Contribution
My Lords, I support the amendments led by my noble friend Lady Hamwee and the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, which have been signed by others. We have debated refugee family reunion at numerous points over the past five years or so. My friend, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, recalls that at one point I picked up the relay from my noble friend Lady Hamwee and took a Private Member’s Bill through this House successfully. Unfortunately, it did not get through the other place successfully, but I have been somewhat involved in this issue and feel strongly about it.
Just to pick up the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield, he talked about family being the basis of belonging and stability. That is important, not only for personal feelings of security and being able to thrive within the family but as a practical issue about integration, which has been much talked about in recent months. On the one hand, people shout, “Why aren’t immigrants properly integrated?”, yet we want to pull the rug from under refugees by saying, “You have no right to have family reunited with you, which would help you to settle and get on in our society”.
There is obviously room for discussion about the scope of the amendments that I support, and colleagues to the right have pulled various holes in in them. One can discuss some of them, but I must admit that I am somewhat shocked by the noble Lord, Lord Jackson—he and I are not always completely eye-to-eye in other fora. Here, he makes some reasonable suggestions in some of his amendments, but this one I find bad. He wants to delete proposed new subsection (5)(e) in my noble friend’s Amendment 166. He wants to delete having regard to issues such as
“the importance of maintaining family unity … the best interests of a child”
and
“any risk to the physical, emotional or psychological well being of a person granted refugee status”.
As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and the right reverend Prelate said, the principle of family unity is important, but I think that the social aspects are also very important. There seems to be a lack of continuity and consistency in the policies of successive Governments. Like others, I find pretty shocking what has happened in the last six weeks. First, the Home Secretary paused family reunion, and then, perhaps tellingly—there may have been an interesting internal debate with the Home Secretary—No. 10 said, “Actually, we are going to make that permanent; it is not just a pause. We are going to eliminate family reunion as we know it”.
Some remarks from noble Lords on the Conservative Benches went to wider issues about immigration and asylum. I always find it a bit rich that such complaints are made. There are valid issues about the control of migration and security of borders—no one denies that—but we must not forget the big explosion in legal migration that took place after Brexit, which the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, supported. We then had far greater volumes than ever happened under EU free movement, besides eliminating the two-way street which allowed Brits to migrate within the EU. I think a bit of non-joined-up thinking goes on there.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, talked about how we do not have a right to deny public opinion. Of course, public opinion—which is perhaps in a rather inflamed state at the moment—is important. I read in a briefing from the safe routes coalition that recent polling undertaken by the organisation British Future found that 67% of the public support a controlled official route for refugee children whose only remaining family are in the UK to travel here safely. Two-thirds of the public polled support family reunion for children who are stranded abroad, which is a large element of these amendments. That is public opinion, and we must be specific about what the public are reacting to.
The aim of some is apparently to curb the numbers coming in, but it depends what numbers we are talking about. In the case of family reunion and child refugees, we are talking not just about compassion, humanity and human rights, or even the principle of family unity, but about the best interests of the child and of the people who will settle in this country. We and they hope that they will make a big contribution to the success of this country, but we cannot expect them to do that if they are lonely, anxious and deprived of the support of their family. We must always remember that we are talking about social practicalities here, as well as the high principles of human rights.