EU Citizens are being discussed at the Home Affairs Select Committee and it’s complicated…
MP Chuka Umunna asks the right questions at the Home Affairs Select Committee about EU citizens living in the UK. Once again, best to read the full transcript rather than the biased media reports.
The truth is out there but one must look for it!
the3million v. The X Files
With thanks to Claudia Borgognoni Holmes for originally posting the transcript on her excellent Facebook group EU Citizenship for EU Nationalshttps://www.facebook.com/groups/132887737155325/
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Oral evidence: The Work of the Immigration Directorates (Q2 2016), HC 651
Tuesday 6 Sep 2016
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 6 Sep 2016.
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Q25 Mr Umunna: Minister, welcome to the Committee and congratulations on your appointment.
How exactly will the division of responsibilities between the Home Office and the Brexit Department work? You say that the Home Office will be in the lead. Do I take it, therefore, that whenever a question in the House is raised with the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union in respect of, say, immigration, he is simply going to parrot the policy that has been set by the Home Office, or is there a joint policy-making approach?
Mr Goodwill: I think the joint policy-making approach is the way that we will go forward but, as I say, we are taking the lead. There is a Cabinet Committee, of which I am a member, along with the Home Secretary, which will be discussing a number of these areas.
I am absolutely convinced that the Prime Minister will be taking a great lead in this. She is the person who will deliver on this deal for us, and she is the person who has the credibility and political weight to cut the deal that we need to cut. It is not just about immigration; it is the free-trade arrangements —
Q26 Mr Umunna: If, say, the Home Secretary says something slightly different from the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and perhaps something different from the Foreign Secretary, when it comes to immigration she is probably the one we should listen to.
Mr Goodwill: Well, the role of the Cabinet Committee is to get round the table and decide what the line is
Q27 Mr Umunna: That was not my question. My question was, if they are all saying different things, which has occurred over the summer in respect of some Brexit policy, the person we should listen to is presumably the Home Secretary.
Mr Goodwill: Yes.
Mr Umunna: Thank you. Can I move on —
Mr Goodwill: And the Prime Minister. I know the press will pounce on what one person said, but actually we are at the start of an interesting process —
Q28 Mr Umunna: You are a happy family.
Mr Goodwill: Well, actually, yes. I even said, when Peter Bone asked me a question, that we were on opposite sides of the debate in the referendum, but we are all on the same side now that we have to deliver this deal for the British people.
Q29 Mr Umunna: Can I move on and ask you about an exchange that I had with your immediate predecessor about the right of EU nationals to remain in the UK? He gave the same response that you just gave to Mr Berry, and he reiterated the desire of the Government to allow EU nationals who are already here to stay. Can I start by asking which EU nationals you are talking about in the end wanting to give the right to stay? Are you talking about EU nationals here at the time of the referendum — people who were in country on 23 June — or about EU nationals who are in country on the date that the UK leaves the European Union? What is the reference point?
Mr Goodwill: 23 June 2016 is one date that could be used, but there are other dates: the invocation of article 50 or the date we leave, or other dates in-between. That has yet to be determined, but the message I would give to EU citizens living, working or studying here is that there is no threat to their treaty rights so long as we remain a member of the European Union. The only circumstance — I will repeat it again — in which that would not be the case is if similar reciprocal rights were not extended to British people living and working abroad. In addition to that, could I —
Q30 Mr Umunna: Just to be clear, the answer to the question is that, currently, you have not determined what the reference point is.
Mr Goodwill: Yes.
Q31 Mr Umunna: So arguably, if you are an EU national wishing to be able to stay in the UK and the reference point is set as the date of our departure from the European Union, so long as you get here before that date, you might be in with a chance of being able to stay here, if you achieve your aim?
Mr Goodwill: That is one of the considerations we will have to seriously look at before we decide, but as I say, there are a number of dates that we could pick; it’s a debate —
Mr Umunna: Which is implicit in my question.
