Immigration Bill (First sitting)

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Q 25 I was in Stockholm last year on a cross-party delegation, where we were all impressed by the rate of compliance and returns under the Swedish system. I just wondered what lessons you all felt we could learn from other countries, particularly in relation to this issue of withdrawal of support, in terms of effective compliance, because that is something that we all share an interest in.

Judith Dennis: I do not know enough about the Swedish system, I am afraid. One of the things that worries me about the family returns process—

[Paul Blomfield]

Perhaps from other international comparisons.

Judith Dennis: One concern when families have come to the end of the asylum process is the lack of legal aid for their immigration cases. Somebody is not often either an asylum seeker or an immigrant; during their time here they may well be in both of those categories. Once their appeal rights are exhausted, they may need professional legal advice to help them pursue their case. There are families who go through the family returns process whose removal is not pursued because they are found to have a right to be there, so we need to remember that we do not always make the right decision first time.

Mike Kaye: The experience of other countries uniformly shows that you want a system that gets the decision right first time and has very little backlog, because that discourages unmeritorious claims. It also, conversely, ensures that you do not have backlogs where it becomes more difficult and, indeed, less reasonable to try to remove people, because the longer they are in the process, they more chance that they will have family obligations here; they have restarted their lives and they may actually have lived the majority of their lives here. If you want a system that works properly, it needs to be resourced to work quickly so that you get accurate and prompt decisions, and those decisions need to be implemented.

John Wilkes: The unintended consequence of backlogs is that when you get to address the backlog, what often happens is that the Home Office exercises its discretion and allows people to remain. The message that that sends to people further back in the system is that if you sit it out longer, you might get a better chance. We need to sort the system out to ensure that decisions are made right first time.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q 26 Briefly, is there any evidence from other countries that withdrawal of support along the lines proposed in the Bill assists compliance?

Mike Kaye: I cannot speak for other countries, but in the UK we can go right back to 1996 and look at how we have tried to use the removal of support either to reduce applications to the country or to encourage returns, and none of those attempts has worked.

[Byron Davies (Gower) (Con)]

Q 27 Good morning. I have heard what you have said in answer to the questions about what is proposed in the Bill. You have given your objections to what is in the Bill, so can I ask you what you think is the way forward to effect behavioural change? What is your answer to it?

Mike Kaye: My answer—I have referred to this before—is that you need to resource the system properly so that you get quick, accurate decisions and you enforce them. That is not about spending more money, because it is a spend-to-save policy. With each caseworker you employed, you would actually save money from resolving asylum cases earlier in the process. Once you reduce backlogs, you reduce incentives for people to make unmeritorious claims. You also ensure that you do not get, as John was saying, people who have been in the system for a long time whom you can no longer remove because they get other obligations to stay in this country. That reduces cost and makes the system work better, and it gives it credibility.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne McLaughlin]

Q 45 Is a worker who does not have the right to work in this country—for example, a parent who is made destitute by this legislation—and who is being ruthlessly exploited, or physically or sexually abused, more or less likely to seek protection as a result of these provisions?

Professor Metcalf: I do not know all the details of the legislation, other than what I am talking about in terms of enforcement. I would hope that the director makes the enforcement issue more central to the labour market. If we enforce the minimum standards, a person in those circumstances would be more aware of the possibilities—often, particularly if they are migrants, they are not aware of them—and also more likely to go public. I would have thought that that would be quite a major component of the new director’s work. That basically follows up the question from earlier, because if you can stop the exploitation of the migrants, it is also helpful to British residents.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q 46 Sir David, I imagine that you would agree that labour market exploitation takes place where gangmasters and those exploiting people can create a climate of fear and intimidation. You will be aware that in the States, for example, there is a clear protocol between the Department of Labour and the Department of Homeland Security on firewalls between immigration control and labour market enforcement, to ensure the effectiveness of labour market enforcement and to create a climate in which people can properly express concerns. Is it important that we have such a firewall in the UK?

