Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL]

Baroness Sheehan Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I commend my noble friend Lady Hamwee for bringing this Bill to your Lordships’ House. Improving the lot of asylum seekers and refugees in UK is a cause for which she has long fought. I commend her for her tenacity.

We have heard powerful arguments on all sides of the House—I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for his speech, which allowed me to say “all sides of the House”—of how devastating it can be for families to be separated from close family members and the desperate measures some are forced to take to escape the dreadful situation they find themselves in. As we heard from my noble friends Lady Ludford and Lord Paddick, the Government place great store on family values so I hope they will give serious consideration to the very measured asks in the Bill.

I wanted to speak in this debate for two reasons. First, one of the hardest things I have to listen to was a mother describing having to make the choice between staying in a dangerous situation with her very young children or fleeing to safety with them. The price of safety was to leave behind a young daughter, because our rules say that as an over-18 she is adult and old enough to fend for herself. I have three children all in their early 20s. I utterly disagree that they have the ability to fend for themselves, even in London. The thought of a young girl on her own without the protection even of her close family in a conflict zone is a chilling one, but that is the choice parents are being asked to make.

The second reason is the example of a young Eritrean I met in the Calais camp, in the Jungle. He was on his own, having left home at the age of 15 to flee the oppressive regime there. He wanted to join his uncle in the UK, but this is against the rules. He, like many of the others in northern France, was reduced to playing refugee roulette, trying his luck every night through dangerous and illegal means instead. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said, we are talking about only a very small number of children who are unaccompanied and alone in northern France and other parts of Europe. It would not take very much on our part to fulfil our own legal obligations—the Government’s own legal obligations—to bring 480 Dubs children to the UK.

These are only two stories and we have heard a few others, all moving stories of human suffering that is, quite frankly, avoidable. At very little cost to ourselves, as my noble friend Lady Ludford said, we could remedy this situation. I do not know exactly what the Minister will say in her response but in the past, all too often the Government have talked about pull factors. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has addressed that argument and showed that the evidence does not give any credence to the Government’s assertion that the easing of family reunification rules will create pull factors. Too often the Government have said in debates on these issues that those pull factors will encourage more smugglers to operate.

Frankly, the argument about pull factors is a fig leaf and there is not a single shred of evidence to support it. I have evidence for my position and I should like to hear the evidence from the Government for theirs. There is ample correlation between push factors, such as conflict, repressive, hateful regimes and famine, and it is these that force people to do the unthinkable and leave their homes, livelihoods and communities and flee with only what they can carry. Alexander Betts, head of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford wrote in a New Scientist article in September 2015:

“No existing sound research substantiates the political claim that giving people asylum in Europe stimulates more flow”.


In an email to me, Professor Ian Goldin, head of the Oxford Martin School of Global Challenges, says, “There is no credible evidence for the Government’s claim on pull factors. The simplest argument against this is that the pull factors have not changed, yet refugee numbers have increased dramatically. The pull factors that are cited for the UK, such as higher wages or attraction to the social security benefits are relatively unchanged over many years, yet refugee numbers have changed dramatically and can be shown to be directly related to the push factors, notably the conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere”.

The Council of Europe’s Report of the Fact-finding Mission on the Situation of Migrants and Refugees in Calais and Grande-Synthe, France by Ambassador Tomáš Boček says:

“I was told by the authorities that there was a reluctance to improve conditions because of concerns that this would act as a pull factor, leading more and more migrants to make their way to Calais. However, it seems clear to me that the poor conditions have not acted as a deterrent so far. The current conditions raise potential issues under Articles 3 (prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment) and 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights”.


The EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, published a report last July on unaccompanied migrant children which says:

“We received no evidence of families sending children as ‘anchors’ following the implementation of the Family Reunification Directive by other Member States; we were also told that in some cases unaccompanied children in the UK declined to take advantage of tracing and reunification procedures, even when these were offered. Kent County Council wrote that ‘the Red Cross is used to trace family who are still living abroad although our experience is that there is limited take up of this service from young people’. This is not surprising … many unaccompanied migrant children fear that attempts to trace family members living in their countries of origin could put those family members in danger”.


There you have it: pull factors, whether through improving humanitarian conditions in refugee camps or easing family reunion rules, will not cause people to pack up their lives in a backpack and risk an extremely hazardous journey to come to the UK. To do that they have to be pushed, and pushed hard.

I shall move on quickly to smugglers. Do the rules that currently exist keep refugees out of the clutches of ruthless people smugglers? The Government are correct in saying that smugglers are a real threat to refugees. In fact, even authorities in Europe, with all their many resources, cannot deal with the smugglers that currently operate in Europe, and vulnerable refugees fear them even more. The fact of the matter is that the fewer safe and legal routes there are to process asylum seekers, the more power the smugglers have.

The Human Trafficking Foundation’s independent inquiry in July this year, co-chaired by Fiona Mactaggart MP and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, found no evidence whatever that a safe and legal route to the UK constitutes a pull factor for traffickers targeting vulnerable unaccompanied children. In fact, it found the opposite—that the closing off of such routes feeds the trafficking and smuggling networks. The prices to get to the UK illegally go up, forcing children into situations where they are exposed to labour exploitation, sexual exploitation, criminal exploitation or a combination of all three. A simple truth coming out of the inquiry is that instead of protecting children who have fled to Europe for safety, the Government are failing them, leaving the way open for smugglers and traffickers to exploit them.

As a number of noble Lords have said, it really comes down to a question of what kind of Britain we want to live in; an open and welcoming country for those seeking sanctuary or a closed one. It is time to stop flouting our duties to some of the most unfortunate people on the planet, step up to the mark as decent human beings and pull our weight on the international stage.