Major Incident in Essex

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

The hon. Gentleman raises a really important and significant point. Anyone who has been trafficked or involved in criminality will be living in fear. However, with the modern slavery legislation and the national referral mechanism, we do have support structures. We actively encourage people—anybody who has any information—to come forward. We will work with them in the right way to ensure that those who have been perpetrating criminality are brought to justice. Where individuals have been victims of trafficking, we can support them in the right way.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

Our thoughts are with the families of the victims of this appalling crime. Holyhead is the second-busiest roll-on roll-off port in the United Kingdom, yet there is no permanent immigration enforcement presence. Why?

[Priti Patel]

With regard to the incident that happened today and what we are dealing with, I have made it clear that Border Force checks are undertaken through intelligence-led operations. We are dealing with a potentially illegal criminal act, so we have to leave this to the investigators to deal with. As I said, I will come back to the House and to individual colleagues to provide more information as we find out more.

Immigration Applications: Fee Structure

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the fee structure for immigration applications.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. Rather than sitting in front of you as Chair, this time I am standing before you. I was first alerted to the subject of this debate after a constituent wrote to me about how a surplus charge was foisted on her when sponsoring her non-European economic area spouse’s application for settlement. Rather than simply charging an up-front fee of £388—that is the actual administration cost—the Home Office opted to slap on an additional arbitrary fee of £1,135. Effectively, the Government are making a 300% profit on my constituents’ “luxury” purchase of their right to live together in the place they call home.

I am grateful to my constituents for drawing the matter to my attention. Public politics is dominated by the superficial and bogus appeal of “Here today, gone tomorrow” braggarts, shysters and snake oil salesmen, but that is just part of what democracy is about. It is also about concerned and determined citizens taking an active interest in the workings of Government, taking their responsibilities seriously, working with their elected representatives and, when the Government are in their opinion wanting, holding them to account.

Significantly, a report by David Bolt, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, attractively entitled, “An inspection of the policies and practices of the Home Office’s Borders, Immigration and Citizenship Systems relating to charging and fees June 2018-January 2019”, published on 4 April this year, outlined the costs of different immigration applications, including short-stay visit visas and settlement schemes, which is the matter I am concerned with today. The report calculates the surplus for each application type. The surplus is the difference between the 2018-19 fee and the actual estimated processing costs. When applying from outside the country for settlement through the family route, the surplus stands at £1,135, as my constituent noted. That is the surplus, but the actual cost is higher. Anybody would understandably be angry to discover that they were being effectively subjected to arbitrary and to my mind unjustified taxation. They are paying an excessive fee that is very much over the odds for something that should be their right.

The report by the chief inspector also directly addresses the point that short-stay visitor visas are being subsidised by other immigration applications. Despite being higher in price than originally planned—the Home Office had initially intended a 2% increase in 2018—the fee for a tourist visa was £37 below the unit cost. My constituent was paying three times more than the unit cost. My constituent was even angrier about having to pay a spouse settlement fee of £1,523 on discovering that the unit cost was £388. That was apparently in order to subsidise the tourist visa system.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this issue for consideration in Westminster Hall. As he said, the increase in fees is astronomical. Does he share my concern on behalf of those who are already working to get a wage to bring their partner and their children to the country? These fees add extra financial stress to their capability and ability to bring their families to this country and reunite. Does he agree that we need appropriate fees that do not keep people’s families out of this country?

[Hywel Williams]

That is certainly the conclusion I have drawn in this particular case. I will refer later in my speech to the income threshold that is applied, which acts differentially in different parts of the country, and surely that pertains to Northern Ireland as it does to north-west Wales.

According to the Minister, the subsidy for the 2.5 million short-term visas issued each year for tourists costs in the region of £90 million per annum. While I accept that tourism is vital to the UK—it certainly is to Wales and my part of north Wales—and I understand the principle of making the UK as accessible as possible to tourists, I do not agree with making non-EEA spouses and other migrants shoulder the burden, particularly when the fee is four times what it should be, as compared with the real cost.

I was in business before I became an MP. Had I charged a fee for a service I was providing that was four times my costs, that would have amounted to profiteering, even allowing for a reasonable profit. Slightly tangentially, does the Minister have information to hand on where those tourists who apply for subsidised short-term visas end up visiting in the UK? Whose economy are we subsidising? Who benefits? Of course, the vast majority of tourists visit London. In fact—this will interest you, Mr Paisley, and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—there were four times as many visits to London as there were to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined. According to the Office for National Statistics and VisitBritain, almost 20 million tourists visited London in 2017. If we compare that with the 372,000 who visited Cardiff, hon. Members can see the point I am making. Who benefits from the subsidy, and who benefits disproportionately?

The Home Office has set itself the target of the immigration system becoming self-funding. Any below-cost offers would need to be balanced elsewhere within the system, either through fees that were higher than unit cost for other application types or through cost-saving efficiencies, or perhaps both. The principle of self-funding seems to disproportionately penalise some of those who interact with the system. After all, they are paying more than they would reasonably expect. The report recommends that the Home Office runs a wide-ranging public consultation on charging for borders, immigration and citizenship system functions to be completed and published in time to inform the 2019 comprehensive spending review, which I understand we are still waiting for. I wholeheartedly agree that an overhaul and a comprehensive review are needed to avoid the continuation of what I see as gross overcharging, especially if BICS continues with its self-funding ambition.

