Immigration: Children

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

It is not a question of not being particularly interested. As I said to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, there is information sharing between the Home Office and local authorities. I imagine that it is management information, as opposed to publishable figures, but I can confirm that to the noble Lord.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in her response to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, the Minister said that several Governments have applied the same rules. She might be interested to know that a very distinguished noble friend and fellow Cross-Bencher sitting not a million miles away from me muttered in my direction, “One of the definitions of insanity is doing the same wrong thing again and again”.

I come back to the point of children being denied free school meals. In all conscience, how can any Home Office official or Minister say that that is the right thing to do? In what way does it promote integration? And what on earth have those children done wrong?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The point I made did not uphold the noble Lord’s point that doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity but that successive Governments have accepted that, if you do not have right of residency, NRPF should apply. On free school meals, a pupil or their parent must be in receipt of any of the qualifying benefits, including asylum support, and must make a claim to the school for free school meals. It is not that a child would not have access, but that they must satisfy the criteria. Decisions over whether immigrants or refugees have recourse to public funds and/or receive asylum support are made by the Home Office.

British Nationality Act 1981 (Remedial) Order 2019

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Lords Chamber

As it is, he feels he is being treated as “less than” and being “shut out”. How can this possibly be justified? It is high time to bring an end to this injustice.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, in her usual style, has once again taken the wind out of my sails, so I will sail in her slipstream. My commiserations to the Minister, as she has the second instalment of the “Lister and Russell show” today.

The Minister commented that the JCHR had gone slightly outside its brief in its comments on this draft order. I would like to suggest to her why that might have seemed the right thing to do. The subjects, conclusions and recommendations it raises on pages 23 to 25 of the report, if you bother to read them, are fairly sobering and somewhat shocking. They are not new; they are issues that have been raised repeatedly in a variety of fora. They will not go away, because again and again we see and hear evidence of what I assume and hope are the unintended consequences of the Home Office’s multifaceted approach to trying to constrain, manage and discourage non-UK nationals and their dependants, including large numbers of children—some of whom have the absolute right to be British citizens—from becoming British citizens. The reason the JCHR has commented on that is that it feels, as many of us do, that that is shocking and simply unacceptable.

While I suspect that the immune system of the Home Office is in a demoralisingly parlous state, I also observe that the cumulative layers of scar tissue it has acquired over the last few years seem to have rendered it incapable of remembering above all that its activities which impact on children are prescribed under British and international law, which say very clearly what the rights of those children are. They make it very clear that those rights have to be first and foremost in every thought and action of the Home Office on our behalf as citizens of this country.

It is unacceptable that the immigration status of parents, whether it is up for argument or not, should have such a material and, in many cases, negative effect on their children, who have done nothing to deserve such treatment. Under international law and the European convention on the rights of the child, and the UN version, they have an absolute right to be protected. I cannot understand why the Home Office seems incapable of recognising this and putting it at the forefront of all it does.

I have three questions for the Minister, and if she is unable to answer them this afternoon, I should be delighted if she had the time and courtesy to write to me. The first is on the subject of citizenship. Do the Government recognise that British citizenship and indefinite leave to remain are simply not the same in terms of the entitlements and security they bring, and that having British citizenship for those entitled to it is a fundamental part of a child’s right to an identity?

Secondly, to return to the perennial issue of citizenship fees and the lack of fee waivers, the Government have, I am glad to say, committed to ensure that the issues highlighted in the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration’s report on the charging for services will be addressed. They said that the recommendations will be,

“factored into spending considerations on fees”,

and undertook to conduct further consultation. Will the Government commit to completing that review even if, as I suspect is entirely possible, the comprehensive spending review is confirmed as being delayed? These children cannot and should not wait.

Thirdly, on local authority duties, do the Government not recognise that local authorities have a duty as corporate parents to support children in care and to secure the most permanent status for which they are eligible? If so, do they accept that to charge children in care for citizenship applications is a cost shift from the Home Office to local authorities that creates extra financial pressures on already cash-strapped local authorities? It is robbing Peter to pay Paul and it is simply unfair.

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I support what has been said so far. The Minister rightly pointed out that this is a remedial order to Parliament to correct incompatibilities in the British Nationality Act 1981 with the European Convention on Human Rights as identified by the courts in recent cases.

