That this House regrets that provisions in the Statement of changes in Immigration Rules (HC 590), laid before the House on 14 March, will initially increase the minimum income requirement for family visas from £18,600 to £29,000 without consultation or sufficient justification; will cause family separation, contrary to respect for family life, the best interests of children, and community integration; and will have a discriminatory impact; and regrets the Government’s failure to publish an impact assessment or equalities impact assessment.
My Lords, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has produced an excoriatingly critical report of the Home Office’s handling of these regulations, which introduce what it describes as a “substantial increase” in the minimum income required—MIR—to bring a partner to the UK, from £18,600 to £29,000, with further increases to £38,700 planned by early next year. Indeed, it was so dismayed by this
“further example of the Home Office failing to provide adequate information to Parliament to allow informed scrutiny”
that it held a special evidence session with the Minister. But this did not assuage its
“doubts about the appropriateness of the Home Office’s overall approach to policymaking, which too often”
fails to proceed from
“rigorous analysis … supported by evidence”
and, where appropriate, consultation.
The committee declared “unacceptable” the failure to publish an impact assessment and equality impact assessment, even though the Explanatory Memorandum states that a full IA has been prepared. In its follow-up session with the Minister, the latter acknowledged that the situation was “regrettable” and publication was “urgent”. Yet, seven weeks later, it still has not appeared. The committee pointed out that this has implications not only for Parliament’s ability to scrutinise legislation but for the development of policy itself, saying:
“That the Home Office may still have no accurate idea of the expected impact of its policies, even after they have come into force, is alarming”.
In response to written questions from the committee, the Home Office blamed the “complexity of analysis” for the failure to publish the IA as planned and assured the committee that it was
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Given the criticisms, the anticipated discriminatory and family-fragmenting harmful impact and the slipshod manner in which the regulations were introduced, it behoves the Home Office to respond positively to these Motions. It should use the welcome pause in moving to £38,700 to produce the necessary impact assessments and immediately refer the increase to MAC so that it can be properly reviewed with reference to the purpose and impact of the MIR and the planned further increases. At the same time stakeholders, including experts by experience such as Reunite Families UK, should be consulted. To quote the SLSC:
“We do not believe that the Home Office can fully understand the effects of its policies if it does not consult those who will be impacted”.
In conclusion, while I am supportive of the hard-cop Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, using the proposed pause to consult urgently—the soft-cop option—is the very least the Government should now commit to. I beg to move.
My Lords, I have never been called a hard cop before, but in this context I take it as a compliment. “Regret” for us is a technical term, but it feels too mild for how I and I know other noble Lords feel about these changes. We are just those in the Chamber; it is the outside world and the impact on citizens that I regret hugely.
Knowing that the Liberal Democrats will be almost entirely on their own if we divide on a fatal Motion, I support the Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and everything she has said, and have decided to add a few points.
With regard to the intention to increase the threshold beyond £29,000 to £38,700, that is pretty much doubling the previous £18,600 without consultation or clarity about the policy objectives and at odds with the Government’s commitment to family life. I am calling on the Government to reverse the increase which is now in place and commit not to increase it in 2025.
The minimum income requirement has not been easy from the start, which was more than a decade ago. I used to think that spouse and family visas would be revised when a couple of Cabinet Ministers realised the problems for their children who had fallen in love with people from say, Costa Rica, the US, or, now, Italy because, as people have said to me quite frequently, you cannot help who you love. I was wrong about that, but I still hear the disbelief: “How can the Government do this to me? I am a British citizen”. I still hear stories like that of a gentleman from Swansea, which was and is a low-wage area; we are aware, of course, of the regional disparities in incomes. He was married to a Canadian woman, a teacher. She could not join him here because of the rules then, but she could have helped, if she had been allowed, to care for his disabled child, enabling him to work more hours and saving the state money. At a personal level this is distressing; at an intellectual level, it is nonsense.
My Lords, I am not quite sure what follows the soft cop and the hard cop; certainly not the fair cop. I would like to add three points to the case against these changes, which has been so brilliantly put by the two cops. I have two points about process, one about substance.
On legislative process, it is absurd to produce a 289-page volume of detailed changes with no impact assessment. It is really very odd to say at the time that the impact assessment has been prepared and will be published, “urgently”. That is what the document said at the time. We have now been waiting exactly two months. It was two months ago today that the papers came to Parliament.
