Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 8th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 80, which I have co-sponsored. The problem is that Covid has sent immigration statistics into a tailspin, to which the Government’s response has made matters worse. As I understand it, the Government suspended the International Passenger Survey that took place at all airports when Covid struck, mainly to protect the staff, who would normally have been interviewing people all day. That is fair enough. It was also the case that the number of international passengers fell through the floor, so it was not much of a guide to levels of immigration.

All this roughly coincided with efforts by the ONS to use existing statistical data to estimate migration flows. That effort has already run into trouble. In any case, it is by definition a year late because it relies on statistics that are looked at every 12 months.

The purpose of the amendment is in effect to call for the reinstatement of the International Passenger Survey, improved where possible, so as to have a clearer and more up-to-date indication of where we stand. I need hardly remind the Government that they promised to “take back control” of immigration. At present, they have very little idea of the present scale of immigration, and when they do find out they are likely to have an unpleasant surprise, with very little time to adjust their policy before the next election. That is their problem.

I will also speak briefly on Amendment 81, which concerns people crossing the channel. The Home Office has announced that it will publish the statistics on only a quarterly basis. I hope that is wrong and that the Minister will be able to say that it will be much more frequent than that.

There seems to have been a kind of fix between the Office for Statistics Regulation and the Home Office, whereby it was agreed that quarterly publication would ensure that the statistics were

“put into the longer term and wider immigration and asylum context and so better support the public debate and understanding”.

Well, “weasel words” does not describe it. What they are actually doing is insulting the public’s intelligence. If they go on with that policy, they are simply trying to keep the facts from the public on a matter of considerable public concern. So it is not surprising that a number of MPs have actually attacked this move, with one calling it an attempt to cover up failure while another said that it was “burying bad news”. I regret to say that that may very well be an accurate statement of the position. The Government clearly have a serious problem here, exacerbated by their previous promises, but they will have to deal with it, and deal with it honestly.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I have put my name to Amendment 80, which I am pleased to support—and I also support Amendment 81 very strongly as well. My noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe is a demon for data, as she has just demonstrated in the House, as a basis for good decisions and keeping the public well informed about what is going on around them while avoiding rumour and anecdote, which takes us to a bad place, particularly in areas as sensitive as immigration. Therefore, I particularly share her view, and the view of the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, that the Government’s decision to reduce transparency about the flow across the English Channel is regrettable. It is clearly an area of considerable public concern and, for better or worse, we will not solve it by not publishing the figures—that is likely to make it worse.

I shall add one thing on the international passenger survey, when we come to relaunch, refocus and redesign it. I was once questioned as part of that survey, when I was travelling through Heathrow, and I was very pleased to answer the lady, who was very good and helpful. I went on and talked to her a bit about her job, and I can offer the House three take-aways. First, under no circumstances do you cross-question; so if someone says that they are coming here to be a plumber in Cardiff, a plumber in Cardiff they are—there is no question of whether they might be something else. That is not your job; you just write that into the form. The second was that you tended to have a predominance of older people answering the form. She said that younger people would be in a hurry, pushing on, and they tended not to want to stay and answer her questions —or there were not many of them. Older people seemed to have more time and, therefore, she felt that the survey was biased towards older people. Thirdly, and finally, on the issue of the early morning or transcontinental flights, known as the red-eye flights, unsurprisingly those people coming off those flights did not want to answer a survey—they wanted to get to a shower, a bed or their office. She told me that so difficult had it been that they had started reducing the number of staff who were on the early shift, and they brought full staffing on at about 8.30 am or 9 am, when people were in a more helpful mood—perhaps that is the best way of putting it.

I leave it to the House, and to my noble friend the Minister, but with that sort of anecdotal background, this can hardly be a system that inspires confidence as to the accuracy and value of the data that it collects. If we are going to relaunch it, we need to think much more clearly about how we are going to gather data in a way that creates confidence and trust.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 80 and, partially, Amendment 81. On Amendment 80, it is common sense—and would be helpful to all sides of the debates on this Bill that arose in Committee and on Report—that we should know more. As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, has said, whatever our analysis or principles, we would all be helped if we had reliable data in the public square on asylum and immigration because we could then perhaps do some myth-busting.

