Passport e-Gates Network Outage

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I can reassure the noble Viscount that I am being honest. The simple fact is that this is not a repetition of the previous outage, which was unrelated to this capacity issue. The capacity relating to this incident has now been doubled, in effect, so I am confident that the problem is currently fixed. The previous issue related to a different set of upgrades, as far as I understand.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I shall be a little bit more positive and say, first, that since their introduction these gates have been tremendous in terms of increasing mobility and getting people through airports generally. I welcome them in terms of people being able to travel relatively freely. At the moment—this may be slightly different data from that of my noble friend—I understand that seven non-European nations are able to use the gates, including South Korea. Can the Minister say whether more negotiations are going on and whether we will be able to welcome more nations to this facility? Secondly, Ireland is not part of Schengen; it is part of the common travel area that we are the major part of. One key area for security was the Schengen Information System, which has an alert system in terms of bad guys and people who we would not want to come into this country. Can the Minister remind me whether we are still seeking entry or sharing Schengen Information System data, whether that is still possible or whether it has happened?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for his positivity, and I could not agree with him more. It is perfectly possibly now to get off a plane and, if you do not have luggage, to be out of an airport within 15 or 20 minutes, which is remarkable—Singapore levels of efficiency, some might say. As regards the sharing of information and Schengen, I am afraid I do not know the answer; I will have to write on that.

Stop and Search

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid that I disagree with the noble Lord in his assertions. Earlier, I gave statistics on the number of knives that have been removed from the streets and the number of crimes that have been prevented because of stop and search. I will give some more examples. In Manchester, the chief constable, Stephen Watson, has said that a 260% increase in the use of stop and search over a defined period correlated with a 50% reduction in firearms discharges and a fall in the number of complaints. I think that there has been a concerted effort to improve; my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said this the other day in the House of Commons. We need to improve the way in which stop and search is applied but also understood; to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, it has to be applied judiciously, proportionately and legitimately.

On the proportionality side, I go back to my original comments. Young black men are disproportionately likely to be the victims of crime. There are disparities in the use of stop and search—they remain and we acknowledge them—but it is positive that they have continued to decrease from nine and a half times in 2017-18 under the 2011 census data to 4.9 times in 2021-22 under the 2021 census data. I also referred to the changing methodology in collecting these statistics, which brings the numbers down even further. However, as I say, that methodology is very much in its initial stages. We will work more on it and will, I am sure, hear more about it.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, was not the exhortation by the Home secretary to chief constables an example of the Executive getting involved in operational matters? It seems to me completely straightforward that it was. Is that not wrong in terms of the way our policing should work?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

No, I do not think it was. She has written to all chief constables and asked them to provide strategic leadership and direction when it comes to the use of stop and search powers. That is not operational. She asked them to ensure that every officer is confident in the effective and appropriate use of all stop and search powers, including the use of suspicionless powers. That is not operational. Investigating instances where somebody is obstructing or interfering with the use of these powers and, if necessary, making arrests is not operational. As I have also said, she asked them to be proactive in publishing body-worn video footage, which will protect officers who conduct themselves properly and will also lead to instilling greater public confidence.

Fishing Industry: Visas for Foreign Workers

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Monday 24th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Murray of Blidworth) (Con)]

Since the original Question was answered in the other place by Miss Dines, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has written to stakeholders to inform them of the details of the generous support package which was communicated today to industry leaders and stakeholders. The package is designed to help producer organisations and individual businesses in the seafood sector understand the immigration system and to offer Home Office premium expedited services and products at no cost. It includes: hosting an initial familiarisation session for key leads; working with our commercial partners to ensure that there is sufficient English language testing capacity at locations where workers could be recruited; working with our commercial partners to ensure that workers can access visa application centres to give biometrics; and, once a sponsor licence is received, expediting the decision-making process for no extra charge. Once visa applications are received from workers, expediting the visa decision-making process will also be at no additional charge. Our service standard is 15 working days, but we will endeavour to make decisions in eight to 10 days. We will also appoint a dedicated point of contact in UK Visas and Immigration in relation to these matters.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, the record of this Government and the Tory party is that they talk about how they defend the fishing industry, yet over the last few years they have seemed determined to destroy it. Why does a vessel need a different crew when it fishes within territorial limits from the one it needs when it fishes beyond them? This seems to be red tape, as does the scheme the Minister just explained. This industry has been on its knees, and we need it to thrive—surely we need to change the way that this operates altogether.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that question. It has been the long-standing position of this Government and previous ones that foreign nationals coming to work in the UK—be that on land or in our waters—should comply with the immigration system when doing so. I do not believe that this is a controversial proposition, and the fishing industry is no exception. This House and the other place legislated to rectify and clarify the position in Section 43 of the Nationality and Borders Act. The action that the noble Lord complains about is merely the implementation of those provisions, which have been approved by Parliament.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I should come clean in that my family, the Teversons, are migrants themselves. The Teverson family reputedly migrated from Denmark in roughly the 10th century. I do not think we were particularly invited by the resident population at the time. There is no picture of us with horns coming out of our helmets, but we were definitely migrants into Suffolk. Since then, I have dwelt with the Celtic tribe of the Cornish in Cornwall, who I am proud to say are a race yet to be subdued by us Danes.

