Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Tim Loughton and Stuart C McDonald

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 4th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I rise to speak in support of Lords amendment 4B. I was disappointed to hear the Minister dismiss it as just well intentioned. I think it is absolutely essential. With just eight weeks to go before the Dublin arrangements for family reunion fall, we have had the tragic drownings in the channel recently; mercifully, but surprisingly, such cases are rare.

Here we go again. This is the last remaining amendment that has come back from the Lords, and it has done so with a vengeance. It was a big defeat for the Government in the other place, by 320 votes to 242. Lord Dubs has led the charge on this ably and eloquently over many months, and he spoke with huge passion. The debate in the other place was just about financial privilege; as he put it, that

“falls short of being humanitarian and falls short of respecting the opinions of this House.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 October 2020; Vol. 806, c. 1595.]

Many in this House think we must do better, and I find it extraordinary that the Government are still digging their heels in for the sake of about 500 highly vulnerable children.

The Government have produced their own amendment. I have no objection to it; it is perfectly innocuous. It commits to a review of safe and legal routes, and that is welcome. It is the least that can be expected, however, because it is what the Government have promised all along in the light of the welcome overhaul of the immigration system and the continued suspension or non-renewal of previous safe and legal routes. Simply adding the Government’s amendment to the Bill will not guarantee the replacement for the Dublin family reunion scheme that we have been promised for so long—despite the fact that, as the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) has said, there is no negotiating mandate from EU member states.

The amendment gives no timescale for when measures may be introduced, if they are to be. Neither does it give details about how extensive a replacement scheme may be, given that the Government’s separate refugee family reunion scheme is much more restrictive about family members who can reunite. Part 11 of the rules applies only to pre-flight children seeking to reunite primarily with parents, and provisions on reuniting with uncles or aunts, for example, are subject to very strict criteria and high evidential thresholds.

Let us look at those thresholds by considering the ability of a young teenage boy on the Greek islands to reunite with an aunt or uncle in the UK—a case that we raised with the Minister in the Home Affairs Committee this morning. The Minister made it sound as though that would be no problem, but it will not work in practice for most cases. That child would have to apply under rule 319X, which technically allows children to join uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings or any other family member who is not a parent and who has the refugee status of humanitarian protection. However, the requirements that have to be met are very onerous, and there are strict evidential requirements.

The child would be able to apply under 319X, but only if the uncle or aunt is a refugee, not if they are British or have other status, unlike in the Dublin regulations. The child can apply only if the uncle or aunt can maintain and accommodate them. That is a very high threshold, and it is much higher than the one in Dublin. The child can apply only if they can show that

“there are serious and compelling family or other considerations which make exclusion of the child undesirable”—

that is a very high test that is hard to meet, and there is no such test under the Dublin regulations—

“and suitable arrangements have been made for the child’s care”.

The child can apply only if the uncle or aunt can afford the £388 fee to make the application. The uncle or aunt cannot be a refugee with indefinite leave to remain; they must only have limited leave to remain as a refugee. That is an absurdly high bar to meet, and I suspect the Minister knows it. Frankly, it is no substitute for the safe and legal routes that are available now, which have worked well and have been responsible for saving hundreds of highly vulnerable children.

That was the only alternative scheme that the Minister could offer the Home Affairs Committee this morning. He claimed that some 7,400 refugees—it fell to one of the officials to look this up on the computer in front of them—had been issued family reunion visas in the year to March 2020. But they are from outside the EU. The scheme is welcome, as is the fact that we have brought those people in. The Government are to be applauded for targeting some of the most vulnerable families and children, who are genuine refugees from some really dangerous parts of the world, and that has worked exceedingly well. They are all from outside the EU, however, so the scheme does absolutely nothing for the children we are talking about. As things stand, on 1 January 2021, an unaccompanied child in a squalid French refugee camp or on the streets of Italy,  or any of the 1,600 unaccompanied children on the Greek island of Lesbos—where a refugee camp recently burned down, as the hon. Member for Halifax mentioned —or a child orphaned because their parents were killed by a bomb in Syria, by terrorists in Afghanistan, or by disease or famine in sub-Saharan Africa, will have no obvious mainstream means of applying to join a last remaining sibling, aunt, or other relative in the UK. Safe Passage, to which I pay great tribute for its work on this issue, says that some 40% of the cases that it supports in France are of siblings trying to reunite. That is the reality.

