Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL]

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 17th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I declare that I—along with Fiona Mactaggart, then an MP—wrote a report on children in northern France, Calais and Dunkirk some years ago. I find this whole group of amendments to the Bill extremely sad.

I want to concentrate on a legal issue, which I raise to some extent with the noble Lord, Lord Murray. I was certainly not an immigration lawyer but, as far as I understand the Immigration Rules, civil partners, who come up in Amendment 13, and adopted children, who come up in Amendment 14—both are referred to in Clause 1(5)—are already within the Immigration Rules. Consequently, if the noble Lord and the noble Baroness are right, they are trying to reduce the Immigration Rules, not increase them.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I was unable to attend Second Reading, but I have come in today especially because this debate is a very interesting one. I say to those who really want to hear a well-argued and well-reasoned debate that it is the convention of this House that, when someone seeks to intervene with a point and they ask the speaker to give way, that person should be heard. It is very sad to see the tone of this debate.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest in that I am supported by the RAMP organisation. At the outset, the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, if I caught him correctly, said that it was difficult to explain why the amendments in this group were laid. That is what I heard—I apologise if it is not what he said. It seems to me, from the conversation we have had on this group of amendments, that it is primarily about making further restrictions on what is already in the rules of our system and, secondly, about creating differences in timings. Those would then make it more difficult to put forward the principles that lie behind this Bill, which of course is about filling some of the eligibility gaps that currently exist for family reunion.

On timings, it strikes me as strange that we have two sets of amendments pulling in opposite directions. In one set we have amendments from noble Lords on the Conservative Benches saying that they want to restrict the amount of time that the Home Office and the Government have to make the new arrangements, while in the other set they are trying to expand them so that they have longer to do it. I do not know whether we can make a judgment on that, but it seems to me that what is common practice in the timings for dealing with changes that the Government have to make—the current procedure in this Bill of six months for the Government to prepare, and 21 days before Parliament—