My Lords, I am pleased to have the opportunity to propose the Second Reading of this important and, I think, timely Bill. I am very grateful to all the speakers in today’s debate, to the Families Together coalition of NGOs, which has supported, encouraged and briefed us, to our Library for its briefing, and to all the parliamentarians who have championed this cause in previous versions of this Bill, not least my noble friend Lady Hamwee.
The Bill is timely because recent events make it more vital than ever. Broadcasts from Afghanistan have highlighted the pertinence of family in the case of refugees. We have seen babies passed over barbed wire to soldiers and small children left behind in the chaos outside Kabul airport, and heard the many anguished accounts of those who could not locate their families in time to gather them together for an evacuation flight.
The purpose of the Bill is to expand the criteria of who qualifies as a family member for the purposes of refugee family reunion; to reintroduce legal aid for such cases; and to give unaccompanied refugee children in the UK the right to sponsor their family members to join them under the refugee family reunion rules. On that last point, the application in almost every other European country of the EU family reunification directive means that they allow refugee children to sponsor close relations.
In his report a year ago on the handling of family reunion cases, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration said that
“the Private Members’ Bill having fallen, the Home Office now needs to demonstrate that it has indeed listened to stakeholders regarding: expanding the eligibility criteria for sponsors and applicants; enabling access to legal aid”
and
“fixing issues with the application process itself ... And, where it looks to resist demands for these changes, it needs to show that it has a robust evidence base for its current policy and practice.”
I hope to hear that from the Minister if he is indeed to resist the Bill.
I was impressed by Home Office Minister Victoria Atkins MP, speaking last week about the importance of giving stability to the recipients of the ARAP scheme through indefinite leave to remain and the right to work. That word “stability” is of the utmost relevance and importance in the context of family reunion. Permitting a refugee to be with their family will greatly improve their chance of leading a stable, well-integrated life without threats to their well-being and mental health. Family unity may also save the public purse. It costs £30,000 a year to look after a child in a residential home or foster care.
However, the family reunion provisions of the Immigration Rules are narrow. They allow only a spouse or partner and children under the age of 18 to be reunited with a family member granted refugee status or humanitarian protection in the UK. Under the Dublin process, if a family member was in another European country, they had a prospect of being reunited, but of course this no longer applies in the UK, so the prospects of family reunion have become even more constrained.
I thank the noble Lord; I certainly have lost some brownie points.
I was noting that the New Plan for Immigration contained a suggestion to raise to 21 the age of children eligible for reunion, which was withdrawn in the response to consultation. I hope that the Minister can provide an explanation for that. As a refugee called Ngozi told the Joint Committee on Human Rights on Wednesday:
“We remain children to our parents even when we are over 18.”
The Conservative MP and former Home Office Minister, Caroline Nokes, said in the debate on Afghanistan in the other place on 18 August:
“Our children do not suddenly become independent because they pass a day over their 18th birthday, so refugee family reunion in this instance has to ensure that those girls are able to come here. Would we leave our daughters in Afghanistan?” —[Official Report, Commons, 18/8/21; col. 1322.]
To answer her question, I think none of us would regard it as remotely reasonable to make a family contemplate leaving a 19 or even 25 year-old daughter in Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban, or indeed in a refugee camp or unsafe situation anywhere. Imagine being the parents of a family having to make the cruel choice either to depart the country while leaving an over-18 child, considered adult but still vulnerable, or to stay in a dangerous situation in order for them all to remain together. It is entirely possible—indeed, it happens—for there to be delays in deciding an asylum case such that a child who was well under 18 when the asylum application was made turns 18 while waiting for a decision. We know that some decisions can take many years.
The Home Affairs Select Committee called it “perverse” to deny refugee children the right to bring close family to join them in the same way as adults. The traditional Home Office objection is that a child may be sent ahead as a peg or anchor, to justify a whole family being able to secure refugee status. In response to the 2020 report by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration that I cited, it said:
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for having given us a chance to debate this Bill. I am also grateful to Safe Passage for the help it has given us—or certainly me—with briefings on the legislation.
