Fiona Mactaggart
Main Page: Fiona Mactaggart (Labour - Slough)Department Debates - View all Fiona Mactaggart's debates with the Home Office
Immigration Bill
Fiona Mactaggart Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Mrs May
No, I have been very generous in giving way. Let me say to Labour Members and to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) that one of the problems we have seen in some family visit appeals in the past—this is why we removed the family visit appeal process—is that people have introduced new information into the appeals mechanism in the time since the original decision. That means that the decision in an appeal that is won is not necessarily based on the original case but may be based on the case put forward on appeal, which may be different. The hon. Lady needs to be careful when she quotes figures.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather). I shall be doing the same as her at the end of the debate, and I shall make my remarks shorter simply by agreeing with her remarks about children and about bail detention. Those are critical issues that need to be addressed during the debate.
I have campaigned for more than 30 years against injustice in our immigration laws. Indeed, one of the reasons that I stood for election in Slough rather than anywhere else was that I wanted to follow the tradition of Slough Labour MPs who had voted against the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. That legislation had the effect of making whole groups of people stateless, and I was proud that that injustice was remedied in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002.
I recognise that we can achieve change and get justice even when the debate on immigration is as toxic as it is at the moment. I also recognise that people feel deep anxiety about immigration, particularly in an era of austerity when they are feeling insecure about their jobs, their pensions and about their families’ futures. However, this Bill is operating the worst form of dog-whistle politics in blaming migrants for problems that are not of their construction. I know how much migrants bring to Britain. Slough, a migrant town, is the third most productive wealth-producing town in Britain outside London.
After years of campaigning, I am pretty familiar with issues such as the Wilson committee’s report of 1967, which stated that it was
“fundamentally wrong and inconsistent with the rule of law that power to take decisions affecting a man’s whole future should be vested in officers of the executive, from whose findings there is no appeal.”
Yet that is in effect what the Government are proposing to do in this Bill, 42 years after the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968.
In introducing the Bill, the Home Secretary told us stories about cases of repeat applications by criminals and abuses of the appeals system. I suppose this is why the Home Office loses cases so frequently! We are not talking about a load of radical Trotskyist judges; we are talking about judges who decide that the Home Office is wrong almost half the time. The Home Office is now saying that the judges will not make those decisions in future, and that it will resolve those matters through administrative appeals.
Let me tell the House about the administrative reviews that already exist in parts of the system. A judicial review in the upper tribunal involved a case in which an applicant had given the Home Office their credit card number, and—guess what—the Home Office had typed it out wrongly. The consequence was that the application was not treated as a proper application because it was not accompanied by the full fee. The case had to go as far as the upper tribunal before a judge decided that it was a proper application, and that the Home Office had written down the credit card number wrongly.
Such cases are not rare. I have a constituent whose husband wrote the cheque to accompany her application, but instead of putting £865, he put 865p, because he is a twit. The consequence is that her application is now out of time, and she has no appeal. Another case involved a response from an entry clearance officer who, having stated that the immigration rules require a spouse to have good spoken English and to have passed a speaking and listening test, said that the applicant had passed that test but failed the English writing test and was therefore refused entry. We have asked for reviews of all those cases, but—guess what—we have been told that there will be no review or that the review has upheld the original decision.
Those of us who deal regularly with the Home Office know that it is incapable of doing what it is supposed to do now. Yet through the Bill, it is grabbing a whole lot of work for itself from the appeals system. The result is that it will break. It might have got rid of the UK Border Agency, but the Home Office will break if it tries to do all those things.
We need to heed the words of the Wilson committee report. On decisions as serious as whether someone should be allowed to live with their husband, everyone should have the right to have that decision subjected to an independent review. That is why we need an appeals system. There are groups of people who currently have no right of appeal, but the Home Office admits that it cannot do anything about them. There is a large Zimbabwean community in my constituency, but the Home Office is not returning any of its members to Zimbabwe because of the situation there. They are hard-working people who are desperate to work, yet they are in limbo. In passing responsibility for immigration control from those previously responsible to other bodies such as landlords and the health service, the Home Office is putting those people at greater risk. They are already at horrible risk. I have spoken to constituents who turn to illegal activities or to prostitution in order to feed their children, because they are not allowed to work.
