Immigration Rules: Impact on Families

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, a huge amount of concern has been expressed outside this House about the Government’s policy of making it more difficult for near relatives to join primary migrants who are settled in the UK, contrary to the declaration that my noble friend Lord Teverson quoted, which appears in both the Conservative manifesto and the coalition agreement, and states that,

“strong and stable families ... are the bedrock of a strong and stable society”.

Instead, the Government have divided husbands from wives, parents from children, and elderly dependants from those who want to look after them in their final years. They have weakened family unity and made it harder for migrants to contribute their full potential to our society. They are violating the right to family life and will face challenges, I hope, in the courts.

The Government intend to narrow the permitted exceptions in Article 8 of the ECHR beyond what is permitted in the convention. However, whatever is written into our legislation may have no effect on the jurisprudence of the European Court. If it follows the existing practice of the court, it is a pointless exercise, but if it is more prescriptive, the Government risk a series of expensive cases in Strasbourg, which is already grossly overloaded.

It has been almost impossible for a sponsor to bring an elderly parent to the UK following the amended rules that came into operation last July. From then until the end of October, only one visa was issued to a dependent relative, and, like my noble friend, I would like to know whether anyone else in this category has got past the barriers since then. Is it necessary and proportionate to prevent a migrant looking after an elderly parent? In many cultures, as the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, emphasised, it is an exigent duty to look after your parents in their old age, and making that virtually impossible is doubly inhuman.

Mrs M, aged 65, left her homeland in Iraq with her husband and they were living in Syria. A few years ago, Mr M died, leaving his widow entirely on her own. As the situation in Syria worsened, Mrs M applied to the UK consulate in Beirut to come here as the dependant of her two sons, both of whom are UK citizens. The brothers are poor but a well known charity stepped in to guarantee that Mrs M would be supported without recourse to public funds. When no reply was received to the application, the brothers asked me to help and I wrote to the Minister for Immigration in April. Two months later, I had received no reply, and I wrote again on 15 June. Today, exactly a year after the original application, her son got a refusal letter. So even where the financial and other conditions are satisfied, the Home Office avoids issuing the visa to an elderly dependant in a war zone.

The committee chaired by my noble friend Lady Hamwee, who is to be warmly congratulated on such a professional job of work, found that 61% of British women citizens in work would not qualify to sponsor a non-EEA partner on the basis of their earnings. No account is taken of the provision of free accommodation by parents, other close relatives or an employer. The income threshold was also found to be discriminatory, because women’s earnings are 15% below men’s. The committee’s recommendations deserve sympathetic consideration, as do those of ILPA, BiD and the Migrants’ Rights Network.

To make matters worse, legal aid is no longer available for appeals against refusal of visas for spouses, children and elderly dependants, in spite of the fact that some of these cases are far too complex to be dealt with adequately by litigants in person, as we heard on Tuesday from the Red Cross and UNHCR at a meeting in this House. Many will turn on European case law dealing with the right to family life, of which few non-lawyers would even be aware.

I should like to give an illustration of this in the case of non-EEA victims of domestic abuse. They have a legal right to stay in the UK if they comply with Rule 289A of the Immigration Rules, which is explained in the 48 pages of guidance published under the imprint of the UKBA in April, even though it had been abolished a month earlier. On page 5 of that document, the applicant is told that she must also comply with E-DVILR, an appendix to the Immigration Rules, and other obscure requirements kick in for particular applicants. If the relationship is an informal one, the abused non-EEA partner is clearly even more vulnerable. The Black Women’s Rape Action Project says that the frequency of the abuse and the severity is often more extreme when the victim is an immigrant woman and even more so when she is not married and is in an informal relationship. Even worse, the victim’s presence in the UK becomes unlawful the moment she leaves the abuser. Informal relationship victims have nevertheless won cases before the First-tier Tribunal. I would like to ask my noble friend whether the Government will accept those decisions and amend Rule 289A accordingly.

The successive tightening of the screw on family migration, now being taken a stage further by the MoJ’s Transforming Legal Aid proposals, is not really aimed at saving money. It is part of the Government’s campaign to reduce net migration to below 100,000 by the time of the next election, an impossibility when at the same time we are seeking to attract more than the 206,000 students admitted last year. Family migrants accounted for under 10% of the total last year, but they and their British sponsors are being made to suffer in pursuit of what the Economist has called, “the Tories’ barmiest policy”.