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Immigration

I must correct my hon. Friend. I am Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, not the Home Affairs Committee. I will not say whether he just offered me a promotion or a demotion. All of us who have high immigration case loads in our constituency offices will be aware of such problems. People make genuine mistakes and they end up being challenged. The point about these rules is that there is no incentive to put things right. The incentive would be to fight everything every step of the way as a consequence, because there is no benefit in trying to put things right. The real problem is that an employer might have submitted a false document, and the migrant might have no knowledge of it. The same could be true of an educational or financial institution. Any false statement by a third party damns the applicant, too. Children are affected in the same way, as I have just said. The child who overstays because the parent failed to renew their leave is caught by the mandatory rules. That is not fair on the child, who is still caught by the ban. The seriousness or otherwise of the breach makes no difference at all. The person who overstays by 29 days because they made a mistake with their visa date, or because their flight was delayed, is treated in exactly the same way as somebody who has overstayed for 10 years. That is not fair or right. Similarly, no discretion can be applied in the case of a student who works an extra hour beyond the 20 hours a week permitted. Some provision must be made for dealing with such hard cases. The consequence of mandatory rules is inevitably injustice. In this case, there is another by-product: cases will increasingly be fought tooth and nail, every step of the way, through the courts. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to consider whether some discretion could be used in cases involving children, trafficking victims, inadvertent mistakes or mistakes where there is no culpability whatever on the part of the migrant concerned. If we are serious about our international obligations to asylum seekers, about our obligations to victims of trafficking under the European convention that we are supposed to be signing by the end of the year, and about the convention on the rights of the child, which I hope we will sign by the end of the year, we have to make exceptions in such cases.