Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2020-09-14
Topic: Immigration
Sally Rachel Hamwee (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, in moving Amendment 42. I will speak also on Amendments 50 and 71. These amendments deal with the so-called hostile environment measures. That phrase is used by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in her Amendment 71, which extends to the Data Protection Act; that is the subject of the next group. I am aware the term used now by the Government is "compliant environment", but I am concerned with the substance not the terminology We have turned citizens, our public services and the police into border guards. We have dumped on them the enforcement of immigration control. The policies encourage us to be suspicious of each other and undermine trust in our public services. People are deterred from seeking medical treatment for fear of a large bill or being reported, detained or deported. An answer to this would be that emergency treatment would not be withheld. A condition not an emergency today may still need treatment and it may become life-changing or life-threatening To what end is the hostile or compliant environment? I understand that the Home Office acknowledges that the "vast majority"—I quote that term—most of whom are people who came here legally but subsequently lost status, have done nothing wrong. Landlords are required to check the immigration status of potential tenants and face huge fines or imprisonment if they fail to check or get it wrong. Can it be any surprise that many landlords take the easy course and look for tenants who are British passport holders? They must regard this as being simply practical, not discriminatory. It is—though without any real sanction The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, whose action against the Home Office continues, says on its website: "It takes BME people and migrants up to twice as long to find a home to rent as a white British person." Recently, the organisation the3million commissioned a poll of employers in connection with its campaign for physical documentary proof of EU settled status; we will come to that shortly. The poll seems relevant to this issue. It was a poll of professionals with authority over hiring decisions. It said that it was worth noting that the picture is bad when considering all employers in the UK; the fact that the poll was online means that there will be a certain amount of oversampling of employers who are more comfortable with digital technology. This affects EEA and Swiss citizens in the immediate short term, but the Government aim to roll out the digital-only status to an ever-expanding group of immigrants The poll’s findings included the fact that employers are very concerned about the consequences of getting it wrong. This creates an incentive to play it safe and avoid recruiting people from outside the UK, so there is just the same risk of discrimination as in the landlord/tenant sector. Thank goodness the "Go home" vans were short lived We can address only address legislation through our amendments. The legislation sets out the policy, and from the policy, practice flows. A week ago, Ian Birrell wrote an interesting and powerful article in the i about the impact of our arrangements. He talked about the large number of people who "had never bothered applying for passports, while the Home Office had lost their papers" and then discovered that they were "technically undocumented". One young woman who found herself in that situation was precluded from attending university, for which she had qualified, and is behind a report showing how lives are "distorted and damaged"—her words—by a "callous bureaucratic system that sows division, hurts mental health and condemns families to more than a decade of massive financial strain … Talk to these young adults and you hear tales of life on the edge as they are pitched into a Kafkaesque process that is complex, intrusive, often incompetent, demands huge and constantly rising fees"— the fees are no little part of the picture— "yet make one mistake and, like a dystopian game of snakes and ladders, applicants slide back down to start the torturous … process to citizenship again." I will discipline myself and not quote further from the article, but it ends by saying that "the horrors of the hostile environment have not faded" The Government talk of welcoming people from the EEA making a home here within the Immigration Rules, but the application of the hostile or compliant environment legislation does not say, "Welcome to the UK." I beg to move.