In response to the report’s recommendation, the Home Office has said it will be reviewing the ambition in the context of the 2019 comprehensive spending review. I understand that that is pending. I have no idea when it is due or, for that matter, when the Minister will be reviewing it, so perhaps she can inform us. The Home Office expects there to be greater linkage on the basis of three key principles in the setting of all fees: providing funding stability, instilling fairness throughout the system, and promoting prosperity and UK interests. I have no problem with those principles; the problem is with the application of the system in instilling fairness, because I do not think it is fair.

I have written to the Minister asking for a meeting to discuss the charging framework for visa and immigration services, but perhaps she can answer a few of my questions in this debate and we can avoid using her valuable time for a meeting. What progress has she made on reviewing the self-funding ambition, especially in line with the principle of instilling fairness throughout the system? Will she commit to holding a comprehensive review, as the chief inspector recommends?

In a previous Westminster Hall debate, the Minister stated:

“The charging framework for visa and immigration services delivered £1.35 billion of income in the last financial year, 2017-18. That helped to fund more than £620 million of costs associated with other immigration system functions”.—[Official Report, 4 September 2018; Vol. 646, c. 20WH.]

It seems to my constituent, and I agree with her, that the British Government treat some parts of the immigration system as a profit-making wheeze, churning out and charging people according to their net financial worth, when what really matters is people’s rights and their dignity—people’s right to live together as a couple. If the Government are intent on using business-like jargon, what has the Minister’s Department done to promote cost-saving efficiencies—the other part of what I mentioned earlier—as a strategy for the future? It seems an obvious avenue worth exploring.

When constituents of mine are subjected to fees four times the unit cost, the system is obviously fundamentally flawed. For many people, the process of bringing over a spouse from abroad to live together here in the UK is complicated, arduous and costly. For the British Government, however, immigration bureaucracy has become quite the money spinner. Such a policy fits neatly with the Government’s unjust £30,000 immigration threshold, which I mentioned earlier in response to an intervention. It has a clear differential impact on areas of low wages, such as in my Arfon constituency. A £30,000 annual income might seem reasonable here in London, but in Arfon it is a small fortune that many people cannot even hope to achieve. The £30,000 threshold and the fee structure have been thrust on us by an Executive that know the price of something, but have no idea of the actual value, reducing everything, even the institution of marriage that they purport to support, to bean counting.

For the Government to charge spousal immigration applicants for administration costs is at best a burden, but to profiteer from it is unconscionable. The Home Office is pricing out couples who cannot afford an inflated charge of £1,523. The Immigration Minister must take a long, hard look at the visa fee structure system. We need an immigration system that abolishes arbitrary charges and instead treats people with the dignity that they deserve and to which they have a right.

Far-right Violence and Online Extremism

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

The hon. Gentleman is right; we need to show leadership. If we see racism or antisemitism in our ranks, we should deal with it. If we see Islamophobia in our ranks, we should deal with it; if I find it in my party association, those people should not be in the Tory party. I totally agree with everything he said. We have to be cautious about what we say and what we inspire, given our privileged places as political leaders in society. That goes for my friends, my colleagues and my opponents on the Opposition Benches.

We should also recognise that the next step in intolerance is linking violence to politics. The hon. Gentleman sits in a party whose shadow Chancellor talked about lynching my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Ms McVey) when she was in the Department for Work and Pensions, and whose shadow Chancellor regularly supported Irish nationalism that had a violent streak rather than a peaceful one. Let us see what his actions are when it comes to condemning Labour’s Front Bench.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I associate my party with the condemnation across the House of the appalling attack in New Zealand. That shows, if evidence were needed, that such attacks can happen in the most peaceable and unlikely of communities. Security is a reserved matter, though the Welsh Government have responsibility for economic, social and cultural matters to do with the faith community. Is the Minister confident that there is sufficiently deep co-operation between the Home Office and the Welsh Government to ensure that such attacks do not occur in rural and city communities in Wales?

Home Office Removal Targets

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Thursday 26th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

My right hon. Friend is right of course that exit checks are an important part of securing our borders and knowing who comes and goes, and I am very pleased that this Government reintroduced them in 2015.

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I have always been puzzled about why my constituent Shiromini Satkunarajah, a Londoner and student at Bangor University, was wrongly detained at Yarl’s Wood last year. The answer now seems to be clear. She was a Tamil who escaped from Sri Lanka as a child and was reporting to the police station, as she was required to do under law—she was doing her duty under the law. She was, to use that horrible, dehumanising phrase, “low-hanging fruit”. What is the Home Secretary now doing to identify and provide redress to those not of the Windrush generation but whose lives have wrongly been disrupted by Home Office target chasing?

[Amber Rudd]

I want to make it clear that I would never use that phrase, and it is not an approach I would want anybody working in the Home Office to take. I have said that, as a result of the Windrush changes, I will make sure that the Home Office has a more human face. I am setting up a new contact centre and making sure there are more senior caseworkers so that the more junior caseworkers have the confidence to make their decisions by engaging with somebody really experienced. I accept that we need to make the Home Office more personal, and I will be doing that.