Immigration Act 2014 (Commencement No. 6) Order 2016 — House of Lords, 2016-02-24
Topic: Immigration
Sarah Ludford (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I agree with everything that the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, said. I also agreed with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said. He delivered forcefully and vigorously his strong objections to the scheme going ahead without fuller evaluation. I have to say that I felt that his outrage is synthetic if Labour will not join the Liberal Democrats in voting for my noble friend’s fatal Motion. It has no effect; it is just outrage without action The checking requirement is not expected to be onerous—that was a comment in the Government’s Explanatory Memorandum or some guidance document. Elsewhere, they state that a landlord or agent can carry out simple document checks—simple document checks. We have already heard that in fact they will have to refer to the Home Office and wait a couple of days. As the noble Viscount pointed out, landlords do not want to wait: they do not want voids. Tenants will lose the chance of the property. It is a particularly unfair responsibility on small landlords to have to check documents. The noble Lord, Lord Best, said that it was straightforward to do that checking, but that is absolutely not the case The judgment in the recent Ryanair case has been mentioned. The judge who found in favour of the airline said that its staff could not be expected to spot cleverly forged passports that even trained immigration officers found hard to detect Interesting evidence was given to the committee in the other place by Tony Smith, former director-general of the UK Border Force. He said that when he was regional director of UKBA, his enforcement teams, "uncovered a significant number of ‘forgery factories’ in London who were manufacturing fake EEA identity cards … mainly being sold to migrants from non EEA countries who were working illegally in the UK. Although these documents would likely be identified as fraudulent at the border"— there is no guarantee— "they are usually sufficient to pass the ‘reasonably apparent’ test to an employer. The same is likely to apply to the implementation of landlord sanctions" So a former Border Force director says that the number of forgeries in circulation makes it extremely difficult, even for immigration officers. He wrote: "Although the EU Council has called on all Member States to adopt common designs and security features", for identity cards for a decade, "not all EEA countries have done so" Of course, the UK does not have a permanent resident card for foreign nationals with indefinite leave to remain, equivalent to the US green card, so there is no one document Even as a Member of the European Parliament, I was dealing with quite a lot of immigration cases, and people would often turn up with a whole batch of letters from the Home Office which apparently attested to their immigration status. I was completely unequipped to work out what they all meant. There was a set of different stamps and letters, instead of one simple document. To put this onus on landlords is not appropriate I also do not understand what is apparently regarded as the concession of allowing expired biometric residence documents and immigration status documents to be recognised. How is a landlord to know which expired documents can be relied on and which cannot? Perhaps the Minister can give us an answer to that I noticed something in the Financial Times a few months ago that reminded me that a landlord must identify all adult occupiers who will use the property as their main home, whether or not they are named in the tenancy agreement. The columnist wrote that, "Nosiness may be necessary", to inquire who else is going to live in the property who is not in the tenancy agreement. The column also recommended that you may, "need to pay for a professional opinion", which all raises the cost that will no doubt be passed on in the rent. Noble Lords opposite have made the point about how they only know about these requirements from being Members of this House. Obviously, not all landlords are Members of this House. There has been a suggestion that the dissemination of information will largely rely on electronic media and people knowing where to seek out the information. The Residential Landlords Association made the point that 90% said that they had not received any information from the Government either by email, from an advert, from a leaflet or from the internet, and 72% did not understand their obligations under the policy.