Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, in Committee we tried, with only partial success, to clarify what the Bill means by "in continuous employment". This is another attempt to get some clarification about how that term will be interpreted. We extracted from the noble Lord, Lord Brett, an acknowledgement that in the present economic circumstances migrants would often cease to be in employment, but he then added "for short periods". With 2 million people out of work, and that number rising, it is getting increasingly difficult for somebody who is thrown out of a job through redundancy or through the employer going bankrupt to find a new job, however widely he casts the net. The compelling circumstances may not be of that short a duration and victims of the recession are entitled to know how this discretion will be exercised. Like so many things in the Bill—we have discussed this before—everything will be left to guidance so that noble Lords and another place will have no say in what the final solution is to be. The noble Lord, Lord Brett, said that he took the point about domestic servants who leave an abusive employer and may not be able to get a reference, and he promised to let us have greater detail on how that problem will be tackled. Although the problem was raised in the context of domestic service, there may well be other circumstances where a reference is unobtainable. A case where the employer goes bankrupt is perhaps the most obvious. We also discussed what happens when the worker loses his job a few weeks before he comes to the end of probationary citizenship and the latitude that would exist when interpreting "continuous employment" in an elastic way that would allow that final period out of work to be overlooked. I presume there is to be guidance on all these questions, but we have to take it on trust that what comes out in the end, weeks after the Bill receives Royal Assent, would have been agreed by Parliament if we had been able to look at it. That is not a satisfactory way to legislate and makes a mockery of the idea that Parliament exercises control over the Executive.