Immigration Bill

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I am going to make some further progress.

Part 3 is about migrants’ access to services. We want to ensure that only legal migrants have access to the labour market, free health services, housing, bank accounts and driving licences. This is not just about making the UK a more hostile place for illegal migrants; it is also about fairness. Those who play by the rules and work hard do not want to see businesses gaining an unfair advantage through the exploitation of illegal labour, or to see our valuable public services, paid for by the taxpayer, used and abused by illegal migrants.

Hon. Members will know that the right of non-European economic area nationals to work in the UK is restricted, and where the right to work is granted, it may be restricted to a particular employer or limited hours. Employers are required to ensure that their employees have the right to work in the UK and if they do not, they will face penalties, but the process for enforcing those fines is complicated. The Bill will streamline that process, making employers think again before hiring illegal labour.

Let me turn to the national health service. Many temporary migrants are currently allowed free access to the NHS as if they were permanent residents. Such an approach is extremely generous, particularly compared with wider international practice. Our intention is to bring the rules regulating migrant access to the NHS into line with wider Government policy on migrant access to benefits and social housing. That means restricting access to free NHS care to those non-EEA nationals with indefinite leave to remain and those granted refugee status or humanitarian protection in the UK. Under this Bill, other migrants will have to contribute.

Temporary migrants seeking to stay in the UK for more than six months will have to pay an immigration health surcharge on top of their visa fee. I assure the House that this surcharge will make the system fairer and will not undermine our aim to attract the brightest and the best. We have carefully examined what other countries do and will ensure that the UK offer is a competitive one in a tough global market.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Mrs May]

I want to make more progress.

Dealing with migrants is not new for the NHS. There is already a framework for charging other countries. The NHS must enforce it and recover the cost of treating foreign nationals from foreign Governments, and all of us in government will work with it to make the system work.

The Government also want to ensure that illegal immigrants cannot hide in private rented housing. We are already working with councils to tackle rogue landlords who provide beds in sheds and illegal, overcrowded accommodation. Under the Bill, we will go further and have the necessary powers to deal with rogue landlords who rent homes to illegal migrants.

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[Mrs May]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), because I have not done so yet.

[Barry Gardiner]

The most recent migration statistics quarterly report by the Office for National Statistics was published in August 2013 and it noted that the net flow of long-term migrants was 176,000, compared with 235,000 in June 2010, when the right hon. Lady’s Government came to power. That suggests that the figure of 25% cited by my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) when he intervened earlier is right and that the right hon. Lady’s figure of 33% is wrong. Will she confirm that those are the latest statistics and that the reduction was by 25%?

[Mrs May]

If the hon. Gentleman looks at Hansard, he will see the answer I gave to the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk). I said that net migration has come down by a third from its peak in 2010. That figure is absolutely correct, because in September 2010 the figure was 255,000 and the latest figure, therefore, is a fall of 31%.

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[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. The Government decided to suspend the contract three years ago, in 2010. There has been a complete freeze with no contract in place and no proper action taking place. He is absolutely right that we need not just proper checks in place when people arrive, but proper checks on deportations and departures to be able to take follow-up action on illegal immigration.

What was the Government’s flagship policy to tackle illegal immigration, which was trailed by the Prime Minister, who this summer promised new action? It was to hire a man with a van to drive around in circles for two weeks. What was the Home Secretary thinking? Did she really think that people here illegally, who have ignored Home Office letters and avoided UK Border Force scrutiny, would change their minds because they saw one of her posters on an ad van? What did she think people were going to say: “Oh, thank goodness I saw the ad van today. I had just forgotten I was supposed to go home. Hang on while I pop out and get an airplane ticket”? Will she confirm that only one person has rung up to return? He did not even see the vans: he saw a picture in The Guardian. This has not just been a blunt instrument; it has been a complete failure. Will she admit that this has been a pointless gimmick from the start?

Last week the Immigration Minister said that the vans could be rolled out around the country, but instead the Home Secretary strung him out and today decided that the policy is a blunt instrument and she will not do it again. Why did she do it in the first place? Will she stand up and tell the House how many people returned home as a result of it? The Immigration Minister said that only one person returned as a result of the ad vans, but will the Home Secretary say how many people have returned as a result of her ad van approach?

