Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 30th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, at the previous stage of the Bill and very late in the debate on this amendment, which was then in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Flight—I am glad that he is able to be here this evening—having listened to the Minister I asked what she would advise a couple living in the EU, one British and one an EU national, if they both have elderly parents, on one side of the family in the UK and on the other in that EU country. They would be—they are—faced with not just the end of free movement but an impossible choice: not just where they should live after March 2022 but which parents they should decide to care for personally. They will have to make that decision within the next 18 months—15 months after the end of the transition. The Minister had an impossible task in responding to my question as to whether picking between parents was a humane response. She argued that people will have had plenty of time, but does that really address the point?

Since Committee, I have had so many emails, as no doubt have other noble Lords, making it clear how many different family situations there are, but all presenting families with similarly impossible choices. I thank everyone who has written to me and to other noble Lords. They have taken such care to contact us, not with standard formulaic emails but with powerful descriptions of their situations, their concern and their distress. Noble Lords will understand that I want to read some of them into the record, and that I cannot read them all. As examples, however, there is a lady of 75 living in the Netherlands supporting a Dutch companion, and vice versa, whose mother is 96 and in a care home there. There is a lady of 79 in the UK who expected to receive support and part-time care from her daughter, who would be prepared to give it provided that her French husband is able to move to Britain. A couple in France with a 12 year-old son are faced with whether to uproot him from school. There is a family in Italy, one parent British and one Italian, with two teenagers of dual nationality—one of whom has just started at university in the UK, while the other may want to make her life here; the parents may want one day to follow their daughters. And so it went on.

We are a global society. Families come in all shapes and sizes, and in all places. Many people make the point that their residence outside the UK makes them feel no less British and that they are surprised to find themselves writing as they do. Many say that the prospect of separation from family is unbearable. All say that when they moved abroad, they had no idea that there could be restrictions or conditions on returning as a family.

The amendment provides that the regulations

“must make provision to enable UK citizens falling within the personal scope of”

the agreements referred to

“to return to the United Kingdom accompanied by, or to be joined in the United Kingdom by, close family members”

without

“conditions on the entry or residence of close family members … which could not have been imposed under EU law relating to free movement … on the day on which this Act comes into force.”

I have been asked about a detail of the amendment: the reference to “close family members”. As it happens, in a Select Committee yesterday the Immigration Minister used exactly that phrase in discussing family reunion. I suppose the technical answer is that these provisions would be implemented by regulations which would be precise, but by anyone’s definition partners and parents “where that relation subsisted”, which in the case of parents it obviously would, at the end of the year and continues to do so would fall within it, as well as children.

The Minister explained in the context of various amendments in Committee that the Government were seeking to be not discriminatory but to end discrimination between, on the one hand, EEA/Swiss citizens and, on the other hand, other citizens. But the Government’s proposals for ending the current arrangements in March 2022 would discriminate between those families of mixed nationality who happened to have settled in the UK and those who settled elsewhere in the EU. They would require Britons who wish to return to meet conditions for sponsoring a spouse and children.

The financial requirements—the minimum income requirements—are not easy nor by any means available to everyone. Some 40% of UK workers could not reach the minimum income requirement, and the non-British partner’s income can be taken into account only after six months, assuming he or she can get here in the first place. If you want to bring elderly parents, they have to be so much in need of care that, according to evidence given to a working party that I chaired some years ago, they would probably be unfit to travel. If you yourself are older and no longer earning, can you reach the income threshold? This would be discrimination against our own citizens, imposed retrospectively on citizens who had no expectation that this choice might lie ahead.

Lifting the end date would not mean unlimited numbers of people coming here with their families. As I have explained, we are talking about people who fall within the agreement, their families and children, and others with whom the relationship subsisted before January 2020. I asked rhetorically in Committee if this was really humane. I ask now whether it is the right approach—to ask that, I think, would also be rhetorical. Since Committee, I have begun to realise just how inhumane it is, so I give notice now—I suppose it is notice for Monday—that, barring assurances which I cannot say I anticipate, though they would be very welcome, I will press the matter to a vote in accordance with current procedure. For the purposes of the debate this evening, I beg to move.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 11 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. When I spoke to it in Committee, I genuinely thought that this was something the Government had overlooked. I discover that this is not the case and that there is some history behind the Government’s position. The reason perhaps for my naivety is that the argument as I saw it, and as I still see it, is very simple: it would be wrong to put a deadline on British citizens returning to the UK with their families. It would be deeply unfair to do so, and I am glad that the noble Baroness intends to press this to a vote if the Government do not accept the amendment.

The Minister cited in Committee the case that the Conservative Government of the day brought against Surinder Singh in 1992, and said at the beginning of her reply that the amendment

“refers to a specific cohort of people relating to what is known as the Surinder Singh route for family immigration.”—[Official Report, 9/9/20; col. 827.]

I fear that this statement betrays an element of cynicism in government thinking about this issue—for which I of course do not blame the noble Baroness. However, this is an inappropriate analogy, in the sense that the Government have clearly not accepted the decision made in Surinder Singh’s favour. It is an inappropriate analogy for a couple of other reasons. One is that there is a universal cut-off point that applies both to British and European families, which is of course the end of this year. We will not then be part of the EU and there will be a limit on the number of families, European and British, who might then come to this country from Europe.

The second thing to say is that we are talking about many British citizens who have been married for many years, often to other European partners—though it should not matter where in the world their partners have come from—and often they are building families with strong and complex roots in the UK and the rest of Europe. They have done so believing at the time that they had a settled life in Europe, wherever that may be in Europe; that was their bone fide position. Yes, people get divorced—and indeed married—for all kinds of reasons; that is life. But this Government are applying the Government of 1992’s perception of that case to generalise about all British families living in Europe. British citizens and their families in Europe are not that cohort, as this Government perceive it, and it is insulting to all British families currently living in Europe that they should draw that analogy.