Illegal Migration Bill

2nd reading
Wednesday 10th May 2023 Lords Chamber

Second Reading

11:06

Moved by

[Lord Murray of Blidworth]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Murray of Blidworth) (Con)]

My Lords, the British people are generous and welcoming to those in need fleeing persecution, war and humanitarian crisis abroad. They also know that uncontrolled illegal migration makes us less safe, is unfair on taxpayers, puts lives into the hands of people smugglers and is unfair on would-be immigrants who play by the rules.

More than 45,000 people came here by small boat last year. The overwhelming majority of arrivals were adult males under the age of 40. These journeys are extremely dangerous; people have lost their lives attempting to cross one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes in flimsy boats. These journeys are also unnecessary. Those making the crossings are coming from safe countries, such as France, where they could have claimed asylum.

Our broken asylum system is costing the country some £3 billion a year, and taxpayers are now spending more than £6 million a day on hotels alone. We cannot continue, year on year, with this relentless rise in the number of illegal arrivals adding unacceptable pressures not just on our capacity to house new arrivals but on our ability to provide health, educational, children’s and welfare services.

My right honourable friend the Prime Minister is right: we have to stop the boats. I welcome the fact that this objective is shared across the political spectrum. The issue before your Lordships’ House today is how best to achieve this shared objective.

There is no one single solution. We need to address this complex issue across a broad front, and the Bill needs to be seen in its wider context. The Government have already delivered: the largest-ever small boats deal with France; a new agreement with Albania; a new, unified small boats operational command; tougher immigration enforcement; new, more robust measures for identifying potential victims of modern slavery; and a plan to clear the legacy initial decision asylum backlog by the end of the year and move migrants out of expensive hotels.

But we also need new legislation to make it unambiguously clear that if you enter the UK illegally, you will not be allowed to stay here. Instead, you will be liable to be detained and will be swiftly returned, either back to your home country or to a safe third country. It is only by removing the incentive to come to the United Kingdom that we will stop people taking these dangerous journeys and deter the people smugglers from profiting off people’s suffering. This is what the Bill seeks to deliver.

Crucially, the Bill places a legal duty on the Home Secretary to make arrangements for the removal of illegal entrants who meet the four conditions set out in Clause 2. This is critical to the operation of the scheme. It will send a clear message about Parliament’s intent in enacting this legislation. Save in the very limited circumstances provided for in the Bill, it will be crystal clear to illegal migrants, the courts and the British people that the Home Secretary is legally bound to remove all those who meet the conditions set out in Clause 2 as soon as it is reasonably practical to do so.

As I have indicated, the exceptions to this duty will be limited and, in most cases, only temporary. In particular, we recognise the sensitivities in relation to unaccompanied children. That is why the Bill provides that the duty to make arrangements for removal does not apply until they reach adulthood, which in some 70% of cases is within two years of their arrival. Reflecting our current policy, the Bill confers a discretionary power to remove unaccompanied children in limited circumstances. The Bill now expressly sets out those limited circumstances in which the power to remove unaccompanied children may be exercised; that is, for the purpose of reuniting a child with a parent, where the child is to be returned to a safe country of origin or where the child has made no protection claim.

The Bill also suspends the duty to make arrangements for removal, again on a temporary basis, in the case of those persons who make a factual suspensive claim or a serious harm suspensive claim. It is vital to the effective operation of the scheme provided for in the Bill that we address head-on the cycle of repeated and late legal challenges by those seeking to frustrate the Home Secretary’s existing removal powers. The suspensive claims provided for in the Bill will be the only claims that will be heard in country and will therefore be the only route by which someone can challenge removal. Legal challenges by way of judicial review are, of course, still available, but they will not suspend removal, and Clause 4 makes this clear. These claims can continue remotely. It follows from this that the courts are not able to grant any form of interim relief that would have the effect of holding up removal pending consideration of the substantive judicial review. Clause 52 now makes this clear in the Bill.

As I have indicated, the Bill itself makes provision for two kinds of suspensive claims that provide sufficient legal remedies to those seeking to challenge their removal. Where a person seeks to challenge their removal on the basis that the Home Secretary has made a mistake of fact in deciding that they met the removal conditions, they can lodge a factual suspensive claim. Where such a claim is successful, the duty to make arrangements for removal would no longer apply, although the claimant may be subject to enforcement action under existing law if they have no legal basis to remain in the United Kingdom.

The second type of suspensive claim is a serious harm suspensive claim. Under the provisions of the Bill, a person who has made a protection or rights-based claim in respect of their home country will not be returned to that country unless it is one of the safe countries listed in new Section 80AA of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 and only if there are no exceptional circumstances militating against their return. But such a person can and will be removed to a safe third country.

Serious harm suspensive claims recognise that, exceptionally, there may be a well-founded reason why a person cannot be removed to the third country specified in the removal notice. Such a claim must be based on the fact that the person would face a real, imminent and foreseeable risk of serious and irreversible harm if they were removed. This is purposefully a high bar that reflects the terms on which the European Court of Human Rights may decide to indicate interim measures under rule 39 of its rules of court. Where a serious harm suspensive claim is upheld, it would be open to the Home Secretary to remove the person to another country or to revisit their removal to the original third country following a change of circumstances—for example, should the medical condition that previously prevented removal subsequently improve.

I have already alluded to the fact that the test for serious harm suspensive claims reflects the approach taken by the Strasbourg court when deciding the grant of interim measures. I have also explained the provisions in the Bill placing limitations on the grant of interim remedies by our domestic courts. In this context, it is entirely right that we address the impact of any interim measures indicated by the Strasbourg court.

Clause 53 of the Bill provides a discretion for a Minister of the Crown to suspend the duty to remove a person where an interim measure has been indicated. That discretion must be exercised personally by a Minister. This means that the Minister may suspend removal in response to a rule 39 interim measure but is not required to as a matter of UK law. The clause provides a broad discretion for the Minister to have regard to any factors when considering whether to disapply the duty and provides a non-exhaustive list of considerations that the Minister may have regard to when considering the exercise of that discretion. As my right honourable friend the Immigration Minister indicated in the House of Commons, this Government take our international treaty obligations incredibly seriously, and I can assure noble Lords that this discretion would be exercised judiciously and on the basis of the facts of an individual case.

The Bill provides for bespoke powers of detention for the purpose of the scheme. It is vital that we have the power to detain to establish whether a person falls within the scheme, and pending their removal, if the Bill is to be effective both as a deterrent and as a means of ensuring that the Home Secretary can comply with the duty on her to make arrangements for removal. That said, I again acknowledge the particular vulnerability of unaccompanied children. That is why the Government have brought forward amendments to provide that unaccompanied children may be detained only in circumstances prescribed in regulations. In addition, in line with the commitment given by the Immigration Minister, later in the Bill’s passage through this House we will set out the new timescale under which children may be detained for the purposes of removal without judicial oversight.

It is a central tenet of the Bill that a person who satisfies the conditions in Clause 2 will not have their asylum, human rights or modern slavery claims considered in the United Kingdom. It is a sad but incontrovertible fact that our modern slavery protections are susceptible to abuse by illegal migrants seeking to frustrate their removal from the United Kingdom. Whereas in 2019 just 6% of people arriving in the UK on a small boat and detained for return involved a modern slavery referral, the figure in 2021 was 73%.

The Bill therefore applies the public order disqualification, as provided for in the Council of Europe convention against trafficking, to those who meet the conditions in Clause 2. This means that they will not benefit from the protections otherwise afforded to potential victims of modern slavery. The Bill provides for an exception where a person’s presence in the UK is necessary for the purposes of their co-operation with a law enforcement agency in the investigation of an offence linked to their exploitation.

We recognise that the application of the public order disqualification to this cohort is a significant step and justified only during such time as the exceptional circumstances relating to the illegal entry into the UK, including arising from the channel crossings in small boats, continue to apply. For this reason, the modern slavery provisions are subject to a sunsetting clause such that, unless renewed by affirmative regulations agreed by both Houses, they will cease to apply after two years.

As I have set out, the whole point of the Bill is deterrence. As well as being clear that illegal entry into the UK may simply result in your detention and swift removal, the Bill underlines that you will have no ability to build a life in the UK. Save in very limited circumstances, Clauses 29 to 36 provide that a person will have no right to secure settlement, acquire British citizenship or, once removed, lawfully re-enter the UK.

Finally, I return to the theme I began with. Ours is a welcoming, compassionate and generous nation. We have offered our homes and communities to nearly half a million people seeking protection since 2015. We have safe and legal routes available to people from any country in the world, such as the refugee family reunion scheme and the UK resettlement scheme, as well as in recent years country-specific routes for people from Syria, Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Ukraine. We stand ready to do more. But our ability to do more must be directly linked to our capacity to house and support new arrivals.

We recognise the calls for early progress on this front, so within three months of Royal Assent we will begin the consultation with local authorities and communities themselves to understand their capacity to accommodate and support persons to be admitted to the UK each year through safe and legal routes. Within six months of Royal Assent we will set out, in a report to be laid before Parliament, the existing and proposed additional safe and legal routes. We will seek to open the proposed new routes as soon as practicable and, in any event, by the end of 2024.

We simply cannot continue with a situation whereby, year on year, tens of thousands of people make the dangerous, illegal and unnecessary journey across the channel in circumvention of our immigration controls. Illegal migration is not fair and not right. It is not fair on the British communities whose public services and housing are under pressure. It is not fair on those who work hard and obey the law to come to the UK through established routes. It is also not fair on the people travelling in the small boats themselves, who are placed in peril at the hands of people smugglers.

We must stop the boats. The Bill, in conjunction with the other steps the Government are taking, is a necessary, urgent and indeed compassionate response to the daily challenge posed to the integrity of our immigration system. We must act now and, on that basis, I beg to move.

11:24

Amendment to the Motion

Moved by

[Lord Paddick]

To leave out from “that” to the end and insert “the House declines to give the bill a second reading because it

(1) undermines the rule of law by failing to meet the United Kingdom’s international law commitments and by allowing Ministers to ignore the directions of judges;

(2) undermines the UK’s tradition of providing sanctuary to refugees by removing the ability of refugees to exercise their legal right to claim asylum, by removing protections afforded to modern slavery victims and by increasing the number of people in indefinite detention, including children;

(3) fails to provide safe and legal routes for refugees;

(4) fails to include measures to eliminate the backlog of asylum cases; and

(5) fails to include measures to tackle people smuggling gangs.”

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, Trevor Phillips recently wrote in the Times that, in 2000, 175 million people lived outside the country of their birth and that, by 2020, it was 280 million. He likened the Prime Minister’s pledge to “stop the boats” to King Canute ordering back the incoming tide. He argued that we need to bring order to the flow, rather than focusing on the impossible task of locking the doors to keep asylum seekers out. We agree.

We have yawning gaps in our labour markets that refugees could fill. We believe that we should adopt the approach many other countries are adopting, that responsibility should be taken away from the Home Office and given to the Foreign Office or the Department for Business and Trade and that “Migration is no job for a home secretary”. Phillips agrees. We should be harnessing the power of the incoming tide, not refusing to accept that it cannot be stopped.

The Government talk about “pull factors”. We talk about “push” factors: the intolerable conditions in their home countries that compel asylum seekers to find sanctuary elsewhere in the world. Even in detention in the UK, you do not have to worry about where you are going to live, how you are going to survive without adequate food or water, or whether you are going to be killed or persecuted, or otherwise have your life endangered. Can the Minister say what evidence the Government have that the measures in the Bill will deter small boat crossings?

Talking of so-called “pull factors”, the Government have reduced their spending on measures designed to improve conditions in asylum seekers’ home countries from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income, while at the same time spending millions of pounds from the 0.5%—this so-called “overseas aid”—on housing asylum seekers in the UK. Can the Minister confirm how much less the Government are currently spending on overseas aid since the downgrade to 0.5%, and how much of the 0.5% is being spent on housing asylum seekers in the UK?

In the Times today, the Home Secretary talks about

“the clear desire of the British people to control immigration”.

The Telegraph reported yesterday—under the headline that net migration was set to hit double the pre-Brexit level—that, in the year to December 2022, 1.37 million work, study or other visas were granted by the Government to allow people to stay long term in the United Kingdom. The Home Secretary says that the number seeking asylum crossing the channel in small boats in the same period was 45,000—just over 3% of those who sought to stay in the UK last year, even if every asylum seeker was granted leave to remain. If the Government are, as they appear, subscribing to the populist view that there is “too much” immigration, can the Minister explain why they are attempting to push through legislation that seeks to deter only three in every 100 long-term arrivals, and why, since Brexit, they have increased the number of countries from which people can enter the UK without question and without a visa by 10?

The Government portray asylum seekers as an undesirable drain on society. We disagree. Let me give noble Lords an example. A young man who I know personally, who is now in Norway, had been living in Afghanistan when, at the age of three, he lost his father, killed in the Afghanistan war, and, at the age of five, his mother died of breast cancer. He was sent to his grandmother in Iran, where he worked from the age of six until he was 12. He saved enough money to begin his journey through Europe, finally arriving in Norway the day before his 16th birthday, where he was granted asylum.

He had never been to school before arriving in Norway; now, at the age of 23, he speaks fluent Norwegian and English. He works long hours in the security industry, sending £500 a month to his grandmother and two cousins in Iran. He is also on a three-year course at police college, which will result in him becoming a Norwegian police officer. He has a Norwegian passport and driving licence, he lives alone in private rented accommodation that he pays for himself and he is saving for a deposit to buy his own home, as well as paying Norwegian tax and national insurance.

Under this Bill, if that young man came to the UK in the same way, he would face compulsory X-rays to confirm that he was not an adult. Even though the Home Secretary’s duty to deport him would not apply until he was 18, the Secretary of State would still have the power to deport him while he was a child. He would most likely be detained until he was 18 and then sent to Rwanda—if anyone ever gets sent to Rwanda, and even if the capacity of Rwanda could cope with the numbers involved.

During that time, the Home Office could prevent that young man being looked after by a local authority, ignoring this country’s international obligations to act in the best interests of the child and the provisions of Part III of the Children Act. Whether the detention of asylum seekers was reasonable or not, including the potentially indefinite detention of children, pregnant women and victims of torture, would no longer be a matter for the courts but for the Home Secretary to decide.

If the European Court of Human Rights blocked that young man’s deportation by means of an interim order, the Home Secretary could ignore the judge’s ruling. UK courts would be prevented from granting an injunction, even if there were grounds for a judicial review. So much for the rule of law.

If that young man could not be sent back to where he came from, because neither Iran nor Afghanistan are listed as “safe countries” and he remained in the United Kingdom, he would never be able to work, never be given leave to remain and never be able to become a British citizen. Neither would his children, were he to have any, nor any of his family members. Estimates are that between 160,000 and 193,000 asylum seekers could be left in limbo in the United Kingdom in the first few years of the Bill’s operation—a permanent drain on the state, a subclass of society, open to labour and sexual exploitation. Can the Minister say when we will receive the Government’s own impact assessment, or will noble Lords have to rely on NGO estimates?

This young man’s story is not exceptional. There are many such examples in the UK that prove that those with the drive and determination to make such long and perilous journeys are just the sort of people who will work hard, contribute positively to society and support their families—the complete opposite to how this Government seek to portray those seeking asylum.

The Bill seeks systematically to deny human rights to a group of people desperately seeking sanctuary. It would breach our international obligations under the UN conventions on refugees, on the rights of the child and on the reduction of statelessness, and the European convention against trafficking. This is the first, but not the only, Bill that explicitly states that it does not have to be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The Human Rights Act is being revoked, one law at a time. The Bill would undermine the rule of law, with Ministers able to ignore the rulings of judges. At the same time, we are asking Russia and China to abide by the international rule of law.

I have one final thought. I studied moral philosophy at university. One of the acid tests of whether something was morally right was the question: “What would happen if everyone did the same thing?” Can the Minister say what would happen if every country adopted the approach outlined in the Bill?

This Bill is a low point in the history of this Government and we should not allow it to proceed any further. I beg to move.

11:34

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, before I make my speech, let me make it clear that we will not support the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, in his amendment. Of course, we oppose the Bill, and did so at Second and Third Reading in the other place. We understand why the amendment has been moved and we know that it sounds attractive, but if we pursued it, all that would happen is that the Government would use the Parliament Act and no amendments in this place would then be possible. So we will propose amendments and press the Government to think again, but we recognise that the elected House passed this legislation.

I also say to the Minister and this Chamber, however, that we do not need lectures either from the Home Secretary or the Justice Secretary about the constitutional position of the Lords. We will not be rushed or intimidated into giving the Bill an easy ride. We will do all we can to do our job in seeking support across the Chamber to bring about the much-needed change.

As we begin this House’s discussion of the Bill, I declare my interest as an unpaid trustee of the Human Trafficking Foundation and my work with the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab. It is essential, if not crucial, that we lay out again the principles on which we should base our consideration of the measures in the Bill. We can address the detail in Committee and on Report, and I shall do so a little in this speech—but what of our principles?

Of course, we face a very real challenge, with the Government having lost control of migrants crossing the channel in particular and asylum policy in general. The Bill is the latest response to a crisis whereby 138,000 asylum claims await decision and 45,700 migrants crossed the channel in 2022, with 6,415 so far this year. Since the Bill was announced, 3,265 migrants have crossed the channel—some deterrent. They come into a system in which already 38,900 people await removal. Of course there is a problem that needs fixing, but this new Bill, layering on more incompetence, complexity, unworkability and unfairness, will not do it—it will make it worse. Indeed, it comes less than a year after we were told that it would all be sorted out by the Nationality and Borders Act—that it was the solution and the way to stop the boats. The ink is hardly dry on that Act, and in blind panic, as the problem gets worse, new measures, which would have been regarded as unthinkable just a few years ago, are now to be rushed through.

In the face of increasing global migration, fuelled by regional insecurity, war and persecution, and the challenge of climate change, which can only get worse, where is the leadership that you would expect from our Government? Our Government say that the solution is to go it alone, embarrassed and humiliated, even as we look at countries—often some of the poorest in the world—taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees from conflicts on their borders. One has only to look at Sudan. Where are the leaders such as Churchill and Tory MP Maxwell Fyfe, who set up the Council of Europe when faced with the humanitarian and refugee crisis post World War II? Obviously now it is totally different, but they saw international co-operation, based on human rights, as an essential prerequisite to any solution.

This illegal migrants Bill has been condemned by the United Nations refugee commissioner, the Council of Europe, UNICEF and numerous NGOs and organisations, including faith organisations working in this area—condemned by all. And what do the Government say of us? That we are out-of-touch lefties, trendy lawyers and people who are not in touch, when we are standing up against those introducing unworkable measures that drive a stake through the heart of our international standing—something that we can be proud of.

As Amnesty says, Clause 1 means that, whatever the merits of the refugee’s asylum claim, whatever the strength of their connection to the UK and however indecent and impractical the aim of expelling them, their expulsion is to be required by the Bill, and no moral, legal or practical consideration is to obstruct that. That is shocking and appalling. Furthermore, the Bill bars anyone and any court from interfering; it says that there will be no judicial review for up to 28 days for anyone. No ability to test the legality or reasonableness of that is to be allowed under Clause 2. Under the Bill, everyone who has entered irregularly has to be detained; no matter whether you are fleeing persecution, war, or being trafficked, you will be locked up. Thousands on thousands will be locked up but the Government will not even give a number. There are approximately 2,000 places available at the moment. How many more cruise ships, military barges or camps are needed? Where are they? When will they be available? The Government have no idea or proper plans—they are clueless—and no judgment can be made, because no impact assessment is available for us to consider.

We have no idea what happens after those 28 days. All of it is predicated on returns agreements, like the one with Rwanda, which is stuck in the courts; other such agreements are completely non-existent. What do the Government do? They seek unilaterally to undermine the ECHR, even while they negotiate, by giving the Home Secretary what is effectively an opt-out from any interim measure granted under Rule 39. As Joanna Cherry MP, the acting chair of the JCHR, reminded us, we are talking about the suspension of measures such as extradition—not stopped, but suspended—while the case is properly examined. She pointed out that between 2019 and 2021, interim measures under Rule 39 were applied for in 880 cases against the UK but granted in just seven. How does that justify driving a coach and horses through international treaties that we signed and, indeed, helped to set up? As a former Attorney-General, Geoffrey Cox MP, said, the provisions in this Bill ask the House, should the Bill be approved, to allow,

“quite consciously and deliberately, a deliberate breach of our obligations under the convention”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/4/23; col. 785.]

What of children under this Bill, particularly unaccompanied children? Last year, over 5,242 unaccompanied children sought asylum in the UK. These children will be detained, whatever the Minister says, for an uncertain period and returned if possible. Even if they are allowed to remain in the UK while a child, unaccompanied children will live in the knowledge that on their 18^th birthday they will be subject to removal, regardless of their protection needs, which will be deemed inadmissible. If this Bill becomes law, more children will go missing. Notwithstanding the Children Act, unaccompanied children have often been placed in hotels outside the care system. The result has been 4,600 children placed in Home Office-run hotels, 440 missing episodes and 200 children still not found. This Bill will make it worse. I say to the Government that, if the state was a physical parent, it would be prosecuted. Clauses 15 to 20 do all of the above and have been condemned by, among others, the Children’s Commissioner.

