Nationality and Borders Bill

Stephen Timms Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making that point, which the Labour party should also recognise. A little earlier, the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) said, “In 11 years, what have you done?” As my right hon. Friend has just pointed out, cumulative efforts have been made—[Interruption.] Perhaps the hon. Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) would like to listen as well. It is important to note that over the years —my right hon. Friend is right, and in fact I am going to refer to a piece of legislation with which she will be familiar—change did come in, but unfortunately, for a range of reasons, the system is now being abused and gamed.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Will the Home Secretary give way?

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

Will the Home Secretary give way?

[Priti Patel]

I will give way shortly.

Our plan will increase the fairness of our system so that we can better protect those who are in need of genuine asylum. That is absolutely right, and it is important that we have that fair principle. However, it will also do something that I sense does not interest the Labour party: it will deter illegal entry to the UK, and, importantly, will break the business model of the smuggling gangs and protect the lives of those whom they are endangering.

[Stephen Timms]

One of the big problems at present is the very long time that it takes to determine asylum applications. Since the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), left the Home Office, the number of case workers has gone up but the number of decisions has gone down in every single year. Why has that catastrophic fall in productivity been allowed to occur?

[Priti Patel]

I shall go on to refer specifically to the time it takes to process cases, but the right hon. Gentleman will also be familiar with the number of appeals involved. This is not just about initial decisions; it is about the system itself, seen from an end-to-end perspective. That is why—and I will go on to make this case as well—in our new plan for immigration, as the right hon. Gentleman and all other Members will be aware, we are speaking about comprehensive end-to-end reform of the asylum system that looks at every single stage.

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[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

With great respect to the right hon. Lady, she was making the point about late filing of evidence, and I was making the point in response—I will come on to it in a moment, and I am quite happy to give way to her again when I do—that the way this Bill is framed, in terms of the direction to give very little weight to late evidence, is very concerning with respect to victims who are unable to talk about their trauma at an early stage in the proceedings. I will come back to that and I will be very happy to give way to her again when I do.

On asylum accommodation, the idea of sending people to offshore processing sites is dehumanising and unconscionable. As the UN Refugee Agency puts it,

“The UK should abandon plans to ‘externalise’ its refugee commitments, which would see it shift responsibility for protecting refugees on to states with less capacity and more refugees.”

Frankly, it is an attempt to distract from Government failure on the housing of those seeking asylum.

[Stephen Timms]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, and I agree with him about this point. Of course, Australia has undertaken offshore processing, and there are terrible stories, which shame Australia, about what has happened to some people in those places. Has he had any indication: where might these offshore places be where asylum applicants could be processed?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that. Unfortunately, I have had no such indication beyond leaks to the media, a fact which will probably not surprise him.

Last month, the High Court judgment on Napier barracks found inadequate health and safety conditions and a failure to screen victims of trafficking and other vulnerabilities. The Home Office continued to house people against the advice of Public Health England, endangering those in the accommodation, staff and the local community. It resulted in what the Court described as an “inevitable” covid outbreak in January 2021, with nearly 200 people testing positive for the virus. No wonder the independent chief inspector of borders and Her Majesty’s inspector of prisons published an emergency report that raised “serious safeguarding concerns”. On asylum accommodation, this Government have failed and failed dangerously.

The idea that this Bill helps those fleeing violence and persecution does not stand up to scrutiny. Let me take one example, because the former Prime Minister raised it a moment or two ago. The Bill says that evidence submitted late without good reason should be given only “minimal weight” by asylum judges. Asylum seekers have been required for the past 19 years to submit arguments and evidence at an early stage. Now it seems we are going to have a situation where judges are directed to have minimal regard to evidence being given late. But there are many reasons why refugees, and particularly victims of human trafficking, cannot provide evidence at an early stage, not least the fact it is difficult for survivors of trauma to talk about their experience immediately, including—and, indeed, especially—women and other survivors of sexual violence. That shows the real failure at the heart of this Bill. It fails victims of human trafficking, and it is a glaring missed opportunity to address the vile crime of people smuggling. Instead, the Government will turn their back on some of the most vulnerable people on Earth.

