Immigration Bill

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

The defences that we have written into the Modern Slavery Act will still apply. Indeed, there are other areas where, if we take action in relation to abuse of certain parts of the system, that defence and that issue of trafficking will continue to apply. I spoke last week of using the so-called Spanish protocol. For example, if someone comes to the United Kingdom from another European Union country and tries to claim asylum, the claim would initially be determined as inadmissible, but if there were evidence that someone had been trafficked, we would look again at the issue. Certainly, we will continue to have defences for those who have been trafficked.

I was talking about the establishment of the new director of labour market enforcement and the consultation document we have issued today. Once we have considered the responses to that consultation, we will strengthen the Bill further.

The Bill will also allow us to make illegal working a criminal offence. That will not only make Britain a less attractive place for people to come and work illegally, but will provide a firmer legal foundation for seizing earnings from illegal working as the proceeds of crime. Most employers obey the law, but we believe that a number of employers are deliberately turning a blind eye and not checking whether their employees have the right to work in the UK. That is not acceptable, so we will introduce tougher sanctions for these employers and make it easier to bring criminal prosecutions against them. We also know that a significant proportion of illegal working happens on licensed premises. Measures in the Bill will ensure that those working illegally or employing illegal workers cannot obtain licences to sell alcohol or run late-night takeaway premises. Immigration officers will also have new powers to close businesses where illegal working continues to take place.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

The creation of the statutory director of labour market enforcement is very welcome, but to whom will he or she be accountable and through what mechanism will he or she report either to Parliament or to the Department?

[Mrs May]

There will be joint accountability to Secretaries of State—to me, as Home Secretary, and to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. That is important, because some of the operation on labour market enforcement takes place in the Home Office through the Gangmasters Licensing Authority and some through bodies in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, so there will be a joint reporting mechanism.

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[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I think that it is universally accepted that the British people want properly controlled immigration. Their objection is to unfair and uncontrolled immigration. This Bill has been dressed up as a powerful response to that demand for effective immigration control, but it is in fact the opposite; it is a sign that the Home Office has given up on doing its job.

Instead of fixing that which is broken—the ports of entry that passengers go through without seeing an immigration officer; the practice, when police officers intercept people who have been smuggled in lorries, of sending them on their way and asking them kindly to present themselves at the Home Office in Croydon; and even appeals where, having refused an application, the Home Office fails to send a representative to defend the decision—the Home Office has instead allowed terrible delays in listing appeals, resulting in people who have no valid claim to remain here staying longer and putting down roots so that they become more difficult to remove.

The Home Office has rejected calls to extend the role and remit of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority so that practical action can be taken to prevent labour exploitation in sectors where we know it exists, such as the hotel trade and construction. Instead, it is delegating the problem to us—to ordinary people and not just employers, who rightly should check the immigration status of people who apply to work for them, in order to protect themselves and their customers. Those employers regularly complain to me that the information on the advice line is at best confusing, and at worst wrong.

We are told that there will be an advice line for some of the new groups who will have to check someone’s immigration status. Banks already have some experience, but landlords will now be expected to refer to an advice line in order to spy on the immigration status of their tenants. In effect, the Bill is setting us all up as snoopers on other people’s immigration status. We know that that is ineffective. Of 75,000 allegations to the Home Office in 2013, there were 4,000 arrests and only 1,000 removals. Even privatised Capita, when given 120,000 records of overstayers, managed to persuade only 1,000 to leave.

I have been advising people about immigration status for over 35 years, but I still need to check with up-to-date experts about what some of my constituents’ entitlements are. The Home Office is not providing the tools that would allow citizens to be sure of the status of someone who might seek services from them. The result is unsurprising, and it is confirmed by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants report on west midlands landlords: people will just stop taking the risk.

Britain, having been a tolerant and welcoming society in which iconic British successes have often been created by refugees and migrants—businesses such as Marks & Spencer and inventions such as the Mini, which was designed here by an Italian—will become a place where people with foreign names and accents face a kind of pass law system in which, in order to play a full part in society, they have to keep proving their status and the fact that they have rights. The MPs who opposed the national ID card system did so on the basis that it was an infringement of civil liberties. The consequence of failing to introduce such a system is that all of us will have to make these checks, and minorities will bear the brunt of infringements of their civil liberties.

[Simon Hoare]

I do not know when the hon. Lady last rented a property or opened a bank account, but when doing so, as British citizens, we are all required to provide information, be it a passport, a utility bill, proof of address or a driving licence, and so on. Surely it is just common sense that when landlords are letting a property these safeguards and checks should be made. They are made on the rest of us, as things stand now.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The point is that if someone has a full British passport, it is very easy to say that they are entitled. The Residential Landlords Association predicts, rightly in my view, that the consequence of this measure will be that people who do not have a British passport, even those who are British—we should remember that some 12 million people in Britain do not carry a passport—will find themselves discriminated against because the landlord thinks that the situation is difficult.

We need to make sure that the only landlords prosecuted are those to whom Ministers have referred, who are sometimes complicit in illegal migration and the exploitation of vulnerable migrant workers. Can the Minister point to a provision saying that only people like the pimps who are exploiting trafficked workers in brothels will be prosecuted but innocent landlords who make a mistake and do not understand the documents will not? I do not believe that this Bill is going to help these women. The clause 8 offence of illegal working will apply to them, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) clearly explained. Will the Minister give specific details about what action he will take to make sure that victims who are coerced by others to work are not criminalised by the offence? Will they have a statutory defence under the Bill? We know that the results of the assessment of landlords experiment will not be available until after this debate, but has he conducted an assessment of the impact of these measures on victims of modern slavery?

