Immigration (Health Charge) (Amendment) Order 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-11-28
Topic: Immigration
Simon Russell (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, I feel brave enough to rise to my feet. I declare my interest as a governor of Coram, the children’s charity. I shall agree with the noble Lords, Lord Lansley and Lord Rosser, as a true Cross-Bencher should. I understand, and in principle do not disapprove of, charging those from outside the EEA for using the wonderful NHS. If it produces £220 million for the NHS, I think we would all say hurrah. For many migrants, it is undoubtedly a very good deal and a lot cheaper than insurance But—as the Minister knows, there is always at least one "but"—I should like to make a few points. They concern what I hope are unintended, not deliberate, consequences of the IHS. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, asked a Written Question on 12 July about whether there would be a children’s rights impact assessment of the increase in the fee. In her reply on 23 July, the Minister said: "A full impact assessment will be published alongside the draft Order" In the event, the impact assessment had been completed three weeks earlier on 3 July, but having read it extremely carefully to see whether I could find any trail within it which looked like a children’s right assessment, all I could find, at the top of page 17, in subsection F.5, was a comment about the proportion of in-country family visa applications which may be eligible for the waiver. It said that Her Majesty’s Government, "is also considering options to mitigate the consequence an increase in Surcharge may have for applicants’ affordability" Given that the impact assessment says that the Government are considering options, what are those options and how far have Her Majesty’s Government gone in their thinking about them? Does the Minister genuinely think that the impact assessment before us includes anything like a full children’s impact assessment Secondly, when we are talking about the fee waiver system, which is extremely well intended, many of us outside the Home Office struggle to understand how it is working at all. The reason is that the Home Office has the relevant statistics and we do not. In May last year, Coram, of which I am a governor, sent a freedom of information request to the Home Office, to which the Home Office replied. The statutory response timeframe is 20 days. In this case, it excelled itself by responding nine months later. It said that roughly 7% of fee waiver applications were successful. Why was a new request for the 2017 statistics in a freedom of information request denied by the Home Office on the grounds that it would be too costly to compile it? Given what we heard earlier—that the Government, in their wisdom and munificence, are deliberately undercharging when it comes to the IHS—how can the Home Office justify not acceding to the freedom of information request We simply cannot judge whether the waiver scheme is working properly if we do not have the data. I am not trying to be awkward or embarrass the Minister or the Government; we simply need to know the figures so that we can come to a reasoned judgment, together with the Home Office, on whether the fee waiver system is working in the way we all know it was intended to work. It would be helpful to all sides if we were able to do that. Thirdly and lastly, we welcome the report of the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. I hope he will include the effect of the IHS when he publishes his report, and we look forward to its findings. If it does not contain an analysis of the effect of the IHS, will the Minister say why not? The children we are talking about find it very difficult to have their voices heard. Frankly, we are inadequate substitutes for these children, though we do our best to communicate their raw and often very painful testimony. But they have an inalienable right to be heard, and it is in that spirit that I ask these questions—their questions—and I look forward to the Minister’s answer.