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The Claim

“The Immigration Bill will [..] reduce the pull factors which encourage people to come to the UK and make it easier to remove people who should not be here.” – Immigration minister Mark Harper.

The background

Illegal migrants face a new crackdown in Britain says Home Secretary Theresa May, and the responsibility no longer lies only with the border police. Her new Immigration Bill enlists doctors, landlords and employers into tracking down illegal migrants. But will the new systems actually succeed in removing illegal migrants from Britain? And if they do will it have a noticeable impact on the country?

Employers

The plan:
It is already illegal to employ people who do not have the right to work in the UK. That has not changed. The  new Immigration Bill just increase the fine from £10,000 per illegal worker to £20,000. And the bureaucracy has been streamlined, giving the Home Office more power to chase unpaid fines.

Will it work?
The change here is very slight. It is just a reinforcement of existing law rather than increasing the scope of the law in any way.

Employers’ group, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) – told us that they and their members had little to say about the change because their members were law-abiding businesses who already performed the correct checks. A spokesman said:

“These are aimed at businesses who employ people illegally. Our members do not do that. So it’s difficult for us to give a view on whether this will affect levels of migration.”

It could be reasonable to infer that this will not vastly different in impact. The higher fine may deter law-breaking employers, but if they are already breaking the law, then it may not.

The numbers:
Between February 2008 and the end of 2012, over 8,100 penalties were levied against employers of illegal workers. That’s 1620 known illegal workers a year, though the numbers are almost definitely higher.

Landlords

The changes:
Under the new rules, landlords will have to check the immigration status of new tenants before taking them on. The government says it will be a simple and straightforward check.

If the Landlord fails to carry out the check, and the tenant does not have permission to live in the UK, the landlord will be liable to a fine. The amount of the fine has not been set, though a consultation document proposed between £1000 and £3000.

Previously, landlords didn’t have to check immigration status of prospective tenants and there was no fine for renting to someone who didn’t have the right immigration documents.

The government will set up a 48-hour response service to deal with any queries from landlords.

Will it work?
Chris Norris, head of policy at the National Landlords Association thinks the legislation is on balance good. It will put a clear line between good landlords and bad ones, he says:

“Our hope is that it will put a clear line between good landlords and bed-in-shed landlords, people who have established a shanty town.

But it won’t necessarily change the bad landlords, he thinks:

“They are already way outside the law. But don’t think that they’ll change their practice because of one new law.”

But Mr Norris does have concerns about side-effects of the legislation and how it will operate in practice.

He wants the fines to be discretionary and proportionate, so that a landlord who makes an honest mistake won’t be hit with a impossible sum.

Mr Norris is also worried that the new law could lead to discrimination if it is hard or confusing for landlords to work out who is or is not eligible. He anticipates problems if the proposed new response line set up doesn’t stick to its 48 hour promise.

“We would not like to see landlords turning people away, even subconsciously, because they are not UK or EU citizens. You need to support landlords.

The numbers:

Unknown.

NHS

The changes:
The new Immigration Bill aims to tie people’s access to the health system to their immigration status in Britain. Full citizens get full access, people on temporary stays have to pay for it, and visitors or undocumented migrants also have to pay and can only access very limited emergency services.

Overseas students and people on work permits used to be able to access the NHS like normal citizens.

Now they will have to pay a surcharge on entry to use the NHS. The surcharge will be equivalent or less than private health insurance for the same period, the Home Office promises. This applies even if the person is paying UK tax.

Undocumented migrants, or people on short-term visits such as tourists, are still allowed to get primary care for example access to A&E, or labour wards. But now they will be made to pay for that and chased if they don’t cough up.

Will it work?
Leigh Daynes, Director of Doctors of the World, a medical charity treating patients in London does not think the new laws will free up many resources in the NHS

He does think it will cause confusion about eligibility, resulting in people who should get care, not getting care.

“What we’ve seen are many more migrants being turned away from doctor’s surgeries and GPs. It’s causing confusion and people are already being turned away even though the law hasn’t yet changed. There’s a really urgent need for doctors to be given guidance.

And he raised the question of the admin costs involved if immigration checks start to creep into the NHS, and what level of responsibility doctors have to bear for work like migration status checks.

“We question whether a new system will recoup more than it costs.”

Based on his experience, migrants – even legal ones – aren’t heavy users of the NHS:

“People who come into our centre in east London, have been living here for three years and don’t even know there is a national health service.”

Mr Daynes said tweaks to the NHS system were unlikely to deter migrants coming to the UK:

“Migrants don’t come here to see a dentist. They come to work and provide for their families, or to seek protection from persecution.”

The numbers

According to the Home Office 480,000 people enter the UK as temporary migrants. If the amount of the surcharge was equivalent to basic private healthcare insurance then it would be at or below £500 a year.

If 480,000 people paid that a year, you’d expect £240m to come into the NHS each year. That is a significant amount, but it is only a 0.22% increase in the total yearly NHS budget of £108.9bn.

As for cracking down on health tourism, the figures there are actually much smaller: just £12m or 0.01 per cent of the NHS budget was lost in 2011-12, according to these figures in the New Statesman.

So the new Immigration Bill could add approximately 0.23 per cent to the NHS budget. While the workload of  A&E might be slightly reduced, as people without documents who can’t pay decide not to go, there is unlikely to be a change on numbers in secondary care – GP waiting rooms or general hospital care – which undocumented migrants are not eligible for anyway.

Who will be affected?
A Latvian citizen – can get full access to the NHS as a citizen of an EEA state.
A Chinese citizen on a 3 year work permit can get NHS treatment, provided they paid a surcharge on entry.
An American studying in the UK can get NHS treatment, provided they pay a surcharge on entry.
An Australian tourist can get limited primary care treatment eg. accident and emergency, but has to pay for it.
An asylum seeker from Syria can get limited primary care in the UK, but has to pay for it.

Conclusion

This new legislation probably will succeed in making Britain a colder house to illegal immigrants.

Giving immigration responsibilities to landlords and doctors might result in more illegal migrants being found, but then again, it might not. It will certainly cause more admin work.

As for “reducing the pull factors” for migrants seeking to come to the UK it doesn’t seem that likely that these minor changes will affect anyone’s life decisions.

The biggest change is the NHS. But while the extra tax on foreign students and workers will drum up a tidy bit of revenue for the NHS, the denial of care to undocumented migrants who can’t pay for it probably won’t save the NHS much in money or beds.

Total legal migration to the UK was 497,000 in the year ending December 2012, according to the ONS. The number of illegal immigrants in Britain is by its nature hard to measure, but is believed to be between 618,000 (a 2008 LSE estimate) and 1.1 million (the estimate from the Migration Watch pressure group).

by Anna Leach