The Bill changes the law so that helping an asylum seeker will no longer need to be done “for gain” to attract criminal liability. That is what the Bill does, and it is a profound and dangerous change in the law. It could criminalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for saving people at sea, and it seems to take no account whatsoever of the international law of the sea, which requires ships’ captains to assist those who are in distress. Let us be frank about this. Had this measure been in place when Sir Nicholas Winton was rescuing hundreds of children from the holocaust on the Kindertransport, he would have risked being criminalised—[Interruption.] There is no point in Members shaking their heads, because this legislation risks bringing into the scope of the criminal law those who are helping people for humanitarian reasons.

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[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker, and congratulations on taking the Chair. I am delighted to see you there.

Every year or two, we hear from a Conservative Home Secretary that they are going to fix the broken system. The Home Secretary has told us again tonight that the system is broken, and of course she is right: it is broken. All the previous attempts—we have heard about exactly the same things in the past—have not fixed it, and this one will not either. I cannot agree with the thinking in this Bill that making life more miserable for people whose circumstances are already utterly miserable will fix these problems and deter people from their desperate efforts to reach the UK.

Most people think that distinguishing between asylum seekers on the basis of their route to the UK is contrary to the 1951 refugee convention. No doubt that will end up in the courts. I am particularly dismayed by plans to process asylum applications overseas. We have no idea where this will happen. We certainly should know before we agree to this Bill.

Australia has offshore facilities in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, although nobody has been sent there since 2013. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees urged that they should be evacuated because of poor health standards, highlighting in particular the number of suicides there. Those facilities shame Australia, and if we go down the same road, it will shame us too.

The long wait for asylum decisions is a massive problem. I asked the Home Secretary about this earlier. There are 50% more asylum caseworkers now than there were in 2014-15, but the number of decisions they make has gone down every single year in that time. Why has productivity fallen so far? I asked the Home Secretary that and she did not give me an answer. Without fixing the problem, things will just carry on getting worse.

The number waiting more than a year for initial decisions, as we have been reminded repeatedly in this debate, has risen tenfold since 2010. I have seen that in constituency surgeries. People wait four years, and they have no idea when they will hear anything. Sometimes a reply to me is the only way they know they actually are in the Home Office system. They have no other evidence that they are.

I strongly support the proposal of my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) for legally binding targets to process asylum cases more quickly. If people cannot stay, they should be told soon, not, as happens so often at the moment, after years, so that leaving is impractical and in practice hardly ever happens. The current gross inefficiency helps nobody. I hope the House will reject this Bill.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous]

I do not agree with the principle of it: it should be done on notice.

Clause 9 means that individuals will not be able to challenge deprivation of their nationality as they will not be aware or told that they are no longer British citizens, and the time limit for appeal may run out before the individual becomes aware that their rights have been stripped. As Reprieve has pointed out, under these proposals, a person accused of speeding would be afforded more rights than someone at risk of being deprived of their British nationality.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I very much agree with the point that my hon. Friend is making. Is he aware of the very widespread alarm that clause 9 is creating up and down the country?

[Bambos Charalambous]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right.

In recent years, the Government have unlawfully failed to satisfy the simplest of obligations in relation to citizenship deprivation: providing notice to people that they are seeking to deprive them of their rights. Having been found to have unlawfully stripped people of citizenship without telling them, the Home Secretary now seeks to undo these unlawful actions.

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[Richard Graham]

I am grateful for the hon. Member’s comments. I specifically quoted two words that the hon. Member for Streatham used in relation to the clause—she spoke about this “horrible” Bill and this “hostile” Bill. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) will recognise that the clause has been used by Opposition Members, notably the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), to stir up concerns—which, bluntly speaking, I regard as scaremongering—among members of different ethnic communities in our country. To my way of thinking, that is deeply inappropriate.

What we are talking about is the notification of revocation of British nationality to a tiny, tiny number of people who have chosen to behave in a way that is totally against the interests of our country and who have allied themselves with the enemies of this country. All the clause will do is allow for the absence of physical notification where those individuals are either unreachable or in a war zone. So far, so good.

[Stephen Timms]

I am listening carefully to the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but will he take it from me that the alarm about the clause is not because of any stirring from the Opposition, but because of the reality of its content and the Government’s track record?