I am grateful to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for its two excellent reports. It rightly points out that, without providing adequate explanation of secondary legislation’s consequences, it is quite wrong to expect the House to approve it. Our scrutiny role is pretty vestigial at the best of times, but we cannot do our job at all if we are given no analysis of the consequences of the laws we are invited to pass. Refusing to tell us makes a mockery of the process and must verge on contempt of Parliament. So, I support both regret motions.
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We are not talking just about legislative defects; we are also, I think, up against a real problem of administrative process. I do not think the reason that the impact assessment has been suppressed is incompetence; I think it is inconvenience. I suspect the analysis will have revealed that the results of the changes would not be as Ministers wished. I suspect the policy was driven not by evidence—after all, there was never any consultation —but by ideology. I suspect what was wanted was not objective analysis but assertion. I suspect officials did their job, came up with an honest report and had to see it suppressed. I do not blame the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom; I do not think his was the guiding mind behind either the policy or the suppression.
I applaud the honesty of the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, when he told the committee that the delay was because the Home Office—presumably he meant Home Office Ministers—were
“not totally content with the assumptions”
and that “minor differences” in assumptions can make a “massive difference”. Quite—the cat is out of the bag. Officials used objective assumptions; they did not use politically driven presumptions. I do not expect the Minister to confirm my suspicions but I have to tell him that, in my Whitehall days, it used to be thought wise to have the analysis done before the choice of policy options. It also used to be thought quite a good idea to base the analysis on evidence collected by consultation. What drives these changes has to be ideology; it cannot be good economics, because that will do harm, and it cannot be good government in the John Stuart Mill sense, because that certainly will not produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number—indeed, it will do the opposite.
My third point is about cruelty. The change in the MIR means that, from early next year, a UK citizen will not be able to live in this country with his or her foreign partner, fiancé or spouse unless he or she earns at least £38,700 a year. That is double the threshold today and more than 70% of what UK full-time employees currently earn. Two in every three men and three in every four women in this country will be banned from bringing in their partner. For those in part-time employment, of course, the numbers will be much worse. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, mentioned, spouse’s income—actual or potential—does not count. When the present MIR was introduced 10 years ago, only 30% of employees failed to meet it; now, over 70% will. A lot of lives—and a lot of young lives—are going to be blighted. Think of it in personal, family terms: two of my children married foreign women, and four of them were paid less in their first job than the equivalent of £38,700 today. These changes are not just chauvinist and economically illiterate; they are casually, callously cruel. Between the two regret Motions, I prefer the one with teeth—the hard cop.
My Lords, I believe that immigration in this country is out of control and has been for some time. I think the numbers are far too large. If we look at the difference in the rates of immigration since we left the European Union, we see that, far from taking back control, we have lost control—and the numbers justify that. However, that is not the point I wanted to try to raise tonight—and I am not going to get into the cop business because I think that is dangerous.
We have seen cases where people who should have been put out of this country because of convictions—including even some very serious convictions for sexual and other offences—have had their deportations stopped because of, perhaps, a right to a family life. I want to raise a particular case. While the system may be intended to try to curtail immigration, the side effect has been that, where somebody behaves properly and plays by the rules as set out, they are in a worse position in many cases than somebody who tries to enter this country illegally, or somebody who has managed to get in, committed criminal offences and still has their right to a family life protected.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, mentioned a case where it was said that the resident here could go to the other country and work there with their partner. However, that does not work if the individual is registered as disabled. The particular case I want to draw the House’s attention to tonight is that of Mr Barry Ferguson, in Newtownards, County Down, who is registered as disabled because of an autoimmune illness. He has two children with his partner, who is a Malagasy national. He has been bringing up his children in Newtownards, where they are at school, and who are there without their mother. The arithmetic, whether we have the high level or the low level, would be utterly irrelevant because they cannot meet the criteria. We have been dealing with their case for the last couple of years.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds
My Lords, I think personal stories illustrate the broader point. I am pleased to stand in solidarity with these regret Motions and will not repeat much of what has been said, particularly about the lack of impact assessments and consultation in these matters.
I met a man last week, in Leeds, who is coming up to 80 and who has been married for 27 years, and his wife is not able to join him. They have been separated now and it is just miserable—I cannot imagine being in that situation myself. There are parts of Leeds where the average income is £27,500 a year. This is fundamentally discriminatory in that, if you are from the poorer end, your love counts for less than if you are more affluent. This cannot be just; it cannot be right in a society that we would describe as fair and just.
I do not want to prolong this, so I will put another question, as much of what I wanted to say has been said. It is a genuine question and I do not know the answer—there might be a perfectly good one. We are seeing in our universities a drop in numbers and, at the same time, a real financial crisis. Has any assessment been made by the Government as to whether there is any link between these two phenomena?
