UK Border Agency: Visas and Passports

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, whose knowledge of Latin America and ear to the ground on all things Latin American have such benefits for this House. It is useful that she has secured this debate today to allow the Minister to update us on what has happened in the intervening year and to give us a flavour of a change of attitude, perhaps, with the change in government. Before I continue, I declare an interest as the chair of the All-Party Group on Bolivia and the chair of the All-Party Group on Street Children—the reason for the latter will become apparent shortly.

As we have heard, there were particular problems with the process when it changed over but the problem now—as I have heard it mentioned by people from both South America and central America—is perhaps less with the process than with the attitude. Indeed, that is reflected by the large community that we have living in London, whose members feel strongly that they are still not recognised in the UK as an ethnic group, a point that they have made time and again. They should be recognised as one, but there is no provision on the census form to ask whether people are Hispanic. Considering their numbers, I think that that would be a reasonable thing to do. The fact that they are not really recognised as a group has, I believe, a knock-on effect in their feeling about applying for visas.

My noble friend Lord Avebury mentioned that the Bolivians felt singled out. It was perhaps unfortunate that, even under a Labour Government, the two most left-wing Governments in Latin America—those of Bolivia and Venezuela—failed to get the visa waiver through. The noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, raised this issue in the House some eight months ago and was told of the various reasons for it. Have those criteria since changed and, indeed, would those people wishing to come and visit their relatives here for a short time, for example, be able to do so and to benefit from the visa waiver? We benefit from the many people who have come here. Perhaps they came here as economic migrants but they now work in some of the most invisible jobs in London, in cleaning in particular. Living as I do in Kennington when I am here, I often catch a bus home towards Elephant and Castle and meet them in the evening. We need to recognise that they, too, need their families to be able to visit without too much difficulty.

We heard today that the UKBA has lost thousands of asylum seekers through the system, which highlights again the question that the Government are at some stage going to have to address: amnesty for long-term residents. These people, who have been here for a long time, are working. Their children are probably in schools and their lives are made extremely difficult because they can have no legal status. We lose out as a country from the fact that they cannot pay taxes because they cannot officially exist. That is a problem—and all the more of a problem in these times of austerity.

Before closing, as we have the Minister from the Home Office replying to this debate, I want to mention the issue of Britons going the other way to Latin America. That is why I declared an interest as the chair of the All-Party Group on Street Children. It has been brought to our attention by a number of NGOs working in the area that the problem of sex tourism, where people from the EU are going to Latin America, is growing and that it is children whom those people are preying on. That is a big issue, so we should not think just of people coming from South America as the risk to the UK, which is what the reply from the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, to the Question from the noble Baroness, Lady Gibson, suggested. We pose a threat to them as well.