Clauses 21 to 28 destroy one of the Conservative Government’s greatest achievements, the legacy of Theresa May, the former Prime Minister, and our reputation as a world leader in the area of modern slavery. As the former Prime Minister said, the Bill

“will drive a coach and horses through the Modern Slavery Act”.[Official Report, Commons, 28/3/23; col. 886.]

If noble Lords have not yet done so, they should read Clause 4(1)(c). People cannot claim to be a victim of slavery or trafficking to suspend any detention or removal, which is justified and based on selective statistics. As Theresa May said,

“more people will stay enslaved”,

and the Bill will give more power to the slave drivers and traffickers, for whom it will be easy to say,

“Don’t even think about trying to escape”,

because, if you do, you will be sent away, perhaps to Rwanda. This cannot be what our country has come to. The Government have said that you do not even have to be in the UK to assist an investigation, making it harder to identify, catch and prosecute the traffickers. Most astonishingly of all, the former Prime Minister said:

“It is a slap in the face for those of us who actually care about victims of modern slavery and human trafficking”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/4/23; cols. 808-09.]


That was a former Conservative Prime Minister speaking recently in the other place about the provisions in the Illegal Migration Bill that is before us today.

We have a Bill that gives the Home Secretary the power to remove anyone who arrives via an irregular route, with no certainty as to where, if anywhere. Such a power extends to children—the power to detain children with no legal redress for at least 28 days. It is immoral, but there is no space or places for detention. Courts can be ignored, whether domestic or international. There are no returns agreements or international co-operation and no help if you are trafficked. That is what this House is being asked to support.

A new approach is needed. There is a better way: an approach that takes on the traffickers and smugglers, sorts out the bureaucratic mess and muddle of the current system with a fast-track asylum system and seeks international agreements and co-operation. We need an approach that restores the aid budget to 0.7%, tackling more problems in the region itself, and the speedy setting up of safe and legal routes. Above all, we need an approach that is workable, practical and based on our international obligations and the conventions that we have signed.

Instead, in response to a broken system that is failing, we have a Government playing fast and loose with our place in the world and our respect for international law. This must change. We will do all that we can, particularly on Report, to change this Bill—not by blocking it but by standing up for those who look to us for sanctuary and by proposing workable, humane solutions. We will be proud to do so. We will ask the Government to think again, as is the constitutional right of the House of Lords with respect to things that come to us from the other place.

We will not be cowed by the other place as it tries to intimidate us about seeking to change the Bill. Of course we will seek to change and amend it and we will say where we think that the Government have it wrong. This House has always done that and we will not be deflected. As I said, we need a different, moral approach that works and does not make things worse. What we are seeing from this Government is even more gimmicks and we will get more of the same until we get the change that we and the country need: a change of government.

11:46

[Lord Etherton (CB)]

My Lords, I acknowledge at the outset the great assistance that I have received in discussions with Dr S Chelvan, a barrister with particular expertise and experience in immigration law.

It is important to appreciate where we are going with UK legislation on refugees. There are four resettlement schemes operated by the United Kingdom: Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Hong Kong. Critically, under the Immigration Rules, there is no asylum visa route for an individual refugee to enter the United Kingdom and claim asylum. This means that, unless a person is within one of the four resettlement schemes or asylum is sought by someone already lawfully present in the United Kingdom, the refugee’s arrival in and entry to the United Kingdom will inevitably be illegal.

That means that they will fall within category 2 refugee status under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. They will therefore be subject to accelerated and punitive procedures and, even if they fulfil the refugee definition, they will not have the benefits of settlement and nationality afforded to group 1 refugees. They would, however, be able to make a human rights claim or a protection claim, albeit under strict constraints, including very short time limits. If they have arrived after 7 March 2023, they will almost inevitably be caught by the four conditions for mandatory removal under Clause 2 of the Bill. It is obvious and must be emphasised that this is not a small boats Bill. The provisions of the Bill would affect all who seek refugee status in this country and are entitled to the protection of the 1951 convention.

In a move away from even the limited rights of category 2 refugees under the 2022 Act, the duty under Clause 2 to make arrangements for their removal is unaffected by the making of a protection claim or a human rights claim or an application for judicial review. Any protection claim or human rights claim is by statute inadmissible and carries no right of appeal.

Removal must be to one of the countries specified in Schedule 1, but the only country there specified with which the United Kingdom has an arrangement for taking such asylum seekers is Rwanda. Such asylum seekers will be detained, as provided in Clause 10, and, under Clause 11, that will be for

“such period as, in the opinion of the Secretary of State, is reasonably necessary to enable the … removal to be carried out”.

There is no statutory time limit on such detention. An asylum seeker who is subject to removal under Clause 2 has the ability to make a suspensive claim—either a serious harm suspensive claim or a factual suspensive claim—but that does not affect the legality and finality of the obligation of the Secretary of State to make arrangements for removal.

Can it get any worse for a refugee seeking asylum in the United Kingdom? It can, because even in relation to safe and legal routes—the four resettlement routes—Clause 58 says:

“The Secretary of State must make regulations specifying the maximum number of persons who may enter the United Kingdom annually using safe and legal routes”.


Even in the case of refugees from war or armed conflict, the Government have failed to provide a safe route in relation to Sudan. We appear to be witnessing the playing out of a policy continuum under which increasing barriers for refugees to the United Kingdom are being imposed with an ultimate goal of preventing all refugees save those who have already applied under the four resettlement schemes.

It is against that background that I wish to illustrate the operation of the current and proposed legislation by reference to LGBT refugees. It is well established that LGBT refugees are within the protection of the refugee convention. Not only is that the view of the UNHCR but it has been decided by our own courts at the highest level. Unless an LGBT person is already legitimately in the United Kingdom and claims refugee status while here or happens to be within one of the four resettlement schemes, they will, as I said, almost inevitably be caught by the four conditions in Clause 2, so the Secretary of State will be under a statutory duty to make arrangements for their removal. They cannot make a protection claim, a human rights claim or an application for judicial review to prevent the operation of that duty. They will be detained for as long as the Secretary of State considers “reasonably necessary” to enable the removal to take place, without any statutory time limit. None of that is affected by the ability to make a serious harm suspensive claim.

They have to be sent to one of the countries in Schedule 1. Here, however, is a difficulty. There are many countries on that list in Schedule 1 that have anti- LGBT laws or where, even if such laws are not actively enforced or there are no express laws, there exists a social environment where there is anti-LGBT persecution with impunity and a climate of fear for LGBT people. This is particularly true of those Commonwealth countries, of which there are many, where our colonial history has had the civilising consequence of bequeathing brutal anti-LGBT laws and prejudices. Such laws or prejudices exist in the following countries specified in Schedule 1: Albania, Brazil—particularly in relation to trans people—Gambia, Ghana, Hungary, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Nigeria, Poland, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and, in some respects, South Africa. The only country with which the United Kingdom has reached agreement is Rwanda.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

I point out to the noble and learned Lord that the speaking time is six minutes.

[Noble Lords]

Advisory.

[Lord Davies of Gower]

Advisory.

[Lord Etherton (CB)]

I am nearly at the end.

The Foreign Office travel advice includes the following:

“Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda but remains frowned on by many. LGBT individuals can experience discrimination and abuse, including from local authorities. There are no specific anti-discrimination laws that protect LGBT individuals”.


While the search is on for some other more appropriate safe country for LGBT refugees fleeing persecution, which may take years or may never be achieved, the refugee is detained without limit of time. What an appalling indictment of our failure to comply with our international legal obligations in breach of the rule of law and of our lack of humanity and empathy.

11:54

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, we need a Bill to reform migration. We need a Bill to stop the boats. We need a Bill to destroy the evil tribe of traffickers. The tragedy is that, without much change, this is not that Bill.

This Bill fails utterly to take a long-term and strategic view of the challenges of migration and undermines international co-operation, rather than taking an opportunity for the UK to show leadership, as we did in 1951. There are too many problems in this Bill for one speech. The right reverend Prelates the Bishop of Durham and the Bishop of Gloucester will speak to other issues, but I hope the Government will listen to the speeches pointing out some of the issues, including the eloquent and detailed speech by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker.

The existing global conventions and agreements need updating in response to the crises we face today. While now inadequate, those conventions offer a baseline from which to build a globally shared understanding of what protection must be given to refugees. They are not inconvenient obstructions to get round by any legislative means necessary. Legal compatibility is a question for the learned lawyers among your Lordships, but it does not require a lawyer to see that what is suggested is a dramatic departure from what was ever envisaged in international law since 1951.

Even if this Bill succeeds in temporarily stopping the boats, and I do not think it will, it will not stop conflict or climate migration. The IPCC forecasts that climate change by itself, let alone the conflicts it is already causing, will lead to at least 800 million more refugees in total by 2050.

What if other countries follow suit? The UNHCR has warned that the Bill could lead to the collapse of the international system that protects refugees. Is that what we want the United Kingdom’s contribution to be in our leadership? Currently, 80% of refugees are still in the global South, protected by the poorest countries in the world. Of course we cannot take everyone, and nor should we, but this Bill has no sense at all of the long-term and global nature of the challenge the world faces. It ignores the reality that migration must be engaged with at source, as well as in the channel, as if we as a country were unrelated to the rest of the world. It is a siloed Bill, not a whole-of-government Bill. It does not draw in conflict management and prevention, which drives migration. It does not draw in climate impacts, which drive migration and conflict. It is isolationist. It is morally unacceptable and politically impractical to let the poorest countries deal with the crisis alone and cut our international aid.

Nor is there any measure in this Bill for engaging with the criminal gangs of traffickers directly and offensively, rather than trusting simply to what appears to be the unpredictability of market forces—as if traffickers were rationally trained economic actors and not appalling criminals. Safe, legal routes must be put in place as soon as illegal, unsafe routes begin to be attacked. We cannot wait for the years that will take place before that happens.

This Bill is an attempt at a short-term fix. It risks great damage to the UK’s interests and reputation at home and abroad, let alone the interests of those in need of protection or the nations that together face this challenge. Our interests as a nation are closely linked to our reputation for justice and the rule of law, and to our measured language, calm decision and careful legislation. None of those is seen here.

Long-term, globally co-ordinated solutions must be part of the way forward. This nation should lead internationally, not stand apart. I intend to table amendments in Committee that encourage this longer-term thinking and collaborative focus, including a plan for combating traffickers and working with international partners to look at updating the 1951 convention.

Nevertheless, I hope that this House will not support the excellent, sympathetic and carefully put amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. I agree with its sentiment but I also believe that, as the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said, it is our duty to change, not to throw out, the Bill.

Finally, as one might expect from these Benches, in the New Testament, in Matthew, chapter 25, Jesus calls us to welcome the stranger. That call has been part of the history and culture in this country for centuries and was part of the drive for the Modern Slavery Act. I urge the Government to reconsider much of the Bill, which fails to live up to our history, our moral responsibility and our political and international interests.

12:00

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

My Lords, it is indeed a privilege to follow the most reverend Primate. I am sure that the whole House will wish to congratulate him on the most distinguished part he played in the Coronation proceedings on Saturday.

Notwithstanding the eloquence of those who have previously spoken in opposition to the Bill, I cannot agree with them. I support the Bill. It is the first duty of a Government to protect the borders of their state, and the Bill represents the best available means of achieving that objective.

I shall make three points. First, I want to deal with the allegation that the provisions in the Bill, particularly those relating to interim rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, in some way breach the rule of law; secondly, I want to comment on the provision of safe routes for asylum seekers; and thirdly, I want to consider the extent to which the Bill’s measures are likely to succeed.

The provisions of Clause 53 have attracted a good deal of controversy. It has been suggested that they constitute a breach of our duty under the European convention and therefore a breach of the rule of law. In order to assess the validity of those arguments, it is necessary to examine the legitimacy of the power of the European Court of Human Rights to make interim rulings—which is what Clause 53 is all about.

The European court derives its authority from the convention. Article 46 of the convention expressly states that only final judgments of the court are binding. Rule 39 of the court’s rules of procedure, which provides the basis for its ability to make interim rulings, states only that it may indicate the measures that it thinks should be taken in any case. It is true that the court, in a case in 2005, seemed to conclude that it could make a binding interim ruling, but that was clearly inconsistent with the convention and with rule 39 itself.

Against that background, let us consider the ruling that the court made last year in relation to the Government’s plan to remove illegal immigrants to Rwanda. It was an ex parte ruling so the UK Government had no opportunity to state their case, it was issued by an anonymous judge in a press release, and it was indefinite in the sense that no provision was made for a hearing to take place at which the UK Government could state their case. It was contrary to all the rules of natural justice. I ask your Lordships to consider the fate, on appeal, of any first-instance judgment in our courts made in that way. It would not survive five minutes.

The response to that lamentable state of affairs set out in Clause 53 is commendably moderate. It gives a Minister of the Crown discretion, and in subsection (5) it sets out some of the matters to be taken into account in exercising that discretion. Those matters represent all the elements of natural justice that were lacking in the interim decision made by the court last year, so I commend Clause 53 to your Lordships.

Next, I would like to say a word about safe routes. There are of course legitimate arguments to be made about safe routes, but they are—I am afraid—irrelevant to the need for measures to deal with the boats. Let me explain why. Unless everyone—and I mean everyone—who applies for leave to enter the UK through a safe route is granted that right, there will be some who are refused. Some of those who are refused will be able to acquire the means to pay the people smugglers, and the people smugglers will continue to put them on boats to cross the channel. Whatever the arguments in favour of safe and legal routes, they are—I repeat—irrelevant to the main provisions of the Bill.

Finally, I want to say something about the likely efficacy of the measures set out in the Bill. There can, in my view, be little doubt that the most effective way of dealing with the problems posed by the illegal immigrants crossing the channel is to reach a return agreement with France. We reached such an agreement in 1995 when I was Home Secretary. Both countries agreed to take back anyone who had entered one country from the other and who was refused admission. Although those refused admission to the UK far outnumbered those who applied for and were refused admission to France, France honoured and complied with the agreement—which, as a matter of fact, has never been rescinded or revoked. I accept that France is not now prepared to implement this or any similar agreement, so the Government have to take whatever action is available to them. It seems to me that this Bill represents the best option available. I believe that it will have a deterrent effect and diminish the ability of the people smugglers to continue to ply their evil trade, and I commend it to the House.

12:06

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to be able to take part in this debate. Given the attendance in the House today, the number of speakers and the number of NGOs that have contacted us with representations about the Bill, there is clearly a great deal of public interest in the Bill—quite a lot of which is in support of the opposition to the Bill.

I listened to the Minister very carefully when he made his opening remarks. I am not sure I have the wording quite right, but he said that this Government take international obligations seriously—then he proceeded to explain why that was not the case. There have been so many instances where a Minister has been forced, as it were, to eat their words. For a long time, we have valued the international consensus on human rights, including refugees, and we have felt that this was a part of the world that we wanted to be in: it was healthy, sensible and humane. When countries have torn up that approach, we have condemned them properly—we know who they are. The Minister says that we take these obligations seriously; we are not going to debate Northern Ireland, but it was inferred about some Northern Ireland matters as well. It is fundamental to the reputation of this country, as I think the most reverend Primate made very clear, that we take a clear stand on human rights. We have set standards and, indeed, for a long time the world has followed us.

I was with the Joint Committee on Human Rights in Strasbourg some time ago visiting the European Court of Human Rights. At that time, there was some talk about this country not adhering to the decision of the court on voting rights for prisoners in jail. It was said to us in Strasbourg that Britain has a reputation for adhering to decisions made by the European Court of Human Court and has stuck by the European convention. If we did not, the notorious abusers of human rights would simply say, “If the United Kingdom doesn’t do it, why should we?”. That is already beginning to be the case—we are beginning to hear that.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees made a statement, which noble Lords have probably all seen. I quote a small part of it:

“The effect of the bill (in this form) would be to deny protection to many asylum-seekers in need of safety and protection, and even deny them the opportunity to put forward their case. This would be a clear breach of the Refugee Convention and would undermine a longstanding, humanitarian tradition of which the British people are rightly proud”.


If the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that something is in breach of the refugee convention, surely they are the guardian of the convention, and it is not up to Governments to say, “We don’t like this bit of it, and we don’t intend to go along with it”.

There are so many ways in which our refugee system is a mess at the moment. We have had it referred to in earlier speeches—by my noble friend Lord Coaker, for example. But the Bill tackles virtually none of those. We have an enormous backlog of unresolved cases. Anybody sitting in Calais will say, “Look, the Brits can’t even resolve those cases—there are 130,000 to 150,000 of them. The Home Office isn’t capable of making any decisions, so let’s have a go, because they won’t make a decision about us either”.

The Government talk about return agreements. I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister went to France and discussed this with the French authorities, something that we have long been asking for, but the fact is that there is no return agreement in place with any country—and with Rwanda, it will not be a return agreement. If the Minister could indicate where such an agreement exists, maybe some of the things that he said will fall slightly into place.

I was very concerned about what the Minister said about judicial review, and I am sure that there will be amendments to that effect. If I understood him correctly, he was saying that judicial review would be much more limited than in the past—and we have always seen judicial review as a fundamental safeguard. Reference has been made to the rights of children. The Minister says that we will hold them here until the age of 18 and then we can remove them. Previous Governments have said that children will be treated in a more humane way—but no, that appears no longer to be the case.

As for safe routes, I know that the noble Lord who preceded me said that he did not think that safe and legal routes would work. However, I am sure that it is right, when there are safe and legal routes, that people sitting in Calais or elsewhere will try to use them, as they have in the past.

I think that a noble Lord has already referred to this matter, but the humanists have drawn attention to the list of 57 countries that are said to be safe. A Humanists International report found that 10 of those have on-book prison sentences for blasphemy and apostasy —and many are enforcing those laws. Significantly, Nigeria is one of those countries, maintaining the death penalty for blasphemy. Indeed, the president of the Nigerian Humanist Association is serving 24 years in jail for blasphemy, so it is not safe to send people to that country.

I fear that small boat crossings will not be dealt with by the Bill. There is an argument that we must get public opinion on our side—public opinion matters—but some of the language used by some Government Ministers is intended to inflate public opinion and make it hostile to refugees, rather than enabling us to resume our tradition of welcoming people who are fleeing for safety to our shores.

12:13

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, what an absolute pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who is a living example of what happens when a country opens its hearts to refugees and how those people can then settle here and contribute to the future prosperity of the nation that they make their home.

This Bill has already failed in its primary purpose, set by senior government leaders. It failed on Thursday, when the results from the red and blue wall seats came in and demonstrated that the Bill had not delivered Conservatives the votes that they sought. This is not a Bill to deal effectively, sensitively and humanely with those seeking refuge via unofficial routes. There is no such thing as an illegal route—there are unofficial routes into the UK, sometimes in very dangerous situations that could cause loss of life.

The Bill is highly political and has nothing to offer in getting rid of the backlog of asylum claims. It has nothing to offer to effectively deter the real criminals, those who traffic and profiteer from the desperation and misery of those seeking asylum in the UK, and it is not effective in building a coalition of international partners to work across the globe to deal with this.

For the Home Secretary, the Bill is about trying to win votes in some parliamentary seats by using language that dehumanises people and using traumatised and vulnerable people as political pawns. The Government say the Bill is about stopping the boats, which it will not do. Because of that, this House has a duty to stop the bull.

The Government have no clue how this will all work out. If they had, they would have published an impact assessment. They know that doing so would expose the false nature of their proposals and claims about what the Bill will achieve. One third country, Rwanda, has signed up to this deal to offshore the UK’s obligations to process and settle those seeking asylum in the UK. Rwanda will be able to take a maximum of only a few hundred people in the next few years.

The Government can make a wish list of third countries and put it in the Bill, but it would mean nothing. No other country has signed up and the Government know that they are light years away—if not further—from getting enough third countries to take the number of people that will seek asylum in the UK via unofficial routes. That will therefore lead to many hundreds of thousands of individuals stuck in limbo in new Home Office refugee prisons, as no other options are available under the Bill.

Where will vulnerable and traumatised individuals be imprisoned by the Home Office? These Home Office refugee prisons have to be identified, commissioned and, in some cases, built, whether they float or are on terra firma. According to the Refugee Council, these places will cost the taxpayer an extra £6 billion in the next few years. It is impractical, expensive and inhumane. That is not how a proud and decent country deals with those fleeing war, torture and rape.

How the Government of a nation deal with the most vulnerable says a lot about their values. The Government have chosen to treat unaccompanied children seeking refuge—some of whom will have seen their parents killed, or acts of war, or who will have been sexually exploited and trafficked to the UK—as criminals not worthy of having the dignity, hope and opportunity to rebuild their lives and settle here in the UK.

Under the Bill, children can be detained at the Home Secretary’s wish and for as long as she sees fit: a child version of refugee prisons. It is entirely unclear how the powers set out in the Bill will sit alongside local authorities’ duty under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 to safeguard any child in their area and take them into care under Section 20 if the criteria for so doing are met. The Bill has the potential to make it harder for local authorities to fulfil their duties under the Children Act to ensure stability for children as their corporate parent and to protect and support child victims of trafficking and exploitation.