My Lords, it is perfectly obvious that those who have spoken already have demolished any thought that these changes are based on any evidence, or any critique of anything at all beyond the political philosophy that is driving them forward. I must first declare my interest, as laid out in the register: I am supported by the RAMP organisation.
What is clear from the addresses of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and my noble friend Lady Hamwee, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, is that there are no real answers to the questions that the proponents of this instrument have been asked in many places so far. We are quoting the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee very importantly in this debate, because it has taken the time to examine this legislation, which is quite a brickful. It always amazes me that we want to try to pass legislation by the negative procedure when it is so important to people’s lives in this country, and so dense and so deep.
The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee was quite clear. It said these changes had
“a lack of clarity about what the policy is designed to achieve”.
That is precisely what all the contributions so far have pointed out. It is quite clear to me, as I am sure it is to many in the House, that this is about dealing with a problem inside the Conservative Party—a particular branch of the Conservative Party—which is trying to be assuaged. As a result, we have a policy being implemented which the noble Lord, Lord Empey, described as blunt. It suffers because it does not have the impact assessment with it; it does not have any evidence to go behind it; it also has not taken the evidence that the Government could find from their own bodies and advisory committee.
Some 70% of the UK population do not earn £38,700. The Government are concerned about burdening the taxpayer, but everyone who has a spousal visa has no recourse to public funds. Can the Minister tell the House how granting a spousal visa will be a burden on the state, given that an individual on such a visa has no recourse to public funds—and, by the way, has probably already paid huge amounts in fees to get to that position. A quite extraordinary number of pounds have to be spent on those fees.
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“working at pace to ensure this is published promptly so the impact of changes can be assessed”.
That was in March. It is now well into May and we still are not in a position to assess impact.
The same goes for the EIA, yet it is obvious that the impact is likely to be indirectly discriminatory, as submissions received by the committee warned. Whether we are talking about gender, ethnicity/race, disability, age or region, any EIA worth its salt would demonstrate the unequal impact of such a high earnings threshold. The response to a petition to the Commons on 11 March said that the EIA would be published “in due course”, which smacks more of indifference than urgency.
In the Commons, the Minister for Legal Migration simply did not answer the questions about the failure to provide either an IA or EIA. Will the Minister please explain now why, despite the SLSC’s criticisms, they still have not been published? I cannot believe the analysis is that complex. If it is, surely the policy should have been paused until it was clear what its impact would be. Call me a cynic, but my suspicion is that the impacts revealed by the assessments were so damaging that it was decided it was safer to keep them under wraps.
The committee’s concerns were
“compounded by a lack of consultation … which might have helped to shed light on the real-world impact”.
It was dismissive of the Home Office’s argument that consultation
“would be disproportionate given the nature of the changes”,
and noted that advice had not even been sought from the Migration Advisory Committee. Why was advice not sought from MAC, which, in its 2020 annual report, had advised that it was now time to look again at the MIR? Perhaps the Home Office preferred not to hear its views, given that it had suggested that, hitherto, too much weight had been placed on fiscal arguments and not enough on the benefits to families and society from partner migration. I hope the Minister can give a more lucid response to the question than that offered in the Commons to my right honourable friend Sir Stephen Timms MP.
As if that was not all damning enough, the SLSC criticised the lack of any coherent overall rationale for the increase and what it is trying to achieve. According to the Explanatory Memorandum, the MIR
“is being amended as it has not been increased for over a decade and no longer reflects the … income required by a family to ensure they are self-sufficient and do not need to rely on public funds”.
Where to start? First, the point about public funds simply does not make sense, given that anyone allowed entry by this route would have no recourse to public funds for five or 10 years anyway, and the proportion for whom the condition is lifted is tiny.
Secondly, there is no real attempt to justify linking the level of the MIR to the skilled worker visa requirement if the key objective is a family’s self-sufficiency. On that basis, half of UK employees would not meet the current self-sufficiency test, and as many as seven out of 10 would not do so when the MIR is raised again next year.
Thirdly, can the Minister explain how the salary of the sponsoring partner represents a test of the contribution that the migrating partner would make to the economy and the public finances, another element of the supposed rationale, given that no account can be taken of the latter’s current or prospective earnings, even if they had a job offer in this country?
As it is, the policy is likely to cause hardship and heartbreak, even more so than it already does. Reunite Families UK reported in 2020 that the consequences
“included not just emotional impacts of separation”
from partners, and of children from parents,
“but financial, mental and physical hardship”.
