Immigration and Nationality (Fees) Regulations 2018

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for moving this very important Motion. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, for highlighting that there may be complexities to this and limits to what the Minister and the Secretary of State can do. I must confess that when thinking about this I feel furious. How can we as a country do this to our vulnerable children—children who have a right to be here? Why would we so foolishly make them feel unwelcome? It is absolutely shameful. There may be constraints on what the Minister can do. This morning I spoke about child health at the Royal Society of Medicine with young GPs and young paediatricians who are enthusiastic to help children in their community. They are working in Hackney and other deprived neighbourhoods. I am proud to be British, to have a health system that is free at the point of delivery and helps vulnerable families and families of all kinds, and an education system available to all. Many countries do not have such services. I am proud of that. I am deeply ashamed of this. What is the underlying message here? We do not want you here. You have a right to be here. We will begrudgingly let you be here. We are going to make as much money out of you as we can because we can get away with it—until the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, highlighted it to us.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby talked about belonging and helping people to be proud to be British, to be proud of this country and to want to be a part of it and contribute to it. I spent this afternoon with foster carers. Church groups around this country have recognised the need of the children of this country for foster carers and adoptive parents and work with their congregations to recruit more vital placements for those young people. These congregations are reaching out to the vulnerable, mostly from impoverished backgrounds, to take them into their homes.

We talked yesterday about the Serious Violence Strategy and young people feeling that they do not belong. When they do not belong, they find places where they are welcomed—gangs where they feel they have a family. Noble Lords will have followed stories of young people from this country choosing to go to Syria to fight for ISIS because they felt that was the place they belonged. Will the Minister say how this policy fits with the Government’s strategy to prevent the alienation of young people so that they may wish to be drawn towards organisations such as ISIS? It is surely in our own best interests not to be so penny-pinching and, where these children have a right, to make it as easy as possible for them to become British citizens and fully integrated members of our society. I am sure there are limitations on what the Minister can say tonight, but I hope she can assure us that every effort is being made to address this problem as speedily as possible.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness. I will add persistence to the attributes that have already been listed. As noble Lords have said, this was raised not only in the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement but at a recent Home Affairs Select Committee taking evidence from the Home Secretary. In response to one member, the Home Secretary said that the Home Office had to get the right balance between the funding of the Home Office and the fees charged. Like other noble Lords, I question whether this is a matter of balance.

As the noble Lord, Lord Russell, mentioned, a memo giving a rundown of the cost of these fees and how they were justified was requested. The Home Secretary responded to the comment that, on the face of it, the fees go way beyond normal cost recovery by saying that it would be a “good exercise for me” as well.

We hear many complaints and expressions of astonishment about the level of Home Office fees generally. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, that the complexity of the system is at the root of this. When the Home Office introduced its premium service some years ago, my first reaction was that, given what all applicants have to pay, they should all get a reasonably quick and reliable service. I do not think I need to expand on that. The briefings have reminded me that I have often read about a whole family being subject to fees, particularly those payable periodically over a long period. That is similar to the position of Amelia, which has been mentioned. If it is not essential to pursue the matter, for instance with naturalisation, and it is too much for the family, some members are omitted. It may be children but often it is women. I can imagine the potential problems down the line in the cases we have heard about, quite apart from the issue of these children being unable to exercise their rights.

What is at issue is not entitlement but the registration of that entitlement. The child has a statutory right to citizenship and everything that goes with it. As noble Lords have said, this is not about immigration control. On Thursday, we will be debating the difficulties that some people face when they try to pursue activities in everyday life. However, these children are not migrants and, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned, the leave to remain is not a substitute for citizenship, as is sometimes suggested by the Home Office. I understand that it is not necessarily available, but it is not for the Home Office to dismiss rights in this way.

In his strategy for social integration, the Mayor of London put it very bluntly, saying that,

“if a young person has the right to be a British citizen, then government should remove obstacles to them becoming one”.

He commented on the profit element, which is,

“at least ten times higher than in many other European countries”,

and is,

“preventing too many young Londoners from accessing the rights they are fully entitled to by law”.