This is not just about a policy that is ineffective and a blunt instrument. The Home Secretary sent the van around four London boroughs with the highest proportion of ethnic minority British citizens. One Brent resident—a British citizen—said:

“As a child in the 1970s with migrant parents I remember how ‘go home’ was shouted at us in the streets and graffitied on walls. One of my earliest memories is of the panic I felt when hearing my parents discussing in hushed tones whether we would indeed have to ‘go home’, as we watched the National Front march on TV.”

The Home Secretary agreed to that slogan. She agreed to send it round communities whose parents heard it from the National Front in the 1970s, and whose British citizens work in our public services, build our businesses, and fight in our armed forces today. She signed off and defended that policy, all for the sake of one person returning. She should be better than that, and I hope she is ashamed of what she did.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for allowing me to intervene, because Brent was one area where the van came round. On the occasions when it did so, the division and hurt that it caused in the community was extraordinary. Does she agree that the policy could not have been introduced because the Home Secretary genuinely thought it was likely to inspire anyone to leave the country, and that instead it was a calculated political propaganda move? As such, her party should pay back to the taxpayer the cost of those vans.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, and the Home Secretary should confirm that she will never pursue such divisive gimmicks again. That is beneath her and ought to be beneath the Government.

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[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I am proud to speak in today’s debate. The speeches of my hon. Friends the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) were quite magnificent. They dealt with this issue from their own experience, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, who always speaks so eloquently on these matters. I would even say—those who know me will know how much it costs me to do so—that the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) also made a very good speech.

The quality of the speeches comes from the nature of Members’ constituencies. It was instructive that the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) should say that when the Bill was published he received correspondence from his constituents who, of course, are the landlords, while the constituents who wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East and to me are the tenants. Each of us in this place is properly reflecting the views of our constituents, but, on behalf of those against whom the Bill will be so penal, I hope that hon. Members who do not share the same constituency issues and problems might take note of some of the speeches that have been given already.

I want to focus on the heart of the Bill, which is that the Home Office argues that the immigration appeals framework is flawed. To whom will it give the work? An internal Home Office review estimated that approximately 60% of the volume of allowed appeals are due to casework errors. The Home Office believes that the appeals framework is flawed, but part of the problem with that framework is the poor quality of its initial decisions, which then clog up the appeals process. How can the Home Office believe that an administrative review process will properly go to the heart of the problem? It will not.

As the Bill stands, refused applicants will be required to apply for administrative review within 10 days of receiving the decision. All of us who have extensive correspondence with the Home Office know that most of the decisions come back to lawyers. So lawyers will be required to make that administrative review application within 10 days, but the Home Office must know full well that that simply will not happen. It is not happening at the moment. Many of our constituents do not receive notification from their lawyers until several weeks after even a positive response has been received from the Home Office. The very idea that such a review could be made within 10 days is quite simply incredible. Those officials who have told, written to and persuaded Ministers that this can be done know only too well that that is false.

Under clause 11, where there is right of appeal to the first tier tribunal, refusal decisions made on erroneous grounds or without reference to highly relevant information simply cannot be challenged. The option to raise challenges to unlawful decision making before the High Court in judicial review proceedings will remain, but that means that the time of the High Court judges will be used in pointing out basic errors in Home Office decision making. The Home Office states that the immigration appeals framework is overtly complex, slow and expensive, but reducing the number of appeals will cause the number of applications for judicial review to soar. That will be more expensive, slower and less effective, but it will be the only lawful option left for many cases. The High Court is likely to become the first port of call for those opposing deportation decisions. Again, immigration officials in the Home Office know that. They know that they are taking a bottleneck from one part of the system and putting it in another part where it will be more costly to the public purse.

In the light of the proposed reforms to judicial review funding and challenges to legal aid, including the proposed adoption of a residence test, judicial review will not be practically accessible for a number of cases, leaving individuals without any form of redress and the Home Office with no imperative to improve its processes.

[Mark Reckless]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

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[Barry Gardiner]

In one moment.

I listened carefully to the right hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), who made the interesting point that without the speed cameras we cannot see things going wrong. On the same principle, if we take off the monitoring, the Home Office will not improve its processes. The light that judges can currently shine on what is going on in the Home Office to show where it is incompetent, where it is taking arbitrary and flawed decisions, will no longer be there. According to the Home Office’s own statistics, 32% of deportation cases and 50% of entry clearance applications were successfully appealed last year. That means that the initial decision was wrong. We need the judges to be able to keep that focus on those wrong initial decisions. Yet the Government’s response to this high margin of error is not to seek to improve the quality of their decision making, but rather to reduce the opportunities for challenge. Instead of improving the bad administration and inefficiency at the heart of the Department, the Government are shifting the responsibility and attacking due process.

