Immigration and Nationality (Fees) Regulations 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-06-12
Topic: Immigration
Simon Russell (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I support the Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. I declare my interest as a trustee of Coram, which includes the Coram Children’s Legal Centre and the Migrant Children’s Project. I will give a cross-party flavour. The noble Earl, Lord Dundee, would have spoken in support from the Government Benches but he is unavoidably detained, organising the wedding of his last remaining unmarried daughter. Understandably, that takes priority. One almost feels a degree of sympathy for the Home Office at the moment. It is under enormous pressure. The Windrush scandal has been mentioned, as has the cap on skilled workers, particularly the effect on doctors. One wonders who will be next in the firing line. Some of us in this Chamber have a horrible sinking feeling that it will be children As has been mentioned by other noble Lords, the new Home Secretary—brave man that he is—went in front of the Home Affairs Committee on 15 May. He went so far as to agree to a memo giving a rundown on costs and how they were justified, without giving any timeframe for when that would happen. He mentioned that he found the £1,012 fee to be rather a lot and said, "I understand the issue". Let us hope that he is beginning to understand the full complexity and awfulness of it As has been said, we have a fee where there is a £640 surplus over the cost of processing a child’s application. We are completely out of line with other countries. Our fee is nearly six times what it costs in Ireland, 20 times the amount it costs for a child to be registered as a citizen in Germany, and 21 times what it costs in France—not an entirely comfortable place to be As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, we think there are about 120,000 children in this country with neither citizenship nor immigration leave to enter or remain, and for many of them these fees are a huge and significant impediment. I think we all agree that that is completely unfair The noble Lord, Lord Alton, gave the example of Regina. I will quickly talk about another lady, Amelia. She is 24 years old. She is a single mother. She has been living in this country since she was 12. She has one dependent child: a son aged two. She will have to pay a series of four payments—£3,066 every two and a half years—in order for her to reach settlement in the UK. She will need in due course to pay a total of £7,144 for her son to become a citizen, and a total of £9,851 for herself. She is unlikely to be able to afford legal advice, if indeed she could find it, so she may be unaware that her son is in fact entitled to British nationality under Section 1(4) of the British Nationality Act 1981. At the moment there is no legal aid available for her or her child at any stage. That is simply unacceptable and untenable I would like to put on the record my own deep embarrassment and shame at what has been going on recently with the Windrush scandal. I suspect I speak for many of your Lordships when I say that. That is combined with a degree of anger over what I have read about the ill treatment and lamentable maladministration that appears to have gone on. How on earth the Home Office could even imagine not grasping this slightly uncomfortable and complex nettle of how to deal with children, I cannot really understand—not least in the interests of its own self-preservation and to spare it further embarrassment, anger and shame. There is almost a sense of institutional depression, which occasionally seems to be the culture there I strongly support the regret Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, which has been carefully crafted to give the Home Office a "get out of further embarrassment" card. I urge the Home Office to seize the moment or regret it later.