When you talk to people outside of this House, there are a range of responses to this issue and, indeed, to our discussions here on the Bill. There is some perception that borders are open, and that there are too many people flooding into the UK for society to cope. Some people will even go so far as to say that we are full. I do not think that we are full but, as far as some are concerned, it looks as though we are being overwhelmed. They use the evidence of their own eyes, watching people crossing the English Channel weekly, sometimes daily, with a perception that nothing is being done. I know that this Bill is trying to do something about precisely that, but the perception is that all these people are coming in and nothing is being done.

I have said before that I do not believe that the people making those observations in public are motivated by xenophobia. I have a number of observations. The UK may not be full—it is not full—but if you live in one of the many towns where there is a chronic housing shortage, you are near the top of the housing list and then you get bumped, you may have a perception that it is to do with immigration because some refugees have been given housing. British citizens from all ethnicities can become frustrated and can feel as though there are indeed too many people coming to the UK. We need to have the figures to be able to refute that, or to do something about it. Also, as it happens, you need the figures to plan how we can get more housing and deal with the lack of services—because, actually, the problem is not too many people but not enough services. We need to know, and that is why the data would be helpful.

My second point is about lack of trust, a sense that those in authority are not prepared to tackle this issue; that it is too difficult. Often, that takes the form of people believing that lies are being told about the figures and the real numbers are being hidden. It is in all our interests in restoring trust that we are not hiding any figures. Also, confusion remains over different categories of people wanting to come to the UK. Even in this House, throughout this debate there has been slippage in talking about migrants, immigration, asylum seeking, refugees and so on; they are all too often conflated.

This is further confused by reality. For example, in my view, there are not enough opportunities for unskilled economic migrants to make their life here. I have to persuade my fellow citizens of that; they do not necessarily agree. Regardless, many undoubtedly present themselves as asylum seekers here because of the confusion. I know that it is not a clear picture; none the less, it would surely help to detoxify the issue if politicians were open and honest. That would mean our having much more granular information about the numbers of all types of people living in the UK and their status here.

Finally, I have reservations about Amendment 81 asking for weekly figures of the numbers entering the UK across the English Channel. My reservations are based on the image of some ghastly nightly announcement like those Covid death announcements, which were so often demoralising and not necessarily very reliable. I do worry about scaremongering, or that stats might be used as a substitute for analysis or context, but, on balance, I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant and the more information in the public realm, the better. This is not because I am particularly enthusiastic about data or into number-crunching, like some other noble Lords. No nation state can claim to have meaningful sovereignty if it does not know or check, or has no control over, the number of people living within its borders. It comes over as indifference to the worries of people who are already citizens here if it looks like we are being evasive about those numbers, or not openly telling them the truth.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I am wholly familiar with Governments siphoning off funds raised for one purpose and using those funds for a quite different purpose. I was particularly conscious of that during my years as president of the Civil Court Users Association, when the Government collected very large funds on the issue of writs and the other issues needed in the litigation process, and then used that money in a quite different sector of the court system.

I am also familiar with the disproportionate fees, compared to the administration costs, involved in the process of obtaining British citizenship. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, has already given examples of that which I willingly adopt. I am aware too of this problem for a rather more personal reason, in that young members of my family, who have very little resource, have been in the process of obtaining British citizenship and have been heavily penalised—not by £1,000 but by £2,000 and more. They were young, and the family were able to provide the necessary support. But that is an example of the rampant unfairness.

My recollection—I cannot put my finger on it exactly—is that one of your Lordships’ committees recently investigated this problem and issued a report, in which it said specifically that the correct level of fees involved in the obtaining of British citizenship should be based on the administration cost and nothing else. However, the practice continues, and the provision contained in this amendment to Section 68 of the Immigration Act 2014 is very well drafted and sets out precisely what should be done. It reads as follows:

“in setting the amount of any fee in relation to registration of British citizenship the Secretary of State … must not set that amount at a level beyond the Secretary of State’s estimation of the administrative costs of the function to which the fee relates”.

