Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 (Consequential, Saving, Transitional and Transitory Provisions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Holly Lynch Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2020 General Committees

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Mrs Murray, as we consider this very important secondary legislation. I thank the Minister for his opening remarks, but I suspect that Labour’s opposition to the regulations will not come as a surprise to him, as we rehearsed a great deal of the debate during the passage of the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020. Then, however, we did not have any of the detail that is contained in the SI. We were greatly concerned that the Act granted the Government powers to bring forward the changes to the law contained in the SI. A 90-minute delegated legislation Committee is no way to scrutinise law changes of such magnitude.

The SI is 64 pages long and if I am not mistaken, it changes well over 70 existing Acts and regulations. We have been working hard to follow the changes to understand the implications for people’s lives but we would need to consult the country’s leading experts and lawyers on everything from immigration to housing and equalities to devolution even to scratch the surface of the regulations.

To put the changes in context, the regulations document is five times bigger than the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020, which ran to only 14 pages. Bizarrely, the explanatory notes accompanying the regulations constitute just 14 lines.

We sought a number of improvements to the process at various stages of the Act’s passage in the hope that we would not be in the current position. We called for limits to its Henry VIII powers or for the changes in the regulations to be included on the face of the Bill, as called for by experts at the evidence sessions, so that we could all exercise due diligence and allow for proper Parliamentary scrutiny. Sadly, our efforts were in vain.

I have had the chance to discuss the detail of the legislation with experts and they have expressed their real concern about what they believe its impact will be. They have voiced concern not least that some Acts of Parliament are to be amended when not strictly necessary to give effect to Brexit and the withdrawal agreement. To quote from one of the country’s leading experts on this matter, other changes will leave the law in a state of “bewildering complexity”. That is contrary to the Minister’s suggestion that the regulations will render the statute book coherent. Those changes risk errors in interpretation by public officials and those private persons including landlords and employers who will have to apply the regulations.

Feedback from those working in the field has flagged up that the regulations amend some fairly recent Brexit-related statutory instruments, but leave other parts unamended when it would have been a significant improvement simply to have replaced the regulations with new ones that could have been followed and understood.

That principle applies to at least three changes including those to the Citizens’ Rights (Application Deadline and Temporary Protection) Regulations 2020, the Allocation of Housing and Homelessness (Eligibility) (England) Regulations 2006—if I am not mistaken, that amends a Brexit-related SI but leaves parts unamended, which means the amended 2006 regulations have to be read with schedule 4 of the amending regulations—and the saved parts of the Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2016. It is painfully complicated and completely at odds with the Government’s aspiration to simplify the immigration system. A leading expert described it to me as a “Frankenstein-like patchwork quilt” of 20 years-plus of immigration changes, layered on top of each other.

It is the combination of the process and the content of today’s regulations that make for such a toxic mix. They lay bare the architecture of the hostile environment to be extended to a brand-new cohort of people. We fear some of those most vulnerable, who have made their lives in the UK, perfectly within the rules, will stand to fall into its trap, without even being aware that they will do so come the end of June next year.

If we consider just some of the details, the Minister has outlined the variations in the start date for some of the changes. We were particularly interested in the regulations relating to changes to marriage and sham marriages, which come into force on 1 July 2021. I appreciate the Minister’s explanation about why that might make life easier for those who conduct such ceremonies, but I still wonder whether there is scope to push the start date for other changes back to coincide with that July date. That would give everyone the chance to be aware that all those changes are on the way.

I note that the Aliens Employment Act 1955 is changed by the SI; EU citizens and family members with leave to enter or remain on a basis outside the scope of the EUSS—for reasons such as family members or as skilled workers—will have restricted access to civil service jobs. Why do that when they are lawfully resident? That is just one of the anomalies thrown up in the time that we have had to consider the regulations. However, our substantive concern with the legislation is that it is highly likely that a significant number of individuals will not apply to the scheme before next June’s deadline—the Minister and his colleagues have previously acknowledged that risk—for a multitude of reasons. That means that a significant number of individuals with full rights to be in this country will lose those rights overnight.

We are about to launch our own campaign to encourage all local authorities to reach out to those who have not yet applied, or who do not know that they need to do so. The Minister will have seen the utterly depressing statistics released by the Home Office on 13 November, which revealed that only 46% of children in the care of local authorities have made an application to the EUSS. The Children’s Society fears that those figures are worse again. We argued for a declaratory scheme for that group of children as an absolute minimum during the passage of the Bill, and those figures are simply just not good enough.

I have outlined examples of groups who will be affected by the proposed changes. We believe that the Government’s disregard for those groups by attempting to enact such significant changes through secondary legislation is totally inappropriate, given their scale. The regulations, which will have such major long-lasting effects, should be examined line by line, in detail, by all Members of Parliament, who should have their say. We have argued for that time and time again.

We have grave misgivings about the substance of the regulations, as well as about the procedure governing their introduction. Those apprehensions relate to the possible consequences of the regulations for those who fail to meet the deadline for whatever reason and therefore fall prey to the hostile environment created by them.

We cannot vote for the regulations in good faith, and I call on the Minister to withdraw them and reintroduce them in primary legislation, which would enable the House to exercise proper and appropriate scrutiny of the proposed changes.