Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Monday 19th October 2020 Commons Chamber

The Home Office has said that late application cases will be considered on their individual merits, that it will take a pragmatic approach and that guidance for case- workers will be published to ensure that cases are considered consistently. The situation might be in the forefront of our minds now, and those of Home Office caseworkers, but might not be in 10 years’ time, so I urge the Home Office to ensure that the guidance actually details that, in the case of looked-after children and care leavers, if the necessary EU settlement scheme paperwork has not been lodged at the appropriate time by a social worker or local authority, those are reasonable grounds and, as such, the late application will be accepted.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I am honoured to speak in this important debate in support of the Lords amendments, particularly Lords amendments 4 and 5, which are reasonable amendments that were supported by great majorities in the Lords. Amendment 5 provides an option of providing physical proof of immigration status under the EU settlement scheme to prevent disenfranchisement of EU citizens.

In Wandsworth, there are 41,000 EU nationals, which is 13% of my constituents, so this is a big issue for my constituents in Putney. Two of those constituents, who have lived in the UK for 30 years, are French citizens and classical musicians with settled status in this country. They have written to me and said: “We are very concerned by the fact that we have no physical way of proving our status when we come back from holidays or trips abroad, and we are afraid that at any moment a similar situation to the Windrush population might happen to Europeans who’ve settled in this country.”

Moreover, Citizens Advice Wandsworth workers who support EU citizens are concerned about that aspect of the Bill. Access to proof of settled status requires digital skills, access to the internet and a suitable device. Time and again, they have seen that vulnerable people find it difficult or impossible to view or prove their status. That means that they are unable to prove their rights in the UK when they are seeking job opportunities, finding a place to live or even getting treatment in hospital. They find that they are discriminated against in those circumstances because they cannot have the physical documentation that they need to prove their status. That cannot be right.

Lords amendment 4 allows unaccompanied children and vulnerable adults to claim asylum in the care and context of their family, which will prevent dangerous journeys from being taken to join them. I have been to the camps in Calais—they were not really camps; they were a lot of bushes in an area near Calais—and I have seen the traffickers circling the area. I know that if any of my children were in that camp and their siblings were just across the channel waiting and able to protect them, I would do everything I could to reunite my family members. To narrow it down to just parents is not fair when many have lost their parents—that is why they fled their country and why we can rescue those children and show compassion.

On 20 December last year, the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and stated that the Government were “absolutely committed” to continuing family reunion. A Home Office statement on 15 January used exactly the same language, saying it was

“absolutely committed to the family reunion of refugee families”.

There has been commitment after commitment to family reunion, yet it is not in a good enough state in the Bill. That will leave children such as Lili, who fled Eritrea and was found by Safe Passage on the streets of Rome, in a highly vulnerable situation, instead of being reunited with her brother as she was. She wants to be a computer engineer. That is compassion—to allow those children to be here.

To conclude, unless we act tonight, 2021 will be the year in which child refugees in Europe lose the only safe legal route to sanctuary in the UK. Voting against this amendment would be quite wrong. I urge Members on both sides of the House—we have heard good arguments from Members on both sides for this—to think of children such as Lili, do the right thing and vote for Lords amendment 4. It is time to show our British values of compassion and justice, and to deliver for refugee children.

[Gary Sambrook (Birmingham, Northfield) (Con)]

I have been pleased to support this Bill throughout its passage, particularly for its two primary aims of ending free movement of labour and introducing a points-based system. I wish to focus mostly on Lords amendment 1 and social care. As has been discussed, the amendment would require the Government to publish a report on the impact of ending free movement of labour on the social care sector. I spoke on Second Reading and served on the Bill Committee, and at every stage of my involvement in this Bill I have heard Opposition Member after Opposition Member try to claim that in some way the only way to fix labour shortages in the UK is by immigration. I simply do not agree with that analysis. In the Committee stage, we heard from Brian Bell, the MAC’s interim chair, that only 5% of social care workers come from EU migration. In constituencies such as mine, unemployment is standing at 10.5%. Are the Opposition genuinely trying to say that these jobs in the social care sector are not ones that more than 6,000 people in my constituency can have and that they are out of reach for my constituents? I do not agree.

Immigration plays a very important role in managing labour markets, but it does not solve all the problems all the time. The Government are tackling this issue of social care head on; we have seen the investment of £1.5 billion in adult and children’s social care, along with a national recruitment campaign for the sector. I absolutely support those two things. The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), made a fair point about the MAC suggestion about pay. Every Conservative Member stood on a manifesto that pledged to look at social care and, importantly, at a way of redesigning it so that it is fairer for those who are cared for, their families and carers too. That is very important, and it is incumbent on all of us that we come to some kind of consensus across this House on that system. In the same way as we see a consensus on the NHS, we need to come to one on social care.

On the NHS, there will be times, including now, when there are gaps in the labour market, which is why I am pleased that the Bill contains provision for the health and care visa, which will be available for people to use to come to this country to work in the NHS. That is very important.

I conclude by saying that I am happy to support this Bill and will be voting to reject the Lords amendments, because I will be fulfilling my promise to my constituents to end free movement of labour, to introduce a points-based system and to deliver on a firm but fairer immigration system for this country.