Immigration Bill (First sitting)

Chloe Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

There is a chance, down the line, that that could be the case. I just wanted to clear that up. Thank you.

[Chloe Smith (Norwich North) (Con)]

Q 16 Two quick questions from me. The first is on what happens at present to engage with these families. Mr Kaye, you were just saying that the longer we do not engage with them, the more there is a problem; yet, as I have just heard it, Ms Dennis, you were outlining the current process and saying that it was chock full of engagement. Will the panel comment on the ways in which current engagement is different from what happened under the 2005 process, which I understand hinged largely on corresponding with people rather than engaging with them, perhaps as happens at present?

Judith Dennis: The 2005 pilot took away support, or threatened people with taking away their support if they were not taking steps to remove themselves. Partly as a result of the lack of success of that programme, and of hearing from some families in parliamentary work done by various agencies about the complexity of the situation, this programme was established. There are several stages at which family conferences take place, and specialist family engagement managers who understand the process invite the families—parents and sometimes children—to meetings. They are invited to think about whether or not they want to go and they visit the family, and those kind of things. There are lots of steps. Most of the process is designed to help people think about voluntary return, because there are fewer barriers to removal if someone agrees to go rather than being forced to go. So measures that just take away support, rather than put in more support, have been found not to work, and those that put in more support have some more success.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 17 I suppose in what you are saying there are two types of support, in the sense of money and of engagement, and just to be clear you are—

Judith Dennis: Indeed. I would say that they need to go hand in hand.

Mike Kaye: I just draw attention to the fact that—the point that I was making—if you cut off support, you cut off all that work, because you no longer engage with that individual and they no longer engage with you. The other point that I would make is that under the Bill we are looking at—the Home Office is talking about—cutting off support to families after 28 days. That is an entirely insufficient amount of time to work with a family to get them to return home. In fact, under the voluntary return programme you would be looking at 90 days. This is for delegated powers, but it would be useful if we could get the Minister to indicate that the minimum would be 90 days.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 18 My second question looks back somewhat. Mr Kaye’s organisation, Still Human Still Here, in 2008 gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on the then draft citizenship and immigration legislative proposals. Your organisation stated:

“Government asylum support policy is leaving many refused asylum seekers destitute”—

that was clearly the then Government in 2008—and that that destitution

“results from the current statutory scheme”

of that Government. Why is it that two major British political parties, which most recently represented around two thirds of the UK population, would want to pursue such measures when they have been democratically elected?

Mike Kaye: Why would they want to—

[Chloe Smith]

Q 19 Why do you think that the Government—either of those Governments—respond to the electorate’s ask?

Mike Kaye: To be frank, it is a total mystery to me after 20 years how Governments can continue to do the same thing and expect a different outcome. Over 20 years Governments have basically been implementing policies that are short-term, deterrent policies, and they have not been resourcing the system to do the job properly. It is a huge frustration to me, because if Government really supported the Home Office to do the job properly, we would not be looking at a problem with asylum seekers. We have had a static number of asylum seekers for 10 years—25,000 applications—well within the realms of the Government’s ability to deal with quickly and efficiently, but we have under-resourced the system so dramatically that we have not dealt with it effectively. The measures being put forward are a repeat of measures that have failed before. We have evidence from previous Governments, all democratically elected—I do not know why we are even talking about whether they are elected or not. They all try to do the same things and, if you look at the evidence, you will see that those things have not worked. That is what is so frustrating—to look at measures in the Bill that are replicating measures that have not worked previously.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 20 But they are not, because the 2005 pilot was based on correspondence rather than engagement.

Mike Kaye: Talking about correspondence rather than engagement is not going to be the issue that changes whether this works or does not work.

John Wilkes: I have worked in this field for seven years now, and one of the observations that I would share is that the system has been in a state of constant churn over that seven years. Asylum is a very complicated thing—it is one of the most complicated activities that the Home Office has to do under its responsibilities—and it has had perpetual change in all sorts of aspects of the system, and I mean major organisational changes. So the system has no time to settle down and to have a coherent overview of how these things are done. Doing a pilot in one area of the system when there are things that need to be addressed in other parts of the system means that you do not get the results you need. The system needs some time to settle down and to enable a much more focused approach on the whole system. In that way, you will start to achieve better results.

Mike Kaye: If you look back over the past 20 years—I totally agree with what John is saying—what you see is different Governments setting different targets. What you are generally doing is shifting very limited resources to meet a separate target, which just creates a backlog in a different aspect of the asylum system, and you have big structural changes, which are administratively inefficient, waste time and do not deliver the end goals that you are looking for. If we want to save money, to make the system work more efficiently and to have quicker and more accurate decisions, we need to resource the whole system properly.

