Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc.) Act 2004

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 11:22 am on 29 March 2007.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Lord Soley Lord Soley Labour 11:22, 29 March 2007

My Lords, will my noble friend confirm that this is a very difficult area of public policy that we perhaps ought to debate more fully? My experience has been that often the families being offered return were offered financial assistance that would have been very significant in the country they were going to. The issue was not always the safety of the family in their country; the problem was that they wanted their children to be educated here. It is a very difficult double bind to allow people to come in and get their children educated here. In my old area, there were about 200 such children in our schools.

It is very difficult, and I am not entirely happy with how we deal with this problem at the moment. We need a wider and more open debate, maybe here, about how to handle this narrow, small group of families whose children are disadvantaged, often because parents want something that does not fit with the rest of our policy, which this House would agree with.