Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL]

Second Reading

Moved by

That the Bill be now read a second time.

My Lords, perhaps I should start my speech with, “As I was saying,” given that this is the fifth such Private Member’s Bill from these Benches since 2017. My noble friend Lady Ludford introduced numbers 3 and 4.

I declare an interest as a trustee of a trust established by the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, which has introduced me to a number of young asylum seekers applying for funding to attend university. Like so many young refugees I have met, they have impressed me by their resilience and their determination to contribute to the UK.

The first purpose of the Bill is to provide in primary legislation, not just in amendable rules that can be changed without Parliament’s involvement or scrutiny, the rights of people who seek safety in the UK to be joined by their family. It is not enough to hope that the Home Office will use its discretion. The second purpose is to define “family”. It is an unambitiously narrow definition, in the hope that the Government will see this extension to enable children to sponsor immediate family to join them as modest and doable—she says looking straight at the Minister. The right to sponsor applies to people with protection status—that is, refugees—and those with humanitarian protection who are at real risk of harm if returned to their country of origin but not for the specific reasons which bring them within the refugee convention. I shall refer to them all as refugees. The third purpose is legal aid.

Since 2017, when the first Bill was introduced, the plight of refugees has not changed, nor have the UK’s moral obligations or the importance of family, which politicians continue to emphasise. However, the political context has not stayed still: the areas affected—afflicted —by conflict; the greater politicisation of immigration; the conflation of asylum and immigration; and small boats have succeeded the lorries and trains used by desperate asylum seekers. Last year, 7% of asylum claims were from unaccompanied children. The academic think tank UK in a Changing Europe reports that 33% of the public think that the figure is not 7% but 40% or more. There is a huge leadership role for government to be clear here.

This Bill sits squarely within calls for safe routes for refugees; I acknowledge that we have some, mostly very specific. I acknowledge that, under the new Government, families separated during the evacuation from Kabul airport will benefit from an expansion of the ACRS and that a child evacuated without his parents will be able to make a referral to relocate them or—GOV.UK says “or”—his siblings. But there is so much more to do to put safe routes in place.

Today is Anti-Slavery Day. We know the dangers of being in the hands of traffickers—a very real risk for children alone—and of extreme exploitation. The organisation Missing People is clear that being missing very often means harm. I hope the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, with her experience, will expand on this. Her report seven years ago found that closing off safe routes feeds the trafficking and smuggling networks.

Will the noble Baroness give way?

I am time limited, like others, but I give way.

Perhaps the noble Baroness could inform the House how many people she envisages, on an annual basis, would be granted refugee family reunion status under these measures.

I will not go into that now; I do not have it in my speech. I am time limited and conscious of other people’s need for that time. I will happily tell the noble Lord later. From the tone of that question, he obviously opposes what I am saying. I will go into that with him later, but he does not have his name down to speak.

In 2018 the UK Government requested information from EU member states about the impact of their family reunion policies. The UK is quite an outlier in Europe. There was little assessment about public services or the costs to Governments, but Italy reported that it had seen no financial effect on public resources. If the noble Lord who has just intervened is worried about numbers, he might think about costs, which are another factor. I can tell the noble Lord that the Refugee Council and Safe Passage estimate an additional 240 to 750 visa grants—not sponsorships—a year.

I turn lastly to legal aid. Yes, of course, there is a shortage of lawyers, but family reunion needs to be in scope. Exceptional case funding is so exceptional as to be well-nigh invisible. The current rules are a maze, almost impenetrable to applicants and to many lawyers.

I urge noble Lords to see this Bill all the way through, and the Government to accept what it provides. At the last iteration, the Labour Front Bench was very supportive. I will not name the spokesman for fear of embarrassing him, but he was very senior.

I have received a lot of support from outside the House. The International Rescue Committee says that it

“welcomes and strongly endorses this Bill which would see children and young people, who have fled conflict and persecution, finally reunited with their loved ones in the UK”.

In 2020, 14 children from a London primary school who had read the book The Boy at the Back of the Class—I commend it to noble Lords—told me how sad they were about the plight of lone refugee children. The boy at the back of the class was an unaccompanied asylum seeker. They were happy, though, that the book had a happy ending. In fact, the fiction involved the intervention of the late Queen Elizabeth. One child wrote:

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on putting forward this important Bill and on her eloquent and forceful introduction. I intend to make just a few remarks with regard to unaccompanied refugee children having the right to bring their siblings or parents to join them, something currently disallowed under the refugee family reunion rules. My immediate concern on learning of this was that it would potentially be a pull factor, something we can little afford considering the current stresses and strains of migration.

However, looking at the facts and figures, it became clear to me that this reaction on my part was a reflection of the general narrative in recent years on the issue of migration. In fact, a report by the House of Lords European Affairs Committee categorically came to the conclusion that there was no evidence provided by EU member states where children are allowed to sponsor family members that they had in some way been coerced into going ahead with the rest of their family to seek refuge, and for others to follow on the back of that. In other words, there is no evidence to support the pull-factor premise. In fact, this gap in the UK family reunion policy of refugee children in the UK being unable to sponsor any family members under the Immigration Rules is out of step with every country in the European Economic Area other than Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

The Bill would expand family reunion and allow refugee children to sponsor their parents and siblings. Importantly, in 2016 the Home Affairs Committee recommended this policy change, as did the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee in 2023. We may ask what the estimated result would be in terms of numbers if this rule were to be implemented; the noble Lord asked that very question. On average it would increase family reunions by as many as an additional 750 visas. To put that in context, that is around two people in each of the council areas in England and Wales. However, statistics obscure the reality of the people behind them and how they are affected. There are many examples of depression and thoughts of suicide.