The Government say that it will be easy for landlords to check out the status of applicants, but any of us who deal with employers know that the current Home Office advice service for employers is gummed up: they can never get through on the phone and the process takes ages. Many of my constituents who are allowed to work here perfectly legally have been unable to prove it because of Home Office inefficiency, and therefore lose their jobs. A similar advice service is now going to be offered to landlords. It might be fine in an area where landlords have to try hard to find tenants, but that is not the way competition works in the south of England; it is all the other way. Large numbers of people will therefore be refused housing to which they should be entitled.
That is why the Residential Landlords Association—not noted for its lobbying of Parliament—has written to say that it is
“seriously concerned that the proposal depends on untrained landlords doing the work of UK Border Agency staff without support and with the threat of penalties if they get it wrong.”
A programme on television recently highlighted a number of landlords in London who were already operating a racially discriminatory rental policy. They do not need much encouragement to continue with that, or to do worse. That is the risk that the Bill will create.
On health, the Bill also suggests that there should be a prior payment. People should pay, if they are here temporarily, for health care—there is no problem with that—but the choice optioned in this Bill is the wrong choice. There is a reason why the consultation, the details of which I have been requesting for more than a month, has been published this morning. Let me quote the analysis we heard about in Health questions:
“The analysis is a top-down estimate based on data from the Census 2011, the International Passenger Survey 2012 and Immigration and other statistics from the Office of National Statistics…These are the best available data in the public domain”.
What that means is, “We licked our finger and put it up in the air. We are guessing.”
Many countries have a requirement that migrants should, for example, have an effective health insurance system. That would not be a bad thing to do and is a more popular response in the Home Office consultation than the proposed levy, yet the Home Office has rejected that idea and proposes to introduce a levy that will burden particular nationalities more than others.
The Bill shows the arrogance of the Home Office by refusing to have its decisions appealed. It shows that the Home Office, in an island nation where it is possible to have effective border controls, does not care about the racially divisive consequences of increased internal immigration control. It shows that the Home Office has ignored its lack of capacity for doing this and, shockingly, includes proposals that were not prefigured in the consultation and that will bear down on victims of human trafficking.
The consultation on health payment contained a specific commitment about victims of human trafficking. Until now, overseas domestic workers have not been charged for health care. There is a reason for that—they are vulnerable and exploited. Frankly, the National Crime Agency is not making a priority of tracking down that particular form of human trafficking. We know how hard it is for those people. There are shocking stories of people with chronic, often infectious diseases who are prevented from getting access to health care by their exploiting employers. Under these proposals, they will be more vulnerable than they were before.
I am very glad that the Home Office is planning to introduce a modern day slavery Bill, but I am truly shocked that through this Bill they will reduce even the pathetic rights that modern day slaves have today. We have to chuck it out. There are some good things in it, but as a whole piece of legislation, it is truly unacceptable and we should reject it.
Mark Reckless
The hon. Lady says that such things were very common. I cannot comment on the 19th century, although she did mention cases that were more up to date. Whether during the depths of the worst of the de Valera regime in the ‘30s, or after what we have seen in the past five years with the move to switch away from a link to sterling and experiment on the Irish people through the imposition of the euro, which has destroyed so much of the Irish economy, I feel that this country—England, the United Kingdom—has stood ready to welcome people who have come from Ireland, often in large numbers. It has welcomed them and they have found work here that they were not able to find in Ireland.
Other Members have referred to their experiences, history, or what some of their constituents have said, but I do not believe that my mother experienced that prejudice or discrimination as an Irish citizen and passport holder. She has felt welcome in this country.