The question remains as to how we got into this mess in the first place. So deeply entrenched has been the Home Office in keeping people out of the United Kingdom that previous policies lacked basic concern about the rights and values of people wishing to settle here. Common sense would have told the Government that they were entitled to the incompatibilities being removed at the earliest possible occasion. There are no ifs and buts in this matter: it has taken 28 years to recognise this anomaly and the sooner it is put right, the better.

None of us are surprised that, as the British and British overseas citizenship rights campaign tells me, once again the Home Office is stalling and wants to push for a better legislative opportunity, for which the Home Secretary must look. Meanwhile, children of BOT descent born to unmarried BOT fathers remain shunned and left out in the cold, preventing them being officially embraced by their unmarried BOT fathers’ homelands. It is plainly wrong and should never have been allowed to happen in the first place.

Recent information has revealed areas of serious concern regarding immigration and nationality issues. We were concerned about the scandal of Windrush settlers who were denied proper documentation when they arrived here. This week, we read about the treatment of immigration detainees by private contractors who inflicted misery in our detention centres. They made millions of pounds’ profit from the services they provided. For this to happen at a time when we took great pride in promoting antislavery legislation in the United Kingdom shames all of us who are keen to promote dignity and respect for detainees.

This weekend, the Sunday Times reported on cash for British passports for those who can afford to pay millions of pounds into government coffers. You may ask what this has to do with the order before us. The aim for each of the above group is to obtain British nationality so that they can lead a decent life in the United Kingdom. Why is it taking us so long to rectify an anomaly identified by our courts?

We accept that a number of the recommendations are outside the scope of the remedial order before us. There is no need to wait for another opportunity to revisit nationality laws. We should be actively promoting new legislation to rectify anomalies identified by the JCHR. This order gives us the opportunity to bring forward sooner rather than later legislation that would remedy the deep hurt and sense of rejection felt by the affected children, who are now adults. They simply want to be respected and treated fairly. It is unacceptable that discrimination in acquiring British nationality persists. We should also use this opportunity to consolidate all immigration and nationality issues and proof these against anti-discrimination legislation. We welcome a wider consultation and ask the Minister to set up a timetable for this exercise.

A number of issues that have been identified in the debate so far need to be considered. One such is the “good character” requirement in the context of seeking British nationality. This applies to those aged 10 or over, as that is the age of criminal responsibility. Is the Minister aware that my Private Member’s Bill on this matter has gone through all stages in your Lordships’ House and will be dealt with by Wera Hobhouse MP in the other place? I ask the Minister to await the outcome before specifying that the Government do not consider it appropriate to adjust the “good character” policy so that certain acts become inadmissible when assessing a minor’s suitability for British citizenship. No one would wish to ignore some heinous crimes, but great care must be taken to look at the proportionality of the crime and its impact, so that applicants are less likely to meet the threshold for refusal of citizenship.

My final point relates to the fees issue, which was also identified by previous speakers. My noble friend Lady Hamwee—she would have loved to speak today as she was a member of the JCHR, but she is at a Select Committee meeting and is unable to be here—told me that the size of the fees can mean that a family is able to pay for one child but not stretch to the other. When is the Minister going to look into this? Does she accept that citizenship is not something to be granted on a discretionary basis but an entitlement when all the conditions are met? I look forward to the Minister’s comments.

Migrant Children: Welfare

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Tuesday 9th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Roberts. I must confess that there was a point, about three minutes ago, when I hoped beyond hope that he would go into song and sing about these refugees and these children. Perhaps that should be for another time; I am not sure what it says in the Chamber handbook about the appropriateness of that. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for initiating this discussion, and declare an interest as a governor of Coram, which has among its many activities dealing with children—with whom this report is concerned—the Coram Children’s Legal Centre.

I commend Project 17 on a timely and truly shocking report. Noble Lords do not need to read the whole thing; the conclusions and recommendations on pages 44 and 45 are hard-hitting, painfully clear and, for me, and I suspect for many others who care deeply about the welfare of children, a source of deep shame and embarrassment. Our excellent Library briefing moves sequentially from the Project 17 report at the beginning seamlessly into the Government’s overview of the Immigration Act 2016, and there, at the bottom of the first page, the Government state:

“The act will restrict the support we give to people whose claims for asylum have been unconfirmed”—


note that, “unconfirmed”—

“and their dependants … We are also simplifying”—

why do I want to reach for a hard hat whenever I read “simplify” in a government document?—

“the basis on which local authorities in England can support migrants without immigration status. We will continue to meet all of our obligations towards asylum seekers, refugees and children, but equally we should be expecting illegal migrants to leave the UK rather than providing access to support”.