Let me explain briefly why I am speaking this evening. I normally get involved in issues relating to energy, climate change, fisheries—a niche subject—and biodiversity, those sorts of areas. I am speaking tonight, because when I listened to the Queen’s Speech and the Government’s programme, what I saw very strongly was a dark side, a malevolent streak, that I had not seen before in a government programme. The relevant Bills, which I will go through very briefly, were: the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill; this Bill; and the heavily modified, I am pleased to say, Judicial Review and Courts Bill. There is also the Elections Bill, which is primarily about voter suppression. Let us be clear: that is what it is about. I therefore decided that I would involve myself in this Bill.

Let me move on for a minute. It interesting that the Minister in his opening remarks mentioned “reality”. I should like to concentrate on that a little because there are some unrealities that we talk about on asylum-seeking. It is different from migration and we should keep those two subjects separate, as other noble Lords have said. One issue is people smugglers. I condemn their gross activities but let us not pretend, as some Ministers do or imply, that migrants and asylum seekers across the channel somehow have traffickers with Kalashnikovs behind them who force them to come across the channel. It does not work in that way. I did A-level economics—wow—and one of the things that I learnt about was called supply and demand. It happens in most things with any economic background. Where there is demand, there will be supply. In this area, forget trying to stop the so-called pull factors. The push factors will always outweigh those by miles. What is the evidence of that? It is the evidence of those 27 people who died in that small vessel in the channel several weeks ago because they were willing to risk not just their own lives but the lives of their families to reach these shores. Forget the idea that pull factors will end that. I do not know whether anyone in the Government has been in business, but the thing about destroying business models is that they are replaced by more effective business models. It does not solve the problem but tends to make those challenges even greater.

One of the other so-called realities that I need to challenge is the contention that we are a friendly nation for migrants. There are 84 million refugees in the world. More than two-thirds of those are from five countries, which maybe gives a clue as to the way in which we should approach this issue rather than concentrating just on the symptoms. Four out of 10 refugees are in five countries. The fifth country is Germany, in which there are 1.2 million refugees. We have only a 10th of that number. Let us keep those numbers somewhere in our minds.

I was going to talk about some of the other matters that I find difficult in the Bill but I will not go through them because I will run out of time. However, I will refer to one of my fellow Scandinavians who maybe came over in the same ship as my forebears—King Canute. He is famous for one thing. He went down probably to the channel coast, looked across to the continent and tried to push back the ocean. What is he known for? It is his failure. The fact is that the Bill cannot and will not work. It will not be a solution to a problem but, in the process, we will continue to trash the reputation of this country internationally. To me, that is a matter of despair.

Cannabis

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on this debate and the all-party group on its work and the excellent report that was published on this subject. I need to warn my noble colleague next to me, the noble Lord, Lord Low, that I am going to be very short in my contribution. I put my name down for this debate because I did a little bit of background research again, and the thing that really came over me was the Government’s own 2017 drug strategy. It is an excellent document, which states:

“In 2015-16, around 2.7 million ... 16-59 year olds”—


so on the whole, as Members of the House of Lords, we are not included in this—

“in England and Wales reported using a drug in the last year”.

It is estimated that just over 2 million of those were cannabis users. Of course, included in that are a number of people who had to use cannabis as a medicinal aid for their suffering.