Given that, I am afraid that all the assurances given by the Minister at the Dispatch Box and at this morning’s session of the Home Affairs Committee pale into absolute insignificance and irrelevance. I have set out what the position will be on 1 January 2021, in eight weeks’ time, unless a deal is negotiated and agreed before then—and a deal on a Dublin replacement is not even being discussed at the moment.

I have asked previously for a serious replacement for Dublin III, and a Dubs 2 scheme; the previous Dubs scheme did an extraordinary job of rescuing 480 very vulnerable unaccompanied children from dangerous parts of the world. I ask the Government, as a last-ditch effort to show their good will and commitment to a practical scheme that we know works, to roll over the terms of Dublin, at least until a new scheme is in place. I also ask them to give the go-ahead to the more than 30 councils across the country that have offered places to over 1,400 refugees like these refugee children, and to provide the financing for that.

We are not talking about a huge number of children. We are, however, talking about some of the most vulnerable children, who find themselves in hopeless and dangerous circumstances through no fault of their own—the sort of children we have a proud record of helping, and the sort of children whom we helped through the Dublin scheme, and can continue to help if the Government will make this concession. The Lords amendments would achieve that. Let us not let those children down.

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). We provide safe, legal routes so that fewer people feel compelled to try the more dangerous alternatives, with all the tragic consequences that they can entail, as we saw recently. The simple fact that should determine how we vote tonight is this: if the Government successfully resist Lord Dubs’s amendment, there will be fewer, not more, safe, legal routes for people from the start of January.

Bilateral agreements that might replace some features of Dublin are months, if not years, away. There is no prospect of a negotiated settlement with the EU on this issue by the end of December, so in just a few weeks, people who could previously have reunited with family members in the UK will not be able to. They will turn to people traffickers and smugglers instead, or attempt other dangerous crossings themselves.

The Minister has pointed to the domestic immigration rules on family reunion. While some who will lose rights under Dublin will be able to use those rules, very many will not. Those domestic rules are indeed very different from Dublin and more restricted in scope, and often include significantly more difficult legal tests and evidential hurdles, as the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham set out.

I think the Minister knows that the domestic rules are not a substitute for Dublin, so he pointed to the possibility of a review. I thank him for speaking to me about that earlier this week; we will engage constructively with that, but the offer of a review is too little, too late. It simply holds out the possibility that something might appear further down the line to fill the gap left by the loss of the Dublin rights. First, we should be sceptical about whether anything robust enough will ever appear. Even the Government’s proposal to the EU for a post-transition successor to Dublin was in reality a significant watering down of Dublin, under which children’s rights would be subject to the Government’s discretion and appeal rights would be abolished, while other individuals would lose their rights altogether.

Secondly, even if the Government were to come up with something acceptable down the line after this review, the gap between the start of January and that replacement appearing will be hugely damaging in itself. People are not going to wait to see what might happen. From January, with the safe Dublin route closed, more vulnerable people in Europe with family here in the UK will be tempted by and driven towards the traffickers and the dangerous routes. If the Government want a sensible compromise, and it has already been suggested a couple of times in this debate, at the very least they should offer to keep the Dublin routes open for now until the promised review takes place, and alternative proposals come forward and are approved.

British Citizenship Fees: Children

Debate between Tim Loughton and Stuart C McDonald

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Stuart C. McDonald]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention—I shall be very happy to champion the cause of British citizenship for the next few years at least. He makes the absolutely valid point that, on the basis of international comparisons, the amount that we charge children is exorbitant. It does not compare well at all.

The Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens has done fantastic work in challenging the Home Office fees on behalf of kids and even in helping to secure financial support from generous donors willing to help kids to achieve citizenship through donations, although it is outrageous that kids should have to look to charity to secure their citizenship. That organisation is fantastically well placed to speak about the impact on British kids of being denied formal British citizenship. The kids grow up blissfully unaware that they are not, unlike their peers, British citizens. They do not realise that until they cannot join their peers on a school trip abroad or they apply for university and suddenly are faced with paying overseas fees. Without British citizenship—they are just like the Windrush generation in a sense—these children are made subject to immigration control and potentially the hostile or compliant environment, which means that they run the risk of being refused access to healthcare, employment, education, social assistance and housing. There is even the possibility of being detained, removed from and excluded from their own country altogether. In fact, that was mentioned in the most recent report by Stephen Shaw.

