Immigration Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Kelly Tolhurst and Simon Hoare

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kelly Tolhurst]

Q 234 Can I make a comment? Thank you for that. I would say one thing. Every day, people in this country break the law, intentionally or unintentionally, and cause death, and it wrecks their lives—British citizens, who have a legal right to be here. I was not really comfortable with the way you tried to make a death caused by road accident a lower-level activity, because—

Manjit Gill: I’m sorry, that is not what I was saying. Death by dangerous driving is serious. I am not seeking to diminish the offence; please do not misunderstand me. What I am seeking to point to is the fact that sometimes these offences occur, for which someone is rightly sentenced, but that does not mean necessarily that they are to be thrown out of the country. People know that that is the position but they tend to be forced into a certain decision making.

[Simon Hoare]

Chair—

Immigration Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Kelly Tolhurst and Simon Hoare

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kelly Tolhurst]

Q 267 Do you feel, at the moment, particularly in the south-east—and perhaps if you have knowledge of the whole of the country—that the pressure we are currently seeing with unaccompanied minors is greater than the perceived pressure that may come due to some of the measures in the Bill?

Paul Greenhalgh: My sense of that is no. Kent is currently the authority with the largest number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. It currently has 800. Croydon is the—[Interruption.] Okay, I think it is 800, but David has a different view. It is somewhere between 800 and 1,200. Croydon is the next biggest authority in terms of the number of unaccompanied asylum seekers. We have 370. I think that those figures are small compared with the impact that the Bill would have with regard to removing support from families with that status.

Councillor Simmonds: It is important to be clear, though, that because the Children Act 1989 makes the local authority at the port of authority the responsible body, it falls disproportionately on a small number of places. If you are a port, or indeed, a local authority such as Leicestershire, with motorway services where lorries travelling from ports tend to deposit people, you may end up with a significant population, and their rights derive from the fact that they are unaccompanied children, so their asylum status is not strictly relevant to that. They gain those rights by virtue of the fact that they are unaccompanied, at which point the Children Act and Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 kick in.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Q 268 Is the natural corollary of quite a lot of the discussion about the pressure on local government finance to see some change in the Children Act?

Councillor Simmonds: Paul will have a professional view about that. Clearly, what is not sustainable is to say that people have a portfolio of rights, but there is no funding available to fulfil any of those obligations. So it would be possible—I think the provisions in the Bill could conceivably do it—to say that certain individuals are removed from any consideration under the Children Act. The issue that we would have, of course, is that other avenues will then generally be pursued. One of the common problems for local authorities—I speak from a lot of personal experience—is that as one avenue is closed, another one opens up, so we would need to make sure that any provisions that were envisaged of that nature were extremely comprehensive. It would be a challenge for parliamentarians collectively to say that we are going to walk through the Lobby and say, “We are determined to remove a group of children who are in the UK from being considered as children and view them simply as illegal immigrants, and therefore, not entitled to support.” I suspect that, on a cross-party basis, Parliament would have a challenge in getting that through and finding that it could be supported easily.

Immigration Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Kelly Tolhurst and Simon Hoare

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kelly Tolhurst]

Mr Smith, you mentioned earlier businesses or associations that are part of your organisation, and you said that landlords who wilfully engage in this sort of activity will fall under the radar. Do you agree that the tougher penalties in the Bill target those very people?

[Simon Hoare]

I wondered whether Mr Smith wanted to reflect on his comment that there were not many students in Dudley. That will come as a shock to Dudley College, which has worked closely with the University of Wolverhampton since 1999, offering, among other courses, a PGCE and a Certificate in Education post compulsory education, and has six campuses. That suggests to me that there are quite a lot of students in Dudley.

David Smith: In which case, I immediately withdraw any suggestion that Dudley is not a substantial student town, with my apologies.