I was also interested to look up the information—asked for by my former right honourable friend, Nick Clegg—that only about 2,000 people are actually arrested over cannabis. The message that this put over to me was that those people who need cannabis as a medicine to help their suffering have to go down an illegal route so that they can either be healed or get help with their suffering. But this is something that the majority of recreational users do not even have to worry about, because the chances of their being arrested or prosecuted are very low indeed. Yet—for all the illogical reasons already given around how other drugs are treated—we demand that the people requiring this degree of assistance from this particular drug have to commit criminal acts themselves to alleviate their suffering. It is crazy and I hope this debate will be a part of stopping the very illogical and cruel situation that we put those users in.

Immigration Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2016 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Teverson]

140B: After Clause 68, insert the following new Clause—
“Spouses and civil partners of British citizens
(1) The spouse or civil partner of a citizen of the United Kingdom shall be entitled to enter and remain in the United Kingdom in order to live with that citizen.
(2) The provisions of subsection (1) shall not apply in the case of a sham marriage or sham civil partnership within the meaning of section 24 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 (duty to report suspicious marriages).
(3) The Secretary of State shall make rules for the purposes of this section.”

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I shall not keep the House for a great deal of time. This is an issue which I believe to be fundamental, which is why I have brought it back on Report. I thank my noble friend Lady Hamwee for having simplified it down to its basic elements so that we get to the crux of the matter.

When we talked earlier this evening about bringing together families who were asylum seekers, it was interesting how the Minister agreed, as he obviously would do, that it is much better that asylum families are able to live together. I think that what is not recognised or realised by the vast majority of the population is that we do not in many circumstances allow British citizens to live together with their spouse or civil partner. There are many instances where British citizens who have married are not able to bring their spouse or civil partner to this country to live with them, or if they are abroad and wish to do that, they are effectively exiled. If they have children, who are then usually entitled to British citizenship, those younger citizens are also effectively exiled from their country of citizenship.

The reason for that is the requirement of a certain income per annum for the British citizen over a period of time to enable them to live with their chosen civil partner or spouse. It seems fundamentally wrong that we as British citizens are constrained about who we are able to marry or enter a civil partnership with and are unable to live in our home state. Not only is that fundamentally wrong; it is discriminatory in terms of income levels, with those in certain professions or work or those in certain regions less likely to be able to live with their spouse or civil partner in the United Kingdom, with their family, than are those in other trades and professions and other regions.

For a party and a Government who believe that family is of fundamental importance and for a party with many libertarians among it who believe in the freedom to marry and live with who you wish as long as it is not a sham marriage—clearly those exist, and the amendment takes that into account—I have brought this amendment forward again. I believe that there is a fundamental discrimination and a fundamental injustice in terms of what British citizenship should mean and the liberties that this country should offer to its citizens. On that basis, I beg to move.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, at the previous stage my noble friend and I tabled an amendment that sought to change the financial thresholds that currently apply to spousal visas. The Minister gave as one argument for the threshold the need to protect families, saying that the Government want to see family migrants thriving here, not struggling to get by. But separation does not help people to thrive. The Minister thanked my noble friend for raising our sights at that point by talking about love. So instead of another amendment on financial thresholds, my noble friend and I have decided to say what we mean, which is this: do not set a financial threshold on love.

--- Later in debate ---

Those and the other requirements of the family Immigration Rules for spouses and partners provide the right basis, in our view, for sustainable family migration and integration. The amendment would undermine that. The rules that the coalition Government reformed in the last Parliament are having the right impact and are helping to restore public confidence in the immigration system. I hope, despite our difference in views on this, that the noble Lord will agree to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for going through all of that. It is a difference of opinion on principle. That is what it is. To me, British citizenship means that you have that freedom. That is something that should be sacred to us as British citizens. We do not have that. I regret that. It makes the case slightly too strongly in certain areas, but clearly the Government are not going to move on this. That is a great shame, because a number of families are seriously exiled from this country and from being able to live with their wider family where they grew up because of these restrictions. Many of those would be no burden on the British taxpayer whatever. But I take the point and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 140B withdrawn.

Immigration Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we are now on to Part 6 of the Bill on border security. This is the first of a number of amendments on that. I welcome government Amendment 239C, which recognises that border security is not only about maritime security; we have a land border in Northern Ireland. Many years ago when I was at Chatham House and dealing with the beginnings of European co-operation in police, I kept coming across policemen, as well as Conservatives, who said, “But we’re different. We only have a maritime border”. They should go to Dublin and try to explain that. The delicacy of the border between Northern Ireland and southern Ireland is very considerable and would be very sharply affected if we were to leave the European Union. It is very good to see the government amendment.

