Immigration Bill

Baroness Sheehan Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

A civilised nation would ensure that its immigration system is fair and includes checks and balances, such as an appeals process—the ability of an appellant to give oral evidence being a central component of any fair hearing. Clause 34 violates all that, and I therefore hope that, in justifying any claim that the United Kingdom has to be thought civilised, it will be removed from both government thinking and this Bill.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 227 and to oppose the proposition that Clause 34 stand part of the Bill. During my maiden speech I referred to time spent as a caseworker and head of office for my noble friend Lady Kramer when she was a Member in another place. I will recount the salient details of an immigration case that has stayed with me for more than a decade and which will illustrate several speeches made by noble Lords here.

One morning, I received a call from a concerned friend of a young man from Chad who had arrived here as an unaccompanied minor. He was anxious that his friend, having become 18 years of age, had been detained by immigration officers and was about to be deported. To cut a long story short, I was successful in locating the young man and succeeded in getting him off the plane—just. Now, this orphaned young man eventually succeeded in getting indefinite leave to remain, but not until he had spent several months having to report to Lunar House, often having to walk there from Kingston as he had little cash.

He also endured several months in Harmondsworth, where I had occasion to visit him. It was a prison in all but name. In all that time, he lived with the constant fear of deportation. No one should have to go through such mental anguish because of poor decision-making, which was the sole reason behind his ordeal. The Home Office got it wrong. Poor judgment on the part of the Home Office is still prevalent today. If this clause were to be passed as it stands, the injustice this boy suffered would be magnified inordinately.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I will make a brief contribution to this debate based on my own experience as the Member of Parliament for Orpington for 18 years. My experience may be the same as or different from that of other Members of Parliament in the other House, but I had so many immigration cases regularly that one out of my three caseworkers was solely devoted to dealing with them comprehensively. By the way, I think the people in these cases got a pretty good service. I am not sure that a lot of people could devote so much casework time to one particular aspect of what an MP has to face.

None the less, I want to address the question of Clause 34, rather than Amendment 227 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. However, while I understand the argument put forcefully by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the guarantee you get from having something in the Bill, my experience in relation to the handling of children is that they were handled exceptionally carefully. Whenever there was a family involved, the Home Office took particular trouble to do it properly. I felt that it pursued its statutory obligations very fully.

On the wider issue of Clause 34, my own experience was that the really difficult problem in dealing with immigration cases, whether they were economic migrants or asylum seekers, was the length of time the whole appeals procedure took. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, it is byzantine in its complexity. That is the truth of the matter. That very complexity and the number of possible appeals you could make—tier 1, tier 2 and then appeals beyond that—meant that cases went on not just for several months but for several years and individuals, whatever the eventual result of the case, were placed in a situation of great difficulty, resulting very often in mental problems and severe depression. These cases could go on for five, six or seven years before they were eventually resolved. This was the really big problem in dealing with immigrants.

Will this clause as it is improve that? Will it speed things up? We have evidence from the new procedures for dealing with visa applications, for example, on the hub and spoke principle brought in by the last Government, whereby visas were dealt with in a particular area—let us say Dubai for the whole of India, for example—and things were speeded up. Those measures were brought in so that visa applications could be dealt with more rapidly than hitherto. Great experience was developed in dealing with the paperwork, as opposed to seeing people face to face, which ordinary common sense would suggest is a better procedure than dealing just with paperwork—but none the less, that is what was developed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a means of dealing with these things more expeditiously than would otherwise be the case. If my noble and learned friend can tell me what experience and evidence we have that Clause 34 would speed things up, I would be in favour of it, because the real problem was the length of time that appeals took in immigration cases.