Lambeth Council to stop helping immigration enforcement

Lambeth’s Green-led council has declared it will halt cooperation with immigration enforcement.

The new council leadership announced the move on 15 June — the start of Refugee Week. It has ordered a review of policies and practices across the council and its commissioned services, with a view to ending any collaboration or data-sharing that it finds beyond the required legal minimum.

This reflects a commitment placed in the local Green Party manifesto by members, and has long been a demand of migrants’ rights organisations. Activists and the council unions must keep an eye on the review and ensure it is followed through without diluting that commitment.

Minimum

There are some limited areas where the law requires councils to provide information to the Home Office. However, it is common for councils to cooperate and share data far beyond that minimum. Many environmental health, workplace safety and similar inspection services collaborate with immigration enforcement. This may involve passing on reports when they discover or suspect a person’s immigration status. Often it goes as far as joint visits - turning an inspection of a dodgy boss or landlord into a raid on their exploited employees or tenants.

Beyond the racist brutality of the state’s anti-immigrant apparatus, this creates another problem. People are less likely to engage with essential services if they fear that they might be handed over to the Home Office. Employers and landlords are empowered to continue neglect, abuse and hyper-exploitation.

Resist

Workers in these services can and do resist. For example, when housing environmental health inspectors in another London council discovered their managers planned to begin coordinating visits with the Home Office, they collectively declared that they would refuse to cooperate. They told their bosses that their job was to support tenants against neglectful landlords – not to help the Home Office attack those tenants. The planned cooperation was cancelled before it even began.

Lambeth is not the first local authority to stop this kind of collaboration. But the high-profile announcement is an opportunity to push other local authorities to follow suit. Green and Labour Party members should press their councillors and bring motions to their local parties. Council workers should organise in our unions to identify and resist collaboration, and link up with community anti-raids groups. §