Refugee Family Reunion

Debate between Bambos Charalambous and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Thursday 20th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter). I congratulate the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) on bringing this motion to the House on World Refugee Day. I am proud to be a sponsor of his Bill, which will be of great benefit to society in general and to the young people who need the help it offers.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, as this Parliament keeps limping on, there is certainly plenty of time for the Government to get the Bill in Committee and table a money resolution so that we can make progress? I am sure that he, like me, would like to see that happen.

[Bambos Charalambous]

It is frustrating that the Bill has stalled because the Government will not give it a money resolution, and it is very sad that we are in this situation after the Bill has passed its Second Reading. I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to see progress.

On 9 February, I visited some of the refugee camps just over the channel with Care4Calais—a charity that distributes clothes, sleeping bags, tents and other necessities. I cannot forget the harsh conditions in which the refugees there find themselves, with little electricity or hot food, no hot water, no heating, no privacy and the constant background of cold and damp. All this is coupled with the knowledge that their loved ones still face danger back in the country they have escaped.

I heard at first hand from refugees in Calais about the life-threatening situations they had fled. For some, it was religious persecution; for others, the stark realities of war and sometimes torture. Many of the refugees were young—still in their early teens—but already they had experienced horrors in their lives that many of us would find difficult to imagine. The terrifying steps these refugees will take to escape torture and persecution are telling. I spoke to young boys who had clung to the underside of lorries, risking death for hours, and others who had been stowed in the boots of cars. I met a family who had crossed the sea in winter in a tiny dinghy the size of one of the rowing boats in St James’s Park.

We must ask ourselves what prompts people to take such extreme actions. These are not the actions of people who have the choice of a comfortable life back home, nor of people who have taken decisions lightly: no, they are the actions of desperate people who want to survive and build a better life; people who need and deserve the help of rich nations like our own.

It was clear in Calais how often it is the young men who will make the journey first in the hope that they can carve an escape route for their loved ones. One young man I spoke to in Calais told me that he often speaks to his mother on the phone. I asked him, “Does she know where you’re living now?” He smiled ruefully and answered, “She’ll cry if I tell her, so I say I’m in a hotel. I just want a good job so I can make her safe.” I asked him what brought him to the camp. Like so many others, he said that it was his family’s conversion to Christianity that effectively placed a death sentence on their heads.

We cannot sit back and ignore this kind of persecution or people’s death-defying attempts to escape, and should they make the journey safely here, we surely owe it to them to allow family reunion. Some argue that to reunite children with their families will mean taking in too many people. I am afraid that that argument is one of prejudice and selfishness. According to Oxfam, the UK has taken in substantially fewer people than would constitute its fair share. In 2018, the UK received five asylum applications for every 10,000 people living in the UK, while the European average is 14. Even at that number, over two thirds of applications are rejected. In this context, it seems nothing less than cruel to block the reunion of refugee children with their families. It is well known that doing so will condemn these children to greater likelihood of mental health problems and leave them less able to engage with society. This right already exists for adult refugees in the UK, who are able to bring their families over to join them having been successful in their asylum application. It is therefore perverse that the same right is not given to child refugees.

One of my own team in Parliament is part of a family who fled torture in Algeria in the 1960s. Her family are proud of their integration and achievements in this country: proud to be British, proud to contribute economically and socially, and proud to have done well in their chosen professions. They have thrived, but how many others are prevented from doing so because they are being cut off from their loved ones?

That brings me on to the subject of legal aid. It is now seven years since legal aid was made unavailable for family reunion cases. Although the need for family reunion has greatly increased, the Ministry of Justice has been prevented from bringing justice to refugee children. The fact that £600 million has been taken from the legal aid budget in the name of austerity has meant more isolated children, left to fend for themselves. Refugee family reunion has been described by the Government as a straightforward immigration matter, but there is clear evidence to show that this is not the case.

In its report, “Not so straightforward”, the British Red Cross argues that a substantial percentage of refugee family reunion cases are highly complex. These cases are in fact anything but straightforward. Yet because of the removal of legal aid, refugees wishing to reunite with their families must apply without legal help or must themselves pay to hire legal advisers. Of course, refugees are rarely able to hire solicitors or legal advisers on their own due to financial insecurity. Instead, they are left to navigate a fiendishly complicated system that sometimes requires DNA evidence and documents that have been long since destroyed in the rush to escape war or torture.

If we are to be the open, civilised and tolerant country that we aspire to be, we urgently need to make refugee family reunion possible. Part of this would include the Ministry of Justice committing to a statutory funding regime for legal assistance for refugee family reunion cases. We cannot pass by on the other side. It is time as a nation that we behaved like the good Samaritan we should be and took family reunion seriously.