Meeting of the Parliament 17 September 2019
I want to focus my remarks on refugees, who are the most vulnerable group of people who are affected by the rules that we are discussing. Among refugees, the most vulnerable group is that of unaccompanied children. The Amnesty briefing for today’s debate says:
“Children who are in the UK alone and who have refugee status have no right to be reunited with even their closest family members. Because of this rule, children living in safety in the UK live without their family for perpetuity.”
The Home Affairs Select Committee has criticised that rule and has used the word “perverse” to describe the situation in which children who have been granted refugee status in the UK are not then allowed to bring their close family to join them.
I want to put that cruelty into some kind of historical context. It is 80 years since the last Kindertransport brought Jewish children from Nazi Germany to the safety of the UK, in 1939. The rescue programme began after Kristallnacht, in the previous year, when Jewish homes and communities were terrorised by Nazi thugs. Kindertransport transported 10,000 unaccompanied children to safety and has historically been portrayed as a humanitarian gesture, but aspects of the policy were heartless. Parents were not allowed to accompany their children, who were fostered out to complete strangers. Of course, many children never saw their parents again, because, having been unable to follow their children to safety, they died in the extermination camps.
Great Britain and other countries knew that the situation for Jewish people under the Nazis was intolerable but still restricted immigration. After the 1938 Évian conference, the UK, France and the United States left without committing to change their restrictive immigration policies. The approach was relaxed, with Kindertransport, but it was made clear that the policy would apply only to children under 17 and that parents and older children would not be included.
When we look back today at Kindertransport, that rule seems barbaric to us. We might be forgiven for thinking that such things would never happen today and that we would take a more humanitarian approach. However, as we have heard, that is not the case. Today’s rules are not so very different from the rules that applied to the Kindertransport families all those years ago.
Amnesty has pointed out the deep unfairness in our treatment of the children of refugee parents who get asylum status in this country. Under family immigration rules, parents are allowed to bring children with them only if the children are under 18. That seems terribly uncaring as well as unrealistic. A 19-year-old is officially an adult, but as anyone who has grown-up children knows, young people up to the age of 25 or 26 still require a great deal of support.
Indeed, this Parliament has recognised that. We passed the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014, which recognised the right of care-experienced young people to have support up to the age of 26. I was proud to be a member of the committee that put that provision in place. Little persuasion was needed, however, because we all know that parents support their children well into adulthood. We help them with accommodation and we support them through relationship break-ups, job losses, exam pressures and all the other challenges that life throws at them. If children from privileged backgrounds need that continuing parental support, how much more do the most vulnerable young people require it, whether they are care experienced, refugees who are fleeing from persecution or migrants who are split up from their families because of the rules?
The rules do not apply only to refugees. It is reckoned that around 15,000 children in the UK are living without a parent because of the migration system—a system that we are now planning to extend to EU citizens.