Immigration and Nationality (Fees) Regulations 2018

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Lister on her important regret Motion. I shall be very brief, as noble Lords have spoken eloquently and poignantly about children being sometimes cheated out of their livelihood. I want to do one thing, which is to appeal to this House’s sense of fairness and responsibility towards children. We have always had that responsibility and we have had many Bills over the last few years—longer, indeed—on issues relating to child welfare, child protection, social mobility, poverty measures, child refugees, integration into British society and so on. We have consistently been concerned for vulnerable children and vulnerable families. We have a strong record of supporting and protecting children. Can we really forget all that?

I regard this profiteering by the Home Office on all children who make nationality and immigration applications as quite extraordinary and unacceptable. We all know that young people need an affordable way of gaining permanent status and stability. They also deserve legal advice, along with legal aid for separated children and young people. As we have stated over and again, young people in our society deserve help to succeed and lead useful lives. How can a young person faced with this extraordinary situation pay this kind of money, as my noble friend and others have said, for their own security as citizens in this country, something to which they are entitled? What price the Government’s policies on social mobility and child protection? Surely this needs urgent attention.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I will be brief and, like other noble Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for instigating this debate. I want to tackle head-on something that no one else has: the facts and figures of the Home Office’s budget and the reason why it says it has to do this. When she responds, I think the Minister needs to reply to this.

The cost impact assessment says that this provision will close a £60 million gap in the Home Office’s budget. If we read the financial impact assessment, that is the primary reason why this is being done. The amount that will be raised by the issue in the Motion tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, is just over £1 million of that £60 million. That comes within a total Home Office budget of £13 billion. If we take a look at the accounts for last year, we see that the Home Office underspent by £60 million. The accounts clearly show that, at the stroke of a pen today, the Home Office could write this measly figure off. It is a litmus test for this Home Office and the words that have been spoken. Is this really a new system with a humane approach or is it the system in which the Windrush generation was caught up? I say advisedly to the Minister that there is no financial reason whatever to deny these children their citizenship. There is no financial reason to increase this fee and I ask the Minister to explain financially why, at the stroke of a pen, this cannot be written off and the fee put to bed.