My Lords, I first declare my interest as president of Liberal Democrats for Seekers of Sanctuary. I quote from one not of my own party, David Lammy, who, in a speech last week in the House of Commons, stated:
“Your Department’s treatment of the Windrush generation has been nothing less than a national scandal. In November, we learned that at least 164 Windrush citizens were wrongly removed, detained or stopped at the border by our own Government. Eleven of those who were wrongly deported have died. You have announced three more today. Every single one of those cases is a shocking indictment of your Government’s pandering to far right racism, sham immigration targets and the dog whistle of the right-wing press”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/2/18; cols. 170-71.]
In addition, I received a letter earlier this week from one who said:
“I am a Portuguese citizen from Lisbon, came here in 1993 on a full scholarship paid for by the Royal Academy of Music to study, when I was just 19 years old. I stayed and have been working as a performer and teacher ever since.
I came here legally, settled with no issues and have had a national insurance number since 1993. I have paid tax since 1997 … When I applied for settled status I wasn’t given a reason for being refused”.
Nor was she asked to provide evidence. She continues:
“It made me both frightened and angry. I’ve been here continuously for nearly 26 years and couldn’t think of any reason why I wouldn’t be immediately put through … I was promised and reassured by this government that the ridiculous process of having to apply for a status I already have (!) was simple, easy and that bar criminal conviction everyone would get through straight away.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, on calling this debate. What a pleasure it is to follow his eloquent words. I will focus more, if I may, on the business aspects of immigration.
As Brexit draws ever closer, few topics can be as important as the future immigration procedures for our country. The United Kingdom benefits greatly from strong immigrant participation in our workforce. The latest headline figures that I have, from 2017, illustrate this. Nationally, the figures for country of birth among the UK workforce stood at 82.2% UK-born, with 7.5% from the EEA and 10.2% from the rest of the world. But the importance of international labour is much more significant if we look at London, where 59.5% were UK-born, 14.1% from the EEA and 26.3% from the rest of the world. I have worked for 46 years in the City of London, mainly in international shipping but latterly including 11 years elected to the City of London Corporation. If we strip out the figures for the City, they are not dissimilar to those for London, although around 1.5% more were from the EEA and around 1.5% less from the rest of the world.
These are striking figures and illustrate the very important part played by overseas labour in our economy, particularly in London. I am sure that other noble Lords will speak about the importance of foreign labour in specific areas and industries across the country but I want to concentrate on its crucial contribution in London, not least the City. I will focus on the highly skilled individuals who are critical to our future success. We know that concern around freedom of labour movement was a key issue in the referendum but I am talking about highly skilled labour, which we need and should welcome.
A report issued by the City of London Corporation in December 2018 found that the financial and professional services sector contributed over £72 billion in taxes last year. To give a sense of scale, that corresponds to half the NHS budget and about 11% of total UK government revenue. Professional services are international and that international dimension is London’s strongest suit; for example, across measures of competitiveness in global trade and investment and financial services capability, London ranks top when compared with other cities. Between 2013 and 2017, London received the highest volume of financial services foreign direct investment projects globally.
My Lords, there is very little trust in our immigration system. On the one hand, the Home Office is a byword for inefficiency, maladministration and heartlessness, with its “go home” vans, the Windrush scandal and the hostile environment; on the other hand, many people mistrust immigration because they are not sure that people are here legally. Since the Border Force was slashed under the Conservatives, that distrust of good management has some validity.
The migration and asylum system is not fit for purpose and needs to work a great deal better than it currently does to increase efficiency, quality, value for money and trust, making Britain welcoming and customer-friendly for those we want to stay, and better at stopping and removing those we do not. This needs radical reform and better deployment of resources to convince the public that migration is well managed, and to convince migrants that the UK is not out to cause them misery.
The Home Office sets itself up to fail with the net migration target that the Prime Minister is so wedded to. It is arbitrary, unachievable and damaging; and when not reached, inevitably, just fosters suspicion. I am afraid that the sight of the Home Secretary flying back from his holiday over Christmas and declaring a major incident over a few hundred migrants in the Channel—it needed to be dealt with competently, but it was not a major incident—did not increase trust. It undermined trust in the migration system. Fear of EU free movers could have been turned into a win-win if the Government had been more nimble on the local impact, channelling local resources so that communities could see that they attracted more doctors, teaching assistants and so on, to help everybody.