[Richard Graham]

Over the past 10 or 11 years, I have agreed with the right hon. Gentleman many times on many issues, particularly work and pensions. On this particular point, I am sorry, but I think he is being a little disingenuous about how some of his colleagues are using it to stir up concerns when actually we need to be together as a nation. Where I agree with him is that there is real work for the Government to do—as the Minister knows, because he kindly gave me time on the point yesterday—to communicate much more effectively with Britons across this country about the facts of the legislation, which draw on a right that has been there for the Government for 100 years, since the first world war. Most people—most of our constituents—have no idea about that.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I just want to put on record four things. First, this Bill is an appalling piece of legislation. It is designed to appease the most backward elements in our society and it is designed to chase headlines in the popular media. The attacks on refugees and the attacks on people who support refugees are nothing but appalling and disgusting. The idea that this country has always been a welcoming place for refugees is simply not true. Often, it has been very hostile towards refugees. If we were that welcoming, we would not have so many people who have legitimately sought asylum in Britain living in desperate poverty, because the Home Office cannot be bothered to process their applications, and they are living in penury as a result. It would not be criminalising people who are trying to save lives on our shores, or prosecuting people in the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, or anything else. We should all be very proud of people who demonstrated in memory of those who died off Calais, including the 250 people who attended a demonstration at the Stade in Hastings a couple of weeks ago.

I wish to refer to three parts of the Bill. I absolutely support new clause 2, tabled by the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith). I have been a member, and in the past chair, of the Chagos Islands (British Indian Ocean Territory) all-party group for many years, and I worked with Olivier Bancoult, and many other Chagos islanders. We did wrong to the Chagos islanders in the 1970s and ’80s when they were driven off their land, and we have done wrong by them many times since then. The reason British nationality was offered was that the late Tam Dalyell and I tabled an amendment to previous legislation, to try to get recognition of the rights of Chagos islanders. Unfortunately, the Foreign Office and the Home Office collectively got it wrong, and the new clause corrects a mistake—let us be generous and call it a mistake—that was made many years ago, and will grant security to Chagos islanders living in this country.

I strongly support new clause 8 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy). Nationality fees should be based solely on the cost of processing, not on the Home Office making a vast amount of money out of that. The new clause would help to right what is an intrinsic wrong.

In my remaining 39 seconds, I strongly support amendment 12, tabled by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), about the removal of British nationality. Many of us in the House—probably everybody—has at some point been to a citizenship ceremony at our town hall. They are nice; they are moving occasions. But all that could be for naught. The Home Secretary could simply remove the right of citizenship from someone who has gained it in this country or gained it through their heritage. Such a removal requires the agreement of another country, but people will not get that, and we will end up with stateless people as a result.

[Stephen Timms]

I wish to support new clause 8, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy). The “Barriers to Britishness” report was published a year ago this month, and in his foreword, the Conservative hon. Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa) pointed out that the cost of citizenship in the UK is the highest in the western world, and that

“the combined cost of applying to become a citizen in Australia, Canada, the USA and France still does not add up to the cost of a single application in Britain. The fee of £1,330 is almost four times the cost to the Home Office of processing an application.”

This is a hostile environment for hard-working, law-abiding migrant families, and that is why clause 9 provokes such anxiety.

I know many families on the so-called 10-year route to indefinite leave, which means that two and a half years’ leave to remain at a time needs to be obtained four times, before they can apply for indefinite leave. They pay extortionate fees every time. Sometimes people lose their jobs because they do not have leave to remain between one two-and-a-half-year period ending and the Home Office getting round to granting the next. No recourse to public funds applies throughout that 10-year period—that is the subject of a different amendment that we will debate later.

At the Liaison Committee last year I told the Prime Minister about a family I know. Both parents work, the mother as a teaching assistant and the father in a big international company. The mother’s job continued after lockdown, but the father was laid off. Lockdown happened in one of the gaps between two-and-a-half-year periods, and the father’s employer did not know whether it was allowed to furlough him under the new scheme, so it did not. That family had no recourse to public funds, and all they could do was turn to a foodbank to survive. At the Liaison Committee the Prime Minister said that hard-working, law-abiding families in that position should have help of one kind or another. I very much agree with him, but unfortunately they do not, and every two and a half years they have extortionate visa fees. How do people cope with massive fees? For one family I know, we are talking about £14,000 every two and a half years in order to stay in the UK. For 10 years, they get no child benefit, even if the children are British citizens; no universal credit if somebody loses a job; and, prior to the pandemic, no free school meals if the family hit hard times. That is the hostile environment for law-abiding, hard-working migrant families, which is why families are so worried about what is in this Bill.