Professor Metcalf: I have never thought about that. I would need to ponder that a little. In some senses, when we went out in Wisbech, for example, we thought that having a Home Office official and somebody from the Department for Work and Pensions doing national insurance, as well as some people from the local authority and a community policeman from Latvia who spoke Latvian—the issue was about Latvians—made for a very strong enforcement team. So I am not sure, on the ground, when you do major inspections like this, that the firewall would be completely helpful, but I have not thought through the issue. I understand what you are saying in terms of the machinery of Government, but I can see that, on the ground, it would actually be quite helpful to have the different bodies.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q 47 Are you not concerned that those who are being exploited might be less willing to talk about their exploitation if they felt that that threatened their immigration status?

Professor Metcalf: No. I think that that would be the case. I mean, by and large, when we were dealing with this, we were dealing with A8 countries. But in terms of threatening immigration status, we do not want people to be exploited, but if their immigration status is that they should not be here, well, they should not be here.

[The Chair]

Time is again catching us out, so I think this will be the last question. Mims Davies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Byron Davies]

Q 64 What would your definition of harbouring be, out of interest?

Caroline Robinson: Harbouring was placed on the UN human trafficking protocol by the Americans at the time of the travaux préparatoires to the protocol. It was based on the definition of harbouring in US domestic law, which is about retaining individuals in a situation—keeping people in a situation and harbouring in the same situation.

[Paul Blomfield]

Q 65 I am keen to ensure that we learn from other countries, and I am interested to know what the panel thinks we can learn from them about effective labour market enforcement. In particular, I am interested in the line of questioning that I was pursuing earlier, which was about the relationship between immigration officers and labour market enforcement regimes. For example, in the States there are clear firewalls, which the Americans think enhance effective labour market enforcement.

John Miley: I have no view on that, I am afraid.

Caroline Robinson: FLEX has just conducted a review of other countries’ labour inspection frameworks, and we have also been looking at research; we have been conducting research as part of a pan-European project on improved identification of victims of modern slavery. That research in particular showed an interesting finding in the Netherlands, which we had previously held up as a great example of labour inspection; it has a very large labour inspectorate and has conducted work in this area in the past. However, the victims of trafficking we spoke to there said that the confused mandate of the SZW inspectorate caused problems on the ground, so that they were unwilling to come forward. That is because the inspectorate serves two functions: one, to identify undocumented workers; and, two, to identify exploitation.

The concern in our research then was that the people we had spoken to had not come forward to be identified by inspectors at the time of inspection, because of the overlap they saw between the inspectorate and the aliens police, which often conduct joint investigations; and the inspectorate has an overlapping mandate.

We are also concerned that where this overlapping mandate exists, it is quite hard to look for two things at the same time. We have our own example of that in the UK. We have the case R v. Khan, Khan and Khan, from 2010, about nine men who were held in in a restaurant by the Khan family in a situation of trafficking for labour exploitation. Those men were there for four years in situations of exploitation before they were discovered and before those perpetrators were convicted of trafficking. During that time, the judge’s report from the court said, there were regular inspections by Home Office officials. So the documents were in order, but the labour exploitation was not; those people were being held and trafficked for labour exploitation, yet regular Home Office inspections identified nothing. Eventually, they were able to seek help from family members or friends to leave that situation.

Kevin Green: Our take on it is that we are part of a global organisation of recruitment businesses called Staffing Industry Analysts. We recognise the need for strong labour enforcement, and there are lots of examples of where it works well.

One area that we would certainly flag up, and where we need to be careful, is in putting too much of an onus on business to address this issue through some kind of licensing regime. We have looked internationally and we cannot find any example of where we think this adds a huge amount of value. We think that a lot of this activity is about criminal activity, where people are trafficked and in forced labour.

We are very clear that the role is, first, to hold large organisations to account, as I have already talked about, through supply chain management, and, secondly, to have a strong inspectorate, which has the resources to investigate and bring people to bear, rather than creating a huge bureaucracy for a lot of legitimate businesses, where there is more responsibility to produce evidence, and which would add cost and complexity to legitimate businesses. What we are really doing here is trying to find the people who are undertaking this activity of forced labour and human trafficking.

[The Chair]

I am aware that time is getting on, and I also have quite a few Members who still want to ask questions. Undoubtedly, we could talk for a long time about the trafficking issue, but we will move on.

Minister, would you like to ask a question?