Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Flight and Baroness Smith of Newnham

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 30th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. That probably comes as no surprise to noble Lords.

I am going to do something that I normally try not to, and that is to rehearse one of the arguments that has been going on for years. For five of the six years that I have been a Member of your Lordships’ House we have been talking about having a referendum on leaving the European Union, having that referendum, and then trying to deal with the fallout from it. The debates that we were having in October 2015 have been rehearsed again and again. I have tried not to rehearse them; I recognise that the UK voted to leave, that we have left and that at the end of the transition period things will be different.

However, one of the points made during the debates on the European Union Referendum Act 2015 was the importance of enfranchising EU nationals resident in the UK but also UK nationals resident elsewhere in the EU. That was suggested precisely because those groups of people were disfranchised yet were potentially going to—I will not use “suffer”, as I realise that that could be seen by some as inflammatory—be more clearly affected than many of the rest of us who are not actively using our rights as EU citizens. British citizens who have opted to use their rights under EU law to marry, reside and exercise the right to family life as EU and UK citizens should not have those rights torn away from them.

We have heard many individual cases this evening, but I will take a slightly more general approach. When an EU national is working abroad in another EU country, family members also have the right to reside and work in that country, regardless of their nationality. That has applied to UK citizens. The Minister puts forward the idea that somehow people have 15 months to make a make-or-break decision: “You can come back now or stay away. You can’t come back with your spouse, your children, your in-laws, your close family members.” Is that really what people thought that they were voting for? Taking back control surely is about us making the right decisions. They do not have to be xenophobic or exclusionary, or choices that say no to people. Why should we make it harder for those British citizens who have chosen to live in other countries—because they were exercising their rights and living with people they loved—to be back in the United Kingdom after March 2022 than it will be for EU citizens with settled status? We should at least be as generous to our fellow British citizens who have used their EU rights as we are to EU citizens who will benefit from settled status. Can the Minister please talk to her colleagues in the Home Office and make the Government think again?

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that the Government have already seen what course of action they should take. I can see absolutely no sensible reason for the proposals being as they are and, apart from the issue of acting in a civilised way towards individuals, I cannot believe that so many people or such high costs are involved, so I cannot understand why so far the Government have been stuck on this issue.

As we know, the purpose of the amendment is to preserve the rights of UK nationals living in the EEA and Switzerland who return to live in the UK in future to bring with them or to be joined by non-British family members on the same terms as at present. Unless this Bill is amended, British citizens who moved to the EU or EEA while the UK was a member of the EU will lose their right to return to their country of birth with a non-British partner or children, unless they can meet financial conditions beyond the reach of many. If they need to return to look after an elderly parent, thousands will now have to choose between returning alone and leaving their families behind or abandoning their parents to stay with their non-British families in the EEA. Nobody should have to face such a choice.

The problem is that the Government are using the end of free movement to make these British citizens for the first time meet the minimum income requirement for family reunion. The MIR has been roundly criticised, because it is so high that 40% of UK workers would not be able to reach it, and because of the Catch-22 rule that the non-British partner’s income can be taken into account only if they have been working in the UK for six months. How can they get into the UK if they cannot satisfy the MIR? The MIR is harsh but what makes it doubly unfair to apply it to this group of British citizens is that the change is, in effect, retrospective. When they left their homes in the UK to move to the EU or EEA, those people were safe in the knowledge that if they established a family while they were abroad they could bring them back to Britain, and the British parents they left behind had the same expectations.

It also leads to the perverse result that the British Government’s approach involves discrimination against its own citizens: while British citizens who have moved or will move to the EEA before the end of 2020 will face these restrictions, EU citizens who have moved or will move to the UK before the end of 2020 will not. They will have the right under the withdrawal agreement to bring existing family members here for life, as well as keeping their existing rights to return to their country of birth with families they have made in the UK.