Immigration Rules: Impact on Families

Lord Taylor of Warwick Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Warwick]

My Lords, I would like to add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for introducing this debate, and I thank her committee for its excellent report.

“No blacks, no Irish, no dogs”; that was the sign in many windows in Britain in the late 1940s when my father was looking for accommodation. Growing up in Jamaica, he had thought of Britain as the mother land. After fighting for the British Army in the Second World War, he was shocked to be asked, when he came to Britain, when he would be going back home to the Caribbean. But after scoring a century for Warwickshire County Cricket Club he changed overnight from being described in the local Sports Argus as a “Jamaican immigrant” to “local Brummie hero”.

Let us fast forward to August of last year. Instead of racist signs in windows, millions of British TV viewers and thousands in the Olympic stadium cheered a Somali immigrant running to double Olympic gold. What was also significant was that the man from Mogadishu, Mo Farah, was wearing a British vest. Today, many of Britain’s high flyers in public life, business, entertainment and sport are from immigrant backgrounds. This is why the all-party parliamentary group report is so important. It is not an inquiry just about a minority group; it is about the Britain of the future. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Kilclooney, have made the point that the report emphasises that there must be an independent review of the minimum income requirement, and the reasons for that are set out very eloquently.

The rules are such that children, including British children and babies, are being separated from their families. We know that the formative years of any child’s life are the most crucial. It is easier to build a strong child than to repair a broken man. Keeping children away from their families is just storing up trouble for the future, as was so eloquently emphasised by the noble Lords, Lord Teverson and Lord Judd.

What really concerns me is the context in which we are debating these matters. Only today the Home Office produced a report that talked about the negative impact of immigration. It used phrases such as “asylum dispersal areas”; for example, Bolton. What the report did not do was emphasise the positive impacts of immigration. For example, as the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, mentioned, there is evidence from the BMA that the National Health Service has already lost some skilled foreign doctors because they have had to return overseas in order to care for elderly relatives. If you took away immigrants from the NHS and many of our public services, they would be in chaos. What worries me about the Home Office report is that it is really more about the coming election. It is creating an “us and them” attitude, which will play very much into the pathway of racist parties such as the EDL and the BNP. We need a society that comes together. We must argue and debate these matters in that context.

The Prime Minister has described the Government’s immigration policy objective as,

“good immigration, not mass immigration”.

The Government believe, and I agree, that they can reduce overall net migration levels while attracting more of the “brightest and best” migrants whose presence is deemed most beneficial to the UK. But good immigration should also be fair immigration. There is worrying evidence that the recent changes to the Immigration Rules are separating families and depriving Britain of skilled professionals, such as doctors. The Government need to commission an independent review now. Yes, the rules need to be firm, but they also need to be fair.