Draft Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004 (Remedial) Order 2010

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I take an interest in these matters because I believe that when I represented the constituency of Glasgow North East there were more asylum seekers in my constituency than in any other in Scotland. That must have been the case, because when I held surgeries on a Friday night after I had finished Speaker's work and come to Glasgow, I used to finish at 8 pm, but when the asylum seekers came in large numbers, it was more like 11 pm.

If I understood the Minister correctly, she said that approved register offices would accommodate immigration officers. It should be remembered that the marriage of a young local girl to someone from abroad is in most cases a time of celebration. Often, friends and relatives want to come along to witness the marriage. If the dedicated register office for the young lady and her new husband to get married in is a distance away from where that person lives, it will create a social difficulty and mean that relatives cannot come along to the marriage.

There is something else that I would like to know. I keep hearing the term “sham marriages”. I understand what is meant by it, but I would rather use the term “suspect marriages”. Has the Minister given any thought to arranged marriages? I have experience of situations where a young girl who is a member of a family that comes from the Indian subcontinent has left her native city of Glasgow and gone back to marry a young man. In the eyes and in the tradition of that family, it is a genuine marriage: the family would not call it a sham marriage. However, the groom may have ideas of getting into the country as a married man and, at a later stage, will perhaps apply to join his bride. They have not been married in this country but abroad. Has the Minister given any thought to arranged marriages where these circumstances often arise?

The second paragraph of the Explanatory Note refers to,

“persons who are subject to immigration control”.

I well understand that someone who is an asylum seeker is subject to immigration control. However, my experience as a Member of Parliament was that often the asylum seeker was refused the right to remain. Sometimes he exhausted the appeal process but stayed in the country for longer than the period when he was applying for asylum. In other words, he stayed on as an illegal immigrant for longer than he had enjoyed the legal status of being an asylum seeker, in the hope that the community would support him or that he might find a lawyer who would find a new way of allowing him to remain in the country. What about the person who has been refused, having exhausted all legal applications and tribunals to stay, but decides to remain? It has been my experience that, in some cases, those who have remained after exhausting all the procedures have sometimes stayed three or four years in the country. Is that person subject to immigration control or is there another category for them? Sometimes before a couple get married they enter into a partnership which may produce children before the actual marriage takes place. What consideration is given to the children of that union and the opportunity for a father or a mother to visit their children in this country?