Sarah Champion
Main Page: Sarah Champion (Labour - Rotherham)Department Debates - View all Sarah Champion's debates with the Home Office
Immigration Bill (Second sitting)
Sarah Champion Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
James Brokenshire
Q 79 Such as?
Neil Carberry: The obvious one would be parts of agriculture.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
Q 80 I look forward to serving under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. Mr Carberry, offences are already specified in the Immigration Act 1971 that are applicable to migrants who breach their immigration conditions. Do you believe that clause 8, which creates the new criminal offence of illegal working, is necessary, and do you think that it may have unintended consequences?
Neil Carberry: What we are particularly concerned about is that any criminal offence is genuinely used to go after criminal activity. Employment law offences are typically civil offences. As I have already said, breaches are largely inadvertent, or if they are not inadvertent they are due to lack of understanding on the part of an employer. The right place to police that is through education, the tribunal system, the advice that ACAS offers and so forth. I am not a criminal lawyer. To the extent that the offence that has been created is to be used to go after employers where there is repeated, multi-faceted and exploitative treatment of workers, we are very happy for that offence to exist, so long as the businesses that are brought to justice are engaged in those steps. What worries us particularly is not the existence of the offence but the risk that there may be a general drift of employment law in the United Kingdom from the civil to the criminal, because that would be quite destructive for employee relations in general.
Sarah Champion
Q 81 Just to unpick that, do you think that actually criminalising the workers is useful in changing practice?
Neil Carberry: I think that the critical issue is the action by employers. The CBI is not taking a position on criminalisation of workers; that is not within our vires as a business organisation.
Sarah Champion
Q 82 I agree that if employers are employing people illegally, they should be accountable for that. Do you feel that the Bill goes far enough to enable that to be enforced?
Neil Carberry: I think that the critical issue is not the law in this case; it is the will to go after some of the very worst practices in the UK labour market. It is about co-operation between the police and other authorities in getting into some of these beds in sheds places and taking action. One of the lessons we have to learn from the experiment with the Gangmasters Licensing Authority is that the GLA has largely been a box-ticking licensing organisation that has increased costs on the compliant. There is relatively little evidence that the creation of a registration approach has actually done anything to prevent exploitation. From a CBI perspective, we would far rather that the Government had a strong offence, structured in a way that would stack up in the courts, and then used powers of prohibition, for instance, to drive out bad practice. Of course, that is what we had before the GLA was brought into existence—albeit that they were not heavily or effectively used.
Sarah Champion
Q 83 Finally, do you believe that the director has the remit and the resources to prevent this from being a box-ticking exercise? Would they have the authority to make the necessary changes?
Neil Carberry: That remains to be seen. The director clearly has to develop an enforcement plan, which has to be approved by the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. I would hope that that enforcement plan was well grounded in the effective work that some of the agencies are currently doing and would therefore be resourceable from within that. I had discussions last week with the HMRC team who are looking at non-compliance with the minimum wage; they feel that they currently have the resources to continue the good work they are doing.
Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)
Q 84 I want to turn back to the evidence given to us this morning by Professor Sir David Metcalf. When he was discussing the CBI, he said that the regulation of the labour market proposed in the Bill would take away the cowboys and help your sector. He went on to say that it would go a long way towards raising the welfare of British residents. Do you think he has applied a risk-based, intelligent approach to his assessment?
Neil Carberry: I think the proof of the pudding is in the eating when it comes to the director. On the existence of a labour market director to do this work, his assessment could well be the case. What worries us is less what is in the Bill as introduced than some of the discussion in the Government’s consultation paper last week, which seems to suggest a broadening of a licensing approach. I think that would ultimately be a doubling up regulation on the compliant and would draw away from kicking down the doors of the non-compliant. From our perspective, there is every chance that the labour market director’s role could be very beneficial to lawful companies and workers.
Sarah Champion
Q 101 Thank you all for coming today. Lord Green, to give us some context, what is your estimate of the current size of the irregular migrant population in the UK?
Lord Green of Deddington: Yes, I am very glad to offer you some context, because I think we really have to see the Bill in the wider context. We realise that there are already 11 Acts of Parliament dealing with immigration and that there is a handbook of immigration law of nearly 2,000 pages. So we have that in mind, but, even so, the Bill in principle has our full support. We think it is a serious and intelligent attempt to tackle illegal immigration and the pull factors that drive it.
