Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL]

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 8th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, in her Private Member’s Bill on family reunion. We discussed these issues just a few months ago during the passage of the Nationality and Borders Bill and I do not want to rehearse all those arguments now. Instead, I want to focus on the evidence of what happens to people when we do not allow family reunion.

We hear a great deal about the Kindertransport children of 1939 in this House and, indeed, nationally. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who I am delighted to see in his place today, is one of those Kinder. We treat the Kindertransport scheme as an iconic success and a heroic endeavour. In some ways, it was; it saved many lives. But recent research has made it very clear that it did so at considerable cost to those children, as well as those parents.

Take the book Into the Arms of Strangers by Mark Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer. In it, one of the Kindertransportees, Robert Sugar, who was only eight when he was sent to England, recalls that

“the younger you were, the more unforgiving you are of your parents. You may say oh, they were so brave and saved you, but they really abandoned you. We were four friends [all Kinder] ... and the only serious conversation we had [as children] we all agreed if it ever happened again, we will not send away our children, we will stay together no matter what. That’s what we said”—

out of the mouths of babes. As it happened, Sugar’s mother was already in the UK on a domestic visa, as my mother was, but they saw each other so rarely that each time was like another abandonment. He was relieved when she stopped visiting, because it was so painful. Like all children who were separated from their families for the war’s duration, growing up alone and reuniting as young adults eight, nine or 10 years later, his reunion with his parents was extremely difficult and painful as well.

Jennifer Craig-Norton’s book, The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory, says much the same. In a recent personal email to me, she added that

“every Kindertransportee who was Robert Sugar’s age or younger that I have ever spoken with (and there have been dozens ...) felt exactly the same way—a deep, crippling sense of abandonment. They were just too young to understand why they were being sent away and none of them ever got over it. In fact, every Kindertransportee I have known has carried a deep well of sadness within them, regardless of their age when separated from their families, regardless of whether or not their parents survived, regardless of how successful their subsequent lives have been.”

We know that many of the Kindertransportees lived very successful lives and continue to do so. Nevertheless, the key words are despair, dismay, puzzlement and sorrow, and a sense of abandonment was commonplace, even among those who were treated wonderfully and given a real welcome—which was true for many.

This is hard evidence. Back in 1939, this country decided to take children, because they were thought easier to assimilate, and not their parents. We now seem to wish to follow the same pattern and make family reunion harder and harder, despite knowing from this research the long-term effects our policy is likely to lead to. We must take the evidence seriously, so I ask the Minister to commit the Government to assess what we know about separation seriously; look again at the present policies, particularly those that came into force just last June; support this Bill; and tell us, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, just said, what assessment the Government have made about unaccompanied refugee children being able to integrate into UK society, given their lack of family reunion rights.