Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

Amendments 51 and 52 are intended as an opportunity for the Minister to explain what is meant by "continuous employment" and why the condition is thought to be necessary. The first amendment deletes the requirement in Clause 37 that a person must remain in continuous employment throughout the whole of the probationary citizenship stage. Again, we are grateful to the Minister for the Keeling schedule, which enables us to see where that fits into the BNA 1981. The expression "continuous employment" is not defined. If the Minister says that that will be done in future in guidance, that would mean that Parliament has no say in the detail of the requirement now or at any future time when the Executive may amend the guidance at their absolute discretion. The second amendment provides that the person must not have been in breach of the conditions of that leave; there are already conditions attached to employment under the points-based system. For example, where the sponsor of a skilled worker under tier 2 of the PBS loses the sponsor licence, the worker has his leave curtailed if he is out of work for more than 60 days after that, unless he has less than six months of his leave remaining, in which case the leave will not be curtailed. If the worker finds a new sponsor to employ him within the 60 days, is he to be treated as having been in continuous employment, or is the period of his probationary citizenship to start again from the day he begins the new job, even though his temporary unemployment was through no fault of his own? If so, why do the Government consider it necessary to apply more onerous conditions to the worker on the path to citizenship than are already laid down by UKBA in the sponsor policy guidance manual? There are already inconsistencies between the treatment of tier 2 migrants and that of migrants from the access states of the EEA in 2004 and 2007. To take the case of a migrant from Bulgaria or Romania, the UKBA’s European case work instructions provide: ""Employment is to be considered to be continuous if the applicant was legally working at the beginning and end of that period and any intervening period in which the applicant was not legally working did not exceed 30 days"." We consider, therefore, that introducing a new and as yet undefined continuous employment requirement will create confusion and is unnecessary when there are already strict conditions that apply to workers changing jobs. We also fear that unknown conditions are likely to cause especial difficulty for domestic workers, whose ability to change employers is specifically restricted to another job of the same kind. The domestic worker who has to leave an abusive employer and will not therefore have a reference may be unable to obtain another job as a domestic servant and special arrangements should be made for people in those circumstances. Your Lordships have debated these problems many times over the past few years, but since the meaning of continuous employment is to be defined in guidance, from now on we are to have no say in the means of protecting this vulnerable group of workers. I beg to move.