Far from offering improvements, the new immigration Bill will suck all EU citizens into the bureaucratic system that they have so far escaped, instead of the simplicity of EU free movement—and of course Britons will lose that opportunity for free movement as well, because it is a two-way street. EU citizens and their employers will be subject to the full weight of the Home Office red tape. The NHS will be paying hundreds of millions of pounds in visa fees to the Home Office—talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul. The proposed £30,000 salary threshold could leave up to 100,000 jobs in social care and nursing unfilled, and imperil the ability of businesses to expand or survive.
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord for securing this debate, and need to declare my own interest, as laid out in the register, as a trustee of Reset.
Given the velocity with which the incredibly narrow immigration Bill will likely be sped through this House, any and all opportunities for Parliament to provide scrutiny of immigration is to be welcomed. Without more scrutiny we seem to risk squandering the potential for a reset moment in the way that the UK thinks, debates and legislates about migration.
What could have been the moment when the Government led a discussion about the deeper purpose of our migration system has become instead one that underlines the persistent and escalating centralisation of policy by successive inhabitants of 2 Marsham Street. This trend has also resulted in the Immigration Rules becoming infamous in their complexity, as the Law Commission has recently highlighted.
Improving immigration procedures means making them simpler and more open to parliamentary scrutiny. Only then can we hope to secure a future system animated by a shared sense of purpose and focused on human dignity.
This is not to say that the reflections on purpose are entirely absent from the current discussion. The White Paper is not without its problems, but it sets out some of what the Home Office thinks migration is for. In particular, it is to be welcomed that the rhetoric is beginning to move beyond arbitrary targets.
However, given that the focus of this debate is on opportunities for improvement, I want to focus on the ways in which crude policy levers continue to be confused for a deeper purpose and risk jeopardising other policy objectives. For example, we see this in the proposed short-term worker visa proposed in the immigration White Paper. A 12-month “cool down” period would create a churn of workers, hurting businesses and integration. The National Conversation on Immigration found that while people were often sceptical about immigration, they would much prefer newcomers to settle in a community and integrate, and not constantly churn. At the moment, our procedures prioritise making immigration undesirable to certain groups over and above making immigration desirable to local communities. There is a conflation of “control” with “making life difficult for those considering migrating”. We need an immigration policy led by the needs of communities and the personhood of migrants.
My Lords, may I invite your Lordships’ co-operation in keeping an eye on the clock? The time limit allocated to Back-Benchers is six minutes. When the clock shows six, time is up, I am afraid.
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, for giving us this opportunity to debate an important issue while there is still time to smooth some of the rough edges of the Government’s policy on immigration procedures, as outlined in last December’s White Paper. It is worth saying that flaws in the system have existed for some time and are not caused exclusively by Brexit, although they are exacerbated by it.
I want to concentrate on the creative industries sector, which contributes more than £90 billion a year to the British economy and is growing twice as fast as the rest of the economy. It is highly international and dependent on overseas employees. I therefore very much support many of the observations made by the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans.
It so happens that last week a meeting of the British Council All-Party Parliamentary Group brought together representatives of the arts—ballet, music and writing—the fashion and design industry, museums, architects and the regions, particularly the devolved regions, to discuss the gaps and risks for the arts and creative industries post Brexit. Time and again, the issues of visas and freedom of movement were raised. It seems to me that a special category of highly skilled workers needs to be considered for the sector. I recognise that the Government state in the White Paper that there will not be a cap on the number of skilled workers and I hope that is good news for the creative industries. It may also be that the new regulations on leave to enter and remain, introduced by my noble friend Lady Williams earlier today, will be helpful, but there is a need for more discretion and flexibility.
There needs to be a fast-track procedure for a situation when, for example, an opera singer loses his or her voice or a leading ballerina strains a muscle and a replacement has to be flown in at short notice. Obviously, in the past there was little or no problem if the replacement was an EU citizen, but it has always been difficult when a third country is involved. I therefore ask the Minister whether any consideration has been given to creating a special exemption for highly skilled performers to cover these exceptional cases. After all, there is clearly very little likelihood that these exceptional people will either wish or be able to remain permanently in the United Kingdom, which seems to be the dominating thought behind our immigration procedures. Might the concept of an individual immigration status as a basis of control be tailored in some way to meet such special needs?
