It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather). I shall be doing the same as her at the end of the debate, and I shall make my remarks shorter simply by agreeing with her remarks about children and about bail detention. Those are critical issues that need to be addressed during the debate.
I have campaigned for more than 30 years against injustice in our immigration laws. Indeed, one of the reasons that I stood for election in Slough rather than anywhere else was that I wanted to follow the tradition of Slough Labour MPs who had voted against the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968. That legislation had the effect of making whole groups of people stateless, and I was proud that that injustice was remedied in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002.
I recognise that we can achieve change and get justice even when the debate on immigration is as toxic as it is at the moment. I also recognise that people feel deep anxiety about immigration, particularly in an era of austerity when they are feeling insecure about their jobs, their pensions and about their families’ futures. However, this Bill is operating the worst form of dog-whistle politics in blaming migrants for problems that are not of their construction. I know how much migrants bring to Britain. Slough, a migrant town, is the third most productive wealth-producing town in Britain outside London.
After years of campaigning, I am pretty familiar with issues such as the Wilson committee’s report of 1967, which stated that it was
“fundamentally wrong and inconsistent with the rule of law that power to take decisions affecting a man’s whole future should be vested in officers of the executive, from whose findings there is no appeal.”
Yet that is in effect what the Government are proposing to do in this Bill, 42 years after the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968.
In introducing the Bill, the Home Secretary told us stories about cases of repeat applications by criminals and abuses of the appeals system. I suppose this is why the Home Office loses cases so frequently! We are not talking about a load of radical Trotskyist judges; we are talking about judges who decide that the Home Office is wrong almost half the time. The Home Office is now
saying that the judges will not make those decisions in future, and that it will resolve those matters through administrative appeals.
Let me tell the House about the administrative reviews that already exist in parts of the system. A judicial review in the upper tribunal involved a case in which an applicant had given the Home Office their credit card number, and—guess what—the Home Office had typed it out wrongly. The consequence was that the application was not treated as a proper application because it was not accompanied by the full fee. The case had to go as far as the upper tribunal before a judge decided that it was a proper application, and that the Home Office had written down the credit card number wrongly.
Such cases are not rare. I have a constituent whose husband wrote the cheque to accompany her application, but instead of putting £865, he put 865p, because he is a twit. The consequence is that her application is now out of time, and she has no appeal. Another case involved a response from an entry clearance officer who, having stated that the immigration rules require a spouse to have good spoken English and to have passed a speaking and listening test, said that the applicant had passed that test but failed the English writing test and was therefore refused entry. We have asked for reviews of all those cases, but—guess what—we have been told that there will be no review or that the review has upheld the original decision.
Those of us who deal regularly with the Home Office know that it is incapable of doing what it is supposed to do now. Yet through the Bill, it is grabbing a whole lot of work for itself from the appeals system. The result is that it will break. It might have got rid of the UK Border Agency, but the Home Office will break if it tries to do all those things.
We need to heed the words of the Wilson committee report. On decisions as serious as whether someone should be allowed to live with their husband, everyone should have the right to have that decision subjected to an independent review. That is why we need an appeals system. There are groups of people who currently have no right of appeal, but the Home Office admits that it cannot do anything about them. There is a large Zimbabwean community in my constituency, but the Home Office is not returning any of its members to Zimbabwe because of the situation there. They are hard-working people who are desperate to work, yet they are in limbo. In passing responsibility for immigration control from those previously responsible to other bodies such as landlords and the health service, the Home Office is putting those people at greater risk. They are already at horrible risk. I have spoken to constituents who turn to illegal activities or to prostitution in order to feed their children, because they are not allowed to work.
The Government say that it will be easy for landlords to check out the status of applicants, but any of us who deal with employers know that the current Home Office advice service for employers is gummed up: they can never get through on the phone and the process takes ages. Many of my constituents who are allowed to work here perfectly legally have been unable to prove it because of Home Office inefficiency, and therefore lose their jobs. A similar advice service is now going to be offered
to landlords. It might be fine in an area where landlords have to try hard to find tenants, but that is not the way competition works in the south of England; it is all the other way. Large numbers of people will therefore be refused housing to which they should be entitled.
That is why the Residential Landlords Association—not noted for its lobbying of Parliament—has written to say that it is
“seriously concerned that the proposal depends on untrained landlords doing the work of UK Border Agency staff without support and with the threat of penalties if they get it wrong.”
A programme on television recently highlighted a number of landlords in London who were already operating a racially discriminatory rental policy. They do not need much encouragement to continue with that, or to do worse. That is the risk that the Bill will create.
On health, the Bill also suggests that there should be a prior payment. People should pay, if they are here temporarily, for health care—there is no problem with that—but the choice optioned in this Bill is the wrong choice. There is a reason why the consultation, the details of which I have been asking for for more than a month, has been published this morning. Let me quote the analysis we heard about in Health questions:
“The analysis is a top-down estimate based on data from the Census 2011, the International Passenger Survey 2012 and Immigration and other statistics from the Office of National Statistics…These are the best available data in the public domain”.
What that means is, “We licked our finger and put it up in the air. We are guessing.”
Many countries have a requirement that migrants should, for example, have an effective health insurance system. That would not be a bad thing to do and is a more popular response in the Home Office consultation than the proposed levy, yet the Home Office has rejected that idea and proposes to introduce a levy that will burden particular nationalities more than others.
The Bill shows the arrogance of the Home Office by refusing to have its decisions appealed. It shows that the Home Office, in an island nation where it is possible to have effective border controls, does not care about the racially divisive consequences of increased internal immigration control. It shows that the Home Office has ignored its lack of capacity for doing this and, shockingly, includes proposals that were not prefigured in the consultation and that will bear down on victims of human trafficking.
The consultation on health payment contained a specific commitment about victims of human trafficking. Until now, overseas domestic workers have not been charged for health care. There is a reason for that—they are vulnerable and exploited. Frankly, the National Crime Agency is not making a priority of tracking down that particular form of human trafficking. We know how hard it is for those people. There are shocking stories of people with chronic, often infectious diseases who are prevented from getting access to health care by their exploiting employers. Under these proposals, they will be more vulnerable than they were before.
I am very glad that the Home Office is planning to introduce a modern day slavery Bill, but I am truly shocked that through this Bill they will reduce even the pathetic rights that modern day slaves have today. We have to chuck it out. There are some good things in it, but as a whole piece of legislation, it is truly unacceptable and we should reject it.
2.42 pm