If a child is lucky enough to be in the care of a local authority until the age of 18 and has the protections of looked-after status in law, just what awaits them on their 18th birthday? Imagine a traumatised and vulnerable child who arrives in the UK aged eight spending 10 years building a life, a network of support and friends and getting educated here, knowing nothing but a life in the UK, and then the Government snatching that all away from them and throwing them out of the country to God knows where at the age of 18. Do the Government not understand how impractical and inhumane this is? It is inhumane, as thousands of young people getting near the age of 18 will just disappear, many into the hands of criminals and traffickers, and it is impractical, as we are back to the imaginary third countries which will not be waiting with places to take these individuals, so they will be left in limbo in an adult Home Office refugee prison.

As well as impractical and inhumane, the Bill is ineffective. It is built on the ridiculous premise that the only way to stop the traffickers profiteering is to criminalise their vulnerable victims and treat them in a subhuman way. The Bill undermines our commitment to international law and our obligations under the UN conventions on refugees and the child, and it degrades what it means to be British. It trashes our proud and long-held values and our record, dating back to 1951, on how we deal with those seeking asylum. It undermines our country’s international standing for upholding and abiding by international law.

For these and many other reasons, the Bill has no place on the statute book. It must be placed in the dustbin of history as soon as possible. That is why I will support my noble friend Lord Paddick’s fatal amendment to ensure that the Bill does not pass Second Reading.

12:19

[Baroness Prashar (CB)]

My Lords, it is a clever ploy to entitle this Bill the Illegal Migration Bill. Not for the first time, illegal migration has been conflated with asylum. This is essentially an asylum Bill, and asylum is a fundamental right. Migration, of course, is a choice. Although the Government claim that this Bill is designed to deal with boat people, it will apply to everyone who arrives here by whatever means as of 7 March 2023. It is doubtful whether the Bill will achieve its objectives. It will probably make matters worse and damage our reputation internationally.

No one denies that action is needed, but what we want is an effective, fair and compassionate asylum system which respects our international obligations and the rule of law. Asylum is a collective responsibility of all states—a global challenge which requires international co-operation, working within regional and international frameworks to achieve effective and sustainable results. This cannot be done in isolation.

We need a system that ensures that all claims are considered efficiently and speedily, no matter what the mode of travel. This requires streamlined processes and tailored asylum procedures. We need an expansion of safe and legal routes to ensure that those suffering persecution can reach the UK safely without being exploited by smugglers. We need to support those seeking asylum so that they engage effectively with processes, integrate and contribute by being able to work here.

The Bill falls very short of these objectives. In fact, several amendments introduced on Report in the other place will raise the bar even further. They will have the overall effect of making it even harder for people subject to the duty to remove them from the UK to resist removal. It will raise the threshold for a person to show that they would suffer serious harm.

The Government themselves have identified the new clauses on age assessments as ones that they are unable to state are compatible with the European convention. Another clause identified as one that could not be declared compatible with the convention is the one that gives immigration officers new powers to search for, seize and retain electronic devices, such as mobile phones, from individuals who are liable to be detained under the Bill, and to access, copy and use any information on them.

The Government’s own quangos remain seriously concerned that the Bill risks placing the UK in breach of its international legal obligations to protect human rights by exposing people to serious harm—particularly the measures for the detention of children and pregnant women—and removing protections for victims of trafficking and modern slavery. The Bill itself starts with a statement that the Minister is unable to say that its provisions are compatible with the convention.

In effect, the Bill will block almost everyone who arrives here by means which the Home Office deems irregular from making admissible asylum claims. By making the claims of people who have entered and arrived in the UK by irregular means permanently inadmissible, it will also make nearly all these people unremovable in reality, despite placing a duty on the Home Secretary to remove them if they meet certain conditions. This will create a large and permanent population of people who will live in limbo, at public expense, for the rest of their lives, without any hope of securing lawful status. For those who may be removed to a third country there will be a new complex fast-track system, with limited judicial scrutiny to make a claim that suspends removal.

It is predicted that the Bill will result in a large number of people being detained. It removes almost all protections for victims of modern slavery who are targeted for removal, leaving them at the mercy of traffickers. In fact, it strengthens the hand of traffickers. It is equally damaging for children.

What is missing from the Bill are any specific proposals for safe and legal routes to enter the UK. The Bill contains no confirmed details of any additional safe routes. Even with the amendment on Report in the other place, there is no obligation in the Bill to create new routes. There is nothing about speeding up processing of claims. Decision-making is slow and the backlog is increasing.

As we know, the Bill has been condemned by a whole range of people. The European Commissioner for Home Affairs and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights have raised serious concerns that, if the UK were to withdraw from the ECHR, the EU could terminate the law enforcement and judicial co-operation in criminal matters part of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, as that agreement allows the EU to suspend or terminate the agreement as a whole if there is a serious and substantial failure by the UK to respect human rights and human rights treaties to which both are parties.

What makes things worse is the rhetoric that has accompanied the Bill, which damages what Britain stands for. Hostile language that demonises and dehumanises those seeking asylum and refugees creates resentment and reprisals. Equally damaging are the attacks on lawyers and of course this House. These attacks highlight the Government’s inability to respond to substantive concerns raised by the Bill, and clumsy comments that the values of those seeking to come here are at odds with the values of this country are not helpful. It is not the values of those seeking asylum here which are at odds with our values but this Bill which is at odds with the values of our country.

12:26

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, I will concentrate my remarks on the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, which is a complete abuse of this House. This House is here to revise and offer advice to the elected House of Commons. For any Member of this House to bring forward an amendment that seeks to kill a Bill completely, which has been passed by majorities of around 60 in the other place and which is an absolute priority for the Prime Minister to stop the boats, is an absolute abuse. I do not think that any Member of this House who respects its values and its role could possibly go through the Lobbies and vote for that amendment.

Of course, the point of the Bill is to stop the boats. I have listened carefully to the speeches that have been made and I have yet to hear a remedy from anyone who opposes this Bill as to how we are going to stop the boats. I hear a lot about the rights of children and the right of people fleeing persecution, much of which I support. However, I cannot support the idea of people drowning in the English Channel who are fleeing from a safe country, which is France. To be drowned in the English Channel and watch your children being taken by the sea must be a most horrendous experience, yet all the people who oppose the Bill have nothing to offer by way of a remedy for that problem, which is happening now and which will happen during the course of the following weeks as the summer—

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

If the noble Lord were to look at Hansard for 11 December, he would find a whole-day debate on immigration which puts forward some very clear ideas about stopping the boats.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

I am most grateful to the most reverend Primate and I echo the words of my noble friend about what a fantastic job he did on Saturday. I am in strong agreement where he is concerned with issues spiritual rather than temporal. I use the word temporal in this sense because there are of course many things that we can do, but these are all going to take time. People are drowning in the English Channel now. People are leaving a safe country in order to come here, and it is fatuous to try to present this in the way that many have done. The much-misquoted saying, often attributed to Edmund Burke but in fact from John Stuart Mill, is:

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.


That is what we are hearing today, effectively that we should do nothing about the immediate problem.

To return to the amendment, the role of this House is to give advice and make amendments. I accept there are issues with the Bill that need further scrutiny, particularly the issues of those who are already here in the United Kingdom and who are victims of slavery and placed in a position where they are unlikely to help the police, or those who are concerned, to deal with the real villains. These are the traffickers and the men and women who exploit people who are under enormous stress and strain. It is just not reasonable to criticise the Government for trying to deal with this problem. How on earth can it be justified that 40,000 Albanians are able to come to this country by crossing from France—a safe country—and to argue that this should not be tackled?

Those who criticise this country’s values need to ask themselves why so many people want to come here rather than remain in France, on the other side of the channel. It has been suggested that perhaps hubris has set in, as a result of the success of the liberals—I call them liberals because they are not liberal democrats. Democrats do not seek to use an unelected House to overturn the decisions made by an elected House. We know perfectly well that the United Kingdom has finite capacity. Our public services are under immense strain and yet there is a notion that we should be spending billions of pounds and not actually addressing the problem of stopping the boats. I say to those who oppose the Bill, by all means improve it, but I am delighted that the Official Opposition have indicated that they will not support the amendment, and the most reverend Primate said the same. We need to recognise that something needs to be done, and done now. This is something, which is an alternative to doing nothing, which is the mission of the people opposite.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask in a more timely manner what I was going to ask earlier? The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury asked whether the noble Lord was aware of the practical proposals made in a previous debate. The noble Lord did not answer that question, and I think the House would like to know.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord, for whom I have immense respect. Of course I am aware of the measures, but I thought I pointed out that those would take time. It is possible to argue for changes in our approach and that it is necessary to use overseas aid to support people in their own countries. I get all that, but there is an immediate problem now, and this Bill deals with it. It is a duty upon this House to get this Bill on the statute book so that we can deal with the terrible things happening in the English Channel.

12:33

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I refer to the register and support from RAMP. Here we go again: the wretched of the earth, fleeing violence or persecution, are to be thrown from the frying pan of the Nationality and Borders Act, enacted less than a year ago, into the fire of this punitive and inhumane Bill, which effectively raises a “No asylum seekers here” sign at our border. Moreover, it will have retrospective application, which is just one example of how the Bill undermines the rule of law.

The Bill has serious implications for groups in especially vulnerable circumstances. Despite the limited concessions in the Commons, the Children’s Commissioner, who feels passionately about this, warns that the Bill

“would place the UK in clear breach of its international law obligations under a range of children’s rights treaties”.

Clear legal restrictions on children’s detention, introduced by the Conservatives, are withdrawn; rights concerning age assessment are circumscribed, contravening the recommendations of the government-appointed advisory committee; and future citizenship rights are lost. Yet there is still no sign of a child rights impact assessment. Can the Minister therefore explain how the Home Secretary will meet her duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children under Section 55 of the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009, the importance of which to this Bill is underlined by UNICEF, among others? Furthermore, the restriction on the detention of pregnant women, which the Government conceded in 2016 in response to successful amendments in this House, will be removed, with serious health implications for mother and baby.

At the heart of the Bill is what the UNHCR describes as an “asylum ban”. Such a ban, it makes clear, contravenes the refugee convention and international human rights law. In the Commons, the former Prime Minister, Theresa May, warned of the damage that this could do to our international reputation. The UNHCR also warns that the Bill does not guarantee more safe and legal routes; on the contrary, it places an inflexible annual cap—which includes children—on the numbers admitted this way. Moreover, it makes clear that, welcome as they are, such routes can never substitute for the right to claim asylum.

In the Commons, the Home Secretary described as “fatuous” claims that the Bill breaches refugee convention obligations. Can the Minister explain why we should accept the Government’s interpretation of the convention over that of the body with supervisory responsibility for it—described the other day in this House as “a key partner”? In the absence of adequate third-country agreements, can he also explain what will happen to all those deemed inadmissible who cannot be returned to their country of origin under the convention because their claim will not have been assessed? The fear of the Refugee Council, the UNHCR and others is that those people will be left in semi-permanent limbo, at risk of destitution. The likely harm to mental health is spelled out by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

The Bill’s title is phrased so as to signal the false claim that desperate people who cross the channel in boats, or enter via other unauthorised means, are economic migrants. Yet analysis of official data indicates that six in every 10 who crossed the channel last year would be recognised as refugees. In contrast, the Home Office has been unable to provide evidence to back its representation of them as economic migrants. Instead, as already noted, Ministers have deployed vile, dehumanising language such as “invasion”, “breaking in” and “cannibalise” to create fear and hostility among “the British people”, undermining the very social cohesion they claim to be promoting—all in the name of compassion.

The significance of such language is brought home by Erfan, an asylum seeker, in the preface to a recent JRS UK report on Napier barracks. He writes how he came to realise that

“these are not just words. They build a completely new identity, which then justify how you will be treated, seen and talked about. The language that dehumanises people makes it seem acceptable to place them in inhumane conditions and cut off from society”.

Such words, he warns, “stigmatise and justify discrimination”.

There can be no justification for such language. Nor can this shameful Bill be justified, as the wide range of civil society organisations briefing us so well have made clear. It was rushed through the Commons and still awaits the required impact assessments. We have a heavy responsibility in this House to scrutinise and amend it from start to finish. I hope that we will fulfil that responsibility and protect the fundamental right to claim asylum.

12:38

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I decided to speak today after reading the words of the Immigration Minister, Robert Jenrick, speaking for the Government to Policy Exchange, demonising migrants and failing to recognise our responsibilities to refugees seeking asylum. He said that

“excessive, uncontrolled migration threatens to cannibalise the compassion of the British public”.

“Cannibalise”—what a deliberate and demonising choice of word. He went on:

“And those crossing tend to have completely different lifestyles … to those in the UK … undermining the cultural cohesiveness”.


It was deliberately divisive language and certainly not borne out by the UK experience.

Throughout that speech, there is a constant failure to look at economic migration separately from asylum seeking. I am the daughter of a refugee. My mother was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in a small village in eastern Hungary. When the Hungarian Government brought in anti-Jewish laws in 1938, she and her family tried to obtain visas to go to another country but, like so many others, found that no visas were to be had. She decided to be a survivor: she became a nightclub dancer in order to join a troupe going on tour in the Middle East. Once outside Hungary, she settled in Greece, which she hoped to make her home, but by 1943 the beginnings of civil war in Greece were tearing Athens apart. Her bed was strafed with bullets; friends standing beside her were shot down in the street. Women’s bodies lay butchered—women were particular targets.

She had met my father, a major with the British Army in Greece, but he was denied army permission to marry her and his attempts to get her papers to go to Britain were rejected. He returned with his regiment to the UK and was demobbed—so you can imagine his astonishment when, on Christmas Eve 1945, he got a call from an airbase in southern England to say that my mother had arrived on a British miliary plane from continental Europe. She had been smuggled on board by the RAF. She was a genuine refugee but no one could argue that she had chosen an official route—or, as this Government would call it, a legal route. This Government would send her to Rwanda as an undesirable.

I see that the Minister is no longer in his place, so I ask the Whips and others to put this point to him, because I want an answer. I want the Minister today to show me the body of evidence and research that shows how British compassion has been “cannibalised” by asylum seekers and by people like my mother and me. I want to see his evidence of damage to cohesion that genuine asylum seekers, never mind migrants, have inflicted on the UK. I suspect that we will find it has no substance. He needs to show why diversity is a weakness not a strength. Ironically, if the Government continue to argue that migration creates such problems, it should never by its own logic return a single refugee to any country that already has a significant migrant population—and that eliminates most of Europe and indeed Africa, including Rwanda.

Limiting economic migration has never required treating asylum seekers as undesirables. I argue for the Britain that we saw this weekend at the Coronation, not threatened by diversity but energised by it, and comfortable with its complex identity. I recognise that not all the children of migrants or refugees share my view. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, the daughter of migrants, asserted in the Commons on immigration that

“we have had too much of it in recent years”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/3/23; col. 575.]

But many do share my view and say, “Do to others what I would ask you to do for my family”. I repeat to the Minister, who has now returned to his place, that he should put in front of us today the evidence of the damage that he claims underpins and justifies this Bill, without which it should not stand—please feel free to use my mother and me as examples.

12:43

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, few situations are so bad that they cannot get worse, and certainly the current world migration crisis will inevitably get worse. Whether the UNHCR figure for those currently needing resettlement is 100 million or just tens of millions, future floods, fires, famines and human conflicts will inevitably drive it up. Obviously, it is insoluble by any single country, so—and this is the easy point to make—there must be international agreement as to what share of the burden we must all take. Of course, we must make the effort, but let us not pretend that it will succeed. It will not.

Each country, like the UK, must find its own solution, including sensibly—surely few would dispute—deciding on a cap for admissions and the best way for administering it. Plainly, this is by arranging safe and legal routes for the number decided on and, as under the several schemes currently operating—Ukraine, Hong Kong, Syria, Afghanistan, family members and so forth, some directly involving the UNHCR, others not—giving proper consideration in advance of arrival to who should come.

Now that we have absorbed so many Ukrainians and Hong Kongers, surely the time is ripe for a wider new scheme, ideally in co-operation with the UNHCR, to admit more. Indeed, this now seems essential. Unless a generous, fresh resettlement scheme is decided on, there is little hope of persuading people to sign up to these obviously severe measures. Happily, most of this country is still hugely sympathetic to refugees.

How infinitely preferable would this be to the present chaotic situation of having to process those arriving after perilous boat and lorry crossings? As to these, one is entitled to ask: why should they steal a march and gain an advantage over those we will have agreed to take under the capped schemes? Surely it cannot be suggested that we should reduce the number we agree to take lawfully under these schemes to accommodate those coming by boat. Although I do not accept that those arriving from a safe third country, such as France or Belgium, are on that ground alone disqualified from refugee status—indeed, having myself in decades past judicially decided the contrary—there is no reason to ignore the fact that their lives were not in immediate danger when they took to the boats. They had the money to pay the smugglers and, in a number of cases, had already been refused asylum in France or plainly had no legitimate claim to asylum, as with most of the Albanians.

At the core of this Bill, therefore, necessarily lie the twin aims of introducing and enforcing a cap for the numbers we take in future and deterring all others from arriving illegally by ensuring that, with only the narrowest exceptions, they gain absolutely nothing from doing so. The need and basic justification for that is all that I have time for. Plainly, the Bill raises many different and difficult questions—on children, accompanied and unaccompanied; about whether, where and for how long to detain those coming illegally; about Rwanda; about modern slavery; about Article 39 interim orders; about the existing backlog, et cetera—but there is no time to discuss those today. No doubt the Bill can be improved in various ways, but we must recognise that almost every amendment we make to soften it can tend only to weaken its essential objectives: stopping the boats and—the real desire of many, sometimes perhaps masked by an avowed concern about deaths in the channel—limiting the overall numbers admitted.

We really must now harden our hearts and give the Government the opportunity by this Bill finally to confront this most intractable of problems. I hope not to lose too many of my friends by saying so.

12:48

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown. We are told that this Bill is unethical, which puzzles me, because, like my noble friend and roommate Lord Forsyth, I cannot quite get my mind round the ethical nature of this bizarre proposition that unelected parliamentarians should, without any real discussion, destroy a Bill that has been passed by our elected House of Commons and for which there is very considerable public support—but heigh-ho.

I find the Bill distasteful in many ways. I wish we did not have to do it. But the issues it tries to resolve are supremely distasteful—actually, they are barbaric. We need action. We are told the Bill is full of weeds. Well, if there are weeds in the garden—knowing modern legislation, there are probably a good few—you pull them out: you replace them. You do not call in a cement truck to cover the entire thing in concrete and bury it, as this fatal amendment demands.

At its heart, the Bill aims to find a better means of fighting the modern slavers and people smugglers—saving innocent lives. That seems a most moral objective. It aims to stop the evil trade in human beings by the smugglers and slavers. It is only by beating them—crushing them, if we can—that we will put an end to the miseries and deaths we have seen all too often on the seas. If we do not act, and lose control of our borders, we will play straight into the hands of the racists and bigots who will stir up hatred on our streets and in our communities. There are terrible consequences to be paid if we fail in this.

How do we stop those who arrive here claiming to be children, with stubble on their chins, who have deliberately destroyed all their documentation and paid thousands of pounds to people traffickers, enabling them to continue their awful trade? These people—these pretenders, if you will—are the enemies of genuine refugees, because they help to create and sustain an evil system that is run by criminals of the cruellest kind, who think nothing of throwing children overboard to drown in order to save their own miserable lives. They trade in lies and in lives. It is our moral obligation to stop them—to bring an end to the unimaginable pain of mothers and fathers watching their children drowning off our shores in the channel. No amount of hand-wringing or bell-ringing will do that.

I know that at Second Reading in the other place, the Labour Party said that it wants to boost international policing to try to catch the smugglers. Let us hope they can catch the drug traffickers too while they are at it. They know that that is not a solution. This quixotic and deeply unconstitutional proposal to kill the Bill is a moral cop-out. There are no simple solutions. It is about not just small boats but jumbo jets, too, and a modern world in huge flux.

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

Can the noble Lord—and his noble friend Lord Forsyth—explain what the Members of this House thinking when they designed a system that allows for a fatal amendment when legislation is bad enough? If, in 1946, the Salisbury convention was considered absolutely adequate, that is what we would have, with no provision for a fatal amendment.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

I will try to answer the noble Baroness’s question like this: I wish the Liberal Democrats would listen to the arguments that will come in Committee and contribute to them, rather than trying to kill off all discussion. That is unprincipled and unconstitutional.

This is a world in which there is no one moral solution any more than there is one legislative solution. Of course, we will have to do much more, but this Bill is part of that effort. I ask the doubters: what are your plans? Apparently, you do not want to discuss them, but how will you stop the slavers and smugglers? What will you say to the people of this country, who have human rights too? If not this Bill, then what Bill? What would the doubters do? That is what we need to hear—in legislative detail, not just in passing debate. We wait to hear whether the moral outrage is matched by solid proposals for action, but I suspect we might be waiting for that from the opposition for a very long time.

12:55

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I start where the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, finished. Some asylum seekers clearly are non-religious. It is worth repeating that, of the so-called safe countries in the Bill, at least 10 have on-book prison sentences for blasphemy and apostasy. As my noble friend said, the president of the Nigerian Humanist Association, Mubarak Bala, is serving 24 years for blasphemy—you would have to be a pretty nasty piece of work to support that as a policy.