My initial interest in this area came from looking at the Channel Islands as a very odd, semi-British dependency. I noted that the owners of the Daily Telegraph—a newspaper that bangs on about border security and the defence of British sovereignty—have a company that owns at least one helicopter, which advertises that it flies between Brecqhou and Monaco. Since the Channel Islands’ authorities rarely, if ever, send a policeman to Brecqhou, let alone a border security officer, I assume that this is a means of entirely avoiding border security. I mark that as one of the many oddities of the way the debate on sovereignty and border security in this country takes place.

Thinking more widely on this, we can see that it is clearly a serious loophole. I am one of those people who occasionally looks at the Financial Times weekend supplement, How to Spend It, just to see how people who earn £3 million a year or more get through it. The editor of the Daily Mail, another newspaper that bangs on about sovereignty and border security, is supposed to earn £3 million a year, so now doubt he thinks about spending his money on things such as that. There are advertisements in How to Spend It for yachts with their own helicopters, so you can fly directly from your yacht in the Mediterranean to your helipad on your estate in Surrey—or, for that matter, the helipad close to us in Yorkshire, where you can get straight on to the grass moors, if you like, again without passing through border controls.

As the super-rich extend their ability to fly in light aircraft and helicopters across national boundaries, there is a growing problem that needs attention. When I first came into government I was briefly spokesman for that aspect of the Home Office that dealt with counterterrorism and border control. I spent a very interesting day with the West Yorkshire Police and the combined Yorkshire serious crime squad, learning about how they work. One of the things I remember most strongly from that was that there is no domestic serious crime. All serious crime involves criminal networks; all important criminal networks are cross-border.

The idea that we do not need to be too careful about helipads at luxury hotels, golf courses or estates in Surrey because the people who go there are rich and therefore law-abiding is not necessarily accurate. Some of them may be rich and not entirely law abiding. Some of the richest people in this country are Russian oligarchs. They may, or may not, be law abiding in this country, but the origins of their wealth may not have been entirely according to British legal standards. Others are from Gulf royal families. Most of them are entirely honourable people, but occasional ones claim diplomatic immunity because they represent St Lucia on the International Maritime Organisation or whatever. There are, therefore, occasions when they may not be entirely in accordance with British law. We have no idea who they may bring in and out of Britain in their private aircraft or helicopters. They may even be bringing domestic workers without visas to work for them here under conditions which we regard as illegal and against the Modern Slavery Act.

I raise this question as there is a major loophole in border security and incursion into British sovereignty. I hope the Government will provide a sign that they are aware of the seriousness of this loophole, which is growing as air traffic from private aircraft and helicopters grows, that they are doing something about it and that they will close the loophole. I beg to move.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 241A in my name. At the end of the debate at Second Reading, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, responded extensively to a wide range of questions and comments. One of them, brought up by me and a number of other noble Lords, was about the fact that we have so little information in this area. In his response, the Minister read off a whole lot of evidence and research that the Government had possession of. I was unsatisfied by that, because most of the information did not help to determine an evidence-based policy towards migration, particularly the illegal migrants who are in the country. I therefore set myself a challenge: if I was making a decision, as a Minister, on the basis of evidence, what would I want to know? If, in my business life, I was looking at market research, what would I try to determine? I then asked myself if it was possible to determine them, because that is clearly the second stage of this. I have put in the amendment the sort of information that I would want to know if I was a Minister or Secretary of State making decisions about how I approached this subject. Illegal migrants in the country are clearly a problem: no one denies that. If they are here illegally they should not be here, and we should be able to take action. I have a list of eight or 10 things that I would want to see. I will be interested in the Minister’s response in terms of actually finding those things out. Are they, indeed, the sort of things they should know?

