Immigration Bill

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a landlord, as set out in the register of interests. I follow the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, in deeply regretting the failure of successive Governments to invest in housing, which has had so many adverse outcomes. However, I am grateful to this Government for making a commitment to build many more houses. I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill, for his correspondence, and for listening to the concerns of colleagues and putting back the first Committee day in January. That is helpful.

The noble Lord, Lord Horam, and others have said that the Department for International Development is funded to the tune of 0.7% of gross national income. That measure was put into statute by the last Government and is very welcome, particularly in the context of the situation that my noble friend described. With so much global migration, we need to tackle the problem partly at source.

I am grateful to the 30 British soldiers who have recently returned to Helmand in Afghanistan to help maintain stability there and to stem the flow of migration. The International Organization for Migration announced today that on Monday, we passed the 1 million figure of people entering Europe over the last year. That is a fourfold increase on the previous year, so there is a huge challenge for us in many different ways, but particularly for our humanity. The Minister may have referred to this, but there, but for the grace of God, go us. I often speak to my mother about her experience of the war. She had a factory at the end of our garden in Croydon, which was bombed. My father was on the list that Hitler ran up of people he would knock off when he arrived in this country. We had the experience of being bombed in this country not so long ago and have experienced the threat of invasion. It is helpful to keep that in mind.

The noble Lord, Lord Horam, and others also referred to concern about young unskilled workers in this country and the lack of incentive in the past for business to train them because it was so easy just to take migrants from the continent. I welcome what the Bill does to increase incentives for business to train young people in this country. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, referred to centres established in the past to enable the dissemination of immigrants across the country. Many years ago, I lived and worked in Bermondsey in east London and used to reflect that the poorest, least educated, most poorly housed groups of people tended to become the neighbours of immigrants. They do not go to Hampstead, so it is important to think how we can make it as easy as possible for those people to accommodate incomers. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, also said that, rather than making families destitute, we should engage with them and build a relationship of trust, as that is the most effective way of helping them to move on. I recall looking at research in the past, and will do so again during the passage of this legislation. I much prefer what the noble Lord proposes to what is proposed in the Bill.

I should like to concentrate my comments on care leavers. I have been the vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for young people in care and care leavers for the last 10 years. I have worked with young migrants in hostels. Last year, I met six young care leavers, two or three of whom were from Afghanistan, and heard about the issues they had faced. I would like to talk about support for care leavers. The Government’s changes to the Immigration Bill aim to limit support to care leavers subject to immigration control. These provisions effectively override children and leaving care legislation and policy to prioritise immigration control over young people’s welfare considerations. It creates a two-tier system of support for care leavers based on their immigration status. The corporate parent duties of local authorities would be severely limited despite the ongoing needs of these young people. This is effectively a reversal of the Court of Appeal’s judgment in SO v Barking and Dagenham, which held that local authorities could not look to the availability of asylum support to determine whether a continued leaving care duty applies.

This provision will affect care leavers who came here as unaccompanied children and have not been granted refugee status or humanitarian protection but have been granted temporary leave on the basis of there being no adequate reception facilities in their country of origin. This leave is normally granted for 30 months or until the child turns 17 and a half years old, so it will include children who have been trafficked into the country for the purpose of exploitation and those who arrived as young children but are estranged from their families and have lived in the UK for most of their lives but were never helped to regularise their status. Upon turning 18 years old, these young people are likely to be left without status and most at risk of being caught by these provisions, despite continuing to need the additional support provided through leaving care provisions in recognition of their continuing vulnerabilities. I encourage noble Lords to imagine that the circumstances of our children were very different and they had to be sent off to another country, as some children were sent to America in the past, and how concerned we would be about their future. When I spoke to those young men last year—this is backed up by the research—I became aware that most of them would disappear. They will not return to their own countries and will disappear into the black economy. I think that one became a taxi driver and another spent a lot of time in a mental institution.

I ask your Lordships to keep this in mind. If the Bill is passed, these care leavers would no longer be able to stay in their foster placements, counteracting the staying put provision, recently introduced by the Government, whereby care leavers can stay in placements until the age of 21. They would no longer have access to a personal adviser; therapeutic support; a pathway plan; maintaining contact; support with legal aid, training and education; or any of the other services that care leavers are entitled to in light of the fact that they have no family responsible for them.

Young migrants in care often face additional difficulties that British children do not. They are particularly likely to have faced trauma, may experience language and cultural barriers, and are less likely to have contact with biological family members. Care leavers often need their personal adviser or advocate to help identify, and even instruct, their immigration lawyer and a local authority to pay for their representation or evidence, including subject access requests and doctors’ letters. The Government argue that these young people are simply adult migrants, will not remain in the UK in the long run and should not, therefore, receive additional help as care leavers. Not only is this not the case for many of the young people affected by the Bill, but that argument ignores long-established law and policy, which makes it clear that those who have been in care need additional support on turning 18, in light of their vulnerabilities.

Care-leaving services are already limited to eligible and relevant children. By that, I mean children aged 16 and 17 who have been looked after for at least 13 weeks since the age of 14. Central and local government have a unique relationship with children in care and care leavers, as they are their corporate parents. As such, care leavers should expect the same level of care and support that other young people get from their parents. Will the Minister outline what would happen if a care leaver whose appeal rights were exhausted needed additional support, for example to remain in a foster placement because of concerns they may self-harm? Would the local authority have the power to support this vulnerable young person in those circumstances? I look forward to the Minister’s response. He may prefer to write to me.