Immigration Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Lords Chamber

I ask the Minister to think thoroughly about this sort of situation. These are not children from East Anglia, Scotland or Wales. They come from all parts of the world and we have an obligation to them. When I was younger, it used to be said that the Church of England was the Conservative Party at prayer and that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than to Marxism. Every party has its moral foundations. I suggest that we will betray our moral foundations if we let the Bill go forward without any further serious amendment.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 81A, which is in my name along with that of my noble friend Lady Hamwee, whom I thank for her support in helping me to put it together. I also support what was said by the other three noble Lords who have already spoken. This is a probing amendment and the intention is to investigate how best support can be given to young people brought to this country as children—that is, refugee children, trafficked children and children brought here for sexual exploitation and so on. These young people find that their lives come to a complete standstill when they reach 18 due to their non-status and lack of citizenship.

I thank my noble friend the Minister for meeting me to discuss this issue, and for his letter explaining the present policy and responsibilities of local authorities and children’s services, which are obliged to assist and protect young people with unresolved immigration status. My noble friend quite rightly pointed out current laws and regulations which theoretically should be applied by well managed and financed local authority children’s services. However, Kids Company, the charity which provides therapeutic, emotional, practical and financial support to 36,000 children, young people and families in services across London, Bristol and Liverpool—some with unresolved immigration status—still has serious concerns that the impact of the proposals in the Immigration Bill in its current form poses a major risk to vulnerable children and young people because, despite all the good intentions, the Bill does not appear to make adequate provision, or provide sufficient safeguards and protection, for the young people who find themselves with unresolved immigration status.

Kids Company’s concerns are not hypothetical; it has considerable evidence related to failures in care by some social work departments handling very serious child protection issues. In fact, the organisation spends approximately £1 million a year on staff whose sole responsibility is, sadly, to police the working of social work departments, which apparently cut corners and avoid responsibility, presumably because of budget limitations, and which it finds merely go through procedures as opposed to affording genuine care and protection to children. As Kids Company says:

“Unfortunately, unstable economic times … can lead to further pressurised and fundamentally unlawful decision-making by local authorities”.

Kids Company has had to initiate a number of pre-action protocol letters and judicial reviews, every single one of which has been actioned or ruled in favour of the children. With legal aid being diminished and time limits on assessments being removed, the framework of protection afforded by social work departments to the most vulnerable is weakening, so it is unreasonable to base further legislative change, which impacts on the children accessing vital services, on the premise that the system currently operates as described in the Minister’s letter. That is simply not the case according to Kids Company and other organisations. There must therefore be further clarification about the degree of the obligations that the Secretary of State and local authorities have in respect of this problem.

This amendment is necessary because many of these children, even those in care, when they turn 18 are often forgotten, unlawfully, by many local authorities. They are left to navigate a system that presupposes that they have an adult who has brought them up and have the tools to navigate themselves into early adulthood, or have parents who are able to assist when something unknown comes their way. This is simply not the case. So when local authorities fail to submit applications to the Home Office or fail simply to fill out an application for British registration to ensure citizenship, who is that young person or child supposed to express that failure to? How is that local authority being held to account?

We need to consider the psychological strategies used by overstretched workforces in local authorities to defend against overwhelming demand. In Kids Company’s experience it has found that some social workers can become immune to children’s distress because they have seen too much violation. They can become complacent, driven by overfamiliarity with horrific abuse; and that complacency can become normalised in the workplace. Unacceptable risks emerge when social work departments are under clinical and financial pressure.

There is an unintentional impact on children leaving care. The current legislation states that children leaving care are entitled to support until the age of 25 if they are still in education or training. However, in Kids Company’s experience, as soon as a child turns 18, some local authorities have already failed to confirm the child’s immigration status—and now use that failure to prevent the child leaving care accessing statutory support based upon the immigration position—or their limited leave to remain, granted by the Home Office. As a result, the young person has to go through the whole immigration court process to extend their stay. This can often take years and their lives can be left on hold because, even though their leave is extended, statutory bodies and employers are fearful of immigration laws.

There is some anecdotal evidence that some unscrupulous solicitors who receive legal aid to assist these young people are practising without giving proper advice or carrying out the work correctly. These young people urgently need documentation to show that they have legitimacy to be in the UK—legitimacy that is suspended when they reach 18. This causes a huge problem when it comes to accessing higher education, which involves many obstacles and seemingly impossible hurdles for these young people. The university application forms require rigorous and detailed information that is impossible to supply because the young people have no documentation. So they live in limbo, waiting for decisions to come back from the Home Office to gain immigration status and, during that time, their access to higher education becomes a distant dream. They become disheartened as their ability to access local authority services is stopped, based upon their having no documentation. With no ability to work, the child turned young person is caught up in a cycle to survive in a state that has blocked his or her access to official help.

Another problem caused by unresolved immigration issues is that young people are not able to open bank accounts due to lack of relevant ID and proof-of-address documentation. The additional requirements on banks to carry out checks are another way of stigmatising this group. A further implication is that those young people will have no formal way of accessing support payments, if they are in care, once they have turned 18 or are receiving their leaving care grant. Because these young people have no documentation, they often live under the radar, surviving in rented accommodation that is poorly maintained and often not fit for habitation. However, they have nowhere else to go. Often the local authorities do not have social housing to offer them. Therefore, the proposed checks that landlords are expected to make will have an impact on these young people, and that is a cause for concern.