The stated purpose of the legislation is to:
– Control Immigration, making sure we put hard working British families first
– To support working people. clamp down on illegal immigration and protect our public services
The stated benefits of these clauses would be:
-Dealing with those who should not be here, by rooting out illegal immigrants and boosting removals and deportations.
– Reforming our immigration and labour market rules, so we reduce the demand for skilled migrant labour and crack down on the exploitation of low skilled workers.
The main elements of the clauses are:
– Illegal working: The Bill will introduce an offence of illegal working, making it clear to migrants who have no right to be here that working illegally in the UK is a crime, with consequences for their earnings. This will provide a firm legal foundation for the wages aid to illegal migrants to be seized as the proceeds of crime.
– Work: We will create a new enforcement agency that cracks down on the worst cases of exploitation. Exploiting or coercing people into work is not acceptable. It is not right that srupulous employers can exploit workers in our country, luring them here with the promise of a better life, but delivering the exact opposite, and the full force of the State will be applied to them. A new single agency will have the scale and powers to do this. The Bill will also make it illegall for employment agencies to recruit them solely from abroad without advertising those jobs in Britian and in English.
– Skills levy: A consultation will be carried out on funding apprenticeship schemes for British and EU workers by implementing a new visa levy on businesses that use foreign labour.
–Services: A clearer bar on access to services by illegal migrants. We will build on the national roll-out of the landlord scheme established in the Immigration Act 2014, and make it easier to evict illegal migrants. We will ensure banks take action against existing current accounts held by illegal immigrants.
– Appeals:Extend the principle of ‘deport first, appeal later’ from just criminal cases, to all Immigration cases. In 2014 the last government cut the number of appeal rights but other than foreign criminals, migrants retain an in country right of appeal against the refusal of a Human Rights claim. We will now extend the ‘deport first, appeal later’ principle to all cases, except where it will cause serious harm.
– Tagging: Require all foreign offenders released on bail to be tagged, so we always know exactly where they are. This will prevent absconding and increase the number of criminals deported.
The stated aim of ‘scapping’ the Human Rights Act has been put back due to opposition. There is also the issue of whether the UK stays in or out of the Human Rights Convention, which will prove to be an equally thorny issue.
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