Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Bishop of Durham

Report stage
Monday 3rd July 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I declare my interests as laid out in the register. I will speak to Amendment 89, and I am grateful to my noble friends from differing Benches—the noble Lords, Lord Coaker and Lord German, and the noble Baroness, Lady Helic—for their support. It is a damning indictment that an amendment of this nature is even required, as it proposes such a basic safeguard to ensure the well-being of unaccompanied children. It requires that, if a child is to be transferred from local authority child protection systems, a justification should be provided as to why it is in their best interests to be looked after by the Home Office rather than the local authority.

It is reasonable that councils should not be mandated to follow a child transfer direction, regardless of any safeguarding or protection concerns. If the Government are unwilling to accept this point, can the Minister say how they will enable the appropriate scrutiny of a decision to move a child out of the formal child protection system and ensure the highest level of safeguarding consideration? These questions deserve full and detailed answers, since the Bill does not set any standards, safeguards or protective obligations for the Home Office when providing accommodation for children. It is even more pertinent given the Home Office’s own record on accommodating unaccompanied children.

The Minister was pleased to share, during the passage of the Bill, that no children are currently accommodated in hotels, but let us not forget that this does not mean that all unaccompanied children are therefore in the care of local authorities. Up to April this year, 186 children remained missing, and it should keep us all up at night, including Ministers, when we think about whose care those children may now be under.

Regardless of the power that the Bill gives to the Government to accommodate children, two things remain true—both of which have already been explained well. First, the Children Act applies to all children, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or immigration status, and therefore any child under the care of the Home Office should have access to the same level of care and protection as any other child in need. Secondly, as recent legal judgments have shown, the Home Office does not have the expertise, knowledge or experience to look after children.

Therefore, it is only right and just that the power to remove a child from the well-established care system should be exercised only when a child’s well-being will be served by doing so—I suspect that that would be very rare. I share the fear of the Children’s Commissioner that accommodating children outside of foster families or children’s homes will be harmful and unsafe; we have no evidence to the contrary. Fundamentally, the care of children is, first and foremost, not an immigration matter, and safeguarding cannot be allowed to be a casualty in pursuit of the objectives of the Bill. Thus, I also support Amendment 87, for all the reasons already laid out. Neither amendment should be regarded as controversial, as, frankly, a child’s life, security and future are too important for them to become collateral damage. Therefore, I support Amendment 87 and intend to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 89.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I support most strongly the remarks of my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss and the other powerful comments already made from the Conservative Benches, the Bishops’ Benches and elsewhere.

My amendments propose that Clauses 15 and 16 should left out of the Bill in their entirety. These clauses, for the first time, provide the legal power for a central government department to take responsibility for extremely vulnerable unaccompanied children and to provide so-called care, protection and support, both while they are children and as adult care leavers.

I understand that the Home Office has recently been housing unaccompanied children in hotels, without the legal authority to do so. But, according to the Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick MP, no unaccompanied young people are currently in hotels. The Home Office has recently reopened a hotel in Eastbourne, and another in Brighton and Hove, in anticipation of the Bill becoming law. The local authority in the second case is threatening legal action, and I anticipate that it will be successful.

Ofsted has described the housing of unaccompanied children in hotels as utterly unacceptable. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child called for the urgent repeal of the provision in the Illegal Migration Bill, describing this practice as violating children’s rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the refugee convention 1951. Seven organisations responsible for protecting children have written to us, arguing that they consider Clauses 15 and 16 to be such a danger to unaccompanied children, and to our child welfare system, that they must be removed from the Bill altogether. The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services makes the point that unaccompanied children seeking asylum are fleeing desperate situations; they are extremely vulnerable and should not be placed in hotels, where they are open to further exploitations and abuse.

Clauses 15 and 16 are ill conceived and discriminatory in principle. They give the Home Secretary wide powers to house unaccompanied children of any age in any type of accommodation for any length of time—housing a one year-old or 18 month-old in great big ex-Army barracks, or whatever. The clauses direct that a local authority stops looking after an individual child irrespective, it appears, of the child’s needs, characteristics, experiences and legal status. They legitimate and potentially make lawful arrangements that hundreds of non-governmental organisations have contended are unlawful for nearly two years.

I know that Amendments 87 and 89 might help a little. However, bearing in mind the powerful comments from his own Bench from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, and from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and from other parts of this House, I appeal to the Minister to seek within himself his humanity and to withdraw Clauses 15 and 16 from the Bill.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Meacher and Lord Bishop of Durham

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for something he said in his speech that helped me understand why I am more half-hearted in my support than others. I hope he will forgive me if I misquote him, but he implied that there had been no thought about areas that could be badly affected, including faith schools, until later. Actually, the Secretary of State and the Minister have been incredibly helpful and supportive in discussions with us about some of the later clauses. The department recognised that there are growing issues connected with voluntary-aided and voluntary-controlled schools and the move to MATs, which need to be dealt with and must be dealt with by legislation. Our experience has been of working behind the scenes with Ministers and officials in a very positive and helpful manner. That perhaps explains why we approach it more positively. Therefore, I say thank you and completely support the noble Lord’s Amendment 27A on the same basis—that these schools should have the protections.