I suppose the Bill is in some ways almost a precursor to the Nationality and Borders Bill that will come to this House, but that does not in any way weaken my support for it, because it makes the case for an important matter of principle. I refer first to the argument that Ministers keep using, that asylum seekers should claim asylum in the first safe country that they reach. I have discussed this with UNHCR and, as I understand it, that is not UNHCR’s position. Secondly, it is not logical. Had it been the case in 2016-17, 1 million Syrians would not have gone to Germany but would have remained in Greece, Italy or Malta. It does not even make sense in practical terms, and it could have a very damaging effect on the rights of child refugees in particular.
I am reminded of an example a year or two ago of a young Syrian in the north of England whose younger brother who had managed to get to Greece. The question was whether the younger brother could come and join him here; the older brother had accommodation and everything ready for him. It took quite a lot of argument to achieve that but, under the Government’s present proposals, it would not even have been possible. The Government ought to explain by what argument they differ from the views of UNHCR as well as of humanity and logic.
It is very clear—and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, said so emphatically—that it is important to give children the right to be with their families. Surely, the right to be with family is absolutely fundamental to human existence, and anything we do to prevent that must be adverse to the interests of children and the family; indeed, it makes no sense in respect of the country that we are.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on the Bill. I am grateful for the helpful briefing from the Refugee Council. We all watched shocking reports from Afghanistan. We saw people fleeing for their lives, terrified, confused and hungry, leaving everything behind to try to save their families. Sometimes they even left disabled family members behind. I tried to imagine what I would do in their situation, how I would protect my family, especially as a woman. The thought of being in that situation is frightening, especially because I am the mother of disabled adults with additional support needs. It has made me reflect deeply on the invisible and ignored challenges some Afghans will be enduring. What about those Afghans who are carers of disabled adult relatives, some of whom may have been left behind, relatives with learning disabilities, autistic relatives, relatives who will be struggling to understand why their world has been turned upside down and why they are running away from their homes leaving behind everything that made them feel safe and calm?
The media rarely focus on the struggles of disabled people in humanitarian crises. Millions of people become refugees every year, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has said that one in seven of them is a disabled child or adult. Most refugees will have no words to describe the trauma they have been through in their own language, let alone in the language of the strange new country in which they find themselves. That situation is made worse if they have arrived in a country by a means other than official routes, resulting in them being detained for lengthy periods.
Seeking refuge in a refugee camp is tough for anyone, but for an autistic child or adult or somebody with learning difficulties the situation is amplified beyond comprehension. This is a huge challenge for organisations working with them, including for interpreters who often have very little experience of working with disabled refugees who also need to be reunited with their families. I declare an interest because Beyond Words, the charity that I founded and now chair, has published a free wordless story to help refugees, refugee organisations and others cross that language divide. Wordless stories can be particularly helpful for many people in refugee communities because they are not language dependent. This resource was in development and being tested with refugees from other countries in the UK and in refugee camps abroad, and their children, before the current Afghanistan exodus. The feedback has been that it helps them feel understood and validates their trauma. They have told us that the pictures are powerful and give an accurate representation of some of their experiences. Beyond Words hopes that this short story will help children and young people in schools offer a genuine welcome to refugee children and to understand something about the traumatic journeys some may have had to face in the days and weeks before they arrived in their school.
My Lords, I wholeheartedly support my noble friend on this Bill, which I do not think will come as any surprise. In 2017, when my similar Bill was agreed by the House, I began by acknowledging the UK’s resettlement programmes and its financial contributions. Since then, we have had cuts to the aid budget and a new asylum policy, but the wider context is not that dissimilar. Of course, we can never do enough. We cannot host everyone, but we can do better.
The qualitative point today is about families. On extending eligibility to sponsor family members to those who are far closer than “extended family” suggests, the Bill is really quite narrow. To be without everything that has been a part of your life is desperate, especially if you are young and still developing. Settlement in a new country is extremely important to a refugee’s well-being and to how the whole community functions. That is much more easily achieved if you are with your family; that may be a parent, a sibling or your mother’s sister. Our rules, as my noble friend has said, are very restrictive, with discretion rarely applied, and people should not have to look to discretion.
