Immigration Bill (Fourth sitting)

Craig Whittaker Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Keir Starmer]

Q 250 I just want to pick up a second point. Evidence has been given that the objective is that people leave, and therefore there is no burden on anyone to provide any support, but the evidence from the 2005 pilot seems to show pretty strongly that if that is the objective, this is not the way to achieve it. The likelihood is, therefore, that local authorities will be picking up the burden of supporting families, particularly those with children—children are children, in this.

You talked about a cost shift. What is the cost increase when asylum support is swapped for putting a child or family who are not going to go voluntarily—a child may not have any choice at all—on local authority support? It seems to me that under these provisions the cost will go up, because you take someone from one regime to a regime for which they have to go through two assessments, which someone has to carry out, and be put on to temporary support and further support. They could have become more destitute and so need more support. Am I right in thinking that this is not just a cost shunt—you are not simply moving cost x from the Home Office to the local authority but shifting and increasing it, so the cost to the taxpayer goes up?

Paul Greenhalgh: Potentially, yes, under how the Bill is currently drafted.

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

Q 251 I want to drill down on the shift of the cost burden from the Home Office to local authorities. We already know that schedule 3 to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 broadly limits access to local authority social care for families anyway. Is there not a mechanism between local authorities and the Home Office that is triggered when a family present themselves and it becomes clear that they are in this country unlawfully, so that they get deported and the local authority does not have to shoulder the burden of the cost?

Henry St Clair Miller: I think you are referring to the exclusions from social services support under schedule 3 to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, whereby if a local authority is working with someone in an excluded group—a failed asylum seeker would likely fall within the excluded groups—the authority is instructed to provide support only if it is necessary for the purpose of avoiding a breach of human rights. It is that exception to the exclusion that gives rise to the human rights assessment, which can be quite time consuming for a local authority.

When you work in this area you have to be quite specific about each client group. It is true that an asylum seeker who has already put in an application has been through the courts, and the courts have decided that there would be no human rights breach in returning the family to the parents’ country of origin. The best interests of the child will have been looked at within that, and the courts will have decided that. It should then be possible for the local authority to follow the same line within the human rights assessment and opt to say that no assistance is required other than a return to the country of origin through assisted voluntary return.

It is a little bit different in our experience, because a lot of the applicants go on to put in further representations under the UK’s immigration rules. That is often on the basis of article 8 human rights and on the basis of there being children. Once the application goes in, there is a legal barrier to that family leaving, and it is impossible to enact schedule 3 to withhold support if the family is destitute.

[Craig Whittaker]

Q 252 I am a little confused. Are these families not here unlawfully—has it not been deemed through the court process that they are failed asylum seekers, or whatever category they are in, and so they are staying in the country unlawfully anyway? Are you saying that local authorities traditionally ignore that process and go beyond that? Why would you continue to offer support?

Henry St Clair Miller: At present failed asylum-seeking families are not a group within our cohort. We are usually working with visa overstayers who have been in the UK for many years undetected—possibly with safeguarding concerns about the welfare of children after long periods of forced dependency for the family. In our experience, these people are usually at the beginning of the process of applying for leave once we have come into contact with them. That is quite different from people who have been in the asylum process and all appeal rights have been exhausted. At the moment, we do not see so many of those cases.

So I assume—not I assume—it is the case that if you were looking at schedule 3 and Humans Rights Act assessments, you would have regard primarily for the decisions of the court in that equation.

[Craig Whittaker]

Q 253 So the cases that you are primarily dealing with do not apply to the Bill, because the Bill talks about removing support for those who have gone through the process and are deemed to be unlawful immigrants.

Henry St Clair Miller: It is both. Sorry—I will try again and then I will give up. It is both, because you are also looking at measures to tackle illegal migration in the UK such as landlord checking and the rest, which might give rise to more of those.

Paul Greenhalgh: Our concern is about families who have been given that status in terms of how the Bill is currently drafted. The onus will be on the families to leave rather than there being an enforcement to their departure. While they are still in this country, local authorities still have legal duties to them under the legislation that we have previously cited.