I want to go back to new Labour—I know that is not popular with recent Labour leaders. Between June 2001 and June 2002, I was privileged to work under my noble friend Lord Blunkett as Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality at the Home Office. I was responsible for sending people and families who had arrived illegally in the UK out of the UK. I was criticised by many, including my good friend Chris Mullin in one of his many successful diaries. Chris did say, however, that I was operating the law, and the destination of such families was to safe European countries from which they had travelled to the UK. I recall that they included France and Spain.

I know that it has become unfashionable to praise new Labour, but it remains the case that we were able to use the Dublin convention—not massively, but from time to time—to return people who had no case to be in the UK to whence they came. This Tory Government ripped up the Dublin convention when they organised and controlled the Brexit decisions, including getting rid of freedom of movement. It was a deliberate policy, and everybody knew that Dublin would go without any alternative being in place. As of today, there is still nothing in place. Why? We hear constant talk of popping across the channel and meetings between Ministers, but there is no agreement. The present situation is entirely of this Tory Government’s own making. They own Brexit. They own the actions of the coalition Government—I notice, by the way, that the world started in 2015 according to the Minister today; for most of us it started in 2010, because that is when the Tories came into power. This Government have left the UK unsupported and friendless among our geographic neighbours.

I recall the arguments and briefings in the Home Office about why the UK was a target for illegal migration. Other than the English language there were, and remain, two reasons. The first is that the UK is the easiest European country in which it is possible to work illegally and the second—which helps the first—is that there is no identity system. In 2001-02, we started work on the ID system in the Home Office, and it was pursued by others after my noble friend and I had left the Home Office. It was within sight of implementation when the Tory-led coalition, as one of its first actions under the deal with the Lib Dems in 2010, scrapped it. The Government today own that decision. Of course, that pleased the CBI and other employer bodies, as well as the Tories, because illegal working keeps wages down across the economy. That remains the case today.

New Labour stuck to legal frameworks, which meant that we could talk to our EU partners and not become friendless. While there is not time to go into it, I recall a couple of occasions when the Civil Service had to warn us that we were on the verge of breaking the law —“possible malfeasance” was the phrase used. So we changed policy, unlike the present Tory Government, who simply change the Ministerial Code.

Of course, the routes then were via the Channel Tunnel in lorries. We worked with the French, including visits to Sandgate, to seek to close these routes safely. But we had a large backlog of cases—it was huge. The Home Office employed an expert in operational research from the Ministry of Defence—in fact, I think professionally he was a rocket scientist—who sorted out the flow of work in the Home Office, which vastly reduced the case load. We were actively doing something, and we used external civil servants who were experts in making sure that that was the case. This Government own the present situation in its entirety; the case load has grown due to incompetence. Deliberately shunning friends and breaking international law is not the solution—it is time for another new Labour Government to sort it out.

13:00

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill is one of anachronisms; it is not suitable for our time and does not reflect the values of our country. It has consequences that go far beyond the supposed effect of the paper that the Bill is written upon.

The Bill starts with a statement under Section 19 of the Human Rights Act that the Minister is unable to say that its provisions are compatible with the rights contained in the ECHR—an express acknowledgement that the Bill puts human rights at risk. However, the Secretary of State for Home Affairs stated in the Commons that she was “confident” and “certain” that the Bill’s measures are compatible with our international obligations. So, at the outset, can the Minister tell the House when he replies whether the words on the front of this Bill are as a result of legal advice to Ministers and that the certainty expressed by the Secretary of State is her view and not that of the Government’s legal advisers? I look forward to a report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which would be very timely, if we could see it speedily.

Secondly, we are offered no impact assessment to accompany the Bill. As my noble friend Lady Kramer asked: where is the evidence? Why was the Bill put together in such haste that one could not be prepared? Is it because, as there are no options in this Bill, it does not merit an impact assessment? Given that the Bill’s consequences will require large amounts of money, we are at least entitled to know its impact on public finances and resources.

Thirdly, this Bill sets up a substantial shift of power from the courts to the Secretary of State, and from this Parliament to the Secretary of State. The Bill sets up the Government as both judge and jury in a court of their own making. Clause 1(5) of the Bill disapplies Section 3 of the Human Rights Act, meaning that courts will no longer be required to read provisions—or any regulations that the Home Secretary makes under the extensive delegated powers she gives to herself—to verify their compatibly with convention rights. Using as of now unknown legislation, the Bill proposes giving the Secretary of State very broad powers, which Parliament will have no ability to alter or to demand a government rethink.

I illustrate my fourth concern through the story of Linh, who was trafficked into the United Kingdom at the age of 15. She was discovered by police in the back of a lorry. Social services placed her with a foster family, where it was discovered that Linh was five months pregnant, having been raped by her traffickers. Fortunately, Linh was able to move in with the foster family and give birth to her son. Under this Bill, Linh would not be able to use her status as a victim of human trafficking to challenge her removal. Even if Linh had passed through a safe country, she could not have claimed asylum there because she was held prisoner by her trafficker. Under this Bill, Linh would not be able to make a new life in the United Kingdom for her and her son. Moreover, the hand of Linh’s captor would have been strengthened by this Bill. They would have threatened that, if she tried to escape and contact the authorities, she would be removed from the United Kingdom rather than be provided with safety. The Illegal Migration Bill would serve the interests of Linh’s captors rather than secure her rights.

So, we are presented with a Bill which flouts human rights legislation and deprives those seeking asylum of their right to have their case heard. It is a Bill which amasses power to the Government from the courts and Parliament, and breaches our international obligations.

Of course we face an issue that requires a solution, but that means working with our international partners, including our partners in Europe. There seems to be a fundamental issue here: if the United Kingdom does not like the treaties and international obligations to which it is signed up, it should seek those international solutions that sit at the heart of our international obligations and not try to find a route that will have no success.

This is a dreadful Bill built purely on political dogma. It is unworkable. I have yet to meet anyone who believes that it will achieve any of the aims it sets out. It will leave tens of thousands of people in limbo in this country. It will bring misery to those who genuinely have a case to ask us for a place of refuge. There are no safe routes for many of these people; after the Bill is passed there will be no routes other than the very limited ones before it. It is certainly the case that it does not have to be like this. There are perfectly decent, just and fair alternatives.

13:07

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, there will be plenty of time later to tackle the many complications in this Bill. For my part, I will make a short speech but I will take a longer and wider view.

It is now about 20 years since I co-founded Migration Watch UK, with the assistance of Professor David Coleman of Oxford University. In that time, the UK’s population has grown by an astonishing 8 million. That is about eight times the population of Birmingham and close to the population of London. Of this huge number, nearly 7 million has been due to immigration— seven out of eight. That includes the inflow of asylum seekers, which has gone up and down over that period. Nobody likes to say this, but it is surely obvious that, if this inflow is allowed to continue, the whole nature of our society will be changed—not in our time but certainly in our grandchildren’s.

The Government have claimed that their new “Australian- style” immigration system will get the numbers down. Regrettably, that is the exact opposite of the truth. The Government have actively encouraged large-scale economic migration. I briefly mention three measures: they have substantially reduced the educational requirement; they have significantly lowered the salary requirement; and they no longer require jobs first to be advertised on the domestic market. As a result, nearly half of all full-time jobs are now open to immigrant labour—yes, nearly half. It is extraordinary.

The current scale of immigration, of which asylum is only a small part, simply cannot be allowed to continue. The pressure on our schools and public services is heavy and increasing. We already have to build—wait for it—nearly 300 homes every single day just to house immigrant families. Regrettably, that is very seldom mentioned in this House.

That is the wider background to this Bill. Public anger at the chaos in the channel has obliged the Government to focus on that appalling problem but, even at 50,000 a year, as last year, asylum is only a small part of immigration as a whole. When the numbers for calendar year 2022 are published in two weeks’ time, we may well find that net migration is running at 10 times the rate of asylum—that is, about half a million. It could be even higher. If this mass immigration is allowed to continue, it will very rapidly change the way of life that we have developed over centuries. It will also weaken our sense of community as a society. The public sense this, of course, which is why nearly 60% of them want to see immigration reduced.

The Bill may have some impact on one aspect of mass immigration. However, I repeat that asylum, however chaotic, is at present only a small part of a wider issue. A real reduction in net migration, whatever its source, is now essential to preserve the nature of the country that many of us love.

13:10

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

I declare my interests as a member of the RAMP project and a trustee of Reset.

When looking to engage with a Bill, Members decide whether to focus on the detail or address the underlying principles behind the proposed legislation. This Bill leaves me with no choice but to start with the latter, as it asks fundamental questions about who we are as a nation. In order to supposedly reduce channel crossings, are we really prepared to consent to “extinguishing”, as the UNHCR puts it, the right to claim asylum and withholding support for victims of trafficking, and indefinitely detaining thousands of asylum seekers, including children and pregnant women? We have been left to consider the Bill’s provisions without an impact assessment, but these consequences will potentially lead to an unjustified intolerable level of harm which does not reflect who we are as a nation.

The Bill appears to be fundamentally about preventing those who have travelled irregularly to the UK from claiming refugee protection. This is in clear breach of the refugee convention and indiscriminately applies to everyone, regardless of the violence or persecution they may have fled. Let us be clear: this means even refusing to offer a child or a victim of trafficking the dignity of having their asylum case heard.

More than three-quarters of asylum cases assessed last year were found to be valid, but under the new regime they would be automatically deemed inadmissible. This Bill conversely gives up on the idea of returning home people who do not qualify for asylum by grouping them with those who would qualify and attempting to remove them to a third country. In reality, both groups will be left in a permanent state of legal precarity to face a future of inescapable destitution.

The Home Secretary’s duty to detain and remove asylum seekers changes the nature of detention considerably. It moves it away from an administrative process to facilitate someone’s removal to a wider system of confinement. Therefore, disturbingly, it does not discriminate. The state will view a child or a pregnant woman first and foremost as individuals subject to immigration control, not as an innocent child or a vulnerable mother due to give birth. We need to ask, “What about the Government’s duty to protect?”

Just less than a decade ago, the Conservatives introduced time limits for the use of child detention and, at the very least, I hope to see these limits back in the Bill for all children. A child faced with detention looks at their surroundings and asks, “What did I do wrong to be here?” This develops into the question “What is wrong with me?” We cannot let children face this trauma. As the Children’s Commissioner for England has said:

“It is not acceptable for them to be treated in the same way as adults”.


Safeguarding is not discretionary.

Although the Bill enacts a new system of detention, it does not set any standards, inspection details or protective obligations on the Home Office in terms of accommodation. As I have said before, children need the highest levels of safeguarding written into the letter of the law, and I hope that more detail will be forthcoming from the Government on this. I am reminded of Jesus’s words, that

“it would be better to have a millstone around the neck and be cast into the sea than to cause a little one to stumble.”

This responsibility needs to bear upon us heavily.

No one is questioning the need for compassionate measures to prevent asylum seekers having to resort to dangerous crossings to reach sanctuary. But the rationale behind proposing a cap on safe routes, while simultaneously penalising those who have no access to a safe alternative, is unjust. I do not want to see the UK abdicate its responsibility as a global leader to explore sustainable solutions to forced migration in solidarity with the persecuted. Undermining the global system of refugee protection is no solution, and it is beholden on us all to remember that no one is too different and therefore any less worthy of compassion and respect. I hope our language in debate reflects this truth.

The wonderful founder of Citizens UK, Neil Jameson, sadly passed away recently. He often shared this quote:

“It is not hope that gives rise to action, it is action that inspires hope”.


It is this action I have seen communities up and down the country take, as they have formed community resettlement groups, opened their homes to Ukrainian refugees and supported asylum seekers to build new lives and feel hope again. The British people support and help those who genuinely have need. Although there are strong feelings on the issues that this Bill raises, I pray as we work together to bring a range of amendments that the legislation will better reflect hope and a deeper humanity.

13:17

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I always argue and indeed believe that legislation is improved by the process of scrutiny in this House. However, until the powerful and welcome statement by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, who sadly is no longer in his place, I thought that no noble Lords would be willing to see how our persistence against measures in what some have described as “popular Bills” has the consequence of reciprocal persistence and yet stronger measures. So I applaud the noble and learned Lord for his statement, and urge noble Lords to take note of what he said.

That said, I urge my noble friend the Minister, who I commend for the clear and sensitive way in which he introduced this debate, to listen carefully to those noble Lords who seek, with all sincerity, to improve this legislation with the purpose of ensuring in its implementation that it is effective in stopping the boats that cross the channel illegally. However, as much as our collective effectiveness relies on Ministers listening and taking this House seriously, it also relies on us—your Lordships—listening to and taking seriously the public, who demand that their elected Government take action against illegal activity that affects their lives and livelihoods.

We often forget that, as human beings, we all want what we often deny each other—respect and understanding. In fact, last night in this Chamber, when we were debating amendments on the Online Safety Bill, there was quite a bit of frustration at the lack of understanding from the Government in their response to debates. Something that frustrates many of our fellow citizens is the ease with which we demand respect and understanding for ourselves and show it to those who we do not know ahead of those we live alongside and whose support and co-operation we rely on most. Whether we call them the “squeezed middle”, “just about managing” or the “hardworking people who play by the rules”, these are the people we rely on to pay their taxes, keep good order in their communities and uphold British values which we—those of us in leadership roles—have become shy of or are reluctant to promote ourselves.

Our fellow citizens are no less compassionate or caring than us, and they, too, want to—and do—support people in genuine need. But they do not want their compassion to be taken for granted or taken advantage of, and they do not want us to dictate the terms on which they must support others, when it is them who always have to pay, whether that is via the growing queues for public services they have little choice over using, the shortage of housing for them and their families or through the consequential changes to our society which challenge people’s sense of status at work and the cohesiveness of their community.

I enjoy great privilege. Not only do I spend a lot of time with powerful and influential people in Westminster and other walks of life, and I get to hear and learn from their experience and wisdom. I gain the same benefits of wisdom and experience from my close family and friends who ensure that I enjoy and understand a very different world. Unlike most of us, some of them work alongside immigrants from around the world, including people who arrived in the UK on the backs of lorries a few years ago. They, too, hear some tragic stories, but they hear a whole lot more said, which leads them to make a simple plea when they talk to me, which I relate to this House with their sincerity: “Don’t assume or believe that everyone attempting to enter our country illegally is a genuine asylum seeker fleeing persecution”.

When we get to Committee, if noble Lords table amendments about the right for asylum seekers to work, I will say more about why I oppose that and why I am worried about the growing numbers of legal migration to do unskilled or low-skilled jobs. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, was right to raise the issue of the increasing number of work-study visas, about which I have heard stories of misuse. There is far more to the impact of all this than meets the eye, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, who is no longer in her place, asked for evidence. I would say to the noble Lady that there is plenty, if we are willing to listen.

But today what I ask is how noble Lords opposing the Government on this Bill think they are helping genuine asylum seekers. How does it help to improve the system? Does opposing this Bill help to restore people’s confidence in our country’s ability to distinguish between refugees fleeing for their lives and those who would simply like a better life, but are willing to lie and use illegal means to get here? Does it help to demonstrate that we can and will prioritise the former and not the latter? Does it reassure that we have the necessary support and infrastructure to cope with new arrivals without pitting their needs against those of the communities in which they are put? In short, how does opposing this Bill persuade the public that this House takes seriously all their legitimate concerns, rather than ignoring or dismissing them as the products of ignorance or prejudice?

If the Lib Dems divide the House tonight, and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, has already said he will, the Minister can most definitely count on my support. I support the Bill.

13:23

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, attempting to compress all my criticisms of the Bill into the time allotted would be impossible; I am not alone in that situation, as other noble Lords have indicated. This debate has exposed—and I expect it will continue to expose—criticisms of the Bill’s intentions, methodology and internal incoherence, and its violation not only of international law but of civilised norms. I echo and supportively anticipate many of those criticisms.

As the UNCHR points out, the Bill

“would breach the UK’s obligations under the Refugee Convention, the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, the 1961 Convention for the Reduction of Statelessness and international human rights law”.

Given that the Home Secretary and the Minister have shared—as they are obliged to under the Human Rights Act—their personal view of the compatibility of the Bill with the European Convention on Human Rights, and that they are unable to certify the Bill as compatible with UN convention, I suspect that my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock’s suggestion yesterday that the Bill’s title would be proper if the adjective “illegal” were intended to qualify the noun “Bill” and not “migration” is accurate.

I am afraid that I can come to no other conclusion than that the Bill is entirely cynical in its intention. It is a clear case of attitudinising via legislative means. I do not believe that the Government have any objective for the Bill other than to create an environment in which they can adopt a certain posture that they think will help their future electoral success.

In the rest of my time, I shall focus on two of the more egregious measures in the Bill. That the Rwanda policy is immoral has been so widely discussed as to need no further explication from me, although I point out that the latest US State Department human rights report on Rwanda, released six weeks ago, is even more critical than the last. For example, it describes typical detention conditions in Rwanda as “harsh and life-threatening”, with regular, credible reports of “unlawful or arbitrary killings”.

I refer back to the debate we had on UK asylum and refugee policy. I asked the Minister the following question:

“How do our assessments of the robustness of judicial systems, the likelihood of arbitrary arrest and the propensity for agents of the state to use torture in Rwanda differ from that of the US State Department?”—[Official Report, 9/12/22; col. 403.]


I will never forget that, in summing up the debate, the Minister wilfully refused to answer in writing the questions that he could not get to in his speech. He has had five months’ notice of this question, and I ask him today to explain to your Lordships’ House why the US State Department has come to the conclusion it has about Rwanda and we have come to an entirely different one. What separate data do we have that they do not?

Not only is this policy immoral but, as the Refugee Council has pointed out, it threatens to embroil us in not only a series of legal challenges but immense logistical and practical endeavours. To put it politely, the Home Office’s record in recent years has not been so overwhelmingly positive that I would be confident in its ability to deal with these expeditiously and effectively. We currently have only one existing agreement with a third country for housing a small number of asylum seekers, with paragraph 16 of our MoU also binding us to take a small group of asylum seekers from Rwanda in return.

The Refugee Council estimates that:

“In the first three years of the legislation coming into effect … between 161,147 and 192,670 people will have had their asylum claims deemed inadmissible but not have been removed. They will be unable to have their asylum claims processed, unable to work and will be reliant on Home Office support and accommodation indefinitely … In total, between £8.7bn and £9.6bn will have been spent on detaining and accommodating people impacted by the bill in the first three years of its operation”.


These estimates are damning. This is not reforming our asylum system but replacing it with a state of limbo, at immense public expense.

Lastly, and briefly, I will raise Clause 53. Universal compliance with interim measures issued by the ECHR is critical. Last summer, the European Court of Human Rights, in an interim measure, spared two British citizens from being executed by Russia. In the case of Ukraine versus Russia, President Zelensky holds several interim measures against Russia to constrain the use of military force against civilians. They hold vital symbolic and practical weight, and this attempt to dilute their power for domestic political purposes is extraordinarily short-sighted.

In closing, I will mention the admonitory statements of the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Justice, and, much more importantly, the briefing on their behalf that emerged last night. They warned this House that to oppose this Bill was to frustrate the “will of the people”. On what basis has this numinous concept been determined? Yet again, we see legitimate scrutiny discredited by inflammatory rhetoric. We remember previous attempts at this, with judges described as “enemies of the people” during Brexit and the 2019 election being framed as a contest between the British populace and their own elected representatives. Last night’s statements are a tacit admission that there is no argument to be advanced in defence of this Bill but that it must simply be acceded to. We are today, in effect, being asked to abdicate our responsibilities. If the Bill is objectively to our benefit, what can it stand to lose from today’s proceedings?

13:30

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, with which I thoroughly agreed.

There is little mirth to be had on the grim subject of this shabby, illegal and immoral Bill, but I did allow myself a little smile this last weekend. The chasing of easy headlines through divisive, dehumanising and xenophobic rhetoric about invasions by migrants and their threat to “our” values did not pay the electoral dividend the Conservatives were hoping for, despite claims that they are “the will of the people”. In fact, the symbolic district of Dover delivered them a big rebuff when turfing Tories out of control in favour of Labour, which I congratulate.

We saw an example this weekend of how facile tough talking coupled with hasty headline-chasing legislation backfires. At least part of the blame for what went wrong with the Met lies with the Home Secretary for her rushed, illiberal, gesture politics legislation. If you wanted an example of how to unify a country and bring people together in harmony, you had to look at the Coronation and the Coronation concert. You certainly will not get it from the modern Conservative Party, and decent Tories are grasping that and not liking it.

The Government have not deigned to give us an impact assessment, but the Refugee Council forecasts that, after three years of people being refused consideration of their asylum claims, up to 200,000 of them could remain in this country due to the absence of return agreements. They will be part of a whole new class of destitute people that this Bill will knowingly create. They will be in limbo: legally and socially excluded, barred from making asylum claims but incapable of being deported, banned from working or claiming any normal benefits, excluded from any path to settlement or citizenship—in other words, an outcast underclass. That will hardly assist cohesion.

As to legal issues with this Bill, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, said of the proposal to allow the Government to ignore an order from the Strasbourg court:

“Many people would say having the power to ignore a court order is something”


that,

“unless the circumstances were quite extraordinary … is a step a government should never take because it is symbolic of a breach of the rule of law”.

