No Recourse to Public Funds

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Thursday 8th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

I would like to remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice in order to support the new call list system and to ensure that social distancing can be respected. Members should sanitise their microphones before they use them, and please respect the one-way system around the room as you leave. Members should speak only from the horseshoe, and they can speak only if they are on the call list. This applies even if debates are undersubscribed. Members cannot join the debate if they are not on the call list. Members are not expected to remain for the wind-ups. I remind hon. Members that there is less of an expectation that they stay for the next two speeches once they have spoken; this is to help manage attendance in the room. Members may wish to stay beyond their speech, but they should be aware that doing so might prevent Members in seats in the Public Gallery—there are none there today, so fret not on that front—from moving to a seat on the horseshoe.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered No Recourse to Public Funds.

I begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for facilitating the debate in our first week back in Westminster Hall. It is great to be back, and it is very good to see you in the chair, Ms Nokes. I am very pleased to see the Members who have come to take part in the debate, and I am pleased to see the Minister in his place as well. I particularly want to thank the hon. Members for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) and for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) for their help in applying for the debate.

In a Liaison Committee hearing on 27 May, I told the Prime Minister about a couple in my constituency. Both of them work and they have two children, both born in the UK and holding British passports. The husband’s employer did not put him on the job retention scheme, so he had no income. His wife was still working, but her income was less than their rent. They have leave to remain in the UK but no recourse to public funds, so they could not get any help at all—a hard-working, law- abiding family being forced into destitution. I explained that to the Prime Minister, and he responded:

“Clearly people who have worked hard for this country, who live and work here, should have support of one kind or another”.

In my view, the Prime Minister is absolutely right: they should have support of some kind. Unfortunately, however, the Prime Minister’s view is not the policy of the Government.

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

May I ask my right hon. Friend whether that suggests to him that the Prime Minister has probably not an advice surgery in a very long time? Does my right hon. Friend think that any London MP would be unacquainted with the facts of no recourse to public funds?

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[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Any London MP who has done an advice surgery in the recent past would be very familiar with this issue. Under the “no recourse to public funds” policy, the family I spoke of and thousands of others were getting no help at all.

Last Friday I visited the Deptford warehouse of the remarkable charity FareShare, which gathers surplus food from farms and supermarkets and distributes it to food banks and other charities. Before the pandemic, they were sending 1 tonne of food to my borough, Newham, every week. Now, they are sending 20 tonnes every week. Around a third of that increase, from 1 tonne to 20, is about no recourse to public funds. A large number of hard-working, law-abiding families have no income, cannot afford to buy food and are therefore dependent on those charities.

I am full of admiration for all the organisations in our borough that have risen to the enormous challenge, including Bonny Downs Baptist church, Bonny Downs community association, City chapel, Ibrahim mosque in Plaistow, Mana Park Christian centre, Highway Vineyard church, Newham Community Project, the Magpie Project and Alternatives Trust East London—all of them supported extremely ably by Andy Gold and the Newham public health team.

Some people in Government have done the right thing. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government agreed at the start to accommodate street homeless people at public expense on public health grounds, although it is being reported now that they are starting to receive eviction notices. The Department for Education agreed that children in families with no recourse to public funds would be eligible for free school meals, contrary to previous policy. That has been a lifeline, especially since, thanks to Marcus Rashford, those families received meal vouchers for their children throughout the summer holiday. I commend that Department for doing the right thing.

The Home Office, however, has not done the right thing. The Home Affairs Committee and the Work and Pensions Committee, which I chair, both unanimously called for the no recourse to public funds restriction to be suspended for the duration of the pandemic, but the Home Office has not budged. It insists that families must be facing destitution before they can apply for an exemption from the restriction. Previously, families had to be actually destitute, rather than facing destitution. A Court of Appeal case about an eight-year-old boy who had been sleeping rough because of the “no recourse to public funds” policy forced the Home Office, greatly against its wishes, to make the policy less draconian than it previously was, although it remains pretty draconian. Those who apply for an exemption have to wait for a month on average for the Home Office to get around to granting it. I spoke to a family that the Home Office had kept waiting for four months. The whole set-up is a disgrace.

In May, the Prime Minister said to me:

“I will find out how many there are in that position”.

That was a helpful offer. Unfortunately, he has not been able to keep that promise because the Home Office will not tell him. There is extraordinary unwillingness on the part of the Home Office to answer straightforward parliamentary questions on no recourse to public funds. I always thought, perhaps naively, that Departments have an obligation to answer straightforward parliamentary questions. That is clearly not the Home Office view.

