Immigration Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Chloe Smith

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Chloe Smith]

Q 260 Would the rest of the panel like to make any comment on this notion of having to reduce our undesired costs to be able to do more for those who most need it?

Paul Greenhalgh: Absolutely, and we would want to do that to ensure that the relevant safeguards are in place, particularly for children in families.

Henry St Clair Miller: I agree with that, yes.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Q 261 I would just like to follow up a little on some of the witnesses’ answers to the Minister’s questions about the interaction that you have had with the Home Office. Mr Greenhalgh, you said in relation to the 2005 pilot by the then Labour Government that it not only failed but was counter- productive, in that it drove many people underground and made compliance more difficult. From the discussions that you have had with the Home Office, do you know what different measures the Home Office is putting in place that will mean this time it is different, and are you confident that that is the case?

Paul Greenhalgh: I spoke about the complexity of the current assessment system when families need to come to local authorities for support. So, as the Bill is currently drafted, we believe that the number of families that would inevitably come to local authorities for support would increase significantly.

One of the questions that we are exploring with the Home Office is whether it is appropriate to leave the legislation around the Children Act as it currently stands, which we then have to apply to those families, or whether we take migrant families without status out of the Children Act and provide support for them through schedule 3 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. There are some advantages to that, in terms of the potential for establishing a new simplified assessment system, for providing support in a way that takes more account of the family’s immigration status and for being more explicit about the fact that it would result in a clear new burden on the local authority, which would need to be funded. That is one mechanism that we are in discussion about.