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The proposed free trade agreement with India that will allow Indians working in this country to avoid paying National Insurance is a betrayal of hard-working Brits who pay their taxes and will now foot the bill for foreign nationals.
This is the crux of the matter: it burdens British workers even more. The agreement includes something called a “Double Contributions Convention” that the government has said means workers “will only be liable to pay social security contributions in one country at a time”.
What this means in reality is that Indian nationals will be able to avoid paying national insurance, and instead pay directly to the Indian social security system. is clearly designed to benefit Indian migrants in Britain and not the other way around. There are over 1.8m Indian nationals in Britain, while there is no clear data on how many British nationals live in India.
Moreover, Indian nationals will benefit from the lower Employee Provident Fund (EPF) of 12%, compared to the British 15% National Insurance Contribution (NIC). Indian workers will be able to benefit from the higher British salaries and the lower Indian social security payments, leaving British workers to pay for the increased cost of yet more migrants in the country.
All trade deals carry a price and this one is no exception. India has for years pressed for looser visa rules for its nationals and it seems at least some of those demands have been met with this deal. More work permits will be issued to Indians – 81,000 were handed out last year – taking the number of Indians in the UK over two million. This flies in the face of the government’s promise to reduce immigration from its catastrophically high levels.
We have warned for a long time that trade deals with India need to be viewed with scepticism. We pointed out that the EU trade deal with India that was pursued in 2010 was likely to blow a hole in our immigration controls, due to there being no limit on numbers and the likelihood of undercutting native workers’ wages.
Thankfully this was avoided thanks to Brexit, but the subsequent rise in numbers of non-EU migrants and the government introducing an artificial goal of 600,000 foreign students per year (of which India is a main recipient) has seen our immigration numbers explode.
Not only this, but our visa system is being completely exploited – especially by Indians. Our ‘Intra-Company Transfer’ (ICT) Visa which was uncapped and in the IT sector at least was issued almost exclusively to Indian nationals – for example, of the 8,940 IT business analysts who came here in 2017, 93% went to Indians. This matters because the ICT visa and now the Senior or Specialist Worker (SSW) Visa has consistently proven to be a route to long term migration, as well as seriously undercutting the wages of native British workers.
The reality is we are now likely to see even greater numbers of Indian workers coming to this country, forcing greater competition onto native workers, and then paying their social security back to India. Any economic benefit this so-called “free trade deal” might generate will evaporate just as quickly.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.