It has also come at a pretty opportune time. I need hardly tell you that immigration is the major issue of public concern, especially as the crisis in Syria and the middle east has led to the effective collapse of the borders of southern Europe. We have been lucky here in that, in recent years, we have had only 20,000 or 25,000 asylum claims, but I think we all remember when that number hit 80,000 and we found that there were half a million files lying around in a warehouse, which was appalling, especially for those who had genuine cases, but on any level that was appalling and must not be repeated.
In terms of context, it seems to me that we now need to get ahead of that curve, both in identifying genuine claimants and removing and deterring those who are in fact economic migrants. We think that the Bill can help in that task.
To answer your specific question about the probable size, in 2009, the LSE gave a central estimate of about 600,000. We looked at that and thought that a million was probably closer, but almost by definition it is impossible to be accurate. The conclusion to be drawn from those numbers is that it is absolutely inconceivable that the Government would introduce measures that removed a million people from the country by force. It cannot be done, would not be done and nobody would support it. That is why measures, including some of those in the Bill, are essential if we are to persuade people to make up their own minds and go home when they should.
It is worth mentioning in that context that the sheer scale of movement is not really widely understood. In any one year—I will take 2014—7.5 million tourist visas were issued. Clearly, some of those will be tempted to overstay. Business visitors: 1.7 million. Students and student visitors: 270,000 in one year. So you are looking at an enormous flow of people and no way in which you can forcibly remove them if you need to. Indeed, we do not even know who they are, or even if they are here. As you probably know, exit checks were abandoned by the Conservatives to the EU in ’94 and by Labour to the rest of the world in ’98. So for nearly 20 years, nobody— the Government, the Home Office—has the slightest idea who has gone home and who has not. We are starting from an appallingly difficult situation and, as I said, the only way to approach it is to improve the likelihood of people deciding for themselves. Also, it is necessary to tackle the difficulties that have arisen in the removal process. In my view, they are not very widely understood, and when I first heard them, I was rather surprised.
It is the case, surely, that an effective removal capability is at the basis of the credibility of the whole system. If people think that they can stay indefinitely and not be removed, of course they will do that if it is to their advantage. I am afraid that successive Governments have sort of concealed the weakness of the system by conflating various figures, but if you look at the number of immigration offenders who have been removed, in the last six years the average has been fewer than 5,000 every year compared to the numbers that I have just given you for the inflow. It will be obvious to you that work is required on this front, and I hope obvious to you that this Bill will help with that.
Sarah Champion
Q 102 To expand on that, at a practical level, you rightly said that there are 11 Acts of Parliament, and that we still do not know who is coming in and who is going out. Groups have said that if support to asylum seekers is withdrawn, there is concern that they might abscond from the system. On a practical level, what do you believe the Bill will add to existing legislation, so that we can deal with the problem? From my casework, I know that the biggest problem is that once the Home Office team has gone through the process to recognise that someone needs to be deported, it does not have the resources to deport them. On a practical level, I cannot see how the legislation will make that process more straightforward. Are there specific proposals in the Bill that will do so?
Lord Green of Deddington: Yes, and that is a very good question if I may say so. There is a huge amount to do, but I would pick out the appeal process, which has been leading to significant sources of delay, and is sometimes quite ruthlessly exploited by a bogus applicant, and is more likely to be so, and by some of the lawyers. The first-tier tribunal has considered 850,000 cases in the past seven years, so the provisions in the Bill that will provide for removal first and appeals later will be very important. Equally, it will be important that that provision is not applied when it should not be, and I am sure that you will be focused on that as a Committee. The reality, however, is that the legal system has been exploited to the disadvantage of the community as a whole.
So far, as I am sure that you know, the Government have reduced the number of kinds of appeal that you can make from 17 to four. When they applied the “removal first, appeals later” provision to foreign national offenders, they found that only 25% bothered to appeal and of the total, only 1% succeeded. Of course, foreign national offenders are likely to have a much less convincing case than many others, but if we can find a way, consistent with human rights of course, to shift the burden of appeals, we can get the whole system moving more rapidly than it has in the past. And as I said at the beginning of my evidence, now is the time to do it, because we must have a system. The Government keep talking, and rightly so, about breaking the link between people getting to Britain and believing that they can stay here indefinitely. That amounts to the fact that we must have an effective way both of differentiating between economic migrants and asylum seekers and of swiftly removing the first of those two. There is a lot to be done, and I think that the Bill will help.
