Immigration

Debate between Nick Smith and Fiona Mactaggart

Thursday 6th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Mactaggart]

Before the regulations were changed, they had an absolute requirement that someone coming in had to be able to show that there would be no recourse to public funds, and I certainly support that. I have never objected to a requirement that a family trying to be reunited in this country should not depend on a public subsidy to do so and must be able to show that they can afford to house themselves and so on. That is perfectly right, but I do not see why ordinary, hard-working, low-paid workers in my constituency should be barred from being reunited with the families, which has been the case since the rule change.

A second change that I would like the Minister to address is the growing Home Office practice—one designed to look tough but not necessarily be tough—of insisting on more temporary steps before someone can become a permanent resident of this country. As a result, people are given three or five years’ leave and then must apply at a later time to become a permanent resident, with additional costs for them, and then of course they must be here for longer to acquire British citizenship. I have no problem with people having to be here for a substantial amount of time before they can acquire citizenship, but what I know is that the Home Office cannot administer these applications and is grotesquely inefficient.

I have constituents who can work perfectly legally but, because their applications for an extension of leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain have not even been logged in the Home Office computer two months after they were submitted, the Home Office is unable to tell their employers that they have the right to work. In two of the three cases in my constituency people have been suspended from their jobs, although they are here perfectly legally and have the right to work, simply because the Home Office’s immigration system is unable to confirm that to their employers. That just seems to me to be stupid. It was introduced in order to look tough, but the consequence has been to give the Home Office more work than it is capable of doing, as a result of which it has become even more inefficient than it has been for years. I beg the Minister to look at that again.

Another feature of the temporary arrangements, in my view, increases the risk of human trafficking to the UK: the changes that have been made to the domestic workers visa. Some years ago the Home Affairs Committee produced an excellent report pointing out how important that visa was as a tool for reducing the rate of people being trafficked into the UK to work in people’s homes. The visa has been abandoned, and as a result I am certain that we are seeing more human trafficking into the UK. I hope that this Minister can look again at the issue, because one of the horrific phenomena arising from being part of a more globalised society is the terrifying increase in human trafficking into and, increasingly, out of Britain.

One group of migrants that the Minister cannot influence, and that the motion would not influence, is the number of people seeking asylum in this country. One of the reasons why migration levels seemed low in the late ’90s was simply the fact that the Home Office made no decisions on asylum seekers; it just took in the applications. It did not always register them; indeed, about 100,000 of them are still lurking in something called the controlled archive.

It is really important that the Home Office makes decisions in real time and delivers on the promises it made. I wrote to many of my constituents to tell them that their cases would be determined by July 2012, yet thousands of people across the country who were told that have still not had their cases decided.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

No, because I have only three quarters of a minute left; I am sorry.

I beg the Minister to look at the administration of these systems to get the human element at the forefront of his decisions. In doing that, he can take measures that reduce migration—for example, working with women who are tricked by men who use them as taxis in order to get settlement in the UK by marrying them and then disappearing the day after they have got their indefinite leave to remain. This Minister could change some of that. If we start not from numbers but from people, we might get justice in our immigration system; otherwise we will not.