Immigration Bill (Fourth sitting)

James Brokenshire Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

Q 245 On that point, Mr Greenhalgh used the phrase behavioural change. I think we all understand what the Government are trying to achieve, but you do not believe that the Bill does that. What should be in the Bill to get the behavioural change that the Government are trying to achieve?

Paul Greenhalgh: One of the difficulties with the Bill as currently framed is that there will be a number of what we would perceive as unintended consequences. They are twofold, mainly around our duties to provide support and care in certain circumstances arising from the Children Act 1989 and the Care Act 2014. Mainly, section 17 of the Children Act is something that would come into play in these sorts of cases.

At the moment, 80% of those cases are funded by no recourse to public funds arrangements as a result of a Children Act assessment. As a result of the current drafting of the Bill, a lot of families who would receive no further support as a result of their asylum status being confirmed would come to the local authority if they were about to become destitute. The local authority would be bound to make a human rights assessment and, if there are children involved, a children in need assessment. Those assessments take some time, so if a family are at immediate risk of destitution, we would have to put immediate measures in place.

So the first of our significant concerns is that this could result in a huge increase in demand on local authorities, which would in effect be a cost shunt from the Home Office to local authorities in an unfunded way. The other consequence is the danger that people will not come to local authorities but will go underground, and therefore be more at risk of exploitation and less able to be supported by the authorities.

If those are our concerns, we think some measures need to be put in place to provide appropriate safeguards. First, there should be a clarification of assessment processes, to reduce the burden falling on local authorities and the difficulty for families of having to go through what at the moment are two assessment processes. If the assessment process could be streamlined, that would be one improvement to the Bill.

The other significant issue is funding and the extent to which, however we frame the Bill, it will result in more cost to local authorities to support people on an interim basis. If there is recognition that those costs are a new burden, and if there is engagement between local authorities and the Home Office to work together on a practical level to support those families and help them to engage, we could see some of the intention of the Bill working more effectively.

[The Minister for Immigration (James Brokenshire)]

Q 246 Perhaps I could just pick up on that last point and ask the witnesses about that engagement. Are you engaging with the Home Office and working through some of those details that you suggest may be needed?

Paul Greenhalgh: We are. We had meetings with Home Office officials during the consultation period. We put in a joint response, and 48 local authorities sent in individual responses. The feedback from Home Office officials is that there was a consistent response from local authorities. We made it clear that we were very happy to continue to work with Home Office officials, and we have been doing that. We have had three technical meetings so far, and we are trying to work through how we can try to address together those issues that I have raised.

Councillor Simmonds: I thank the Minister for making himself available for those discussions. The one challenge that we have found at a political level is that there are sometimes differences of opinion between officials in different Government Departments. For example, on Children Act duties, traditionally we have had feedback from the Home Office that broadly says, “We are seeing people through our role in asylum and immigration, which we are here to manage.” Those in the Department for Education would say, “We’re not interested in that. We see them as vulnerable children, and therefore the duties are absolutely and unambiguously clear, and at the highest possible level.” The more consistency that we can get on some of those challenges, the better.

[James Brokenshire]

Q 247 No doubt we will come on to the detail of some of the cross-governmental work that is taking place.

In your responses to the 2005 pilot, you expressed your thoughts on what occurred 10 years ago. Obviously, the world has moved on; other provisions exist in respect of identifying people, and encouraging or supporting them to depart. Also, the proposals in the Bill are different on the balance of engagement, with the onus being put on the family to show that there is a genuine obstacle to their departure, rather than the family not co-operating and the Home Office evidencing that. So a different approach is being taken. Do you see some of those differences as being relevant in the context of the effect and workability of the new proposals?

Henry St Clair Miller: I guess that sometimes that is where the local authority position arises. We are not within the Home Office; we are not Home Office enforcement. So, sometimes it is difficult for us to comment on the barriers, in terms of leveraging return or indeed enforcing return.

I guess that local authorities working in this area have had a kind of old-fashioned approach to it—that we should end up with actual outcomes when we look at immigration enforcement. The outcome might be a grant of status, if that is appropriate, or it might be a removal.

It is often said that things such as a lack of documentation and a lack of engagement from the families are among the key reasons why removal rates are very low. Yet from the outside—from a local authority perspective—we have seen other reports about how things are organised for immigration processes in some of the caseworking teams, the barriers to processing cases, the delays in deciding applications and possible challenges to making sure that cases that have recently been refused are tasked to removal teams. I guess that we have always thought that there is scope to work with the existing framework, whether that is a family returns policy or an enforcement policy.

Notwithstanding all that, we can see why Home Office officials want to leverage compliance to some degree. We understand why it is thought that the tools proposed in the Immigration Bill will help to do that. From a local authority perspective, we are trying to work in that context, particularly if the Immigration Bill becomes law, while ensuring that the remaining safeguards—we provide a safety net for the most vulnerable—are retained where necessary. Of course, the unknown—the risk—is how many people do not go and what the burden is on the local authority. Indeed, that risk is not only about numbers and referrals but about cost, because we carry the cost burden of financial support, which goes on at the moment for more than two years on average.

Immigration, as you know, is a complex area of work. Lots of different approaches work, and we have been keen to work out with Home Office officials which are the best tools to do this in the work that we have done.

[James Brokenshire]

Q 248 Obviously, we have talked about the new burdens assessment. Do any of the other witnesses wish to come in?

Paul Greenhalgh: More broadly, we are keen to build partnerships with the Home Office and other relevant Government Departments. We see room for improvement in the way we engage together on identification and compliance in voluntary returns, and potentially on family engagement and supporting family returns. In the context of a new piece of legislation, it is important that we make that surrounding partnership work more effective.

Councillor Simmonds: I have little to add to that. The bottom line, from a local authority perspective, is that if people are not entitled to support and should not be in the country, they need to leave. The challenge is that, although a lot of the debate—understandably, in the context of the Bill—is about the rights or otherwise of individuals, the balance is that local authorities have a set of duties. For the most part, they are general duties. We are blind to a person’s immigration status. A child is a child, and we have a responsibility under the Children Act 1989 to intervene where appropriate. Any intention to remove entitlements or rights from certain individuals needs to be balanced by a recognition that that does not remove the local authority’s duty in those circumstances to provide support.

[The Chair]

A number of Members want to come in, but I interrupted Mr Starmer.