James Brokenshire
Q 103 Lord Green, there has been some questioning during the course of this session about the introduction of offences relating to illegal working, in particular the creation of an illegal working offence against employees. Could you share any thoughts and comments on how we can have a firm response and crack down on illegal working in all its different forms, as well as some of the draws that entice people into migration? How would you respond to the challenge that this may somehow prevent people from coming forward who may be victims of exploitation or trafficking, for example?
Lord Green of Deddington: I will keep my answers shorter in future, Mr Chairman, but I wanted to set out some of the basic considerations.
Chloe Smith
Q 137 Mr Leenders, any reflections?
Eric Leenders: I think we can identify 123 million instant access accounts. If we were to apply the experience from the Immigration Act of roughly 1% of searches being referred to the Home Office, that would potentially lead to a working assumption of about 1 million or 1.2 million searches being referred to the Home Office. That, in itself, surfaces an operational point about the readiness of the Home Office to deal with that volume in the initial wave of searches in the first quarter of the implementation of the Act. That is just one of those technical issues that we would like to work through. We might be able to find mitigants to that. For example, we might be able to strip out those who currently hold UK passports, but that is detail that we can work through in secondary legislation. I would not see that as a primary legislative point at all.
Sarah Champion
Q 138 I have two small, mopping-up questions. Mr Leenders, you went through the customer service and administrative burdens that the legislation puts on you, but are you largely in favour of it? Are there any unintended consequences of the legislation that we should be aware of?
Eric Leenders: We do not have a policy position on the Bill, nor did we on the Immigration Act 2014. There are some customer service points that give a little cause for concern. Referring customers with a seven-day service level agreement to the Home Office leaves them, effectively, in limbo for a period, and that customer might, quite justifiably, be entitled to an account. We do not feel that is the best experience, so we would want to work through one or two details like that. We would certainly want to have a period of testing—we are already encouraged by the Treasury giving some consideration to its own pilot exercise—presumably during the formulation of the secondary legislation, such that the customer impacts are minimised so far as possible.
Sarah Champion
Q 139 Mr Smith and Mr Lambert, I was surprised by how small the sample size was in the west midlands pilot results. Of the 67 respondents who are tenants, 60 are students. My assumption is that students are much more likely to have passports and letters of authority from their institutions. Do you believe that this is a skewed sample?
Richard Lambert: The evaluation period could have been better. It could have been a lot longer. We would have said, ideally, a year to 18 months because most tenancies last more than six months. In order to understand how this process works, you have to give it that length of time so you can see tenancies coming to an end, and limited right to remain coming to an end and you can see how that renews. It also took place at what is probably the slowest time of the year so, inevitably, there were not going to be a lot of tenancies turning over. Then there were the difficulties of contacting the population. It is interesting that in a university area, most responses to the request for tenant respondents came from students who are possibly more likely to be active in some of the social issues and more aware of these things going on.
David Smith: Students are also, to a large extent, exempt from checks. Students are nominated into accommodation by their educational institutions so any student in a hall of residence is effectively exempt from checks anyway. Given that areas around Dudley and West Bromwich are not substantial student areas—parts of my family come from the area—it is a shame that there was such a high student sample. I would have liked to have seen a sample that more adequately represented a wider spectrum of social demographic groups. We remain concerned about the effects, not so much on, for example, Members of Parliament renting homes, but on people in the lower social demographics who increasingly are coming into the private rented sector, will have difficulty with this legislation and are often driven into the arms of less salubrious landlords.
Gavin Newlands
Q 140 I know from your written evidence that you call for a clearly understood and properly resourced helpline for landlords. Will you share your members’ experiences of the helpline during the pilot? A recent written answer from the Minister, for which I am very grateful, revealed that there were two full-time equivalent staff for the helpline. Was that sufficient for your members?