The Home Office says that it does not know how many people have leave to remain with no recourse to public funds. I understand that it does not know how many people have left the country after having that condition attached to their status. Hon. Members might think that the Home Office could produce an estimate, but it is not willing to do so. Fortunately, others have. Based on work by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, Citizens Advice recently estimated that 1.4 million people in the UK have leave to remain but no recourse to public funds, including families and 175,000 children.

Of course, the Home Office does know how many people it applies no recourse to public funds to each year. I asked a series of questions before summer about that, but the Minister refused to provide a substantive answer to any of them. His colleague, the Immigration Minister, answered a whole series of questions with a single meaningless answer. On 20 May, I asked:

“how many people were given leave to remain in the UK subject to the no recourse to public funds condition in 2019.”

I asked for a number. On 2 June, the Minister’s colleague replied:

“The information you have requested is not assured to the standard required by ONS for publication and as it would be too costly to do so, we are unable to provide it.”

In other words, “We’re not interested in answering your question.”

I complained about that answer to the UK Statistics Authority, and it upheld my complaint. The correspondence is on its website. The Home Office head of statistics responded on 3 July. His letter accepted that that answer was inadequate, and he said that the reason that it was inadequate because no statistician had cleared it. Well, I suppose that clears the statisticians of guilt, but the Immigration Minister saw it and put his name to it. How on earth was he prepared to put his name to such a hopeless answer to a straightforward parliamentary question?

I say this to the Minister: Ministers have constitutional responsibilities to Parliament. It is not good enough for a Minister of the Crown to sign off a completely hopeless answer like that simply because—I don’t know—somebody answering to Dominic Cummings has instructed him to do so. Ministers in the Home Office need to start fulfilling their responsibilities and providing answers to straightforward questions.

The letter from the Home Office head of statistics said they could not answer how many people were given leave to remain in the UK subject to NRPF in 2019, because

“Home Office administrative data only captures information on whether visas are subject to NRPF conditions for in-country extensions.”

I have since asked twice in how many in-country extensions in 2019 people were given leave to remain with no recourse to public funds. From the head of statistics who had the information, answer came there none.

In response to the Windrush scandal, the Home Office has just published its comprehensive improvement plan. Theme number four of five is openness to scrutiny— that will be the day. Can we at least dare to hope that Home Office Ministers might at least stop refusing to answer basic, straightforward parliamentary questions? On how many people were in such a situation, the Prime Minister eventually said that the Home Secretary would write to the Liaison Committee with an answer. She did so but provided no useful information. As such, I am grateful to the Chair of the Liaison Committee, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), for writing the Home Secretary a letter yesterday, also signed by myself as Chair of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), who I am delighted to see in her place this afternoon. In it, we asked to meet the Home Secretary to discuss her failure to provide basic information that the Home Office head of statistics has confirmed the Department holds, but that for some completely unknown reason Ministers are unwilling to provide. Not having the data means not being able to evaluate the policy. That is, as the Windrush lessons learned review pointed out, a large part of the problem of why the Windrush scandal occurred. Now, we are heading down exactly the same tracks with this.

I will make two final points. Among 1.4 million or so people with leave to remain but no recourse to public funds is a large group of overseas students. Many among them were working to support themselves through their studies. The pandemic has ended their work, or their families back home have also been affected by the pandemic, so support from them has dried up. People from overseas studying in the UK do not expect to claim benefits. However, I do not believe it is in Britain’s long-term interests to force into utter destitution such a large number of those who have chosen Britain of all the countries they could have chosen in which to study, often investing their family life savings to do so. Certainly, we need the universities to be flexible and supportive to students struggling to pay fees in this academic year. We want those students to be friends of Britain for life in their own countries. The way we support or fail to support them now will be key. At the moment, we are giving them no support at all.

The Government line over the past six months has been that no recourse to public funds is okay because people could apply to the job retention scheme or the self-employed income support scheme. Of course, millions of UK citizens have been ineligible for those two schemes, which is why 3 million people have had to apply for universal credit in the past six months. People with no recourse to public funds are barred from doing that. There is no safety net for them at all. It is true, though, that some with no recourse to public funds have been supported by one of the Government pandemic schemes. In fact, the family I told the Prime Minister about in May was eventually able to benefit from the job retention scheme. However, those schemes finish at the end of this month. A whole new cohort of working people will have no job, and if no recourse to public funds is attached to their immigration status, there will be no safety net for those hard-working, law-abiding families. Banned from universal credit, foodbanks will be their only option to survive. If they do find work, they cannot claim the £500 track and trace support payment, so if they get covid they will be forced to carry on working and will be a risk to public health.

