Fixing UK workforce should be a goal in itself, not a means to cut migration

Good morning. Growth was higher than predicted in March — but both consumer and business sentiment remain low. The government’s standing in the polls remains weak. And the cumulative impact of the government’s tax rises, new restrictions on business and the increased minimum wage remain unclear. But the big policy debate animating the government at the moment is over immigration.

One frequently raised argument, including by Inside Politics readers, concerns the 9mn working age people who are economically inactive. Some thoughts on how that group does, and doesn’t fit into the net migration debate below.

Money, people, time

The big policy question facing Labour on immigration is, essentially, contained in this chart — the UK is about average in the OECD and in line with its peer countries when it comes to the proportion of foreign-born people living in the country, an imperfect but useful measure of recent migratory flows.

Every poll, focus group, and frankly, many conversations I have when I travel the country asking people what they think about politics, tell us that British voters want immigration to go down. So the question is: do you think there is a desirable, and electorally tenable, way for the UK to change its position in this chart without dropping away from its peers entirely?

And that word “peers” is worth thinking about — because frankly if you want to shift the UK away from its current, fairly typical model for high recent immigration, you have to be willing to accept profound changes to the UK’s state provision, tax levels and the experience of people in retirement.

One reason why I think that the focus on “net immigration” leads to bad policy that fails essentially everybody is that you can’t usefully answer the question of “how many people does it take to run this thing?” and work backwards from there. Japan has far lower levels of immigration than the rest of the rich world, but it has not been its overarching political project to do so.

If you want lower immigration, you need to do a combination of a) increasing the number of people born in the UK who are in the labour market and b) change our economic and social model. Of course this is a bit of a false choice because these two things are linked — you have to be willing to do both and you have to believe that doing both is worthwhile and electorally achievable. Let’s start by looking at the 9mn people in the UK who are of working age, but not in work, and why.

I think we should be cautious about treating everyone between the ages of 55 and 65 who gives their reason for being out of work as “retired” as completely straightforward — some will have simply experienced enough ageism in the workplace that they have felt forced to take early retirement. But equally, I think anyone who thinks that British people are crying out to have as many people aged 65 to 69 still working as Japan (where 50 per cent do, the highest in the OECD) is kidding themselves.

A third of people in mid-life are out of paid work because they are doing largely or wholly unpaid work as a carer, whether for their children or for adult dependants. While some are doing that out of choice, many are doing it out of necessity. (My suspicion, based on talking to people who have made this decision, is that the answer is “a bit of both”.) But you can’t move these numbers without being willing to fix the UK’s social care crisis, which costs money.

Some of these problems are easier to solve than others. The 987,000 people aged between 16 and 24 who are “NEET” (not in education, employment or training) is a predictable consequence of cutting spending on further education and how we have changed our benefit system. If we want to fix this, we can. It costs money, but it is much cheaper than fixing social care.

When it comes to those who are out of work because of sickness . . . some of this is about making workplaces warmer homes for people aged over 50 with musculoskeletal conditions who wish to keep working but have limited options. Some of this is about reducing the number of people waiting for an NHS procedure, and some of this is about reforming the NHS, largely a sickness service, so that it gets better at treating people in poor health or with chronic conditions. Again: costs money!

These things do also cost people. It takes a further education lecturer to run an education class, a care worker to ease the pressure on an unpaid carer, to in some cases physically alter a workplace so that someone with a physical disability can work there and so on.

One issue with seeing the UK’s economically inactive population as a solution to the supposed problem of the UK’s net immigration figures is you are either confining yourself to solutions that involve moving around people in work to assist with this, or to solutions that don’t require any additional personnel to accomplish. The former can be economically costly and politically difficult and the latter is often illusory. Instead, you need to see this as a public policy problem worth solving on its own terms rather than as a clever trick to get governments out of a political problem they have on immigration.

Now try this

I am indebted to William Warren over at the Economist for recommending that I try the work of Simeon ten Holt, the Dutch contemporary classical composer. I am very much enjoying his complete piano pieces at the moment.

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