David Smith: We have not had any particular feedback. We have certainly had calls to our member helpline from members. I do not know whether that means that they were not happy with what they got. We are concerned about whether the helpline will continue to be resourced as a helpline once we are talking about all of England. That is not clear yet—I am looking at the Minister to see whether he nods or shakes his head. I can tell you that we run a member helpline and that more than two people staff it. It is that simple. Two people will not be enough to cover all of England, but I am not clear about the plans for widening the helpline.
If the helpline is not adequately staffed, there is little point in having it, I suspect. We would like more online resource. I note that, in the evaluation—the guide that was published today—the Government have highlighted the European PRADO database, but it covers only EU documents, not EEA documents. My members are not familiar with Liechtenstein passports, not that they would necessarily see a great many of those. However, many members are likely to believe that countries such as Ukraine are in the EEA, which they are not. We are therefore concerned about people both ignoring countries of which they should take account, and thinking that countries that they have seen in the news recently, which are around the fringes of the EU, must be in the EU.
We are also concerned about the potential for forgery that is opened up on list B. Several documents on there are potentially prone to forgery with a laser printer and we are very worried about the risk our members run of prosecution for not being the most adept spotters of forgeries. Immigration officers frequently examine passport documents and they are highly trained in that. My members are not equipped with UV scanning lights or skilled watermark detection systems, and I am afraid that many of them would not know a watermark if you asked them about it anyway. I am therefore concerned about how they will detect the more sophisticated forgeries, and what the break point is for what they should detect. I am not worried about sellotape.
The Chair
No, you have not, but please be brief.
Chief Superintendent David Snelling: We have been involved in discussions with the Home Office that have proposed this power, but to the question whether we approached the Home Office, the answer is no.
Sarah Champion
Q 149 Mr Gabriel, do you believe the provisions in the Bill covering landlords and the new responsibility of landlords to effectively become immigration experts are going to put a strain on community relations and perhaps lead to more discrimination?
Stephen Gabriel: We speak to landlords on a daily basis. Some of the landlords are not saying that they feel it is an extra burden. The point was made earlier that some landlords have already been looking for and taking information such as copies of people’s passports or other forms of identification, so the good landlords would have been doing checks anyway. Also, some landlords have said that where they felt a bit nervous about asking for proof, the pilot gave them a legitimate reason to ask for and get that information before they could move further with any contracts.
A point was raised earlier about the indigenous population having access to identification, and that could be a challenge. As we know, migrants or asylum seekers who are looking for accommodation will normally come with the relevant documentation. I think there is a point around the indigenous population having the right documentation. As was raised earlier, if two people come along at the same time and one has the documentation but the other does not, the landlord is likely to go with the one who does.
Sarah Champion
Q 150 As you said, good landlords are going to welcome this because it gives them more support to ask for documents to prove legitimacy and protect their tenancy. The group that I am concerned about are the accidental landlords, who just see this as another burden when they did not particularly want to be in this situation, and who may withdraw themselves from the market. I am concerned about the potential for bad landlords to fill that gap, offering substandard accommodation and not asking for the right documents, so that people could fall off the radar and people who choose to fall off the radar could go even further off.
Stephen Gabriel: Bad landlords have always been out there. Even with the introduction of this legislation, in the area that I cover in Sandwell, we are still picking up landlords who are not fulfilling their obligations. I talk about the grey economy of landlords, and I think there is still a lot of work to do to identify those landlords. In Sandwell, we have undertaken a proactive approach for one of our neighbourhoods that we know has a high turnover of newcomers. We are finding some real challenges in relation to the quality of properties that people are living in, particularly properties above shops. We have tried to go there with colleagues from environmental health and housing to take a holistic approach to those buildings, so we can get up and see what is happening above the shops. We found on one occasion two elderly people aged over 80 living in a property that I would describe as—well, not very nice.
Sarah Champion
Q 151 Unfortunately, I have areas like that with private landlords, and those properties tends to be occupied by migrant workers but also trafficked people coming over. What could be in this Bill that is not there already to target those bad landlords?
Stephen Gabriel: From my perspective, it is about what we do on the ground operationally and how we work with our enforcement colleagues. We have now opened up the channels of communication with the Home Office and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. We have undertaken one joint enforcement activity in Sandwell, and other enforcement activities are coming through now. I am also aware that across the other authorities affected by the pilot, the increase in that relationship in sharing information, sharing data and going out on joint enforcement visits has really raised the profile of the work that we are doing among landlords.
