Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 14th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Primarolo (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I hesitate to speak in this debate having heard the eloquent and dedicated contribution of my noble friend Lord Dubs, and from the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, about the humanitarian imperative to act now in this terrible crisis that we are seeing unfold, both in Greece and France, of unaccompanied children and families. As pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, we see proposals from the Government that appear to prepare to weaken our commitment to reuniting unaccompanied children with their families—at a time that strikes at the heart of what we believe are British values of caring and standing up for those who are less well off than us and taking our share and burden in helping those in greatest need.

Amendment 48, which I support, would provide the basis on which this country could have rules that offered a safe route for children to join their family members in the UK. Having such clear rules offers a path forward. The Minister has to tell the Committee why the Government find themselves in a position in which the EU has rejected the proposals that they put forward in the negotiations on the basis that they were not part of the mandate. They were never part of the mandate. It looks unlikely that we will be able to negotiate bilateral agreements with the other member states. If the EU has overall competence for this matter, that route will be closed off for ever.

On 3 September, a Home Office official appearing before the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee confirmed that at the end of December 2020 the UK will not be bound by the Dublin arrangements. So we have no route through negotiations; we think that bilateral arrangements are unlikely, and we know we will not have Dublin III, according to the Government. Can the Minister tell the Committee, if she is going to reject amendment, what plans the Government have to ensure that we have a mechanism in place at the end of the transition period to provide a replacement for Dublin III? Can she explain how unaccompanied children in desperate need of clarity and certainty will receive speedy action so that they can be reunited with their families? Will she detail how, if she will not accept the amendment, she intends to insert rights into the Bill that protect children with relatives in the UK who are willing to take responsibility for those children?

The Government are being offered a clear and simple way forward to meet these obligations by the brilliant work of my noble friend Lord Dubs. I urge the Minister to accept the principles enshrined in the amendment. I hope she will respond positively to all the comments that have been made thus far in this very important debate.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, with the Children’s Society saying that child refugees worldwide now number some 13 million, surely the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, was right to say that this is one of the gravest crises facing the world. The Minister will no doubt remind the Committee what the Government have done. They have done much to try to help children caught up in this terrible spiral of violence—I do not think that anyone in the Committee would not want to respond in some way to try to deal with many of the issues raised during the debate so far. However, she will understand from the cri de coeur she has heard from noble Lords across the Committee that just because we have helped some, that is not a reason not to try to help others as well. Just because we cannot solve the problems of everyone is not a reason not to try to solve the problems of anyone.

Given his own personal story, there is no one better equipped or able than the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, to put the case. I also wholeheartedly associate myself with the remarks of my noble friend Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, and with what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham said about the sanctity of every human life and our particular duty to the most vulnerable. I make common cause with all those who have spoken in the debate so far.

Amendment 48 takes us back to the well-worn road to Dublin, although, as the Irish would say, if you wanted to get to Dublin you wouldn’t start from here. Over the months, the Minister has had to respond to my repeated questions, along with those of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and other noble Lords, about the Dublin regulations—those European Union protocols concerning the identification and transfer of people, especially unaccompanied children who have submitted a claim for asylum from one member state to another where the applicant has family. Of course, the issue of unaccompanied children was also the subject of the Dubs amendment, which was referred to by the noble Lord earlier in the debate. That amendment was passed by your Lordships’ House and I was very happy to be one of the signatories to it.

Amendment 48 has become necessary because Ministers have yet to create new arrangements post December 2020, when the transitional arrangements elapse. The amendment would provide some legal framework to enable those who would have been able to come here under the Dublin regulations to enter the UK and make their asylum claim.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I am the first person who signed Amendment 51 to speak on this group. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for providing such a clear introduction to both the need for a physical document and the difference between these two amendments. Amendment 51, which I signed with the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Kennedy of Southwark, calls for the automatic provision of the document, as the noble Lord, Lord Oates said, and Amendment 49 would provide one on request. I would argue that Amendment 51 is stronger because “on request” requires people seeing into the future and predicting when things might not work. It would be simpler and easier for the department to administer, but either one of these amendments would be a significant improvement on the situation we have now.

As the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said, both the3million and Britons in Europe have done a great deal of work to spread the information about the need for this document. I was at a briefing earlier with the Children’s Society and the3million, focusing on the situation of the 260,000 children who have acquired settled status and the 150,000 who now have pre-settled status. If we think about the situation where—in about 10 or 15 years’ hence—one of those young children has to suddenly prove their status, recovering all the emails, the phone numbers and all the other information they might need to do that is likely to be far from simple.