The second question is: is it possible to know about and explore something that is an illegal activity? There have been studies of the number of illegal migrants in the UK but I understand that the last major one—maybe by the LSE—was in 2009. It estimated that there were somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 in the UK. There is quite a large margin of error between the minimum and maximum numbers in that estimate. Is it possible to measure illegal activities? I expect that noble Lords are aware that in May 2014 the Office for National Statistics started to include in GDP figures the amount of GDP generated by illegal drugs and prostitution. Prostitution is not strictly illegal, but in terms of how it is carried out it is broadly seen as an illegal activity and therefore had not been brought into GDP before. The total GDP for those two activities was about £12 billion; more or less 50%, or £6 billion, related to illegal drugs, and approximately the same figure related to prostitution. It is therefore possible to estimate those types of figures with a reasonable standard error, if not with certainty.

The techniques that have been used to measure illegal migration are the Delphi method, the capture-recapture method and the residual method, which has been used to make these estimates in the United States. I am not for a minute saying that this is an easy or totally accurate exercise, but for decisions around such important areas as this, which we all want to solve, we should spend a little more resource and time moving away from rhetoric and into understanding what is going on. By doing so, we might have a lot better decisions about migration management, and there might be legislation that we can all agree on, rather than taking rather normative views.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. In fact, I am amazed to hear that this loophole exists. We are now under considerable threat from terrorism. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that people of wealth are not necessarily any less likely to be objects of suspicion than others, but he rather implied that only people of wealth would have access to these means of arriving in Britain. That is simply not true. Let us get away from the idea that terrorism needs a lot of money. Noble Lords will remember that the post mortem on 9/11 worked out that the total cost of doing the whole of 9/11 was lightly less than $250,000. The idea that money is any constraint on people who wish to get into this country by a means that does not involve a check is not valid. I have been arguing for years in your Lordships’ House that there should be proper entry and exit checks. We have been immensely dilatory about them. It is very late in the day because now we are under real threat and it is essential that the Government give a positive answer to this.

The details are very easy to work out. The law states that anybody landing has to land somewhere where there is a place to check them and, if that adds to the cost, so be it. If it is an emergency landing of some sort, they have to signal it, which they would have to do anyway—and all aircraft have radios—and would be required to remain there until the police were alerted and went to meet the aircraft. It is an essential matter to stop this loophole, and I hope the Government will immediately say that they will draft the necessary regulations to support the implementation of the noble Lord’s amendment.

Immigration Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, Amendments 232 and 234AA are in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Paddick. They stay on the issue of family visas, although not necessarily in the context of the refugee crisis. My noble friend Lord Teverson is going to remind us about “the party of the family” and marriage in the current context.

As I mentioned, I was involved in work on the impact of the family visa rules that were introduced in 2012. The situation has not eased since. In a search for a solution, my own thinking has developed only as far as, “These rules will not be changed until a Cabinet Minister’s son falls in love with a woman from Costa Rica and wants to bring her to live here”.

The rules apply to refugees; they apply to people who are far from being in a refugee situation. They are academics and businesspeople: people from a wide range of backgrounds and in a wide range of situations. It has to be said that many of them would bring a great deal to this country. A comment that I have heard from so many people who, because of the rules, are unable to live as a family in this country is: “I am a British citizen and I pay tax. Why is this happening to me?”. Families are separated and children are not living with both parents as a result of these rules, which must have an impact on a child’s development.

There are situations where, if the rules were not as they are, savings would be made for the state. I remember a gentleman from a low-earning area with a 17 year-old daughter, from his first marriage, with developmental problems. He married for a second time, to somebody really dodgy—a teacher from Canada, and because he could not meet the threshold, he could not sponsor her to come here. I understand that a lot of spouses are being refused visitor’s visas now, because it is not believed that they will leave at the end of a visit. In the case of the couple I have just mentioned, the last I heard was that she was detained when she arrived here and was in Harmondsworth. She had to stay over two or three nights because her physical reaction to what was happening to her meant that she was not well enough to be returned.

The financial threshold in place is beyond the means of something like half of the British population. The provisions which we are proposing in subsection (4) for the income requirement are, instead of £18,600,

“the equivalent of one year’s salary”.

I have spelled that out a little by saying,

“for a partner … at the rate of the national minimum wage”.

Then there are figures, which I accept are arbitrary, that would allow for children and for third-party support, because there are many examples of where families would help. The amendment says that,

“subsidies and financial support … shall be applied towards the calculation of income”.