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

Q 21 My question is specifically to John Wilkes. It is about the Scottish issue. Obviously, every country has different legislation. You have been through the changes in legislation coming from this House, so I hope that you will be able to advise us about the impact of this legislation, and the challenges that that presents, in terms of Scottish legislation.

John Wilkes: One of the things we said in our evidence was that the Committee should ensure that the Immigration Bill considers whether the legislative consent process needs to be undertaken with the Scottish Parliament under the Sewel convention, which is actually going to be put into statute under clause 2 of the Scotland Bill, which is currently going through the House. We say that because the whole concept behind legislative consent is that whatever this Parliament does should have no unintended consequences on the business of the other Parliament. There are a number of aspects of the Bill, particularly on asylum support, that we feel would have an impact, in the way colleagues have identified, on local authority responsibilities and on duties to children, which are framed in different legislation in Scotland. There is the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 and the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968, which, in Scotland, defines local authorities’ responsibilities in terms of a duty of care to people who have no other resources. We believe that one of the duties of this Bill Committee is to ensure that there are no unintended consequences. What the Home Office often says about immigration legislation is that the intention is around immigration. What Sewel also says is that you have to look at the impact of that legislation, and we think that the impact of this legislation potentially involves legislative consent considerations between the two Parliaments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kelly Tolhurst]

Q 70 Undocumented workers. It has not always reached a full conclusion, so there has perhaps been a view that the penalties are not stiff enough. That is why I am interested to know whether this measure is enough finally to stop people taking those decisions and using undocumented workers.

Kevin Green: My take is that we have to be very careful. There are lots of businesses, and we look at national minimum wage breaches. There are only two cases that have involved recruiters, and they were just miscalculations. Such businesses should be held to account to make sure that they put it right, and then we move on. There is a difference in holding businesses to account. Sometimes small businesses without the resource might make mistakes, and we still need to hold them to account. There is lots of regulation already in place to do that. I think some clarity about that and resource for enforcement are important, but that is very different from somebody who is actually bringing people, harbouring people—what I would call human trafficking. That is criminal activity, and we need strong clarity about the potential punishment, the right level of resource and the right level of intelligence gathering across the different agencies, where this is moving in the right direction.

One of the things that we have uncovered is that, when they find criminal activity, lots of my members will provide examples and identify areas to the GLA where they think they have been infiltrated or where they see information, bank details and telephone numbers being given from one employer—they will then whistleblow to the GLA. Those legitimate businesses need to be sure that, by whistleblowing, they are actually helping to resolve the issue. Resource for the GLA is critical in moving this forward. They need the resource to go after the people who are carrying out real exploitation so that we do not mix them up with small businesses that make the odd mistake along the way.

[Chloe Smith]

Q 71 I want to take Ms Robinson back to her point about defences under the Modern Slavery Act 2015, in which I take a great interest—I sat on the Public Bill Committee. I have that Act and the Criminal Damage Act 1971 in front of me because she made a specific reference to that defence. As I understand it, the defence supplied in the 2015 Act in relation to criminal damage specifically excludes criminal damage with the intent to endanger another person’s life, so it is a rather more specialist case than she might have suggested. Secondly, on Second Reading of this Bill, the Home Secretary was very clear that all those defences will continue to apply. Will Ms Robinson explain her view?

Caroline Robinson: All those defences will continue to apply. What do you mean?

[Chloe Smith]

Q 72 The Home Secretary said that those defences will continue to apply. I thought I heard you say earlier that the defences will not apply; the Home Secretary says that they will.

Caroline Robinson: In relation to the Immigration Bill?

[Chloe Smith]

Yes.

Caroline Robinson: Sorry, I was thinking about Second Reading of the Modern Slavery Act. Yes, she did say that, which is why I said it will be very interesting for organisations such as mine, and many others, as part of the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group to know for sure what would be the situation in the case I set out in which there is a series of events in a person’s stay in the UK. They might be exploited when they arrive and then they escape that exploitation on their own—that happens many times, including to a woman I spoke to last week—before entering undocumented work.

Secondly, what would be the situation if I was in undocumented work when I arrived in the UK and then that work deteriorated to the point of exploitation, as we know is a regular pattern in exploitative working conditions? What would happen there? Would I be offending for that work at the beginning, or would the modern slavery defence, if proved, counter that previous work? Those are the questions that remain for us. It would be brilliant to have expanded detail on that in Committee.

[Mims Davies]

Q 73 I want to pick up with Mr Green, and perhaps Mr Miley, how the Bill intends to improve the market regulation and enforcement of workers’ protections. Why has such a culture built up in certain sectors, and how have we allowed that? Does what is in front of you work for that culture to be broken down?

Kevin Green: In terms of exploitation in certain key industrial sectors?