The legal commentator, Joshua Rozenberg, mused:

“Is the government’s new Illegal Migration Bill a bill to deal with illegal migration? Or is it a migration bill that we should regard as illegal? The lawyers who draft bills for government departments are bound by strict naming constraints, but I wouldn’t put it past them to have slipped an arcane joke into the short title”.


The fact is that the Bill drives a coach and horses through the UK’s domestic law and international legal obligations, including through trashing the separation of powers and obstructing recourse to independent judicial scrutiny. It undermines the rule of law in various ways, not least through some provisions of retrospective effect.

The Bill contravenes the refugee convention in penalising refugees, excluding most arrivals from the right to seek asylum and breaching the ban on refoulement. It fails to respect the UN conventions against statelessness and on the rights of the child. It removes protections for victims of trafficking and modern slavery, in breach of the European convention against trafficking, and protections against arbitrary, unnecessary and indefinite detention. It also undermines the universality of human rights, contravenes the Human Rights Act and risks breaching the European Convention on Human Rights.

In his recent letter to us, the Minister said of his inability to make a statement that the provisions of the Bill are compatible with convention rights:

“This does not mean that the provisions in the Bill are incompatible with the Convention rights. A section 19(1)(b) statement simply means we are unable to say decisively that this Bill is compatible with the ECHR … Indeed, the Government is satisfied that the provisions of the Bill are capable of being applied compatibly with those rights”.


He should have been a scriptwriter for Monty Python.

What will the Government tell next week’s Council of Europe summit of 46 Heads of State and Government, the first for 18 years, about their UK contribution to fighting threats to democracy, human rights and the rule of law, when they are actually committing such threats? Everyone sensible knows that solutions to the difficult and complex challenge of migration pressures are to be found not in cheap gestures, stunts and simplistic slogans but in international co-operation and investment in efficient Home Office administration. We could usefully seek to join Europol as well, to tackle the trafficking and smuggling gangs, which the Bill does nothing about.

As Financial Times commentator Gideon Rachman has written:

“Reducing refugee numbers in a humane and effective way requires a painstaking combination of diplomacy, law enforcement and targeted development. Deportations and walls make better headlines, but worse policy”.


Would that this Government were to take note of such wise counsel.

Finally, as to the rebukes of the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Dobbs, neither of whom are now in their place, have no Tory Peers ever voted against a Bill at Second Reading? I look forward to finding out.

13:36

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, on which I serve, is required and mandated by Parliament to scrutinise every government Bill for its compatibility with human rights. How is it expected to do that if a Home Secretary fails to come to the committee to defend and explain a Bill that she has been unable to sign off as human rights-compliant? That is discourteous and worse.

By contrast, in 2015, and with consummate skill, Theresa May steered the landmark modern-day slavery and human trafficking legislation through Parliament, providing pre-legislative scrutiny and building bipartisan and bicameral consensus and support. Last week, with my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss and the noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, we spent an hour with Lady May and Sir Iain Duncan Smith. I hope that when the Minister replies, he will explain why their amendment on trafficking victims, alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, in his remarks, has not been accepted.

Let us be clear: the changes proposed in the Bill will not stop the boats, as modern slavery victims are just 6% of small boat arrivals. However, it will remove support and protection from many genuine victims, and will deter slavery victims exploited on British soil from coming forward, leaving them trapped in exploitation and making prosecuting criminal gangs even harder.

I have been a trustee of a charity that combats trafficking and yesterday chaired a session for key organisations, including the Salvation Army, which with partners have supported over 18,000 victims during the 11 years that it has held the Government’s modern slavery victim care contract. It points out that the Bill disapplies various protections and those who arrive irregularly and indirectly will be deemed a “threat to public order” and will therefore be disqualified from the existing legal protections.

The weight of evidence received by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, some of it taken in camera from victims, has been overwhelmingly clear that this would be in breach of the UK’s obligations under the Council of Europe’s convention against trafficking and Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Yesterday, at that meeting with the Salvation Army, I was told that traffickers will use the new law as a tool, and that it will not break the cycle of exploitation, only exacerbate it, adding to the trauma—to destitution, homelessness and mental illness, and to people living outside the law in precarious uncertainty. Paradoxically, we will empower traffickers and brothel owners and disempower the victims.

The JCHR also heard concerns that Clauses 2 to 5 will ultimately lead to the UK failing to play its part in the global system of refugee protection, a theme that has been mentioned so often in the debate so far. Vicky Tennant, UK representative to the United Nations refugee agency, told the committee that the Bill is

“a series of unilateral measures that are about pushing refugees away and pushing responsibility on to other countries, it will undermine the trust and regional co-operation needed to manage these movements”.

Within the last 24 hours, the UNHCR has said that it

“breaks the core UN Conventions that UNHCR is mandated to safeguard: the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1954 Statelessness Convention”.

In addition to concerns for the victims of trafficking, there are five other areas that have raised red flags for the JCHR: first, the removal of protections for refugees and stateless persons; secondly, potential for indefinite and arbitrary detention; thirdly, due process and appeal rights being compromised; fourthly, concerns over interim measures; and fifthly, lack of protections for both accompanied and unaccompanied children—a point properly made by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, whose amendment on children I seconded when it was considered and supported right across your Lordships’ House.

The JCHR heard that the Bill would not be compatible with the UK’s obligations under both the ECHR and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Two experts said the provisions

“create risks of Article 5 breaches”,

while Welsh Women’s Aid said there would inevitably be

“an increase in the number of women and children exploited in hidden and organised illegal trade”.

As far as due process and appeal rights are concerned, listen to Freedom from Torture, which told us that:

“A person may be able to provide ‘reasonable’ or even ‘strong’ evidence, but not quite enough to be ‘compelling’. Very many refugees will not be able to surmount this evidential burden, putting them at risk of harm”.


The Bill also gives Ministers legislative permission to ignore interim measures indicated by the European Court of Human Rights and to breach various international and domestic legal obligations, and risks breaching others. Several witnesses told us that the Bill is so bad it is simply incapable of amendment, and that we should first undertake post-legislative scrutiny of the Nationality and Borders Act, which came into force only in January, before legislating further.

If it proves impossible to amend the Bill in the ways that many noble Lords have argued during this debate, we should have no hesitation in using our constitutional right to defeat it at Third Reading. I agree with others that it is our duty to consider the Bill in Committee and on Report.

Let me end. In 1938 the independent MP Eleanor Rathbone established the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees. In 1940, during a six-hour debate, when Europe faced the challenge of enormous numbers of displaced people, she argued that in addition to the humanitarian case there were hard-headed reasons for the UK to lead the international response. She said it is

“not only in the interests of humanity and of the refugees, but in the interests of security itself”.—[Official Report, Commons, 10/7/1940; col. 1212.]

Her speech, and its description of dog-whistle politics and the stigmatisation of refugees, bears careful study today.

13:43

Sitting suspended.

Illegal Migration Bill

2nd reading
Wednesday 10th May 2023 Lords Chamber

Second Reading (Continued)

15:49

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, it is the right of every sovereign nation to control its borders. We in this country have a real problem with a complete breakdown of the UK’s ability to control its borders and to enforce its own laws. As the Minister said at the beginning of the debate, more than 45,000 people arrived in small boats last year. Many of those who crossed here were economic migrants—some from safe countries such as Albania—yet arrivals by boat accounted for almost half of those applying for asylum last year. We already have an accommodation problem, with 50,000 asylum seekers living in 400 hotels, costing £6 million a day. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, acknowledged that there is a problem and that it needs solving. Perhaps in the spirit of the Labour-Liberal alliance we now have, he will talk to his almost noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, who said that this is a problem that is incapable of solution and that there was no point in trying.

Some say that we should just let illegal immigrants work here, but surely that would not work; it would simply increase the pull factor of the UK to those wanting to come here. Who gets to come to this country and in what numbers is a legitimate political question. All eyes are on small boats at the moment, but there is also the much larger question, numerically, about the extraordinary recent surge in legal immigration. Last year, there were nearly 1.1 million arrivals—a net migration figure of over 504,000. There is no economic case for mass migration on that scale. These numbers are not sustainable. Our housebuilding target of 300,00 a year, which has not yet been met, probably ought to be well over 400,000 or 450,000.

Noble Lords have talked about safe routes to asylum. Legal migration is more likely to be accepted generally if we manage to control illegal immigration. At the moment, we have a situation where it is often difficult to remove migrants whom the legal system has found have no right to be here. The Bill addresses that question —that is the question and problem we have.

The heart of the Bill is Clause 2 and the provisions that give the Government the right to remove those with no legal right to remain here. It makes an asylum claim for any individual here illegally inadmissible. It should not be forgotten that the aim of the Bill is to deter. If a robust system can be established, there will be fewer boats and less need for flights to Rwanda. The Bill has been described as a threat to the rule of law, but it should be remembered that, when the Government introduced their plan to remove illegal migrants to Rwanda, our courts considered the legalities of the plan, and all courts up to the Supreme Court refused to grant an injunction to a group of migrants to stop them being put on a plane. But then, at that moment, Strasbourg issued a rule 39 interim ruling, and that is why the Government have taken powers to disregard interim rulings from the ECHR.

I am sure that noble Lords will listen very carefully to the many distinguished lawyers in this House, especially the former Lord Chief Justice, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, but many legal experts—including Sir Geoffrey Cox and my noble friend Lord Howard—have said that only final rulings, not interim rulings, of the Strasbourg court are legally binding. Martin Howe KC has even gone so far as to say that the real threat to the rule of law comes not from the Government in the Bill but from Strasbourg exceeding its jurisdictional powers.

The Bill gives the Home Secretary broad discretion; it does not require the Home Secretary to ignore rule 39 interim measures. The Government have also said that they are engaged in constructive dialogue with the ECHR, which they intend to continue, on reforms to the process by which interim measures are considered.

I agree that there are other difficult issues in the Bill; I will mention only two. The first is the removal of unaccompanied children. I am sure that Ministers would rather not contemplate being in a situation where they have to deal with such a problem. It is difficult to imagine a more awkward issue. The Immigration Minister in the Commons said that this could happen

“only in the most exceptional circumstances”,—[Official Report, Commons, 26/4/23; col. 837.]

such as reuniting a family, but I am sure the House will wish to probe that in Committee.

The second issue relates to Clauses 21 to 28. These disapply elements of the protection against modern slavery. Again, the Immigration Minister referred to cases where individuals are, as he put it, considered a threat to public order or have claimed in bad faith to be victims of slavery. This was queried, but the Minister claimed plenty of evidence and undertook to provide it, and the Minister speaking here today quoted some statistics, which I am sure the House will wish to probe. He quoted a figure of 73% of illegal immigrants applying for asylum, but in fact I think that figure refers to those in detention, and we have been told by other experts that the figure of those who have come here illegally applying under the slavery provisions is only 6%, so I am sure the House will wish to probe that.

Politics is sometimes described as the art of the possible. Perhaps more accurately, it should be described as the art of choosing between the incredibly difficult and the unbelievably difficult, but we have to make hard choices; to govern is to choose. One problem with ever-expanding human rights is that one person’s rights may clash with those of another. The rights of the individual matter deeply, but the ability of the Government to act as the trustees of the rights of the individuals who make up this country also matters. We have an acute problem which needs solving. Let us do it in a humane, legal way, but let us not duck the difficult choices.

I hope that this House will not fill the Bill with so many loopholes, exemptions, exceptions and get-out clauses that it actually becomes unworkable. We have a problem to solve, it needs solving, and this Bill is part of the solution.

15:56

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, a refugee convention refugee can never—I repeat, never—be illegal. I have the unhappy duty of speaking as both the child of migrants and as a human rights lawyer. While the latter may be a cause for derision among senior members of the Government, I fail to see that it is any less noble than being a lawyer to the wealthy or an investment banker.

None of our political traditions commands a historical monopoly of virtue when it comes to the treatment of immigrants in general, or refugees and asylum seekers in particular. Low points have included: Home Office obstruction of safe passage for so many fleeing the Nazis; the racist treatment of the east African Asians in 1968; virginity testing of Hindu brides at Heathrow Airport in 1979; and, of course, the still unresolved Windrush scandal of more recent times. This is not to deny prouder moments, but to acknowledge our mixed record and the importance of legal protections for the most vulnerable people—or at least of not baking vulnerability and discrimination into our statutes for the sake of cheap headlines that tickle the base.

The politics of the Bill are a populist, divisive distraction from economic turmoil caused by mismanagement and greed. Increasingly, this is a desperate electoral strategy of culture war. Notwithstanding the inevitable cruelties that would be caused to even the most genuine refugees, this will not stop the boats. However, it is as a believer in the international rules-based order and the domestic rule of law that I have the gravest concerns. In its current form, the Illegal Migration Bill would live up to its name—assuming that the adjective describes the second noun. It would put this country, a country that was at the heart of negotiating the post-World War II international settlement, in violation of the ECHR of 1950, the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the 2005 anti-trafficking convention and, perhaps most shamefully of all, given the events that led to its creation, the 1951 refugee convention and its protocol.

I do not criticise the Minister—an alternative “activist lawyer”—for making a Section 19(1)(b) statement that he cannot confirm ECHR compatibility. Such an honest position was always envisaged by the scheme of the Human Rights Act so as to facilitate parliamentary debate over whether, for example, in a state of emergency Parliament should be prepared to legislate contrary even to lawful derogation from the convention. However, I note that both the drafters of the human rights memorandum to the Bill and the Home Secretary, in the other place, adopted cake eating in the extreme with their confident assertions about the compatibility of the Bill while simultaneously ousting various aspects of the jurisdiction of both the Strasbourg and domestic courts.

The domestic duty to read legislation compatibly with rights is replaced with a duty to do the Government’s bidding, in a grotesque parody of the separation of powers. Interim relief, which is so vital in expulsion cases, will no longer bind the Government’s hands, even where either the European Court of Human Rights or UK courts believe that a person might be trafficked, tortured or killed pending a full and final hearing of their case. The provisions narrowing suspensive claims would appear to allow removal in potential breaches of rights to life and of protections against inhuman and degrading treatment in a number of cases.

There will be no bail for those caught in the wide net of this Bill for 28 days. There will be no judicial review of immigration detention decisions. All of this is in breach of the right against arbitrary detention so embedded in our common-law traditions. Further, in the absence of viable deals with safe third countries, people may be interned in legal limbo indefinitely. In addition, the Bill would apply retrospectively to people already here who have made a claim for asylum in good faith.

The core of the evil—that is not a word I use lightly —of this measure is the notion of punishing some of the most genuine refugees on account of the necessarily clandestine nature of their escape. This was not lost on the former Prime Minister and right honourable Member for Maidenhead in the other place, who was with us this morning. It was not lost on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. It is not lost on me. Still, I cannot quite believe that our values have sunk to this.

16:02

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, as the previous speaker has said, this Bill brings shame on our country. The UK was once one of the most compassionate countries, welcoming victims of oppression and violence, upholding human rights and championing the causes of the oppressed. The British public have shown their generosity in welcoming war victims.

The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said that there was public support for this Bill. But members of the public whom I have spoken to do not support the removal of protections for child imprisonment or the removal of rights for trafficked people in this Bill. She talked about equal treatment of genuine asylum seekers being the same as for imposters, but that is what is happening at the moment because so many claims have not been processed. Under this Bill, there would be no assessment; they would simply be imprisoned and moved somewhere else. So I think that, once the generous and fair-minded British public understand what this Bill contains, there will be no support for it from them.

As areas of conflict increase across the world, the numbers of people seeking sanctuary from violence and persecution are massively increasing. Yet the UK, claiming to be an influential global player on the world stage, is unwilling to take its share of responsibility for finding solutions to the worsening humanitarian plight of so many people fleeing conflict.

The Government are abdicating their international obligation to play a full part in worldwide efforts to address the growing numbers affected by war and violent persecution, failing to comply with long-standing international agreements and conventions. Worse still, as others have said, are the utterances of senior members of Government who are fuelling racial intolerance and painting a false picture of what is happening.

Ministers’ assertions that we are taking our fair share of asylum seekers and refugees can be seen to be untrue if we look at the performance of our European neighbours. When it comes to granting refugee status to asylum seekers, seven EU countries issued more positive decisions than the UK in 2021. These included Germany, with 59,000; France, with 33,000; Italy, with 21,000; Spain, with 20,000; Greece, with 16,000; Austria, with 12,000; compared with the UK, with 10,000. These are massive differences.

As the UNHCR says, the Bill all but extinguishes the right to asylum. To claim asylum, refugees have to be in the country where they are claiming asylum, but Clause 2 effectively removes this right, as any refugee entering the country under this Bill will not have the right to be assessed. There are no safe routes to the UK.

The noble Lord, Lord Howard, said that the problem would be worse if there were safe routes because people would go underground, but many people will go underground as a result of this Bill if it becomes law. So why are we not receiving information about safe routes from the Government at the same time as they are trying to enact this Bill?

The Bill does not, as Ministers say, protect trafficked people; it removes from them rights afforded to them by previous legislation. It means that, instead of being offered protection and support, as is the duty required by the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, a potential victim will face detention and arrangements for their removal will commence.

So far, as others have said, the only third country willing to receive asylum seekers from the UK is Rwanda. In light of the Government’s confrontational approach, might not other third countries be unwilling to co-operate with the UK?

The Bill requires that any illegal immigrants be detained until they can be removed. The UK does not have sufficient accommodation for people who are already here—as many noble Lords have said, this is being provided at great cost. How then are we going to find accommodation for the increased numbers that will result if this Bill is implemented?

The Children’s Commissioner has raised major concerns about the current quality of accommodation for keeping children safe and 200 children are currently missing from Home Office accommodation. It is clear that many children have urgent health needs which are not being met in existing accommodation, as well as severe mental health problems, having lost family and witnessed scenes of horrifying violence. More children, including unaccompanied minors, are now to be detained under the terms of this Bill and there is no doubt that on current performance this will be in horrifically substandard accommodation.

So, it is no surprise that I agree with my colleagues that this is an appalling Bill that should be prevented from reaching the statute book. I hope that other noble Lords of the same view will stand up and be counted this evening and join us to vote for the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Paddick.

16:08

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, this Bill fails to respect our international obligations and will therefore undermine the reputation of this country and our influence across the world. For this reason and others, I believe this House has a moral obligation to prevent this Bill from reaching the statute book unless it is very severely amended.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees makes the point that there are virtually no ways to claim refugee protection before arriving in the UK—with the obvious exception of people from Ukraine and Hong Kong. Anyone arriving without having already obtained refugee status will be regarded as arriving irregularly and will be locked up before being deported. This Bill therefore amounts to an asylum ban for victims from most unsafe countries.

Particularly shocking is the fact that these inhumane provisions apply even to unaccompanied children, who will be removed at the age of 18. To make matters worse, people will not be able to apply for immigration bail for the first 28 days, nor will they be able to obtain a judicial review regarding the lawfulness of their removal.

As others have said, the Bill drives a coach and horses through the Modern Slavery Act; we have to address this, along with many other issues. The idea behind the Bill is to deter people from coming to the UK in boats across the channel—but, as well as being inhumane, the Bill will not achieve this objective. The assumption is that people can be quickly returned to their own country. However, most people who come here as asylum seekers come from unsafe countries—Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, et cetera—and the Bill prohibits people from being returned to such countries. There are other countries, of course, defined as safe which imprison people who are non-believers simply because of their lack of faith. An obvious option would have been to remove asylum seekers to EU countries—safe countries they may have come through on their way to the UK—but the Brexit withdrawal agreement makes this impossible.

When the Government’s own statistics and research show that the deterrent model they have chosen does not work, can the Minister explain why they have failed to bring forward a Bill to tackle the business model of the people smugglers operating in the channel—an approach that would undoubtedly succeed in stopping the small boats and would, in fact, tackle the villains rather than the victims? The fact is that there are alternatives. In disliking this Bill, we are very clear that there are perfectly good alternatives.

What will be the cost to the UK of this policy? It will require a massive expansion of the detention estate—10,000-plus beds, according to the Refugee Council. The quality of those detention facilities will surely be appalling. The Home Office regards the approach used on the Greek islands of Chios, Lesvos and Samos as the right model for the UK’s response to asylum seekers, but Médecins Sans Frontières describes the accommodation in those facilities as “deplorable” and points to appalling suffering, exacerbated by the daily stresses and constant fears of the asylum seekers involved. Is this really the model that the UK Government wish to adopt? I do not think so. I fear that we have a Home Secretary who may be out of line with others.

Finally, I turn to the mental health consequences of the Bill. The people detained under it will have had a high prevalence of trafficking, torture and sexual and gender-based violence. The Royal College of Psychiatrists rightly points out that the Bill is likely to precipitate a significant deterioration of mental health problems in most cases. The consequences for children, with both mental and physical symptoms, are particularly distressing.

This Bill is cruel, immoral and unworkable. I call on the Government to accept the need for far-reaching amendments and, if necessary, withdraw the Bill wholesale at Third Reading.

16:12

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, despite support in the other place, the Bill has come under a good deal of criticism, both in your Lordships’ House this afternoon and outside Parliament. If this House is not able to or will not offer that criticism but bends silently before the exhortations of the Home Secretary, we may as well pack up and go home. It seems to me that our constitutional duty is to warn, advise and seek to persuade the other place to think things through with care and in a less fevered atmosphere than was apparent when the Bill was debated in the other place. It is in Committee that we can look carefully at the Bill. With the greatest respect to him, I do not think that following the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, into the Division Lobby is the answer to this question.

