Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2021-09-10
Topic: Immigration
Sally Rachel Hamwee (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): 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." 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.