European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Warner

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 14th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have done an amazing amount to look after EU citizens in this country. I cast my mind back to the early days of the May Government when there was great pressure to unilaterally make steps to ensure the position of EU citizens living in this country. At that stage, the Government resisted the pressure because they said that this should be part of the negotiations. It should be reciprocated by the EU: it should do the same for our citizens in the EU. As far as I can make out, that has not happened. We have made a generous, unilateral gesture towards EU citizens in this country and there has not been reciprocation from the EU. Does that not mean that the Government have been rather mistaken to make this generous offer? Surely we have an obligation to our citizens in the EU and we should look to it to reciprocate anything that we do in this country. Will my noble friend address this problem when she sums up? As I understand it, British citizens in the EU do not, at the moment, have any freedom of movement between one EU country and another and there are certain problems with EU citizens in this country travelling to and from their country of origin in Europe. This has not been a very satisfactory outcome in the negotiations. Perhaps we would have been better not to have made this extremely generous, unilateral offer.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, I support these two amendments. I do so as the roommate of my noble friend Lord Kerslake, who sends his apologies for not being here but has strengthened my arguments for supporting the amendments. I speak as someone who, after the 1997 election—oh glorious days—spent two years in the Home Office and saw every submission of any significance that was made to the then Home Secretary. I always shuddered a little when we got submissions from the immigration part of the department. They sent a quiver through my soul, because of reliability. I remember a former Conservative Home Secretary briefed us shortly after that election. He said to the then Home Secretary: “You have to remember that there are always 500 people in the Home Office who can ruin your political career. The really scary thing is that none of them actually realises that they can do it.” The Windrush exercise demonstrated rather well the wisdom of those remarks.

The important thing about these two amendments is that they do not in any way disturb significantly what the Government want to do. They provide legal certainty, about which I think we will hear more later in Committee. They also provide some very practical stiffening of the arrangements around these new Immigration Rules. I went to one of the Home Office briefings for parliamentarians on the new scheme, at which everybody, MPs, Peers and members of MPs’ offices, made the point to the Home Office that in the real world a lot of people expect someone to produce hard-copy evidence, whether it is the landlord, the GP or whoever. I can speak from personal experience, having helped a number of people get permanent leave to remain here, and not that long ago either. These people had had experiences of having to produce some written documentation that they were entitled to live here.