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Immigration

I shall be brief. I was prompted to speak by the intervention of my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (Mr. Spellar), who asked why British citizens should bear the burden of such responsibilities. The Minister, whom I thank for listening carefully to a series of representations that I have made about the rules, led me to write letters to 63 families in Slough, to which the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) alluded. I had a look at the families who would have been affected by this proposal, and in a large proportion of cases the families involved a number of British citizens, and the British citizen in question was married to someone from overseas. I can think of one case about which I am still battling with the Home Office. A woman with five children who had been married for years was deemed not to be a wife, but was admitted as a fiancée. That happened because the husband had been married previously and, ab initio, the marriage was determined to be bigamous in UK law, although, when the couple originally married, he was a Pakistani citizen. He is now a British citizen. She did not know that she had been admitted as a fiancée—she thought that she had been admitted as a wife because she had been a wife for many years and had five children. When her six-month visa expired, she applied to the Home Office for indefinite leave to remain, and it replied, ““Sorry, no marriage certificate.”” She tried to book a wedding at Slough town hall and could not do it in the time left before her visa ran out. Shortly afterwards, she had her sixth child, and she is still here because the child is too young for her to return. In that case, I have not done what I usually do—advise people to go overseas and make an application from there to come back home, as the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey described—because her children need to be cared for. My concern about the rules is their effect on family life and article 8 of the European convention on human rights. The Minister has listened carefully to my comments and I shall stop speaking soon because I hope that he will cheer us all up by saying that he recognises that the impact on British as well as long-resident families is unacceptable. The lack of confidence in the system created by that wee group of people, who happen to go overseas just before the period described in the other place as a concession and get refused but would not be refused two weeks later, is unreasonable. I hope that the Minister can tell us that those people whose applications were made before 1 April and refused after that date but would have fitted the concession will have their cases reconsidered. I also hope that the Minister can tell us that he intended people who disregard UK immigration law to face penalties, but that those people's families, who will be deprived of sometimes a breadwinner and always a loved one, should not pay those penalties. I look forward to his comments.