Baroness Hamwee (LD)

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords who have spoken in support of the Bill. I know that, for at least two, being here was not straightforward. I also put on record the support that I have been asked to mention by four who have had to be elsewhere—the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and the noble Lords, Lord Dubs, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Lord Purvis of Tweed. I thank the organisations that have briefed Peers for this debate and the individuals in them for all their work in the sector. I know how pressed they are. I will not name them all, other than to thank the Refugee Council—Jon Featonby has helped me so much to get this Bill and its predecessors to Second Reading. I am sorry that, over the years, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, and I have been put into oppositional positions, as it were. It is not something that I wish at a personal level. He said that the system is not as dysfunctional as it has been painted, but I think that it is dysfunctional for the children whom we have been talking about. The noble Lord also talked about playing into the hands of smugglers. It is widely regarded that establishing safe routes is the best way to address smuggling. I and the whole House look forward to a policy from the new Government on this. The Minister referred to a change of tone; I look forward to a change of policy and a change of law. The Government accept the importance of family reunion, but it is more than children joining their parents. It is illogical that it does not apply the other way round. The term “exceptional” is prayed in aid, in respect of both legal aid and how the rules can be disapplied. I think that this separation should always be regarded as exceptional; it is the separation that is exceptional. I hope that there may be an opportunity to reflect with the Government, not against them. I anticipated a number of the objections that were made but, on resource pressures, several noble Lords made it clear that those pressures are best reduced by simplifying the rules and procedures. My noble friend Lord Oates referred to the processes; if they were smoother, that would save everyone an awful lot. I am not going to take the time to refer to all the points that have been made but I realised that, since I have to wear spectacles, I could not see that I had rather more time left at the beginning. So I will take a moment to share with the House the responses that I received from the Migration Observatory, which I contacted to ask about numbers in preparation for this debate. It said that, as so many factors influence asylum migration, isolating the impact of family and reunion rights on asylum flows would be difficult statistically. However, it gave me two examples that it thought were instructive. In 2016, Ireland changed domestic policy to enable children to sponsor family members and saw no significant change in numbers of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the two years following the change. Very properly, the Migration Observatory said that one could always argue that, absent the change, numbers would have been smaller, but this is again impossible to verify statistically. The example of Norway, which has family reunion for these children, suggests that a small share sponsor family members to join them—just 12% from 1990 to 2015. The Migration Observatory also refers to a report by the Refugee Council and Safe Passage, which said that this small percentage is supported by anecdotal evidence from service providers in the UK, which say that separated children are often unable to locate their family members. This makes sponsoring them very difficult. I beg to move.