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

Lord Hain Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, under cover of the pandemic, Ministers are doggedly pursuing their Brexit immigration agenda when we are in the grip of a pandemic-induced economic tsunami. A hard Brexit, sought by many Conservatives, will sever links with our most important trading partners and neighbours, and unilaterally end free movement on 31 December, with our economy still on its knees and facing a major skills crisis.

This will be the second time in the last 10 years that a Conservative Government have retrospectively changed the rights of migrants who have legally entered this country to live and work here. The Bill aims to prioritise “skilled” labour with a points-based system based largely on salary. However, as shown by a recent Ipsos MORI poll, the public recognise, with my noble friend Lord Rosser, the important role played in the pandemic by the 180,000 European Union-national health and care workers, most of whom would be identified by the Home Secretary as “low-skilled” and would not have qualified for visas under the Bill.

Unless deals on citizens’ rights are reached with the European Union, these workers, many of them heroes in the Covid crisis, will be exposed to the harsh reality of the Home Office’s failed and inhumane hostile environment policy. It is also likely that there will be a second Windrush for the children of migrants, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said in this House on 2 July. The Government’s promises on EU nationals’ rights mean nothing if they are not backed by primary legislation. They should be granted automatic settled status. The Bill does neither.

To lead a recovery from Covid, the Government are promoting investment in construction and infrastructure, highly dependent on skilled labour from the EU, yet they have no effective strategy for domestic skills-based programmes, which take years to deliver results. By ending free movement, the UK will become less accessible to highly skilled EEA migrants, on whom we have depended for years. The Huawei debacle has illustrated that the “global Britain” assumed by leave in the referendum campaign no longer exists. Our legal, economic and trading relationship with the EU—the world’s biggest, richest market, right on our doorstep—which is in no way settled, should remain our most important for years to come. Our immigration system should reflect that, not the other way around.

Another huge consequence of the Bill is that, as a direct consequence of the lack of reciprocal agreements on citizens’ rights, 66 million UK nationals will lose the benefits of their EU citizenship, their rights to travel freely and to live, work and study elsewhere in our European home. Frankly, this is all a shambolic disgrace.

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

Lord Hain Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 7th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I wish to speak particularly to Amendments 2, 47 and 57. I strongly agree with the excellent opening speech on this group by my noble friend Lord Hunt and with many other speeches, including those of the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and my noble friend Lady Lister. This Bill illustrates that the pandemic has revealed fundamental flaws in the present United Kingdom non-EU immigration system and the Government’s post-Brexit plans for immigration. In an economy which previously had record levels of employment, and despite the joblessness effects of Covid on the labour market, their proposed points-based system could produce damaging labour shortages in many sectors, including the NHS, social care, which has been spoken about authoritatively in this debate, farming, food processing and construction.

None of this should come as a surprise, as the 2016 referendum campaign was based on rhetoric falsely linking the free movement of EU workers with the legacies of Tory austerity: housing shortages, depressed wages and huge cuts in public services, especially social care. The promise to take back control of borders may have appealed to nationalistic jingoism, but it was never rooted in the reality of modern Britain, where EU and non-EU migrants of all skills levels and income brackets keep the economic and social wheels turning. EU and other migrant workers were always, in fact, net contributors, through tax and national insurance, to the National Health Service, social care and other public services. Despite the Government’s intention to equate low pay with low skills and low value, the pandemic has abruptly brought migrants’ significant front-line roles as key workers in keeping the country afloat to the attention of the public, among whom it is now widely recognised, whereas perhaps it was not in 2016. As the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has stated, the Bill

“will deny our communities the care and professionalism contributed by migrants in these areas, to our own detriment.”

The Bill does not set out in detail what the future points-based UK system will look like. These changes will be covered in unamendable Immigration Rules. The Bill gives the Government Henry VIII powers to modify primary or secondary legislation as appropriate. Despite the Government’s claims that these powers are usual, they will diminish the role of Parliament in an area of policy where many, including the Lords’ Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee in its 2019 46th report, have concluded that greater scrutiny is already required.

In the social care sector, on which millions of extremely vulnerable British people depend—many of them our relatives, in care homes and in their own homes—the vast majority of social care roles do not meet the planned immigration system’s salary threshold of £25,600. The noble Lord, Lord McCrea, who spoke immediately before me, emphasised that point in relation to Northern Ireland. Using data collected before—I stress, before—the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Skills for Care estimated the number of vacancies in the sector at 133,000. It also estimated that 5% of the 1.65 million workforce, or more than 80,000 staff, are at risk of losing their employment rights at the end of the transition period, in a sector where nearly half of employers are already struggling to fill existing vacancies because of low pay, anti-social hours and the demanding nature of care work.

