Much like schoolchildren, Peers have returned from the Easter break this week. We’re now within a month or so of the end of this parliamentary ‘session’, and so there will be lots of battles as the government attempts to secure the last parts of its legislative agenda for this year.
Looking at the business ahead, on immigration, on housing and on trade union legislation, I don’t envy the task of our team leaders and whips. They’ve got to decide which are the crunch issues on which we can bring together a coalition of peers to beat the Government in votes on the floor of the House. With Labour Peers so prone to a poor turnout, and Crossbenchers seeking only the strongest of cases before being willing to inflict defeat on Ministers, it is quite a balancing act.
I am reminded though that, in the Lords, there is more than one path to (at least partial) victory. I’ve been pushing behind the scenes for Ministers to accept that their ‘fee waiver’ system for immigrants who are unable to afford new charges the Government has imposed simply isn’t working.
As I told Peers in a debate on the Immigration Bill before Easter, those applying for or renewing visas have to pay £811 per person in application fees, and a £200 annual ‘health surcharge’ to cover their potential use of the NHS. Since visas are usually issued to cover around 2.5 years, that means £500 per person to cover the whole period. So a mother of three will be pay £3244 in application fees and £2000 for the NHS. Ministers strenuously resist the idea of allowing people to pay in instalments, meaning many try to apply for a waiver because they just can’t afford such huge sums up-front. Yet in the last 11 months, the Government rejected 84% of such applications.
Our efforts in the Lords recently succeeded in getting the Minister then in charge of the Immigration Bill, Lord Bates, to visit the excellent Cardinal Hume Centre in Westminster. I arranged with the centre staff that he would be shown six cases chosen at random, where the centre had put in an application for a fee waiver. In one of these, a man who had been living on the streets for two years, was deemed “not destitute”, and therefore refused a waiver. If he isn’t destitute, who is?
If our party were in government again, there would be so much more we could do to help vulnerable people such as these. As it is, we are fighting a government whose caring reflexes are too often inert. Yet this visit, and my later amendments in the Lords at least provoked Lord Bates to promise a review of the way in which fee waiver applications are processed. Having seen at first-hand the thorough status checks undertaken by organisations like the Cardinal Hume Centre on those they help, he seemed to accept that applications which go through such third sector organisations should be treated more seriously.
It will take many further meetings, and badgering to make progress with the review Lord Bates promised – but I am confident we can now make some difference for this group of people. And by achieving a partial victory – without a vote – we have saved up one further opportunity to defeat the government on the floor of the House. I’ve no doubt we’ll draw on that in the coming weeks!
* Dee Doocey is Liberal Democrat Tourism Spokesperson in the House of Lords.
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2 Comments
The business of government should not be to turn government into a business !
I remember during the New Labour years , an irrate Germaine Greer , who is a permanent resident of Britain going back about five decades, saying , to have a stamping of her passport , renewed , not obligatory , but always free once , she would be billed about five hundred pounds , she , on principle , declined to !
And then there were the efforts Nick Clegg , yes , him, went , with Joanna Lumley and co, to do something compassionate and common sense ,over the Gurka issue .
It is not just the increasingly wretched Tories who fail miserably on these matters. Thank goodness for places such as the Cardinal Hume Centre.I had the great pleasure , indeed , honour , to visit Lourdes as a volunteer helper in my sixth form years in the catholic comprehensive tradition I was educated in, and did so with the late , great Cardinal Hume.A genuine Christian man.
I would like to add a well done to Baroness Doocey, I meant to open with , but is better in its own right , for the input she and so many of our excellent peers regularly put in. There are many who work on behalf of our fellow human beings , who are overlooked.
It reminds me how important it is to remember such things.I have a photo of myself , during the trip I allude to ,sat next to the same Cardinal Hume, mentioned above, and my best friend from my school years , now Deacon , Michael Kennedy, himself one of those everyday sort of unsung heroes of humane decency who works in service of others , in his case in the church, often liaising on the very issues mentioned in this article, there we are in the photo of thirty years ago , a smiling trio , in a French cafe, !
Those who help others in our own Liberal Democrat tradition, tempered with the reality of what can be achieved, must be appreciated.It is the individual acts of commitment that count , often as much or more , than those of government !