Then, at the bottom of page 2, the Government state that,

“the costs of implementing measures in this act are compensated by the benefits”.

The then Immigration Minister, James Brokenshire, described the Immigration Act as a Bill that,

“will build an immigration system that truly benefits Britain”.

If you read this report, one of a sorry procession of reports and stories continuously eroding public confidence in the Home Office and in our whole approach to immigration—let alone how we choose to treat certain children—it is hard not to be moved and hard to resist the temptation to become intemperate, and even indignant. What a huge irony it is that our outgoing Prime Minister, who devoted so much time and effort to achieving her breakthrough Modern Slavery Act, should also have presided over a Home Office that has evolved and instituted a barrage of initiatives that have created an environment in which it appears that some Home Office officials feel empowered to apply a form of modern slavery to those they view potentially as illegal immigrants—both adults and their children.

I suspect that, like me, many noble Lords have genuine sympathy for the Minister—and the Minister who sits beside her—who has had to stand again and again at the Dispatch Box and explain what so often appear the unintended consequences of ill-thought through and poorly executed initiatives and regulations. It is interesting to note the body language of her predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, whom I have seen around the House. All I will say is that her facial expression and body language make me feel that a very large weight has been lifted from her shoulders. She seems an awful lot happier. I have not asked her, but that is what I imply.

Windrush has become shorthand for what appears to many outsiders an endemic and institutional failure of the moral compass that is so vital to ensure that there is an appropriate social, judicial and responsible culture in the Home Office. I was talking earlier today to a noble Lord who shall remain nameless but with whom I share an office—so noble Lords can look that up and work it out. He was the head of another government department, not the Home Office. I asked him whether what has been going on in the Home Office was unusual and particular. He assured me that it was not at all unusual, and that it was the department of all departments where one spends most of one’s time firefighting, standing at the Dispatch Box unexpectedly and having to defend things that probably one had never heard about until about eight hours previously. So apparently this is business as normal—but the fact that it is business as normal does not make it morally acceptable.

I cannot even begin to imagine what it must feel like to work in some of the units on the front line, whether in the Home Office or in the local authorities to which our current legislation delegates so much of the nitty-gritty detail that can have a profound and sometimes devastating effect on the children whose voices we hear in the Project 17 report. Should the Minister remain in her post, I will give her due warning. I had a discussion yesterday with the noble Lord, Lord Porter, who stepped down from his chairmanship of the Local Government Association on Monday, having devoted the preceding three years to a very successful campaign focused on social care that resulted in a series of initiatives, including the report of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean. After this campaign the issue appears to be firmly on the political agenda. My warning to the Minister is: guess what the LGA’s next campaign will be? It will be to focus on the interaction between local authorities and the children they are asked to look after. So the Minister is warned: this is coming quickly down the road.

I appeal to the Minister to consider the following questions. Does she genuinely feel that the hostile environment has been helpful and, more importantly, effective? Have the Government done any detailed analysis to measure whether it has been successful? Does she genuinely believe that she can uphold the UK’s duties to children while presiding over a policy that denies some of them access to services and leaves some of them in destitution?

In preparing for this debate, I entered the terms “Home Office” and “Children” into a search engine. The results were sobering and shocking. One could try to explain them away by citing biased algorithms, but I think we all know that the excuse will not wash. So I appeal to the Minister, to her senior officials, to her ministerial colleagues and, perhaps most importantly, to her conscience to listen to the voices of these children and then reflect deeply on the policies that appear to be having such a defining and negative impact on their lives. I contend that the legal status of parents should have no bearing whatever on how their children are treated.

Immigration (Health Charge) (Amendment) Order 2018

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 28th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, I feel brave enough to rise to my feet. I declare my interest as a governor of Coram, the children’s charity. I shall agree with the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Rosser, as a true Cross-Bencher should. I understand, and in principle do not disapprove of, charging those from outside the EEA for using the wonderful NHS. If it produces £220 million for the NHS, I think we would all say hurrah. For many migrants, it is undoubtedly a very good deal and a lot cheaper than insurance.

But—as the Minister knows, there is always at least one “but”—I should like to make a few points. They concern what I hope are unintended, not deliberate, consequences of the IHS. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, asked a Written Question on 12 July about whether there would be a children’s rights impact assessment of the increase in the fee. In her reply on 23 July, the Minister said:

“A full impact assessment will be published alongside the draft Order”.