I was astonished by what the hon. Lady said. As if a large number of people who are prepared to work harder for less money coming here would have no impact on wages! Other things being equal, it will have a significant impact. The debate has changed in that the most recent large-scale immigration—from central and eastern Europe since 2004—has not been of black, Asian or foreign-looking people, as she described them, but of the white Caucasians. She is so insistent that the immigration debate must be about race but, in a way, that immigration has de-linked race from the debate. It is clear that the debate is not, or largely not, about race.
Whatever the overall costs and benefits of immigration, the fact is that the impacts are different. People who are well off often buy goods and services produced by people who have come to this country. The people who have come here have, at least initially, competed for some of the less-skilled jobs. If wages are lower than they otherwise would be in those categories, that allows better-off people to get a better or cheaper service—they understandably welcome the people providing it. However, it is less understandable and not right for better-off people who benefit from immigration to look down on those who do not have the same view of those coming here and think that it is because they have antediluvian or even racist attitudes.
The reality is that less well-off people are competing with those coming in and it affects their wages or how hard they have to work for their wages. Their situation is less good because they are subjected to a large amount of competition from significant numbers of people who have recently come into the country. Sometimes the competition will be between people with skills, but it is often at the lower-skilled end. They will compete with those who might otherwise have those lower-skilled jobs or receive better pay in those jobs. It is not surprising that people are unhappy with the scale of immigration. It is quite wrong for those who benefit from immigration to look down on those people and suggest that their attitudes are racist when what we are seeing is the economic effect.
One other important context of the Bill is this country’s system of eligibility for benefits, which is different from that in most other EU countries. The UK, Ireland, Estonia, Finland and, importantly, Germany, do not require a significant contributory period prior to eligibility for unemployment benefit. That leads to the possibility of people who do not have a long-term connection with this country benefiting without having paid in. I am not suggesting that that is the most significant part of the immigration pull into this country, but it causes concern among my constituents.
The more significant pull within the benefits system is the possibility of family benefits. The payment of child benefit to children who are resident overseas, be that in Poland or, in greater numbers, in Romania or Bulgaria, is wrong and should be stopped. I believe it could be stopped, even under current EU law, but I am not sure whether Ministers agree. Another pull is child tax credits. Our system of in-work benefits for people in some of the not-so-well-paid jobs is very generous compared with the system prevailing in, for example, Poland, particularly if they have children. That is a significant draw and my constituents are not terribly happy with it. They have paid into a system for a long time and see people who do not have that link with the system immediately taking significant benefits from it.
Those two problems are the basis and context of the debate. The recent large-flow immigration de-links race from the immigration debate, although some people would like to preserve the link. In addition, when more recent immigrants compete for jobs with people from a previous migration, the latter understandably object. We will either have to change our benefit system, or leave the European Union.
Fiona Mactaggart
Some of the hon. Gentleman’s points make sense. There is a case for ensuring fair competition on wages and that benefits are not paid to children who have never seen the UK and never intend to, but none of those points will be addressed by the Bill. Why is he speaking about them?
Mark Reckless
One area within the broad range the hon. Lady describes is the charge for the use of NHS services. If someone comes to this country for a considerable period, say as an overseas student, it is right that they should make a contribution. She is right to say that in many of these areas we are not able to make the changes that I would like within our domestic legal system, because of the European Union. It is right, therefore, that my party has said that it will give the people an in/out referendum so that they can decide whether they want us to be an independent country or whether they want to continue to have these rules set by the European Union.
One impact of the scale of the immigration we have seen to this country is the linking of those issues in a way that people understand. If people want to control immigration and reduce the numbers coming from the European Union, we once again need to be an independent country. Over the next year as people from Romania and Bulgaria gain the ability to come here for employment, rather than self-employment—or purported self-employment—or other reasons, I hope that we do not see a huge influx of people from those two countries, which might get in the way of the very good progress that the Government have made towards our target of cutting immigration from the hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands. Were that to happen and to reflect on the Government—perhaps unfairly, given that it was the previous Government who signed up to that treaty of accession—it would be unfortunate if in any way that were to prevent the referendum that we have promised coming to pass in 2017.