I also want to address the situation for adults. Can the Minister confirm my understanding of what the process would be? My understanding is, for example, if someone wants to prove their right to work—as we were discussing in an earlier amendment—they will need to access their status via a website, providing the passport or ID card they applied with and their date of birth; they will then have a choice of getting a code with either email or phone; that code will need to be entered on the website; if that is successful, their status will appear on the screen and there will be an option to prove their status. They will then have to fill in the employer’s email address; the system will attempt to email a code to the employer, who will then need to find the correct website, enter the code along with some security information and finally see a screen with a photograph and proof that the person has the right to work. Does the Minister acknowledge that this has many moving parts? If any one of these fails, then it all fails.

We were talking before about landlords being reluctant to go through the extra hassle. We can also imagine plenty of employers who might be similarly reluctant—if they are choosing between two nearly equal applicants—and thinking, “Well, let’s just go for the simpler option.” We saw research from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants that showed that only three in 150 landlords said they were prepared to do those digital checks. Perhaps employers might not be quite so prepared—if they are concerned about discrimination legislation—to talk about their reluctance to do it, but you have to wonder if it would be there.

Of course, as other speakers have already said, this is really very frightening; it makes people feel very insecure. It is estimated that 22% of people do not have the essential digital skills to complete this process. It might be that they rely on someone else—such as the small child that I started off by talking about—but what happens when that person is no longer accessible or available to them or in contact with them? Physical back-up would provide people with certainty and security. It would be good if everyone had it, but either way it should certainly be available. Therefore, I commend both of these amendments, but particularly Amendment 51, to your Lordships.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to support Amendments 49 and 51. I listened carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Oates, said in introducing them so cogently and reasonably, and I had the advantage of being able to have had a conversation with him last week where he explained the generalities of the amendments to me. I thought the arguments were compelling; the noble Lord, Lord Polak, put it well when he said this was a practical and sensible option. All three speeches that we have heard so far have underlined why this is not one of those ragged political debates that require us to take positions; it is something about which we can do something useful this evening in Committee.

I will turn, if I may, from the generalities to something specific, a particular case of people who will be especially disadvantaged by the impact of digital-only status: the Roma community. On 2 August, Roma Holocaust Memorial Day commemorated the shocking liquidation of Roma in August 1944 at the so-called Gypsy family camp at Auschwitz- Birkenau. On that infamous day, 2,897 men, women and children of Roma or Sinti origin were murdered by the Nazis. Of around 23,000 Roma taken to Auschwitz—and hundreds of thousands more perished during the Holocaust—an estimated 20,000 were murdered there. At the time of the liberation of Auschwitz, only four Roma remained alive.

Now, 76 years later, Roma people still face discrimination and liquidation. I especially commend the work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Roma in ensuring that Parliament understands the horrors that this community has experienced and the special circumstances and challenges which it faces today.

In debates like this, I miss the voice of Lord Avebury, a good and long-standing friend and the author of the Caravan Sites Act 1968. At the memorial event celebrating his life, Damian Le Bas, a Roma who wrote The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain—a remarkable insight into the world of Travelling people—spoke powerfully about how parliamentarians such as Lord Avebury can act to ensure that the UK’s 200,000 Roma can lead lives of dignity.

Lord Avebury would have been the first on his feet to support these amendments, pointing to the lack of awareness within the Roma community of digital immigration status and the way in which digital exclusion simply builds on the other exclusions which Roma historically have experienced. The Roma Support Group says that only 3% of Roma are able independently to complete online applications such as those required by the European Union settlement scheme. Very little data exists about how many Roma have applied to the EUSS so far and been given settled or pre-settled status. As the debate proceeds, I will hand the Minister a copy of the Roma Support Group’s briefing on this so that she can read some of the cases illustrating this point. I would be grateful if the Minister could say how this problem can be addressed, especially as the Home Office data does not include a breakdown of ethnicity.

Enabling those who need it to receive physical evidence of their status in the UK would certainly be a start, and enabling programmes to be developed which could address the issue of digital exclusion, on which this debate has helped us to focus, would be a very good outcome.

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, that we all cherish the memory of the much-missed Lord Avebury, who was a champion for human rights globally.