In the event, the impact assessment had been completed three weeks earlier on 3 July, but having read it extremely carefully to see whether I could find any trail within it which looked like a children’s right assessment, all I could find, at the top of page 17, in subsection F.5, was a comment about the proportion of in-country family visa applications which may be eligible for the waiver. It said that Her Majesty’s Government,

“is also considering options to mitigate the consequence an increase in Surcharge may have for applicants’ affordability”.

Given that the impact assessment says that the Government are considering options, what are those options and how far have Her Majesty’s Government gone in their thinking about them? Does the Minister genuinely think that the impact assessment before us includes anything like a full children’s impact assessment?

Secondly, when we are talking about the fee waiver system, which is extremely well intended, many of us outside the Home Office struggle to understand how it is working at all. The reason is that the Home Office has the relevant statistics and we do not. In May last year, Coram, of which I am a governor, sent a freedom of information request to the Home Office, to which the Home Office replied. The statutory response timeframe is 20 days. In this case, it excelled itself by responding nine months later. It said that roughly 7% of fee waiver applications were successful. Why was a new request for the 2017 statistics in a freedom of information request denied by the Home Office on the grounds that it would be too costly to compile it? Given what we heard earlier—that the Government, in their wisdom and munificence, are deliberately undercharging when it comes to the IHS—how can the Home Office justify not acceding to the freedom of information request?

We simply cannot judge whether the waiver scheme is working properly if we do not have the data. I am not trying to be awkward or embarrass the Minister or the Government; we simply need to know the figures so that we can come to a reasoned judgment, together with the Home Office, on whether the fee waiver system is working in the way we all know it was intended to work. It would be helpful to all sides if we were able to do that.

Thirdly and lastly, we welcome the report of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. I hope he will include the effect of the IHS when he publishes his report, and we look forward to its findings. If it does not contain an analysis of the effect of the IHS, will the Minister say why not? The children we are talking about find it very difficult to have their voices heard. Frankly, we are inadequate substitutes for these children, though we do our best to communicate their raw and often very painful testimony. But they have an inalienable right to be heard, and it is in that spirit that I ask these questions—their questions—and I look forward to the Minister’s answer.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it has been an interesting debate for me because other noble Lords have argued from points of view that I have not considered. I support the amendment to the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, simply on the basis of unfairness and injustice.

I want to take issue with some of the things said by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. It seems to me that we do not take into account the value of immigrants in Britain, and again and again that creates a hostile environment. I shall quote a government press release:

“We welcome long-term migrants using the NHS, but the NHS is a national, not international health service and we believe it is right that they make a fair contribution to its long-term sustainability”.


That is true, but the NHS is paid for by everyone who pays tax in Britain. This includes immigrants, who overwhelmingly pay more in tax than they receive—and perhaps make the wider contributions that the Minister was thinking about when she mentioned that. They already make more than their fair contribution to the running costs of the NHS, but the Government do not seem to appreciate that, and I ask why. All the figures suggest that immigrants give more than they take, so why are the Government not recognising that?

This dog whistle rhetoric of calling it,

“a national, not international health service”,

is a particularly harsh insult to the 144,000 NHS staff whose nationality is non-British. The truth is that we do have an international health service, which runs on the hard-working dedication of so many people who move here from all over the world to look after the people who live here in the UK. It is hard at the moment to see why anybody would want to come here in view of the sorry, xenophobic state we are in, but they still do.

Not only is our immigrant workforce being blamed, yet again, for the failures of government policy, but now they are being charged £400 a year for the privilege. The same people who came here to work so hard to deliver our National Health Service are now being told that they do not deserve to have their own health needs looked after properly. If this kind of policy had been introduced in 2010, people would have been rightly disgusted. It is the kind of thing that only UKIP would have got away with eight years ago, and everyone would have thought it wrong. But somehow, in our society today, we have become so hostile, so fast, that now such policies just seem normal.

This change is a continuation of the Government’s obsession with blaming all the country’s problems on immigration. As a Green, I strongly resist any measure of hostility based on where in the world a person was born. In particular, I ask the Government to consider whether it is particularly unfair to charge an NHS surcharge to people who work in the NHS. I am dubious about the amount that the Government claim they will raise. I would like the Minister to confirm that amount, because it would be interesting to see later whether it is realised.