The cost of the application is also of course an issue. During the debate on the last group of amendments, I read out a letter that I had just received. Because my name has been associated with some work on this, I quite often get letters and emails from people asking me to help and telling me of their situations. I will read just a little from the most recent, which came from a gentleman yesterday. A British citizen who had been living in Argentina, he came over here to a job. His wife and three year-old daughter were in Argentina, and when he tried to bring them over, he discovered the problems. He says:

“I understand the importance of doing everything by the books and would be ashamed to do it any other way. The difficult situation for me to understand here is how, being a British Citizen, should I have to wait for nearly a whole year without seeing my wife and daughter”.

He says that it is,

“unexplainable to a 3-year-old … All the thousands of pounds paid can be made with hard work but the time lost is never coming back”.

The second of our amendments refers to adult dependent relatives. As I said in the previous group, that route has now become more or less theoretical. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, mentioned the gain to this country from two daughters of a refugee qualifying as medical practitioners. The story I have to tell, which I dare say the Minister has heard me tell before, is of a woman who could not bring her elderly parents over from Singapore. She was a consultant in the NHS, so she decided she should go there to look after them. Her sister, also a senior person in the NHS, thought it was unfair to leave all the burden on her sibling and went out as well, and then the husband of one of them, also a consultant in the NHS, went out to join them. Those are three senior people lost to the NHS because we cannot somehow sort this out.

I am very aware of the time; I am also aware that I am not bringing any new points to the Committee because, by definition, they are not new: this has been going on since 2012. That does not diminish the importance of the matter, and I beg to move.

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I speak to my Amendment 239A, and I very much agree with all the points that my noble friend Lady Hamwee just made.

It is quite obvious to all of us that we live in a global society. We welcome that, we participate in it and encourage it. We study abroad, we work abroad and we are proud that Britain is an outward-looking nation. As part of that, our sons and daughters and other relatives go out as students, to work and for leisure to other parts of the world—we are not just part of the European Union. It is quite appropriate in February, the month of St Valentine, to say that they occasionally fall in love—I expect that some Members of the House have come across that—and get married. All too often, when deciding to take that step, they do not think about the practicalities. They do not think about the fact that they might not be able as a couple, as a family—in future, as a larger family—to live back in the United Kingdom because of that decision.

As my noble friend said, I have made that point before, so I too shall be brief. It seems to me fundamental, perhaps more so to those on the Benches opposite than anyone else, that family life is sacrosanct. Subject, clearly, to the legal restrictions in the Marriage Act and elsewhere, which we all accept, a British citizen should have the right to marry whom they want, and then be able to live with their spouse or civil partner back in their home in the United Kingdom, should they wish. That right should not be discriminated against by income; in effect, that discriminates against certain ages, those in certain parts of the country or in certain occupations more than others, and perhaps on gender as well. People should have that freedom. If anything should be the birthright of us as proud citizens of the United Kingdom, it should be that. That is the simple thing that my amendment tries to achieve. That was all swept away in 2012, during the period of a coalition Government— unfortunately, as far as I am concerned.

Since I have got involved in this issue, I can name all sorts of instances of people affected by this who have come to me on the internet. Most recently, there was a young man whose family live near me in Cornwall and who is working for a British company out in South Korea. He has married a Korean national and is unable to come back. He earns a lot of money out there, and she is very capable as well, but because of the rules they cannot come back together. That is completely wrong. There are an estimated 33,000 people in that position.

This problem does not make a huge difference to migration figures, but if the Government ever introduce a British Bill of Rights, please make this right No. 1. I ask the Minister to look at this again, think about the principles that the Government espouse so well in this area, listen to that rhetoric and correct analysis about the centrality of the family and family life, and change this policy area so much for the better in the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Teverson]

I ask the Minister on a practical basis and in a positive way what channels the Government recommend that individual families who want to help should use.

[Lord Bates]

There will be a national register for those who want to help, in particular, with Syrian children. That is being brought together. That is a different arrangement. The children and families who we are currently taking from Syria are in acute need, often medical need, or have suffered violence. They are not those who would be most suitable for a room in someone’s home—they need particular attention. Further down the line, as we continue to help people fleeing that dreadful situation, we will want to take up those offers that have been generously made from charities, individuals and churches. That is why the national register is being put together, and it will be overseen by Richard Harrington, who is the Minister responsible for the Syrian vulnerable persons scheme.

