Cutting education won’t help reduce immigration
MESSAGE TO the Prime Minister: you can’t cut immigration if you cut spending on education and training. Our economy needs skilled labour, not just in higher professional occupations.
Computerisation means that mathematical skills are more and more important across the economy. Now that employment has moved from mass workforces in mills and factories to more diverse and individualised tasks, social skills and self-motivation are important.
Those without such skills find themselves on the fringes of the labour force, in part-time or temporary jobs or false selfemployment, while companies around them recruit directly from outside Britain.
The Bangladesh Caterers Association has just publicly protested that the Leave campaign promises to offer additional visas to chefs from South Asia once European immigrants were barred have been forgotten. Curry houses across the country, they claim, will be forced to close unless allowed to recruit staff directly from South Asia.
Britain’s major housebuilding companies have made similar representations to Ministers about their dependence on recruiting skilled workers from Eastern Europe. Agencies across Britain recruit hospitality staff, long-distance truck drivers and other semi-skilled workers from continental Europe for employers desperate to fill vacancies. And in the National Health Service, the structural shortage of nurses leaves hospitals dependent on recruiting nurses from Poland, Portugal, South Africa and elsewhere.
Why don’t we motivate and train more of our own citizens to fill these jobs?
There’s a direct link between immigration and education: spend too little on education, leave schools struggling to motivate disadvantaged children or to ensure that they acquire basic skills, continue to neglect careers advice for teenagers, and the outcome is a significant proportion of unskilled school-leavers who will struggle to find worthwhile or well-paid jobs.
These are the children who benefit most from the extra help that teaching assistants provide, and who need the greatest encouragement in making the transition from school to work. And these are the pupils who will suffer most from the tightening squeeze on school budgets.
For too long, emphasis on academic skills and league tables has led to neglect of training and preparation for work for those not going to university. Apprenticeship schemes have withered, further education colleges have been starved of funding. The Government is now introducing a major new apprenticeship scheme, to be paid for through a levy on large employers; but there is considerable scepticism whether companies will respond by initiating new programmes for unskilled recruits, in cooperation with schools, or find it easier to re-label existing courses as in-work apprenticeships.
Local Enterprise Partnerships will play a role in encouraging employers to co-operate; but the argument that investment in long-term apprenticeships is risky when qualified apprentices might then take their skills to better-paying competitors is strong. Investment in training has always included an element of corporate social responsibility. Today’s companies answer to shareholders, most of them far beyond Britain’s borders; incentives to contribute to broader economic and social objectives are weak.
Social enterprises and small companies do what they can. A social housing association in Bradford has run its own apprenticeship scheme for several years. Last year it recruited 10 new apprentices in a variety of building trades.
There were several hundred applicants – proof that the demand is there, and that there is an alternative to continuing dependence on East European migrants.
One curry restaurant in Bradford is now training its own staff from the local community – cheerful, ethnically diverse, keen to learn and contributing in a small way to strengthening social cohesion in a divided city.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister is sticking both to her party’s commitment to bring immigration down to ‘tens of thousands’ and to hold school budgets down as their costs and wages rise.
The schools that will suffer most are those already under strain: struggling to motivate disadvantaged children from one-parent families, to encourage pupils whose parents are ground down by the disappointments of intermittent employment and limited cash. Those are the pupils who should be moving into the jobs that we now rely on immigrants to fill, but who will live out their lives in frustration and resentment if they fail to acquire the skills needed.
Theresa May insists that the Conservatives stand for lower taxation, as well as lower immigration. Liberal Democrats point out that Britain is already a low-tax country; cut further, and we’ll become a tax haven.
Five per cent less of our GDP goes on public spending than in the Netherlands and Germany, squeezing health and social care as well as education. Lower taxation means poor-quality education for poorer British citizens. If we as a country prefer lower taxes to investment in our own people, then our future prosperity will continue to depend on a flow of skilled labour from abroad – whatever false promises some political leaders make.