Nationality and Borders Bill (Sixteenth sitting)

Debate between Holly Lynch and Neil Coyle

Committee stage
Thursday 4th November 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Neil Coyle]

The Minister says that things have improved since the court judgment and that, for example, NGOs now have more routine access. The hostel accommodation in Bermondsey and Old Southwark was open for three months before the first visit of Migrant Help on site. I am just not convinced that the Minister has given an accurate portrayal of the current picture and the real situation in a real building affecting hundreds of people in my own constituency.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making excellent points. The Minister says there have been changes at Napier barracks since the High Court judgment, but those changes happened because of the High Court judgment, and they perhaps would not have happened had the Government not been taken to court over the use of Napier barracks and the conditions there. That is why we do not trust the Government to make the right judgment calls on the quality of accommodation, and why my hon. Friend’s new clause is important.

[Neil Coyle]

I agree with my hon. Friend. The Government routinely dodge using the term “accommodation centre” because they do not want to set up an advisory group. If they went through the formal process of designating something as an accommodation centre, an advisory group would help to resolve some of the problems that we have seen at Napier and in the hostel accommodation in my constituency, where they had an almost inevitable covid outbreak.

The Minister has not committed to a strategy. We are seeing a longer process, with routine delays for applications and appeals. We are seeing damage to people’s lives. We are seeing damage to the economy because people cannot get a job and make more of a contribution as quickly as would be possible if there were a strategy and a plan. We are leaving the taxpayer with a massive bill for the Government’s failure. Therefore, we will press new clause 27 to a vote.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

Nationality and Borders Bill (Ninth sitting)

Debate between Holly Lynch and Neil Coyle

Committee stage
Tuesday 26th October 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Neil Coyle]

I think the right hon. Gentleman makes the point that I am making, which is that we need a fast, fair and effective system up front. If we had such a system, those bogus claims would be weeded out pretty early on, and we would not have a Government desiring to implement a new set of impositions on children who have gone through trauma. The Government’s own statistics show how many cases are actually proven and upheld, so he does an injustice when he suggests that there might be some volume to the level of the claims he described.

I want to come back to the point about legal advice. It is poor legal advice, in addition to trauma, and an inability, not through any deliberate purpose but just through a lack of understanding, that lead—I am trying to find my place.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

I just want to support the incredibly powerful contribution that my hon. Friend is making, following our hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central. As we have heard, it is often those who have been subject to the most trauma and who are most deserving of sanctuary who will take the longest to disclose. Those are the people who will be really negatively impacted if we allow these provisions to go ahead.

[Neil Coyle]

My hon. Friend is not only right; she is also a jolly good egg for helping me out.

All too often with asylum-seeking children and young people, poor legal advice, in addition to trauma, can lead to an inadequately prepared case and the rejection of their claim—in the small number of cases that are rejected. Having a good solicitor can make all the difference in enabling young people to give instruction, and to anticipate a thorough and full asylum claim, which negates the need to present at later stages.

In the hostel I visited yesterday, I was told that there is a Home Office list of legal aid providers that can be used. It would be really helpful if the Government agreed to publish the list so that it could be expanded and improved. Other local organisations that do this—often on a pro bono basis but obviously with professionals—could provide the best advice up front, so that we do not end up with lengthy cases, with stuff added later that could have been added up front, and the individuals could then have the best support possible. I think we should be committed to having a first-class, up-front service.

I will give one example, provided by the Children’s Society, of a child who went through the process:

“My solicitor did nothing, it was horrible. They didn’t even prepare a witness statement for my interview. I had to do everything myself. I had my social worker but she didn’t know how to help me with my asylum case. The interviewer told me she had no information and that I had to tell her everything”.

Of course, we have had a decade of legal aid funding cuts, with many asylum-seeking children and young people struggling to access quality legal advice. The availability of high-quality legal advice under the legal aid contract or on a charitable basis is both patchy and frequently limited. We are very fortunate to have some excellent organisations in Southwark but I know that that is not the case across the country, where there is a dearth of legally aided advice for asylum seekers. That is the system that exists and that has been attacked for a decade because the failure to provide up-front support necessitates further stages. Clause 16 will make that worse.

Another example from the organisations that have briefed us is the fact that many asylum seekers change solicitor. That is not because they have hundreds of thousands of pounds in their pocket and are looking for a different lawyer who might get a better result but because of the process. It is because the Home Office has moved them and because they rely on free legal aid contracts. They do not have the funds to stick with one solicitor and visit them by train if they move from city to city as part of the accommodation process that the Home Office requires. The Home Office is not doing this because it is deliberately trying to upset the legal support but because it is moving people and takes too long to make decisions. If it committed to a timeframe to make decisions up front, perhaps we would be in a stronger position and would be more supportive of legislation that makes such demands, though I doubt it very much in this case.

