Details of the Government’s long-anticipated Immigration Bill have been announced by Home Secretary Theresa May and roundly criticised by professional medical associations, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.
The Bill, which is expected to become law in spring 2014, subject to approval by MPs, will include measures to allow the UK to “deport foreign criminals first and hear their appeal later” when there is “no risk of serious irreversible harm”. It would also force private landlords to interrogate tenants about their immigration status and restrict access to bank accounts for people in the country without permission.
Mrs May appeared on various television and news programmes to publicise the Bill which she says will “make it harder for people who are here illegally to stay here”. At the same time, Mrs May says that the UK will “continue to welcome the brightest and best migrants who want to contribute to our economy and society and play by the rules”.
The Bill coincides with separate visits to the Far East by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and Mayor of London Boris Johnson to encourage Chinese investment and tourism entailing a loosening of visa restrictions for Chinese nationals and even extending to a 24-hour ‘super priority visa’ available from next year.
Before he was elected Prime Minister in 2010, David Cameron promised to cut net immigration to the UK to “tens of thousands”, interpreted as below 100,000 a year by 2015 from its then level of around 250,000 per year. Figures show that the level of immigration in the year to December 2012 was 176,000. Mrs May says that the government will continue to introduce policies aimed at cutting numbers of legal immigrants. Many of the provisions of the new Immigration Bill, however, are aimed not at legal immigrants but at those who are living in the UK illegally.
There are no official estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the UK. A 2009 study by the London School of Economics produced an estimate of 618,000 but the Migration Watch pressure group said this under-estimated the number of people who had overstayed, typically on visitor visas or Tier 4 student visas, and the true figure was more like 1.1 million. While these people feature prominently in Government rhetoric, it should be noted that they represent a small minority of visa applicants. The vast majority of those entering the Country leave when their visas expire.
The Immigration Bill proposes the following measures to make life harder for illegal residents:
A requirement for landlords to check the immigration status of prospective tenants
A requirement for banks to check that prospective account holders are not named on a government database of known immigration offenders before they can open an account
An increase in the level of penalties for those who enter into sham marriages in order to acquire UK residency/citizenship
A restriction on the ability of immigration detainees to apply repeatedly for bail if they have previously been refused it
The removal of thirteen of seventeen possible grounds of appeal against a decision to deport, thereby making it much harder to overturn a decision. Mrs May hopes to halve the number of appeals against deportation from 70,000 annually to 35,000.
New powers to check driving licence applicants’ immigration status
A change in the law so that illegal immigrants or criminal offenders can be deported before their appeal against deportation is heard. They will be entitled to appeal from elsewhere and return if successful
Mrs May told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that the Bill would create a ‘hostile
environment for illegal immigrants’.
An organisation representing private and public sector landlords said the measures would “make it much harder for non-British people to access housing even when they have a legal right to live in the UK”.
Gavin Smart, director of policy and practice at the Chartered Institute of Housing, said: “Checking immigration status is complicated so landlords may shy away from letting to anyone who appears not to be British.”
Health tourism
The Bill will also introduce new measures aimed at ensuring that migrants pay for services that they use in the UK. The bill will provide for
A health levy for people in the UK on temporary residence visas such as Tier 4 student visas and Tier 2 skilled worker visas
Measures to crack down on ‘health tourism’. Mrs May told The Today Programme that those in the country who are not resident in the UK will have to pay for their healthcare. She said that this was necessary because of the “concern people have about people not contributing”.
When new Today Programme presenter Michelle Husain put it to Mrs May that health tourism accounted for only 0.06% of the UK’s National Health Service budget and asked whether the system for collecting fees from foreign nationals might not cost more to implement than it would raise, Mrs May replied that it was “a point of principle”. But Dr Paquita de Zuluetta a GP who has worked in East London for over 30 years, said that the number of foreigners accessing healthcare was small. Most waited over three years to visit a doctor. She said that to prevent them from seeing a GP would be likely to have a negative impact on public health because of the possibility that immigrants might transmit infectious diseases such as tuberculosis to the general population if they failed to get treatment.
She added that it would also be likely to cost the NHS money, not save it if, rather than getting treatment for minor complaints, immigrants allowed their symptoms to fester untreated before presenting themselves at an accident and emergency unit while gravely ill.
The British Medical Association (BMA) is also critical of the plans.
Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chairman of the BMA’s GPs committee, told BBC Radio 5live there is already a system in place for hospitals to recover the cost of treating patients who are ineligible for NHS care.
“Clearly that could be improved, but introducing a system for general practice could be a bureaucratic nightmare,” he said, adding: “The reality is people don’t come to the UK to use the NHS, they’re more likely to come to work in the NHS.”
Simon Walker, of the Institute of Directors, warned that some of the government’s rhetoric was starting to make the UK “look unwelcoming and hostile to the people on whom our export markets depend”.
