Immigration Procedures

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, there is very little trust in our immigration system. On the one hand, the Home Office is a byword for inefficiency, maladministration and heartlessness, with its “go home” vans, the Windrush scandal and the hostile environment; on the other hand, many people mistrust immigration because they are not sure that people are here legally. Since the Border Force was slashed under the Conservatives, that distrust of good management has some validity.

The migration and asylum system is not fit for purpose and needs to work a great deal better than it currently does to increase efficiency, quality, value for money and trust, making Britain welcoming and customer-friendly for those we want to stay, and better at stopping and removing those we do not. This needs radical reform and better deployment of resources to convince the public that migration is well managed, and to convince migrants that the UK is not out to cause them misery.

The Home Office sets itself up to fail with the net migration target that the Prime Minister is so wedded to. It is arbitrary, unachievable and damaging; and when not reached, inevitably, just fosters suspicion. I am afraid that the sight of the Home Secretary flying back from his holiday over Christmas and declaring a major incident over a few hundred migrants in the Channel—it needed to be dealt with competently, but it was not a major incident—did not increase trust. It undermined trust in the migration system. Fear of EU free movers could have been turned into a win-win if the Government had been more nimble on the local impact, channelling local resources so that communities could see that they attracted more doctors, teaching assistants and so on, to help everybody.

Far from offering improvements, the new immigration Bill will suck all EU citizens into the bureaucratic system that they have so far escaped, instead of the simplicity of EU free movement—and of course Britons will lose that opportunity for free movement as well, because it is a two-way street. EU citizens and their employers will be subject to the full weight of the Home Office red tape. The NHS will be paying hundreds of millions of pounds in visa fees to the Home Office—talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul. The proposed £30,000 salary threshold could leave up to 100,000 jobs in social care and nursing unfilled, and imperil the ability of businesses to expand or survive.

For those already here, or who come in the transition period, if we get to it, many of us—including the Liberal Democrats—wanted a simple declaratory system. Instead, the Government have insisted on making them jump through the hoops of an application for settled status, and if they fail, risk falling into the hostile environment. As my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno mentioned, this is not only causing administrative hassle for people but it affronts their dignity that, in some cases after decades of being here, they have to reapply—or apply for the first time—to stay in their own homes.

I understand that the cost is about £500 million to £600 million—can the Minister confirm that? Can she also say what the cost would be, or would have been, of a simple declaratory scheme, with a light-touch evidential requirement? It is a vast bureaucratic undertaking of 3.5 million or 3.7 million people. The stakes are very high. Even if 5% are rejected, that is 175,000 people, and that will not improve either the Home Office’s reputation or social integration. To get through everyone, the Home Office will have to process about 4,500 applications a day, whereas I think in the pilot phase the maximum was about 360 a day. Will 1,500 case workers be enough to cope with those who have difficulties?

The Home Office has to get this right. The operational failure of the settled status scheme will further damage confidence and Britain’s reputation—and possibly get us into problems under the legal provisions of the withdrawal agreement—and would harm our reputation with key partners in Europe. There are many problems with the settled status system: it is not available on iPhone; people, I understand, are holding Android Tupperware parties, which must raise the possibility of data protection issues, if they are helping each other with all the data. There are problems where the official records do not match. People may be wrongly being classed as having pre-settled status because the system is wrong and has wrong information. They are faced with having to trawl through years of evidence, and then the Home Office has the problem of looking through it all. We need to look at whether the burden of evidence is too high.

Lastly, I raise the fear of what happens to vulnerable applicants. Are the outreach and communications sufficient, and is information available in all EEA languages? Can the Minister clarify what exactly happens in a no-deal scenario? Do the EEA regulations remain in force, even if the immigration Bill is passed? Will that part of it be suspended so as not to abolish the regulations? Finally, could the Home Office reconsider that people are not going to get any piece of paper as evidence of their settled status? They have to rely on a digital code and therefore on the efficiency of the Home Office’s digital systems.