Last week, I asked the Minister about the extension of legal aid and I did not get a particularly precise answer, if I may put it delicately. I also tabled a named-day question––I think it was 58412––to the Ministry of Justice because the equality impact assessment suggests that legal aid will be extended. I asked the Minister whether it would be and I did not get an answer last week. Nor is there a commitment to extended legal aid for these cases in the answer from the Ministry of Justice, so I am confused and surprised. There must be a cost attached to this. The Department must have some more information, which I hope the Minister can share today, on how this new extension for legal aid will be paid for, where exactly it sits and who is delivering it. Is the Home Office again going to seek to extend its empire and build new services and contracts rather than working better with the Ministry of Justice? Councils often get dumped on by the Home Office rather than being supported and worked with. They have contracts with legal aid solicitors and experts on the ground who could provide a valuable service that speeds things up and cuts costs for the Home Office, rather than having the Home Office suddenly impose a new contract. I hope that the Minister can shed some light on that.

I am concerned about the clause’s potential cost and damage to the UK’s reputation, and about the potential breach of Home Office duties. Hon. Members have already touched on this, so I shall just whizz through. The Secretary of State bears a duty

“to safeguard and promote the welfare of children”

under section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009. It is through section 55 that the spirit of the UK obligation to the best-interest principle set out in article 3 of the 1989 UN convention on the rights of the child in respect of asylum-seeking children has been translated into UK law.

The Home Office’s own casework guidance for assessing claims from asylum-seeking children makes it clear that decision makers are to take account of what it is reasonable to expect a child to know or relay

“in their given set of circumstances.”

That is crucial to the children we are discussing. It is inappropriate for authorities to question the credibility of a child’s claim if they omit information, bearing in mind the child’s age, maturity and other reasons that may have led to those omissions, which may be many, given the people we are talking about. The guidance sets out distinct factors that decision makers are to take into account, including age, maturity, the time of the event, the time of the interview, mental or emotional trauma experienced by the child, educational level––bearing in mind that many children will have had a fractured education––fear or mistrust of authorities given the experience many of them will have come through, and feelings of shame and painful memories, particularly those of a sexual nature.

Once again, we look set to have a Government, who have already been found to be acting unlawfully, failing to take into account the best interests of children. We have had that in the High Court. The Government want to spend hundreds more millions of pounds going through legal cases. Let us not do that. Let us get the system right and ensure that first-class legal aid and support are there for children at the soonest point rather than requiring them to fail because they do not understand the system and because no legal aid is there, and then punishing them for their failure, which is actually a state failure.

I have one more example from the Children’s Society—again, from a child:

“My first court hearing was horrible, my solicitor advised me to not answer every time anyone asks you any questions. However, when I got the refusal letter from the judge, it said it was because I hadn’t answered any of the questions. As soon as I changed solicitor, my solicitor told me to appeal, prepared an expert report and told me to speak in court this time round and finally my case was accepted.”

Nationality and Borders Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Holly Lynch and Neil Coyle

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Neil Coyle]

That is very clear and helpful. Thank you.

[Holly Lynch]

Q It has been put to me by a police officer working on the frontline in this area that, because we have British citizens and migrants entering the NRM, if somebody goes missing from it, it is dealt with primarily in terms of immigration compliance rather than safeguarding concerns. Do you think that is a fair assessment? What are your thoughts on that? Dame Sara, first.

Dame Sara Thornton: This has become quite a topic of discussion in law enforcement. The problem has been that practice has varied from force to force as to whether missing person reports were completed or whether there was a report to immigration enforcement. I know that some interim guidance has been put out by the National Police Chiefs’ Council setting out what needs to happen, but to give you an example from June this year, about 140—I think—Vietnamese migrants who had come across in small boats were put in hotels in a variety of cities across the UK, and within 24 hours they had all disappeared. My view is that that was because they were clearly under the control of traffickers. They got sucked into the asylum system; that would not be the plan of the traffickers. As I say, they were gone in 24 hours. The reason I am aware that there has been some debate is that the forces were all then saying, “What’s going to be our response? What should we be doing in terms of investigating what has happened?”

One of the difficulties, if I may, is that when people go missing in that situation, we have no biometric data on them, so it is very difficult to ever work out whether you have found those people or not, with all the issues of language and difficulty with names and dates of birth. It is a live and current operational issue at the moment.