My Lords, I remind everyone that Clause 11 is not only not about immigration, let alone illegal immigration; it is not even about asylum seekers. It is titled “Differential treatment of refugees”—people who have been recognised and accepted as entitled to asylum in this country. What Clause 11 means is that the Government want to penalise a certain category of people who have been accepted as refugees. On the one hand, we accept them as refugees, but then we are going to turn round and penalise them in various ways for how they arrived. I have agreed with all the critics of Clause 11, and I agree that Clause 11 as a whole needs to get the chop.
Clause 11 wants to penalise people with a much-reduced permission to stay; by requiring several frequent applications for further permission to stay; by keeping them in uncertainty for many years; by excluding them from public funds; and by delaying or denying altogether a visa for family reunion. I suggest that this is not only pernicious, as everyone has said, but costly. It is costly to that individual and it is costly to society, because it is not good for society when you have people who are unable to integrate and living with instability, isolation,
possible destitution, homelessness and separation from family. They have been recognised as refugees, which means that we expect these people to be part of our society. I cannot see that it is good for society.
I had the opportunity, when the Minister was kind enough to meet me, to receive the great news on CSI. I come at this with an approach of both principle and practicality. As I say, I cannot see that it is in the interests of either society or the Home Office to have people living in this constant fear of what their futures are going to hold. We are told that the asylum system is broken. We know about the 125,000 unresolved applications. We know about the time and delays; on average, it now takes a year to decide a case. When I was an MEP, I had people who had been waiting three and a half years for an initial application, with the harm it did to them physically and mentally and to their status within their family as well. How is it going to help the Home Office to have more administration in constantly having to review these applications to decide whether it is going to deny public funds or renew the permission to stay?
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There is also bound to be an increase in litigation that arises as a result of Clause 11. I appreciated the comments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, on the likely legal situation but there is bound to be strain on the legal and judicial systems from all this. I cannot see that this is going to help the problem of overload in the Home Office. It is shooting itself in the foot with all this.
I want to say something about family reunion in particular. I had an opportunity with the Second Reading of a Private Member’s Bill on family reunion, which I sort of took in relay from my noble friend Lady Hamwee. That was last September; I do not know whether it will make any further progress. Penalising group 2 refugees through family reunion is going to penalise women and children in particular and remove the largest single visa route by which they have a chance of arriving. Other people have made the point that that is going to create the incentive for dangerous and unsafe routes to this country—even more business for the smuggling gangs we are told the Home Office is so keen to put out of business.
My Private Member’s Bill wants to enlarge the opportunities for family reunion, particularly by allowing unaccompanied refugee children the right to sponsor their parents and siblings under the age of 25, as well as allowing adult refugees to sponsor adult children and siblings under the age of 25. Clause 11 goes completely in the opposite direction to what I and many other people want, but I do want to ask what the situation would be under Article 8 because there are no details in this Bill or any of the supporting documents on what the family reunion rights for group 2 would be, other than that the temporary protection status they would get would “restrict” those rights. In the other place, Tom Pursglove MP from the Home Office said, in writing to members of the Public Bill Committee, that
“we will not permit Group 2 refugees to reunite with families unless a refusal would be a breach of our international obligations under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Our policy on Article 8 is already clear.”
I am grateful to the British Red Cross briefing for reminding me that, far from being clear, the Home Office’s current guidance on Article 8 runs to 100 pages.
This Bill will make the family reunion process far more complicated, again going completely in the wrong direction. It is also not clear what level of evidence would need to be provided to substantiate an Article 8 claim. The Home Office has not set out under what circumstances it would consider that a refugee in the UK would not engage Article 8. If you are seeking to have your family, spouse and children come and join you, how would that not come within Article 8, which concerns the right to family and private life? I ask the Minister to give in her reply a bit more clarity about what family reunion rights group 2 refugees would have under Article 8.
Clause 11 is not only pernicious in principle: it has bad practical implications all round for the refugee, for our society and for the workload of the Home Office.