We welcome the publication of the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee’s report on Settlement, Citizenship and Integration, to which we submitted written evidence drawing on decades of frontline experience supporting Black, minoritised and migrant women subjected to violence against women and girls (VAWG).
We welcome the Committee’s clear rejection of proposals to extend the standard qualifying period for settlement to 10, 15 or 20 years, and its recommendation that the Government retain the existing five-year route. The Committee rightly recognises that prolonged insecurity does not promote integration or deter migration; instead, it entrenches precarity. We also welcome its conclusion that applying any new rules retrospectively would be “manifestly unfair and may be unlawful”.
Despite the rejection of the extension of the qualifying period for settlement and the retrospective application proposal, we are concerned about two recommendations that would have serious consequences for migrant victim-survivors.
First, while retaining the five-year route to settlement, the Committee recommends maintaining the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) condition until migrant people have lived in the UK for ten years or obtained citizenship. For at least 32,000 victim-survivors of domestic abuse, NRPF is one of the most powerful tools of coercive control, trapping women in abusive relationships by denying them access to safety and support. Extending NRPF beyond settlement would hollow out the security and stability that settlement is meant to provide.
Second, the report’s calls for greater cross-government data sharing run directly counter to the firewall victim-survivors need between immigration enforcement and the police, health services and other statutory services they must be able to trust in times of crisis. Without that protection, many women will continue to fear reporting abuse, leaving perpetrators free to act with impunity.
More broadly, we are concerned that the disproportionate impact of these reforms on Black minoristised and migrant women and victim-survivors of VAWG is not sufficiently reflected in the report. Nor does the report adopt our central recommendation: a clear statutory exemption from immigration restrictions for victim-survivors, recognising that no woman should be forced to choose between abuse and destitution.
As the Government prepares its response, we urge it to remove NRPF as a barrier to safety, establish a full, unconditional firewall between public services and immigration enforcement, and introduce a statutory exemption protecting all victim-survivors of VAWG.