The administrative review process already exists for overseas applications, but my own experience of entry clearance manager reviews is that they are slow and of little better quality than entry clearance officers’ decision making. It is difficult to believe Ministers’ estimation that an administrative review would be processed within 10 working days of an application given the historic backlogs that already exist in the Home Office.

The Department has included in its impact assessment a summary of the ongoing costs and benefits of the changes to appeals. It has come up with a figure of £261 of benefits through a decrease in appeal costs. Interestingly, however, it has not included administrative review costs in the cost side of the analysis. It acknowledges that those costs will exist, but it has put in that column the word “unknown”. They are unknown, but the Home Office could have estimated them and did not, because that figure would have made the cost-benefit analysis come out in a way that the Minister did not wish. That is shameful.

In response to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made about the problem of landlords having to check people’s status, the Home Secretary said that we already had such a system for employers. We do, and I will read a letter of 14 December last year from an employer to an employee, whom I will call RS. It states:

“I am writing to advise you that we have received notification from the UK Border Agency regarding your entitlement to work in the UK and would like to invite you to an investigation meeting to discuss this and other aspects of your right to work in the UK…I must advise you that you are currently suspended (no payment) pending further investigation as we have liaised with you and unfortunately you have not provided us with the necessary documents to confirm your eligibility status within the UK.”

A week later, the employer wrote to RS again, stating:

“I am writing further to the investigatory meeting held on Tuesday 18th December 2012…We have received notification from the UKBA to advise us that they cannot confirm your status to work within the UK. We advised you of this notification and requested that you provided us with further documentation…I am therefore writing to you to confirm that you are required to attend a formal disciplinary hearing”.

That was on 21 December. I had become involved in the intervening period and written to the UKBA about the case. It confirmed to me on 19 December that the case had been logged on its computer system, and that from that date the employer should have got a positive response when phoning the employer checking service. I understand that a manager checked on 7 January, but again, the system showed a negative response.

On 9 July, seven months later, I got a letter from the Home Office, which read:

“Thank you for your letter of 18 June with enclosure on behalf of”

RS. It stated that it had received her application on 27 July 2012—a year previously—

“and it is now still awaiting consideration…I am sorry to hear that”

Ms RS

“is experiencing problems with her employers. She may be interested to know that employers can check the eligibility of prospective employees to work in the UK by using the online Employer Checking Service”—

which was precisely what her employer had done the previous December, when she had not been logged on it, and every week and month since. The Home Office has done nothing, and a woman has lost her job and livelihood. The Home Secretary holds that up as an example to show that the system is already working. I think not.

Let us not be down on the landlords, though. I have a letter to the Home Office from a landlord, Mrs Patel, which states:

“I can confirm that”

Mr KA

“is my tenant. He lives at the property with his wife and three children. I understand that he is in great financial difficulties”—

that is because his case has been in limbo with the Home Office for 15 years—

“and I have accommodated this only because he has three very young children. However, I am unable to continue with this arrangement as I have a mortgage and other bills to pay. I would appreciate if his claim could be dealt with urgently so he is able to get help, as I am no longer able to let him stay at the property without paying his rent. I don’t wish to see him homeless, as he has three young children.”

That is a landlord who is acting like a human being. The Bill asks that she instead act like an immigration officer. Tenants often have limited leave to remain in this country and apply for additional leave to remain. During the pending period, what can a prospective landlord do? If they do not know their prospective tenant’s immigration status, they will not take them on.

I have to respect your wish for others to be allowed to speak, Mr Deputy Speaker, although there are of course many cases that I would like to cite. I must finish, however, by talking about the racist van that affected my community so dreadfully this summer. The Government claim that the objective was for people to realise that they could get assistance in going home. However, every person whom the Government could deport has received a letter telling them that. Mr KN has been signing on every single month for 12 years, and on every one of those occasions an immigration officer could have detained him and taken him for deportation. They have not done so. They know where every one of the people targeted by the van lives, but they have not bothered to go and ensure that they are detained and deported, because they do not want the costs. The idea that the racist van was sent out to remind people that they could go home, when thousands of people are not being deported with the full knowledge of the Home Office, shows that that Department is the most dysfunctional in government.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—