Orders of the Day — Immigration Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:11 pm on 16 November 1987.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Hon. Douglas Hurd Hon. Douglas Hurd , Witney 4:11, 16 November 1987

I will now get on.

The intention of the changes that I have announced so far is to produce a better customer service and a tighter immigration control. The main beneficiaries of my announcements will be those who at present suffer from delays, and right hon. and hon. Members who chastise us because of those delays, which the proposals are principally aimed to reduce.

Let me now deal with the procedures under which hon. Members take up immigration cases with me or with my hon. Friend the Minister of State. I do not believe that many hon. Members find the present arrangements satisfactory. The enormous number of cases imposes considerable burdens not only on my hon. Friend, but also on the hon. Members concerned, and often results in lengthy delays. Ministers are put in the position of having to examine straightforward and routine cases for which a statutory appeals system exists. I hope that new arrangements can be found which will better achieve the objective of providing a service to hon. Members and their constituents without detracting from the proper exercise of ministerial responsibility.

At the same time, I believe that it would be right to review the arrangements for dealing with hon. Members' interventions—particularly "stops" in port cases—that have been operating over the past 12 months. I want to hear the views of all hon. Members on both issues, and I shall shortly be writing to the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) with a number of proposals. I am making no proposals today, but simply signalling that we wish to open up the subject.

Clause 1 of the Bill repeals section 1(5) of the 1971 Act, which sought to preserve the position of British and other Commonwealth citizen men settled here at the time of the 1971 Act, and their wives and children, so that they could not be adversely affected by subsequent rule changes. The terms of section 1(5) are very wide. They apply to all British and other Commonwealth citizen men and boys, whether black, white or brown, who were born before 1973 and settled here when the Act came into force. The main effect is that the wives and children of those covered by section 1(5) are able to come here without having to meet the marriage tests in the immigration rules, and without having to meet the requirement that there must be adequate financial support and accommodation for them without recourse to public funds.

Fourteen years have passed since section 1(5) came into effect. It is not confined to adult men living here before 1972, their wives at that time and their children at that time. I want to emphasise that. If section 1(5) continues in force, it will have effect well into the next century on those who were settled here as boys before 1973 when they marry and have children. It has also been objected to on the ground that it confers benefits on wives and not on husbands. Following the Abdulaziz case at the European Court of Human Rights, the Government gave a commitment to end that element of sex discrimination.

Section 1(5) gives rise to anomalies and unacceptable results. Let us take the example of a family with a daughter, a son born in 1972 and a son born in 1973. If they all marry abroad and apply to bring their spouses here, the application from the wife of the elder son will fall to be dealt with on a different basis from that applying to the husband of his sister or the wife of his younger brother. Such a result cannot be right. To take a further—and actual—example, in the recent case of Husseyin, the Court of Appeal found that a woman who was the subject of a deportation order could not be deported because she married a man who qualified under section 1(5) after the deportation order, but before deportation action could be taken. That also cannot be sensible.

Those examples illustrate the anomalies and difficulties to which section 1(5) gives rise. Accordingly, we now propose to repeal section 1(5). I stress that that does not mean that those settled here before 1973 will be unable to bring their wives and children to join them. It merely means that they will have to satisfy the same requirements in the immigration rules as those who do not benefit from section 1(5). We already apply the full range of requirements in the immigration rules to those who have come to settle here after the beginning of 1973. After 14 years, it seems right now to bring these special benefits under section 1(5) to an end, and to treat everyone on the same footing. [Interruption.] May I develop my argument before the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms. Abbott) intervenes?

Of course, the change will affect people regardless of origin—a point that was clearly made in this week's New Statesman. However, when Parliament considered the matter in 1971, it was concerned about the rights of adult males already settled here. From previous patterns of immigration, it might reasonably have been assumed that, once those men had brought in their close dependants, the demand for entry of dependants would begin to fall away. So far, that has happened only to a modest degree, because those who were children in 1973 are still often seeking wives and husbands from the sub-continent. That is their right, and the Bill does not remove it. The Bill says, however, that it is not a right which should be exercised indefinitely without regard to the ability of those concerned to support themselves once they are here. It is no service to community relations for families to come here if they are then homeless or destitute. It is fair and reasonable that people should not come here without having somewhere to live and some means of support without recourse to public funds.

There are of course some applications now outstanding from the wives and children of section 1(5) men, and there will be more by the time that clause 1 comes into effect. It would be unfair to penalise those applying to come here from parts of the world where there are queues for entry clearance. I therefore propose to frame the commencement order so that applications from section 1(5) beneficiaries which are outstanding when clause 1 comes into effect are dealt with in accordance with the law as it stood at the time of application. 1 propose to adopt the same approach in dealing with applications from polygamous wives under clause 2.