Immigration Bill

Debate between Sarah Teather and Anne Main

Thursday 30th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Teather]

I am trying to explain why I have tabled my amendments to the clause, as amendments 2 to 5 relate directly to clause 14, as do my other amendments. I cannot explain them without referring to clause 14 to clarify, I am afraid.

A lot of people might be under a misapprehension, as regards the redrafting of what is in the public interest, that the measure will only apply to a very small group of foreign national prisoners. My point is that it will apply to anybody who attempts to make an article 8 appeal.

Let me make a point about new clause 15 that follows on directly from those points. It seeks to move things in the opposite direction from the proposals I have been trying to make. I find it slightly astonishing that any hon. Member would put their name to something that states that it is okay to cause serious harm to children, to cause manifest harm to children and to cause overwhelming harm to children, and that it is only not okay to cause manifest and overwhelming harm to children. Indeed, it has to be the child of the particular individual concerned and it is otherwise fine to cause manifest and overwhelming harm to any child. I am absolutely astonished that hon. Members think that that is okay.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

As a Member who put her name to the clause that the hon. Lady is disputing, may I say that if she looks at the intent behind it, she will see that Members such as me and others across the House wish to see the greater good of the population trump the good of the individual? She is losing sight of other people who may be harmed, who might be other people’s children.

[Sarah Teather]

I think I probably do not share her utilitarian view of what the greater good is. I probably have a slightly different view about the common good and do not think that that includes causing serious or manifest or overwhelming harm to children. That is why the UK is a signatory to the UNCRC, and why we believe that the best interests of children should always take prime consideration and that the law should be blind in that regard, irrespective of someone’s immigration status. It would be a sad day if the House legislated to say that it is okay to cause serious harm to children and indeed that it is okay to do that in order to pacify a Conservative party rebellion. That is not a good reason for legislating.

Immigration Bill

Debate between Sarah Teather and Anne Main

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Teather]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point. These are the sort of people I worry will fall foul of the Bill because they struggle to provide their documentation. We know that there are a lot of people who fall through the net when they are first given refugee status and end up destitute. They make up the bulk of the people whom the British Red Cross deals with in terms of food parcels because they cannot prove their entitlement to benefits. A significant number of people have the right to stay but will struggle to be able to prove it.

Personally, I have never seen an organisation more in need of checks and balances on its own use of power than the Home Office or, indeed, its predecessor, the Border Agency. Instead, the Bill gives powers that it is not equipped, nor frankly able, to meet and powers that it cannot be relied upon to exercise properly. Where it exceeds or abuses its power, or simply fails to do the job, it will be shielded from challenge in many cases and there will be no redress whatever. The implications of the Bill cannot be understood without also placing it in the wider context of legal aid changes and proposals to restrict judicial review.

The problem is that the impact on individual lives gets lost in the grandstanding of headlines. When immigration is all about reducing numbers on a spreadsheet to meet an arbitrary cap or creating arbitrary political dividing lines and traps for opponents to fall into, the subjects of the legislation—the human beings at the centre of it—are somehow invisible. I am weary of a politics that creates and defines enemies in order to demonstrate potency but, frankly, it angers me to see politics do that at the expense of those who have the least power to change their own futures. All three Front Benches, I am afraid, are at it, including my own, scrabbling over the mantle of toughness, chasing opinion polls and, in some cases, wilfully whipping up fear and loathing in the process. It is staggeringly careless with lives and with community relationships that have been built up over a long time.

I am afraid that whatever the damage that is done by the detail of the Bill when, I dare say, it is ultimately passed, some of the worst damage has been done in our debate in the lead-up to it. The language with which this was brought forward is what really causes the damage to community relations. I remind hon. Members of the debate we had earlier about the Home Office vans. That is a case in point; it had almost no effect on the ground except to whip up real tension between communities. My constituency was one of those areas that was targeted by the vans.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I can understand the passion with which the hon. Lady is speaking and she is making a very sensitive point, but does she agree that there is an element to this that involves the prevention of exploitation of vulnerable people who are brought in illegally, treated badly and fall outside the system? If their pimps and traffickers are unable to do that because we have tougher immigration laws, we will free those people from being put in that awful position. I had a young lady brought to me whose passport had been taken off her. If people can come to our country legally, it will stop those who want to be able to take advantage of them outside the system.