The PRCBC has provided a number of case studies—I suspect that hon. Members have access to them—highlighting individual stories. I will mention just one. May was brought to the UK when she was two months old and she has never left the country. She was first taken into care when aged five. A full care order was made later. She should have been registered as a British citizen under section 3 of the British Nationality Act while she was in care, but she was not, and she lost the opportunity when she turned 18. May gave birth to Heather and was later granted indefinite leave to remain, but Heather was not born British, because at the time of her birth her mother was neither British nor settled. Heather now has an entitlement to register as British under section 1 of the 1981 Act because of the settled status that her mother subsequently acquired, but her mother simply cannot afford the £1,012 fee to register her daughter as British. Heather was born and brought up in Britain. She knows no other country. She is to all intents and purposes British. She is entitled to British citizenship—she should not be required to pay more than £1,000 to access that entitlement—and cannot access it.

Tens of thousands of British-born children face similar issues. Surely that is contrary to the Government’s duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and to the requirement that children’s best interests be a primary consideration in all actions concerning them.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I congratulate my fellow member of the Select Committee on Home Affairs on bringing up this very important issue. Is he aware of two things? First, the very expensive fees for all sorts of visa and citizenship arrangements in this country are having repercussions. For example, I have just had to pay out £465 for my daughter to study for a few months in Brazil—that form of visa is most expensive for UK citizens. Secondly, does he agree that, far from the Home Office making a substantial profit out of vulnerable children, there should be no fee at all in the case of children in the care system?

Immigration Bill

Debate between Tim Loughton and Stuart C McDonald

Monday 25th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

We have heard some passionate speeches about unimaginably difficult conditions, but we talk as if the United Kingdom is the only country capable of doing something about the crisis. We forget that the United Kingdom taxpayer has given more than the rest of the European Union together to help Syrian refugees. Does the hon. Gentleman not think that if these circumstances existed in the United Kingdom, our social services would have taken care of those children? Does he not think that other European countries could be doing a rather better job of looking after those children who happen to be within their borders?

[Stuart C. McDonald]

I do not disagree with very much that the hon. Gentleman, my colleague on the Home Affairs Committee, says. I agree that other European countries must step up to the plate. The Save the Children proposal is based on a calculation of what our fair share as a European Union member would be: it was 11.5% of the total number of unaccompanied children at that time. It fully comprehends that other EU member states have to take their share.

I shall move on now to amendment 60, which gives us the chance to protect yet another vulnerable group, overseas domestic workers. Such workers frequently come from backgrounds of extreme poverty and are dependent on their employer for both accommodation and wages. They are often women with limited formal education. Significant numbers of them suffer from mental illness resulting from past traumas, and many have learned or have been conditioned to distrust authorities.

Again, the Lords amendment is modest. The Government asked for an independent review by James Ewins QC. All we are asking for is that Mr Ewins’s recommendations be fully implemented. The Government have moved part of the way, which is very welcome, including what the Minister said today, which is encouraging, but they still have to move further. Their insistence on going through the national referral mechanism as a condition of leave beyond the initial six months is, in our view, wrong, and although provision of information is right and welcome, it is not sufficient in itself.

As well as providing a legal right to change employer, we can and must make that right one that can realistically be exercised by all who are at risk, as Mr Ewins suggested. The right should be dependent not on going through the slow and possibly quite intimidating gamble of the national referral mechanism, but simply on notifying the Home Office, as was said earlier in the debate. As no one will employ an overseas domestic worker with a few weeks or months left on their visa, Mr Ewins was clear that extensions had to be available to all, whether they were going through the mechanism or not, for up to two years beyond the original visa. That was what he described as

“the minimum required to give effective protection to those overseas domestic workers who are being abused while in the UK”.

That is the least we should deliver.

The SNP also fully supports amendment 84, which moves us closer to an effective 28-day time limit on immigration detention. The reasons we need such a limit have been set out at length in recent debates, including an excellent Backbench Business debate, in which Members from both sides of the House spoke with one voice in support of the conclusions reached by the all-party parliamentary groups on migration and refugees. Compulsory judicial oversight is also welcome. Often those with the most to gain from a legal challenge are the least likely to understand or to be able to access judicial processes, whether because of language, educational or mental health issues.

With due respect, the Government’s amendment in lieu is a non-starter. A single, guaranteed bail hearing every six months is simply not an acceptable level of judicial oversight for SNP Members. It is not a worthwhile time limit in any sense of the word, and it seeks to shift the burden of proof back on to the detainee. For these reasons, the Government’s amendment in lieu is simply not in the ballpark of what we would consider appropriate.