The Bill will bear down on several channels for immigration, and some of the issues it addresses are quite technical. The Home Office has looked at all the issues and made progress in many different areas to reduce the overall scale of immigration. Part 2, on restricting the right to appeal, strikes a good balance. I have referred to the NHS charge in part 3, but it also addresses the need to ensure that people have the right to be here before giving them a driving licence. That is clearly a good thing. In the United States, that is a massive political issue, and states have very different policies on it. In this country, it seems to have gone by default, but at last we have a Government who are waking up and ensuring that people get a driving licence only if they have a right to do so by virtue of their eligibility to live in this country.
I welcome the Bill’s approach on article 8. We have heard some excellent proposals recently from my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). I thought that they were very sound and it was a shame that they did not make it into the Crime and Courts Bill, and his approach may have further benefits over and above those in the Bill. Nevertheless, the provisions in the Bill are very sound. For example, and crucially, clause 14 would insert into the 2002 Act a new section 117B(4) that states:
“Little weight should be given to…a private life, or…a relationship formed with a qualifying partner, that is established by a person at a time when the person is in the United Kingdom unlawfully.”
That is overdue. It continues:
“Little weight should be given to a private life established by a person at a time when the person’s immigration status is precarious.”
The fact that that will be in primary legislation will at last give us a real opportunity to rein in the courts and their overly expansive interpretation of article 8. In this instance, it is not so much the European Court in Strasbourg, but our own domestic courts that have had an excessively loose approach to the definition of article 8.
I add one caution. The provisions on article 8, which are good, will act as a restraint—although I look forward to reading them in more detail—but there remains an issue with how section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 has been used. As a general principle of family law, it is right that the interests of the child be paramount—for instance, in a divorce case—but I am much less convinced that it is useful in considering the deportation, following a long prison sentence, of a foreign national, not least because it is not easy for immigration judges to come to a fair and proper assessment of the interests of that child. I suspect that very often the individual concerned will not be a good parental influence on the child, but even where it might have a small impact—if it might become more difficult for that child to see a parent—I am not convinced that it should always be the trump card, which is what section 55 has become. However bad the crime committed, so long as a foreign national can find a UK partner and have a UK nationality child, a reference to section 55 has come close to trumping all other considerations in the eyes of the courts. The article 8 stuff is good, but I am worried that section 55 will still be applied, even when the overall balance, including the public interest, would have individuals deported to their home country.
I congratulate the Home Secretary, the current and former Immigration Ministers and officials in the Home Office, because one thing about the Home Office is that it does respond to a lead. As we saw under the noble Lord Howard, when Ministers have a clear set of objectives and direction of travel, more often than not officials respond, and in many areas the Home Office has done good work that has not been properly sung. For instance, appeals are going a different way because of operating criminal nexus and because judges can now consider information from police short of a conviction. That has largely been upheld as proper and judges have allowed it, and some seriously bad people have left the country who would otherwise have stayed because of the excellent work by Ministers.
I think also of the work on the electoral roll. Previously, Commonwealth citizens would apply to be on the roll even though they had no immigration leave to be here, but now Ministers are insisting on immigration leave and the guidance to electoral registration officers has changed. Rather than people being able to refer to their being on the electoral roll as evidence of their legitimacy, we now have the proper checks and linkages. Those are just two examples, but an awful lot of unsung work goes on in the Home Office. I welcome that, as well as the Bill, which will assist us, at least, in bearing down on immigration, and I give credit to Ministers for their work.
Henry Smith
They are from an independent assessment commissioned by the Department of Health. As I mentioned, I have tried to get information through FOI requests, and the figures from those trusts that hold statistics are quite staggering, but more than three quarters were unable to provide any figures at all, which suggests that the scale of the problem is probably larger than the Department recognises.
Henry Smith
I need to make progress and other right hon. and hon. Members are yet to speak, so I will not give way.
