Immigration Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I can easily describe those things as achievements. They are achievements that the Labour Government, which ended in 2010, signally failed to secure. That Government did nothing, for example, about people coming to use the health service and then failing to contribute to it. We have changed the rules and more than £100 million has been injected into the national health service.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Does the Home Secretary not recognise that this is a nasty, punitive Bill that will inevitably risk yet more racism and discrimination and undermine the social cohesion that she says she cares about? At the very least, will she guarantee full financial compensation to anyone whose livelihood is undermined by action taken by immigration officers that later turns out to have been falsely and wrongly taken?

[Mrs May]

I will tell the hon. Lady what impacts on social cohesion. It is when our constituents see people here in this country illegally and able to continue to be in this country illegally. It is fair that we deal with those who abuse our system and who do the wrong thing. It is fair not only to people who have been born and brought up in the United Kingdom, but to those who have legitimately migrated to the UK, have played by the rules and have done the right thing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

No, I am going to make some progress.

The other measure that we support in the Bill is the requirement for all front-line public service staff to speak fluent English, which of course is a sensible proposal. However, I believe that, in legislating on these matters, we all have a responsibility to bear in mind at all times that this is the most difficult and sensitive of policy areas. Unlike other issues that we debate in this House, this one has the potential to cause real harm and strife in our communities.

We will support the Government when they get the balance right, but I want to be clear about what we will not do. We will not support legislation that is introduced in haste or that is not backed up by clear evidence. That is the problem with the Bill. Parts of it appear to have been drafted on the same beer mat and in the same pub as the Home Secretary’s speech to the Conservative party conference in Manchester. It is legislation driven by a desire to be seen to be doing something and to get headlines.

[Caroline Lucas]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that international student numbers should be removed entirely from net migration figures, because otherwise we risk losing key international talent as well as undermining many local economies, such as Brighton’s, that depend on them to a great deal?

[Andy Burnham]

I think that is where the Home Secretary is beginning to cut an isolated figure, as she did last week at her party’s conference. I understand that her own Cabinet colleagues are making the same argument to her—the Chancellor of the Exchequer got dangerously close to making the same argument on his recent trip to China. The hon. Lady is right. If we are looking for an area where there is economic benefit to the country in the long term, it is absolutely that of welcoming to this country students who will then commit themselves to the country for the rest of their working lives.

The critical response to the Home Secretary’s speech last week did not come just from the usual suspects on the Labour Benches. The Daily Telegraph called it

“awful, ugly, misleading, cynical and irresponsible”,

while the Institute of Directors, no less, dismissed it as

“irresponsible rhetoric and pandering to anti-immigration sentiment”—

serious words. They were not alone. The public can spot any attempt to play politics with this issue from a million miles away, and that is why the Home Secretary got the reaction she did. She claimed in Manchester that immigration was undermining social cohesion. I put it to her that legislating in haste without clear evidence and bringing forward half-baked, divisive measures is far more likely to do precisely that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

We have heard much this afternoon about the serious flaws in the Bill. More than anything else, there is a complete lack of evidence for its proposals, and a large number of experts have highlighted their potentially damaging effects. It risks compromising community and social cohesion, putting individuals at risk in the process. I am particularly concerned about the impact of outsourcing enforcement functions to private third parties that are not subject to adequate levels of public scrutiny. Contradiction and conjecture are a recurring theme, and I very much hope the Home Secretary will explain why the proposals have been made when there is no evidence to suggest that existing measures in the Immigration Act 2014 are not working well enough or need to be extended.

Let us take as an example the extension of the “deport first, appeal later” provisions in the previous Immigration Act. They came into force only recently and as yet there has been no impact assessment to determine their effectiveness, but the Bill seeks to widen those powers. I am worried both by the potential consequences of such an approach and by what it implies about the Home Secretary’s motivation.

Anyone who heard the Home Secretary’s speech at her party’s conference earlier this month may share my concern. Despite the stated aim of clamping down on illegal migration, the Bill goes considerably further and extends the principle of “deport first, appeal later” to all immigration cases. Not only is there a complete lack of evidence that that is required, but it signals that the underlying intention of the Bill is to undermine the very principle of freedom of movement.

The Government also clearly stated that they would not go ahead with the ill-thought-out right to rent programme without conducing an evaluation of the pilot carried out in the west midlands. Yet here we are with proposals to extend that programme to the entire country and no sign of any comprehensive evaluation from the Home Office. The hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) made an eloquent argument in those terms.

Moreover, the Home Secretary has failed to absorb the results of the evaluations that were carried out by independent experts. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, for example, found that the pilot forced landlords to make poor decisions and that discrimination clearly occurred against both migrants and British citizens, including making landlords less likely to rent to anyone with a “questionable” immigration status—in other words, as other hon. Members have said, anyone with a name that sounds foreign.

What we do have evidence for is the economic benefit of immigration, including in the form of a warning from the chairman of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker, who has said that the Bill will turn away

“the world’s best and brightest”.

That is already happening in my constituency of Brighton, Pavilion, thanks to the ongoing changes to the student visa regime.

The latest changes include those to the international English language testing system for eligibility to study. An estimated third of international students who come to study at UK universities could be at risk, along with an estimated 27,000 jobs in the UK. In Brighton and Hove alone, a minimum of 1,000 jobs could be lost, although given that two major pathway providers—Into and Study Group—have head offices in the city, the number is likely to be significantly greater. There is therefore considerable concern about the extent to which international students are being blamed for rising net migration—that is why I want to repeat my call for student numbers to be removed entirely from the net migration figures—and about the fact that many students on tier 4 visas will be criminalised under the proposals if they undertake paid work. The competitiveness of international markets is increasing and we can ill afford to reduce our attractiveness to international talent, particularly as such international students sustain our research output, which supports our economy.

The argument about international students is not only an economic one; it says something about who we are as a nation and what kind of people we think we are. Are we outward-looking, confident and welcoming, or are we fearful, inward-looking people who do not want to make the most of the huge opportunities that lie out there? Once again, the Government are pushing forward with their proposals without any impact assessment, nor do they seem to have any concern for the way in which their misleading and often divisive rhetoric affects individuals.

There is plenty in the Bill to object to, and there are also big gaps in what should be in an Immigration Bill, one of which is clearly the measures needed to tackle some of the problems in our current immigration system. The most notable problem is the Home Office’s long history of poor decision making on immigration cases, as demonstrated by the high rate of successful appeals. My surgeries are full of cases that illustrate the abundant delays in processing.

The Bill not only fails to take steps to improve the situation, but in effect removes the right of redress when the Home Office makes mistakes and individuals are wrongly identified as illegal migrants. The knock-on effects may include wrongfully depriving people of their homes, bank accounts and driving licences. That would be a violation of their human rights in and of itself, but it will be further exacerbated by the changes to the right of redress.

The Bill will also have an impact on asylum seekers. Removing financial support from those who have been refused asylum risks consigning vulnerable individuals to destitution, homelessness and exploitation. Many of those individuals may well have their asylum claim upheld on appeal, but I would argue that the measures in the Bill will push them underground, reducing the likelihood that an appeal will be brought. That will create a wide set of knock-on problems, including for local authorities, which have a responsibility to protect children under the Children Acts. Even if there are strong grounds to refuse asylum, when did we become a country that is comfortable removing every kind of safety net for people who have come here and need it most?

[Several hon. Members rose—]