Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether the Government plans to add bus and coach drivers to the Skilled Worker Visa: Shortage Occupations list.
Answered by Robert Jenrick - Shadow Secretary of State for Justice
The Government commissioned the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to review the Shortage Occupation List (SOL). We therefore expect the MAC to launch its call for evidence shortly for all sectors and we encourage businesses to provide their evidence to the MAC at this point.
Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of the Offshore wind workers concession on (a) training and (b) employment numbers of UK seafarers; and if she will undertake a review of the impact of the concession before the latest extension ends on 30 April 2023.
Answered by Robert Jenrick - Shadow Secretary of State for Justice
The Government regularly reviews the existence of concessions against the general principles of the immigration system to check whether they are necessary and regularly undertakes engagement with a wide range of stakeholders. This will continue to be the case in future.
Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of reducing the number of international students at UK universities on the UK's future position in the Higher Education Policy Institute soft-power index.
Answered by Robert Jenrick - Shadow Secretary of State for Justice
Our offer to international students is extremely competitive and ensures that we continue to attract the best and brightest students from around the world.
The Government’s International Education Strategy set out a target of attracting 600,000 international Higher Education students to the UK by 2030, which we have achieved almost a decade early.
The public also rightly expects us to control immigration and ensure we have a system that works in the UK’s best interests.
As the Growth Plan set out, the Government is looking at how immigration contributes to growth and will set out further details in due course.
Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the performance of the Employer Checking Service.
Answered by Robert Jenrick - Shadow Secretary of State for Justice
Additional staff and investment has been made into the Employer checking service in 2022. This has increased capacity for checks and improved response times, which have returned to within the Service Level Agreement in the second quarter of 2022.
Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the number of complaints received on the Employer Checking Service from (a) MPs offices, (b) employers, (c) people with leave to remain applying for employment and (d) other agencies; and what assessment she has made of the willingness of employers to use that service.
Answered by Tom Pursglove
The information is not available in the format requested and could only be obtained at a disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether pregnant women seeking asylum will be considered for removal to Rwanda under the Rwanda asylum plan.
Answered by Tom Pursglove
Decisions on whether to relocate individuals to Rwanda are made on a case-by-case basis depending on the individual circumstances at the time, and in accordance with the inadmissibility guidance available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inadmissibility-third-country-cases(opens in a new tab).
Everyone considered for relocation will be screened and have access to legal advice, and nobody will be removed if it is unsafe or inappropriate for them.
Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many bilateral agreements she has negotiated and concluded with member states to replace former arrangements that existed under the Dublin III Regulation; and if she will make a statement.
Answered by Tom Pursglove
The UK is in discussions regarding the returns of asylum seekers to European Member States. It would not be appropriate to provide a commentary on these negotiations.
Work is underway to secure appropriate return agreements with safe countries. Returns may also be agreed with partner countries on a case-by-case basis without formal agreements. This happened historically, outside of the former Dublin arrangements, and will continue to be part of the approach we apply.
Our inadmissibility provisions in the Immigration Rules give us the legal basis to declare an asylum claim as inadmissible where a person has a connection to, or has passed through, a safe country. The first returns on inadmissible grounds have been successfully carried out.
Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many asylum seekers are there currently in the UK who would previously have been returned to the first country they arrived in under the Dublin Agreement.
Answered by Tom Pursglove
Until 31 December 2020, the UK was bound by, and participated in, the EU’s Dublin arrangements for assigning EU Member State responsibility for considering asylum claims. These arrangements included use of the Eurodac fingerprint database, which assisted identifying an individual’s earlier presence in another Member State. Responsibility for claims was determined according to a referral mechanism between Member States and the application of a hierarchical criteria to the particular facts of each case.
Since the UK no longer participates in the Dublin arrangements, these specific considerations and referral mechanisms no longer operate as they did. There are therefore no statistics available to show how many people who have claimed asylum in the UK would, or could, have been identified and considered for action within Dublin were it to have continued, or how many of those we would have removed.
Asked by: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the merits of including endometriosis amongst the medical criteria which allow consideration of escalating spousal visa applications on compelling or compassionate grounds.
Answered by Kevin Foster
Every family visa application is dealt with on its own merits.
Any evidence which indicates a compelling or compassionate reason for expediting an application will be considered, yet the bar for this is high in fairness to other applicants who have applied on an earlier date.