However, picking up the concerns I expressed earlier about the overreach of the Secretary of State’s powers proposed here, I support the thrust and purpose of Amendment 2. The period is possibly too long but that is debatable. It is a proposal that helps to protect. It enables others from the sector to engage with us and for us all to express our opinions about proposed regulations, so that those regulations can be properly debated, the report can come back and the regulations can be amended. Amendment 2 is a really helpful proposal in principle, to assist with the restriction of the Secretary of State’s power.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I support the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, to oppose the question that Clause 1 stand part of the Bill. I declare an interest as a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which has produced a highly critical report on the Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, alluded to this in many ways and I will try to avoid replicating what he said. However, I need to say that this report was exceptionally critical and that the committee sees the Bill very much as an outlier, and one we hope and expect that the Government will revisit.

I draw to the attention of the Committee and of the Minister an important 30-year review of delegated powers undertaken by the Delegated Powers Committee, which reported on 24 November last year. It was the first time such a review had ever been done and that report showed a steady diminution of democracy and of the powers of Parliament, and an ever-greater accretion of power to Ministers. Quite interestingly, the report is called Democracy Denied? This is an important issue and not a minor matter. We are talking about our democracy and we are losing it: that is the reality set out in that 30-year review. I hope the Minister and the Bill team read that, if they have not already.

The report points out the urgency of the need to redress this balance and shift power back towards Parliament and away from Ministers. Yet here we are, six months after its publication, with Clause 1(1)—an extreme and deeply concerning example of the skeleton Bill approach. One of the main criticisms in that 30-year review is the growing use of all sorts of delegated powers, but skeleton Bills in particular. Clause 1 provides no indication of what academy standards will look like or the principles upon which they will be based. In my view, and other noble Lords have said this clearly, Clause 1 should not stand part of the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, referred to the department’s memorandum attempting to explain why these delegations of powers are necessary. I want to spell out in more detail one of the two points the memorandum makes: there is a need for haste and to adjust as changes in educational needs evolve. Its real point is that you need principles and key standards in the Bill, then regulations are used to amend those standards—but not the principles; I hope the principles remain. It would be a big step forward from this, if we had a set of principles within which amendments might be laid. The speed issue, which is the department’s excuse for this level of delegation, is entirely unacceptable. The Delegated Powers Committee was clear on that point.

I think we have said enough about that, so I will move on to my Amendment 32 in this group. Again, I support the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, in his opposition to Clause 3 standing part. Amendment 32 is very important because it focuses on the Henry VIII powers in the Bill. The 30-year review focused strongly on the unacceptable nature of Henry VIII powers. Basically, the Secretary of State is saying that the Government do not want Parliament involved in wholesale reform, such as changes to Acts of Parliament over the years, but to get on and do that sort of stuff themselves. That is unacceptable, as noble Lords know and as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, alluded to.

Statutory instruments have very little scrutiny; we are not allowed to amend them, but we can reject them, as my amendment on tax credits did. We rejected the statutory instrument. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, suggested, we were threatened with abolition; we had the Strathclyde review and were going to lose all our powers. The whole earth seemed to have been turned upside down, simply because we had deferred acceptance of those regulations. We know the scope for reviewing statutory instruments is incredibly limited compared with the detailed scrutiny that we can give to Bills. The idea of these Henry VIII powers within the context of a skeleton Bill is really quite shocking.

The Delegated Powers Committee is not the first committee to have drawn attention to the appalling nature of Henry VIII powers and the unacceptability of them, and here we have rafts of Henry VIII powers. The Donoughmore committee said that a Minister had to justify a Henry VIII power “up to the hilt” and that such powers should not be used “unless demonstrably essential”—not useful, but essential. As already alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, the department’s memorandum utterly and completely failed to argue successfully that these Henry VIII powers are essential, as they simply are not. That is why we cannot accept what is going on here. The department argues the need to act swiftly, but I have already made the point that this can be done perfectly well by including the basic material in the Bill. There is an absence of policy development and the deferral of its creation, with it being left to Ministers. Clause 3 has to be completely rewritten and cannot be left as it stands. I therefore support the plan of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for it not to stand part of the Bill.

Exceptionally, the Delegated Powers Committee forwarded its report to the Secretary of State for Education personally. To my knowledge, we have never done that before. We do not do it, actually, but we felt that this case was extraordinary, in the skeletal nature of the central part of the Bill, combined with its Henry VIII clauses.

The Secretary of State replied to the committee’s report and said that he is taking note of our concerns. I find that helpful and I warmly welcome the approach of our Minister and of the Secretary of State. I, for one, as I am sure do all noble Lords, want to work with Ministers to ensure the yawning and total gaps in Clause 1(1) can be filled before Report. Deferring Report to the autumn is an interesting idea as, by this time, I hope there would be substance in the Bill that we could all debate as we should—by holding Ministers to account.