3:49 pm
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I want to talk about settled status and follow on from the discussion we had at Question Time this afternoon. In doing so, I pay tribute to the campaign and information groups that have brought to light serious problems with the system that is being set up, notably the3million, the Twitter-based group In Limbo, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and its latest report, and many other individuals, academics and journalists who are raising this. A scandal is developing, and it needs to be nipped in the bud early if it is not to result in what Yvette Cooper called, “Windrush on steroids. We are at an early stage; we can do it now and we need to do it.
I have lots of questions to ask the Government and I have not possibly got time to ask them all, so those that I do not get to I will put down as Written Questions. The Minister may be batting on a sticky wicket with some of them, but she will no doubt write if she cannot answer.
As the existing rights of EU citizens living here are being abolished, which is what is happening, they were promised that these would be replaced with a new system—the Government are calling it settled status—which would simply require them to say who they are, show that they are an EU citizen, and show that they are resident in the UK and have not been guilty of a serious criminal offence. It was promised that it would be simple, easy to navigate, and in the interests of the applicant and of the Home Office, which simply cannot cope with a complex new bureaucracy. Instead, we are being offered something that is complex, difficult to navigate and not coping: settled status looks like a new slippery slope.
What is settled status? What is pre-settled status? So far, it has been a talus of broken promises. What is the system for applying? It has been a tale of betrayal. Does it work? No. The Government seem to be telling us that it is okay because, of the people who have been successful so far, 100% have been successful. That seems to be their argument. They ignore the facts. They say there have been no refusals so far. That is because the default they are giving the people they refuse is pre-settled status, whatever that may mean. It is an even more slippery slope.
My first question concerns the3million. Last July, the3million sent the Home Office 168 questions. I have looked at these questions; they are all pretty obvious and straightforward. The organisation claims that, so far, only 19% have been adequately answered. Why is this? Is it because the Home Office does not know the answers, because it is trying to keep everything secret or because it is a bit shambolic?
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, for securing this debate and for generously framing it in a way that allows the concerns of many sectors to be raised. Addressing the noble Lord’s question squarely is a bit of a challenge, as it would require general agreement on what exactly is wrong at the moment—this we do not have. The Prime Minister continues to assert that taking back control of our borders is the will of the people, while polls show that public concerns about immigration are the lowest they have been for 16 years.
Be that as it may, we now have a White Paper, which confirms, as anticipated, that the current dual-entry system—
Surely the reason concern is lower than before is that people believe that we have taken back control and that henceforth we will have proper controls on immigration. That is the only explanation.
20 of 34 shown
I was lied to.
The app doesn’t work for the self-employed.
The app doesn’t come with a helpline number or email to write to, it also doesn’t tell you that if you’re self-employed you’re not likely to get through.
It doesn’t offer help in any way.
What I want to know is why on earth the Home Office cannot just look at my 25 continuous years of NI and understand it is me!
I have lost sleep, been hugely stressed over this, and none of this is of my choice and making.
17.5% of all EU citizens here are self-employed and they are all having the same issue. Half a million people! To me this is a human rights issue, we’re being lied to, the app system is immature, bugged and biased against the self-employed … Every time an EU citizen gets rejected and is asked to submit evidence of their lives here, it creates a huge amount of confusion and stress.
It seems that this whole sorry process is unethical, biased, and unlawful. The government is scrambling to put together anything that may be seen to make sense but has no actual substance.
People’s lives matter, and they are playing with our future!
I worked very hard all my life, this government is happy to take my money and work but won’t give me a voice or a choice in my future”.
She concludes:
“I have a British husband and two small children”.
This instance and many others clearly show that the whole situation is not fit for purpose. Nothing proves that better than the results of appeals against Home Office immigration decisions and how those appeals have increased in number over the years. In 2005, 17% of appeals were approved by the tribunal or the higher court. In 2009 that was up to 29%; in 2014, it was 28%; in 2015, 35%; and in 2016, 40%. We are assured that the Government are attempting to improve the situation, but nothing changes.
This results in a destruction of confidence in the whole system. When people cannot trust government decisions, we are in grave danger. When people feel, as David Lammy asserted, that one section of the community is discriminated against, that danger is even more threatening. I do not lay the blame on the officers or decision-makers; they try to fulfil this part of their Home Office responsibility. But there must be great stress in the job they are undertaking. I can immediately suggest two changes. First, every interview should be audio recorded so that there is no uncertainty over responses or the ability of those interviewed to understand a language foreign to them. Secondly, I suggest we should have not one decision-maker in every interview, but two.
