Immigration Bill

Lord Bishop of Norwich Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

I support the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, in this amendment. I reiterate what he said: that this is a narrowly drawn amendment. It was drafted by the British Red Cross but is supported by a number of NGOs, including the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. It is closely defined in that it expands the categories of family members eligible for family reunion. It can only be, as the noble Lord has said, those who are coming here to seek respite from war, genocide or ethnic cleansing. They would have to be joining a family member who is already here, having been given refugee or humanitarian protection status. The two caveats are, first, that they would not be able to have recourse to public funds—they would be sponsored—and, secondly, that they would be registered with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or a similarly recognised authority.

We make this argument to the Committee, and to the Government, on the basis that the people involved have close connection already with a family member in Britain. They are at the most extreme end of those who seek support and assistance—who seek a haven from persecution. This draws on the great tradition that we have in this country of offering asylum—genuine asylum—to those in desperate need.

I remind the Committee of what happened in the late 1930s. Although I am a Scot of Catholic background, I am married to a man who, on the one hand, is the son of a Presbyterian Scot but whose mother was a refugee from Austria. She came to this country in 1939, as a doctor from Vienna, and she and her sister managed to get out. Because of Quakers in this country, they were looked after or sponsored on their arrival into this country. They were able to bring their mother from Austria by sponsoring her. We still have among family papers her passport, which bears the stamp “J” for Jew. She came to this country precisely in the way that we are advocating that people should be able to come now—people who are fleeing persecution and are able to say, “Let us have a close family member come and join us”. I know that other Members of the Committee will join me in urging the Government to keep that great tradition alive by allowing for this amendment. It is precisely of the same order.

I add a coda. The two daughters went on to become practitioners—doctors—who brought great credit to the way in which they were able to join this community. They always felt an enormous indebtedness to the generosity of the people of this country. I urge the Committee, and the Government, to accept the amendment.

[The Lord Bishop of Norwich]

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark, who has added his name to Amendment 234, cannot be in his place, but I am glad to speak on my own behalf and, I hope, for him, too, since we are of one mind on this matter.

One of the great privileges of being a bishop in the Church of England is found in the many connections we have with Anglican dioceses overseas. The diocese of Southwark has very long-standing links with Zimbabwe, while my own has an association with Papua New Guinea that has gone on for 60 years. I was last there in August and September, visiting the remoter parts of the western highlands, which was a challenge. The welcome is amazing and humbling, but what one learns is about the huge significance of family and kinship roots in such societies. They make all the difference for individuals between flourishing and destitution. They provide the practical and emotional bonds through which people make sense of life. They are the source of social and financial security, elder care, childcare and so on.

I reflected while I was there on the atomistic character of many British social and family relationships, which seem very limited and limiting by contrast, and certainly unthinkable to them. Consequently, when states fail and insecurity becomes unbearable, as we have already heard, families do shift, but they do not fracture even if the world around them does; mutual obligations hold. When one flees terror and ruin, there can be no better way to do it than with those with whom there exist bonds of affection and mutual obligation. It may seem to us to be an organisational and financial necessity to break up family units or kinship groups, but to those within them in such situations, it seems like madness.

I appreciate that rules already exist to provide for a degree of family reunion, but the sentiment behind the amendment is that they are too restrictive. What sort of family life do we believe in if a minor is admitted to the UK and granted asylum status but there is no basis in the Immigration Rules for parents or siblings to join him or her—or, in reverse, if a Syrian father is granted asylum but not his 19 year-old daughter left in a refugee camp? I realise that the Minister may argue that such cases can be considered outwith the Immigration Rules, but the number of these visas is dropping rapidly, down to just 11 in 2014, which suggests that this is a route that is now very little trodden indeed. I would be grateful for the Minister’s reflection on that tiny number in this context.

The problems and issues underlying our net migration figures do not subsist in family reunion, nor are they caused by them, and hence I hope that the Minister will respond favourably to Amendment 234.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 231, to which I have added my name, but I would be more than happy if Amendment 234 were to be accepted because I acknowledge that we need to act as quickly as possible to enable family reunion. My noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws talked about the experience of her husband’s family in the 1930s. It was very similar in my own family. My father came as a young man to this country from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and his parents, my grandparents, were allowed to join him in the late 1930s having escaped to Palestine and then coming to this country, so the question of family reunion has great personal significance for me.

ILPA has provided us with extracts from parliamentary debates in the 1930s and 1940s, and I was particularly struck by a speech by the then Earl of Listowel, who said in 1939:

“There is a common assumption underlying this debate … that these refugees are a common responsibility of every civilised nation, and that each country has to play its part, according to its economic resources and according to its opportunities for offering temporary asylum or permanent refuge, in providing the means of life for these helpless and persecuted people. The question surely that is before our minds first and foremost this afternoon”—

they probably did not go quite as late in those days—

“and is naturally one that confronts every member of the British Legislature is: Is this country really making its rightful contribution?”.—[Official Report, 5/7/1939; col. 1026.]

The answer today has to be no. We are not playing our part according to our economic resources when compared with poorer countries in the region on the one hand and richer countries such as Canada and Germany on the other.

While I very much welcome recent government concessions, I fear that they do not go nearly far enough. This is the message of, for example, a statement made by more than 300 eminent lawyers last autumn who, among other things, called for the establishment of safe and legal routes to the UK from both within and outside Europe. One element of that, they argued, would be humane family reunion policies such as allowing child refugees in the UK to be joined by adult family members. This would help avoid the tragedies that continue to occur in the Mediterranean where already this year 149 people have died trying to cross, according to Save the Children. Just this week over 120 leading economists have sent a similar message in an open letter to the Prime Minister.

The British Red Cross writes of heart-breaking cases it encounters of separated families not covered by the existing rules, such as the two Syrian brothers who wanted to be reunited with their mother stuck in a camp in Iraq, having been recently imprisoned in Syria. She was alone with no family and in a second country but did not qualify for family reunion. I know that the Government’s argument is that if refugee children were entitled to bring their parents into the country, it would act as an incentive to send children on ahead to secure leave. But as ILPA points out, these children are given leave to remain not because they are children but because they are recognised to have a claim as refugees. While parents understandably prioritise getting their children to safety, surely it is cynical to believe that they would deliberately put their children in the hands of smugglers to make such a dangerous journey alone as a ploy to get entry themselves. As Save the Children put it, we are talking about:

“A terrifying push, not an enticing pull”.

It reminds us of children’s rights under the UNCRC to remain with or be reunited with their family.

The Government claim to be the party of the family. In the guidance on the family test, the list of,

“relationships at the heart of family life”,

as it puts it, includes a wide range of family relationships, including extended families. Yet the Government take the most narrow and exclusionary approach to family relationships when it comes to the reunion of a particularly vulnerable group of families. I believe that if the Government were to accept one or other of these amendments, or bring forward their own amendment on Report, this would be widely welcomed.