The aims of the Bill are not in the least bit difficult to understand. They are to deter illegal entry into the United Kingdom; to break the business model of the people smugglers and save lives; promptly to remove those with no legal right to remain in the United Kingdom; and to make provision for setting an annual cap on the number of people to be admitted into the United Kingdom through safe and legal routes. I fully accept that all of those are legitimate policy aims, and in a pre-election period they are just the sort of policy aims that a Government who wish to remain in office through demonstrating their desire to protect their citizens from the expense of illegal immigration and from their having to see on their television screens images of thousands of people arriving in rubber dinghies, and who want to blame “the others” for failing to stop them before they set off, would espouse. However, while simultaneously claiming to be welcoming and compassionate, and portraying the United Kingdom as the victim of others’ failures, or of far-away political upheavals or moral ineptitude, is easy if somewhat lazy politics—and certainly not novel—it runs the risk of creating or encouraging a form of sectarianism.

In the context of the last presidential elections in the United States, sectarianism became a highly moralised political identity that saw the other side as contemptible. The moral component was fundamental. You believe that you are a member of a select group, and you fervently believe that only you know the moral truth and that the other people are hopelessly and irredeemably wrong. That is the tenor of the thinking we see across the American political divide nowadays. That is the way Donald Trump electioneers and how he describes the people who disagree with him.

This divisive political system has three main components. The first is what is known as “othering”—labelling these people as so different from us that they are almost incomprehensible. The second is called “aversion”—the idea that they are not just different but dislikeable. The third is “moralisation”, whereby they are morally bankrupt. Now sectarianism cuts both ways and moral rectitude does not belong only to one side of the argument. However, there are questions that need to be asked about whether, for example, it is acceptable to redefine one’s relationship to the law or to a long-standing convention on refugees, or to claim that judges who apply the laws enacted by Parliament—this Parliament—are “lefty lawyers”. Is it right to argue that what you think is in your immediate political interest is what is best for democracy? If the stakes are high enough, anything goes. To see where we may be heading, one has only to look at the clauses in the Bill relating to suspensive claims and serious harm; or at Clause 1(5), relating to the disapplication of Section 3 of the Human Rights Act; or at Clause 4, on the disregarding of certain claims; or at the Section 19(1)(b) statement on the face of the Bill. I have been described, I am sure, as many things, but no one I think could describe me as a “lefty lawyer”, and government by insult is not encouraging.

I am truly sorry that I have not been able to agree with my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne, but I do suggest that we all study with some care the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, given at the outset of our proceedings.

What is less easy to understand is how the Bill’s four aims are to be achieved in practice. I have no doubt that a Home Secretary could articulate in a persuasive and evidence-based manner how each of those aims can and will be met within the rule of law and in compliance with our existing treaty obligations, most obviously under the refugee convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. There may be both a political and legal case for this Bill and the measures it demands. I genuinely look forward to hearing it, because so far, I have not.

16:18

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am minded to vote in favour of the amendment and to oppose Second Reading of this disgraceful Bill. Other speakers have explained and will explain that the Bill is immoral and will cause much unnecessary pain and suffering, and it is far from obvious that it will achieve its stated objectives; but I am going to speak directly to the amendment and suggest reasons why it is right and necessary for this House to refuse to consider the Bill further.

No one doubts that the House of Commons has a democratic mandate and is entitled to pass whatever legislation it wishes. The issue here is the role of the second Chamber when presented with legislation that is so egregiously bad as this Bill.

The political reality is that there is no way that this Bill will or could be revised to make it better. It is intrinsically bad and, having read the debates that took place in the Commons, it is quite clear that the Government are opposed to any meaningful amendment.

Various threats have been made as to the consequences for this House if it refuses to pass this Bill, although today’s article in the Times is more measured, but we need to recognise the role in our constitution of the Parliament Acts. Any Government with a majority in the Commons can overrule this House, and if they think it is right to do so, they should do so. That does not require us to accept their proposals.

Earlier speakers have tried to suggest that for this House to refuse to consider a Bill is “unconstitutional”. Clearly that is nonsense; we have the constitutional right to refuse a Bill. I quite understand that noble Lords may not be greatly interested in my views on the matter. However, they may be swayed by the words of Sir Winston Churchill. I refer noble Lords to his speech in the Commons on 11 November 1947, when he was leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, speaking in the debate on the Second Reading of the Parliament Bill, which can be found in Hansard vol. 444, beginning at col. 203.

Sir Winston’s position on this matter is interesting, as in 1911 he was, in his own words, a “radical” and an active proponent of the legislation that limited the power of this House by restricting it to a two-year delay. Then, in 1947, he opposed Labour’s proposal to reduce the period of delay to one year. Much of his speech was devoted to setting out why two years was right and one year was too short, which, while interesting, need not concern us. There was also much political knockabout, although his comment that

“No Government has ever combined so passionate a lust for power with such incurable impotence in its exercise”


has contemporary relevance.

The burden of his speech, and what is relevant to us here today, is his forceful argument as to why and when, in accordance with our constitution, this House was entitled, even under an obligation, to refuse to consider a Bill, even when it had been passed by the Commons. The crucial point is that, as a great democrat, he argued the case for this House taking such action on the grounds of democracy. He said, in terms:

“The spirit of the Parliament Act, and the purpose of that Act, were to secure the intimate, effective and continuous influence of the will of the people upon the conduct and progress of their affairs”.


In other words, he argued that our power to delay should, when this House thought fit, be used in the interests of democracy. He asked:

“Is the party opposite really to be entitled to pass laws affecting the whole character of the country in the closing years of this Parliament without any appeal to the people who have the vote and who placed them where they are?”


In other words, our role is to make the Commons think again and, towards the end of a Parliament, make the Government seek a new mandate. His conclusion was:

“The object of the Parliament Act, and the spirit of that Act, were to give effect, not to spasmodic emotions of the electorate, but to the settled … will of the people”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/11/1947; cols. 205, 204,214, 206.]


This Bill is clearly based on “spasmodic emotions” and we should, on the grounds set out in the amendment, use our constitutional powers to decline to give it a Second Reading.

16:24

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

My Lords, it is a privilege to add my voice to this debate. I echo much of what has already been said, including by my friends the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. I will focus my remarks on the impact of this Bill on women, including victims and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence—all of it set, as you might expect, within my belief that every person is created in the image of God. We are talking here about people with names, not faceless numbers.

I hear the Minister’s concerns about the statistics around modern slavery but this issue needs much more careful analysis, as the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said. Other noble Lords have highlighted many of the issues around modern slavery. Surely it cannot be right that no one who arrives here by irregular means will be eligible to receive modern slavery support. As we have heard, this Bill proposes that victims of modern slavery will instead be subject to detention and removal. This seems wrong on so many levels, not least morally, but it will also be a substantial law enforcement issue. Why would anyone come forward as a victim of modern slavery and risk being sent to Rwanda? My right reverend friends the Bishops of London and Bristol will be following these issues with interest and concern.

There are many crossovers for victims and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. For five years, the SEREDA Project at the University of Birmingham and across other international universities has been researching refugees’ experiences of displacement from the Middle East and north Africa to the point at which people seek refuge. These academics warn that this Bill will increase vulnerability and the risk of exploitation, and will unfairly punish survivors who have unknowingly come to Britain. Safe countries, even some of our closest neighbours, are not necessarily safe for a woman who has been sex trafficked to that country or abused by smugglers in-flight. She will want to put as much distance as possible between her and the perpetrators. There is nothing in this Bill to ensure that such victims will receive the support that they need in these countries to prevent the resumption of abuse.

If this Bill is enacted in its current form, Albania will be added to the list of safe countries from which people will never be accepted. There are questions there for me around gender disparity. If a large percentage of male asylum seekers from Albania are sent back but the vast majority of women are accepted at present, surely that implies that it may not be safe for them there.

I add my voice to those speaking against the indefinite detention of pregnant women. I strongly support the call from the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for the 72-hour time limit to be reinstated. The impact of detention on this group may include considerable, extremely serious health repercussions, including for their unborn children, who may be harmed by the stress and trauma of detention.

Across all these points, I see a worrying failure to recognise the trauma experienced by victims. I will not say more at this point—so much has been said—but I hope that we will pick up on many of these issues in Committee, so that we ensure that we shape our legislation in a way that enables our country to be an appropriate place of sanctuary, not harm.

16:28

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, this debate has focused largely on legal issues. I do not doubt the importance of such issues, not least those just raised by the right reverend Prelate, but I would take the lawyers more seriously if they recognised that there is a problem and suggested solutions rather than arguing as if neither law nor treaties nor their application need to change. Ultimately, the Government and Parliament of this country must be able to decide how many people, and for what reasons, are granted refuge in this country.

I had hoped that the lawyers would explain why British courts and administrators reject only 26% of initial asylum claims, whereas France rejects 75%, Germany rejects 55%, and both Sweden and Spain reject 71%—especially since, in addition, Britain goes on to accept a majority of those who appeal. If lawyers do not admit that our system is too credulous, why do they not criticise our EU neighbours for being too harsh? Does not this disparity explain why, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth pointed out, some people are willing to risk their lives to escape safe EU countries to claim asylum in the UK?

At the heart of this debate is a challenging moral and political question: to how many and to which categories of people should we offer refuge in this country? The most reverend Primate, in his great speech on his Motion to Take Note before Christmas, said that

“I make … absolutely clear and underline”

that Britain neither can nor should

“take everyone who flees such devastation”.—[Official Report, 9/12/22; col. 370.]

I was going to say that everyone agrees with him, and that everyone accepts that we cannot accept all those who would like to find refuge in this country, until I heard the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, state that we should not even attempt to limit the numbers, only handle the flow in a more orderly fashion.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I did not say that.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

The noble Lord did say that. He can check Hansard or his notes. If he wishes to tell me what he did say, I will give way to him.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord. What I said was that we need to manage the flow of those seeking asylum into this country rather than close the gates and try to seal off the country from all people seeking asylum. I said that we should be managing the flow. I did not say that we should accept everyone.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

The great difference between what the noble Lord actually said, which is that we should not even try but should just manage the flow, and what he has just said now, is too fine for me to appreciate. At least I have his original version.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

The noble Lord has had his go. His original version at least had the merit of being breathtakingly honest. However, the implications of just “managing the flow” rather than trying to limit it, when this country already has a catastrophic housing problem, are obvious, and from a party that is notorious for opposing every new housing development across the country, the Lib Dem policy is breathtakingly hypocritical.

Many noble Lords have spoken of the importance of creating more safe and legal routes for immigrants. Presumably they will therefore welcome the clauses in the Bill, under which the Government and Parliament will agree an annual quota of people to be accepted under such routes. That raises several questions, the first being, “How many?” That question is contentious but is to be answered in the light of circumstances each year.

Secondly, who should be allowed in under such safe and legal routes? Clearly, we should prioritise the most vulnerable, as we do with the UNHCR for refugees from Syria, and those with the greatest right; for example, those who are related to people who are already here or whom we have obligations to, as with the Afghan translators. We can be pretty sure that there will be little overlap between these groups, who we think should have priority, and those currently arriving in small boats. The latter include the better-off members of their national communities, who can finance the tens of thousands of pounds to get here, the more audacious and usually young men who are willing to take risks, and those who have been, or expect to be, refused asylum in the EU.

Thirdly, from which countries should we enable people to come legally and safely? Presumably it is those coming directly, or as near as directly as possible, from the place where they suffered persecution. Surely it would not be to give priority to those who are already in safe countries; that is, our EU neighbours. Allowing illegal immigration across the channel to continue would mean that they will continue to jump the queue and absorb all the available accommodation in hotels, barges, barracks or otherwise, which will be needed for those coming on safe and secure routes.

Fourthly, how will we restrict those who will still want to come illegally by boats across the channel? As the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, pellucidly explained, unless we allow unlimited numbers to come by safe and legal routes, there will always be some who, having been refused legal access, will wish to come illegally by the boats. So far, none of those who accept that we cannot take everyone who wishes to come to this country has proposed any concrete alternative to the proposals in the Bill.

My question to those who condemn the Government’s plan as immoral is: why is it perfectly moral to pay the French to prevent people leaving the beaches of Calais but immoral to try to deter people from landing on the beaches of Dover? Both measures would help us save the lives of those who risk being drowned in the channel, and both leave migrants free to seek asylum in the EU if they do not wish to do so in Rwanda. I will not hold my breath while waiting for a convincing answer.

16:34

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak plainly. I believe the Bill to be a thoroughly reprehensible piece of legislation that would be more suited to a party of extremists than the party that saw one of its greatest leaders, Winston Churchill, among the architects of the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. How utterly ashamed I believe Churchill would be today of the Bill.

I am not alone in my concerns, and I am indebted to all organisations that have written to me and others about the Bill and the consequences for those seeking sanctuary and asylum: people who are among the most vulnerable, damaged, dehumanised and misrepresented —individuals who should command our support, understanding and compassion. But they are warned that they will instead be stripped of the most basic human rights by this Government, whom I call the Tufton Street mob. I am indebted particularly to Amnesty International for its briefing, as well as the Bar Council, the Royal Society of Psychiatrists, the British Red Cross and LGBT group Time to be Out.

I deeply regret the introduction of the Bill, which seeks to oust judicial control of executive powers, deny refugees their right to seek asylum in the United Kingdom, exclude victims from modern slavery protections, and strip some British children of their rights to British citizenship.

It plainly risks—and, I believe, seeks—conflict over the European Convention on Human Rights and the court. The Bill is a deliberate and carefully designed vehicle to put the UK on a collision course with the European Court of Human Rights, to further the ambition of the Tufton Street mob to whip up hatred of the court in support of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights. In that regard, the Bill is utterly cynical and an act of bad faith.

The Government argue in pursuit of a singular purpose, stated in Clause 1. It is

“to prevent and deter unlawful migration, and in particular migration by unsafe and illegal routes”,

as the Bill describes them. By citing this purpose, Ministers show a remarkable disregard for people’s real lives, real-world events, this country’s international obligations concerning these matters, and even Ministers’ own policy as it relates to these issues. Sadly and reprehensibly, in promoting the Bill, this lack of respect for law, fact and people’s innate dignity has led to Ministers expressing themselves in terms that are indecent and racist, and they have quite rightly been criticised by members of their own party.

The Bill is plainly not compliant with international human rights law—no doubt something that this Government, the Tufton Street mob, are proud of— nor is it compliant with basic principles of legality and constitutionality. I believe that it is a blight on the reputation of the United Kingdom as a civilised, law-abiding, constitutionally sound and democratically accountable nation. It is my profound belief that Parliament is better than this vicious, far-right piece of legislation, and that the British people are better—a people known for compassion, understanding and basic human decency.

We will deal in greater detail with the brutal injustices of the Bill, but I will name just some. Several provisions, in effect, oust judicial oversight. Clauses 31 and 52 deny refugees their basic right to seek asylum and put minorities, such as LGBT people, at greater risk, as brilliantly expounded by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton.

The Bill excludes victims from modern slavery protections; it can deprive British children of their citizenship rights, as I said before; and there are new powers to indefinitely detain pregnant women. Women for Refugee Women’s research has found that most women seeking asylum in the United Kingdom are survivors of rape and other forms of gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual exploitation, forced marriage and female genital mutilation, yet these women arriving through so-called unsafe and illegal routes will be detained and sent to so-called safe third countries.

As I read this, I find it unbelievable that I am doing so inside a British Parliament and that this Bill and its intentions originate from a British Government. How quickly we can be debased and reduced by those eager to misrepresent the most vulnerable as a threat to our culture and way of life, and as cannibalising our values, and to whip up public opinion against them. How reminiscent it is of the 1930s, and how I so agree with Mr Gary Lineker and his denunciation of the language used.

In conclusion, I paraphrase Shakespeare and a play that he co-wrote, “Sir Thomas More”. The strangers have made their way from Calais to Dover, and on to London. The citizens of London, whipped up by the mob, become unruly. Thomas More stands before them and someone in the crowd shouts: “Remove them!” He replies: “You bid that they be removed, the stranger with their children upon their back, their families at their side, their belongings at their feet. You bid that they be removed. Imagine you are the stranger, with your children upon your back, your family at your side, your belongings at your feet. Imagine you are the stranger and bid that they be removed and show your mountanish inhumanity”.

Such inhumanity is within the Illegal Migration Bill, and we should consign it to the dustbin of far-right politics.

16:41

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

The reason that some years ago I supported the Conservative-Liberal coalition was the pledge that the imprisonment and detention of children on immigration purposes would be abolished. Now, the possibility of that is to be reintroduced.

The Government will say that this is what the British people want. Thursday’s local government election, with over 1,000 Tory losses, shows that there is no great clamour for the sort of action proposed, which is aggressive and inhumane. The Home Secretary dreams of planes deporting refugees to Rwanda. I believe this is not a dream shared by the majority of the British people, who are more likely to dream as Martin Luther King did of justice and fairness for all people. Once again, not a single Tory councillor was elected in many of our larger cities—none in Liverpool, Manchester or Newcastle. You may say, “What about the places most affected by the people in small boats?” On the south coast, the Tories were down five councillors in Dover and more than that in Folkestone. The people do not want this.

The Coronation concert showed how much we appreciate the diversity of those from many different backgrounds. This Bill has no place in the law of the United Kingdom. I am certain that every concerned Peer in the House today will join me this evening in opposing this squalid Bill.

16:43

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, the only thing I really like about the Bill is the honesty of its title—it is indeed an illegal migration Bill. It bans even asking for asylum if you are coming from Khartoum, Tripoli, Tehran, Myanmar or Yemen because there is no regular, legal approved route from there. We are being asked to agree to a blatant repudiation of our commitments under the 1951 convention, as the UNCHR, the custodian of the convention, has confirmed. We are being asked to approve of indefinite detention for all such arrivals by decision of the Secretary of State, without legal oversight and with no appeal. The Secretary of State’s decisions cannot be questioned in any court or tribunal. That is astonishing, but that is what new paragraph 3A, to be inserted by Clause 12(4), says. When the Minister states in the Bill that he cannot say it is compatible with European convention rights, that is the truth but not the whole truth. The incompatibility is obvious.

That is not all. Like others, I struggle to see how this Bill can be squared with our promises under the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons 1954, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989, or the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings 2005, which only the Russians have not ratified. It is not just about small boats, although that is how it is being sold. It is about trucks, London airports, trains, victims of modern slavery, and students, businessmen or tourists from Khartoum or Tehran who when here chose to seek asylum. Their claims cannot be heard if this Bill passes; they have to be locked up sine die until the Secretary of State can find somewhere to send them. That is astonishing in my view.

I have two interests to declare. First, I was, until recently, a trustee of the Refugee Council. The Government have produced no impact assessment on the Bill but the Refugee Council has, and, as others in this debate have already mentioned, its verdict on its impracticability is damning. It puts the cost of detention over the first three years at some £9 billion. More importantly, it points out that it will not work: it will not crack the small boats problem. What might work would be for our Government to accept the repeated French offer to let us set up processing centres in France—and that is my answer to the very legitimate question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean.

I have a second interest to declare. For five years I headed the Diplomatic Service, which thought it was its duty—I am sure it still thinks it is its duty—in the national interest to speak up for the rules-based international system, which is now under such challenge from the likes of Trump and Putin. This Bill would disarm our diplomacy. When we remonstrate with rule-breakers, they would fling this back in our faces. Do as we say, not as we do is not a winning diplomatic gambit.

It is an honour to serve in this Parliament, and we must all do what we can to sustain its reputation. In almost 20 years here, I do not think I can recall a more disreputable Bill than this one. It victimises the vulnerable, and if we enact it, the country breaks its commitments and trashes its traditions. It takes perseverance to keep honour bright, and this House should ask the Government to think again. We should send the Bill back to the other place in a form which does not purport to legitimise illegality.

16:48

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate, and it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord who, as always, spoke with such sense. He certainly knows what he is talking about, and we would do well to listen to what he said.

I look forward to this legislation being improved in your Lordships’ House—there is certainly scope for that. There are some very real concerns about this legislation. I do not doubt the need to control immigration, nor indeed do I doubt the need for a properly regulated system of asylum. However, it is a complex global issue. It does not follow that, because we have a problem, any action is appropriate, justified or to be welcomed. It is not. This Bill does not deal with the asylum backlog, nor does it do anything to bring to book traffickers, who are the real villains who should be centre stage in any system of governmental action. I question whether this legislation will have the deterrent effect that is argued for, and I look forward to hearing evidence of that.

It is legitimate to ask what we would do instead, and I will come on to some of the things that could be done. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has just talked about processing in France, which is a real way of tackling some of the problem.

At the centre of my concerns is the statement in the Bill made by the Home Secretary that in her view she is unable to make a statement that the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill are compatible with the convention rights. That goes to the very centre of what makes us great as a nation: a belief in the rule of law. This is the post-war settlement coming back at us. Do we really want to ally with Trump and Putin? That is what we are doing if we turn our backs on the very fundamental problem that this is illegal. That statement is a concern, and I assume it concerns the Minister. I look forward to hearing more about how he thinks we are on the right side of the law here.

