Immigration Bill

Debate between Keir Starmer and Christopher Chope

Tuesday 1st December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer]

I start by confirming that we see the sense in the Government new clauses—I think they are new clauses 3 to 7—intended to help local authorities such as Kent deal with unaccompanied children, and we support them. But that is the extent of the agreement on this group of amendments.

Amendment 29 deals with the removal of support for certain categories of migrants. Such removal is wrong in principle and likely to be counterproductive. All the evidence is one way—support for families facing removal is the best means of ensuring that they leave. By support, I mean not only support in the terms set out in the Bill, but support by way of help with obstacles, documents and advice. It is the families that are supported in that broad way that are most likely to leave, and thus the objective is achieved by having the support in place. By contrast, withdrawing support has the opposite effect.

Let us call a spade a spade. Withdrawing support for this category of migrants is a threat of destitution as a means of enforcing immigration rules. All the evidence suggests that it is counterproductive. The Minister mentioned the 2005 pilot, confident—I think—that I would also mention it. It was a pilot of the proposition that withdrawing support—threatening destitution—was likely to encourage people to leave and to alter behaviour. The results of that pilot were evaluated in 2006, and they were stark. Of the 116 families in the pilot, one family left as a result of the withdrawal of support; 12 sought help with documents; 32 families went underground; and nine were removed from the scheme because on analysis it was found that their claims should not have been refused. The pilot was considered a complete failure.

The evidence is not only a pilot some 10 years ago: it is practice since then, with successive and different Governments accepting that destitution, or the threat of destitution, should not be used as a means of enforcing removal because—among other reasons—it is wholly counterproductive.

The Minister says that the situation now is different, and he put forward two reasons. The first is that, under the proposed arrangements, families would have to prove there was a genuine obstacle to removal. I am not sure how far that advances the argument. The idea seems to be that putting the onus on the family to prove a genuine obstacle will make them less likely to go underground if support is withdrawn, but there is no rational link between the two propositions. Secondly, he says the process will not be by way of correspondence, but carried out in a more engaged manner. It is hard to see how that change, welcome though it is, will make a difference to the stark results of the 2005 pilot. The withdrawal will cause hardship, distress and anxiety and will be wholly counterproductive. That is one the problems with the Bill: it does not meet its own objectives. The only basis on which the Government can advance these provisions is that they will make the UK appear to be a more hostile environment.

Destitution in the 21st century should not be a means of enforcing immigration rules, or any other rules, yet that is what lies behind the provisions. The whole House will accept that children should not be adversely impacted by the decisions of their parents, yet the Bill will visit those adverse impacts on them, because they will fall within the removal of support provisions. That led to great debate in Committee about whether this would simply transfer the burden from one Department to local authorities, which are not going to stand by and leave destitute children unassisted. The provision, therefore, is wrong in principle and counterproductive, and not one that in the 21st century we should have anything to do with.

Turning briefly to appeals, I will start with the narrow issue of appeals on the question of support. Amendments 31, 40 and 30 would reinstate the right of appeal against Home Office decisions on support. This is where the Home Office has made a decision on support but it is thought that the decision is wrong. At the moment, the error rate is very high. Those in the House who were not on the Committee will be astonished to hear that it is as high as 60% in some cases. Under the Bill, those decisions could not be put right on a simple appeal. In Committee, the Minister said that the long route of judicial review would remain as a remedy, but I failed to understand then, and I fail to do so now, how it can be sensible or cost-efficient to remove a simple right of appeal in cases for which there is a high rate of success and to rely on the much more expensive route of judicial review by different principles. With a 60% error rate, it is unacceptable to withdraw the right of appeal.

In relation to that error rate and others I will mention, the argument that some decisions that are changed are changed because an individual provides additional information is no answer. The rate of 60%, and of 40% to 42% for general appeals, is high in any event, and there is no evidence to suggest that in the majority of cases an individual has not provided the necessary information. In any event, whether or not they have been properly advised about what information to provide, they should not be punished by the withdrawal of support where inappropriate.

On the wider point of appeal, amendments 27 and 28 deal with the extension of appeals to the wider category of individuals who will be removed before they can appeal. There is a general point to make about such appeals, which is that although there may be court cases establishing that these provisions or their forerunners do not extinguish the rights of appeal, there is no question but that they materially inhibit the right of appeal. The success rate under the current arrangements, of between 40% and 42%, is instructive—these are the cases where individuals have been removed, only in the end to succeed in their appeals. I accept that some in that group may well have succeeded earlier had different or fuller information been made available to the authorities, but there is a variety of reasons why that may have happened, including the advice that those people had been given. Removing first, before appeal, materially inhibits rights of appeal and it should certainly not be expanded.

Amendments 27 and 28 are intended to ensure that before a decision is made to certify any claim for out-of-country appeal, the best interests of any child affected must be considered. These amendments propose a specific provision to deal with a real problem, rather than the general provision that is already in place, and that is materially important for the children who will be affected by the extension of the rules on appeal.

I want to spend just a few moments on the family reunification issues. Part 11 of the immigration rules are very narrowly drawn, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) has given a powerful example of the injustice that they can and do inflict. New clause 1 is intended to remedy that, and I am sympathetic to it, but we have tabled new clause 11, which proposes a wider review of the refugee family reunification rules. New clause 11 has the advantage of covering the failure to implement the Dublin III convention, the advantage of enabling the review to consider an option to allow British citizens to sponsor close family members recognised as refugees or granted humanitarian protection, and the advantage of looking at options for extending the criteria for family reunion in the way envisaged by new clause 1.

[Mr Chope]

I rise to speak to my two new clauses. In so doing, I want to thank the Minister for telling me all the reasons why he does not support them, although he was generous enough to say that he agrees with the principles that lie behind them.

The second of my new clauses, new clause 12, could well be a blueprint for what happens after the country decides to leave the European Union in the forthcoming referendum, because it sets out the way in which people who are already in this country would be able to obtain the right of residence here, as well as some of the associated rules to ensure that those without the right of residence would be the subject of criminal sanctions.

Before coming to that in more detail, I want to refer to new clause 10 and some of the background to it. New clause 10 is modelled very much on a private Member’s Bill that I have brought forward on a couple of occasions for debate in the House, the Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill. The Bill had the privilege of being the subject of an opinion poll, which was conducted by the noble Lord Ashcroft in June 2013. The findings were that some 86% of those polled supported the provisions of the Bill and only 9% were against them, so this is a new clause that strikes a chord with the British people.

The reason I have brought those provisions forward again is that, despite previous debates, it seems that the statistics on how many people are being prosecuted and/or convicted for offences under section 24A of the Immigration Act 1971 are going in the wrong direction. In 2009, the number of people proceeded against and convicted both in the magistrates courts and the Crown courts for offences against that section was a giddy 158. For every year after 2009 the number had fallen, and by 2013—the last year for which figures are available—the number found guilty in the magistrates courts had fallen to six and the number convicted in the Crown courts had fallen to 66, making a total of 72 convictions for a widespread range of criminal offences against our immigration laws.