Another thing is how we raise the profile among tenants. One of the things that we have done in the region is recently to launch a mobile app, which is called “Check Before You Rent”. One of the questions in the app is: is your landlord accredited, and have they asked you for any information about the immigration checks?
Mims Davies
Q 152 I must declare an interest in the road safety aspect, because that is an area I have worked in previously. Chief Superintendent Snelling, in terms of people killed or seriously injured, have you identified communities where there is a difference in the culture regarding drink or drug-driving? Have the police identified that as a concern?
Chief Superintendent David Snelling: In wider issues such as drink and domestic abuse and domestic violence, we have identified some communities that are more prone to that. That would be the remit of a local police chief superintendent. I am Sutton borough commander, so I have a good idea of the make-up of my communities within the area that I police. Were there to be specific community concerns or tensions, we would seek to look into it either through education or through enforcement.
On the road safety side, in Sutton we are working closely with Transport for London to raise awareness of safety among schoolchildren. For the wider population, we would hope that the provisions of the Bill would be widely publicised. As I have highlighted with the scenario for stopping, we have run certain operations nationally with the immigration service and we have worked with them to target areas of concern. They, like us, would be feeding into their community representatives to ensure that they would have an understanding of why we have exercised those powers.
The Chair
Good afternoon. We will now hear oral evidence from the Children’s Society, Coram Children’s Legal Centre and the Office of the Children’s Commissioner. As I indicated, this is the final panel, and we can go up to 5 pm. May I ask the witnesses to introduce themselves for the record?
Ilona Pinter: I am Ilona Pinter. I am policy adviser at the Children’s Society and co-chair of the Refugee Children’s Consortium.
Kamena Dorling: I am Kamena Dorling. I am head of policy and programmes at Coram Children’s Legal Centre and co-chair of the Refugee Children’s Consortium.
Adrian Matthews: I am Adrian Matthews. I am the policy adviser to the Children’s Commissioner for England on immigration and asylum-related matters.
Sarah Champion
Q 165 To all of you, please—if you could answer briefly—what do you perceive to be the risks for children’s welfare of the provision to remove support from families who have been refused asylum under clause 34? May I start with Ms Pinter?
Ilona Pinter: We think the risks for children from this provision are very serious indeed. Essentially, it would see families becoming destitute—they would no longer have accommodation and financial support under asylum support. That obviously brings with it a whole range of risks, from families being street homeless to families having to move around, potentially for short periods of time, to stay in potentially unsafe accommodation. The research broadly, including the Children’s Society’s research, shows that children who are currently destitute are at a heightened risk of being exploited, as well as at risk of remaining in circumstances where they are facing domestic violence. Obviously, some of the evidence that currently exists from serious case reviews highlights the real child protection risks for children of having no support.
Adrian Matthews: Could I add that some families will no doubt go into the woodwork? That actually creates all sorts of problems, because parents will then, in order to feed their children, resort to very unsafe practices—unsafe childcare practices and unsafe working environments, and so on and so forth. The other effect is very clear: a lot of families will turn to local authorities for support, and whether they are given that support or not I think is almost immaterial in the end. The fact is that it will massively increase the burden on local authorities in terms of processing applications and claims from families who are destitute and street homeless.
Kamena Dorling: I would echo what both Ilona and Adrian have said. A key concern is, as Adrian has mentioned, this shift of the burden on to local authorities. We are already seeing local authorities struggling to support the number of families currently in the UK with no recourse to public funds. This would look to increase that pressure, and one of the results we are seeing of that pressure is very low levels of support for families that are turning to local authorities, if they are getting anything at all, but also quite high levels of gatekeeping, where often families are turned away anyway. Then we are just going to see either children visibly destitute and homeless or going missing entirely from services, and that will presumably have a knock-on effect on their access to education, access to healthcare and all the problems that we are already seeing for children in families who are undocumented at the moment.
Sarah Champion
Q 166 Looking at current practice, from your experience, how are children’s best interests currently being assessed by the Home Office? How would this play a role in a decision to deport a family under the clause?