Now, more than ever, the Government need to deliver what the Prime Minister said. Those hard-working, law-abiding families who have been contributing to the UK should have support of one kind or another. Suspend no recourse to public funds.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

I am not proposing a formal time limit, but you all have the beauty of a published call list, so you will know that a number of speakers want to speak. If Members could stick to about six minutes that would be appreciated.

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[Meg Hillier]

Absolutely, and I will touch on that at the end. That is a very significant issue. We have talked a lot about children today, and we are in danger of putting a whole generation on the wrong side of everything. They were often born here, or arrived here as young people, and all they want to do is contribute.

On the face of it, it does not sound wrong. People who come to this country should pay their way; we would expect that if we went to visit other countries—but life is not as simple as that. Many of my constituents are in very low-paid work. As my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) said, they are often in low-paid, zero-hours contract jobs. Actually, in my constituency, they are often in good, well-paid jobs. I have nurses, teachers and others who are in jobs that pay well but not enough to live in London. It is very difficult. In my constituency, and probably across the whole of the south-east of England—I do not have up-to-date figures—people cannot rent a three or four-bedroom property under the housing benefit cap. Those people are not necessarily claiming housing benefit, but the costs of renting are too high to pay for out of their wage packet.

What happens is that people live with family and friends, and I have many constituents who do that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden said, if these pictures were shown in the media, people would not believe it. People are living in one room with another family member living in the other room, because they just cannot afford the housing costs. They have no recourse to public funds, and they cannot get a penny of housing benefit to help towards that. Let us not forget that most housing benefit goes to people in work. That is another issue, but it is a systemic sign that the whole housing system is bust. That is a debate for another day—possibly the same Members might wish to contribute.

Overcrowding is a big health risk at the best of times, and we are not in the best of times. A concern of mine during the covid pandemic is that those double households are trapped. I had a very distressed grandmother come to see me at a surgery. I had been to visit the family, and they had been to see me before. She loves her daughter and granddaughter, but they cannot move out of their one-bedroom flat because they have no recourse to public funds, and mum is a nurse. The grandmother came to see me and said, “When will we get housing? How will we get housing?” She came to see me privately because she did not want to tell her daughter how hard it was for her to share her small home with her beloved family. These are small flats, and they are often very overcrowded.

As others have highlighted, councils are spending a lot of money on this. In 2018-19, 59 councils were spending £47.5 million a year on service provision to people with no recourse to public funds. That was before coronavirus, and some of those people are being affected now. I want to highlight an individual case—we all have so many. One of my constituents has two children, and her late father was British. She is working, but because she has no recourse to public funds, she cannot claim tax credits, child benefit or housing benefit. That has had a very big effect on her, and is having an impact on her children. She is not sure, and nor am I, how much longer she will be able to cope.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden highlighted the issue of cost-shunting, which the Public Accounts Committee talks about all the time. There are costs to society, the taxpayer and, of course, individuals. I want to highlight the taxpayer costs to the Minister, because that should bite if nothing else does. So much of the system is having to pay for people who cannot pay their own way because they have no recourse to public funds. They are working people for the most part. They want to work, and they might just have hit a rocky time.

[Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend made a point in passing that I want to highlight. I do not know whether it is well known, but we are talking about a large number of British-born children whose parents cannot claim child benefit for them. I do not think most people know that is the case, but it is.

[Meg Hillier]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, for that intervention, because that is correct. People assume that there is a safety net there—we all assume a lot of things about other people’s lives in a general way, because people do not always live that path themselves—but many of our constituents do not have a penny coming in, even though their children are British. It is the main householder who affected. There is a really big cost and those children are growing up in increased poverty as a result.

If we want to invest in the future of our country, we must consider these young people with their driven parents—parents who came here, who are working, who want to work and want to contribute, and anyone would say that they have the right work ethic to ensure that their children will also achieve—because they are living in much more difficult circumstances than they need to. The cost of any public funding will not suddenly fund their lifestyles; it is just going to help them to keep afloat, to keep their housing and to keep playing their active role as working members of society.

