Immigration: Hostile Environment

Debate between Lord Bassam of Brighton and Lord Morris of Handsworth

Thursday 14th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, when I think of the term “hostile environment”, it conjures up notions of a war zone, of environmental degradation or an inhospitable climatic event, perhaps an earthquake—something stark and unpleasant, like a scene from a World War I killing field. I do not think—or, I should say, I had not previously thought—of it as something to do with my own country.

Sadly, that perception changed when the full horror of the Government’s treatment of the Windrush generation became increasingly apparent over the last few months. Back in 2012, Theresa May said:

“The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment”,


for illegal immigrants. This was at a point when net immigration was running at about 250,000—well above the Conservative Party’s target of bringing it down to the tens of thousands. Over the course of Mrs May’s tenure at the Home Office, this usually cautious politician brought forward seven pieces of immigration legislation and an estimated 45,000 changes to immigration rules—so many we might have been forgiven for thinking that immigration was an obsession. It also explains why many foreign EU nationals are so disbelieving of Prime Minister May’s promises about preserving their residency rights post Brexit.

I fully expect the Minister to repeat a point she made to me in a Written Parliamentary Question: that the term “hostile environment” originated during Alan Johnson’s tenure as Home Secretary. Maybe it did, maybe it did not, but the really important point is what that term came to mean when it was elevated to become a policy that had to be delivered with the careful precision that Mrs May has made her trademark.

The treatment of the Windrush generation is the most objectionable manifestation of the Government’s intentions for the hostile environment. The Guardian, to its great credit, has documented its full human impact. It seems that from about 2013 legal advisers began telling the Home Office that older Caribbean-born people, here entirely legally, were receiving letters from Capita saying that they had no right to be here. Some were told to leave immediately. The Refugee and Migrant Centre in Wolverhampton reported that it had seen hundreds of clients getting the Capita letters but they had already been given right to remain and the correct documentation. As time went on the threatening letters turned into action. People began reporting loss of housing, benefits and jobs, and refusal of access to free healthcare.

The impact of these deprivations has become clear. Many Windrush workers and their children have experienced years of uncertainty, leading to ill health and mental breakdown, and some have ended up sleeping rough. But the hostile environment policies were not just visited on the Windrush generation. In April this year, the Oxford Migration Observatory estimated that some 57,000 Commonwealth migrants from Pakistan, India, Kenya and South Africa might be caught by the policy. Refugee Action reports that the detention, destitution, homelessness and limbo experienced by Windrush children were the tip of the iceberg and that asylum seekers face exactly the same problems.

Colin Yeo, an immigration lawyer, has described the effect of the policy well. He says that it has led to,

“the creation of an illegal underclass of foreign, mainly ethnic minority workers and families who are highly vulnerable to exploitation and who have no access to the social and welfare … net”.

Rachel Krys of the End Violence Against Women Coalition speculated that while rightly the public were outraged by the policy impact on the Windrush generation:

“The same policy is also leaving many women at risk of violence and exploitation, scaring them away from seeking help, and making it harder for them to access life-saving services”.


This cannot be right, but it is exactly what the policy was supposed to achieve: to create such a hostile environment so that people simply left the UK. It is precisely that fact that ultimately led to the undoing of the previous Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, and forced her resignation. We should remember that she first tried to deny that there was a target for forced removals and then, when it was pointed out that she had been briefed on the target, she resigned for misleading Parliament. I suspect that, by that time, Amber Rudd realised that the target covered operations that wrongly deported people, falsely detained them, increased their vulnerability and was probably unlawful—most of its victims were in the UK quite lawfully.

The Government must now regret the day that they dreamed up the expression “hostile environment”. In the wake of the Windrush scandal, the policy of being tough on anyone deemed illegal, or without documents proving citizenship, has rapidly unravelled, and so it should. The new Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, presumably fearing the impact of the policy on the Conservatives’ credentials as a more multiracial party in the Theresa May era, has been rapidly distancing himself from the term. He knows that the policy is a stain on our country’s international reputation for fairness and goes to the heart of the reputation we once had for providing a safe haven and a home to the dispossessed.

As a deliberate act of government, creating a policy called “hostile environment” seems odd in itself; cold, politically calculating and designed for effect. So to adopt the term to be used as a policy relating to immigration, where race plays a part, is even more awful. What can Ministers and in particular our Prime Minister have thought they were doing and, more particularly, why? What was the purpose of the term? It seems to me that it was dreamed up as part of the Cameron response to UKIP, to somehow demonstrate that this Government were getting a grip on the ridiculous target they set to bring immigration down to the tens of thousands. I was a Home Office Minister during Jack Straw’s tenure and I find it hard to believe that officials would have advised on a specific target. Migration and asylum targets are notoriously hard to hit because so many factors are involved in driving the numbers.

Weirder still, of course, was the mobile billboard campaign of 2013 that came with the adoption of the policy. Apart from its offensive language, this acted only to highlight the Government’s failure to grapple with a problem of their own imagining. The ill-fated campaign was nothing more than a piece of naked populism aimed at appeasing UKIP-leaning voters. The policy also had inbuilt flaws. The Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration reported on three areas covered by the policy. The reports are instructive. The report looking at driving licences and bank accounts found real concerns about incorrect data. The chief inspector reported:

“During file sampling, the inspection identified a number of examples of individuals being wrongly listed as in the UK without leave”.