Ilona Pinter: The first thing to say is that there is currently no mechanism by which children’s best interests are decided, considered or assessed. That has implications not only for support, but for how families’ substantive decisions within the asylum process are taken into account. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees did a piece of research in 2013 that highlighted a lot of failings where children’s best interests under the protection claim were not considered, which has consequences down the line. The Home Office’s own evaluation of the family returns process highlights that most families involved in the process feared returning home. Reasons include families fearing what will happen to them and their children if they are returned. We believe that the provision to end support for families to encourage them to go home will not work, because they still have those remaining fears about the consequences.
Adrian Matthews: The current practice of Home Office decision makers in taking into account the best interests of children is patchy, to say the least. We had a good example last year that we were involved in as the Children’s Commissioner, in which the Home Office had removed a mentally ill Nigerian mother with a six-year-old who had been born here. She did not survive in Nigeria. She only survived through the foster parents, who had been fostering the child for six months and supporting her while the legal process was going on in the UK. Eventually, the upper tribunal decided that the Home Office had acted unlawfully in not taking into account the child’s best interests and returned the family to the UK.
Sarah Champion
Q 167 So building on that, the potential in the Bill to deport before appeal presumably raises concerns.
Adrian Matthews: Yes, exactly.
Kamena Dorling: I was going to say that when we look at a range of provisions within the Bill, there appears to be an assumption that children’s interests will be considered as a matter of course. From our day-to-day practice and at Coram Children’s Legal Centre, where we represent children and families in such situations, at best we get lip service paid to children’s interests. Quite often, there is no detailed analysis of how any immigration decision would affect a child in a family or on their own, which is really concerning. There is a huge absence here both when we are talking about changes to support for families in the asylum system and when we are talking about the extension of the deport-first appeal. Children are absent from later provisions. There is no consideration of the impact on children.
Adrian Matthews: I would very much like to echo that. One of the most serious aspects of the appeal provisions is the test of “serious and irreversible harm” but that is applied to the person who is to be removed, excluded or refused entry, depriving the child a voice in proceedings. Under the current arrangements, in an in-country appeal under article 8 human rights grounds there is at least the potential for the child’s voice to be heard. The change specifically excludes children who are settled or who are UK citizens from having a voice in the proceedings about how they will be affected by the removal or exclusion of a parent. That is a serious concern that engages the UK’s obligations under the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, particularly article 12, which requires the state party to allow the child to have a voice in such proceedings.
Sarah Champion
Q 168 The Government believe that they are compliant with the European convention on human rights and that there is no conflict with any children’s legislation. You would disagree with that.
Adrian Matthews: I would not agree with that.
Sarah Champion
Okay. To the rest of the panel, do you think that the legislation complies?
Ilona Pinter: It is notable that on the provision to withdraw asylum support, for instance, there is no mention of the section 55 duty on the Home Secretary to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in relation to all of the functions, including asylum support. There is no mention of how many children would be affected specifically by that provision.
Kamena Dorling: If we look broadly at the UN convention on the rights of the child, as has been already mentioned, article 12, which is about the voice of the child, is key, but so is article 3, which requires us to take the best interests of the child as a primary consideration. We have had a number of cases go to the Supreme Court on that, and we have got very good guidance from the Supreme Court about how the interests of children should be examined.
One of the findings of the Supreme Court is that children should not be blamed for the actions of their parents. Again, what we seem to see in this Bill is this idea that any immigration behaviour that is deemed undesirable can result in a policy of forced destitution, for example, which seems to me a very stark means of punishing children for the action of their parents. So there are a number of concerns.
Sarah Champion
To reassure the panel, I will point out that we are blessed with a Minister who has always been a child advocate and campaigner, so I am sure he will look very closely at these matters.
The Chair
We will just take Sarah and Kelly, and then we will try to get some responses in two minutes, I am afraid.
Sarah Champion
The panel responded to all the questions by talking about families. Does the Bill have any implications for unaccompanied children?
Kelly Tolhurst
I represent a constituency in Kent, where the issue of unaccompanied minors has caused great pressures over the past 12 months. It is already a burden on the local authorities and the local people. I wonder whether you think there are any measures that are not in the Bill that would discourage families from allowing their young people to travel here on their own?