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Immigration and Nationality (Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2008

My Lords, we are grateful to the Minister for his explanation of the regulations. The way in which the Government are using the powers in Sections 51 and 52 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 and in Section 42 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 to set fees for immigration services that are higher than a cost-recovery basis has been discussed on several occasions, as I hope the Minister’s notes will have reminded him: in our consideration of the original fees order last March; on the regulations that followed in the same month; on an amendment to the UK Borders Bill in July; and most recently on the amendment order relating to the points-based system in December. Some of the concerns that we expressed on those occasions have not, I am sorry to say, been entirely resolved this evening. The regulations specify the fees to be paid for a sponsorship licence as £1,000, other than for a small sponsor, which is a charity or a company with fewer than 50 employees. That is welcome in so far as it means that Bangladeshi and Chinese restaurateurs will not be required to pay this fee, as I understand it, although a further statutory instrument is coming down the track that will affect them. My first question is why the fees for small sponsors were not included in these regulations, as that would have saved parliamentary time and the proliferation of statutory instruments, which grow in number every year. Secondly—I am glad to see the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, in her place, because she will be interested in this, too—can the Minister confirm that institutions of higher education are to be treated as small sponsors, irrespective of their size, because they are charities? In December in the debate on the amendment order, we mentioned calculations that Universities UK gave to us, in which it was assumed that its members would have to pay the £1,000 to be sponsors, and it would be useful if that could be clarified. It was feared that the cumulative effect of the higher-than-cost-recovery fees would be to deter students from coming to the UK, and, although it would probably be too early to detect any such effects from the previous statutory instruments, I hope that the Minister will encourage feedback from any institution of higher education that has any knowledge or experience of the matter. Have the applications been affected at all by the fees that are already in place? On the charges for entry clearance in tier 1, the highly skilled migrants, investors and international graduates who have completed their studies in the UK would presumably be well able to afford the £600 being charged for entry clearance because they expect to earn higher incomes by coming to this country. However, the previous fee for highly skilled migrant approval, which was set before these regulations and came into effect last April, was £400, so this fee, as I work it out, is a 50 per cent increase in less than a year. I wonder whether that is simply a bit of profiteering, or whether there is some objective reason for that large increase. On entry clearance for settlement, the fee was increased from £260 to £500 last April, so that, although the new fee is only a modest increase of 3 per cent, it comes on top of a previous steep rise. Many of those who come here as spouses or dependent children will not enter the work force—at any rate, not immediately when they arrive—so that can be a substantial barrier to family reunification. When the fees were raised the last time, it turned out that representatives of spouses had not been consulted. After the announcement, however, I had several letters which I drew to the attention of the then Minister—I think that it was the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland—protesting about the huge end-to-end cost of bringing a spouse into this country, which I calculated was the highest in the world. Was the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, aware of those representations, and were they taken into consideration in deciding the new charges? I note that, in new Regulation 20C, no fee is payable where an application is for the purpose of family reunion under Part 11 of the Immigration Rules, which deals with asylum. Will the Minister confirm that a person who is being granted asylum or humanitarian protection is therefore entitled to bring a spouse and children here without payment of any fee? What has been the practice until these regulations? When the higher-than-cost charges were first introduced, there was a formal consultation process, although no indication was given in that consultation of what the fee levels were likely to be. I suppose that, having got away with the huge increases that were then imposed, the Home Office now considers itself at liberty to charge whatever the traffic will bear. Is that why the Explanatory Memorandum gives the reader no indication of how the fees were determined? As it turns out, Parliament should have imposed some obligation on the Government to justify any fee levels that were to be proposed, instead of giving them carte blanche in the original legislation. The best that we can do now is to request the Government, as I do now, to have an audit of the revenue yield of the fees compared with the cost of providing the services in question. I hope that the Minister can at least agree to that modest proposal, so that Parliament can see in the end whether overall the fees that we are being asked to sanction are reasonable.