I would also appreciate it if something were to be said about the impact of this legislation. We are told, and I agree, that there is a problem and we need to do something about it, but we are entitled to ask what the costs of this measure would be. Part of the answer, apart from the processing, is more safe and legal routes. That does not mean we are giving way to massive inroads into the country, but it would take pressure off illegal, costly and hazardous routes.

I am concerned about the prevention of asylum for anyone entering the UK irregularly, because people will come in irregularly, particularly because we are closing down safe and legal routes. We are, as the refugee convention has made clear, in danger of extinguishing the right for refugees to seek refugee status here. Is that what we really want as a country?

I am concerned too at our turning our backs on the modern slavery legislation—the withdrawal of protections that we passed recently with such great pride, and in contravention of international law. Is that what we want to do as a country? I do not think we do. How does the withdrawal of the rights of modern slavery protection help our country?

I am concerned also about the rights of children. The treatment of children refugees is another massive area of concern, specifically a power given to the Secretary of State to deport child asylum seekers.

The thrust of this legislation should give us pause. We should be dealing with traffickers and providing protections from modern slavery and for children. We should uphold the principle of asylum, which needs to be restated.

I listened with great interest to the contribution from the most reverent Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was right to say that he would be bringing forward proposals in Committee to deal with some of the concerns that exist about the convention and the need to update it, as well as things to be done at an international level. I hope the Government will engage with him. We should take that offer positively so that we can improve this legislation, because there are massive improvements that need to be made.

16:53

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, 87 people originally signed up to speak in this debate, and I was one of them. There are slightly fewer now, but I know that if 187 had signed up I would still have wanted to add my name to those speaking on this issue, since its importance can hardly be exaggerated.

I share with noble Lords the fact that I am part of the delegation from the British Parliament to the Council of Europe, and I sit on its migration committee. I never thought that saying that would leave me feeling as if I should declare it as a conflict of interest, and yet today, faced with this legislation, I feel that the Council of Europe’s position is conflictual with the spirit of it.

Two or three years ago, I was asked to write a report to celebrate and commemorate the 70th anniversary of the 1951 convention. I consulted widely with people from the UNHCR and other United Nations agencies, as well as NGO bodies such as Amnesty International and others, and from countries around Europe. I produced my report; it was unanimously accepted by the migration committee and then went to a plenary session of the Council of Europe in Rome, where again it was accepted unanimously. Even at that time, it was possible to see and recognise—and to note in the report—that the arrangements of the 1951 convention were under pressure in various places, and in some countries were being eroded. But at that time it was possible to stand up, as a United Kingdom spokesperson, and feel that we could contribute positively to the need to do the necessary forms and tidying-up.

At the heart of the report are three basic principles: that when a refugee seeks refuge in this country, or any country, there should be, first, no penalisation; secondly, no discrimination; thirdly, no refoulement—no pushback. It would not be difficult, in the time remaining to me, to show how in this and previous legislation every one of those core principles has been either threatened or undermined, or quite simply pushed to the side. It is time for us to look again at our commitments. I am not a lawyer; I cannot do this from a legal point of view. But I believe that I and every Member of your Lordships’ House can understand those three principles without any difficulty, yet all of them are under threat and even worse.

Since I presented that report, the Ukraine war has happened. When I look at the considerably more than one million refugees in Poland and Germany as a consequence of that war, I almost feel ashamed at hearing the way that we cavil about the small number who are coming here. When the convention was drawn up, and largely at the hands of British lawyers in its present form, there followed its coming into being a meeting of what were called—quaintly—plenipotentiaries. Again, there was a significant British presence among them. They were clear that while the convention spelled out contractual arrangements to deal with the migration that everybody was having to look at, there should be generosity on the part of those furthest from the problems to help shoulder the burdens of those nearest them—the front-line states. Honestly, if that was true then, I cannot believe it is not true now.

As an accident of geography, we have a channel separating us from mainland Europe. We are already insured against the sorts of figures that I have mentioned for Germany and Poland. We pride ourselves on the number of people that we are taking in from Ukraine; it is nothing compared with what others are taking. Indeed, most international migration is dealt with by neighbouring countries absorbing the problem and taking people in. Turkey, a country for which I have mixed feelings, is doing heroic work in this regard.

We have not had pre-legislative scrutiny for the Bill, but only in February one of the Select Committees of this House produced its report, All Families Matter: An Inquiry into Family Migration. Clearly in there is a direct criticism of the direction of travel of our House and our Parliament on these issues now. Treat that as a piece of pre-legislative scrutiny and observe its strictures, and we would be far better off.

I must close. They say a Methodist minister preaches for at least 25 minutes, but I do my best. In the Times this morning and all over the radio we had the headline: “Don’t defy will of the people on migration bill, Peers warned”. The will of the people was expressed last Thursday, and it was not favourable to the people putting this Bill forward now. I suggest that it is time we recognise how radically this proposed piece of legislation eats into the spirit and values of the country we should all be proud to belong to.

17:00

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, and not only because we share a family background in south Wales. Given my legal background, I am going to focus on one issue. It is a legal issue, but an important one highlighted by my noble friend the Minister in opening this debate.

Last year the Government attempted to remove a small number of people to Rwanda. The group applied to court for an injunction to prevent their removal until the full challenge to the removal order had been adjudicated. That claim for interim relief failed three times. The Government won in the High Court, won again in the Court of Appeal and won for a third time in the Supreme Court.

However, the claimants applied to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. On 14 June last year a single, unidentified judge—we do not know who it was because these things are done anonymously —of the Strasbourg court indicated interim measures under rule 39 of that court’s rules to the effect that the claimants should not be removed from the UK until all the UK litigation had concluded.

The Government acted consistently with that rule 39 interim measure indicated by the Strasbourg court and did not remove the claimants. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, charges that in this Bill the Government seek to act contrary to the rule of law and their obligations under international law. So far as the Strasbourg court and rule 39 are concerned—my focus today—that is wrong for at least three reasons. The first reason is grounded in international law, the second reason is grounded in domestic law and the third reason goes to what the Bill actually says.

First, on international law, when we signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, we signed up to a written document that set out our obligations clearly. One of those obligations is in Article 46(1). We have to abide by a final judgment given by the Strasbourg court against the UK. But an indication under rule 39 is not a final judgement against the UK. Indeed, as the Strasbourg court recognises—see the rule 39 factsheet on its own website—in the convention itself, there is no jurisdiction to grant interim measures. That is not surprising. In 1949 a draft version of the convention included a power to grant provisional measures, but that did not find its way into the final text. As with Sherlock Holmes’s nocturnal dog that did not bark, sometimes it is the clause which is not in the contract which is in fact the most important. Rule 39 indications therefore rest on the court’s own decision in 2005 by a majority that it has jurisdiction to make them—overturning, I might add, the same court’s more forthright previous decisions that it did not have jurisdiction to make them.

The first point is that the Strasbourg court’s jurisdiction to grant rule 39 indications is itself questionable. That, no doubt, is why they are called indications and not injunctions or orders. I invite my noble friend the Minister to confirm that, although historically the UK has taken on board the indications of the Strasbourg court under rule 39—no doubt for good political reasons—that is not because we have a treaty obligation to do so. We do not.

Secondly, not abiding by a rule 39 indication is not a breach of our domestic law. The Strasbourg court attempts to ground rule 39 indications in Article 34 of the convention, but the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the convention into our domestic law, deliberately excluded Article 34. To pick up a point made by Professor Ekins KC in his recent Policy Exchange paper, that is important. A civil servant is bound by Acts of Parliament, and it is no answer for a civil servant to refuse to do something ordered by a Minister, on the authority of this Parliament, because it might, or might arguably, involve a breach of international law. We are a dualist state, and international treaties have no application in domestic law, unless and until they are given effect by this Parliament.

Thirdly and finally, the Bill does not require a Minister to refuse to give effect to a rule 39 indication, although I accept that the default position is that the duty to remove takes priority. The Bill gives a Minister discretion that is to be exercised personally. As my noble friend the Minister pointed out, Clause 53(5) sets out specific points to which the Minister should have regard. These include whether the UK was given an opportunity to make submissions before, or after, the rule 39 indication was made; the “form” of the measure; and its “likely duration”. These are all pretty basic points, you might think, but they have to be made because they are currently not part of the procedures of the Strasbourg court. Were it to adopt the fairly basic procedures that we have in this jurisdiction surrounding the making of injunctions, a large part of the problem would go away. Therefore, the solution is likely to be, at least in part, in a reform of the procedures of the Strasbourg court. I noted with interest that Robert Jenrick indicated that the Government now have a renewed and focused engagement with that court, which I welcome very much.

However, for the reasons I stated, the Bill’s provisions on interim measures engender no breach of the rule of law, no failure to meet our international commitments and no requirement for Ministers to ignore the decisions of judges. For those reasons, if the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, pushes his amendment to a vote, I urge the House to reject it.

17:07

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, on Saturday morning, I watched the Coronation. The ceremony affirmed that we are an inclusive and humane country that aspires to be a community in which people of all religions and ethnicities live harmoniously together. The King swore to govern the people with justice and mercy. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London read, from St Luke’s Gospel, of how Christ came

“to heal the brokenhearted … to set at liberty them that are bruised”.

The ceremony was uplifting and made me proud to be British. On Saturday afternoon, I turned to considering what I might say about the Illegal Migration Bill. It was depressing and made me ashamed of our Government.

The Bill is merciless. It removes modern slavery protections and deprives people fleeing suffering and persecution of any realistic possibility of refuge in our country. The Home Secretary prated of our “proud and extensive tradition” of offering refuge, even as she introduced legislation that repudiates that tradition. Under pressure from MPs, the Government have said that new safe and legal routes for asylum seekers will be opened; we will see what they offer. They have made it clear that they will not set up a scheme for people fleeing Sudan, and they are making it as difficult as possible even for Sudanese entitled to family reunion in the UK. The Bill as it is creates a Kafkaesque regime under which asylum seekers who enter the UK illegally are immediately to be deported and never again permitted to apply for asylum here, while there are no safe and legal routes for entry for almost all asylum seekers.

The Bill is particularly cruel towards children. Asylum seekers under the age of 18 will be separated from their parents; they will be detained until they are 18 and then deported. During their detention, they will be subject to a special regime administered by the Home Office. The Home Office does not have the skills to look after children. Too much of what we know about the character of the Home Office and its contractors tells us that their so-called care of these vulnerable children will be brutal.

We have been shocked by reports of the squalid and demoralising conditions in which asylum seekers are forced to exist: in seedy hotels, with filthy food, in enforced idleness and, on occasion, besieged by racist mobs. The prospect the Bill provides is of traumatised, frightened people warehoused in putative detention centres for far longer than the 28 days envisaged, while official incompetence perpetuates their limbo. If the Government succeed in deporting these poor people, it will most likely be to Rwanda, a country with a terrible history of racial strife and where human rights are not respected. Only this Government could describe Rwanda as a safe country.

The Prime Minister is obsessed with “stopping the boats”. Presumably, this is a dead cat tactic to distract attention from the Government’s failure to turn the tide of net migration running at half a million a year. He calculates that it will make his party popular among red wall voters, readers of red top papers and people who have been given to understand by the Home Secretary that the arrival of asylum seekers in small boats is an “invasion”. The stratagem did not seem to work last Thursday in the local elections.

I remind the proponents of this legislation that Mrs Thatcher used to say that, in politics, you have a choice: you can appeal to the better part of human nature or the worse. She was no softy, but she did not practise cruelty out of a cynical notion of electoral expediency. She would have understood that the policy will not work at any level. The asylum seekers will not be deterred from getting into the boats, because they will not know what our law is, and the people traffickers will continue to take their money and shove them out to sea.

True leadership would remind us that we have a duty of compassion and help to people thus broken-hearted and bruised. It would also explain that, historically, our country has been greatly enriched by immigration, that we now need an influx of young, enterprising, resilient people to eke out the demographic imbalance of our ageing population, and that we should therefore invest in the asset that asylum seekers are. On that basis, a leader can decently accept that both the pace and amount of immigration must be controlled and go on to acknowledge that there are indeed problems with the operation of the European Court of Human Rights and with the open-ended commitment of the UN Convention on Refugees, framed in very different circumstances in 1951. The way to address these problems is not to breach international law or, in effect, to secede but to engage in serious negotiations to achieve reform.

I am ashamed, too, of the Government’s attitude to justice; the Bill reprises their familiar contempt for the courts and their resentment of judicial review. In this legislation, the Home Secretary is seeking to make human rights claims inadmissible, to remove the practical possibility of appeal, and to curtail the oversight of our domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights. If we consider the brazen statement by the Home Secretary that she cannot certify that the Bill is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, together with the obvious breaches in the Bill of the UN Convention on Refugees and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is clear that the Government disdain the rule of law. The Bill is disgusting and demeans us all.

17:13

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport. I will address the Minister’s introduction to the Bill, when he stated that, if the Bill is to be effective as a deterrent, the extreme measures in it are necessary. So the Bill is, very clearly, the Government’s response to address their often-stated, firmly-held belief that, in the argument of pull versus push factors in the reasons for migration, the pull factor is most relevant. In short, the Government believe that people risk life and limb, of themselves and their families, and get into flimsy boats to the UK without serviceable life jackets because the pull factors of life in the UK are irresistible.

However, this argument is deeply flawed. I say that that because every study that has ever been carried out on the subject clearly shows that, while the argument holds some truth when applied to voluntary migration, it utterly falls apart when applied to those who are escaping the unimaginable horror of conflict, famine and persecution. The Government’s own research shows this but, inexplicably, this research is no longer available online. In November 2021, the Guardian reported that the then Home Office Minister, Chris Philp, argued that accepting asylum seekers

“creates a pull factor where migrants are incentivised to undertake dangerous and illegal journeys”,

but the Home Office refused to release the report that that statement was based on. In response to this refusal to publish the evidence, a Médecins Sans Frontières spokesperson said

“The reality is that ‘pull factors’ are a myth - people who are fleeing persecution or conflict don’t need any further incentive to look for safety. It is hard to see why the government would refuse to share evidence that supports its plans - the only conclusion to draw is that they know their arguments don’t stand up”.


In fact, previous Home Office research into asylum seekers’ decision-making appears to undermine the pull factor argument for harsher policies, saying that asylum seekers

“are guided more by agents, the presence or absence of family and friends, language, and perceived cultural affinities than by scrutiny of asylum policies or rational evaluation of the welfare benefits on offer”.

The link to this report appears to have been taken down. Will the Minister look into this? In fact, it would be informative if the Government would publish all reports and advice, including legal advice, on which the Bill was put together, as requested also by my noble friend Lord German.

What we do know, however, from sector analysis, partly based, in fact, on the Home Office’s own data, is that more than two-thirds of people who cross the channel in small boats are judged to be genuine refugees and, on appeal, are allowed to remain—contradicting a government claim that 70% of small boats arrivals

“are not genuine asylum seekers”.

A compassionate Government would put in place genuine safe and legal routes for these genuine asylum seekers, and then seek to break the business model of the people smugglers. The Bill seeks to do neither.

I spent a lot of time in the Calais Jungle before it was demolished and burned to the ground in 2016. The people I met there, mostly from Sudan, Afghanistan and Syria, had no other thought than to get to the UK. They had overcome unbelievable odds to reach the English Channel and they would not be defeated now that they were within sight of its shores. Their logic was simple. The smugglers were the ones they trusted, because they wanted to help them in their aim; the French were their enemy, because they wanted to stop them, often quite brutally; Britain, in contrast, they believed, wanted them. What were they supposed to believe, when each DfID—as was, now FCDO—sack, box or pallet is emblazoned with a union jack and the words “UK Aid”, ensuring all recipients knew whom to thank for their charity?

They were right in one respect: the British people are overwhelmingly supportive of refugees. The Bill is not representative of British people. Britain is a country that has shown, time and again, that it welcomes refugees. If the Government truly want to do the right thing, they will work with international bodies, such as the IOM and the UNHCR, to support decent refugee camps in the affected regions, camps that offer the dignity of work, education and health facilities. They should make a serious effort to address the real cause of the misery of people forced into such desperate actions, the push factors behind the mass movement of people today—push factors such as desertification, flooding and extreme weather events the like of which we have never seen before. They should invest urgently in mitigation and adaptation measures against the ravages of climate change.

17:20

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I declare a specific interest as a member and former chair of the Cambridge Woolf Institute’s independent Commission on the Integration of Refugees. I resigned as chair to be able fully to participate in the proceedings on this Bill.

I have listened with great care to all the speeches we have heard so far. I particularly agree with those of my noble and learned friend Lord Etherton and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier. I recognise that the numbers of unprocessed asylum seekers and refugees speak for themselves. There should not be so many; there should not be a backlog of the kind that we have. I agree with the Government to this extent: we need changes in asylum policy, management and possibly the law. However, I agree with others that the changes to the law proposed in this Bill are neither necessary nor proportionate.

I listened with great care to the interesting and persuasive speech by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, on rule 39 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That should be changed not through this Bill but through discussion in the Council of Europe, which is the appropriate organisation. Knowing his skill as an advocate, I can imagine him persuading courts that the British Government have been right in many cases to stick to decisions given under rule 39 because of the precedent they have set in doing so. This is not the place to deal with it.

I was concerned to hear some highly respected Peers whom I admire enormously suggesting that, because the House of Commons has passed this Bill, we are obliged to do so. Indeed, it led me during the short adjournment to play the game of cross-examining ChatGPT to see whether I could get it to agree with any of those propositions. I am sorry to say to those Peers that I failed; ChatGPT has consistently come up with something like, “The Members of the House of Lords are appointed to provide scrutiny and review of legislation passed by the House of Commons. They also act as a consultative body, providing expertise in various fields to assist in decision-making. Additionally, they may participate in debates and question government Ministers on policy issues”. Perhaps even former Cabinet Ministers should turn to ChatGPT before they decide to join your Lordships’ House. We have the duty, never mind the right, to do just what ChatGPT has insisted to me that we should.

Surely it is an imperative of sound public policy that it should enjoy an unimpeachable ethical and legal foundation. Where on the moral ground does this stand? The noble Lord, Lord German, reminded us of the title page of this Bill. If he or I in moving an amendment in Committee said, “I am unable to say that my amendment is compatible with convention rights but nevertheless I wish the Committee to proceed with it”—exactly the words on the front page of the Bill—the Minister, whoever it was, would shout me down for the effrontery of trying to break the law during a debate. But that is what the Government are doing. They should not get away with it. They are deliberately breaking the law.

How big is the problem we are dealing with? Has it been exaggerated by political rhetoric? My noble friend Lord Green, perhaps an unlikely source, reminded us that asylum seekers are a small proportion of immigrants, and the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, referred in her excellent speech to the figures in other countries, such as France, Germany, Italy and, above all, the United States. Why do we have this problem? Has it come upon us secretly in the night? Of course not; it is the result of years of failures by the Government to deal with the predictable and to reform the processing of refugees within existing law. To reform the law, they want to break the law—a most extraordinary proposition, particularly to the revising Chamber. Surely breaking the law should be the last resort.

We should not flatter totalitarians by imitating their addictions. I think we should have a Committee stage on this Bill, during which we will show the Government how this work can be achieved much more empirically and efficiently. I hope to be able to play a part in doing so.

17:25

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My Lords, illegal small boats crossing the channel see desperate people putting their own lives, and those of their families, at risk, and profit criminal organisations. It is clear from all contributions to this debate that our immigration and asylum system needs significant review. I acknowledge that the Government are attempting to address some of these problems in this Bill, and that it is an incredibly complex situation.

In order for the measures in this Bill to have a chance of success, there are two fundamental issues to be addressed. The first issue is the unacceptable backlog of immigration and asylum claims. There are many reasons to regret this—the human cost for those claiming asylum and for the local authorities and communities trying to cope with long and unjustifiable waiting times, and the spiralling economic cost to the public purse and the impact this is having on our international work, as aid funding is diverted. Dealing with the backlog is essential, both so that this long delay does not act as a pull factor and to free up capacity at local and national level to provide sanctuary to those most in genuine need. Can my noble friend the Minister provide any update on what progress has been made towards the Prime Minister’s pledge to clear the backlog by the end of this year?

The second fundamental issue is that of safe and legal routes. Of course we cannot and should not take in all of those who wish to come to the UK, but we can and should continue to play our part in helping some of the world’s most vulnerable people. I am sure my noble friend the Minister will point to our generous schemes for Ukraine and Hong Kong, and indeed they are to be commended, but we must not forget about the rest of the world. Here, our recent record is not so impressive. Last year, only 1,185 people were resettled in the UK under the UNHCR global resettlement scheme; that includes the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, which has resettled only 22 people in the UK. In his opening remarks my noble friend used these examples and others of existing safe and legal routes, but the ones he listed do not work and are not sufficient.

The Government have made some progress on this issue in the other place, thanks to Tim Loughton MP and others, though I hope to hear more about how the mechanisms will work as the Bill progresses. I agree that we need practical and thought-through plans, but without clearer ambitions and proper support for local authorities I worry that we will end up doing less than we can and should do.