I refer to a film directed by Professor Sue Clayton of Goldsmiths university. The main character of her film is ZS—let us call him that. He is a vulnerable Afghan boy with bullet wounds from the Taliban and a record of repeated suicide attempts in France. The Home Office refused to accept him and the other 36 children in the film, who, Sue suggests, were eligible under the Dubs amendment. Sue says that,
“we became increasingly concerned that the procedures they had in place for assessing our kids and others were flawed and profoundly inadequate; that the criteria for acceptance were being constantly changed; and these changes not relayed to the applicants, so that many were not able to apply, or their applications discounted. It was also clear that the Home Office were not meeting the Dubs quota of 480 lone children from Europe. In February 2018, the Home Office were sued in the High Court on behalf of our client ZS and the others, for their failure to lawfully implement the Dubs Amendment”.
The result was, Professor Clayton continued, first, that the Home Office was judged not to have provided,
“the Calais children with written decisions or any reason for their refusal. This meant they were unable to appeal (and cases such as this are generally won on appeal)”.
Secondly, she says, the result was:
“That the Home Office acted unlawfully by failing in its ‘duty of candour’ by not making its policy and procedures available to those who needed to know”.
She says that her film shows that the Home Office,
“changed its policy no less than 8 times in 18 months, so that the young people, their lawyers, carers and even the French government were all unaware of the procedures for applying to Dubs. Latterly it’s only through the French government that kids in France can apply”.
Professor Sue Clayton also says:
“So we did succeed in getting condemnation for the unlawful practices of the Home Office—one small further step on the way to dismantling the Hostile Environment”—
what a terrible word “hostile” is. She ends:
“Shockingly, after nearly 3 years, only … half of the 480 Dubs places have been filled, even though the Amendment stressed the agreed number shall be brought ‘as soon as possible’. So, the fight goes on”.
It could well be that immigration matters should no longer be a Home Office responsibility but in a department of their own. There are so many other changes that we want. We want no indefinite detention, the right to work much sooner than after the present 12 months and far better legal advice and protection for young refugees when they reach 18 years of age. I have a Bill that I hope will reach the statute book this year. All these measures would give hope and huge self-respect to those who have had the most devastating experiences. I do not want to be part of a society that dehumanises people. We should not treat them as citizens of nowhere; I prefer Socrates’ claim:
“I’m not a citizen of Athens or a citizen of Greece, but a citizen of the world”.
The last private rescue ship, the “Aquarius”, was forced to halt its operations in December. More than 29,000 people are estimated to have been rescued by the ship, which was not allowed to dock in Italy last June. But how can we criticise such moves when we ourselves have a questionable record on immigration? We can be a country that restores and builds, or we can be otherwise. In the 17th century, the Dutch of Amsterdam welcomed immigrants and said:
“We are seekers after truth and are richer in having you among us”.
Are we also not richer because of others who have contributed and are contributing to our lives? Remember: we were all immigrants once.
The contribution of the City is not always fully remarked on. I for one have been greatly concerned to see how little the City and the associated sector’s interests appear to have been weighed in the balance during the withdrawal negotiations. This is a sector where the UK is number one in the world. It becomes doubly important that the future visa regime should match the needs of the City and other related sectors. Please do not let us throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is crucial for the future success of our economy and nation—for the City, for British business, for international businesses and to attract more of them, for our creative industries, for SMEs, for academia, for students, for the UK—to have a regime in place where we attract and are open to the best in the world.
On a cautionary note, I would point to a risk. If we fail to put in place a system where the brightest and best can get visas and work here, the risk is that our own British brightest and best will depart. The young feel much more citizens of the world. They want to work with the best from around the world and where they feel best rewarded, which is likely to be where their international peers are working. It is vital that changes are made so that the UK’s future immigration process is both ambitious and dynamic—ready to change for the benefit of the country and those whom we wish to attract. We must improve the current process to one which is helpful, efficient and predictable, and ensures that we are the country of choice for applicants and employers—a country that operates the immigration system to which other countries aspire.