There cannot be a fairer or more precise way of addressing the problem, and I congratulate the tablers of this amendment on the care and precision with which they have done it.

Since I have not tabled this amendment, it is not for me to make the decision about whether a Division should be called. That is a matter for those who have brought it forward. I look down at the leaders of my own party to see how they are going to participate in this issue—we have not heard from the noble Lord on my side what position my party is taking.

I would, however, discourage a Division at this time of night. Certainly, when I was last in the House, a number of years ago, if you put forward an amendment at Report and it had been defeated in a Division, you were not entitled to take it further—to Third Reading, for example. The fact is that those who will be voting in whatever Division is called are not in this House and have not listened to the arguments. It is a kind of routine form of voting, not the measured form of voting that happens after listening to the arguments.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid I have to plead guilty as charged to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, since I was chair of the committee on citizenship and citizenship engagement that he was referring to, which had among its extremely able members the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and my noble friend Baroness Eaton.

We came across this issue, so I have some sympathy with the direction of travel of this amendment. In simple terms, while our committee was sitting the fees for naturalisation were raised to £1202, with an extra £80 if you wanted to have a citizenship ceremony. We were told that the cost of administering was roughly half that, so there was an override of about £600.

To be honest, to forgo the citizenship ceremony, which we were able to attend, would be to miss something. It was an extraordinarily moving experience to watch the people enter enthusiastically into their new life. In the margin of the meeting, they did, of course, tell us about the costs that they had to incur along the way. My major reason for supporting the direction of travel, though, is the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. We are trying to promote people to come forward and anything that dissuades them is a mistake. I am not sure that we must have regard to what other countries are charging. That seems to me not necessarily something that will add to the sum of human knowledge; nor do I think there is necessarily not some room for a bit of a surcharge for the overall administration. But the underlying point is that the margin between the cost of providing the service and the cost being charged is too great.

In my view, this amendment—not in this form, but something like it—would impose some financial discipline at a lower operational level because it would impose some direct responsibility. Once it becomes a sort of global figure, nobody cares about it, is responsible for it or does anything to improve the service it is providing. That is why I think this is going in the right direction, even though I do not agree with all the detail.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I want to support Amendments 83 and 84 and really thank the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, for putting them forward. I do not know whether she will be grateful but I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. Whether she wants me or not, I am one of the terriers she has managed to inspire in this instance. I have tried to pursue a bit of theme—I raised it at Second Reading and in Committee—that the Bill should have been used, apart from anything, to send a positive message about the benefits of being a citizen and those special rights and duties characteristic of any nation state. I feel the Government have missed a trick.

It seems to me that these modest amendments could punch above their weight by, on the one hand, removing entirely unnecessary barriers to citizenship but, on the other, making a positive case that we care about citizenship by doing so. It is a reminder that the barriers we are talking about here are not necessary. They are just financial ones. These are people whom the British state, according to its own British Nationality Act, says are entitled to citizenship, so that is not even in dispute. That is what is so irritating about this.

The fees are undoubtedly causing people problems and putting them off realising their citizenship rights. We have already heard the details. But the fact that you can be charged well over £1,000—despite the Home Office estimating that it takes only £372 to cover costs—just makes it feel like a rather grubby money-raising scheme. The amendment rightly tackles the fact that you should restrict any fee to just covering the real cost. I worry that it sends a message that citizenship is being cheapened morally by charging too much.

This goes beyond money because we need to consider what it means. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the right reverend Prelate both referred to what this means politically. It is completely counterproductive that citizenship is treated in this financial way because of the impact it has on social bonds and cohesion. Rather than citizenship which allows a sort of national solidarity of citizens—as we have inspiringly seen among the citizens of Ukraine—instead we are socialising new generations into a kind of shadow citizenship status that is fracturing and creates cynicism in the UK’s very commitment to the belonging, to equal rights and virtues and to the promise of what it means to be British.