Given the tone of the Home Office report that was published in July on legal routes and family reunion, I am apprehensive about the “additional clarity” that we are promised. The report includes a summary of responses to the Home Office’s consultation. We are told that the participants in the public focus group organised by the Home Office
“agreed that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children should be reunited with their family member(s) in the UK, where possible.”
We are told:
“In the deep dive, stakeholders advocated for … removing financial requirements for sponsors, and lowering the evidence threshold, including on demonstrating family links.”
My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for drafting such a timely Bill. In my experience, the cause of human rights has many occasional, selective and even fickle friends. She is not of their number, and it is completely characteristic that she should use this precious opportunity for a Private Member’s Bill in defence of some of the most vulnerable and dehumanised people in our communities and our world. Obviously, it is a shame that her wholly sensible, practical and humane measure is even necessary, but I am afraid it is becoming more essential by the day.
Like the current Home Secretary, I am the daughter of migrants to this country. However, it seems that this shared experience appears to have instilled rather contrasting approaches to refugees on our respective parts. In the summer of 1940 little boats in the English Channel came to symbolise the Dunkirk rescue and Britain’s defiance of Hitler. Now it seems that little boats of desperate people are to be repelled or even sunk, in clear contravention of the refugee convention and even clearer contravention of common decency.
Ministerial answers to this charge plead that they are merely seeking to deter the evil trade in people smuggling or words to that effect: that the answer to the greatest refugee crisis since World War II is not such dangerous and mercenary human traffic, but safe routes to our shores. Does not the noble Baroness’s Bill call that bluff? Her short and simple measure not only provides safe routes but plugs an obscene and discriminatory gap in protection that denies refugee children the right to bring parents and siblings to join them in safety, and she offers those seeking family reunion legal aid. I really look forward to hearing a single valid argument against that legal aid provision.
I am sorry not to find the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, in her place today. That is not to begrudge her a break or to question the ability of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, to turn his hand to her brief. It is just that earlier in the week, in response to a question, she seemed to suggest that the UK had always given compassionate haven to the desperate. I am afraid that I beg to differ. I do not think that our patriotism should lead us to airbrush important history and fail to learn its lessons. In the autumn of 1938 and even after Kristallnacht, the Home Office—my former employer—was regularly denying refuge to German Jewish people seeking to flee Hitler. No less than Albert Einstein had already been denied asylum here, having to go on to find it in the United States. Sylvia Pankhurst pleaded with the Home Office via the Manchester Guardian:
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark will not be able to speak because he missed the opening speeches, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who is taking part remotely.
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Ludford for presenting her Bill on family reunion for refugees and for her excellent introduction to it. I also thank Families Together and Safe Passage for their helpful briefings. It is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, whose advocacy for truly desperate people was so well evidenced in her speech.
In the late 1970s, I knew and was part of a team trying to help a woman doctor who had fled Chile after her husband, also a doctor, had disappeared and was killed by the Pinochet regime. There was no question at that time that her child might be able to escape with her, and I heard and saw the distress this caused her, especially because she knew that her child and her parents were also at risk because of the Pinochet regime’s vindictive nature. Eventually she was able to get her child to the UK because the then Government understood their responsibilities for the right for children to be with their families, and for their own safety.
Her experience mirrors the position that many refugees in the 21st century still face, but what has changed is the current Government’s approach to asylum and refugees, as my noble friend Lady Hamwee outlined. My husband chairs the Watford and Three Rivers Refugee Partnership. He knows of an Afghan refugee with leave to remain who has been in the UK for some time but whose now teenage children could not leave the country when he did. The grandparent who cared for them has died and the father is desperate for his children to be able to join him as they will be at particular risk from the Taliban. I agree with Caroline Nokes MP when she said:
“Our children do not suddenly become independent because they pass a day over their 18th birthday”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/8/21; col. 1322.]
Nor does that birthday make them instantly safe in the country that their parent has had to flee for their life.