Immigration Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, as someone who is not involved in this area of policy very regularly, I thank the Minister for his voluminous explanation of the Bill. I have just one specific interest which I will come on to later on. One thing that really struck me in that booklet was when it started to get down to numbers. As the Opposition have already said, it does not actually give any estimate of what the level of the problem is. We all know that it is very difficult to estimate things that are illegal, but it is possible, and we do not really understand the size of the problem without it. Certainly, in my business life, we would never do anything until we had done the market research and the background numbers, and it seems to me that those are not really being done in this case.

However, I was struck by some of the numbers that were in the booklet: for instance, that there were around 5,000 forced repatriations a year, which is some five times the size of this House—hardly huge. My noble friend Lord Wallace mentioned that some 1,000 passengers are directed wrongly to entry points in UK airports. It struck me that, really, this whole Bill is completely unnecessary. Having gone through many immigration Bills since I have been privileged to be a Member of this House, I think that what we really need is to make the legislation that we already have work; because the other principle of my business life—and this comes back to appeals procedures and immigration controls—is “right first time”. It is not only right because it saves money and resources, but in human issues like this, it actually saves a lot of distress and a lot of problems for individuals, families, immigration officers themselves and all the people who have to deal with this area of policy. My first point, therefore, in a general sense, is: let us get on and enforce what we have, and not bother so much about the Bill that we have in front of us.

There are two areas that really concern me relating to what is in the Bill, and these have already been mentioned by other noble Lords. First, we have scraped the bottom of the barrel, and it is really vindictive, when we get to the point of threatening to take the money off illegal workers in this country through the proceeds of crime legislation. That was brought in mainly to deal with money laundering in the City and wider areas—I fully applaud that. However, to apply it to some of the most oppressed people in this country is really quite a vindictive legislative policy. I hope that this will be removed from the Bill as it proceeds through the rest of its stages: it is clearly quite wrong.

The other area relates to detention, which has been brought up a number of times. To have a system that is clearly not on Guantanamo Bay levels but where people who are detained do not know when they are going to be released is distressing to everybody—primarily the people who are interned, but also those who are dealing with it and the taxpayers who have to pay for it—and wrong. I hope that we can in some way move that agenda forward to a more civilised state as this legislation goes through.

However, the one area that really interests me—in which I became involved originally through casework that came to me naturally—concerns the rights of spouses of UK citizens. I applaud the work that my noble friend Lady Hamwee has done on this issue in the past. It seems to me just obvious and a matter of common sense that British citizens should be able to marry whom we want. As long it is not a sham marriage, we should be able to marry whom we want and live together as a family, because if you cannot live with your spouse, then it is not a family. Since 2012, we have had a regime where you have to have an income of £18,600 to bring your spouse into the UK. It does not matter if your spouse has earnings and a promise of a job in the UK—that does not make any difference—but we have that price tag. It is estimated that around 47% of the population is not able to afford that under the rules. Indeed, it is estimated that some 33,000 spouses or other halves are not able to join their legal, married other halves in the UK because of this rule.

This is completely wrong, even in financial terms, because if a spouse comes from outside the EEA, then we can apply all the rules, which are not affected by EU legislation. It means that they are not eligible to collect benefits anyway. That is the situation at the moment, so they are not going to be a drain on the state. Furthermore, as I said, most spouses who come into the UK earn incomes themselves; they do not claim benefits. It is a problem that does not actually exist.

The 2010 Conservative manifesto strongly, and quite rightly, put the rights of the family at the top of the party’s priorities. In 2015, it was not quite so high, but, having said that, all the way through the 2015 manifesto, the policies were written around families. I think it is on page 17 where a quote is highlighted, saying that the greatest security for a family is a job. I agree with that, but the greatest security of all for a family is that it can live together. In this country, that is not a given, and for 33,000 families, that is not the case. I would like to see a positive aspect to migration in the Bill: that we finally have the common sense to allow British citizens to marry and live with whom they wish.

Railways: Swansea to Paddington

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

On the contrary—as both the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister have indicated, this project remains a priority. We are working with the Welsh Government on issues relating in particular to the connection between Swansea and Cardiff. We have provided additional funding in that respect. Of course, there are challenges; otherwise, we would not have Sir Peter Hendy reviewing this area.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, it reminds me of aircraft carriers not having aeroplanes—

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

My Lords—

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My Lords, I had hoped that we would have a trouble-free occasion.

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords—

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

Would the noble Lord mind sitting down, please? I think that we should hear from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, as the Question refers to Swansea.