Family Migration (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Coaker Excerpts

Wednesday 20th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Paddick; I agree with much of what he said. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on her report and other members of the committee, both those here and those unable to be present with us. It is an excellent report, and the noble Baroness highlighted much of what was important about it—she is to be congratulated on that.

In passing, and on a personal level, I also want to note the tremendously important comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt; I do not want it to pass without further recognition. I have read about his part as a Young Conservative in standing up to Enoch Powell. I do not think that any of us who have read about that period of history can fail to have been moved by the courage and determination that it took for somebody to stand up to Enoch Powell. He was backed at the time by a surge of populism, which not only the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, but many others—including the Heath Government, as he pointed out—had to stand up to. That should be an example to us all —not that today is like that—that sometimes you have to stand up for what is right and for what you believe, and that is what the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, tried to do in her report. But do not mistake me: I am not comparing now with what Enoch Powell said then; none the less, I wanted to pay tribute to what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said and not allow it to pass.

I wanted to take just a few minutes to draw attention to something, because it infects the debate that we have on these matters. Page 5 of the committee’s report says:

“The Home Secretary told us that ‘it is not feasible for all those people who might wish to come to the UK to do so’, adding that ‘we do not have an unlimited capacity to welcome every single person who is in a difficult situation in their home country’. We do not argue this but we do believe that the current rules do not adequately respect the right for families to be together”.


I say to the Government: if you set this up as being about those of us who are caricatured as supposedly demanding that everybody across the world who wants to come should be able to come here, that you have no rules and no borders with everyone piling in if they want to, how does that help the debate? Nobody is suggesting that; not a single person present in this debate believes that that is the way forward. However, what all of us are arguing for, what the report argues for, and what members of the committee and others here have said, is that it is important, within the rules that we have, that Parliament tries to act in a way which is consistent with the values that we want to have as a country. With respect to that, the debate is about family reunion, which somehow is not right as it stands—we have heard the story that the right reverend Prelate shared with us, and there are others.

I also want to take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. The Government are quite entitled to say in response to a committee report, “We don’t agree with this or that”. However, it is unusual—the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has more experience than me, as have others in this Chamber—for a Select Committee report to be virtually just dismissed without hardly any of it being recognised as having a point, which may be pulling the Government up to reflect that maybe they do not have it all right. When the Minister responds, I hope he does so in a way which reflects the way in which Members of the House have contributed to this debate, not from a negative point of view but to try to say, “Can we not do better with respect to family reunion than we are doing at the present time? Have the Government got it completely right?”

I do not suggest that everybody goes through the response as I did on a Sunday afternoon, but I have marked the places where the Government just dismiss the report, saying that it is not right, it has it wrong: “This isn’t right, this isn’t true, that’s not accurate, the data isn’t right”. The Government do not say, for example, which you would expect—many of your Lordships have experience of government—“We are reflecting on the point that has been made here because we too recognise that this is not working in the way that we would want it to”. That is how Parliament should work. Can the Minister also reflect on that when he responds to the debate?

I also wanted to highlight the inspector’s report, A Reinspection of Family Reunion Applications. It talks about all sorts of things—again, the right reverend Prelate mentioned this—but the independent inspector absolutely says that the situation has “deteriorated” since the 2019 report and that

“the Home Office’s performance in this area is ineffective”.

I must say—this is what I asked the Minister about in Questions—that it is unusual for the independent inspector’s term of office not to be renewed. We know that Home Office officials have criticised this inspector as being excessively critical and that his term of office is not to be renewed, and I wonder why that is. Maybe it is because he has pointed out that the Government should at the very least consider allowing children to reunite with family members more than it is being considered at the moment.

How can it operate at the moment, with a backlog which was 8,000 when the independent inspector published his report in February 2020 but which, according to the information I have, is now 11,000? What is the backlog of applications for family reunion? Whatever system you have, with whatever rules, it cannot work if there is not basic competency within it and if decisions cannot be made within a reasonable length of time. Can the Minister point out to us the current level of outstanding admissions, what is the average time that these decisions are taking to be made and whether any of the recommendations of the committee of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—the noble Lords, Lord Hunt, and my noble friend Lord Blunkett sat on it—are to be accepted or whether any of them have caused the Government to think, “D’you know what? Maybe we should reflect on this and change something in the light of what is being said to us”?

The last point I want to make with respect to this is to say to the Government that, when we talk about family reunion or immigration generally, we cannot have a situation that operates on the basis of where I said the Government seem to be: saying that that this is an argument between those who wish to open the floodgates and those who wish to control the borders. If that is what the debate about immigration, asylum and refugees has come to, we will get nowhere. One of the things I think about the debate that has taken place in the House of Lords it that it has been a calm, rational and reasonable one that has said, “We have a real issue here on the aspect of family reunion”. People who deserve to be reunited, families which deserve to be put back together, are prevented from doing so by the current Immigration Rules and, frankly, the incompetence of how the system works at the current time. Is it really too much to ask the Government to reflect on that and see whether maybe some change would actually make a difference and bring about an immigration and asylum system with respect to family reunion that we could all be more proud of?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

Yes, and forgive me; I meant to say that. Of course I will.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

Can the Minister write to me with the current figures for applications outstanding and the average length of time spent waiting?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

Of course.