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for bringing this to our attention. Even though there is major legislation on the way, these things cannot be handled too frequently and with greater urgency.
It is the 70th anniversary of the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and displaced persons. It was endorsed fulsomely by the Labour Government at the time and their successor Conservative Government. A conference of plenipotentiaries took place shortly after the passing of that convention, which remarked
“that the unity of the refugee’s family is maintained … extending the rights granted to the refugee to cover all the members of his family; and … providing special protection for … minors, in particular unaccompanied children … with special reference to guardianship and adoption.”
Again, the United Kingdom subsequently expressed
“the hope that this Convention will have value as an example exceeding its contractual scope and that all nations will be guided by it in granting so far as possible to persons present in their territory as refugees and who would not be covered by the terms of … Article 1 the treatment for which this Convention provides.”
As a further remark, it urged liberality and generosity on the part of those receiving fewer refugees and people fleeing persecution to help those on the front line to cover their costs and shoulder their burdens.
I mention all this from the beginning of a post-war era in the treatment of refugees because it speaks so loudly across the generations to our own day. A few days ago, I spent considerable time with officials of the UNHCR in Geneva. They are beside themselves with the legislation being pushed through or proposed in our Parliament, which is undermining almost every aspect of the guarantees and proposals of the Geneva convention. Refoulement or pushback is in the news lately. British lawyers having largely shaped the Geneva convention, who would have thought a British Government would indulge in such practices?
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Apart from being narrow, the Home Affairs Select Committee in the other place has said that these rules pose “unacceptable bureaucratic hurdles”, with forms that are complex, especially without specialist legal advice, an appeals process that is unclear, costly and lengthy, meaning that a child may have to wait in unsafe conditions while the application is processed. They are likely to be particularly difficult for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to navigate, and may drive children to attempt to come to the UK to reunite with relatives via possibly unsafe and irregular routes.
I imagine that the Minister will again seek to deflect the case for this Bill by directing my attention, first, to another provision of the Immigration Rules and, secondly, to the discretion outside the rules. In its response to the report in October 2020 of the then Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, which cited calls from stakeholders to expand the eligibility criteria for applicants, the Home Office indeed stated that there were “other provisions” in the Immigration Rules which catered for extended family members.
However, Rule 319X of the Immigration Rules, which allows a separated child to join a relative who has refugee status but is not their parent—for example, an older sibling, aunt, uncle or grandparent—is less accessible than under the Dublin system. It incorporates tests which provide a stiff hurdle of “serious and compelling”, an application fee of nearly £400 and demanding requirements for maintenance and accommodation, meaning no welfare support, no recourse to public funds and limited rather than indefinite leave. As far as I know, the Home Office has not provided any data on the number of applications made under Rule 319X and the outcomes of those cases; perhaps the Minister can do so today.
The Home Office also traditionally maintains that the 2016 guidance on cases outside the Immigration Rules allows sufficient scope, which makes a Bill such as this unnecessary. It is true that this guidance allows family reunion to be granted in exceptional cases, such as for dependent children aged over 18, but in reality that rarely happens. The applicant must meet a test of it being “unjustifiably harsh” to refuse, so a justifiably harsh consequence is permissible, which I find a little bizarre. Also, discretion outside the rules does not give the same certainty as a change in the rules. Family members may themselves be in an unsafe situation or escaping danger, and with family reunion restricted, some will resort to finding dangerous alternatives. This is the opposite of what the Government say that they seek to achieve.
The nationality and asylum Bill will radically restrict rights, including family reunion rights, for those who arrive irregularly, but this would undermine any attempt to close down irregular routes, since if someone cannot reach family through the reunion rules, they are likely to attempt an irregular route. If the Government are serious about strengthening safe routes and supporting women and children, they will back this Bill.
The New Plan for Immigration, published in March, prior to the Bill, contained a suggestion to raise to 21 the age of children eligible for reunion. Sadly, that suggestion was withdrawn in the response to consultation, although no explanation was given. Perhaps the Minister can provide one. [Interruption.] I apologise; I thought I had silenced my mobile phone.