The stress created by this situation often had a serious impact on both mental and physical health. One woman said she was scared of her own desperation, and another affected had attempted suicide.
In this context, the Minister’s statement in a Written Answer that
“family life must not be established here at the taxpayer’s expense”
reads as distinctly callous and misleading, given that those seeking to bring partners here are themselves taxpayers and, by the time their partners had recourse to public funds, family life would already be well established. For the once self-styled party of the family, it would seem that only some families count. Indeed, the previous Children’s Commissioner, after the introduction of the original MIR, commented that
“the UK’s family migration Rules are among the most family-unfriendly of any of the developed countries”.
Can the Minister tell us whether the Government’s family test was applied to the MIR increase? If yes, what did it conclude, and if no, why not?
Where there are children, the state is in effect creating lone-parent families, who are more likely to have to claim social security support because of sole responsibility for looking after those children, and the abolition of the child element of the MIR does not change that. The Explanatory Memorandum advises that
“the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children”
continues to apply. Can the Minister explain how the welfare and best interests of children, as required by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, are promoted by splitting up their parents against their will?
In a recent study by Reunite Families UK, even on the original MIR, two-thirds said that their child received a formal diagnosis of a mental health condition. The earlier study on behalf of the former Children’s Commissioner also found children suffering distress and anxiety as a result of separation from a parent, compounded by the stresses faced by some lone-parent families. She concluded:
“If the price of the public policy is interference with children’s rights that impact on their emotional and mental well-being, sense of stability and security, and ultimately happiness and development, then the interference is disproportionate and is not in their best interests”.
The situation will be much worse now than when she wrote that warning.
The Minister’s Written Answer also stated that
“family migrants must be able to integrate if they are to play a full part in British life”.
Will he please explain exactly what he meant? Since when is integration measured by the size of your partner’s pay packet? If anything, keeping families apart is likely to reduce integration overall. To quote from one of the submissions to the SLSC:
“The MIR makes it harder rather than easier for mixed nationality families to participate fully in society”,
given the sacrifices that they have to make to survive. It warns that
“marginalising these families fosters societal division and tension”.
The Home Office’s response to many of the criticisms has been to point to the possibility of an exceptional circumstances application, such as under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but such an application is far from straightforward and the price for the few who succeed is a 10-year path to settlement, which carries its own problems and insecurities. Moreover, the Home Office has acknowledged that it has no idea how many successful applications there might be, so we do not even know how likely the increase is to meet its own objectives.
The SLSC asked the Home Office for its response to suggestions for the mitigation of the rules, in particular through how other sources of income are treated. Its answer was simply to say that there was no flexibility and that it was “right and fair” that the rules be
“consistently applied in all cases”,
but no one is asking for inconsistency, as potentially the mitigations could apply to anybody, nor is it explained why there is inconsistency between this group and the Armed Forces and those who are called “high potential individuals”.
My Motion to Regret was partly prompted by an email I received from the mother of a young woman in a long-term relationship with an American who had recently got a new job which meant she would finally meet the MIR after six months, only for the goalposts to be moved under her feet. Not surprisingly, the family are upset and angry about what in their view is the very opposite of a fair approach, as the Home Secretary described it.
I have heard distressing descriptions of the impact on a child separated from a parent. One child thought daddy had no legs because he could not see them online. I remember a radio call-in where the caller said, “You could move to your wife’s country and work there”. The British husband replied calmly, “But there is not much call for mortgage-broking in Nigeria”.
Apart from concern for the impact on individuals, no Government should set a tone for suggestions that, in effect, are, “Get out of the UK if you marry a foreigner”. Part of the Government’s justification for these changes is that they are necessary in the interests of the economic well-being of the country and people not being a burden on the state. As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, has said, the NRPF rules do not apply in any event, certainly not for a long period—so what is the burden? Apparently, it is because the state has a responsibility to somebody who is destitute. I think that was what the Minister had to say in the Commons, but we are talking about such small amounts.
The Explanatory Memorandum talks about the
“wider ambition for the UK to be a high-wage, high-skill economy”.
Do we not need, for instance, people at the start of their careers: young teachers, young police officers, young scientists? They are not going to meet this requirement. The spouse family visas amount to about 5% of all entry visas. The Commons Minister set the context as “immigration numbers”. The Explanatory Memorandum refers to
“supporting the aim to reduce the overall level of net migration”.
