Immigration Bill

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, support Amendments 50 and 51 in the name of my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon. In doing so, I want to reinforce many of the points that have already been made. It is important that is done and that the Government fully appreciate the amount of opposition to many of the proposals in the Bill, particularly in this section of the Bill. If I were being brutally honest, I would say that I believe that the whole of Chapter 1 of this part of the Bill ought to be deleted—that is, Clauses 15 to 32—because it is ill conceived and ill advised as an attempt to shift immigration control from the legal authorities rather dramatically and pretty fundamentally to the private sector. I believe that that is a societal shift because, as far as I am aware, never before has it been a legal requirement in Britain for private sector providers to demand that people prove their identity and legal status away from the border.

The effect on landlords of the burden of the bureaucracy associated with the proposals in the Bill was eloquently set out by my noble friend Lady Smith and others—and that is if landlords are even fully aware of the proposals. As has been said, they could face a civil penalty of, initially, £1,000. Landlords may well know of the need to vet potential tenants—that is fairly clear—but how will they understand what they are supposed to do about others who happen to move into the property after the tenancy has been granted? As the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has just said, how often are landlords supposed to check this? How many extra staff are they supposed to take on for those checks to be carried out effectively and to demonstrate that they have been carried out to the best of their ability? It is impossible to know realistically who is living in a property at any time unless it is inspected daily. It is most unfair that landlords should be expected to police those requirements.

As so many have said, this part of the Bill is simply not practical. I do not want to repeat what others have said, but I also have grave concerns about the effect on UK citizens who happen to have a name, skin colour or accent that is not quite what some British people would regard as the norm. In any case, a landlord may be able to say, “I don’t know whether this person is a UK citizen or not, but frankly from my point of view as a landlord it is simply not worth taking the risk, so I’ll take the safe option”. That is racial profiling, which is a nefarious practice in any circumstances, but it does not take a huge leap of imagination to imagine that that would be the preferable option for some landlords even if they were deeply uncomfortable with it. They may regard it as preferable to falling foul of the law and then being fined accordingly. That is a dreadful situation in which to place anybody.

The private rented sector in this country is not good enough in many respects already, and this Bill will simply make things worse. It will have the effect of restricting entry to that sector to a significant number of people who have no alternative. That could impact in turn on homelessness, which is already a problem and could become worse through the requirements of the Bill. There is also the question of costs. It is quite unrealistic from what I understand from previous government comments that it is anticipated that landlords will pass the costs on to tenants. Apart from the fact that many tenants will not be able to afford that, and may ultimately make some properties unaffordable to tenants, why should the tenants have to pay the costs? It is not their responsibility. I would suggest that it is not even the landlord’s responsibility, or it should not be. In effect, landlords are being press-ganged into doing the job of the legal authorities. If that is what the Government want to do, at the very least they should be prepared to bear the costs themselves, and not allow landlords to pass costs on to tenants or take on additional staff, which in itself is a significant cost.

Finally, I want to reinforce the point on the question of pilots. It is self-evident that a change as fundamental as this has to be the subject of a pilot—and a properly evaluated pilot at that—before it is taken forward if that is what must happen. As I said, ideally to my mind the whole proposal should be scrapped. That is clearly not going to happen, so I hope that a pilot in one area, as outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, will be taken forward and that lessons learnt from that can then be used to ensure that some of the major problems stemming from the legislation can at least be eased.

[Lord Hylton (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that residential landlords very often, particularly in Greater London, go to some length to seek out companies and embassies as tenants for their properties. That in itself constitutes discrimination against the ordinary individual or family. I agreed with virtually every word that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, particularly when she referred to the unintended consequences that are likely to affect black and coloured citizens of this country as a knock-on effect of what is intended to deal only with migrants. This category will include citizen students who come from British ethnic minorities. The noble Baroness was quite right to go on to mention lodgers. I would much prefer that Clause 15 did not stand part. If it has to be in the Bill at least there should be a carefully designed and carefully evaluated pilot project.