Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL]

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

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

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, in debating the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, I declare an interest as a trustee of the Refugee Council, which for approximately 25 years has tried to help some 1,000 unaccompanied children each year to navigate our complex processes. I pay tribute to the work, for many years, of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, at the Refugee Council. It still goes from strength to strength, as indeed does he.

I want to speak about the problem of unaccompanied children and the alleged pull factor. Until I joined the Refugee Council, I was not aware of the rather cruel anomaly whereby, unlike an adult refugee—who has the right to bring in close family members—a refugee child on his or her own has no such right to be reunited. That seems both illogical and inhumane. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, said, it is certainly out of line with European practice. Such countries, which, unlike us, did not opt out and are applying the 2003 directive on family reunion, allow unaccompanied child refugees to subsequently bring in their families. As the noble Baroness said, we and the Irish opted out—or rather, did not opt in—so we are in a different position. The Irish are in a different position from us because they had the humanity to apply the system in their domestic law; it is written into Irish law. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, suggested that we should write it into our domestic law, following the example of the Irish and the rest of the European Union. It is a little shaming that we are the odd one out.

The number of people who would benefit if we corrected the anomaly is very small, but the benefit to each individual would be very large. Let me cite one example. The Refugee Council is currently trying to help a 19 year-old from Eritrea called Solomon, who came here as an unaccompanied child and was granted refugee status. He has a job, goes to college and wants to bring in his 16 year-old sister, Liwan, who is currently in a refugee camp in northern Ethiopia. He has just been told that he cannot do so. He has been in a camp in the past and knows how grim the conditions are; he knows that his sister is in mortal danger. She is talking of trying her luck on the perilous illegal passage across the Sahara and Mediterranean. He fears that she will die and he blames himself for failing to persuade us to save her—but it is we who are failing these young people and failing to show the common humanity to live up to the standards of the society we like to think we are.

Following the Second Reading debate on what became the Immigration Act 2016, the noble Lord, Lord Bates—for whom I have a very high regard—wrote to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and the rest of us taking part in that debate. He asserted that permitting refugee children here to sponsor requests from their parents and siblings to join them,

“could result in children being encouraged, or even forced, to leave existing family units in their country and risk hazardous journeys to the UK in order to act as sponsors”.

That is the pull factor theory. With respect, it is totally lacking in evidential credibility or plausibility and does not reflect well on the Government. Mr Justice McCloskey, overturning in the Upper Chamber the refusal of an application by a 19 year-old—granted refugee status at 16—to bring his mother to join him, ruled that,

“there is no evidence underlying it”—

“it” being the pull factor, which is inherently implausible. It is implausible to suggest that families living a hand-to-mouth existence in the squalor of a refugee camp in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Syria, Jordan or Libya sit down at the dinner table and make a cold calculation, coming up with a cunning, multi-year plan to send one of their children through bandits and traffickers, across deserts and ocean, in the hope of reaching our land, navigating our system and securing a right—if the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, passes—to bring in the rest of the family. The world is not like that. That is a strange, sick, Swiftian joke, worthy of A Modest Proposal. Parents do not send the children off. The children—and adults—are driven not by a pull factor, but by a push factor. They are fleeing from intolerable conditions. They are fleeing for their lives.

If the Minister has been briefed to warn us against the perils of a pull factor relating to unaccompanied children, I really hope she will not. She should go back to the Home Office and ask her officials how often they have been to the camps and how many of these cruel parents they have spotted there, plotting to force a child to come here. She might ask her officials why their colleagues in all other EU countries apparently have not spotted these cruel, callous, Swiftian parents. Why does the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child now urge the UK to:

“Review its asylum policy in order to facilitate family reunion for unaccompanied and separated refugee children”?


Why is the whole regiment out of step—except us? Why do we know better than everybody else? Why does the pull factor apply only to this emerald isle?

The best way to convince your Lordships would be for us all to see Ai Weiwei’s striking new film “Human Flow”. Soberly, undramatically but rather movingly he captures the scale, waste, misery and human cost of the current refugee crisis and the factors that drive these people—the despair of their broken societies. Against this huge canvas of human tragedy, this Bill is a pitifully small thing, but passing it would be the right and decent thing to do. I support it.

Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL]

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 11th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

I speak in support of the Bill and against the amendment. I recognise the concerns that the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, has raised about pressures on public services, but these children will be in care, so they will need a foster carer or perhaps be in a children’s home. If they have a family member with them, the public purse will benefit in that regard.

From a humane point of view, I worked in a hostel once a week over a period of time and saw a young girl from Afghanistan, and she was always quiet and depressed. She spoke no English—she spoke only a very limited dialect of her language, and the only other speaker was somewhere way off in the East End, so she was very isolated. One evening I arrived and she was in tears, because she had had news that the town that her parents lived in was being shelled, and she was concerned about them. The examples given about the hardship and emotional trauma for these young people ring very true to me. Simply from a humane point of view, anything that can be done to reunite these children and young people with their parents has to be welcomed, so I support the Bill.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I am a little surprised at the amendment, because I have great respect for the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, and have enjoyed working on committees with him in the past. I think that his concerns are exaggerated.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has covered all the points, and I stress just two. First, the category that we are talking about is very limited—it is self-limited. We are talking about only those granted refugee status or humanitarian protection under the Immigration Rules; in other words, we are not talking about economic migrants or anybody here illegally. We are talking about a very small category, clearly defined in Clause 1(1).

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord is absolutely right, and I also said that it is difficult to estimate. Of course people could make applications, but they would be doing so under the legislation we have passed. However, I made the point that it is quite difficult to get exact numbers.

I recognise the potential implications of the Bill highlighted by the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Marlesford, which would seek to limit the number of family members that could be granted leave under the Bill to a maximum of two. It is a recognition of the wider impacts the Bill may have. As I think every noble Lord mentioned, it could have a divisive effect on families and on the people in the position of having to make those awful decisions. While the current provisions are more narrowly defined in terms of family members who may qualify, this is not limited to a specific number of individuals. I think that is why noble Lords probably took issue with my noble friend’s amendment. This clearly demonstrates the complexities around this issue and why it requires careful consideration, which is what the Government are doing.

My noble friend Lord Marlesford talked about the Home Office being corrupt, which is quite a strong allegation. He then moved on to the capacity of the Home Office—what has the Home Office done to improve vetting and recruitment procedures? The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, helpfully pointed out that for anyone to get through the Home Office procedures involves a very rigorous process, which is why I am at this Dispatch Box so much, now almost every day of the week, including Friday. As regards vetting in the Home Office, it follows the Cabinet Office vetting process, which is standard across Whitehall. All Home Office staff are bound to adhere to the Civil Service Code, and the Home Office is determined to uphold the highest standards for our staff.

We have all seen the tragic consequences for people, and particularly the terrible sight of unaccompanied children who take dangerous journeys, most likely in the hands of traffickers. While I fully commend its intention, the Bill is likely to place in danger an increased number of those people it seeks to protect. I have not mentioned the P word, because I do not want to dismay the noble Baroness or the noble Lord, but I hope that the noble Baroness will recognise the point I am making. Rather than refugees seeking protection in the first safe country they reach, the Bill creates a perverse incentive for them to make perilous journeys to the UK in the hope of subsequently bringing their family here. We must ensure that we do not put more children in harm’s way, and we are doing this already through resettlement of children and their families direct from the region. We know that policy changes can and do have an impact—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

The Minister got just too close to mentioning the unmentionable. Is it really plausible that, say in Idlib, if it is under siege in six weeks’ time, the family sits around the dining table, pick a child and tell it that it must set off across the battle lines and the Mediterranean, to try to get into England so that it can then pull the family into England? That is implausible. We are talking about refugee reunion and about children. We really must stop talking about this wildly implausible pull factor. They come here to escape being killed; they do not come here in order to become a magnet for the rest of the family.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I do not dispute a word of what the noble Lord says—that people’s intention in coming here is to flee the terrible things happening in their countries. I am saying that we have all seen the horrible pictures of children who have made these journeys and have either died or got themselves into terrible danger on the way. We talk about this often.