Secret Home Office policy to detain people with NHS debt at airport found unlawful

Tax fraud and evasion are crimes and why? Because taxes are a debt to the Government. So I can and I did.

Well, I didn’t post it, but it was perfectly clear to me that when the poster stated evidence that courts are biased in favour of women and against men
they were deffo talking about bias…

they definitely did not say “male incarceration rates are FAR higher than female incarceration”

Its sort of your responsibility to respond to what is written in a post and not what you thought you read.

When someone states that male incarceration rates are FAR higher than female incarceration without defining the population under consideration, I default to the total population. If you were trying to make a point about custodial sentencing by sex, you should have said that you were referring to incarceration of male convicted criminals compared to female ones.

Your lack of clarity is not my responsibility to try to work around.

You did miss their point though. Numerous studies have shown that when you have an offender on convicted of the exact same offence under almost identical circumstances with almost identical consequences and the same criminal histories male offenders are far more likely to be handed a custodial sentence than are female offenders and even when female offenders are given a custodial sentence, they are on average much shorter. There is a justice system bias of leniency towards women, especially (fragile) white women. When you look at the intersection of race and sex, Black women are treated like white men by the justice system.

@Quveas
"If the UK were to apply the same actions to every person leaving the UK with an unpaid debt, nobody would ever get a foreign holiday."

I would. I pay my debts.

And this is a key point of debate anyway, you write to supposedly highlight a double standard between treating someone who is a citizen of another country being treated differently than our own citizen with the underlying assumption that because there is a difference in how someone is treated, this must be bad. Not everybody agrees with this and there are supportable arguments not to. It goes to @RhinoMoveFast slightly premature comments about communism and "global citizenship" overriding national citizenship. You will agree, I am certain, that the world does not contain infinite resources - not energy, not land, not labour... Both of these women are citizens of their own countries. We know this from the exemptions found in the policy and supporting background in the article. The NHS is a British institution for which UK citizens pay a great deal. We also know that both Mali and Armenia do not have reciprocal agreements with the UK: we don't get to use their health services freely. We depend on health insurance we pay privately for. And woe betide the UK citizen who goes to Mali or Armenia without health insurance and ends up in hospital!

All of this to point out that the underlying "this is a double standard" subtext of your post depends on something that quite arguably should be a double standard. Neither of the women are asylum seekers, neither has been granted indefinitely leave to remain in the UK, neither has lost their original citizenship, neither is unable to return to their own country - the Armenian woman has been bouncing back and forth with her kids for eight years by her own admission. Simply saying "this is a double standard" only works in cases such as race or sex where the double standard is on factors that aren't relevant to the actual process involved. Paying or not paying into the NHS is not such a factor. Every British tax payer pays into the NHS all their lives, even those who barely use it or also pay for private care! Is it inherently wrong to say that a visitor to the country who uses it should not pay?

Satire does not always come across well in writing.

Please point me to the law that says that a debt to the government is a criminal offence. You can't. Because there isn't one. Debt to anyone, whether the government or not, is a civil offence.

Respectfully you have missed my point to a fantastic degree. I am illustrating consequences of holding the viewpoint that disproportionate outcomes indicate judicial prejudice.

this is clearly evidence that the courts are biased in favour of women and against men.

It's actually because men make up the overwhelming majority, greater than 90%, of violent offenders and almost all, as in >95%, of sexual offenders. Men are generally more likely to commit crime. The only crime where women and men offend at equalish rates is fraud.

And yet, a court happened to decide this was unlawful, not the Guardian. You might think the Guardian is biased. A court decided the government is biased. And your biases are also showing Suella.

I don't know the rights or the wrongs of this case, but this is lousy journalism. Link to the actual court decision? Link to the policy? Very light on detail and as seen from numerous trans articles and others, the Guardian is very happy to favour polemics over reporting. Maybe these two women are desperate refugees, maybe they're health tourists who are spending the money they owe on holidays back to their home countries, and what does "Right to Live in the UK" specifically mean in this instance? The Guardian knows but chooses to be vague.

They could at least link to the law in question or cover the basics. With some digging I found the relevent documents: the policy itself and the impact assessment which was done
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/329789/NHS_Implentatation_Plan_Phase_3.PDF
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/331623/Impact_assessment.pdf

I'm not arguing any particular right or wrong here, I'm just doing the work that the Guardian should have done. The policy has a lot of exemptions and doesn't apply to those with indefinite leave to remain or those granted or awaiting asylum / refugee status or victims of trafficking. It also doesn't apply to those classed as "Ordinarily Resident" which covers a lot of migrants who also don't have indefinite leave to remain. A possible guess at these two women might be that they have fiancés in this country. There are also a number of conditions in which the policy does not apply such as victims of torture, FGM or for other humanitarian reasons. The FGM is an interesting aside as the Guardian uses the Mali woman's being a victim of FGM as an emotional appeal to the reader but doesn't note that the UK explicitly makes an exemption for FGM. UK govt. should get credit for that, not have it thrown back at it, in an instance where it is actually trying to help.

It would also be great for the Guardian to have supplied the amount of debt as it can kick in at just £500. Something a person who can afford to go abroad and back can likely pay.

