Immigration Bill

Debate between Julian Huppert and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate and to welcome the Bill.

Immigration remains among the issues that most concern my constituents; that was the case in the run-up to the last general election, and it is still the issue most raised on the doorstep. Not totally surprisingly, perhaps, my constituency does not experience huge immigration—according to the last statistics I saw, I had two of the five most ethnically English towns in the country—but there remains a fear of immigration. What people see, perhaps in neighbouring towns, causes them concern, perhaps over and above the real extent of the problem. Nevertheless, they are concerned—and they express their concerns regularly—that too many people are coming here illegally and not being sent back home. They are especially worried that serious criminals who complete their prison sentences are not being deported, and they are worried that our public services and housing cannot cope with the population increase.

It is right that the Government address those issues and try to restore confidence in the system; we all want an immigration system that people can have faith in. We want to get this right so that “asylum” can cease to be a dirty word and we can be proud to take people who are in desperate need. I am not sure that most of my constituents think that way now. Rather, they are concerned that the system is being abused and that everyone who arrives here has no reason to be here.

While welcoming most of the Bill, I want to focus on some of its key areas. From my relatively limited immigration casework, I know that this can be a byzantine system that sometimes produces bizarre results. Reading some of the verdicts, I find it hard to work out what the facts of the case are or how the verdict bears much relation to those facts.

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the byzantine complexity and the errors in decision making. Does he agree that the Government’s priority should be to ensure that decisions are made correctly?

[Nigel Mills]

That should be a priority for every Department. I serve on the Work and Pensions Committee. Sadly, the DWP’s administration processes too often come up with the wrong decisions, but the problem is often fixed by a mandatory reconsideration process within the Department.

It would be interesting to hear from the Minister how the review process would work. I think it is the right idea, however, because we do not want to be troubling the courts and tribunals with mistakes in the system. If they can be corrected within the Department, that must be a more cost-effective, fairer and quicker system for all involved. We need to know that the person doing the reconsideration is independent, and not just defaulting to the previous decision—because he knows the guy who took it and so it must have been right. We all want a system that gives clear, quick, fair and accurate decisions first time around, avoiding a labyrinthine process that subjects people to an awful wait while trying to establish their status, which makes them miserable and gets them stuck in the system for longer than necessary.

That is a genuine concern for my constituents: why is the system still so slow? Let us get it right first time. If the person has no right to be here, let them be told that so that we do not have to go through multiple different appeals down different routes. The proposal that those with no right to be here no longer need a separate removal notice has to be right.

I also agree about article 8. We need to get the balance right between the interests of the public in this country and the interests of the person making the claim. I am not sure our courts have been interpreting that correctly. We have a right to be protected from serious criminals. I speak as someone who generally favours deregulation and does not favour imposing new burdens on people, so it is with some caution that I welcome the proposals to ask landlords to start checking the immigration status of their prospective tenants. I have an interest, as I rent out a house in Nottingham where I used to live. I use an agent, so I am pretty certain I will be safe from these rules as long as the agent is competent.

There is a real public interest in trying to make sure that it is harder for illegal immigrants to avoid the system and stay here without a right to do so. One of the ways we can do that is to ask landlords to make sure that the person they are renting out to has a right to be here. In my constituency, most letting agents go through some hugely extensive and complicated processes, and take a lot of money off tenants, to check their credit history, references from previous landlords and all manner of things. I am not sure that it is that much of an extra burden to ask them to check a person’s status as well. Clearly there are some whose position is so complicated that it will not be easy for a landlord or agent to come to a clear understanding. That is why we need a service from the Home Office that gives a clear and quick answer and says, “Yes, you can rent to this person. No, you can’t rent to that person.”

Having worked with clearance mechanisms in my previous life, I know that getting that to be quick and accurate will not be straightforward, but it has to be the right thing to do. We need a system that is clear enough so that not every landlord seeks a clearance every time to be 100 per cent. safe. We need a clearance system that works and is used only where there is some doubt and not where there is clearly an easy situation to determine.

Most of us would think that it is ridiculous that someone who has no right to be here can get a UK driving licence or a UK bank account. That should never have been the case and it is right to stop that so that someone cannot build up a life here that they are not entitled to have, because that can make it harder for us to deport them.

I have no need to detain the House at great length. I welcome the Bill, which represents a real step forward. I am sure my constituents will welcome it, although there are things that sadly we cannot do which they would have liked to see in it. There is a great deal of concern about what will happen next year when restrictions on Romania and Bulgaria are lifted. We need to understand what can be done to make sure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past. But this is a welcome Bill, and I look forward to it having a speedy passage through Parliament.