Similar problems were found with bank accounts: from a test sample of 169 individuals, 17 were wrongly flagged as disqualified persons, whatever that means. As the chief inspector observed,

“the Home Office did not appear to appreciate the seriousness of such errors for the individuals affected, and its proposed avenue of redress for individuals who had left the UK with valid leave outstanding ... was inadequate”.

The right to rent review published in March 2018 was even more devastating in its conclusions. The policy, colleagues will recall, was piloted in 2014 and rolled out in England in 2016. It resulted in 468 referrals to the Home Office civil penalties compliance team, resulting in 265 civil penalties and levies of £167,000, but not a single prosecution. The Home Office enforcement of right to rent, through its immigration compliance and enforcement teams, gained entry to more than 10,000 properties but made referrals to the civil penalties compliance team in only 3% of cases. The chief inspector reported that the scheme suffered from poor communications, and early signs had shown the scheme to be wholly ineffective. He said that, overall, the right to rent scheme,

“had yet to demonstrate its worth as a tool to encourage immigration compliance”.

In fact, the number of voluntary returns had fallen over the period. Internally, he found the Home Office had failed,

“to coordinate, maximise or even measure effectively its use”.

The chief inspector went on to reflect stakeholder concerns in four policy areas: wrong right to rent decisions; racial and other discrimination; the exploitation of tenants; and homelessness. The charity Crisis reports that whole households were becoming homeless where a right to rent case had been found in a property, while the Residential Landlords Association research found that 49% of landlords were less likely to rent to someone with limited leave to remain and 44% would rent only to those with documents they were familiar with. Overall, the chief inspector reported that the Home Office failed to monitor the scheme, failed to tackle reported exploitation inherent within it, and made no attempt to measure its intended impact. Recently, your Lordships’ House heard from the noble Lord, Lord Best, that the Home Office’s own Landlords Consultative Panel had failed to meet or even be convened. One wonders why.

Given the treatment of the Windrush generation, we should not be surprised at any of this. As the United Nations special rapporteur, Professor Tendayi Achiume, observed in May 2018, the hostile environment policy was,

“destroying the lives and livelihoods of … ethnic minority communities”,

including people with rightful citizenship status and those who had been in the UK for decades. Of course, the new Home Secretary’s moves to defuse the hostile environment issue are to be welcomed, as are the commitments to compensate and investigate the appalling Windrush cases where people have been deprived of their home, job and access to medical care and benefits.

That the hostile environment policies since 2012 have seeped into the fabric, operation and culture of many of our public institutions shames us all. It is right that these policies are now being scrapped as their appalling implications have been realised. It is also right that the Government have apologised. However, for me, that is not enough. There remains a big question over what replaces the policy, the racial stereotyping it must have been based on, and the loss of trust it has engendered in many of our communities. I want to know from Ministers across our public services how they intend to tackle this. It will be no easy task and they need to convince a sceptical public that they have a plan. Warm words will not suffice.

However, there is a bigger opportunity hidden in this policy disaster. A Government who had a broader vision could start afresh. They could set themselves a goal of taking race out of their political calculations. They could, when they eventually brought forward an immigration Bill, set themselves the task of promoting fairness in the system without playing at dog-whistle politics or trying to appease the politics of social division and racism. Fundamentally, this is where both the Cameron and May Governments have gone wrong. Honesty about the country’s labour needs and the impact of migration at a time of austerity could have helped avoid the policies that led to the hostile environment strategy and the fear of UKIP that triggered the Cameron Government’s foolish rush to a referendum on the EU.

What we should now do is begin to reshape and rethink the debate so that absurd policies such as this do not rematerialise under a different guise in the future. To this end I have a few questions for the Minister to think about. The UN special rapporteur recommended that,

“the Government repeal the aspects of its immigration law … that deputize immigration enforcement to private citizens”,

and make public officials responsible for policing immigration rules in providing health and other public services. Given the evident failure of these policies, can the Minister tell us how actively that recommendation is being considered across government? Can she also update us on the progress being made by the Home Office on identifying the number of Windrush victims of the hostile environment policy, specifically the numbers refused re-entry to the UK and those wrongly made to leave following refusal and denial of housing, health and public services? Perhaps she could tell us where we have got to with the compensation scheme.

Finally, given the welcome hints of change in the offing, can the Minister update us on the position of tier 2 visa applicants and shortage professions? Our health service has been deprived of trained and qualified doctors as a by-product of the hostile environment policy. I know that the Royal College of General Practitioners has raised this issue and has identified cases of trainees being threatened with deportation—this, when we are light of some 5,000 GPs, is a form of public service self-harm.

To conclude, I am pleased to have had the opportunity to highlight this most shameful of public policies. David Lammy and the MPs who have shone the spotlight on the Windrush cases, together with the Guardian, deserve praise for their diligence and determination. 1 hope that as a result of the exposure of the hostile environment policy and its intended and unintended consequences, public policymakers will begin to rethink attitudes to migration, and we can continue to tackle the underlying causes of racism and discrimination on our society and celebrate the multiculturalism which should be at the heart of modern Britain. I beg to move.

[Lord Morris of Handsworth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am mindful that in five minutes this House will participate in a minute’s silence. I therefore seek the Minister’s advice as to whether I should start my speech or wait until the five minutes has elapsed and the minute’s silence is observed.