Okay, now at that last I'm venturing into rights and wrongs and personal opinion. The first part was just to provide actual facts. The Guardian article doesn't give enough information at all to make a really clear judgement by the reader. According to the impact statement there is an average of 2.5million overseas residents in the UK on any given day. According to the impact assessment (2nd link above), the cost to the UK of non-residents on NHS is about £1.1bn (after deductions like I detail later, this is net). Not all of that is recoverable but of that which is, it seems less than a quarter actually is recovered. So this policy which has just been shot down was designed to try and address that by detaining people who do not pay.

There are a lot of reciprocal agreements between our govt. and many others in which NHS charges aren't born by the individual so this would never arise. It has come up here because these individuals are specifically from countries where if a British citizen were in their country, their government wouldn't give the British citizen free healthcare if hospitalised. When we travel abroad we get travel insurance to cover costs if we are injured or get sick. These two individuals didn't which means either they chose not to or they already had their condition and insurance wouldn't be granted. Again, we know at least that these women are neither refugees nor trafficking victims nor granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK. Maybe someone with more knowledge of the immigration system will supply a better interpretation but this looks very plausibly a case of health tourism for both of them. Maybe get a fiancé in the country and for the visa and then go into the hospital - and be able to go back and forth to the home country where they have access to that country's own healthcare system as we know they still have citizenship because they're not UK citizens and they're not stateless (asylum qualification).

People can have different views on what we should or should not be doing in terms of providing health care to people who aren't residents of this country (and again, to emphasize, we know these two women did not have indefinite leave to remain or were asylum seekers or they'd have been exempt), but it doesn't make someone a monster to believe that health tourism is bad for people in the UK. We already have exemptions on humanitarian reasons and for a number of conditions such as FGM. This wasn't that. The UK national debt is... around £3trn ? The govt. doesn't have rooms filled with money. When it spends more money it is doing so by taking out a loan on the taxpayer's behalf. Which must then be repaid either through higher taxes or inflation which devalues it - and everybody's savings and wages at the same time. That's a debate we can have but it needs to be based on facts not biased reporting. The Guardian says:

"The women were held at ports when trying to re-enter the UK after trips abroad to visit family, because they had outstanding debts to the NHS for maternity care – debts which Home Office was aware of when granting them leave to remain in the UK."

Okay, and? Is the Guardian saying that these women should have been denied leave to stay in the UK, visit their fiancé or whatever their basis for admission was, because of debts to the NHS? That's logical inference of the Guardian's attempt to insinuate that the women shouldn't be held liable because the govt. knew about it beforehand. If the govt. actually took the position of denying a woman a visa because she owed a debt to the NHS the Guardian would be all over it. Weasel words.

"While the women were only detained with their children for short periods they did not know when they would be released."

So what was the 'short period?' There's a big difference between being detained for days and being kept in the back room of customs for a couple of hours. Not having a definite time of release when we're talking the latter is pretty reasonable - they're checking things and interviewing. I can pretty much guarantee that if the Guardian of all papers is forced to refer to a detainment period as "short" then it was indeed not long at all. Probably an hour or two.

"In a judgment handed down today Mr Justice Chamberlain found that the two women and their young children were falsely imprisoned by the home secretary without justification."

Falsely imprisioned = Held temporarily at border control then let through.
Without justification = Justification I don't agree with.

"He also found that Suella Braverman had breached her duty to consider the equality impact of the policy on women, who are known to be disproportionately affected by NHS charging."

Equity based policies are dangerous things. For a start, the "equity" is usually selectively applied. If women are disproportionately paying more in NHS charges then I would suppose that for those that don't qualify for charges, women are also therefore getting more out of the NHS. Or is it saying 'disproportionately affected' because women have less money on average? I really have no idea based on information supplied. I can't find the judgement because the Guardian (deliberately) didn't link it. But if you can't implement a policy because it affects group X more than group Y you have a big problem. If the discrepancy is due to double standards, that's one thing. But building law around equity for your chosen, self-defined, social categories is a bad idea, imo. It always leads to unfairness. If men committed more domestic violence then women you would shoot down a law against domestic violence on the basis of disproportionate impact. So what is the case for doing so with the (less serious but same principle) running out on debt?

So this post contained some facts and some opinion. But one thing I hope all can agree on is that the Guardian - as seen through many cases particularly on trans issues or that recent article on strip searches by race - is very happy to write biased articles that mislead and this article rings a number of alarm bells for me: suspiciously vague wording without need, lack of details which they almost certainly had. I do not trust this self-appointed guardian.

Debt isn’t a civil matter when the debt you owe is to the Government, which is the case with NHS debt. It’s only civil when it’s between civilians (legal persons).

if I understand correctly, this is 'trailing' eu spouses where the staus 'no recourse to public funds' has been (deliberatly?) unclear.

Debt is a civil matter and nobody should be arrested or held in custody for a civil matter.

This basically.

Where should we draw the borders? I suppose you're happy with Ukrainian citizens accessing the NHS? There's a reason why this policy doesn't 'rile up' the feminists.

It is a National Health Service not an International Health Service. When we go to France we have to pay before we see a GP. Pay for our prescription. We should be able to charge people who are not UK citizens upfront.