Councillor Simmonds: It is probably worth giving you some figures. When we look at the numbers for local authority responsibilities in providing support to irregular migrants, around 80% of those who are supported are those under the section 17 Children Act responsibilities. The remaining group tend to be with care needs under the Mental Health Act and the Care Act, so the vast majority will be entitled to support through their status as families with children, and there will always be further legal avenues by which they can regain that entitlement should one avenue be closed off.

[Sarah Champion]

Q 254 I have just a small question. Currently, when someone has failed their last appeal, what is the average time before they actually get deported? I just want an idea of the timescale in which they would be destitute.

Henry St Clair Miller: I have not learnt of that particular statistic, so I do not have an answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Can I butt in? I am really sorry, but we have got about five Members who want to get in, with less time than we expected. If you have not got a remit to talk about it, perhaps we should move on. I guess that no one else on the panel is going to answer that question, are they? No.

[Craig Whittaker]

Q 310 I want to challenge Ms Grant, but first I will declare an interest, as I did on Tuesday. You have said that it is not right that landlords have to deal with the complexities of people’s immigration status. In fact, we had Mr Smith on Tuesday from the Residential Landlords Association, who said that the sector was made up of amateurs and accidental landlords. Let me just ask you what is so complex about taking an ID, which the majority take anyway. Do you not think it might enhance the situation for landlords along the way?

Saira Grant: I did not say that it was not right; I said that it was difficult. I will explain, because that is the second part of your question. Taking an ID is not difficult. If you have a passport, it is very easy. You can show your passport, and we do show passports in many situations, including when getting tenancy agreements. The complexities arise when somebody’s immigration status is not clear cut and they do not have a British passport. I was pointing to the evidence that backs that. In the Home Office’s own evaluation, the landlords’ checking service was contacted 109 times, because landlords said, “We do not understand what we are seeing. We do not understand this document, this biometric card or this historic stamp in this passport.” Out of those 109 inquiries, 94 people had the right to remain. That demonstrates that it is not me—

[Craig Whittaker]

Q 311 May I just point out to you that that is no different from anyone else in this country who wants to rent any property? I had the same situation myself only three weeks ago. First, living in Yorkshire, I had to be in London on a particular day, otherwise the property went. Secondly, I had to have all the relevant checks in place. If I did not, the property was given to somebody else. How is that discriminating against somebody, when that situation is already in place?

Saira Grant: That is exactly the point. If you do not have your documents to hand—say you are one of the 17% of British citizens who does not own a British passport, so you cannot show that—what happens is that there will be somebody else ahead of you in that queue, but that is not the discrimination I am talking about. I am talking about the difficulty landlords are having in assessing immigration status, as the evaluation demonstrates. It is not me saying that; it is what the evaluation demonstrates. The discrimination I am talking about and which we found was when landlords said to us—almost a third of landlords who responded to our survey said this—“This is really worrying for us, £3,000 is a hefty civil penalty. We do not really want to rent to anybody who sounds foreign, looks foreign or has a foreign accent. It is just not worth our while.” That is leading to discrimination. That is the problem. The scheme is set up in such a way that you do not need to be a racist landlord; you just need to be a cautious one to say, “If I have a choice, who am I going to rent to? Somebody I am not sure about or somebody who has a British passport.”

[Craig Whittaker]

Q 312 Trust me, as a landlord, you have to be cautious anyway.

Saira Grant: I am sure you do.

[Mims Davies]

Q 313 I just wanted to pick up the line about entitlement, which is running through the conversation this afternoon—people feeling that they will get to a point at which they are entitled to be here. This question is for Ms Grant: does your organisation explain to people that there may be a point at which they feel they are entitled to be here, but they will not be? Do you go through the process of what could happen to them? We heard from the Red Cross earlier that it does that, but some organisations do not and it is adding complexity to complex cases.

Saira Grant: Absolutely. We run an irregular migrants helpline to give legal advice. The best advice we can often give is to say to somebody, “You have to leave the UK.” We spell out their entitlements, their rights and what the process is, and then we refer them to the voluntary returns scheme, to the Red Cross or to whichever organisation is appropriate. Absolutely, it is in nobody’s interest to have people who should not be here remaining here, and it is not in their interest either. The destitution we see is heartbreaking, but if they have come to the end of the legal process, we have to give them fair advice. We are a legal organisation.