Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 (Consequential, Saving, Transitional and Transitory Provisions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2020 General Committees

[Kevin Foster]

I thank members of the Committee for the debate we have had and for the observations they have made.

I will start with the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for South Leicestershire and then move on to the shadow Front Benchers. To be clear, we have said that we will publish a non-exhaustive list of examples. In each instance, a decision-maker should be able to use discretion if it is fair in the circumstances to do so. I have given examples, such as those who were under 18 on deadline day and their parent or local council, who had a duty to apply for them, did not. As I reassured my hon. Friend, when they hit the age of majority, which could be in 10, 13 or perhaps even 14 or 15 years’ time, and realise that there was no application, we would see it as reasonable for them to have assumed that their parent or guardian had done it.

Again, other circumstances include ill health or mental incapacity to make an application. I reassure Members that we will look at situations where someone has clearly received faulty or negligent legal advice in relation to their status. Generally, we will ensure that decision-makers are able to look at the circumstances and see whether there are reasonable grounds, rather than having a list and saying, “If you don’t meet that list, you can’t apply.”

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

If that extra discretion, and the complexity and anomalies that my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax mentioned, were being added to a functioning, gold-plated, brilliant system, Members might be assured, but it is being added to a dysfunctional Home Office that is failing many of our constituents week in, week out through delays and erroneous decisions that leave people destitute.

[Kevin Foster]

I am sorry to hear that description of the EUSS that has already had 4.26 million applications. I give the hon. Gentleman a tip that it is about to hit another milestone in numbers of applications. We think that it is working fairly well. For most people, making an application is a 15-minute job at home, using a smartphone.

We want to take the lessons from how the EUSS has worked into the wider immigration system. Hon. Members may not have picked this up, but in the skilled worker route, an EEA national can use their smart phone from home to apply rather than making a trip to a visa application centre. Building on the experience of the EUSS, we have been able to provide secure identity checks from home. For obvious reasons, I will not go into all the details of what we do to verify identity, but this has been a real success and I am sorry to hear that description of it.

To reassure my hon. Friend the Member for South Leicestershire, we will have a range of circumstances listed along non-exhaustive lines. The longer the delay, the more there is a chance that someone knows that they do not have entitlement under the withdrawal agreement, but is claiming that they do. We want decision-makers to have flexibility and to treat this as faces, not cases. There will be a list, but it is not exhaustive.

The hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East always makes well thought-through contributions, even though we have fundamental policy disagreements on this and a range of other issues. I will provide a detailed written response to him and the Committee, but I shall deal with a couple of points now. He mentioned two EEA nationals. Let us assume that they are in England, because as he will know the right to rent checks do not apply outside England. If they were renting before 30 June a landlord is perfectly entitled to accept an EEA passport or national identity card as proof that they meet the compliant environment checks. If anyone has concerns, they can regularise and make their application via the EUSS straight after. We will not be asking landlords to make retrospective checks if they have accepted an EEA passport or identity card, just as we would not expect employers on 1 July suddenly to check that every member of their staff has EUSS status. Up until that point, landlords and employers cannot insist on it, provided that someone has presented an appropriate document. They can, of course, use it and we are finding that it is very popular. Between April and June there were 400,000 checks under the new improved service, 100,000 of which were to look at EUSS status. Those who have it are already finding it a handy and convenient way of meeting the checks.