This Bill is horribly un-British. It gives immigration officers extreme powers without submitting them to abiding by protections like the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984—protections that police officers have to abide by. It forces people to appeal from overseas, and by doing so ignores the rights of children who will be separated from their parents. The Children’s Commissioner has said that the current arrangements already fail to meet our obligations on children’s rights.

Overseas appeals will not deal with cases such as the one in my constituency of a husband whose documents showed that he lived in Slough while his wife lived in Bradford, so the Home Office said, “This is a marriage of convenience.” In fact, Slough was the only place he could get work, so he was coming down there to work from Monday to Friday and then returning to his family at the weekend. Without an oral hearing, he would not have been able to win his case. He did win it, and the immigration judge praised him for working so hard to support his family. This Bill is going to lead to un-British injustice, and we should reject it.

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[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson). A number of right hon. and hon. Members have made the important point—I am sure that this is neither an intention of the Bill, nor an outcome—about the sensitivity of names with regard to lettings policies. The hon. Member for Belfast East comes from a community where being allocated a house, or indeed given a job, might often have depended upon having a Protestant-sounding or Catholic-sounding name. That is a sensitivity that we should be alert to, as I have little or no doubt Government Front Benchers are.

Let me turn briefly to the reasoned amendment that stands in the name of the Leader of the Opposition and others. I think that this is the first time I have seen a U-turn performed in an amendment. The first two thirds of the amendment are in full praise and support of the Bill, but then it rests its reason why we should not give it a Second Reading on an argument that a report that is to be published

“could cause widespread indirect discrimination”.

I do not think that that is a particularly well argued point from the Opposition. Given the amount of time that they have spent thinking about their position on immigration, I think that we might have expected a little better.

There are some very nasty people out there in our communities, and they have some very nasty views on this sensitive subject, which I have no doubt they will articulate with force and passion from their armchairs and in the saloon bars. But those nasty views are not put forward in this Bill. The Bill does not try to debate—because this is not the kernel of the argument—whether immigration is a good or bad thing, and it does not seek to further or foster racism or discrimination; it seeks purely to find better ways of defining the legal and the illegal. There is no qualitative judgment on an immigrant community the vast majority of whom play a full and active part in British life and are welcomed to our shores.

When my family and I moved house relatively recently, we were assisted by a very hard-working man from Poland. When he discovered what I did for a living, he quaked and said, “You don’t want me here, do you? I’d better go.” I said, “No, not at all.” It is a helpful irony, in many respects, that we are debating this issue on the anniversary of the birth of Lady Thatcher, who did so much to champion the rights of people from the former eastern bloc to come to the west. That free movement of people is something we should celebrate and support. We must understand, however, that it cannot and should not be unfettered. When I stood in the 2010 election—I fought Cardiff South and Penarth, and Cardiff South and Penarth fought back—established members of the immigrant, but very settled, community in Grangetown and Butetown said to me, “For God’s sake, Governments have to get a handle on this because we are starting to feel anxious. We are starting to feel that the Government have lost the plot.” That struck me as a very forceful endorsement of the main thrust of this policy and this Bill.

I am surprised by Labour’s tone with regard to the main thrust of the Bill in trying to clamp down on illegal working and exploitation. This is a matter of human welfare. We have all heard horrible stories of the terrible conditions of people forced to work in this country because they are here illegally and their existence can therefore be abused. It is absolutely right—I hope that it would unify the House—that we should focus on that and try to correct it and remove it from our national life.

I strongly welcome the proposed appeals process, but it will come as no surprise to the Minister that I, and no doubt many in this House, believe that the Home Office needs to up the speed with which it determines these appeals.

I agree with the hon. Member for Belfast East that it is a surprise that a language requirement has not existed in our public sector, and I very much welcome it.

[Anne McLaughlin]

The hon. Gentleman says that a requirement to speak English when working in the front line of public services has not existed until now. Has he ever used a public service and found that the person he is dealing with does not speak English, because I have not?

[Simon Hoare]

It depends at what level. Certainly, within the national health service, you will hear of many patients—constituents in North Dorset have told me this—who often have difficulty communicating because local idioms of language are just missed. To have that core skill—

[Kirsten Oswald]

Thank you very much for giving way. I would just like to be clear that you are not suggesting that only people from North Dorset should be employed in the health services in North Dorset.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Before the hon. Gentleman responds, let me say that I have not yet reprimanded any particular Member for doing this, but now that it has happened several times, I must remind the House that when you use the word “you”, it is in the second person and you are referring to the Chair. It is in primary level 3 English lessons. “You” is the person to whom you are talking, and in here you are talking to the Chair. If you wish to refer to an hon. Member, it is “he”, “she”, or “it”.

[Simon Hoare]

Shall we split the difference, Madam Deputy Speaker, and go for “it”?

Given that my part of Dorset has the highest number of retired people in the country, if we pressed everybody of working age into the national health service we would be very understaffed. This issue goes across the country and, indeed, all parts of the United Kingdom.

Provisions relating to private letting and the banks are a key part of the Bill. Yes, some in the affected sectors—plural—may bleat about it, but the Government are placing an important obligation on their shoulders. This is clearly an issue, because previous Governments have tried to address it, but the Government cannot deal with it by themselves; other agencies and people involved in British commercial and public life need to help deal with illegal immigration.

We are fortunate that the two Ministers who will pilot this Bill through the Committee stage—the Minister for Immigration and the Solicitor General—are humane and compassionate individuals. I have no doubt that they would never put their names to something that they thought would result in some of the Armageddon-like scenes suggested by Labour Members. The Bill addresses a pressing problem in a prudent and pragmatic way. It deserves the support of the House.