My Lords, this is only the third regret Motion I have brought in my 12 years in your Lordships’ House, and, like the other two, it concerns the crippling level of fees. I declare my position as a RAMP associate.
I will focus mainly on the 20% increase in the route to settlement, entry clearance and indefinite leave to remain fees for those on a five or 10-year route to settlement, and on the same increase in children’s citizenship fees, which is the subject of the previous regret Motions and a matter of great concern to a group of us who have come to be known as “the terriers”, as we never give up. Unfortunately, however, a number of the terriers who wanted to support the Motion could not be here today.
I will start with some general points. The first raises the procedural criticism voiced by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee:
“Regrettably, this is the third instrument from the Home Office in just over a month that has breached the convention that at least 21 days should be allowed between laying an instrument and bringing it into effect. In none of the cases has it been clear that urgent action is essential, and in this case the breach seems clear-cut as it resulted from the Home Office’s failure to organise its paperwork in time”.
The committee has written to the Minister concerned to seek assurances that there will be no further unjustified breaches that restrict parliamentary scrutiny in this way, and I hope the Minister can give us that assurance today.
The committee was critical of the failure to publish the impact assessment and equalities impact assessment until after the regulations were laid. Praxis, in its briefing on behalf of a group of 15 organisations working on migration issues—I am grateful to Praxis for its help—argues that the EIA fails to consider properly the impact the fee increases will have on those with protected characteristics, especially where there is no fee waiver. It states:
“Given what we know of the different impact of these fees particularly on women”
and “racialised communities”, and their likely “detrimental and discriminatory impact”, the EIA merely “pays lip service” to the assessment of this impact.
The Home Office has dismissed claims that the visa fees increase will harm business competitiveness, even though the Explanatory Memorandum acknowledges that the impact on business, charities and voluntary bodies is likely to be “significant”. Indeed, the FT ran a story in the summer on how business groups are
urging a rethink on the grounds that the increase will damage the UK’s competitiveness. However, it quoted an “ally” of the Chancellor as saying:
“We need this to fund the public sector pay awards”,
which was a reason given for the increase when it was announced.
This brings me to the justification made for these big increases in fees. As funding public sector pay awards is not a permitted reason for raising them, the rationale offered in the Explanatory Memorandum is
“to significantly increase the income generated through … fees for the purpose of meeting costs within the wider migration and borders system … This will in turn allow taxpayer funding that would have otherwise been required to meet those costs, to instead be prioritised elsewhere”.
Later, there is an oblique reference to public sector pay. I am certainly in favour of decent public sector pay awards, but I fail to see why they should be financed by above-inflation increases in the fees charged to groups who are often in vulnerable circumstances, given that the existing fees were already well above the costs of their processing—a point I will return to.
Furthermore, the justification of helping to meet the costs of the migration and border system is totally inappropriate in the case of children’s citizenship fees—a point that the terriers have made over and again. As the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens, of which I am patron, points out in its briefing with Amnesty and other organisations, for which I am grateful,
“rights to British citizenship by registration are plainly not concerned with migration. Rather these rights are concerned with ensuring that all people whom Parliament identified as having particular connection to the UK when it passed the British Nationality Act 1981 can be fully and equally recognised as citizens of this country.”
Given this, can the Minister please explain the rationale for raising the registration fees of those whom our nationality laws identify as British?
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In the Explanatory Memorandum, the Home Office describes the increases in the various fees as “proportionate”, given that most of them have not been subject to significant increases since 2018. This argument might carry more weight were the fees not already so high—according to one of the submissions to the SLSC, seven to 10 times the cost of processing them. The House of Commons Library points to how, over the last couple of decades, fees have increased significantly and, while the comparisons are not exact, suggests that overall,
“UK immigration costs are much higher than those in many other countries.”
As for child citizenship fees, a former Conservative Home Secretary described them as
“a huge amount of money”.
At £1,214, they are now just over £700 more than it costs to process them. For adults, the excess is now almost £850. How can such sums possibly be justified?
The SLSC did not feel able to adjudicate on the question of fee levels and acknowledged the Home Office’s point that the increases since 2018 have been limited. “Nevertheless”, it stated,
“we understand the potential impact of these large increases in fees on those required to pay them”,
and I will turn to this vital point.
But first, for those on the leave to remain five or 10-year routes, it has to be remembered that in addition to the fee increases in these regulations, already in operation, they face other costs: the immigration health surcharge and repeated extension applications, the costs of both of which are also due to increase. When all these fees are raised, as anticipated, someone on the 10-year route could be paying as much as nearly £19,000 in total for just one adult, never mind children, and excluding the cost of registering biometrics, which must be done at every application. Can the Minister tell us when the repeated extension application fees will be raised; or, better still, can he reassure us that they will not be, given the extra burden they will create?
