Immigration and Nationality (Fees) (Amendment) Order 2023

Lord German Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

May I ask my noble friend the Minister about something to do with the policy background? In discussing the changes for which the order provides, both in function and fee levels under the regulations, my noble friend referred to one of the policy objectives: the overall security of our borders. In discussing security here and elsewhere, the Government have referred to pre-entry checks that will facilitate entry at our borders. My related question is: is there any proposal or plan to have ongoing checks, including checks when a successful applicant leaves the country, given that the proposed electronic travel authorisations will last for up to two years for short visits? If so, what does the Home Office intend to do to operate these?

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I want to raise two main issues with the Minister. He will undoubtedly not be surprised to hear that the first is a process issue; the second will deal with the operation and impact of this SI.

As the Minister knows, he is the Minister responsible for all SIs in the Home Office. I am sure that he will have seen and noted the criticisms and comments expressed in the 44th report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee of this House, which draws this SI to the special attention of this House, and its findings on the Home Office’s approach to SIs more generally.

I also note the Minister’s remarks to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in giving evidence on 11 May. There is much information in that evidence, so I will restrict myself to looking at Explanatory Memorandums and the Minister’s role in all Home Office SIs. The committee’s report states:

“The Home Office’s Explanatory Memorandum (EM) omitted key information about the wider context of the policy changes, something that has been a theme of our comments on recent EMs from the department”.


As this is where the examination of these matters is concerned, would the Minister like to respond to this point?

Secondly on the Minister’s role, I note the judicial analogy he gave in evidence to the committee. The question was being asked by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, who is of course a former Supreme Court judge. He asked the Minister,

“do you look at the Explanatory Memorandum before it is sent out, or are you a bit like some Silks who never read the skeleton argument that they will subsequently have to defend?”

The Minister replied:

“I cannot confess that I read every SI that the Home Office lays before Parliament and every Explanatory Memorandum. If there was a really controversial or difficult SI, the expectation is that it would be raised with me as the SI Minister and I would review it”.


The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, then went on to ask:

“Do you then, in that process, go through it, read it and say, ‘Look, this hasn’t got the right disclosure. You ought to be making this point and that point’, a bit like you would as a Silk dealing with your junior?”


To this the Minister replied—and I am sure he remembers this:

“I shall certainly take that away and adopt that as best practice”.


Could the Minister tell us how that best practice is going, having adopted it? There are clearly criticisms in this report and the Committee would like to hear how the Home Office Minister is responding on behalf of the whole Home Office.

I turn to the content of the SI, on which I have three issues to raise. The first is the impact on tourism from the ETA, the second is the impact on universities—I shall cite Cranfield University in particular—and the third is the operations of the common travel area. This SI touches on all three and there are certainly matters that could do with further explanation.

First, on tourism, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee report, in paragraphs 7 to 10, outlines the range of potential negative economic impacts. Given that the figure the Minister referred to is based on the cost of ETAs and processing them, rather than the impact on the tourism industry, and given the flexing from the difficulty in understanding how many people this will deter from entering the United Kingdom, why has visitor expenditure not been quantified in the documentation that accompanies this SI? I am sure that there are data that outline visitor spend per head in country. Any tourist who comes into this country will be spending money here on hotels, food, visitor attractions and so on. Does the Minister agree that it is possible to quantify the level of expenditure per head? If the reduction is 1% or whatever figure is inherent in the documentation, you could quantify that as a loss to the tourism industry.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

I have a point of clarification. What I do not understand, behind the noble Lord’s probing, is that if it is a requirement under law to have an ETA for all visitors coming, for instance, from the Republic of Ireland, if they travel on a ferry, as the noble Lord suggests, over to somewhere else, or indeed if they come to this country—it will not be required for the Republic but it will for Northern Ireland—is it not the law that they must have it? For instance, it is very important for insurance purposes if they are taking a car on the ferry. They must be covered under law and they must have an authorised travel document, as I understand it. So why would this be an issue, given the way that our law works? If you are obliged to do something, it is expected that you will do it.

[Lord German (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness; she has asked the question to which I particularly wanted to know the answer: how do you enforce it? There is no way of knowing whether anyone has any documentation at all. Whether people avoid it deliberately or because they do not know and they are just moving around, at some stage we have to know—and we do not know. It is easy if you are coming in from Europe, because if you are doing so in any other capacity there is definitely a documentation check, but there is no documentation check coming into the United Kingdom and Great Britain. That is the bit I am trying to find out and that is why I have asked the question. I know this is very tricky and that discussion is going on about it, but I just do not understand how enforcement of any sort will—or could—take place.

--- Later in debate ---

The ETIAS—the electronic travel authorisation proposed by the European Union—is to be set at €7, when that comes in. However, for example, the one used by the United States, the ESTA, is set at $21—£16.36 at today’s rates. The Australian version is 20 Australian dollars, or £10.51, and the New Zealand version is 23 New Zealand dollars if completed online and 17 New Zealand dollars if completed on a mobile app. The Canadian version is 7 Canadian dollars and, as I say, the EU’s version is €7. So I suggest to the noble Lord that the £10 level is an appropriate one, and will not have any adverse impact on tourism in the context of the global position.