Finally, do the Government agree that the best way to fund the NHS is to invest in it properly? Only the Government can do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I am glad to have a former Health Secretary standing behind me to put noble Lords—and me—absolutely right.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

Will the Minister come back to the point I raised about the inadequacy of the information we have about how effective the fee-waiver system is?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I will. I will not give him an adequate response, but I will tell him why; if that is okay.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked why the charge was set below cost recovery levels. I think I have answered that. He asked why the estimate in 2015 of £800 per person is so different from what we have now. It is because in 2015 it was just that, an estimate. We can now give an actual figure, given that people actually use the health service. The noble Lord also asked why we decided to double it on the basis of Department of Health and Social Care analysis. He will know that we made a commitment before the 2017 general election to triple the surcharge. We have not; we have doubled it. It was because we had made a manifesto commitment that we did not consult on the issue.

The noble Lord also asked about EU citizens. We are in the process of negotiating reciprocal healthcare arrangements with the EU. We have reached agreement on citizens’ rights that will protect EU citizens and their family members who are resident in the UK by the end of the planned implementation period on 31 December 2020. We have made it clear that the immigration health surcharge will not apply where EU citizens make immigration applications during the implementation period after the UK leaves the EU. We will set out our plans for the future border and immigration system in a White Paper later this year, which, noble Lords will work out, has not long left. Another noble Lord asked that question. I will not pre-empt or trail the White Paper with further detail at this stage.

We have been through the double taxation argument. I do not think that the noble Lords who asked about it agree with me, but I have made the point that the charge is fair not only to migrants but to UK national and permanent residents who have or will make a greater contribution to the NHS over their working life.

The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, talked about the compliant environment. This is nothing to do with the compliant environment. The charge is intended to ensure that temporary legal migrants make a fair contribution to the cost of their healthcare in the UK. In contrast, the compliant environment is a suite of compliance, deterrence and data-sharing measures that form part of our overall approach to deterring and tackling illegal migration and protecting public services.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, asked why children do not feature in the impact assessment. This is because it is at a macro level rather than an individual level. I know she does not like that answer but individuals are fully catered for in the system of fee waivers and exemptions, and a child is as likely to need healthcare as an adult.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I take the noble Baroness’s point because in everything we do with law, we have to consider the rights of the child. That is a basic requirement on the Government. It may be implied, it may not be, but I entirely take the noble Baroness’s point.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked me about undocumented children having to make four applications over 10 years at over £10,000. These applicants fall within the scope of specified human rights applications for which fee waivers are available—we have gone over that point—but, of course, parents may apply for the fee waiver for the child.

We have produced the policy on equalities assessment and will provide it to Peers who have spoken in this debate and place a copy in the House Library. I cannot stand at the Dispatch Box and say that it includes children. I suspect from what the noble Baroness says that it does not, so I go back to my previous point.

The noble Baroness asked about the chief inspector’s report and when it will be published. The immigration fees and the surcharge are obviously two separate things. The Government made a manifesto commitment to increase the surcharge and it is important that we deliver on that.

The noble Baroness also asked about the proportion of applicants receiving a waiver—this goes to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool—but we have not published that information. However, we are reviewing the process because, as time goes on, these issues necessarily become more complex. I know that does not answer entirely the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, but we will be reviewing that.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

On the point I made that in the impact assessment there is a reference to the Government considering options for families who are experiencing hardship, what options are the Government considering and where are they in their thinking?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I cannot give the noble Lord any more information on that at this point but I am sure it will be released in due course. He also asked about the Coram freedom of information request. The first response was based on management information from a live database which is subject to variations as the year progresses. The second was not answered because of a policy to release only published information. Government departments often do not release information if it is not published information, although I have given management information with caveats before. The Government are seeking to resolve this issue.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool]

Does the Minister accept that it is extraordinarily difficult for us to try to work out the effects and the effectiveness of the fee-waiver system in the absence of any reliable or up-to-date data? How can the Government make decisions about it if they do not have the data? If they do have the data, please can they share it with us?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

We do not share management information data because it is purely that—management information. As I understand it, we are seeking to resolve this issue with Coram Children’s Legal Centre, and when we do I will be happy to write to the noble Lord with the outcome.

I hope that noble Lords are satisfied with my response, although I suspect they are not, and that the noble Lord will feel happy to withdraw his amendment.