My Lords, Amendment 79 would require the Secretary of State to provide physical proof of immigration status to anyone who has been granted such status and requests such proof. The arguments for providing physical proof alongside digital status have been aired extensively in this House, most recently in the debates on the then Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill,
when your Lordships overwhelmingly supported a cross-party amendment to this effect for EEA citizens with settled or pre-settled status. I am heartened that this amendment has also received support from across the House, and I am grateful to all the signatories of it.
This amendment differs a little from my 2020 amendment in that it covers not just EEA citizens with settled and pre-settled status but also non-EEA citizens who have immigration status. That is because, despite the huge difficulties and anxieties caused by digital-only status, the Government have decided to extend it to non-EEA citizens who previously were able to use biometric residence permits, biometric residence cards or frontier worker permits.
Whatever the merits or otherwise of a digital-only system, one would imagine that before introducing such a radical change the Government would have undertaken extensive trials to check that the system worked and could be easily operated by those who had to use it. In fact, the Government conducted only one such trial in 2018, which concluded:
“There is a clearly identified user need for the physical card at present, and without strong evidence that this need can be mitigated for vulnerable, low-digital skill users, it should be retained.”
The Government ignored that finding and ploughed on.
A comprehensive document setting out many of the difficulties users have encountered was submitted to the independent monitoring authority by the3million in November last year, and I raised a number of specific concerns when we debated this amendment in Committee. These included problems with updating status when a person received a new passport, multiple errors in the view and prove system, and even immigration officials demanding physical proof of settled status.
The Government set up a settled status resolution centre, which, confusingly to everyone, works alongside the UKVI resolution centre. At the outset, those who received a letter telling them they had received settled or pre-settled status were not provided with any contact number at all if something went wrong. Subsequently, the letters included the number of the EU settlement resolution centre for people to contact—but many cannot even get through. Despite the Home Office asserting in meetings with stakeholders that callers who did get through to the resolution centre had to wait an average of 14 minutes, it could not or would not say how many did not get through, although it acknowledged that demand was managed. That seems to mean that callers were simply disconnected to keep waiting times down. For example, the transcript of a call made on 12 November 2021 and included in the submission to the independent monitoring authority showed that the call had been automatically disconnected regardless of the options chosen.
The full scale of the problem has come to light only recently, because until then the Home Office resolutely refused to provide detailed information on the performance of the resolution centre. In 2019, an FoI request to obtain this information was refused, on the grounds that the data was already planned for publication. However, as no such publication subsequently took place, a new FoI request was submitted in July 2021. After repeated follow-up requests, an internal review
and a referral to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the information was finally published on 1 December last year. It immediately became clear why the Government had been so reluctant to publish the data, because it showed that, over the 12 months to October 2021, just 44% of the calls to the EU settlement resolution centre were successfully connected.
In response to all these difficulties and to the Government’s rejection of biometric residence cards for EU and EEA citizens with settled and pre-settled status, the3million made the constructive alternative proposal of a barcode system similar to the one we had for Covid vaccination status. The Minister responded to this suggestion in Committee by saying:
“He mentioned the QR code, and I totally agree; the QR code has worked brilliantly throughout the pandemic for certain things such as updating your Covid vaccination status. I will take that back to the Home Office and report back on any progress … but I support the whole principle of being able to use a QR code”.—[Official Report, 10/2/22; cols. 1981-82.]
At last, after so many years debating this issue, there seemed to be a glimmer of hope and some common ground.
How naive I was. Last Friday, the3million received a letter from the Home Office rejecting the idea of a barcode. It is four pages of bureaucratic obstructionism without any acknowledgement of the problem that needs to be addressed, the anxieties of those whom the policy affects, or any positive proposals about a way forward. It makes a whole series of inaccurate assertions that could easily have been corrected if those involved in determining the policy had engaged effectively with those affected by it, but they did not.
Having finally agreed to a meeting for the 3million to present the proposal, the Home Office then took eight months to respond to it and refused to hold an interim meeting with the group during that time to discuss progress with its assessment of the proposal. It then produced a wholly negative response that rejects the proposal out of hand on grounds that are simply wrong and could have been corrected had the interim meeting taken place.
The truth is that the Home Office had made up its mind before it had even begun. Unfortunately, this sort of response is not a one-off but part of a pattern of behaviour at the Home Office that was identified in the independent Windrush Lessons Learned Review—commissioned by the Home Office—which states on page 141:
“It is not clear that the department has learned the wider lesson that it should be engaging meaningfully with the communities it serves. The true test will be whether stakeholders, including those considered to represent critical voices, are firstly invited to participate in developing the department’s policies, and also in designing, implementing and evaluating them.”
The Home Office’s response to the barcode proposal makes it abundantly clear that this test has been comprehensively failed. At the heart of this issue is whether the Home Office is willing to listen to the users of its services and take on board their concerns, or whether Ministers and officials are impervious to them and simply determined to pursue their policy regardless of the consequences.
As I have said in all our previous debates, this is ultimately about people’s lives, the unnecessary difficulties and anxieties being imposed on them, and the Home Office’s seeming inability to recognise or empathise with those concerns. I hope that the Minister and her department will reflect on how their response fits into the wider cultural problems in the Home Office and come back with a proposal that will fix this problem, rather than continuing to pretend that it does not exist. I beg to move.
11.15 pm