It is estimated that if we could recover just three quarters of the money spent treating foreign nationals on the NHS, through insurance or reciprocal arrangements such as the European insurance health card scheme, that would be the equivalent of being able to employ an additional 4,000 doctors or 8,500 nurses, so the scale of the issue is quite acute. This is a point of fairness, both to the British taxpayer and to the patients using the health service, whether residents of this country or people visiting it, and it is one that I think this House has taken too long to address properly. That is why I very much support the provisions of the Bill and look forward to its swift passage through the House.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I am sure the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) did not mean that and will withdraw the comment.
Stephen Phillips
The hon. Lady has a reputation for robust debate. I did not hear what she said, but I am grateful—[Interruption.] I will not ask her to repeat it. Indeed, it is quite unusual in this House not to hear what she has to say from a sedentary position. Be that as it may, when the Government took office in 2010, immigration was an issue that we all knew—having fought the general election—needed to be tackled. The Government have in part attempted to tackle it through secondary legislation, but not always effectively, as my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) pointed out. It was therefore clear to many Members—certainly Conservative Members—that primary legislation was needed, and it is to be greatly welcomed that the Government have brought forward this Bill to attempt to deal with many of the problems that the broken immigration system we inherited suffers from.
What are the problems and how can they be described? There are two principal problems. The first is the complexity of the regime and the lucrative industry that has grown up among immigration practitioners, which makes a mockery of both common sense and the law. Most importantly, that has resulted in constituents of Members from across the House paying large fees to achieve precisely nothing in terms of immigration advice. The second problem is that in the minds of many people overseas, this country has become a soft touch and an easy immigration route into the European Union. Even worse, it has become that in the minds of its own citizens —the very people who sent us here to represent their interests. Those of us who have pushed the Government in this area know that those issues must be tackled, which is what the Home Secretary and her team intend to do with this excellent Bill.
I will turn briefly to the Bill, but before that—if I may in the time available, Mr Deputy Speaker—I will make a few other comments. As I have said, tough action was necessary and I am pleased that we are seeing that in the Bill. Of course we want to welcome the brightest and best people to this country—we should always recognise that—and we want all that they offer to our economy and society. We want to recognise the contribution of many of those who have come here in the past and who run our NHS, as the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington observed, and other public services, and who have given so much to this country. It is interesting, however—we did not hear this point from the hon. Lady or any Opposition Member—that it is those who have come to this country during the past 30 years who most resent the open-door immigration policy pursued by the previous Government. That policy saw a number of people come into this country that was equivalent to the population of a major city such as Birmingham.
What does the Bill do and what must we welcome? The Opposition seem to welcome it since, as I understand it, they are not going to divide the House on Second Reading. First, we all know that the appeal system is not only abused but is broken and not fit for purpose. Unmeritorious appeals are used to delay, obfuscate and prevent that which common sense decrees, where people are here unlawfully. All the provisions in the Bill are therefore to be welcomed.
Why on earth—before the Home Secretary rose to explain I suspect few of us knew this—do we currently have a system in which decisions on immigration status and removal are made separately? Are we really so stupid that we think those who come here illegally will always voluntarily leave without a removal decision? If we have been so foolish in the past, thank goodness we are no longer.
Why did the previous Government countenance a system that permitted bail to be applied for again and again by those to be deported, so that they could abscond? Why are abusive bail applications made day in, day out, which tie up immigration judges, and as a result lead to long periods during which those who have legitimate rights of appeal are denied a hearing in court? What on earth—I will not echo all the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton—were the courts doing in the past in interpreting article 8 of the European convention on human rights in a way that made a mockery of common sense and immigration policy, as enshrined in law and passed by this House? This is a good Bill. It is necessary, as those on the Opposition Front Benches recognise, and has certainly not been brought forward in haste. If the House divides I will vote to give the Bill a Second Reading. I hope that all right hon. and hon. Members, wherever in the House they sit, will do the same.