Voices from Parliament: in conversation with Tim Farron MP

For the latest interview in Voices from Parliament – a series of cross-party conversations about the government's latest immigration reforms – we sit down with Tim Farron, Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale.

In our conversation, Tim reflects on why refugee family reunion matters, the role of safe routes in preventing dangerous journeys, and the importance of ensuring people seeking safety can rebuild their lives with their loved ones.

Read an excerpt of our discussion below or watch the full video interview here.

How do you respond to the government's plans to end the right to Family Reunion as we know it?

I think it's cruel. I think it's foolish. I think it's foolish because, when all's said and done, we know that safe routes deter people from taking unsafe ones. People are horrified by the sight of people taking dangerous journeys across the English Channel and other places as well. Then they surely want something that might stop that.

And having safe routes, of which family reunion is one of the most obvious ones and works already, that's a very foolish and backward step. Cruel because families should be together. We know that from many countries like Eritrea, Iran, Ethiopia and Sudan, you're looking at people where more than 90% of those who come turn out to be genuine refugees. Why is it wrong to keep families together?

From your perspective, why do you think Refugee Family Reunion is so important to people?

It's important, and I think it's right that we use every legitimate tool in order to challenge the government on this because I think it is a backward step. I think it will increase the number of people taking dangerous journeys, and it will divide families.

One of the things that people often understandably don't understand is that you'll hear extreme voices, very often on social media, talking about the predominance of younger men making these journeys.

This is because being a woman, being a child, is an unfeasibly dangerous thing to be if you're on the move from, let's say, the Horn of Africa via here.

I went and did a visit to Cairo about a year and a bit ago with the United Nations, just for a couple of days. I met a young Sudanese woman, about 17 or 18, and she was the chair of what was euphemistically referred to as the Young Mothers Group, which sounds like a nice, lovely thing that you might find in a village church hall.

These were all women who had babies because they'd been victims of sexual violence. This is the reason why families are not very often on those boats, because it's dangerous to be a bloke. It's unbelievably dangerous to be a woman or a child.

If you allow family reunion, then you make it possible for people who are the most vulnerable when it comes to being displaced, which is women and children, it clearly is the case. You make it easier for those people to be able to travel safely.

We don't want to put ourselves in a situation where we are forcing people to flee in dangerous ways, incredibly dangerous ways, because we've just tried to appease a couple of tabloid newspapers.

If you had just one ask for the Home Secretary, what would that be?

I'm in favour of there being safe routes for people, and I'm in favour of ending those which are unsafe.

Why would you chuck out the one safe route we've got that we know works, where, as you said, over 90% of the beneficiaries are women and children?

The government, on one hand, have said they want to increase safe and legal routes, but at the same time they have made it harder for refugees to reunite with their families. So how do you make sense of that contradiction at the minute? It doesn't make any sense.

One thing the government has done that I think is worth investing in more, and they deserve some credit for, is their relationship with France, which actually models something that Joe Biden got no credit for that he did with Mexico — and it worked. The idea of one in and one out.

The problem is, with this particular scheme, the government has not got behind it enough, so only a handful of people, a few hundred people, have taken advantage of it in either direction. They've committed in principle to something which is about a safe route, and then they've under-invested in it. People don't choose that path because they don't even know about it.

The point about Family Reunion is that it is a form of safe passage that people do know about, and you can absolutely, via the normal processes, guard against abuse of that. But don't throw it out of the window completely, because all you are doing is making incredibly vulnerable people take really, really dangerous routes.

The government plans to lengthen the period of time it takes people to reach permanent settlement, and for refugees that could be up to 30 years. How do you relate to, and what is your view on, the idea that settlement is something that should now be earned?

It's a really confused policy, as well as being cruel to individuals who've committed their lives to this country and who've come to us for sanctuary.

To say, "You can't really be British for maybe the whole of your life," is cruel. But it's confused because, on the one hand, you'll hear people saying, maybe with good cause and sometimes just nefarious interest, complaining about people coming here and not integrating. Well, if you tell people there's no route to becoming British in your lifetime, potentially, then of course people won't integrate. We want people who come here.

I'll tell you what: my constituency, Westmorland and Lonsdale - I confess, that's one of the least diverse places in the country. That's just a simple statement of fact. But almost half of the children who escaped the death camps in Germany in 1945 and in the rest of occupied Europe came to Windermere. They came to the Lake District.

The Windermere children's story is one which is deeply moving, and it tells you a story of horror and also of hope. Those kids who came along in their early and mid-teens ended up, because of the welcome they received - and I'm proud it happened in my patch, we're all proud of that - becoming as British as could be.

You know, Sir Ben Helfgott, who died just the other year, captained the English team at the Commonwealth Games in the 1950s. He lifted weights for Great Britain at the Olympics. This is a man who was proud to be British, grateful for the citizenship that was bestowed on him, because we welcomed him.

So look, it's the just and right thing to do for refugees. It's also the sensible thing to give them the route to citizenship as quickly as possible.

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