Immigration Bill

David T C Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

rose—

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

Hopefully the hon. Gentleman will apologise on behalf of the Home Secretary for pushing those divisive ad vans.

[David T. C. Davies]

May I say—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I think that there is an identity crisis that needs to be resolved. I think that the right hon. Lady was pointing in the direction of the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson).

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[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. It should disturb us all that an appalling two thirds of children who are rescued from slavery and trafficking go missing again and often become victims of the same traffickers or other groups. We need far stronger action on that; we owe it to those children who have been rescued, often from appalling conditions. We should not let them simply disappear again.

[David T. C. Davies]

Does the right hon. Lady recognise that one reason for that is that care workers in children’s homes are not allowed physically to restrain and prevent children from walking out? That is a result of the Human Rights Act, which was passed by her colleagues, along with the failure to deal with immigration that has led the Government to bring forward these urgent proposals today.

[Yvette Cooper]

If I had known the hon. Gentleman was going to raise such nonsense, I would not have let him intervene in the first place.

Let me move on to some of the remaining elements of the Bill. People who come to Britain and then abuse British law should not expect to stay here, and Labour has previously supported action to ensure that article 8 of the European convention on human rights is properly interpreted in cases involving foreign criminals. We also believe that appeals should be speeded up—serious cases that go to Strasbourg certainly take far too long.

The measures in the Bill do not deal with those issues, however, and instead it appears that the Government want to abolish appeals for whole categories of immigration cases because they cannot cope with the fact that they get so many decisions wrong in the first place. There are genuine and serious concerns about that approach because it turned out that the Government got it wrong in 50% of entry clearance cases that went to appeal. In managed migration cases that went to appeal, they got it wrong in 49% of decisions. In the majority of those cases the problem was Home Office error, so why not just put a bit of effort into getting the decision right in the first place? If those appeal rights are removed, many cases will cite human rights grounds to get an appeal and more cases will go to judicial review. The Government’s own impact assessment shows that that could cost £100 million, halving any savings the Home Secretary might hope to make.

The real gap in the Bill is that is says nothing about the exploitation of immigration in the workplace. There is nothing to deal with employers who take on illegal migrant workers or to tackle the exploitation of legal migration by the undercutting of wages and conditions in the local labour market. There is nothing to deal with the lack of enforcement of the minimum wage, or employers who use loopholes in the minimum wage to overcharge workers for overcrowded accommodation and offset that against their pay. There is nothing to deal with agencies that recruit only from overseas and exclude local workers from their books, or employers who recruit for some shifts only from certain nationalities.

All those practices are bad for everyone—they are bad for migrant workers who are exploited, bad for local workers who are undercut, bad for other businesses that are undermined and bad for our economy, which continues to depend on low-skilled migration being exploited in that way. The Government are doing nothing. The Labour party will set out amendments to give councils powers of enforcement on the minimum wage, close loopholes and tackle irresponsible agencies, and I hope the Government will support those measures.

The Bill does not do what the Government claim it does. Some of the measures are sensible, some are confused, and some are of serious concern. They claim it tackles illegal immigration, but it does nothing of the sort. It fails to do enough to tackle the serious problems. The Opposition will not oppose the Bill as we believe it should go to Committee so we can amend and reform it, use the opportunity to introduce better and fairer controls to deal with the Government’s failures, and make immigration work for all.

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[Sarah Teather (Brent Central) (LD)]

Last month, one of my constituents—I will call him Philippe—attended an asylum-screening appointment at Lunar house. He had a history of serious ill treatment in Cameroon and had in his hand a referral to Freedom from Torture from his very worried advocates, so one would have expected him to be treated with care and attention when he arrived for his screening appointment. It is worth reading the whole of his statement—it took me some time to do so—to understand what happened to him over three days in September. It gives a picture of what happens to people when they try to navigate Home Office bureaucracy. I want to tell hon. Members a little about what happened to him, because there is a danger that this debate will be about headlines and statistics, but will forget the very people we are being tough on—the very people who are the subjects of the Bill.

Reading all that my constituent said, one gets a sense of his fear and nervousness when he first arrived at Lunar house with all his documents in his hand, and then the abject rudeness with which he was treated, the dismissals, the disbelief and the downright incompetence; and the petty squabbles between contractors unwilling to go beyond the letter of their own instruction and offer basic, normal human compassion and basic, normal information to my constituent. Hon. Members need to read it all to understand his fear, confusion and bewilderment, to follow him from the first moment, when he arrived, with nervous trust, for his asylum-screening appointment, to the moment when, in vain and with frustration, he tried to make the official at Lunar house appreciate that he was there for an agreed appointment and to get her to read his referral to Freedom from Torture. In vain, he tried to make his point through the interpreter about where his belongings were, but instead he was arrested, handcuffed and taken to Harmondsworth. Reading his statement, one gets a sense of just how frightening that is for somebody previously detained in their own country and of its impact on that individual.

Finally, when Philippe arrived at Harmondsworth, rather late at night, somebody realised he should not have been there; somebody eventually checked his documentation and realised that he had originally turned up for a routine asylum-screening appointment, and he was taken back. Eventually, after petty squabbles, which he witnessed, he was dumped in a hostel without any documentation, without being told where he was and without being given an address. There followed a distressing 48 hours, during which he had a paranoid episode and ended up lost on the streets of south London. He had one contact, one human being, who went out of their way to help him. Someone from a church in Brent who had been working with him drove around the streets of south London to find him and then took him into her own home and reconnected him with his lawyer—the best and worst of humanity across three days.

[David T. C. Davies]

The hon. Lady paints a moving picture, and I am sure we all sympathise with her constituent, but does she agree that these mistakes happen because a large number of people are coming over, abusing the system and preventing us from helping those most in need, which is exactly what the Bill is designed to prevent?

[Sarah Teather]

No, I do not accept that. This happens because of the culture of disbelief in the Home Office, and it is that culture that needs to change, yet I see nothing in the Bill that will have any impact on the quality of decision making or on how individual officials treat constituents such as mine when they go with their asylum or visa applications. In my 10 years as an MP, I have seen countless examples of this behaviour, as all Members will have done. Those of us with the highest levels of immigration casework will have seen more, but it is a source of huge frustration for many MPs that our advice surgeries are spent mostly dealing with stuff that the Home Office should be dealing with.