My Lords, UK Visa and Immigration is still floundering in the unreliable IT systems and casework backlog left by the troubled UKBA when the Home Secretary abolished it last March and there is nothing in this Bill to deal with the quality of decision-making which has not improved since that change. Now we are placing new demands on UKVI which, in the words of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, it,
“is not equipped or able to meet and gives it powers that it cannot be relied upon to exercise properly”.
I agree with my noble friend the Minister about separating myth from reality. The views on immigration that the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, said were widely held were influenced by false notions of the numbers of immigrants encouraged by the Daily Mail. In an Ipsos MORI poll in June 2013, people questioned thought that immigrants made up 31% of the population, whereas the true figure was 13%. In the latest statistics, immigration for work was down by 12% on the previous year; there was a 7% fall in work-related grants to stay permanently, and non-EEA family visas were down by 20% to the lowest figure since comparable records began in 2005.
These facts are not well advertised, leaving UKIP and the Daily Mail free to create fear in the minds of the public. We saw this in the totally unjustified hysteria over the floods of Bulgarians and Romanians who were allegedly ready to invade the country on 1January, when the hordes of newsmen greeting a flight from Bucharest were disappointed to find that only two of the passengers were Romanian.
One of my fears is that many dependants are being denied leave to enter because of the £18,600 income threshold applied to the sponsor and the refusal to consider other resources available to a couple, such as the earning potential of the applicant or the provision of free accommodation by the sponsor’s parents or other relatives. There is nothing in the Bill to correct breaches of Article 8—the right to family life—and, indeed, Clause 14 tries to coerce the courts into interpreting
Article 8(2) more restrictively by telling them what weight they are to give to certain factors. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has commented adversely on this attempt to bend the decisions of the courts in directions which may conflict with case law, and we shall have to look at this in detail when we come to the Committee stage.
I also fear that substituting this administrative review for the right of appeal against all immigration decisions, except asylum and human rights claims, is bound to lead to injustice. Half the appeals by economic migrants and students are successful, the majority of them on the basis of factual error by the decision-maker. Half of entry clearance appeals and a third of deport appeals are also successful, as the right reverend Prelate said. The common-sense answer would have been to train caseworkers to get the initial decisions right instead of taking away people’s appeal rights. There is already an administrative review by the Home Office presenting officer when he is preparing for the appeal. That process does not pick up hundreds of wrong decisions, as the appeals statistics show.
How will this review approach the many decisions which are not in accordance with the law because they were not in accordance with the rules or did not deal properly with the evidence? Will the review accept representations from the applicant or her representative? Will the process be conducted behind closed doors? Instead of accepting that officials rubber stamp their own colleagues’ decisions, appellants may either seek to reconfigure their cases as human rights challenges or, if that is not on the cards, to proceed by way of judicial review.
The appeals impact statement suggests that 5,600 extra judicial reviews may be started as a result of this process and up to 1,000 granted permission. These cases will cost a lot more than if they had been heard before the First-tier Tribunal and there will be further expenditure when costs are claimed or damages sought. The impact assessment does not go into the arithmetic on this but I am sure the Home Office has the figures. I should be grateful if the Minister would let us have them.
On bail, there is nothing in the Bill to deal with the scandal of long-term detention of individuals who pose no threat to national security. Some 5% of immigration detainees are held for more than a year and another 7% or 8% for between six months and a year. That is surely intolerable and we should require the independent chief inspector, John Vine, to carry out regular annual inspections of the long-term detention of immigrants. For the past few years, while immigration has been declining, the number in detention has been rising steadily. I should be grateful if the Minister would say how much has been spent on the detention estate since the coalition came into office. How does the Treasury view the plans for an even bigger estate?
I have difficulty also with the decision to allow the Secretary of State to deprive a person of his citizenship if it was acquired by naturalisation and she is satisfied that while a citizen the person conducted himself in a manner which is seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the UK. The instant she makes an order under
Clause 60, if the person has no other citizenship he becomes stateless and has only a retrospective right of appeal under the Special Immigration Appeals Commission Act 1997.
Did the Government consult the UNHCR, the guardian of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, before including this clause in the Bill? Did they consider providing some form of external scrutiny over the powers in Section 40 of the 1981 Act, which are being exercised on an increasing scale? In 2013, 20 people were stripped of their UK citizenship, which was more than in all the previous years since the original power was introduced in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002.
On health tourism, the Bill contains only enabling provisions but the intention is that non-EEA migrants granted leave to enter for more than six months will be required to pay a surcharge, like an insurance premium, to cover the cost of any NHS treatment that they may need, which is reasonable. But all other non-EEA visitors coming for shorter periods of up to six months are liable to be charged at the point of accessing treatment after the initial contact with a GP, for which registration will be required. Did Ministers consider the representations we have all had from Maternity Action and the Royal College of Midwives about the harmful effects this will have on pregnant women among the 500,000 estimated undocumented migrants, including not only the short term visitors but also refused asylum-seekers and visa overstayers? They may be deterred from seeking antenatal care and, as a result, develop health resource intensive conditions later on or potential harm to the unborn child.
Obviously I welcome the statutory prohibition of child detention, even though it is still subject to the exceptions that were agreed in 2010. At the Report stage in another place, the Home Secretary said that the Government would provide a separate legal basis for pre-departure accommodation. I am wondering whether that refers to the short-term holding facilities at Heathrow and other points of entry, which the Independent Monitoring Board has condemned as,
“unsuitable for use overnight or at any time by children”.
There is now at last a plan for improvements, due to start in April and to be completed by December 2014. I should be grateful if the Minister would confirm that the project at Heathrow is still on course.
I also welcome the introduction of universal embarkation checks in 2015, which are provided for in Schedule 8 and seem to have escaped the attention of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria. We already screen about two-thirds of passengers leaving the UK using advance passenger information. I understand that that will go up to 75% on all routes and 90% of all air passengers next month. To complete the picture, data on the remaining passengers will have to be collected at the border by carrier and port operator staff. Those persons are already involved in outbound passenger processes, so the additional work required of them will be minimal.
As the Public Accounts Committee said in July 2013, estimates of annual migration are based at present on the International Passenger Survey sample of 5,000 migrants and are subject to a wide margin of error. I
congratulate the Government on eliminating that uncertainty and collecting information, as has been long advocated by the Liberal Democrats. It is of importance to our national security and to the effective enforcement of our immigration laws.
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