The Government, in their wisdom, have decided that front-line social care staff will be excluded from their fast-track health and care visa, with the Home Secretary stating that this will encourage employers to invest in workers from the UK. Who is going to pay for this? Will it be people receiving care, cash-strapped local authorities, whose budgets have been massively cut, or private-sector care providers, many of whom are teetering on the brink of financial collapse? Parliament’s library briefing confirms that

“a wide range of organisations are concerned that short-term funding pressures remain. In 2018, the Local Government Association estimated that adult social care services faced a £1.5 billion funding gap by 2019/20 and £3.5 billion gap by 2024/25.”

While the points-based system is a fundamental change, other aspects of the non-EU immigration system such as enforcement, the right to bring dependants, settlement criteria, asylum, no access to public funds and more will remain unchanged when EU citizens without settled status become subject to them in 2021—next year. The pandemic has demonstrated that because of these policies, many such migrants are at significant risk of exposure to the virus, fear accessing healthcare, lack access to safe housing and are unable to stop working or to self-isolate because they are on poverty wages. This is not only detrimental to the health of migrant communities; the health of the wider public is also put at risk.

The Bill is a missed opportunity to deal with many more important questions, on which I support contributions and amendments from noble colleagues, including measures to combat modern slavery and indefinite detention, and to address family reunion for refugees and safe routes for unaccompanied children. These unresolved issues mean that the existing UK immigration regime for non-EU immigration is already a stain on our national reputation. Its extension to EU citizens from 2021 is a matter of deep regret, creating a new Brexit generation alongside the Windrush generation.

All British citizens living in the EU want to be reassured that we will uphold the treaty rights of EU citizens in the UK, the better to insist that they are upheld for our citizens in the EU. The Bill fails to provide that reassurance. If the Government want to retain the respect of our former friends and partners, they should listen to the concerns expressed by EU ambassadors and others and accept amendments which will guarantee the rights of the Brexit generation of European Union citizens, including vital social care workers, who have legally made their lives in our country, by writing them into this primary legislation.

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

Lord Hain Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 14th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to support Amendments 49 and 51. I listened carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said in introducing them so cogently and reasonably, and I had the advantage of being able to have had a conversation with him last week where he explained the generalities of the amendments to me. I thought the arguments were compelling; the noble Lord, Lord Polak, put it well when he said this was a practical and sensible option. All three speeches that we have heard so far have underlined why this is not one of those ragged political debates that require us to take positions; it is something about which we can do something useful this evening in Committee.

I will turn, if I may, from the generalities to something specific, a particular case of people who will be especially disadvantaged by the impact of digital-only status: the Roma community. On 2 August, Roma Holocaust Memorial Day commemorated the shocking liquidation of Roma in August 1944 at the so-called Gypsy family camp at Auschwitz- Birkenau. On that infamous day, 2,897 men, women and children of Roma or Sinti origin were murdered by the Nazis. Of around 23,000 Roma taken to Auschwitz—and hundreds of thousands more perished during the Holocaust—an estimated 20,000 were murdered there. At the time of the liberation of Auschwitz, only four Roma remained alive.

Now, 76 years later, Roma people still face discrimination and liquidation. I especially commend the work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Roma in ensuring that Parliament understands the horrors that this community has experienced and the special circumstances and challenges which it faces today.

In debates like this, I miss the voice of Lord Avebury, a good and long-standing friend and the author of the Caravan Sites Act 1968. At the memorial event celebrating his life, Damian Le Bas, a Roma who wrote The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain—a remarkable insight into the world of Travelling people—spoke powerfully about how parliamentarians such as Lord Avebury can act to ensure that the UK’s 200,000 Roma can lead lives of dignity.

Lord Avebury would have been the first on his feet to support these amendments, pointing to the lack of awareness within the Roma community of digital immigration status and the way in which digital exclusion simply builds on the other exclusions which Roma historically have experienced. The Roma Support Group says that only 3% of Roma are able independently to complete online applications such as those required by the European Union settlement scheme. Very little data exists about how many Roma have applied to the EUSS so far and been given settled or pre-settled status. As the debate proceeds, I will hand the Minister a copy of the Roma Support Group’s briefing on this so that she can read some of the cases illustrating this point. I would be grateful if the Minister could say how this problem can be addressed, especially as the Home Office data does not include a breakdown of ethnicity.

Enabling those who need it to receive physical evidence of their status in the UK would certainly be a start, and enabling programmes to be developed which could address the issue of digital exclusion, on which this debate has helped us to focus, would be a very good outcome.

