European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard continued) & Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 15th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

Lack of a jurisdiction is not quite the case. They have not lost their own jurisdiction, unless they have been signed out of it. You can therefore get them back home to their own jurisdiction. That is why my work, and the work of most people who, like me, work internationally, is to try to look after those children at home, to support the families and to bring clean water and food and everything else. Of course children can be signed out—by their own judges, for example—but most of the children that the noble Baroness is describing will not have been signed out at all; they will just have moved.

So I will merely say that we know all too well what happens to children when they are moved around. We in this House should not do anything to encourage that movement. That is why, from the heart, and from all my experience, I urge the Minister to retain Clause 37.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I have sat and listened to the debate on the Bill in this House, which has been wise—and sometimes entertaining, sometimes depressing, depending on one’s view of leaving the European Union. For the past two days I have stayed quiet and reflected on what has been said. For me it has been a surreal debate at times. Last night we had a debate in which all sides of the House pleaded with the Minister to keep one single market in the United Kingdom, and the Minister could not agree that that could be guaranteed. Earlier today there was an amendment about the rule of Parliament, and taking back control of the sovereignty of Parliament and not the sovereignty of the Executive. In the previous debate the Minister said that our hands should not be tied in negotiations—but the Government are tying their own hands by putting a false deadline on the negotiations.

However, I have to stand up now, because we have moved from a surreal debate to a cruel and heartless debate. Now we are talking about children who have family in this country. They are segregated; they will have seen war and persecution; some of them may have seen their mothers raped; some will have seen things that we cannot understand. And we already have a law in this land that says that, as a guarantee and as a matter of principle, they will come here now. Clause 37 takes that away. The Minister shakes her head, but it does. Basically, it says that rules will be laid before Parliament in two months’ time. It stops the existing provision and tries to put in a new provision—and we know not what that new provision will be.

Sometimes in politics, you just do the right thing. You do a thing as a matter of principle. I see nothing at all wrong in bringing here, as fast and as safely as possible, unaccompanied children who have family in this country. It is the right thing to do practically, and it is the right thing to do in principle. I must say to the Minister that this is a political decision. It is not a legal decision; there is nothing impeding negotiations. What is more, it is the right thing to do. I do not care what the other 27 countries do. As a British citizen, I want my values to be that we accept these children as a matter of principle. If the other 27 do not wish to do that, that is about their values—but this country, and this Parliament, should stand steadfast in saying that this is the right thing to do, and we want it to happen now.

I tried to think why the Government would not just allow this to happen. Why would they want to put a two-month staging post in place? Do they not want to do it? The Minister and the Government keep telling us that they do want to do it, and that it will happen. Fine. Are they not quite sure how it will happen, so they want to change the rules and the policy? The Minister shakes her head. So why have they not shown us what the new policy will be? Why the two-month gap? What are we waiting for? If nothing is going to change, the existing provision should stand.

Are we saying that we are putting in a provision for a two-month wait and nothing will change? Yet there are children across the country who need our support and help. Or are we going to use these young, vulnerable children as a negotiating chip? What a disgraceful position for us, as a country, to get ourselves into—that we could use the most vulnerable of the vulnerable as a negotiating position to try to get the other countries to agree to do something, we know not what? There is no reason for this clause—other than the possibility that there is something, however slight it may be, that the Government wish to change. I do not believe that that is the British way, I do not believe that those are British values, and I do not believe that that is what the British public will support.

I will end with what Robin Walker said when he was a Brexit Minister in the other place. He said that this was a matter of principle. I agree: it is a matter of principle—and it is time to put principle into action and stop the fake negotiation.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern]

My Lords, I think my credentials in legislation for children are fairly long and fairly clear—or at least I hope so. Before we start to think about children in principle, it is vital to think about the provision that we seek to replace. The Clause in the 2018 Bill gives children no rights whatever. It does nothing more than require the Government to enter into negotiations with regard to those children. That is all, which is very important.

However, the question is: is Parliament entitled to tell the Executive what they must negotiate for? That is the language of the part of the letter to which the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, referred. In other words, it is said that, as a matter of principle—I will elaborate on that principle in a minute—it is not right that the Government’s hands should be restricted by Parliament before the negotiations. It is the Executive’s responsibility to do the negotiation; it is for Parliament to call the Executive to account on how they have done it.

I shall refer to this only briefly, but your Lordships will remember that in the decision of the Supreme Court in relation to Prorogation, it pointed out that the important thing was the accountability of the Executive to Parliament. That makes an important distinction between the Executive and Parliament, because the Executive have the executive function, and then Parliament has the right to call them to account for the way in which they have carried it out.

