Immigration and Asylum Applications

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I do not think—in fact I am categorically certain—that no assumption is made that all applicants are lying, but where I would concur with the noble Lord is that the quality of the interview is incredibly important in the initial decision-making process. On the cohorts that we discuss quite often in the House such as LGBT people or people of faith, we have well-trained staff dealing with these applications. For LGBT and faith-based applications—I thank my noble friend Lady Berridge for establishing faith as a basis for an application—the training process for the staff has been much improved.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, does the Minister have any suspicion that the hostile environment created by our current immigration system might be contributing to the more overt hate speech that we are seeing on all social media as well as in wider society at the moment?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Baroness will know perfectly well that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary wanted to end the notion of a hostile environment, a term which was of course coined under a previous Labour Government, and move more towards an environment of compliance in the area of immigration. As she knows, hate speech is derived from a number of complex and different factors, so to talk about a hostile environment as the deciding factor for hate speech would be incorrect.