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

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Holly Lynch

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 30th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. We spoke in favour of the “Lift the Ban” campaign, which would have given asylum seekers the right to work after six months of not receiving a decision on their asylum claims. He is absolutely right that that would restore a degree of dignity to those in the system who have skills and are willing to work and want to contribute to the communities that they call their new homes. He is right to raise that important point.

On new clause 14, we very much welcome the Government’s commitment to scrap the NHS surcharge for migrant health and care workers. However, given that the commitment was made more than a month ago and that, to date, no progress as to how it will be delivered has been forthcoming, we have tabled new clause 14, which has, once again, been crafted to sit within the scope of this legislation and would make a start on enshrining the commitment in law.

The fee was described as “appalling, immoral and monstrous” by Lord Patten, the former Conservative party chairman. The general secretary for the Royal College of Nursing, Dame Donna Kinnair, said,

“it is a shame it took this pandemic for the government to see sense.”

The British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Physicians and Unison have all written to the Prime Minister to ask for practical clarification on his commitment. I also asked the Minister at Committee stage for an update on rolling out the policy change, but we are no nearer to having any insight into what progress, if any, has been made.

We worked with EveryDoctor, the doctor-led campaigning organisation to reach out to the 25,000-plus doctors on their Facebook group. It started a poll on Friday asking doctors to let it know if they had had to pay the immigration health surcharge since 21 May. So far, we have heard back from 55 doctors—all 55 have had to pay the charge.

I spoke to three of those doctors this morning. I thank them for their service to the NHS in our hour of need. Upon hearing their stories of what we make them go through in order to stay in this country and work in our NHS, I was genuinely embarrassed. They have each changed their roles within the NHS over the last three months. The automatic visa extension only covers those who are in the same job. If someone is moving to or from a 12-month specialist training post, for example, which is common in the NHS, they need to apply for a new visa, as they will be transferring sponsor, even though the move is within the NHS. They will not get a new visa without first paying the health surcharge.

I heard from Dr Olivia Misquitta, who is switching to a training placement role from paediatrics and who has been asked to pay the health surcharge twice in seven months—the last time being just last week, on 24 June. She hopes that eventually she will be refunded. I also heard from Dr Ahmed Bani Sadara, from Pakistan, who is working in orthopaedics but starts his GP training in August. His change in visa means that, on 1 June, he had to pay the health surcharge for himself, his wife and his six-month-old daughter, having already been asked to pay the charge for his daughter when she was born in this country just six months ago.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that social care workers and NHS porters and cleaners—those who do some of the most important jobs on the covid frontline—have not been included in the free visa extension and, as a result, are also being pressured to pay the immigration surcharge? Does she agree that the free visa extension ought to be extended to cover the lowest paid staff in the NHS and social care?

[Holly Lynch]

I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend. In her capacity as Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, she has pushed for this issue a great deal, and I commend her for that work. I agree with her wholeheartedly.

In the long term, we need to look at the sponsorship issue. If medical professionals had simply the NHS as a sponsor, rather than individual trusts, that simple step would transform the visa system and the fees for those working on the frontline of healthcare provision.

On the health surcharge, we seek to press new clause 14 to a vote, unless we are given a clear steer and assurances about how and when the changes will come into effect, and how those who have had to pay the fee since the announcement was made will be reimbursed.

New clause 15 would quite simply exempt NHS employers from having to pay the immigration skills charge. As things stand, NHS trusts pay the skills charge for those coming to work in the NHS from countries outside the EU, and they will be expected to pay those costs for those coming from the EU after free movement ends. However, in the context of the NHS, where certain clinical skills are simply not available in the domestic labour pool, levelling a tax on NHS trusts for having no choice other than to plug their staff shortages from the international talent pool is nothing short of an outrage. An NHS trust cannot unilaterally decide to train more nurses from the domestic labour force, for example; it needs Government intervention to deliver that uplift.

We have clinical workforce shortages almost right across the board in the NHS, and that is while we have had free movement. We submitted freedom of information requests to 224 NHS hospital trusts in England, asking them how much they were losing from their budgets to pay these charges back to the Government. To give an indication of what some hospitals are paying out, Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust told us that in just one year—the 2019-2020 financial year—it paid the Government £972,000. It has paid over £2 million in immigration skills charges since 2017. Over the past three financial years, Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust had to pay the Government £961,000 in immigration skills charges. Only 21% of trusts have responded to the FOI request so far, but this tells us that nearly £13 million has been taken back out of NHS budgets and handed over to the Government since 2017. That is nearly £13 million from just 21% of the hospital trusts in England. The fact that some hospitals could be paying out nearly £1 million in immigration skills charges in a single year must surely be a sign that the system is not working as intended, and this is all while people have been able to come and work in the NHS under free movement, where fees would not have been applicable. That is about to come to an end. I urge the Minister to adopt new clause 15, to mitigate any further detrimental impact on the NHS workforce and to ensure that NHS funding stays in the NHS.

I will briefly touch on the two other changes we have proposed. Amendment 39 would time-limit the Henry VIII powers in the Bill. These powers have been widely criticised by experts, and efforts from both Labour and the Scottish National party in Committee to curb the powers or to ask the Government to state explicitly on the face of the Bill what they would be used for have been to no avail. Amendment 39 would tie them to the end date of the EU settlement scheme.

I want to take this opportunity to say that we also support new clause 29, tabled in the name of the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), with cross-party support. This new clause would seek to continue the existing arrangements for unaccompanied child refugees and maintain our commitment to family reunion. I was reassured by the Minister’s positive response to the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) on this issue during the urgent question yesterday, and I hope that discussions can continue in that positive spirit. We also support new clauses 7 to 10, tabled in the name of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), which reflect the sustained cross-party appetite to ensure that immigration detention is limited to 28 days, bringing about an end to unfair and unjust indefinite detention.

We are also keen to support new clause 2, tabled in the name of the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who has already given his very articulate explanation as to why it matters so much. We tabled new clause 58 in Committee to the same effect as his new clause, seeking to grant settled status to all those eligible children who are currently in the care of local authorities or who are care leavers. I am grateful that the hon. Gentleman has been able to share with the House some of the latest research from the Children’s Society, which foresees a bleak outlook if we do not take action on this important issue now, taking the responsibility from local authorities who are stretched as they have never been stretched before in order to make an application on behalf of a child. This is a cohort of children and young people who are our responsibility. We, the state, are acting as their legal guardians. They have already had the worst possible start in life, so let us do the best we can for them by at least giving them confidence in their immigration status.

As we have already heard through freedom of information requests, the Children’s Society identified a sample of 404 children who have had their status confirmed through the scheme, out of an estimated 9,000. Of those, 282 were granted settled status and 122 were granted pre-settled status. Given everything that those kids have been through, let us not sign them up for more years of paperwork and burdens of proof by giving them pre-settled status. Let us take all that uncertainty off the table for them by adopting new clause 2 and giving them indefinite leave to remain, as was so articulately outlined by the hon. Gentleman.

I very much hope that the Minister is open to the concerns that have been raised during the passage of the Bill and will no doubt be raised again this afternoon, but we are minded to take new clauses 13, 14 and 15 further if we are not satisfied that the Government are taking steps to mitigate the impact of the Bill and deliver on the promises that they have already made, not least to our brilliant NHS care workers.