Mr Goodwill: But the point I would add is that there is no need for EU nationals here in the UK to get any documentation —
Q32 Mr Umunna: I am going to come on to that precise point. Can I, then, ask you this? One point that was made to me by your predecessor at the last session we had with him was that of course, people who have been here for more than five years currently have the right to stay here permanently. Do you have a number for the number of EU nationals who do not meet the five-year threshold who are currently in the UK? Maybe this is one for Ms Rapson.
Sarah Rapson: We do not, because currently EU nationals do not have to register in the UK.
Q33 Mr Umunna: So you do not know.
Sarah Rapson: We would know the number of European Union citizens who, for example, hold permanent residency — who have applied over the years — but we would not know the full total because they are not required to register currently.
Q34 Mr Umunna: Do you have a sense of an overall number for all EU nationals in the UK at present?
Sarah Rapson: I think it is the ONS —
Q35 Mr Umunna: Other than the ONS figure.
Sarah Rapson: No. I mean —
Q36 Mr Umunna: That is the one you work with.
Sarah Rapson: That is the one we would rely on, yes.
Q37 Mr Umunna: How many EU citizens here have a national insurance number?
Sarah Rapson: That is not something I would know, I’m afraid.
Mr Goodwill: There are also, I think, more national insurance numbers out there than there are people —
Q38 Mr Umunna: Which I was about to raise. You keep pre-empting me, Minister.
Mr Goodwill: Yes, sorry.
Q39 Mr Umunna: I am sure you are being helpful. I just want to go through this for the benefit of the record, so people can follow my thesis here. Have all EU nationals who have been here at some point been granted a national insurance number? I am talking about people who have come here not for a holiday, but to settle in some way, shape or form.
Sarah Rapson: I would think that would be a question for the DWP rather than the Home Office.
Q40 Mr Umunna: So you do not have a sense in Government — there is no figure in terms of —
Sarah Rapson: There may well be, but from a Home Office perspective, we would know the numbers of European Union citizens who had applied for and then got permanent residency or had applied for the registration certificates, as distinct from whether they had applied for a national insurance number or not.
Q41 Mr Umunna: The point I am making is that you do not really know how many EU nationals are currently here. You do not really know how many of them have been here for more than five years. You kind of have some national insurance data to go on, but you don’t actually have a clue. So if you were not to give EU nationals — determined by whichever reference point you choose to pick — the right to stay here, with the result that they have to go, practically speaking you have no way of identifying who they are before you consider the practicalities of actually removing them from the United Kingdom. So this so-called bargaining ploy that you appear to be using with our European partners, with the logic that was set out by Mr Berry, does not really come to much, because you do not really know who these people are, where they are and who may have the right to stay or not at the moment.
Mr Goodwill: I really cannot see that it would be a negotiating position of the other EU member states, particularly countries like Poland, to negotiate to have their nationals returned to Poland. The statement made by the Prime Minister about how the only circumstance she can see is if our citizens were not given the same right is not a bargaining ploy, it is how things are.
Q42 Mr Umunna: I just want to go back to my central point, Minister, for argument’s sake. It is obviously the worry of the Government in the context of the Brexit negotiation that British nationals in other EU countries are not guaranteed reciprocal rights. In those circumstances, you are saying you would not guarantee the right of EU nationals who are here to stay.
If that scenario transpired, the argument I am making is that if you were to seek to remove them from the country, you do not know who most of these people are. You do not know how many of them have not become entitled to stay here through having been here for five years. You do not know.
Is it not the case, Minister, that if you were not to guarantee the right of these EU nationals to stay and they had to be removed, practically speaking, that could be impossible?
Mr Goodwill: There are a lot of “ifs” in that question.
Mr Umunna: Do you disagree with my thesis —
Q43 Chair: This has been raised in the whole context of the failure of the Home Office to have exit checks on who is leaving the country. Surely it is of key relevance to the Home Office — let alone what interest the DWP may have in this — given that it is the Home Office target for a net migration figure and that figure is highly reliant on the number of people leaving the country netted off against those coming in. Surely there is an imperative for the Home Office to know how many people who are not native British residents are in the country and, therefore, may be here for a finite period of time by choice, in order to see how realistic — or not — or sustainable your 10s of thousands target is.
