Women and Equalities Committee

4 November 2026

Women and Equalities Committee Actual start House of Commons

Follow its sittings
44:37 - 45:08
Speaker 1
and welcome to the Women and Equalities Select Committee.  And today we are holding a session, a one-off session, on the equalities impacts of the Government's proposed reforms to routes to settlement, as well as the asylum changes more broadly.  And we're really pleased to be able to hear this afternoon from a really expert panel of witnesses:  Dr Hannana Siddiqui, head of policy, campaigns and research at Southall Black Sisters;  Anita Hurrell, head of policy and change at Coram Children's Legal Centre; 
45:08 - 46:12
Speaker 2
Sabrina Galella, director of policy and advocacy at the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association;  and Andrea Als, chair at Immigration Lawyers Practitioners Association.  Thank you all very much indeed for coming.  It is a very useful time to be having this evidence session today following the Government's announcements on settlement on Monday. 

And I think we now have a kind of more complete picture of what the government intends to do in terms of changes on asylum and immigration.  And I just thought, by way of introduction at the start, what we're going to do with this session is we're going to go through different areas and different potential impacts on women, on children, for example, we're going to go through those thematically.  But just at the outset, I wondered if you each might just give me an overview of, now we've got the full package, your perspective on it and the potential impact that you think it might have broadly on different equalities groups, but bearing in mind that we're going to go into detail on each as we go through the session today.  Does that sound okay?  Hannana, would you like to start? 
46:12 - 46:17
Speaker 4
Yes, thank you.  I've had a promotion, I'm director of policy, campaigns and research. 

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