How are we to set about this? The City of London Corporation and the international consultants EY have just published a very helpful report, Streamlining Success: Building a World-classVisa Process for the UK.The report sets out practical steps to improve the visa process, allowing firms to recruit international talent, and recommends ways to streamline the user experience for people going through the process. The feedback received from employers by the City of London Corporation is that the current system is, “stressful, inefficient and precarious”. The perception is that the Home Office can ask for additional information or documentation at any time, make subjective and retroactive decisions that are difficult or impossible to challenge, and take an indeterminate length of time to make decisions. The research indicated that the practical impacts of the current system include: reputational impact for the UK and a loss of candidates to other employers or destinations; uncertainty and delays; and extra costs associated with internal management processes.
The report made a number of recommendations for a future system including, first, to reduce the administrative burden and uncertainty associated with visa applications. In response to the City’s research, employers agreed that checks are important. However, currently a UK visa application is typically made up of many different processes, requirements and touch points, with overlapping, interdependent and uncertain timeframes. Streamlining these steps will decrease stress for applicants, increase certainty for employers and save time and costs for government; for example, trusted sponsors should be empowered to certify a candidate’s English language skills, and there should be a more transparent approach, allowing candidates to view the progress of their immigration application online, which would mirror the Irish system.
Secondly, the report recommends relying on an entirely digital immigration status so that applicants no longer need to surrender their passport or update physical status documents. To surrender a passport is particularly unattractive for professional services contractors and artists who move between countries from job to job. A digital immigration status could also be a secure log of the individual’s current and past immigration status, tied to their passport number and biometric information.
Thirdly, to avoid duplicate processes, the use of existing data can be very helpful. Fourthly, the report recommends technology and guidance to provide tailored support for employers and sponsors of different sizes and in different sectors, to encourage investment and growth in the UK. For example, it is recognised that SME employers find the administrative and HR management obligations very onerous. The proposal is that, building on the positive work of the outreach programme on the EU settlement scheme, the Government should offer an enhanced level of support for SMEs looking to apply for a sponsor licence for the first time.
In conclusion, businesses must be able to respond rapidly to changing needs, their clients’ demands and new opportunities. To do this, they need a visa system that enables them to fill a new role or bring in an expert from an overseas branch in weeks rather than months. This is needed if the UK is to have a clear competitive advantage in the future.
For those already here, or who come in the transition period, if we get to it, many of us—including the Liberal Democrats—wanted a simple declaratory system. Instead, the Government have insisted on making them jump through the hoops of an application for settled status, and if they fail, risk falling into the hostile environment. As my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno mentioned, this is not only causing administrative hassle for people but it affronts their dignity that, in some cases after decades of being here, they have to reapply—or apply for the first time—to stay in their own homes.
I understand that the cost is about £500 million to £600 million—can the Minister confirm that? Can she also say what the cost would be, or would have been, of a simple declaratory scheme, with a light-touch evidential requirement? It is a vast bureaucratic undertaking of 3.5 million or 3.7 million people. The stakes are very high. Even if 5% are rejected, that is 175,000 people, and that will not improve either the Home Office’s reputation or social integration. To get through everyone, the Home Office will have to process about 4,500 applications a day, whereas I think in the pilot phase the maximum was about 360 a day. Will 1,500 case workers be enough to cope with those who have difficulties?
The Home Office has to get this right. The operational failure of the settled status scheme will further damage confidence and Britain’s reputation—and possibly get us into problems under the legal provisions of the withdrawal agreement—and would harm our reputation with key partners in Europe. There are many problems with the settled status system: it is not available on iPhone; people, I understand, are holding Android Tupperware parties, which must raise the possibility of data protection issues, if they are helping each other with all the data. There are problems where the official records do not match. People may be wrongly being classed as having pre-settled status because the system is wrong and has wrong information. They are faced with having to trawl through years of evidence, and then the Home Office has the problem of looking through it all. We need to look at whether the burden of evidence is too high.
Lastly, I raise the fear of what happens to vulnerable applicants. Are the outreach and communications sufficient, and is information available in all EEA languages? Can the Minister clarify what exactly happens in a no-deal scenario? Do the EEA regulations remain in force, even if the immigration Bill is passed? Will that part of it be suspended so as not to abolish the regulations? Finally, could the Home Office reconsider that people are not going to get any piece of paper as evidence of their settled status? They have to rely on a digital code and therefore on the efficiency of the Home Office’s digital systems.
