Family Migration (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a genuine pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. I should remind the House that he was never known as a Tory wet. The speech he has made this afternoon indicates that in this House, and across parties, we still retain an understanding of the critical importance of our humanity and how we should treat each other internationally as well as locally. I thank him for his speech.

I reinforce the point that the noble Lord made about the unanimity of the committee, on which I have been pleased to serve and will do so for another three months. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on her chairmanship and the resilience that she has shown in being here this afternoon, because I know how ill she has been. I thank her for her words.

I shall reinforce two or three of the points that have been touched on. It is extremely worrying that our Select Committee system, in this House and the other place, is not treated with the respect that would be helpful to the Government and to the health of our democracy in the way that all of us would wish. It is highly unusual for a Government to simply ignore or dismiss all recommendations put forward by a Select Committee. The terms “brush-off” and “cloth-eared”, used by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, are polite when it comes to what can only be described, sincerely, as contempt from the Home Office for anyone, any organisation or any Select Committee that has the temerity even to raise minor criticisms of how it operates.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, referred to the simplification and alignment of different pathways and processes. The rules are applied at the moment in all kinds of contradictory ways that make it difficult for the staff of the Home Office to operate appropriately, not just administratively but in terms of their understanding of the impacts on individuals, and the humanity that goes with that. We also had clear evidence that in local government there was deep confusion about the role that it had to play. That meant that it had to develop an expertise that was not readily available. Although some local authorities shared that expertise, there was little if any understanding by the Home Office about what happens on the ground, at the coalface, for those who face continuing separation and have to deal with the consequences.

We dealt with an issue that has not been touched today: the question of the burden on the “public purse”. It is often said, and often believed, that family reunion will somehow add substantially to the costs for the Government, but we have had clear evidence that, far from doing that, the reunion of families can help directly. If an incoming partner, spouse or other close family member is able to get a job, they can contribute directly and lift other members of the family out of reliance on the public purse. They can also contribute to childcare, which is increasingly expensive. The Government themselves indicated that in their forward programme, in the last Spring Budget by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in terms of the expenditure that we have already in this country.

We all say that we believe in families—all families—and that all families matter. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, that seems to stop when it comes to the genuine uniting of families from across the world. Of course we need rigorous rules and of course they must be enforced both fairly and, often, in a way that can obtain public support and respect for the system, but at the moment that is not the case because of the way in which the rules are drawn up and applied. There is confusion relating to why there should be different rules from those of bespoke pathways. Why were the Government not prepared even to countenance taking a look at how the recommendations might cut costs both at the Home Office and in local government? That might improve the processing system itself, which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said, we do not have time to deal with today. That could all be run more smoothly while still adhering to the Government’s overall principles in relation to migration.

The report needs to be taken seriously. I hope that at some future juncture it will be possible to pull Government Ministers back to a future Justice and Home Affairs Committee or the Liaison Committee to try to get them to seriously address what was in the report rather than what they thought of in the first place.