Immigration lawyers have warned home secretary Theresa May that the immigration checks she plans to reveal in her flagship Home Office Immigration Bill later today (Thursday, October 10) will have to encompass British citizens. The bill will require immigration checks to be carried out before anyone can open a new bank account, be issued with a driving licence or access routine health treatment.
The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) has called the plan for millions of private landlords to face “proportionate” fines of up to £3,000 if they fail to conduct checks on the immigration status of new tenants and other adults living in their properties unworkable. The lawyers say the combination of the new housing and health checks with existing checks carried out by employers and educational colleges amounts to a system of identity checks for foreign nationals in Britain.
The official ILPA response to the Home Office consultation says: “What this means in practice is a system of identity checks for all, since it is necessary for British citizens or people with permanent residence to prove that they are lawfully present in the UK if and when checked.
“British citizens, European economic area nationals and third country nationals alike would be required to produce identity documents at many turns in a scheme that would be intrusive, bullying, ineffective and expensive and likely racist and unlawful to boot.”
The lawyers say the scheme is discriminatory because landlords can simply say they aren’t satisfied with a tenant’s identity documents and refuse them accommodation. They also point out that the proposals take no account of those who do not yet have leave to remain in Britain but have an outstanding application that clearly meets the immigration rules.
The Residential Landlords Association has told the home secretary that there are potentially 404 types of European identity documents that landlords may need to know about to operate the scheme. Landlords are consequently likely to simply refuse to house migrants for fear of falling foul of the new rules.
Habib Rahman, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, says: “These measures will divide society, creating a two-tier Britain, a return to the days of ‘no dogs, no blacks, no Irish’ and of ill people with no access to healthcare walking the streets of Britain. This bill is a travesty and must be stopped.”
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.”
Other new measures in the Bill, which could become law as early as Spring 2014 if approved, include:
New powers to check driving licence applicants’ immigration status
Cut the number of deportation decisions that can be appealed against from 17 to four
Restrict the ability of immigration detainees to apply repeatedly for bail if they have previously been refused it
Make it easier for the Home Office to recover unpaid civil penalties
Clamp down on people who try to gain an immigration advantage by entering into a “sham” marriage or civil partnership
Require banks to check against a database of known immigration offenders before opening bank accounts
Immigration minister, Mark Harper, defends the bill, saying it would “stop migrants using public services to which they are not entitled, reduce the pull factors which encourage people to come to the UK and make it easier to remove people who should not be here”.
