Immigration Rules: Sponsors

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

As I was saying, Mr X needs to return to the UK to look after his elderly parents who are recovering from cancer. They used to go on a fairly regular basis to visit him, his wife and child, but they are now too ill and infirm to visit. Mr X has a professional job in Thailand, which he has held down for a long time. It is a decent salary according to local rates, but it is not the equivalent of the £18,600 earnings limit in the UK. It is enough to provide him with the same living standards in Thailand as he would have if he were on that sort of salary in the UK—it is obviously a lot cheaper to live there. Under the new rules, Mr X will have to leave his wife behind while he finds work in the UK, which he is not prepared to do—by which I mean not that he is not prepared to find work, but that he is not prepared to leave his wife behind. They are now considering moving to Spain instead, so that he is reasonably close to his parents and it will be easier for his wife to join him, perhaps becoming a Spanish national, which would then allow them to enter the UK.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. She is describing a situation that we on the all-party group inquiry into family migration have heard several times. Does she agree that there is a further nonsense to the situation she describes? If the family is not able to come in and look after the parents, instead of the family providing care, this will pile costs on for public social care and public health services.

[Kerry McCarthy]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, as she always does. If I understand the Government’s ideological position on this issue, they want to support families and very much approve of carers taking on responsibility for elderly parents or others within their family network. The rule that we are talking about operates to prevent that from happening.

The second case features Mr Z and Ms Z who came to see me in my constituency surgery a few weeks ago. They were married in the UK in March 2011. She is a British citizen and her husband, who had been living and working in the UK for six years under a valid work permit, is South African. He was in highly paid professional work in the UK, but soon after they married, he was made redundant. Although he could probably have secured another job at a similarly high salary in the UK, they decided to take a chance and move to Cape Town for a couple of years.

After two years in South Africa, however, they have decided that they want to return to the UK, but the rules changed while they were away. He will not be allowed to join his wife in the UK unless she earns more than £18,600—despite the fact that he is a highly skilled computer programmer who could expect to earn perhaps £60,000 a year in the UK. Before they left for Cape Town, my woman constituent was earning £26,000 a year as a pub manager. As she has been out of work for two years in Cape Town, however, there is a gap in her CV, so she is unlikely to be able to walk straight back into a manager’s position, although she aspires to do so in a couple of years’ time. Wages in the pub trade are not particularly high, so it is likely she will start on a salary below £18,600. As I said, they would have a joint income as a family of about £75,000 because her husband could get a well-paid job, but under the new rules it is based on her income, so he would not be able to join her.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

The previous requirement, which I think has been alluded to, was that applicants had to be “adequately maintained”. The courts generally interpreted that to mean income equivalent to the level of income support for a British family of that size, which was about £5,500 a year for a couple at that time. Our view was that that level of income was not an adequate basis for sustainable family migration and did not provide adequate assurance that UK sponsors and their migrant partners could support themselves and their children over the long term.

The previous regime also required quite a complex assessment, both for applicants and caseworkers, of current and prospective employment income and other financial means. It made decision making difficult, as was highlighted by the independent chief inspector’s report of 24 January on the processing of applications under the old rules for spouses and partners. Again, that was partly why we wanted a financial requirement that was clear and transparent; applicants would know where they stood, and we could make clear and timely decisions.

The minimum income threshold is £18,600 a year, with a higher amount with those sponsoring dependent children—it is £22,400 for those sponsoring one child and an extra £2,400 for each further child. We based that on the expert advice of the independent Migration Advisory Committee. It gave us a range of figures and that was at the low end. Its figures went up to about £25,000, a level at which someone would be making a net contribution to the Exchequer. The £18,600 level we settled on is broadly the income at which a couple, once settled here, cannot access income-related benefits. It is not an exact match, but it was as close as we can get. Our approach broadly says, “If they are here earning that amount of money, they are going to be able to stand on their own two feet and not expect the taxpayer to support them.”

[Kate Green]

I understand the logic the Minister is outlining, but when benefits are assessed for a household they are assessed on a household basis. So this approach does not appear to address the point that has been made about ignoring the income of the incoming spouse.

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point, which I am coming on to address. In most cases—this comes back to the point about representations—including one of the cases the hon. Member for Bristol East raised and the one mentioned by the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), there is often an alternative way, through the immigration rules, of someone getting to the United Kingdom. So the reason we do not take into account—