Immigration Bill

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with and admire the excellent speeches made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, my noble friend Lady Hamwee and many other critics of the Bill.

I will restrict myself to three concerns. One is deportation before an appeal is heard. It is an appalling denial of justice that an appeal that may make the difference between life and death, which in Britain would have perhaps a 50/50 chance of success, may be conducted when the appellant is thousands of miles away from the legal advisers familiar with the details of his or her case. In the debate on the Bill in the other place, Wes Streeting MP gave the following example of a case in his constituency:

“One of the many cases my office is dealing with at the moment is that of a Sri Lankan Tamil whose application has been refused and who bears the mental and physical scars of torture. His application is now on appeal. If the Home Secretary’s proposals had been in place, he would already have been returned to Sri Lanka, where, given the human rights situation there, his life would potentially be at risk”.—[Official Report Commons, 13/10/15; col. 212.]

I am rather doubtful about the safeguards that are sometimes mentioned by the spokesmen on behalf of the Government.

My second concern is the position in which some whose asylum appeal is refused are left. I have recently been involved, through the Refugee Council, in a case of a young Afghan who was an unaccompanied child refugee from Afghanistan at the age of seven. He was well looked after at first, and did well enough at school to be offered a place at a college of further education. However, when he was 17 and a half he had to apply for asylum, which was refused. It must be very difficult for someone who was seven years old when they became a refugee to prove that they would be persecuted. For four years, while his status was uncertain, he lived in fear of deportation back to Afghanistan, where he knew no one and had no prospects of a job; indeed, he was no longer familiar with speaking an Afghan language.

Deportation is not often carried out, but Channel 4 showed a memorable film of a young man in a similar plight who was deported and taken away from loving foster parents, ending up as a drug addict living under a bridge in Kabul. My reasons for concern are increased by the fact that the Government seem to take the view that Afghanistan is now safe, which is not a view shared by former ambassadors.

While his status was uncertain, my young Afghan lived without means of earning a living and dependent on support from friends until finally he was given permanent leave to remain. People seeking asylum do not have permission to work in the UK and thus are forced to rely on support provided by the Home Office. This consists of accommodation given on a no-choice basis and just £5.28 a day to cover food, clothing, toiletries, travel, communication and all other necessities.

Even under the current system many refused asylum seekers in the UK do not currently qualify for the limited Home Office support or have to wait for long periods to access this support. Others are sometimes erroneously denied support that they may be entitled to. While they wait, they are destitute, forced to rely on whatever ad hoc support is available to them from friends, charities and faith-based groups. I am told that the British Red Cross has supported thousands of asylum seekers and their dependants in this situation in the United Kingdom so far this year.

My third concern, which I shall refer to very briefly, is the extraordinary proposal to make illegal employment a crime not only for the employer but for the employee. What illegal employee will dare to reveal the condition of near slavery in which he or she is employed if they fear that they will be prosecuted or will lose whatever meagre earnings they may have saved? Control of illegal employment will be infinitely more difficult.

This is another in a series of ineffective immigration Bills. It tinkers with the system and leaves large areas of uncertainty and denial of justice. As an SNP Member in the other place observed, it is a case of,

“if at first you don’t succeed, legislate and legislate again”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/10/15; col. 220.]