My Lords, I declare an interest as vice- chairman of the Human Trafficking Foundation.

Unaccompanied refugee children, the subject of the Bill, are not well cared for in this country. There are many dangers for all of them. There is a particular danger for a certain group of the children about which we should all be very concerned: the possibility of being exploited and trafficked. This is not a vain concern; it happens, and that is what the Government need to recognise. Between 2021 and 2024, such children were being placed in asylum hotels, and 440 children disappeared, 132 of whom have not yet been found. Where are they? Almost certainly they have been trafficked.

There is very little help at the moment. Asylum hotels are not used, and local authorities are expected to take over the children. Anyone who reads the news knows that Kent is completely overwhelmed and unable to deal with the children who flow into its care. It cannot look after them. These are all unaccompanied refugee children.

There is what is called a national transfer scheme, but it is utterly inefficient. Children are not kept track of. Independent child trafficking guardians—something Lord Field put forward in the report of 2019, with which I was involved and which, thank goodness, the previous Government took on board—do not look after refugee children. They look after them in Scotland, so why on earth do they not look after them in this country? There are not so many such children that there could not be guardians to do it. In Scotland that is done extremely efficiently; not everything in Scotland is, but that certainly is.

The previous Government had a series of adverse High Court decisions that it would be illuminating for the present Government to read. These children need families, not care homes. It would save a lot of money if the present Government looked at the cost to the country of the care of each individual child.

My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for bringing forward this important Bill, and I acknowledge the work of other noble Lords on similar Bills.

The sustained interest in a Bill of this kind should tell us something: that the current route to family reunion is unduly restrictive and prohibitive. Government data shows that in 2023 there were over 7,000 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the care of local authorities in the UK, 141 of those in the communities that I serve as bishop in Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield.

Despite the best efforts of dedicated professionals and public agencies, the care system is simply not the right place to house children, least of all children seeking asylum. It is deeply regrettable that so many are in care when they have family members only too willing to come and look after them—if the family reunion routes only made that possible.

These are just the children we know about—just the children on the books, as it were. The risk that unaccompanied children will go missing outside the legal process, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, just reminded us, and fall into the hands of exploitative gangs is horrendous and simply unacceptable.

Of course borders need to be managed. The strains on host communities are real, and we should not minimise or overlook them. Resources are needed to help host communities and incomers to live with dignity side by side and integrate well. However, the reality is that families can be separated on their journeys to safety, and we strengthen communities when we strengthen families.

In July this year the Government allowed children who were separated from their parents during the evacuation from Kabul in August 2021 to apply to have their parents join them in the UK; the last Government deserve credit for that. Will the current Government afford that same right to children from other countries?

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Hamwee on introducing this Bill. Her commitment and that of my noble friend Lady Ludford to the cause of those seeking refuge in our country is as impressive as it is long- standing.

Over the many years that I have been involved in advocating for those entangled in the immigration system, I have been baffled by its unfathomable complexity and its inability to resolve cases, leaving applicants in limbo. Applicants are told one day that they have been granted refugee status, but the next day that that was an error. People are told that they have the right to work, then that they do not, and then told again that they do, but it will take months to get the residence card they need. In all these unfathomable difficulties, I have always been grateful for the help of the former Immigration Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe; and now the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, is proving very helpful as well.

Above all, I have been disturbed that often the system seems so disconnected from human feeling or human understanding. Nowhere is that lack of human feeling more apparent than in the effective prohibition of children granted refugee status in the UK sponsoring the immigration of their close family members. It is hard to imagine the deep emotional trauma that this must cause for child refugees already traumatised by the process that led them to seek refuge in the first place, now discovering that they are barred from ever reuniting with close family in the UK. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, gave us compelling statistics on the real consequences of this in terms of children who have gone missing.

The position taken to date by the UK Government goes entirely against the interests of these children and is in contravention of our obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UK’s own expressed policy that the best interests of the child should be the primary consideration. We have already heard that the reports of the Commons Home Affairs Committee in 2016, the European Affairs Committee and, most recently, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee have concluded that this change in the law is essential and there is no evidence to support the argument that this would be a pull factor.

My Lords, I begin as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, did by suggesting that I could say, “As I was saying before”. I was delighted in 2022 to bring the Green group’s strongest possible support to the Bill presented then by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. We are now in a new political environment. I would have hoped that I would not have to be here strongly backing the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, but that I would be able to welcome a government Bill to deliver the same things as this Bill. As that is not the case, however, I can promise that we will work as hard as we can to promote the Bill’s progress and hope to see it on the statute book as a Private Member’s Bill.

While I have the Minister’s attention, I should like to raise an issue about not refugees but workers who came to the UK before 11 March. These are workers who, because they had sole responsibility for children, had the right to bring their children with them. I met the group Women of Zimbabwe, part of the Care for Someone charity, and met scores of mostly women to whom the Home Office is clearly unjustly and inaccurately refusing the right to bring their children.

This is relevant to the Bill because, in the Tory Government’s response to this debate last time, we kept being told, “There is, under exceptional circumstances, the possibility that the Home Office will provide legal aid and support”. But I am afraid that this case—of workers rather than refugees—shows that the Home Office still cannot be trusted to behave with humanity and justice. Therefore, we need this legal provision.

I shall make one more point, which I am not sure has already come out in this debate, powerful though it has been. It is a simple fact that the UK has far fewer rights for child refugees than nearly all of the rest of Europe. That point needs to be hammered home. I said last time that we were