“The government has made clear in the past its concern that allowing children to sponsor parents would risk creating incentives for more children to be encouraged, or even forced, to leave their family and attempt hazardous journeys to the UK.”
As well as the chief inspector saying that there was no such evidence, the former EU Committee of this House, in its 2016 report on unaccompanied minors, said the same:
“We found no evidence to support the Government’s argument that the prospect of family reunification could encourage families to send children into Europe unaccompanied in order to act as an ‘anchor’ for other family members. If this were so, we would expect to see evidence of this happening in Member States that participate in the Family Reunification Directive. Instead, the evidence shows that some children are reluctant to seek family reunification, for fear that it may place family members in danger.”
I think we can appreciate that there are all kinds of reasons to send a 16 or 17 year-old away from danger, without having to speculate wildly about ulterior motives. Allowing refugee children to sponsor immediate family would, in fact, reduce the number taking irregular journeys.
The Bill also reintroduces provision for legal aid, which was withdrawn in 2012 on the basis that applications for family reunion were, according to the Ministry of Justice, “straightforward”. This is often not the case, as they can be complex and time consuming, particularly when DNA tests or adoption cases are involved. There was an order in 2019 making provision for legal aid in the case of separated migrant children, either under the Immigration Rules or outside the rules, on the basis of exceptional circumstances or compassionate and compelling factors, but I do not know how many cases have benefited from this. Perhaps the Minister will be able to tell us.
The advantages of restoring legal aid would accrue not only to the applicant but to the Government, since helping the system to function better would save money. The inspector of borders found many errors needing to be overturned on appeal or refusals resulting in further applications. The cost of reintroducing legal aid would be modest. It was estimated by the Government a decade ago at £5 million. I have not seen any more recent estimate, but I do not imagine it will have gone up by more than inflation. Let us say that it is below £10 million, and it will save money all through the system.
To conclude, the case for a more generous approach to family reunion for refugees is based on both humanitarian grounds—which, I contend, are very strong—and the hard-headed case that reunited families allow refugees to find their feet more quickly, integrate better and contribute more fully, to the benefit of themselves, their community, the country and the Treasury. I therefore hope that the Minister can give me a positive response today. I beg to move.
We had a long argument about the Dublin III regulations. Although this House and the Commons initially passed an amendment in 2017 to say that we should go on negotiating to continue the terms of Dublin III—the right to family reunion—beyond our leaving the EU, the Government then rescinded that in the 2019 legislation. We were told that it would be okay because we had the Immigration Rules, that it would be fine and I should not get too worried. The fact is that the Immigration Rules are weak in this respect. They are a blunt instrument; they are hard to enforce, and they need far more discretion from the Home Office than has been the case hitherto.
We know, for example—and I have discussed it with them—that many of the young Afghan boys who fled Afghanistan before the Taliban took over completely fled because the Taliban wanted to make them join the Taliban and fight in the Taliban forces. That is why families tried to help get their young family members out even before the Taliban took over. The position now, of course, is more serious for women and girls in Afghanistan, but that was often the argument as to why the children left. Now that we have this difficult situation, we should surely consider sympathetically and properly under the legislation whether, when some of these young Afghan boys are already here, the remainder of their family should come and join them.
We have said on countless occasions that, if there are safe and legal routes, people do not use traffickers. It is utterly regrettable that through the closing down of safe and legal routes, particularly from northern France and Calais, the traffickers have a field day. This will never achieve the ostensible aims of the Home Secretary that we will somehow cut down on numbers. The Bill is an important step in the right direction. I hope that the Government will be a bit more sympathetic today than they have been in the past.
Children over the age of 18 can be included in a settlement application if they were granted the status of being an applicant’s dependant when the applicant received their original grant of asylum but, noting that disabled dependants of all ages are the most likely family members to be left behind, can the Minister explain what mechanism might be available for disabled adult family members to be reunited with their families, who are typically their main carers?
