No Recourse to Public Funds

Debate between Barry Gardiner and Meg Hillier

Thursday 8th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. It is worth highlighting that we talk a lot about this issue, but quite a lot of people are affected, as others have highlighted. There are 285,000 people living in my borough of Hackney. Of that population, 31,000 are non-EEA citizens. Those are people who have never acquired British citizenship; it is not the total number of foreign-born people, which is just over 10% of the total population. A significant number of them are going through the immigration system, and of those a number will be under “no recourse to public funds” restrictions.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) highlighted, however, the Home Office does not know how many people are under the restriction of no recourse to public funds, because it either does not collect the data or does not wish to publish the data. We know there are issues with the Home Office databases, and perhaps the Minister can provide some illumination. I will try to be brief in order to allow the Minister extra time to respond, and I hope our Front-Bench spokesperson will do so as well, because we need answers to why the figures are not available.

We cannot make policy without decent data. As I will touch on later and as my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) highlighted, there are big, cost-shunting issues. If we have the numbers and can work out the cost, we can make better and—dare I dangle this in front of the Minister at this difficult time for all Departments?—cheaper policy. As Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, I spend a lot of time looking at this question.

I have served as an MP for 15 years, and no recourse to public funds was not talked about much 15 years ago. I am sure colleagues in the Chamber recognise that. We know it has been extended in the past decade. When I was first elected, people would apply for discretionary leave to remain, they would get five years, and then they would get citizenship. Then it was split into two periods of three years, so they would have to apply twice to get their five years for citizenship. Now it is two years, so it is three applications, three fees, and often at some point in that process, if they did not start out with no recourse to public funds, that is added on.

[Barry Gardiner]

My hon. Friend is making such an important point. These repeated fee requirements means that families that have three, four or five children find it impossible to earn enough money to pay their rent, feed their children and pay these stupid fees.

[Meg Hillier]

Absolutely, and I will touch on that at the end. That is a very significant issue. We have talked a lot about children today, and we are in danger of putting a whole generation on the wrong side of everything. They were often born here, or arrived here as young people, and all they want to do is contribute.

On the face of it, it does not sound wrong. People who come to this country should pay their way; we would expect that if we went to visit other countries—but life is not as simple as that. Many of my constituents are in very low-paid work. As my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) said, they are often in low-paid, zero-hours contract jobs. Actually, in my constituency, they are often in good, well-paid jobs. I have nurses, teachers and others who are in jobs that pay well but not enough to live in London. It is very difficult. In my constituency, and probably across the whole of the south-east of England—I do not have up-to-date figures—people cannot rent a three or four-bedroom property under the housing benefit cap. Those people are not necessarily claiming housing benefit, but the costs of renting are too high to pay for out of their wage packet.

What happens is that people live with family and friends, and I have many constituents who do that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden said, if these pictures were shown in the media, people would not believe it. People are living in one room with another family member living in the other room, because they just cannot afford the housing costs. They have no recourse to public funds, and they cannot get a penny of housing benefit to help towards that. Let us not forget that most housing benefit goes to people in work. That is another issue, but it is a systemic sign that the whole housing system is bust. That is a debate for another day—possibly the same Members might wish to contribute.

Overcrowding is a big health risk at the best of times, and we are not in the best of times. A concern of mine during the covid pandemic is that those double households are trapped. I had a very distressed grandmother come to see me at a surgery. I had been to visit the family, and they had been to see me before. She loves her daughter and granddaughter, but they cannot move out of their one-bedroom flat because they have no recourse to public funds, and mum is a nurse. The grandmother came to see me and said, “When will we get housing? How will we get housing?” She came to see me privately because she did not want to tell her daughter how hard it was for her to share her small home with her beloved family. These are small flats, and they are often very overcrowded.

As others have highlighted, councils are spending a lot of money on this. In 2018-19, 59 councils were spending £47.5 million a year on service provision to people with no recourse to public funds. That was before coronavirus, and some of those people are being affected now. I want to highlight an individual case—we all have so many. One of my constituents has two children, and her late father was British. She is working, but because she has no recourse to public funds, she cannot claim tax credits, child benefit or housing benefit. That has had a very big effect on her, and is having an impact on her children. She is not sure, and nor am I, how much longer she will be able to cope.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden highlighted the issue of cost-shunting, which the Public Accounts Committee talks about all the time. There are costs to society, the taxpayer and, of course, individuals. I want to highlight the taxpayer costs to the Minister, because that should bite if nothing else does. So much of the system is having to pay for people who cannot pay their own way because they have no recourse to public funds. They are working people for the most part. They want to work, and they might just have hit a rocky time.