According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, people on the 10-year route to settlement are disproportionately likely to be on a low income, and its recent destitution study found migrants to be overrepresented. Not surprisingly, even prior to the fees increase, recent research by the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit found that visa applications are forcing many of them into debts of tens of thousands of pounds. This has left many migrants unable to cover their most basic needs, and vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking. For those who cannot pay, the result can be a loss of lawful immigration status and, with it, the right to work, rent a home or access healthcare safely. Research by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has shown that the inability to meet the cost of these is already a key factor in the loss of legal immigration status. Other research with young migrants has documented the profound impact on mental health and well-being.
For the children required to pay the citizenship registration fee, the consequences of not being able to do so can be profound. The High Court found, on the basis of a mass of evidence, that children so excluded were made to feel alienated. It can affect their right to enter higher education and, in adulthood, makes them vulnerable to the hostile/compliant environment policy, with echoes of the Windrush scandal. In the words of the PRCBC, they enter adulthood “facing significant disadvantages”, even when they were born in the UK. This has particular implications for those in poverty or living with disabilities.
One example is Harriet, who was born in and has always lived in the UK. She has always lived with significant disabilities. Her lone mother could not afford the fee when she was a child, when there was no waiver. Now that she is an adult, without the possibility of a waiver, she is unlikely ever to be able to afford the increased fee and to secure the citizenship to which she has been entitled since the age of 10. Can the Minister tell us what steps were taken to assess whether the children’s fee increase was in the best interests of the child, as is required by law? On the face of it, it is difficult to see how a 20% increase in a fee that had already been described as “huge” by a former Home Secretary could be in a child’s best interests.
The Home Office’s answer to many of the concerns raised is that fee waivers are available in specific circumstances. However, as the SLSC noted, many people are unaware of them or of their potential eligibility. The committee therefore encouraged the Home Office to consider whether they were publicised well enough. Can the Minister tell us what steps the Home Office has taken in response and whether it plans to improve the publicity of such waivers for potential applicants?
Other concerns relate to the narrow scope of fee waivers and the difficulties associated with claiming. Praxis points out that migrant fee waivers are available only to the minority making specified human rights applications for a waiver and cannot be claimed by many of those applying for indefinite leave to remain, leaving them in a prolonged state of precarity and vulnerability to loss of status if they cannot afford the fees. As evidence from the Work and Pensions Committee’s inquiry noted, those who are able to claim face a complex process that is difficult to navigate without expert legal advice, yet, in most cases, such an application will be out of scope of legal aid in England and Wales. That submission also suggested that an historically high refusal rate can itself act as a deterrent to applying.
Just how restrictive the criteria can be is illustrated by the example of someone whose fee waiver request was turned down because he was sleeping on a friend’s sofa. This was deemed to constitute a source of support that meant he supposedly was not destitute. Praxis concludes that
“for all practical purposes, fee waivers are out of reach even for those who are eligible”.
In the face of a big increase in fees, will the Government now review the scope and accessibility of waivers?
Fee waivers were introduced only for children’s citizenship fees, not adults’, last year in response to litigation, together with the welcome automatic exemption of children looked after by a local authority. Although the introduction of a waiver was a positive step, the PRCBC warns that
“the waiver process has itself introduced considerable complexity, bureaucracy, and evidential demands to satisfy the Home Office that the fee is unaffordable and so to be waived. Many British children, therefore, remain excluded. This is because although they cannot afford the fee, they and/or their parents are either defeated by the waiver process”
or are not poor enough to qualify for a waiver even though they are too poor to pay the fee and are, in many cases, poor enough to qualify for means-tested benefits. Would it not make sense at least to waive the fee for those in receipt of means-tested benefits?
This takes us back to a debate that we had last year, when there was considerable criticism of the guidance for the administration of these waivers. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, who was the Minister at the time, told noble Lords that the Home Office was “open to feedback” on the guidance and assured us:
“Where it is clear that applicants face issues of affordability—for example, where the individual might face destitution … there will not be an onerous focus on the evidence required”.—[Official Report, 6/7/22; col. 1068.]
Can the Minister tell us—either now or, if necessary, in writing—what changes have been made to the guidance in response to the feedback provided during the debate and any other feedback received?
In response to questioning, she confirmed that there would be ongoing monitoring of the take-up of the waiver. Can the Minister therefore tell us what the current fee waiver grant rate is? The impact assessment assumed 63%. Although there were
“no specific plans to report to Parliament”
on the monitoring, she said that
“we are open to providing further updates and will consider the best mechanism for doing this”.—[Official Report, 6/7/22; col. 1068.]
That was well over a year ago, so I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us what the mechanism is, as the terriers certainly have not been updated.
More generally, given their “controversial nature”, the SLSC encourages the Home Office
“to review the effects of the changes following their implementation”.
Again, will the Minister give us an assurance that this will happen, that the results will be reported to Parliament and that, if the effects are as feared, the Government will act to mitigate them?
The fee and visa increases implemented as a result of these regulations have caused considerable concern. Do we really want to push people who are trying to make a life for themselves in our country into undocumented penury and ill health, and make it even harder for children to make good their citizenship rights? I beg to move.