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that we all cherish the memory of the much-missed Lord Avebury, who was a champion for human rights globally.

I will speak to Amendments 49 and 51 on the need for documented proof of settled status, and commend the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for his compelling speech, and the crisp speech—notably from the Government Benches—from the noble Lord, Lord Polak. The ending of free movement, which this Bill implements, is nothing less than a tragedy. We should not be severing our links with our nearest neighbours, with whom we have the most in common. This seismic change in our freedom impacts all UK citizens, as we will lose our rights to live, work and study in the EU and EEA countries. For EU nationals living here—many of whom are our family members, friends and colleagues—and for UK citizens living in EU member states, the changes will also be profound, bringing a potential loss of security and life choices in the future.

The aim of the Government’s Brexit project of ending free movement to and from the EU and replacing it with the future global points-based immigration system was supposedly to deliver on their aim of reducing net migration. This policy is not supported by the evidence. In 2019, despite free movement, net migration from the EU fell to less than 50,000, but net migration from outside the EU, where there is no free movement, increased to its highest level for 45 years, above 280,000. Is this what “taking back control” was supposed to be about?

Those EU nationals who for whatever reason do not acquire settled status by the deadline of the end of June 2021 will move from an immigration system that currently works to the same unreformed system that currently applies to non-EU nationals, which is inhumane, dysfunctional and, frankly, chaotic. Even those who succeed in registering under the EU settled status scheme will receive no physical documentation as proof of their status; their rights will not be guaranteed in primary legislation and will potentially be subject to alteration by Ministers under the very considerable Henry VIII powers that this Bill bestows on them.

The Financial Times reported in July that the number of EU migrants who have applied for the right to stay in the UK after Brexit already considerably exceeds official estimates of the Europeans who are eligible to remain, raising further questions over the effectiveness of the Government’s scheme. Home Office statistics up to July show that 3.8 million applications have been made, far more than the official estimate of 3.4 million EU citizens living in the UK that was produced by the Office for National Statistics. In fact, the Financial Times survey of EU embassies discovered that the UK Government might have underestimated the EU-born population of the UK by more than half a million people. By the end of July more than 3.5 million grants of status had been made. However, around 40% of those applicants had been granted only pre-settled status, leaving them in a kind of limbo with their status still unresolved for the long term, while many more applications are still anticipated.

Experts warn that the confusion over the real number of EU citizens living in the UK will make it almost impossible to assess how many eligible people will fail to secure settled status by the time the process closes on 30 June next year. However, it is likely that tens of thousands will suddenly become unlawfully resident in the country that they have legally made their own and be left facing the full force of the Home Office’s “hostile environment”—namely, criminalisation and the threat of deportation.

The groups most affected are likely to include many from the age groups under 18 years and over 65 years, who have had worryingly low application rates. For example, there are 9,000 eligible children and young people in the care system in the UK, for whom only 500 applications have so far been made by local authorities. Non-EU-national family members of EU nationals, rural farm workers, those in isolated communities, those with limited English-language skills, those who are homeless, victims of domestic abuse, those without relevant or up-to-date documents and those who are not digitally literate—often the elderly—are all potentially at risk. That last problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic as the support services normally available to such groups have been forced to move online.

For those groups and others, such as full-time students, full-time parents and those who have previously left the UK temporarily for more than six months, providing the required proof of continuous residence for five years to the Home Office can be very challenging, if not impossible. This means that people with a rightful claim to British residence may lose their legal status overnight. It is another Windrush in the making.

The other main impact of the Bill is of course that, as a direct consequence of the abolition of EEA free movement for UK citizens, we, our children and our grandchildren will from January 2021 lose our rights to live, work and study in the 27 member states of the EU plus the three EEA countries and Switzerland—the biggest diminution in value of a country’s citizenship in history. Therefore, at the same time as the UK Government are opening up higher-paid jobs in the UK to the whole world under the points-based system, the brightest and best UK citizens seeking international career opportunities in the biggest, richest market on our doorstep, the EU, will be second-class citizens in their own country.

In addition, the multiple impacts of the Bill on the estimated 1.5 million UK citizens already resident in European Union member states, who will also become second-class citizens within the EU, should not be forgotten. For example, those with non-British spouses and family members will not have an automatic right to return to the UK with their family after 31 December 2020. Frankly, the Bill is an inhumane, reactionary mess and these amendments try to ameliorate that. I stress that they are not party political; they are simply about humanity. That is why I hope the Minister will accept them when she replies.