breaking the national minimum wage.

DM: Ah, gang masters. I must end it there Mr Bryant. The Shadow Immigration Minister there, Chris Bryant.