I will speak to Amendments 49 and 51 on the need for documented proof of settled status, and commend the noble Lord, Lord Oates, for his compelling speech, and the crisp speech—notably from the Government Benches—from the noble Lord, Lord Polak. The ending of free movement, which this Bill implements, is nothing less than a tragedy. We should not be severing our links with our nearest neighbours, with whom we have the most in common. This seismic change in our freedom impacts all UK citizens, as we will lose our rights to live, work and study in the EU and EEA countries. For EU nationals living here—many of whom are our family members, friends and colleagues—and for UK citizens living in EU member states, the changes will also be profound, bringing a potential loss of security and life choices in the future.

The aim of the Government’s Brexit project of ending free movement to and from the EU and replacing it with the future global points-based immigration system was supposedly to deliver on their aim of reducing net migration. This policy is not supported by the evidence. In 2019, despite free movement, net migration from the EU fell to less than 50,000, but net migration from outside the EU, where there is no free movement, increased to its highest level for 45 years, above 280,000. Is this what “taking back control” was supposed to be about?

Those EU nationals who for whatever reason do not acquire settled status by the deadline of the end of June 2021 will move from an immigration system that currently works to the same unreformed system that currently applies to non-EU nationals, which is inhumane, dysfunctional and, frankly, chaotic. Even those who succeed in registering under the EU settled status scheme will receive no physical documentation as proof of their status; their rights will not be guaranteed in primary legislation and will potentially be subject to alteration by Ministers under the very considerable Henry VIII powers that this Bill bestows on them.

The Financial Times reported in July that the number of EU migrants who have applied for the right to stay in the UK after Brexit already considerably exceeds official estimates of the Europeans who are eligible to remain, raising further questions over the effectiveness of the Government’s scheme. Home Office statistics up to July show that 3.8 million applications have been made, far more than the official estimate of 3.4 million EU citizens living in the UK that was produced by the Office for National Statistics. In fact, the Financial Times survey of EU embassies discovered that the UK Government might have underestimated the EU-born population of the UK by more than half a million people. By the end of July more than 3.5 million grants of status had been made. However, around 40% of those applicants had been granted only pre-settled status, leaving them in a kind of limbo with their status still unresolved for the long term, while many more applications are still anticipated.

Experts warn that the confusion over the real number of EU citizens living in the UK will make it almost impossible to assess how many eligible people will fail to secure settled status by the time the process closes on 30 June next year. However, it is likely that tens of thousands will suddenly become unlawfully resident in the country that they have legally made their own and be left facing the full force of the Home Office’s “hostile environment”—namely, criminalisation and the threat of deportation.

The groups most affected are likely to include many from the age groups under 18 years and over 65 years, who have had worryingly low application rates. For example, there are 9,000 eligible children and young people in the care system in the UK, for whom only 500 applications have so far been made by local authorities. Non-EU-national family members of EU nationals, rural farm workers, those in isolated communities, those with limited English-language skills, those who are homeless, victims of domestic abuse, those without relevant or up-to-date documents and those who are not digitally literate—often the elderly—are all potentially at risk. That last problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic as the support services normally available to such groups have been forced to move online.

For those groups and others, such as full-time students, full-time parents and those who have previously left the UK temporarily for more than six months, providing the required proof of continuous residence for five years to the Home Office can be very challenging, if not impossible. This means that people with a rightful claim to British residence may lose their legal status overnight. It is another Windrush in the making.

The other main impact of the Bill is of course that, as a direct consequence of the abolition of EEA free movement for UK citizens, we, our children and our grandchildren will from January 2021 lose our rights to live, work and study in the 27 member states of the EU plus the three EEA countries and Switzerland—the biggest diminution in value of a country’s citizenship in history. Therefore, at the same time as the UK Government are opening up higher-paid jobs in the UK to the whole world under the points-based system, the brightest and best UK citizens seeking international career opportunities in the biggest, richest market on our doorstep, the EU, will be second-class citizens in their own country.

In addition, the multiple impacts of the Bill on the estimated 1.5 million UK citizens already resident in European Union member states, who will also become second-class citizens within the EU, should not be forgotten. For example, those with non-British spouses and family members will not have an automatic right to return to the UK with their family after 31 December 2020. Frankly, the Bill is an inhumane, reactionary mess and these amendments try to ameliorate that. I stress that they are not party political; they are simply about humanity. That is why I hope the Minister will accept them when she replies.