Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules

Earl of Leicester Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2022 Lords Chamber

To paraphrase the noble Lord, Lord Horam, I think he said he did not like the way the lawyers got in on the act or judicial review and all that. Surely, it is one of the safeguards in a democracy that we have the rule of law and that lawyers can challenge government decisions. It may be a nuisance for Governments, but surely judicial review is one of the important safeguards. We as a country still believe in the rule of law; I hope we will go on doing so, whatever changes there are in government Ministers, Home Secretaries or whatever.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I add my support to the Government and the aims and objectives of this immigration statement of 11 May. Respectfully, I do not support the regret Motion tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton. I found it very interesting to listen to the arguments of my noble friends Lord Horam and Lord Lilley, with which I agree.

Of course I empathise with the terrified people whose desperation is so great that they risk their lives, and their families’ lives, to seek a safe refuge. This is an unimaginable position for anyone. However, I also accept that something effective must be done at our borders to stop criminals intent on abusing these fears and risking people’s lives. It cannot be right that a country such as ours, which stands proudly for protecting the vulnerable, standing strongly with those who have been wronged and upholding the highest standards of human rights and justice, should at the same time, due to inaction or inefficient action, be facilitating conditions for this injustice to occur.

That is why I support the statement from 11 May and believe it will help with the immigration crisis we face on our shores. The statement has introduced new permissions to stay where a person is granted on a protection route and made a pledge finally to define what “claim for humanitarian protection” means, so people who really need the help most know clearly who they are and their application can be completed swiftly, with the most minimal of delays. A clearer definition for the exceptional circumstances which warrant children coming to join refugee parents or relatives will also provide more transparency and clarity and make it easier for children to join loved ones sooner and more safely.

It also provides some different allowances for when a person comes to the UK via another safe country. I think this is fair enough. Maybe the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, stuttered, but he said that people come through another safe country, and then slightly retracted the comment. We must deter dangerous journeys and encourage asylum claims to be made in the first safe country. Differentiating between people who come here first and people who come via another safe country is important and fair.

I support all these measures and the Government’s other moves on immigration, such as amending criminal offences, with increased maximum penalties for people smugglers and boat skippers, and the ability to impose visa penalties where countries pose a risk to international peace and security, to name but a few. These will ensure that those most at risk and most vulnerable will be welcomed and protected while those who use current loopholes for their own criminal gains and risk other people’s lives in the process are stopped in their tracks. We should get on with this without delay.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, it has been an interesting and wide-ranging debate, bearing in mind the subject of the regret Motion, but we support the regret Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and we are very grateful to him for bringing these changes to the attention of the House.

The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, regrets the implementation of plans, set out in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, to treat refugees differently depending on how they entered the United Kingdom. The issue is yet to be tested in the courts, as it inevitably will be. We maintained at the time, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has said, that it was a breach of the UK’s international obligations under the UN refugee convention—a view supported by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has an interesting perspective on the backlogs in asylum applications. Some 10 or more years ago, we had double the number of asylum applications and a fraction of the backlog. We were deporting far more overstayers and illegal immigrants than we do now. All this points to a catastrophic failure by the Home Office—nothing more, nothing less.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, the Government have been very generous on the basis that they expect and hope that the vast majority of those people will return to Ukraine, once peace has hopefully been restored. It is a very different situation.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that rather than taking back control of our borders, we have thrown them open. As the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, said, there is nothing now to stop people coming here with visa-free entry, which is not only still open to residents of all EU countries, but the Government have added 10 more countries to that list. These are people who can put their passports in the e-passport gates at the airport, disappear into the country and nobody knows who they are, where they have gone or whether they ever leave.

I am a little confused about the arguments on identity cards. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who apparently supports the idea, told us how difficult it is to open a bank account. Tell me about it—I have been trying to open a bank account for the last two weeks. I have shown my passport and I have gone to the bank; it wants to know where my income comes from—most of it is a Metropolitan Police pension. Yet, apparently, we need identity cards as well, to try and control things. I think things are difficult enough as it is.

But we digress, widely. The Minister may argue that our objections were debated during the primary legislation that these rule changes are based on, and the majority of this House rejected those arguments. The specifics—for example, that group 2 refugees will get permission to remain for only what I thought was 30 months but the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, thinks is shorter—were not on the face of the Bill, and this is the first time that Parliament has had the chance to debate the specifics in legislation.

We should not expect details of safe and legal routes to be included in the Immigration Rules, but when refugees are to be treated differently depending on whether they have arrived by a safe and legal route—that is, group 1 refugees—or otherwise as group 2 refugees, Parliament has the right to expect the Government to set out what safe and legal routes are available currently and those that are planned, including any limits on those numbers. Without knowing how many or what proportion of asylum seekers will fall into each group, how can Parliament make a judgment as to whether to agree these changes to the Immigration Rules?

As the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, said, group 2 refugees will be disqualified from family reunion, so we are going to have far more unaccompanied child refugees coming to this country who will not be able to be joined by their families.

This week, the BBC reported that 181 of these unaccompanied asylum-seeking children aged 18 or under have disappeared since they have come to this country. They are put into hotels with no supervision, and they disappear. How many more unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are going to be lost and potentially abused, whether through modern slavery or through child abuse, if they are not allowed to bring their families to join them and look after them? Why is there not a risk assessment around how many more unaccompanied child refugees are going to be placed at risk as a result of these changes?

There is no risk assessment on this at all, but there is precedent in the past for impact assessments to be published alongside changes to the Immigration Rules. In September 2020, the Government published an impact assessment for changes to the Immigration Rules for students. In November 2020, they published an impact assessment for changes to the Immigration Rules for skilled workers. The changes we are debating today are arguably the most fundamental changes to the Immigration Rules ever enacted—so where is the impact assessment?