I will touch on the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) made about people who cannot afford the fees; we talked a bit about that. I pay tribute to my constituent, Chrisann Jarrett, and to We Belong, which is a group of young people who are taking the long route for citizenship; some are from families with no recourse to public funds, but there is a wider point that I raise here, too. These people are young, gifted and talented, and they came here as young children. They want to contribute to this society; they are not going to live anywhere else. The countries that their parents were born in are of interest to them, but usually they cannot visit them because they do not have citizenship. However, they have to pay these repeated fees. Often, they never got citizenship early on because their parents simply could not afford even to start them on that process. Then they find that they cannot go to university and they are left sitting around, kicking their heels.

In July, the Home Secretary said—very genuinely, I feel, and I say that to the Minister—when she made her latest statement on Windrush that she wanted to root out any unequal treatment in her Department, and that she wanted to see a root-and-branch review of how it treated people. I took her at her word on that; she stood there, said that, and I believed that she meant it. If she really means it, this group that I have talked about—We Belong, which I believe she has met or is about to meet—are really good advocates for this. Surely, however, if she really believes what she said, she needs to look at no recourse to public funds, because if we look at the profile of the people who are affected by that, we see that it does not meet the equality standards that she professes to support.

In summary, I hope that the Minister will answer the detailed questions on the Home Office statistics. Does he have the statistics? If they are available, why can we not see them? If he does not have those statistics, can he tell us how he will get hold of them, so that he can make sure that he and the Home Office are making policy decisions based on proper evidence and data?

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[Chris Philp]

Let me finish the point and I will give way in a moment. The success rate for those applications is very high. The most recent figures, which I think the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) has seen, show a success rate of 89% for those applications. That has increased in the last year. It was 79% and it is now 89%, and the time taken to make those decisions on average is 30 days—not quite five weeks, but 30 days.

The hon. Member for Brent North said, “Well, these are often quite pressing circumstances. What can be done to make that decision, which is successful in 89% of cases, faster?”. That is an entirely reasonable question. One of the actions I will take away from this afternoon’s session is to probe a little further on the question of speed. Someone mentioned 48 hours. Clearly, we have to make sure that people qualify for the condition to be lifted, and I would suspect 48 hours would not afford time to do that, but I will certainly see if anything can be done to expedite it, for the reasons the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

On the topic of children, the shadow Minister talked about free school meals, and I entirely sympathise with her point. I know that the Department for Education is conducting a review into the interaction of NRPF and free school meals. I hope it will report back on the result of that review as quickly as possible, because I understand entirely the hon. Lady’s point.

I am conscious of time, so perhaps I ought to say a quick word about data. I should congratulate the right hon. Member for East Ham on his terrier-like tenacity on the question of data. In relation to the total number of people who are subject to the NRPF condition, we do not hold that data, as has been explained previously. There are a couple of issues. First, in relation to visa applications made out of country, the data is not recorded.

Secondly, there is obviously a continual coming and going of people—it includes people who are here on holiday visas and so on, who come and go the whole time. Some come and go via the common travel area, or via Ireland, so we do not have an exit check. That number is a moving feast. It includes people who come here on holiday for two weeks and then go. The right hon. Gentleman said that in relation to people who had made an in-country visa application, he had received a reply saying that that data was collected and held, but he had not received any further information.

[Stephen Timms]

The letter from the Home Office chief statistician dated 3 July, which is on the UK Statistics Authority website, states:

“Home Office administrative data only captures information on whether visas are subject to NRPF conditions for in-country extensions.”

I have asked how many there are, but received no answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Timms]

We have had an excellent debate. I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to it and to the Minister for listening and for the offers that he has made.

The big expansion of no recourse to public funds came in 2012. It was an integral part of the hostile environment, or the “compliant environment” as it is now called, and the families we are talking about are, as others have said, largely on a 10-year route to indefinite leave. Frequently, they have been here for years beforehand. Nobody is suggesting that they are ever going to leave. The children have British citizenship. The people are working and pay taxes, yet they have no recourse to public funds throughout those 10 years.

I am grateful to the Minister for his offer to answer my question. I tabled it this morning for the fourth time, so now he has the perfect opportunity to go away, do the job he is expected to do, fulfil his responsibilities and answer the question.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered No Recourse to Public Funds.

[Ian Paisley (in the Chair)]

In order to allow the safe exit of hon. Members and the entry of those participating in the next item of business, I will suspend the sitting for two minutes.