Why has more work not been done on determining exactly how many European citizens are here — quite aside from the implications of Brexit now and in the future — because it is highly relevant to your net migration target?
Mr Goodwill: The net migration figures are based on a survey, not on headcount in and out. We have not had exit checks in place for long enough to be sure about, for example, people who may have left the country before we brought in exit checks, but also the advice I have received from officials is that, at this stage, the exit check information is not sufficiently finessed and accurate for us to use it to pursue people who overstay their visas. I hope we can get to that stage.
There are a number of complications. The simplest one to understand is people who die while they are here. We do not want to be going around pursuing people as overstayers on their visa because they happened to die while they were here.
We have got the Common Travel Area with Ireland and there are a number of US tourists on tours who may leave from Shannon and would therefore not be picked up by the exit checks. It is not as straightforward as I thought, rather naively, it would be — that we would just count them in and count them out and then we would know the difference. At the moment, the survey is the best way we can get those figures, but as we move forward with exit checks I hope we will be in a better position.
As for the number of EU people living and working here, until the British people voted to leave the European Union, this was probably not a figure the British Government were interested in to the same extent as they are now. Also, on that question, Mr Umunna, with all those “ifs” in, it would not be a negotiating objective of the UK to remove people working and living here, making a contribution to our health service, to our agriculture, to all the other areas. Neither, I suspect, would it be an objective of our European partners to send a load of British pensioners back from Spain. There are too many “ifs” in that question.
Q44 Mr Umunna: Okay. I will ask you a question without any “ifs”. Are you in a position to identify and therefore remove every EU citizen in this country — yes or no?
Mr Goodwill: I cannot see a situation that we would even think about it.
Mr Umunna: Minister, I asked you a question. It had no “ifs” in it.
Mr Goodwill: We are going down this —
Q45 Mr Umunna: I am just asking, are you in a position to identify every EU citizen currently living and working in the United Kingdom and therefore to require their removal?
Mr Goodwill: No, we are not in a position and I can’t foresee a circumstance where we would want to be in that position.
Q46 Mr Umunna: So what on earth is the point, Minister, in holding out the hope that, somehow, you could not guarantee them the right to stay here? If you cannot identify all the EU nationals in our country and therefore be in a position to remove them, what on earth is the point of carrying on with this pretence that somehow, if you weren’t to guarantee them the right to stay, you could get rid of them? You have just told us that you can’t.
Mr Goodwill: I can see the route you are trying to take me down, but it is not a route that I think you are ever going to lead me down.
Q47 Mr Umunna: I think I have taken you down that route, Minister. I am going to get ticked off by the Chair, so my final point and question to you is this: there are obviously a lot of British citizens — children — who have parents in this country who are EU citizens and might not have the right to stay here. Can you understand the huge, huge worry you are subjecting them to with this continued pretence that you are not going to grant their parents the right to stay here?
Mr Goodwill: We have made it clear that we wish to protect the status of EU citizens living here in the UK. That is our objective. We have made it clear also that there is no need for anyone to get additional documentation to prove that. I find it difficult to see a circumstance in which we would want to be in that situation. The people from the EU who are here working and contributing are important to our economy and British people working in other parts of the European Union are important there. I can see a number of sticking points in the negotiations, but this is not one of them.
Mr Umunna: I think that’s an understatement when it comes to what I am talking about. Thank you, Minister.
Q48 Chair: There is, similarly, from all the arguments that went on during the Brexit referendum, some doubt over the exact numbers of British expats residing in EU countries as well.
Mr Goodwill: Yes, I think the figure I have is 1.2 million. That rings a bell with me.
Chair: Well, 1.2 million and, put the other way around, 2.1 million, are both figures that were legitimately used by various parties during the referendum campaign.
Mr Umunna: May I just say that the difference between the two figures is that 1.3 million is the number who are living and 2.1 million is the number who are living and working, apparently? I think that the Clerk is indicating to me that I am correct.
Chair: And there are different variations on that too. I think the point is that this problem of exactly who is within the borders is not an issue just in the UK in any case, which just complicates matters. But we will temporarily leave Brexit and go on to the slightly less thorny issue of asylum accommodation with Mr McDonald.