The Project, to which the noble Baroness referred, is very telling and powerful and I will quote one short paragraph from it:

“High-cost fees are completely contrary to the promotion and process of integration. Fees act to divide, distorting the vibrant futures of us—and other young people—caught in the complex net of immigration and nationality entitlements. Fees prevent young people from working, paying tax and contributing economically to society”.


I think that meets the right reverend Prelate’s definition of citizenship. Picking up the noble Earl’s point about young people finding other families, I recently heard that one should not use the term “gang” when working with young people in gangs, because they regard the gang as their family. That needs to be recognised.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member, recently reported on a remedial order following declarations of incompatibility with regard to the British Nationality Act. In that case, it was about requirements of good character. We raised potentially discriminatory provisions in British nationality law with the then Home Secretary, concluding:

“We would be grateful for an assessment and an explanation from the Home Office as to whether any such discrimination does in fact persist”,


and were pleased that the Immigration Minister responded that she would ask her officials to look at this. I cannot help thinking that charging fees in the way that we have been discussing is a form of discrimination.

I have read the Library briefing for Thursday’s debate. It refers to the work by Coram and the Children’s Society, which have reported that there are 144,000 undocumented migrant children in the UK. I do not know how many are in the categories we have been discussing but that is an astonishing and worrying figure. To summarise what other noble Lords have said, I end by saying, “and dot, dot, dot”.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Lister of |Burtersett has highlighted an important issue in her regret Motion and I agree with almost everything that every noble Lord has said in the debate so far.

First, my noble friend has highlighted the increase in the fees that have to be paid and that just over one-third of the fee payable is attributed to the costs involved. The Government generally have a confusing attitude to fees and charges, and consistency is at no point evident in the actions they take in this regard. Generally, I am in favour of cost recovery on fees and have been calling for this to be implemented in the planning system. That call has fallen on deaf ears—even my suggestion that the idea should be trialled in one local authority has not been taken up—so council tax payers are left subsidising applicants for planning permission. Despite the Local Government Association calling for this to be brought in, the Government will not engage with it. The overcosts referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate, have now reached local government planning, because the fee is a local one and not a national fee set by the Government. In that respect the Treasury is not a direct beneficiary—which might explain its attitude.

Here we have the opposite. We go way beyond recovering the costs of the application and are charging a large amount of money and, in effect, making a large profit from the process of becoming a citizen. My noble friend asks the Government to withdraw the increase until they have done two things: first, published a children’s best interests impact assessment and, secondly, established an independent review of fees for registering children as British citizens in the light of the report of the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement.

Dealing with each point in turn, an impact assessment has been produced in respect of the regulations which is fairly detailed in comparison with some other impact assessments I have read on other statutory instruments. However, my noble friend’s regret Motion to Regret is specific: it does not refer to the whole of the fees set out in the regulations but specifically to the increase that affects children. In that respect the impact assessment is fairly light.

As the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, said, the new Home Secretary, the right honourable Sajid Javid, has accepted that the fee is a very large amount of money. He said on 15 May:

“It is a huge amount of money to ask children to pay for citizenship”.


So my noble friend’s request for a specific impact assessment to be produced focusing on children impacted by this fee increase is reasonable, and I hope the Government will agree to it willingly.

The children impacted include those born in the UK; those who came to the UK at a young age, who have grown up in this country and often have no idea that they are not British; stateless children; and children growing up in local authority care. As we have heard, the British Nationality Act 1981 brought to an end being born in the UK on its own as a sufficient reason to acquire British citizenship—unless you were born to British parents. However, the Act recognised that there would be other children who also had a very strong claim, and if the level of fees being charged is becoming a barrier to that, it is a matter of much regret.

The second part of my noble friend’s Motion draws the attention of the House to the report of the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement. This has a section on the naturalisation process, and two of its recommendations are particularly pertinent to today’s debate. On page 120, at paragraph 485, the Select Committee says that the fees charged for naturalisation should be much more in line with the actual costs and that the Government should not seek to make excessive profits out of the process. On page 122, at paragraph 492, it asks the Government to consider whether the fees should be waived for children in care and children who have spent their entire life in the UK. My noble friend is asking for an independent review to be established in the light of this report—and, again, she makes a very strong case.