[Lord German (LD)]

Perhaps I could probe a little deeper there, because we get most of our tourists, in bulk numbers, from within the European Union. That is the number we are looking at, and where people can choose which other country they want to go to. They have a choice of 25 countries, including the Republic of Ireland. The difficulty here is that it is suggested that there will be a 1% drop in the number of tourists to this country, and it is that bit I am trying to find out. If they are predominantly from the European Union, then it is not the cost issue there, because for people who are in the European Union, there is no cost to moving from one country to another. So I would just like to probe a little bit more on that.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

As I say, it is the Home Office’s view that the cost will have a negligible impact on the choice of destination. Interestingly, just picking up on a point that the noble Lord raised, the Republic of Ireland is not proposed to be part of the ETIAS, and has chosen to opt out, as it is not in the Schengen area. So the Republic of Ireland is something of an outlier now in this field, which of course ties back to the point that I will come to in relation to the noble Lord’s third point on the common travel area.

I turn to the noble Lord’s second point: the impact on universities. Fees for immigration and nationality applications are kept under review, as the noble Lord knows. Increases to student visas were announced as part of a wider announcement on fees on 13 July by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Those changes will be made in the same regulations that I have already discussed that will come later this year. Those fees will be within the maximum that we are setting in today’s order. While the student fee maximum was increased by a small amount in 2022, the Home Office has determined that further flexibility is necessary to ensure that we are able to take a balanced consideration of fee levels across all routes. The amendment we are proposing to this order will allow this to happen over the longer term.

The Government are of the view that it is right that those who benefit most from the immigration system should contribute towards the cost of operating it. We also note that there is limited evidence that past fee increases have affected demand on study routes.

I turn to the noble Lord’s final point, in respect of the common travel area. As now, there will be no routine immigration controls on journeys within the common travel area and no immigration controls whatever on the Ireland/Northern Ireland land border, as the noble Lord would expect. However, as is currently the case, individuals arriving in the United Kingdom, including those crossing the land border, will need to continue to enter in line with our immigration framework, which obviously will include the requirement to obtain an ETA when they are introduced. I should add that an ETA will not be necessary for an Irish national, of course, because they have special status.

The general principle that one enters the common travel area while adhering to the immigration framework is a long-standing and well-established one. Those crossing from Northern Ireland into Ireland have long been expected to comply with immigration requirements. Once granted, an ETA will be valid for multiple journeys over an extended period, as I discussed in relation to the point made by my noble friend Lady Lawlor. Third-country nationals who are already legally resident in Ireland will be exempt from the requirement to obtain an ETA when travelling to the UK on a journey within the common travel area. In order to benefit from this exemption, if required to do so by a UK immigration official, non-residents of Ireland will need to present physical evidence demonstrating that they are legally resident in Ireland. I hope that this answers the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord German. Guidance as to the forms of identification that will be required has been provided as of Thursday last week; I can provide a copy to the noble Lord after this debate.

I turn to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, in relation to the process; in particular, how we have tested the tech for electronic travel authorisations. I assure him that I have personally tried the tech. It is very impressive and is swift and easy to use. It simply uses a mobile phone handset, the chip in the applicant’s passport and their credit card details, while their biometric details are taken by the camera on the phone. I assure the noble Lord that this technology has been subjected to robust testing and the Home Office remains on track to launch the scheme in Qatar in October this year.

We have made a deliberate decision to have a phased rollout, starting with Qatar, before rolling it out worldwide in 2024, to ensure that our systems and processes can accommodate the expected number of applications; we expect the figure to be in the region of 30 million a year. We have invested in brand new technology to ensure that customers receive the best user experience when applying for an ETA. As I say, the Home Office has done extensive testing on the mobile application. We are using the same technology that we used for the highly successful EU settlement scheme, so we are confident that the tech should be fully successful when the scheme is launched; as I say, we remain on track to launch in October 2023.

I have already partly responded to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord German, about Northern Ireland tourism. I can assure him the Home Office has been working closely with tourist bodies across Ireland to ensure that the ETA requirement has as little impact as possible on Irish tourism, both from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland and the other way around. We are committed to working with stakeholders to ensure that the requirement is effectively targeted through a variety of channels and to mitigate any risk of it being seen as a barrier to pan-Ireland tourism, if I can call it that.

Finally, on the noble Lord’s point about the general increases proposed, these increases clearly reflect that the majority of fees have not been subject to a significant increase since 2018, despite a context of high inflation and record high migration into the UK. As I have already said, it is the Government’s policy that those who use and benefit most from the immigration system should contribute towards the cost of operating the system, reducing the burden on the UK taxpayer. The increases announced by the Government will mean that a greater share of that cost will be met by those users of the system. This in turn will allow more funding to be prioritised elsewhere in the Home Office, including to pay for vital services and support public sector pay rises. These increases, which are within the existing fee maxima, will, as I have said, be made through separate legislation after the Summer Recess.

I reassure noble Lords that the immigration fees will be kept under review over the lifespan of this order and will be updated within the parameters that we are setting today. In the event that fee levels are changed, they will need to be approved by this House and accompanied by a full economic impact assessment. I commend this order to the Committee.