Migrants: Indefinite Leave to Remain

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The Government have closed a certain number of asylum hotels—it is in the low teens at the moment. The Government have a commitment to closing such hotels because they are a waste of taxpayers’ resource, and there are better ways to manage what we inherited from the previous Government. Since July, we have removed 19,000 people with no legal right to remain in the United Kingdom. Of those, 5,100 were enforced returns and, since July, we have also tackled 5,400-plus visits on illegal working, and we are improving the situation with removal of foreign national offenders. There is a record that the noble Lord has to defend, and we are trying to unpick that record—and those hotels are his legacy. We will meet our manifesto commitment during this Parliament.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, are the Government satisfied that UKVI is providing good or, at any rate, reasonable service to applicants for indefinite leave? If you are paying the standard fees rather than for priority or super-priority service, is that one of the services for which you have to provide your credit card details and pay to hold on the phone, listening to a robot—possibly telling you that “Your call is very important to us”—before getting a formulaic and uninformative reply about the progress of your application?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I hope that that is not the experience—and if it is, I hope that the noble Baroness will send me details of the specifics of the experience that she relates. The Home Office does not make a profit from applications; where the fee is higher than the estimated unit cost, there is no profit element. The Home Office keeps all fees under review, and it is its principle to ensure that those who have a potential legal right to apply to stay in the United Kingdom have the facility to do so in a simple and effective way. I hope that the noble Baroness will supply me with the information if there is a specific case to which she wishes to refer.