However, the Government’s response is that there could be “unintended consequences” through those changes. The response says:
“Overall, we consider the case has not been made for the government to adopt a different approach in relation to fees, financial requirements and the need to meet relevant evidence thresholds for children, including UASC seeking to join nonparent refugee relatives in the UK.”
It says, “We consider this”—that is, the proposed changes—
“has the potential to attract a very high number of applications”.
What do the Government consider to be a very high number? I really hope the Minister can answer that question, because I understand that the Home Office is unable to provide data on the number of applications under paragraph 319X, nor on the outcome of those applications. Do the Government recognise that all NGOs in the sector are clear that family reunion must be in the best interests of the child?
A friend recently published a history of her family. Her not-quite-teenage grandmother, as she calls her, of well over a century ago, features in it. My friend wrote:
“I try to imagine what it must have been like to leave the only place you had ever known and to travel across the sea to a foreign country where you didn’t speak a word of the language. Lea, not much more than a child, had to trek 1,500 kilometres to Hamburg, the German port, where ships were harboured waiting to convey thousands of hopeful immigrants to England. Hamburg was enjoying an economic boom created by the invasion of these transient and mostly unworldly Jews, many of whom were ripe for exploitation.”
These are the people who make Britain what it is today.
“May we not plead for somewhat more humanity in dealing with these cases?”
I suspect that the Minister might not find the red suffragettes so compelling, so I will try these words instead:
“I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam, I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua.”
Today we could add a desperate person in a dinghy in the English Channel. That, of course, was Ronald Reagan. I hope the Home Secretary might find some similar compassion.
Recently the world’s focus has been on Afghanistan but, as other speakers have said, this is a widespread problem where tyrants rule with impunity. For hundreds of years, the UK has had a proud history of accepting refugees in fear of their lives, including the Huguenots, whose small children were thrown from windows of buildings in France; those from Hitler and Pinochet’s appalling regimes in the 20th century; and more recently those from Eritrea and Syria.
It is also vital that parents should be able to join their unaccompanied children who have been accepted as refugees. The UK’s argument that this would encourage more children to travel has been contested by experts in this area. UNHCR, the Refugee Council, Amnesty International and Save the Children all have evidence of how not reuniting unaccompanied children causes anxiety, constant fear and, not surprisingly, mental health problems that will last their lifetimes. I absolutely support the provision of legal aid being available for family reunion, not least because the exceptional case funding rates are inappropriately low for these cases.
Finally, this Bill is tackling one of the inequities proposed in the Nationality and Borders Bill. How someone fleeing for their lives, making for a safe country where they have contacts, should be judged on their eligibility as a refugee only on the route they have taken is outrageous. It contravenes international protection rules and is a severe backwards step for family reunion rights.
I will try to end on a positive note. Despite the proposals of the Nationality and Borders Bill, the way the Government have recently accepted those fleeing Afghanistan for their safety because of their links with the UK has meant that some families have arrived and others hope to join. In doing that, the Government have shown that they understand their moral duty to asylum seekers and family reunion. Accepting this Bill would be a major step in acknowledging that refugees seeking asylum from across the world have a right to be with their immediate families, and I hope that the Government will support it.
Two-tier entrance and non-discrimination is another central feature of the convention. Externalising responsibility and subcontracting some of the actions needed is, again, against not only the letter but the spirit of the convention. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, pointed out, on the whole thing about first country of entry, there was a 35-page document from UNHCR to rebut the legal claims about the interpretation of the word “direct”. It seems indisputable that the United Kingdom Government at this time are putting themselves at odds with the letter and spirit of the convention that has helped us to deal with the post-war realities facing us, the continent of Europe and the whole world, and we must regret it.
One last little thought, on a slightly different note: we have talked about how many people come in. From the last quarter of 2019 until a year later, 1.3 million European Union residents left this country, I suppose because of Brexit. The number of eastern Europeans fell by 12%, and Romanian and Bulgarian workers by 24%. So there is plenty of room for the 750 who come on Monday—plenty of room in all the places that need workers to provide their energies for our economy. So much of what we hear is simply spurious and unworthy, and it makes me feel afraid and ashamed of being a citizen of this country.