Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules (Cm 7944)

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for giving way. Perhaps I may say that during my time in the House of Commons, the opposition parties—then the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—always complained about Ministers and departments releasing information to the press. Will she give assurances that every step will be taken to ensure that the elected Chamber and then this House are notified before information is given to the press?

[Baroness Neville-Jones]

The noble Lord is quite right. It was regrettable. I know what happened—it was inadvertent, but it nevertheless happened. It was regrettable and I give the noble Lord the assurance that every effort will be made not to repeat ignoring Parliament.

I also want to give the House an assurance that statements of changes to the Immigration Rules will be laid before Parliament before implementation of the permanent limit. I want to make it absolutely clear that well before any of those statements of changes are made, and those decisions are taken, there will be continuing and extensive consultation.

There has been comment in this debate and in earlier debates about the effect of these limits on certain categories, businesses and universities. We have been talking to businesses about the interim limit and the longer term. We tried to design the interim limits so that they had some inbuilt flexibility. The intra-company transfers, on which many multinationals rely, are exempt from the operation of the usual limit. There is also a small reserve pool of certificates of sponsorship for new requests. The anxieties expressed by companies have been investigated in detail with them. Sometimes we find that in another part of their business they have some certificates of sponsorship that have not been used and they have more latitude and leeway than they realise. Therefore, it is a matter of the system being understood and of the companies knowing what their position is.

We have been issuing this reserve pool of certificates if a company has had a particular need that must be met and it is certainly in the economic interest of this country. Those are issued once a month according to a set of criteria. Some employers have raised concerns about the interim limit and we often find that many of them have not used their allocations. Many companies are able to bring in the people they want via the intra-company transfer route, which is not subject to the interim limit.

The universities have also been concerned and the Government are well aware of the anxieties that they have expressed. Obviously, it is not our objective to reduce the attractiveness of British universities to those who want to come here to study, to teach, or to do their research. Again, to some extent there has been a misunderstanding of the system. Under the interim arrangements, which have been going only for a short time—in fact, since July—more than 2,400 visas have been allocated to universities to recruit the academics and the researchers they need. I am not aware that in concrete cases there are real shortages.

Under tiers 1 and 2, academics get points for academic qualifications as well as for earnings, a point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp. Therefore, the system is not just earnings-related. Several noble Lords raised the question of the impact assessment. We thought about doing nothing under the assessment, but that would not have met our policy objectives, which are given in the impact assessment as reducing net migration, reducing the adverse social impacts of immigration and continuing to attract the brightest and best to the UK. Furthermore, the application of an interim limit is to ensure that the announcement of a permanent limit does not lead to a so-called surge.

The equality impact assessment identifies no adverse consequences. It makes the point that the immigration system has a very wide pool of potential users who can come here from any part of the world. The equality impact assessment (EIA) is focused solely on the impact of the introduction of an interim limit to tier 1 general and tier 2 general and an increase in the point threshold for tier 1 of the points-based system. It does not address the difficulties which some groups may have in accessing those tiers, which may be due to a wide range of social, educational, and economic inequalities from different societies in the world. Although I have sympathy with the points made, frankly, the UK immigration system cannot be used to mitigate such wider-ranging barriers and inequalities in the home countries of those who may wish to use our system.

On consultation, the interim limit on tier 2 is based mainly on past allocations to individual employers, to give employers certainty. We will take account of concerns when designing the permanent limit and will have a more forward-looking arrangement. At the moment, obviously, we are operating on historical evidence, but the idea is not to base ourselves purely on what has happened in the past but to look forward to the future needs of the economy. We will take into account the findings from our consultation with businesses.

The chief executive of the UK Border Agency has met the CBI and its members. UKBA officials have also received 3,500 responses to the consultation and have met a wide variety of businesses and other corporate partners. Our promise of consultation is not idle; it is real, and consultation is proceeding in some detail. Officials have also listened carefully to concerns and have discussed the proposed mechanism as well as the coverage of the permanent limit. We want a system that works both for the people of this country and for those who are concerned with the running of its economy.

One major theme running through the responses to the consultation is that employers attach greater importance to their ability to fill specific posts through migrant labour, rather than through a pool of highly skilled workers. There is possibly a clash between the perceived short-term need of a company to be able to find somebody easily and what the Government regard as the long-term need of this country, which is to create a pool of highly skilled workers. We need our population to be able to take those jobs in competition with others. It is for that reason, among others, that the Government are committed to limiting non-EU migration and to cutting net migration. We make no apology for that. However, as I said, we are listening to business about how that should be done and how we will make the permanent limit work. This is not a question of it not working.

We also want to give some time for the UK economy and UK businesses to adapt, so we intend to phase the system in. We will introduce the policy in ways which make the needs of individual businesses and of the country as compatible as possible at any given moment. The Department for Work and Pensions programme for welfare reform, including the work programme, should also help to make a difference. If we get these policies right over time, the nation should see reduced dependency on migration, and thus, in turn, less demand for migrant labour. We have to kick-start the skills systems in this country to provide the skills we will need in the future and limiting skilled migration is one of the levers we have to encourage business engagement in that agenda. In the short term, it clearly creates some conflict of interest between individual businesses and what we regard as the national need, but we believe that over time the national need has priority. In this way, we want to bring net migration down to tens of thousands from the unsustainable level at which it was previously operating, but we will engage in consultation throughout this.

I now move to the statement of changes against which the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has prayed. This statement contains a number of amendments, including clarification of the formal definition of a refugee, further provisions to enable the use of online applications and the correction of certain typographical errors in the rules, but my impression from what the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said in the Chamber is that he is principally concerned with the provisions on family reunion for people who have been granted citizenship after having formerly held refugee status, so I will deal with that issue.

The Government recognise the importance of allowing refugees to be reunited with their relatives. The Immigration Rules therefore provide that a refugee’s spouse or partner and children under the age of 18 can join him or her in the UK without the refugee having to show that they can be maintained and accommodated without access to public funds. Also, we do not charge any kind of visa fee. For family members to benefit from these provisions, the family relationship must have existed before the refugee left the country in which he or she used to live. These rules apply where the sponsor in the UK has humanitarian protection, which is a status given to people who are at risk of serious harm in their home countries but who are not refugees under the 1951 convention. However, it has never been the intention that these provisions should apply to people who are not refugees or who do not have humanitarian protection. That is the policy that these amendments are intended to confirm. There is no intention or effect to change policy.

The amendments deal with the situation where a refugee becomes a British citizen. In these circumstances, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees is very clear. The individual is no longer a refugee because he or she has,

“acquired a new nationality and enjoys the protection of the country of his new nationality”.

As the person ceases to be a refugee at that stage, our intention has always been that he or she would no longer benefit from the special provisions in the Immigration Rules for refugee family reunion. Instead, the former refugee would be able to be joined by family members in the same way as any other British citizen under the rules for the immigration of spouses and children that appear in Part 8 of the Immigration Rules. I think that most people would see this approach as entirely fair. Once we have welcomed someone as a British citizen, that person should have all the rights and responsibilities that any other citizen would have, including in respect of bringing in family members. We do not think that it would be right to give one group of citizens—former refugees—privileges over the others. The point is not that we are changing the rules. We do not believe that the judgment given in the case of ZN (Afghanistan) and Others dealt with this point. The case dealt with ambiguity in the language of the rules, which these amendments are designed to deal with. There is no change of policy, but there is clarification of the rules. Noble Lords asked various other questions, but the effect of this language is not to make it any harder for refugees’ spouses to join them or to damage family unity.