Immigration and Nationality (Fees) Regulations 2018
Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Haskel
Lord Haskel (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on bringing this regret Motion. I sit on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and, yes, this regulation did cause us concern: that is why we reported it to the House. For the Minister’s convenience, that was regulation 330. Last week, regulation 680 came before the committee with an almost identical title, dealing with fees for children and immigrants, and this one caused us even more concern: this one dealt with the waiving of fees for the Windrush generation. As my noble friend said, they came here as children. Here again, the Home Office’s uncompromising attitude towards immigrants caused a lot of disruption and difficulty for a lot of people—people legally entitled to be here but whose family settled in the UK prior to 1 January 1973, when the Immigration Act 1971 commenced.
People were not informed and only recently has Parliament become aware of these problems, and the difficulties and expense to which people have been put. The Government quickly introduced the Windrush scheme to put it right and this enabled the Home Office to waive fees for those eligible for the scheme. Yes, in this case the Home Office has apologised and rushed to put things right. Indeed, it has rushed so much that regulation 618 came into force without the normal period for people to pray against it. Indeed, the Immigration Minister wrote to your Lordships’ committee explaining the need to bring these regulations in immediately instead of waiting the usual 21 days. Your Lordships’ committee asked the Home Office how many people it anticipated would use the scheme, the cost and the end date. The answer was that it did not know.
This later regulation 618 proves that my noble friend is absolutely right to raise this question, because there was more trouble in the pipeline; trouble which, at least on this occasion, the Government have apologised for and tried to put right. The effect of having a hostile environment in the Home Office towards immigrants—presumably to get numbers down to the tens of thousands—and the damage done to innocent people will not be put right by an apology.
This policy has done the NHS an enormous amount of harm, as today’s first Oral Question illustrated perfectly, with concern expressed on all sides of the House. Only a change in policy will put it right, so I hope the Minister will carry my noble friend’s message to the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister and that they will accept my noble friend’s proposal.
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I support the Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. I declare my interest as a trustee of Coram, which includes the Coram Children’s Legal Centre and the Migrant Children’s Project. I will give a cross-party flavour. The noble Earl, Lord Dundee, would have spoken in support from the Government Benches but he is unavoidably detained, organising the wedding of his last remaining unmarried daughter. Understandably, that takes priority.
One almost feels a degree of sympathy for the Home Office at the moment. It is under enormous pressure. The Windrush scandal has been mentioned, as has the cap on skilled workers, particularly the effect on doctors. One wonders who will be next in the firing line. Some of us in this Chamber have a horrible sinking feeling that it will be children.
As has been mentioned by other noble Lords, the new Home Secretary—brave man that he is—went in front of the Home Affairs Committee on 15 May. He went so far as to agree to a memo giving a rundown on costs and how they were justified, without giving any timeframe for when that would happen. He mentioned that he found the £1,012 fee to be rather a lot and said, “I understand the issue”. Let us hope that he is beginning to understand the full complexity and awfulness of it.
As has been said, we have a fee where there is a £640 surplus over the cost of processing a child’s application. We are completely out of line with other countries. Our fee is nearly six times what it costs in Ireland, 20 times the amount it costs for a child to be registered as a citizen in Germany, and 21 times what it costs in France—not an entirely comfortable place to be.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, we think there are about 120,000 children in this country with neither citizenship nor immigration leave to enter or remain, and for many of them these fees are a huge and significant impediment. I think we all agree that that is completely unfair.
The noble Lord, Lord Alton, gave the example of Regina. I will quickly talk about another lady, Amelia. She is 24 years old. She is a single mother. She has been living in this country since she was 12. She has one dependent child: a son aged two. She will have to pay a series of four payments—£3,066 every two and a half years—in order for her to reach settlement in the UK. She will need in due course to pay a total of £7,144 for her son to become a citizen, and a total of £9,851 for herself. She is unlikely to be able to afford legal advice, if indeed she could find it, so she may be unaware that her son is in fact entitled to British nationality under Section 1(4) of the British Nationality Act 1981. At the moment there is no legal aid available for her or her child at any stage. That is simply unacceptable and untenable.
I would like to put on the record my own deep embarrassment and shame at what has been going on recently with the Windrush scandal. I suspect I speak for many of your Lordships when I say that. That is combined with a degree of anger over what I have read about the ill treatment and lamentable maladministration that appears to have gone on. How on earth the Home Office could even imagine not grasping this slightly uncomfortable and complex nettle of how to deal with children, I cannot really understand—not least in the interests of its own self-preservation and to spare it further embarrassment, anger and shame. There is almost a sense of institutional depression, which occasionally seems to be the culture there.
I strongly support the regret Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, which has been carefully crafted to give the Home Office a “get out of further embarrassment” card. I urge the Home Office to seize the moment or regret it later.