The provision in question—Clause 17 in the 2018 Bill—is precisely that. It is an instruction to the Executive to open negotiations in a certain way. I understand from what we have heard already that the Executive have entered into such negotiations. However, the point made in the letter is a general one, of the kind I have just mentioned.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate and, in particular, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. I have had many discussions with him, as he outlined. We do not always agree on how we are going to get to places, but we certainly agree with the end. I think Parliament and the Government are in absolute agreement that we are all fully committed to the principle of family reunion and to supporting the most vulnerable children in the world. Our policy on this has not changed. I want to underline that point because noble Lords seem to think that perhaps the policy has changed. It has not. On the point the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, made on the manifesto commitment, it is writ large in our manifesto:

“We will continue to grant asylum and support to refugees fleeing persecution”.


We intend to keep to that commitment, and I am sure Parliament will hold us to account if we do not.

Clause 37 underlines that. We could have just deleted Section 17 and, by turn, Clause 37. We did not because we wanted to outline that commitment again in legislation. The commitment builds on the Government’s proud record of providing protection to vulnerable children. Since 2010, the UK has granted protection to 41,000 children—7,500 of them in the year ending September 2019—most of them because of our obligations under the refugee convention and the wider commitments that we have made. It is mostly nothing to do with EU structures.

More than 5,000 unaccompanied children are being cared for by local authorities in England alone—an increase of almost 150% since 2014. The noble Lord referred to local authorities, and he knows that the Government wrote to local authorities in good faith, and that whenever we heard about additional places being available, we took note and upped our number under Dubs. We have granted 27,000 family reunion visas under the refugee family reunion Immigration Rules over the last five years. This is not a mean Government or a mean country, and I am very proud of our record.

In 2018, the UK received more than 3,000 asylum claims from unaccompanied children, accounting for 15% of all such claims across the EU. That makes ours the third highest intake in the European Union. On national resettlement schemes, we take more children than any other country in the European Union. It is worth saying this because sometimes, if you listen to debates in this House, you would think that we do not do anything. It is important to outline our record, which reflects the unique importance of protecting unaccompanied children and preserves the principle of family reunion, which will continue. I commend this House on its strength of feeling on this issue—we are all humanitarians, and I assure noble Lords that the Government share an undiminished commitment to addressing these issues.

Clause 37 concerns only whether there should be a statutory duty to negotiate an agreement on family reunion for unaccompanied children who have applied for international protection in an EU member state, and who have family in the UK, and vice versa. The debate is not on wider issues relating to refugees, asylum or family unity. It does not represent a change of Government policy—as I said at the outset—it simply removes the statutory requirement to negotiate. We remain fully committed to providing protection to vulnerable children, and noble Lords might note that we have already committed to taking 5,000 people from beyond the MENA region, in dangerous areas of the world with vulnerable children, in the next year alone.

Noble Lords will be aware that, as part of the negotiation and making of treaties, including international trade agreements, this is a function of the Executive. It is interesting that the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said in the previous group that he did not want to tie the Government’s hands, but in the group before that, the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Howarth of Newport, said that Parliament should not tie the Government’s hands. My noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern made a good analogy with the Prorogation decision.

A statutory negotiating objective is neither necessary nor the constitutional norm. It is unnecessary because the Government have already written to the European Commission on 27 October to commence discussions on this issue. It is vital that the Government are now able to get on with it. The UK has existing and extensive legal provisions to guarantee family reunion, and one noble Lord—it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, but I apologise if I am wrong—spoke of no guarantees going forward, yet this legislation already exists, and is not affected by EU exit in any way. Furthermore, the UK will continue to be bound by the Dublin regulation during the implementation period, as my noble and learned friend pointed out.

[Lord Scriven]

That is a bit perplexing. If the guarantee is already in law, what is this clause about?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord hits the nail on the head, because one might ask what Section 17 was about in the first instance. I said at the beginning of my speech that Clause 37 could not have existed, and we could have deleted Section 17, but Section 17 is, in most part, as it was originally, and is amended to include the reporting to Parliament and not the seeking to negotiate. It goes above our obligations and commits the Government to lay that Statement to Parliament on our policy regarding future arrangements with the EU for the family reunification of unaccompanied children seeking international protection, providing Parliament the opportunity to scrutinise our progress.

The clause makes it clear that supporting the most vulnerable children remains a priority, along with restoring the traditional division of competences between Parliament and government, as the noble Lords, Lord Howarth and Lord Butler, pointed out. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said that Parliament cannot give the Government their marching orders in negotiations. I hope that I have quoted him correctly.