Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, this takes us to Clause 53 and a different part of the Bill. It is an important part. I do not propose to detain the House any longer than I can possibly help, but I hope that colleagues will understand that there is a great deal of concern. The concerns are mainly about asylum rather than immigration and borders, so I had some difficulty in trying to slip the amendment under the wire, so that we could discuss it. We do not need a lengthy discussion, but I will listen with interest to what the Minister has to say. The amendment seeks to clarify the duty on the welfare of children by including explicit financial provision. It has to be said at the beginning that Clause 53 is welcome as far as it goes. It is necessary to merge other Children Act provisions on the welfare of children with the provisions of this Bill, and the clause gives the Government new opportunities to make better provision, particularly for children under the age of 18 in families whose legal remedies have been entirely exhausted and who face voluntary return or deportation. That is welcome. I accept that the Bill is not principally about asylum. We are promised a so-called simplification measure. We will get consultation on that later in the autumn, and we look forward to it. The Immigration Simplification Bill has already been published in draft. It is a massive Bill, but it has major omissions, one of which is proper provision to prevent the destitution of children in asylum-seeking families whose legal rights have been exhausted through the courts. My concern is that the consultation phase in areas that are still quite opaque might take some time, and the political timetable suggests that an election next year is likely to intervene. That means that it is likely to be a long time before proper regulation for failed asylum-seeking families is given the necessary attention by way of primary legislation. The destitution that has resulted from the prevailing provisions will exist for a lot longer than any of us are comfortable with. This is urgent, and the amendment is a marker for what will be a keenly followed and keenly contested area of public policy in the autumn when the Government bring forward their provisions in the Immigration Simplification Bill. I fully accept that the Government must have provisions for deportation and voluntary return in any immigration system, which is not easy. Government is not easy; indeed, I do not think that any of us is arguing that. Having said that, however, and having said that Clause 53 is welcome, the clause does not go nearly far enough to address the extent of the deprivation of families in the United Kingdom at the moment. My former constituency of Roxburgh and Berwickshire, when I was a Member of the other place, did not have very much experience of asylum cases because it did not have that profile of constituency casework. However, since I have come to your Lordships’ House, and certainly after the Second Reading of this Bill, I have made it my business to look into the provisions that are made for those under 18 in families whose asylum rights have been exhausted, and I am shocked at some of the effects on small numbers of families who have to depend on Section 4 or Section 95 provisions for support. It is not an exaggeration to say that some families face destitution; destitution is not too strong a word. I am also surprised and disappointed at the extent to which families and children in them are in a wholly different position. They are considered to be entirely separate from all other young people living in the United Kingdom. The lack of statistical provision to try to find out exactly what is happening to that category of young person is very worrying. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has tabled amendments that seek to address that question. I add my voice to those who say that we really do not know the data and the statistics to enable us to understand the extent of the deprivation that stalks our land in this day and age. Of course the people in the immigration agencies and the UK Border Agency are not hard-faced men—they are professionals doing the best they can in difficult circumstances—but one thing that they have to deal with more than anything else and which creates difficulties for them is that provisions that were made for short-term support are now systematically and as a matter of course being used as long-term support. As someone who follows social security law quite carefully, it is one thing for families to fall in and out of poverty. That sometimes happens. The circumstances of families after a short time in poverty are qualitatively and quantitatively entirely different from those of families after a long time in poverty. Families are being sentenced to levels of support that were meant for short-term provision over a long period of time. The evidence is that our system is sentencing people to the long-term use of systems that were never designed for that purpose. I am concerned, too, about the backlog of cases. The latest evidence available to me, although I fully acknowledge that the backlog is being reduced, is that it will be 2011 before the 280,000 cases, which is the suggested current level of backlog in some areas, will be cleared. That means that the neglect of some of these families will continue until then. I could go on but I will not. Reports are produced daily and weekly. One was produced a fortnight ago by Refugee and Migrant Justice, an organisation of excellent lawyers who defend human rights in the United Kingdom, and is called, Does Every Child Matter? I note the question mark at the end. It is an important part of the title, and I hope that the Minister will find a copy of that report in his red box over the Easter Recess, because it makes compelling reading. If all that was not enough, there is a great deal of uncertainty about healthcare provision and failed asylum-seeking families’ access to healthcare and social work support. I was interested to hear about the Appeal Court ruling earlier this week by Lord Justice Ward. I have not seen the judgment, so I will make no comment, but the newspaper reports of that court case suggest that it will be even harder for failed asylum-seeking families to access healthcare. For all these reasons, we really cannot ignore this issue. We must do something about it. Financial support could be addressed in all sorts of ways in the future, as the amendment suggests. The Independent Asylum Commission—an excellent organisation that produced three excellent reports which I have recently read and reread—concluded that the best way of getting financial support to these families is to allow them to work in some circumstances before they are invited to leave voluntarily or are deported. If I had a little longer, I would argue at some length that the Section 4 voucher system, which requires people to have to exist on vouchers, is entirely discredited and should be abolished. It would be much more sensible and better value for money if the Section 95 more generous level of support was made available. The cost savings in winding up the voucher scheme would more than pay for the extra costs of the Section 95 provision. Abolishing Section 9 will obviously be on the agenda. It is not directly related to financial support, so I will not say anything about that because I would be straying out of order. But we will want to return to abolishing Section 9 provisions in the autumn when the consultation begins. The human rights environment has substantially changed since the 1999 parent Act on asylum was crafted, followed by the provisions of the 2004 Act. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, taken with the new appropriate and perfectly proper concentration on human rights in giving people dignity in a way that public policy applies to them, suggests that Section 4 vouchers and Section 9 provisions need to be seriously and urgently addressed. Finally, this might sound like a cheap political point, but it is not meant to be. Our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has got an enviable and rightly drawn reputation for being passionate about child poverty. However, he seems to have forgotten this small group of vulnerable young people under our asylum provisions. It is time for the Government to accept amendments such as this and to look urgently at what they can do later in the consultation on the Immigration Simplification Bill. The Prime Minister’s wish in relation to children in other parts of the United Kingdom would be brought to bear on failed asylum-seeking families. Their need is great and their cause is just. At the moment, the system is badly in need of repair. I hope that this amendment will go some way to putting that situation right. I beg to move.