Immigration Bill

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Lords Chamber

To return to the simple question of the best interests of the child, as I have said, I do not believe that there is any disagreement here on the basic principles involved. The amendment would help to provide a clarity and consistency that the Government have themselves stated that they wish to achieve with Clause 14 in a letter to the JCHR, and I think elsewhere. I hope that the Minister will be willing to take away the amendment and come back at Report with a government amendment that would help to satisfy their critics that they genuinely want to ensure that primary consideration is given to the best interests of children. I beg to move.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, I speak wholeheartedly in support of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, who I would call our noble colleague. I thank her and the Refugee Children’s Consortium for all the work they have done in putting these amendments together. I want to stray, as I do sometimes, to the words of David Lloyd George in 1919, when he said that he wanted to build a world,

“fit for heroes to live in”.

We want to build a world fit for children to live in. That is what we aim for and that is why here, as elsewhere, we are emphasising the best interests of children. I do not need to speak to the amendments at great length as the arguments have already been well presented to us by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister.

Amendment 33 would require that the courts must first establish what are the best interests of any affected child before going on to consider other factors. Amendments 40, 42 and 45 would take into consideration children who have been in the UK for less than seven years. Why should a child not qualify for family rights just because they have been here for less? What about children who are under the age of seven? How should we respond to their needs? They do not fall into the Bill’s current definition of qualifying children whose welfare must be taken into account.

Mention was made of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which this week published its second legislative scrutiny report. The report stated:

“We welcome the Government’s acceptance that a deprivation order should not be made without taking full account of the impact on the whole family unit, and with regard to the best interests of any child affected. To ensure that the best interests of the child are treated as a primary consideration, as required by Article 3 UNCRC, we recommend an amendment to the Bill which requires the Secretary of State to take into account the best interests of any child affected when deciding whether to make a deprivation order under the new power”.

As has already been mentioned, there is an impact on so many people in so many different ways. There is the impact on fostered children. Clause 14 invites judges to consider whether an individual has a genuine and subsisting parental relationship with a child when deciding whether to deport or remove them. However, this does not take into account children who are fostered. We will speak about them later in Committee. The removal or deportation of their carer would have serious consequences for those children. That should be taken into account.

The Government are arguing that it will normally be straightforward for children who have lived in the UK for less than seven years to accompany their parent and adapt to life abroad, but that ignores the fact that, in two-parent families, the parents may well be divorced. Little children will have to face the appalling choice of leaving one parent behind in the UK or being split from the removed or deported parent for the rest of their childhood. The organisation Bail for Immigration Detainees produced a report in 2013 called Fractured Childhoods. We should all look at that as it contains some compelling and powerful examples.

Why, if the Government believe that children’s best interests will be properly considered within Clause 14, should not the need to safeguard children be made explicit in the Bill?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

My Lords, I am delighted to support this amendment from another part of the Celtic community. I do so because the Bill says that you can integrate more easily if you speak English, but that is not so in many of our Welsh communities. There are still 600,000 people in Wales alone who speak the Welsh language and in some villages and areas of Wales it is the first language. It is the language of the community, the chapel, the church and the pub. It is their language. If someone came from a distant place and wanted to settle there, they would feel lost. They would need to be able to speak that local Welsh language.

As has already been said, we battle on to maintain the language. About 21% of the people of Wales speak Welsh and the Government of Wales have a Welsh Language Policy Unit, which spends about £14.5 million a year to promote the Welsh language. We also have Welsh television, S4C—S Pedwar C yn Gymraeg—which will claim £90 million to £100 million per year. This is all investment in the language. If somebody came from a distant place to a Welsh village without any knowledge of the Welsh language, you might say that they should learn English. However, we have only one other Welsh settlement of any size in the world, which is Patagonia. That is where 10,000 people speak Welsh and Spanish. What if one of those people—it happens—wanted to become a teacher or a church minister in Wales? They would not be accepted unless the amendment were also accepted by the Committee.

There does not need to be a great fuss about this. We do not have millions of people speaking Welsh in the world, but we do have a certain number who might well be interested in coming to the homeland—to the land of their fathers and grandfathers—and they would not be welcome because they do not speak English. I will not go to Patagonia to invite them to come over immediately, but if this amendment is passed, I would be delighted to go to Patagonia and invite those people from the Welsh tradition to come up.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a powerful and emotional, in the best sense, statement in favour of the amendment. Will he tell me what its implications would be for an Englishman wanting to settle in that community?

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

It would not hurt that Englishman in any way at all. We would still allow people who speak only English to come into Wales, but we would allow those who do not speak English but who do speak Welsh or even Scottish Gaelic—we might have one or two from the highlands wanting to come to Wales—to come in. I urge the Minister, as a fellow Celt, who I know has the well-being of our communities at heart, to give a thought to this, although perhaps not in the wording of this particular amendment. Is there no way that we could allow those who do not speak English but who do speak Welsh, Scottish Gaelic or Ulster Gaelic to come along? I am sure that there is a way, and we can show the nations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland that we still consider them brothers and partners in this United Kingdom.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, I hesitate to engage in this Celtic discussion. I am half Scottish, which might help, and I recently visited Patagonia. All the people in the Welsh community I met there also spoke English, curiously, otherwise we would not have been able to communicate with them.

The amendments highlight something on which I need clarification. This is not the normal legal language that we see in legislation; it seems to be more a statement of fact or opinion. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, made a powerful point when he said that financial independence was not related to language. I am curious about the evidence base for the statement in the Bill. To be better integrated into society is easier to understand, but is being less of a burden on the taxpayer automatically the case? On what evidence did the Government base that before bringing it forward?

The provisions are confusing because this is not the usual legislative language that we see in Bills such as this. Is there any concern that the courts will not understand how to interpret the decisions that they are making? I am curious about what guidance the Government will provide relating to this specific part of new Section 117B(2).