I was struck by the figures that the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, brought to the debate. I will bring one final point to noble Lords’ attention. The fee in 1983 was £35. If that fee had increased only by taking into account inflation, it would today be £114.71—£897.29 less than the proposed fee of £1,012 in the regulations. As I said at the start of my remarks, I am in favour of cost recovery, so it should be set at least at that £372 mark—but those figures are stark and highlight why my noble friend is right. The Government should act quickly on this and the House should support my noble friend in the Division Lobby.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Manzoor]

I will come to that point in a moment. The noble Lord makes a very relevant point.

As I said, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said he understood the case for charging. It is only right that immigration fees should contribute to funding an effective and secure immigration system to support the prosperity and security of the UK. This approach, which has been in place since 2004, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, herself acknowledged, was endorsed by Parliament through the enactment of the Immigration Act 2014 and in previous primary legislation, which the 2014 Act replaced.

I shall put this into context. To reset fees for child registration so that they cover just the costs associated with processing an individual application—a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven—would reduce fees to below the level that they were in 2007 and reduce the amount of funding that the Home Office has available to fund the immigration system by about £25 million to £30 million per annum. However, I take fully on board the other points that the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, made in relation to this.

I turn to the issue of child registration fees. Let me be clear at the outset that, far from wanting children and young people who regard this country as their home to leave, the Government strongly encourage them to make appropriate applications to make their stay here lawful. The most compelling reason for this is that these children are at risk—at risk of being exploited by adults and of being led into unofficial work that is neither safe nor properly rewarded, and without proper status they could easily be led to look to the wrong social groups for support. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, alluded to this.

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, can the noble Baroness explain how this might apply to children who are here lawfully, who are entitled to be here? It is their entitlement to citizenship that we have been discussing, not the concerns that she is raising, which I see would apply to other cohorts of children, but not, I think, these.

[Baroness Manzoor]

I am getting to that point, but I thought it was important to give the scenario. All children are important, but I want to talk about children who have not been registered in any way. As I said, the most compelling reason for this is that those children are at risk, and we want them to make appropriate and lawful applications.

I accept that the immigration system is complex—several noble Lords raised this issue, including the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and others. I accept that we need to address that and that the system needs to be simplified. But there is no reason why a child who has been in the UK since birth should be afraid of contacting the Home Office or asking a charity to do so on their behalf. I think that that was the point that the noble Baroness was raising.

The Home Office may grant leave to remain to a child who has lived in the UK continuously for seven years or to a young person who is over 18 but under 25 who has lived continuously in the UK for half of their life. Such leave gives the person concerned the right to live, study and work in the UK and the right, in appropriate circumstances, to receive benefits from public funds.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, is right that immigration applications require a fee. Even so, an application can be made to the Home Office for the fee to be waived when it involves certain human rights-based claims for leave to remain and there are reasons why the applicant cannot meet the payment required. These human rights-based claims include those that are relevant to a child who has been in the UK continuously for seven years.

In addition, there is no fee where a child is being looked after by a local authority at the time that an application for leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain is made to the Home Office. This will, of course, cover some of the most vulnerable applicants and children in our society.

Of course, some migrants, like my parents, may wish to become citizens, reflecting that they have spent most of their lives here and are committed to this country—I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby that citizenship is important as a part of civil society. That is something that we should welcome. I speak as someone who was born abroad but is now very proud to call myself British.

However, a child will normally acquire citizenship at birth derived from his or her parents. Since 1983, it has not been automatic that a child born in the UK is British. This does not mean that we do not cater for children and their well-being. We care. Children born in the UK are indeed catered for in our immigration and nationality provisions, which are designed to take account of the fact that a child’s strongest entitlement is to preserve links with his or her parents and, where they exist, with his or her country of origin.

If I may respond to the right reverend Prelate, one reason that the Government require formal applications to be made in a designated way is so that all the factors relevant to a child’s life and future can be taken into account in an appropriate and considered way. We do not provide fee waivers for citizenship, which reflects the fact that, while citizenship provides extra benefits such as the right to vote in elections and the ability to receive consular assistance while abroad, becoming a citizen is not necessary to enable individuals to live, study and work in the UK, and to be eligible for benefit of services appropriate to being a child or a young adult. The decision to become a citizen is a personal choice, and it is right that those who make that decision should pay a fee.