At the heart of current policy-making is confusion over what we mean by “contribution”. The current system operates on a reductive logic that equates contribution with “how much you are paid”. The White Paper’s proposed £30,000 threshold is a strange measure of what it means to be skilled. I worry about parts of the country whose economies rely on immigrants but where jobs paying £30,000 are rare. This proposal will result in communities such as many of those in my own diocese of Durham and regions such as Cornwall, Cumbria and Lincolnshire experiencing immigration almost exclusively in the churn of short-term worker visas. What will this do to how different parts of the UK think and feel about migration? The contribution of immigrants must be better defined and widely experienced. A crude financial measure simply will not work.
Today is Valentine’s Day—I think I am the first person to mention that. I also want to note the ongoing harm caused by the minimum income requirement. We hear that this is about ensuring that migrants contribute, passing over the burden that many separated families are subjected to and the well-known benefits, economic and otherwise, of a united family. This policy punishes British citizens for falling in love and deprives thousands of British children of one of their parents. How can we ensure that love, meaning and those things that make life worth living are given their rightful place in future policy-making?
Finally, on the question of meaning, I want briefly to raise the lack of faith literacy displayed in both asylum and visa application procedures. All too often, asylum claims on the grounds of religion are turned down because someone is told that they are not able to display a detailed knowledge of the scriptures. You do not need a Bishop to tell you that millions of people live lives transformed by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ without being able to name the three gifts that the Magi presented to Jesus. It is their faith that matters, not their ability to answer simplistic questions. This speaks to a deeper issue around improving faith literacy in the Home Office and possibly across the Civil Service as a whole. I understand that some work on this is ongoing between the Home Office and APPG for International Freedom of Religion or Belief, but that it has seen limited progress during the past few months. Please can I ask the Minister for an update on this work?
I hope that faith literacy training across the Home Office might also alleviate some of the difficulties faced by many bishops from across the Anglican Communion as they try to navigate the application process for short-term visas, particularly as we approach the Lambeth Conference in 2020. Here, too, a better understanding is needed of what it means when a bishop and a diocese guarantee that they will care and support the visitor throughout their stay, rather than simply looking at the low income of the visitor in their home nation. We should be trusted on our promises.
I still believe that the White Paper consultation and future legislation can provide the space for a truly national conversation on the purpose of immigration and the gift that migrants can be. We still have the opportunity for a reset moment, if only we would seize it.
On a final and more general point, having read the report, I support the Migration Advisory Committee’s recommendation that the Government should consult users of the visa system more systematically to ensure that it works as smoothly as possible.
My second question is: what exactly does pre-settled status mean? They say that if you have not been here for five years, you get pre-settled status—a silly term—but can then move on to settled status. Actually, people who have been here for 10, 20 or 30 years are being given pre-settled status, because the machines the Home Office uses to deal with the applications say that there is some minor irregularity. In any case, why do you have to have been here for five years before you are thought to be settled? You are either settled or not—it is not a matter of five years.
My third question relates to the fact that there is huge doubt that the Home Office can cope with the burden it is giving itself. My noble friend Lady Ludford has already said that a declaratory report would surely be best, with a presumption of granting settled status on the simple information provided by people—actually believing people and not saying, “There seems to be a gap of six months in your employment record 10 years ago”. That kind of thing is happening time and again. It is all done by machine-checking. There is no common sense; there seem to be no people involved.
My fourth question is on appeals. Surely a right to appeal refusals or the allocation of wrong status must be clearly and urgently set out in law. It is not being proposed at the moment. The right reverend Prelate suggested that the immigration Bill might be galloped through this House—I do not think it will be, unless they want us to sit overnight and at weekends. There is no way the Government can do it, but we will see. Further to that, surely legal aid should be available for those appealing.
My final point, because my time is running out, is on the timetable. There seems to be a mismatch between the start of the full settled status scheme on 30 March—whether we have a deal or crash out—and the timetable for getting the legislation that governs it through the House. As far as I can see, settled status does not exist in English law at the moment. To operate a settled status scheme on a proper statutory basis, I assume that the Government will have to get it into English law. Can we have some explanation of the process to enact the legislation and what they think the possible timetable is for this? If they do it in the immigration Bill, given how it is doing in the Commons, it will not come to us until the end of March at the very earliest.
There is one final thing, if I can pinch another 20 seconds. What nonsense is it that the Prime Minister announced that the £65 fee for settled status was abolished but people on the pilot scheme are still being charged? The Home Office is requiring details of people’s bank accounts so that it can repay the fee when it comes through. This is utter nonsense, and only the Home Office could have dreamed up that kind of scheme. I look forward to the Minister’s replies, and to her replies to the many Written Questions I will put down after this debate.