Crime and Courts Bill [Lords]

Debate between Fiona Mactaggart and Jack Straw

Monday 14th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

The truth is that my right hon. Friend had to make those ministerial decisions because visitor appeals had not been introduced at that stage. Ministers will end up with a lot more demands on their plate, among other things, if they take the route of abolishing visitor appeals.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that this provision is more important than it was when he introduced it, because a number of our constituents will not be able to satisfy the current price of bringing a husband, for example, into the country, and it is therefore likely that there will be many fathers who can never even see their children in this country?

[Mr Straw]

I entirely accept what my hon. Friend says.

Like the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I have looked at the analysis put forward by the Home Office, and I am afraid that I am sceptical about the evidence, which collides with my experience and, I believe, that of my right hon. and hon. Friends and Government Members who have large immigration case loads. It is rare, in my experience, for constituents and their relatives abroad not to have produced the evidence first time round. Much more frequently, they produce the evidence and it is then overlooked. Time and again, my office and I face the situation where the evidence has been submitted and it has been overlooked by the entry clearance officer or has got lost. It may appear to the tribunal to be new evidence, because for sure it is new evidence to the entry clearance officer, but it is not correct to draw the conclusion that that evidence has never gone before immigration officers. Even if that is the case, the fact that a third of appeals are upheld shows that there is important merit in having such a right of appeal. To argue—I hope that the Minister does not do this—that it would be just as satisfactory to re-submit an application is, frankly, disingenuous in the extreme. I have seen constituents re-submit applications in respect of non-family cases, where there is no right of appeal, and all that happens is that the application is turned down again and they have wasted their money.

My final point relates to judicial appointments. I strongly support the proposed changes in respect of diversity. The apparently prosaic change to allow for the number of judges to be counted by full-time equivalents and not by full-time numbers will make a very important contribution to the employment of the part-time judges, typically female, at every level. Also very important are the tipping-point provisions to allow for the Judicial Appointments Commission to take into account somebody’s gender or colour if two candidates are of equal merit.