The Minister in the Commons spoke of “protecting British workers”. From what? As the noble Baroness has said, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has been hugely critical of the absence of an impact assessment or an equalities impact assessment. The rationale, it tells us, rightly, is not well explained. The reasons for these changes are inconsistent. It says in its report that the
“aims may all point in the same direction, but they could imply different appropriate levels for the threshold. The Home Office should be clear about exactly what is its intended outcome and then set policy accordingly”.
The committee’s report to the House includes its questions to the Home Office about the methodology basing a threshold on percentiles of earnings distribution for jobs eligible for skilled worker visas. I acknowledge that the Government introduced some transitional arrangements after the initial announcement of the increases in the threshold, but these changes were really just tweaks: £29,000 now will be £34,500, and then “at least”—I am very keen to hear what “at least” means—£38,700 “by early 2025”. I hope the Minister can be clearer about both those points.
That people need to know is not my principal criticism, but it is hugely important. People need to know, for instance, at what level their savings can be taken into account. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee asked the Home Office to consider mitigating actions and referred to relying on the income of the partner currently overseas. I would add that current earnings are not a bad indication of future likely earnings. It referred to relying on credible promises of third-party support. The answer, apparently, was that this would happen only if it would enable the Home Office to avoid breaching Article 8. The committee also referred to combining all financial resources such as savings and income from self-employment. The answer to that was “No”.
The Justice and Home Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House, which I was chairing at the time, published a report in February last year on family migration that included the minimum income threshold as one of a number of items. I am going to quote a little from the report. We reminded readers of the Government’s commitment to family life, in the words of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who said:
“Strong, supportive families make for more stable communities”.
In a speech setting out his priorities for 2023, he said that, by being overly restrictive, family migration policies weaken families and undermine communities.
We took the view that family migration policies, of which this was one, fail both families and society—families, because the desire to join family members is a natural and understandable response, and the rules force families to live apart. The Home Office portrays family separation as a choice on the part of the family. We profoundly disagreed that it was a matter of choice. We said that we believed that policies that respect family life also benefit society. The interests of families and society are not in competition; they go hand-in-hand.
The Prime Minister also said:
“Family runs right through our vision of a better future”.
We agreed with that. This is a bad decision on the part of the Home Office. It is a brutal decision.
It frustrates me because, while I fully understand the Government’s desire to reduce immigration, we are taking a blunt instrument to a family situation. People find themselves trapped because, if they do things legally and in the right way, they are effectively being punished, while people who pay no attention to the rules seem to get away with it.
I say to the Minister that, while it is probably unusual to bring individual cases to the Floor of the Chamber, Mr Ferguson has gone to his Stormont representative, my colleague Mike Nesbitt, to try to get help from his office for the last couple of years, and we are up against a brick wall. I would greatly appreciate, on behalf of Mr Ferguson and his family, if the Minister would take up this case—I will provide him with the details. It is clear evidence to me that having children be brought up in the United Kingdom without their mother, who cannot get in, is entirely unacceptable. I would appreciate a response from the Minister when he winds up.
Then there is the fairness of these changes. They will obviously have a greater impact on lower average-income earners, as has already been described, but, crucially, they will have a disproportionate impact nationally and regionally. The new MIR is quite likely to remain below the average in London, because it probably matches London earnings, but it will certainly not be so across swathes of the United Kingdom where salaries are lower. Around 50% of UK employees earn less than the £29,000 threshold and 70% earn less than £38,700. So how do the Government explain the fairness in families in some regions of the United Kingdom being much more likely to be entitled to reunite than those in other areas—in fact, in the majority of the United Kingdom? How is this consistent with the Government’s levelling-up agenda?
The Migration Advisory Committee, in its 2020 report, said:
“We also think now would be an opportune time to reconsider the minimum income requirements associated with this route. The MAC are concerned that previous analysis may have given too much weight to the fiscal contribution of such migrants and insufficient attention to the benefits that accrue, to both the family and society, from the route”.
Noble Lords might have thought that the Migration Advisory Committee—the Government’s advisory committee—would have been consulted about these changes, but it was not and the policy goes against its advice, had it been asked. Perhaps it was not consulted because it would have given contrary advice. So I ask the Minister: why was the Government’s own advisory committee not consulted prior to this decision?
One of the most objectionable aspects of these changes is their impact on children. Undoubtedly, they will lead to an increase in the length of children’s separation from a parent before any visa is obtained. These children are often British children. There will also be a greater impact on women: 36% of employed women and 58% of men earned enough to meet the £29,000 threshold in 2022. For the £38,000 threshold, it was 21% of women and 39% of men, so clearly there is gender discrimination.