Immigration legislation re-announced in King’s Speech

It was the King’s Speech this morning, which sets out the government’s legislative agenda for the next year. The speech itself just covers the headlines. In the case of immigration legislation, this was all we got:

Legislation will be introduced to increase confidence in the security of the immigration and asylum systems.

But the government also released a more detailed briefing afterwards which does give us a bit more detail. 

There are three sections to the briefing.

Asylum system

The legislation will ‘introduce a new asylum model based on contribution, integration, and respect for UK laws.’ 

A single ‘core protection’ model will apparently be introduced. That can and should also be done via the immigration rules.

Some sort of further definition will be added to ‘law’ about when protection can be revoked.  The Refugee Convention already allows refugee status to be taken away if the person’s country is now safe.

There is some suggestion that refugees who arrive with nothing and are then forced to live in taxpayer-funded accommodation for years because the government fails to process their claims quickly and refuses to let them work will be required to ‘contribute to the cost borne by the British taxpayer once they are able to do so.’ 

Removals

Ominously, this is where the new ‘independent’ appeals body is mentioned. No new details are included but the briefing does say that the new body ‘will be integrated into the end-to-end immigration system to ensure cases flow through quickly to removal where appeals are unsuccessful.’

The Bill will apparently ‘enable immediate forced removal of those who have exhausted all appeals’. 

Finally for this section, the Bill will allegedly ‘strengthen’ age assessment by those allegedly pretending to be children. 

Order and control

The legislation is coming to tighten the application of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to private and family life) and define family life to limit it to the nuclear family. We don’t really know what is planned here. 

The Bill will:

Provide law enforcement with enhanced tools to tackle exploitation, and embedding provisions to ensure children are identified and supported more effectively.