European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting
Monday 20th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I totally agree with my noble friend Lord Ridley. His point about ID card creep is also part of this point. It is exactly what happened to the Windrush generation. The Government are adamant that we must avoid a situation in which, years down the line, EU citizens who have built their lives here find themselves struggling to prove their rights and entitlements in the UK.

The approach suggested in the amendment is also unnecessary. Managing the end of free movement in the UK and providing certainty for resident EU citizens during that transition has been an absolute priority. We firmly believe that the current, constitutive approach under the EU settlement scheme is the right one. According to the latest internal figures, more than 2.8 million applications have been received and 2.5 million grants of status have already been made. The Home Office, as I said the other day, is processing up to 20,000 applications a day.

We are working with communities up and down the country to raise awareness of the scheme and keep up this momentum. It already allows EU citizens who would be protected by the agreements and other people the Government have chosen to protect, such as many non-working spouses and primary carers not covered by the agreements, to obtain a UK immigration status, enabling them to remain here permanently after the end of the implementation period. This status will mean that their rights and entitlements under the agreements are guaranteed. However, the new clause would interrupt the flow of a system that is well under way, already working well and achieving precisely what it was designed and implemented to do: providing certainty to those who have made their lives here.

EU citizens resident in the UK before the end of the implementation period will have different, enhanced rights compared with those who arrive afterwards. It is therefore essential that these citizens have the evidence they need to demonstrate their rights in the UK. This is also why we are seeing many other EU member states planning to take exactly the same approach and establish a constitutive system for UK nationals living there.

The EU settlement scheme means that those who have built their lives here will not find themselves struggling to evidence their rights in the UK, or have to carry around multiple bits of paper to evidence their previous UK residence. We are legally required to issue all successful applicants under the EU settlement scheme with a written notification of their UK immigration status, and all successful applicants are given a letter confirming their status. The status can be viewed online and shared securely with others, but as noble Lords have said it is not proof but confirmation.

Access to the online status service is via secure two-factor authentication using the document, such as a passport or national ID card, which the individual used to prove their identity and their date of birth. The user is then required to input a one-time use code, sent to their mobile number or email address. This ensures that no one else can access the individual’s information without their permission. Once in the service, users can view their information and update their details, and can choose to share their status information with third parties. This might be with employers, to prove their right to work, or with other service providers, to prove their right to access public services, benefits or the NHS.

When an individual chooses to share their information, they share only the content that is specific and relevant to the checks in question, as I went through the other day. This will include their name, their image and any information that is relevant to that particular purpose. This supports data minimisation, ensuring that only the information required is made available, which is not possible with a single physical document.

All our digital services are designed and developed to be robust and reliable, with extensive internal and user testing before launch to ensure that they perform as expected. We will monitor services to ensure that any issues are identified and acted upon. Mechanisms are already in place for users to report any technical issues with the service. We continue to refine and improve these processes, and all data will be treated in compliance with data protection law.

We do not want to go back to issuing physical documents, which, as we know, can be lost, stolen or tampered with. Our vision for the future is a digital status and service for all migrants. The continuation of a declaratory system would force employers, banks and other service providers to wade through various documents to establish for themselves whether the person is indeed protected by the agreements. Such an approach would be burdensome, for the citizens and others, and for the very systems we have committed to protect.

I will pick up a number of questions which noble Lords asked. Several noble Lords talked about airports. The noble Lord, Lord Oates, gave the example of a friend who was questioned at the airport, and the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, talked about the border, too. What happens at the border is proof of identity to cross the border, as opposed to proof of status to be in the UK.

The noble Lord, Lord McNicol, talked about hiring a car abroad. In doing so, he inadvertently proved the point that, with the dispensing of the paper part of the licence, all one needs when abroad is a code to prove that you can hire a car. You do not need the physical document, you need only the code—as I learned to my peril when I did not realise that that was what you had to do.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

I must correct the Minister. Having had great faith and gone abroad with my code, on attempting to rent a car in the United States and Spain, I found on both occasions that the process failed miserably. Only the fact that I had a piece of paper with me enabled me to rent the car. I hope the Minister will reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, who asked what the back-up is when it goes wrong or there is a cyberattack.

European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued) & Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I had not expected to speak to this amendment, and I will be exceedingly brief. I do not want to take attention away from the healthcare issues that have been raised by my colleagues.

In this House we all know that when legislation is passed it is later used as a precedent. We have here a clause that effectively permits the Government by negative statutory instrument to change a huge raft of primary legislation passed by both Houses of this Parliament. If I had described that to a neutral person without mentioning that it was a move by the UK Government I think they would have assumed that it was being moved by Putin, Erdoğan or someone else who sees a democratic structure as a mechanism that they can reshape to assert government control over the general democratic process.

I am extremely concerned by this precedent and its extraordinary scope. It fits in with a pattern of a government approach to this Parliament that is diminishing the other House even more than this House. I think we can see in this, in the attitude towards negotiations, in the Government’s position on devolved assemblies, which we just heard, and in their attitude towards future trade negotiations that they are in a sense patterning themselves after local government, where an executive cabinet can make all the rules, the assembly can scrutinise—scrutiny only: that is its role, and I refer to the other House as well—and raise issues, but the executive can simply ignore it. I think this is an exceedingly dangerous road. This legislation and this cause advance that process, and everyone in this House, regardless of the party to which they are affiliated and which they support, needs to take on board that pattern which is being developed and which Clause 41 underpins. It requires a very serious rethink before we lose what we have had and it is too late to regret it.

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment for a reason which keeps coming up in our debates: they are all about trust and whether we can trust the Government to behave in a reasonable way. A lot of the amendments that have been put down have been about trying to ensure that—if I may put it as crudely as this—the Government behave well in carrying out these negotiations. We have seen a kind of emotional blindness, if I may put it that way, in the discussions we have had on immigration systems and physical documents that people who have a right to live here can use. This seems to be another piece of work in which we have to table an amendment to try to ensure that the Government behave properly and well in these negotiations.

It is quite extraordinary. Having agreed these reciprocal healthcare arrangements with the EU countries and Switzerland so recently, I cannot understand why we should not just be able to use this amendment to ensure that there are no rapid changes. The Government almost seem to forget the huge number of people who in their daily living move for holidays between the other 27 EU countries and Switzerland, as though that does not matter. This is an important part of people’s lives. They book their holidays assuming the system will not change. Particularly after this recent piece of legislation, no one has told them there is a risk that something may change.

The Government are bringing on themselves a mood in which people will be suspicious of what they are up to. They will raise a lot of anxieties totally unnecessarily. In my experience of government, if you allow rumours to be fostered they spread around quite quickly. What we are trying to do with this amendment is to remove the temptation. The Government would be wise to listen, unless the Minister can give a level of assurance that will remove any suspicion that somehow, because of the way they behave, the Government are up to something.