I acknowledge that safe and legal routes will not stop the demand for illegal boat crossings, but that does not make them irrelevant to this Bill. We must not be in a situation where, because of this Bill, we are closing our borders without opening proper safe and legal routes. I look forward to discussing improvements to the Bill to ensure that these routes function appropriately.

I hope that during the passage of this Bill we can make progress on the detention of children and pregnant women. As we have heard, the Bill removes the prevention of routine detention of children and their families which has been Government policy since 2011 and was enshrined in law in the Immigration Act 2014. That was an achievement that had cross-party support and should be left as it is.

I hope the Government will seriously consider deleting from this Bill the power for the Secretary of State to remove an unaccompanied child. I appreciate that the Government have made some amendments on child detention, again thanks in no small part to Tim Loughton MP. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for confirming that details on detention time limits for children will be set out during the passage of the Bill. I hope that this will be a direct replacement of the 24-hour limit that was put in place by the Immigration Act 2014. Can my noble friend the Minister say if we will also see the details of the circumstances under which unaccompanied children may be detained, and the progress on how and where the Government plan to accommodate those children once identified?

As we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, since 2016 there has been a 72-hour time limit on the detention of pregnant women. This ended the practice of detention for weeks, and sometimes months, which caused huge harm to women and their unborn babies. This Bill removes that protection. Will my noble friend consider amendments to retain it?

Finally, can my noble friend the Minister say whether any progress has been made on the consideration of arguments made in the other place by Theresa May MP and others on exempting victims of modern slavery? I understand the need to ensure that the legislation is not used to make false claims by those crossing in small boats, but we must ensure that actual victims who are being exploited here in the UK are able to report this abuse without fear of deportation.

Finally finally, as I have a little extra time, my noble friend will be well aware of the concerns from many eminent Members of your Lordships’ House, the UNHCR and many others that, as the Bill stands, it would breach the UK’s obligations under international refugee law. I hope that during the passage of the Bill the Government will be able to reassure noble Lords that it does not breach international law or international obligations, including the European Convention on Human Rights. That is not a position we should be in.

17:30

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, and I agree with a very great deal of what she said. I simply emphasise again some particularly disturbing elements of the Bill, declaring an interest as an advisory board member of the British Institute of Human Rights. The word “illegal” does indeed characterise it. Even the Home Secretary considers that it “may be incompatible” with the Human Rights Act. It also contravenes an astonishing number of legal instruments we are party to, as well as our own laws. To instance the most egregious, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees describes

“a clear breach of the Refugee Convention”

in the disqualifying nature of the mode of arrival, as my noble friend Lord Dubs noted.

As a former trustee of UNICEF UK, I note that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child’s concept of the “best interests of children”, incorporated into our law, is so drastically qualified as to be undermined by Clauses 2, 3, 4, 21, 22 and 31. The common-law right of access to justice and its reflection in the European Convention on Human Rights provisions for a fair trial is impaired in numerous ways in the Bill, not least with the power of removal and prohibition of ever applying for asylum or even entering the UK. The undermining of the Modern Slavery Act in Clause 21 arguably means that a trafficked person can either go to the authorities and be removed or stay with the trafficker and let the abuse continue. The Bill is even retrospective in its application, which is another departure from a principle of justice.

What has prompted this extraordinary and unprecedented break with tradition and the rule of law, which we usually see as a conservative principle? The Prime Minister cites the small boats crossing the channel. But, of course, the Bill’s reach goes far beyond those to any arrival by so-called irregular means, whether or not a safe legal route is available, which there is not, apart from in the case of Afghanistan, to a degree, Syria, Ukraine and Hong Kong. I ask the Minister—he is not in his place, but I hope that somebody is noting this—what the legal route is for people fleeing well-grounded fears of persecution in Iran, Eritrea or Sudan.

My noble friends Lord Dubs, Lord Rooker and Lord Browne of Ladyton referred to humanist refugees. How can the Government describe Nigeria as safe for a humanist refugee when the Nigerian Government maintain the death penalty for blasphemy—along with 10 other countries on the Bill’s “safe country” list in Schedule 1—and when they have sentenced the president of the country’s humanist association to 24 years in prison?

This law’s apparent departure from conservatism has not escaped several Conservative Members of the other place. They may be thinking of their 2019 manifesto, which said:

“We will continue to grant asylum … to refugees fleeing persecution”.


My noble friend Lord Coaker, in his stirring speech, cited former Prime Minister Theresa May and former Attorney-General Sir Geoffrey Cox KC suggesting that Parliament was being asked to approve a deliberate breach of our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. Outside Parliament, the Children’s Commissioner, appointed by this Government, said:

“My worry is it will make traffickers even bolder”.


Yet again, undemocratically wide powers are given to the Executive, in eight clauses by my reckoning, some of which amount to arbitrary power. Surely the real abuse in our dealing with asylum is the horrific backlog in clearing applications, which are anyway very many fewer than in comparable western countries. This is itself, arguably, a denial of rights—and it is so incompetently managed.

The laws that this Bill seeks to overthrow were not made to add bureaucracy. They were hammered out by the governments and peoples of the world to shape how we deal with crises without losing essential values. Those values, of fairness in the application of law, of recognition of people’s essential needs and of our common humanity, are not the ones expressed by this Bill. This Government should not assume that they share the values of the British people. I am not sure that they even share mainstream Conservative values. What does the noble Lord the Minister think?

Finally, the Bill is at odds, as it stands, with practical sense. Practical ways to deal with the quest of refugees for safety would include safe legal routes, as so many noble Lords have said, thus undermining recourse to people smugglers, and competent processes to deal with applications in a timely fashion. Surely we are capable of that.

17:36

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. I will focus today on how this Bill will affect some of the health and medical decisions relating to asylum seekers. I thank the many organisations that have provided briefings.

Given the worrying nature of the Section 4 support under this Bill, can the Minister assure your Lordships’ House that basic but proper healthcare will be provided to prevent a repetition of last autumn, when Suella Braverman stopped the dispersal of asylum seekers from the Manston and Jet Foil centres? The Minister will remember well that, as they became overcrowded and diphtheria and scabies spread rapidly, it became clear that there were not adequate health resources—until there was a major crisis and a public scandal.

This should not have been a surprise. The Home Secretary was warned of this months earlier in the Chief Inspector of Prisons’ unannounced inspection report, which said:

“Governance of health care processes was weak … The care pathway lacked coordination or clinical leadership and there were no policies, protocols or governance of clinical standards.”


Can the Minister assure your Lordships’ House that this will never happen again?

As highlighted by other speakers, including the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, this Bill is also severely problematic for pregnant refugees. The previous Government’s 72-hour time limit on detention of pregnant women not only protected them and their unborn babies but resulted in the number of pregnant women in detention falling dramatically. This Bill would remove that limit and offer no exemption for those who are pregnant. Doctors and healthcare staff are horrified. There is also a real concern that the Bill in its current form is likely to increase the number of pregnant women in the UK who are charged for their maternity care, and we know that that impacts on maternal and foetal health. Doctors are also very concerned that offshoring—whether Rwanda or barges—is disruptive and possibly dangerous for women’s access to safe antenatal and postnatal care.

To turn now to the health of children, it is well documented that children seeking asylum are likely to face the worst childhood experiences possible, including physical and sexual violence, persecution, torture, xploitation, separation from parents and even witnessing parental death. In the Lancet, experts in child and adolescent health said:

“Rather than supporting these children, the UK’s new migration policies could cause further harm. The Illegal Migration Bill will violate the rights of children seeking asylum, undermine the Children Act, create safeguarding risks, and exacerbate the toxic stress experienced by children seeking asylum who arrive in the UK by irregular routes. As a signatory of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UK risks reneging on its commitment.”


On mental health, Dr Adrian James, the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, says that

“this new legislation will have potentially devastating consequences for the mental health of those seeking asylum in the UK. Many of these people will have experienced significant trauma in the countries from which they have fled.”

He goes on to say that not only is the Bill incompatible with the 1951 refugee convention but it

“is not compatible with the fundamental medical principle of doing no harm and we therefore consider it to be unethical.”

Earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, talked of a teenage asylum seeker with some soft stubble, and Clause 56 on age assessments proposes that biological tests be carried out to assess age. Last year, the then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, convened a committee of experts to assess whether biological tests, including X-rays, could confirm whether someone was 18 or under. The resulting report from the expert committee warned that there was

“no infallible method for either biological or social-worker-led age assessment that will provide a perfect match to chronological age”.

This was confirmed by the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who said:

“Paediatricians have said time and time again that age assessment by examination and X-rays is imprecise and unethical. Scientific evidence shows that pubertal assessment and bone age assessment are unreliable indicators of age and therefore cannot be used … I think it is highly questionable whether consent can even be freely given in these types of situations”.


Who will decide this highly contentious medical matter, and why are the Government not following the advice of their own expert committee, which believes that it does not and cannot work?

This Bill is not just morally unacceptable, although it is. It does not deal with traffickers and smugglers. Is the Minister serious that the Bill will stop them? It does not speed up the Home Office process of assessment of applications, which is urgent and long overdue. It does not create safe and legal routes, but it clearly breaches the 1951 convention. Our Government should be ashamed. Doctors tell us that it is unethical and unworkable. This Bill is inhuman and a danger to those who are fleeing for their lives. It is not how our country has responded to refugees for hundreds of years, and it should not progress. I will support my noble friend’s amendment tonight.

17:42

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, these are unprecedented times. Last year, we had more than 40,000 illegal immigrants arriving in small boats. This year, the numbers will undoubtedly be greater. We cannot stand by and do nothing. It is not fair on those who seek to come here lawfully; it is not fair on the local authorities which have to accommodate people who have no homes to which to go. If we do not adopt some form of firm deterrence, the numbers will magnify. Those coming pay money to smugglers which is then recycled in organised crime. That chain has to be broken.

We all have sympathy for the circumstances which many leave, but that does not justify jumping the queue or pushing this country beyond its practical limits, especially when, in many cases, they come from safe countries. We owe duties of care to those who come here lawfully and to our own citizens.

First, I suggest that the Government accelerate forcefully the rate at which they process asylum claims. The rate at which it is done is lamentable and painfully slow. That is a practical step which has nothing to do with the Bill.

The Government are none the less right to act. Let me address just a few of the concerns raised. First, there is the question of treaty obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. I refer, of course, to Rule 39 interim orders. It cannot be that the Strasbourg court should grant an interim order of indefinite duration without hearing from the British Government either first or at least soon after as to why such an order is inappropriate. That is contrary to how we do things in our jurisdiction under common law, contrary to our traditions and contrary to fairness. An affected party should be heard either before an order is made or, in a case of urgency, at least as soon as practicable thereafter, and that is a lamentable gap. Importantly, following on from that, the Bill does not oblige the Minister to ignore the interim order, but it will give him or her the option. Nor, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, will that make the Minister in breach of international law. Fortunately, we have also heard that the Government are engaged in constructive dialogue with the Strasbourg court on reforms to the process, so I hope this will be resolved, but we should not be afraid of that provision in the Bill.

Next, I turn to modern slavery. I ask the Government to look again at the amendment advanced in another place by the right honourable Members for Maidenhead and for Chingford and Woodford Green. In particular, those who are already here must not be trapped in true slavery; they must not be trapped underground and abused by criminals and others.

Lastly, I address safe and legal routes. Global safe and legal routes are available for people from any country, and some 50,000 people have come here via those safe routes since 2015. Country-specific safe and legal routes—the schemes for Afghanistan, Ukraine, Hong Kong and Syria—have together provided for some 430,000 people in the same period. The Government must work to expand that network. Only when numbers moderate, however—and I am talking here of the asylum seekers whom the Bill addresses—can we treat new arrivals with the welcome which we would wish. We just have too many to cope with.

To conclude, the Bill addresses complex and difficult problems. This House must not run away from working to solve them, and I am afraid that too many speeches I have heard today point to the difficulties which we face and some of the legal problems which the Bill raises but do not provide constructive solutions. This Bill is the way forward, but no doubt it can be improved. While we examine it carefully, we must not wreck it. The problems are too great and too important to be left untouched. We cannot go on as we are; this Bill must go forward.

17:47

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, this is a Government of divide and rule. Although they have not had many successes over the past few months, they have been moderately successful in that. They attack the leftie lawyers and judges who uphold the law, and they attack environmentalists for their common-sense demands of ensuring a safe, secure future for planet and people. Above all, they attack the immigrants, the foreigners, because they hope it will win them votes. I am afraid it does not, and I should have thought, judging from the local election results last week, the Government would know that their policies are not popular any more.

This Bill is one of the worst in a constant stream, a slurry, of bad Bills, and it really needs to go under. I will be voting for the fatal amendment. I understand where Labour is coming from with its idea about improving it, but if we push it back today, it cannot come back for 13 months, which is worth doing because, who knows, this Government could be out of power by then, and Labour would obviously not bring in anything like this.

There are four huge problems, which I will outline. First, the Bill breaks the law. It is not just that this Government are out to break the Geneva convention and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to both of which Great Britain was a founding signatory; it is not just that the Government are trashing a British tradition of welcoming those fleeing war, terror and persecution but it is the ecstatic glee with which the Home Secretary watches the building of barracks in Rwanda and dreams of locking up those who have committed the crime of being desperate and vulnerable.

Theresa May pointed out that we would be encouraging crimes. She said that

“we are shutting the door on victims who are being trafficked into slavery here in the UK”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/3/23; col 593.]

The UNHCR has commented that is “profoundly concerned” by what the UK Government are doing and:

“This would be a clear breach of the Refugee Convention and would undermine a longstanding, humanitarian tradition of which the British people are rightly proud”.


So it breaks laws, international and domestic—so much for the party of law and order.

Secondly, let us put aside for a moment the humanitarian considerations in the Bill, even though the Bill is cruel, inhumane and just plain nasty, and will inflict pain and suffering on thousands of people. Let us be practical. The Bill will not work. The whole thing is dubious in the way it will be operated. Do the Government seriously think that they are going to deport hundreds and thousands of people without protest and opposition? It just will not happen.

The former head of the British Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt—the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt—has attacked the Government’s plan to send migrants to Rwanda, saying that Rwanda is still living under the “shadow of genocide”. He was in Rwanda as Chief of the General Staff in 2009 and sits on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on War Crimes, which looks into those who participated in the Rwandan genocide. He has argued that it is

“unwise to send people from all over the world to a nation still recovering from the political violence that ravaged it in the 1990s”.

That sounds like a disorganised country to me; it certainly does not sound safe. Perhaps the Minister could explain his criteria for a safe country. I would argue that, when you face opposition from someone who is a pillar of the establishment, you have a problem.

I am sure that the Government have done their sums on this—including on detention, accommodation, flights, payments to other countries and policing protests —to me, it sounds extremely expensive. I would like to know what the cost is per person if all this works out.

Thirdly, the Bill is the opposite of what the UK needs. These asylum seekers could be a drain on resources—but only if your country is not short of a million workers, which we are. These immigrants are a burden only if you do not let them work and pay taxes. Do they cause longer queues for the NHS in hospitals and GP surgeries? No. In fact, these people seeking a new life are part of the solution to the NHS waiting lists. Dr Waheed Arian, an NHS medic and himself a child refugee and trauma survivor, says:

“It’s immigration that’s keeping the NHS just about alive”.


The Government have fooled some people into thinking that we are full up and that too many resources would be used by asylum seekers but the pressure on our NHS, our schools, our public services and our asylum system is coming from deliberate underfunding and careless privatisation by the Conservative Government. We have an ageing population and not enough young people coming through to pay our pensions or keep the economy functioning. We need immigration.

Fourthly, the Bill breaks our democratic system. This Government try constantly to avoid parliamentary scrutiny of their measures, both with this Bill and with others. They subvert democracy to make it easier to enact laws that would be deeply unpopular, giving power to Ministers when they should really be held to account by Parliament. We have had this argument many times in the past few years, with more and more skeleton Bills coming through that allow Ministers incredible freedom to decide for us all.

The BMA has said that it

“supports the development of a single, fair, humane and effective refugee system, in keeping with our obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law, including rights to necessary and appropriate health care irrespective of an individual’s route into the UK”.

Before the Minister asks whether we Greens have an alternative, let me say this: well, yes, of course we do. We have a fair and humane refugee and asylum policy, which is the result of a long period of research and is fully costed—possibly unlike the Government’s scheme. Noble Lords should remember that Greens are actually very good on finance and the economy because we have so little money and we spend it extremely wisely.

In short, the Bill is not the solution to any problem. It is impractical, expensive, cruel and undemocratic, with criminal tendencies. It will not work. I suggest that the Government have a rethink.

17:53

[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, I should perhaps declare an interest as someone who has experience of fleeing their home and country of origin.

I share my noble friend the Minister’s desire to see a fair, safe and controlled immigration and asylum system. I am grateful to him for speaking to me about the Bill. However, I do not believe, I am afraid, that the Bill is likely to be successful in its stated goals or is moral at its core.

I have three particular concerns: on modern slavery; on the rule of law; and on our international standing and commitments. First, modern slavery is an area where this party and this Government have led the way in the past. As other noble Lords have already warned, the provision to remove modern slavery protections for migrants is deeply worrying. Our former Prime Minister, Theresa May, who delivered much of our modern slavery legislation, noted that, as it stands, the Bill

“will consign victims to remaining in slavery”

and

“will give the slave drivers and traffickers another weapon to hold people in … slavery and exploitation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/4/23; col. 809.]

It will remove protections from the very people most at risk of being trafficked and force them underground, preventing them from coming forward to report. Rather than providing a deterrent, it would make it harder to identify and prosecute people traffickers who bring people into the United Kingdom illegally.

Secondly, on the rule of law, I am concerned by the limits that the Bill places on judicial oversight, both domestic and international. I am alarmed by any measure that gives the Government unchecked power to detain—including children, reversing a measure implemented by the coalition Government—and deems human rights claims inadmissible in courts. Restricting the oversight and appeal role of the British courts is a worrying precedent. Threatening to ignore judgments of the European Court of Human Rights breaches our international obligations and undermines an important institution that was created by British lawyers in the aftermath of the atrocities of the Second World War and which has been at the forefront of efforts to uphold the rule of law across Europe, including in relation to Russia.

The UN Refugee Agency has been clear that by, in effect, banning asylum claims in the United Kingdom and removing all safeguards on refoulement, the Bill breaches the UK’s international legal obligations under the refugee convention, the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and international human rights law, and would significantly undermine the international refugee protection system. It is also worth stressing that the Bill, building on the Nationality and Borders Act, does not only prevent people who arrive on small boats accessing the asylum system; it prevents people who arrive by perfectly safe methods—even those who come with a visa—from claiming asylum. In practice, it closes down the UK’s asylum system.

This feeds directly into my third point, which is about the effect of the Bill on our international commitments and international co-operation. Two months ago, the Integrated Review Refresh 2023 noted that the United Kingdom

“has a higher interest in an open and stable international order … based on respect for the UN Charter and international law”.

It recognised that this

“creates the optimum conditions in which the UK can secure its interests”

and

“helps us deal with challenges like migration”.

Undermining the jurisdiction of international courts and ignoring our international legal commitments does not serve our interests. The only way to tackle global, transnational challenges such as immigration is through international law, co-operation and shared responsibility. Leading a race to the bottom where we all try to offload our obligations on to others will not help, bearing in mind that 74% of all refugees worldwide are hosted by low- and middle-income countries with far fewer resources than our nation.

In March, the Home Secretary said that

“there are 100 million people around the world who could qualify for protection under our current laws. Let us be clear: they are coming here”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/3/23; col. 152.]

She must be aware that more than half of that population are internally displaced people who have not left their country of origin. Of the 34 million refugees globally, three-quarters are hosted by neighbouring countries. When the alternative is torture, death or starvation, refugees will seek to cross whatever obstacles are placed in front of them. If we want to reduce the pressure on our borders, we need to put more energy into diplomacy, international partnership and co-operation to address the conflicts and other root causes that are forcing people to flee.

Just over a year ago, I led a debate calling for increased support for Ukrainian refugees. I said:

“No one wants to become a refugee or to leave their home; it is a journey of fear, uncertainty, peril and loss”.—[Official Report, 6/4/22; col. GC 295.]


I reflected on the extraordinary support that I received 30 years ago and which I saw being extended by people across the United Kingdom to Ukrainian refugees. I hoped that we could take the lessons learned from our compassionate response to Ukraine. Instead, we face an outright ban on asylum. For most refugees, safe and legal pathways to the United Kingdom do not exist.

We should seek to build an asylum and immigration system based on the rule of law and dignity, of sustainable systems which could be replicated globally. His Majesty’s Government should always defend international law, which makes us all safer, including the right to asylum. We should create the long-promised safe routes for refugees, address the asylum backlog so that decisions are made quickly and firmly but fairly and not arbitrarily, and strengthen international co-operation to reduce the push factors, from climate change to insecurity, which drive people to make perilous journeys in search of safety. That is how we will end the dangerous channel crossings.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I suggest that the debate be now adjourned until 7 pm.

Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 10th May 2023 Lords Chamber

Commons Amendment

18:00

Motion A

Moved by

[Earl Howe]

That this House do not insist on its Amendment 10E to which the Commons have disagreed and do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 10F in lieu.

10F: Page 6, line 27, at end insert—
“(2) In subsection (1), “loss” means loss of any kind (pecuniary or non-pecuniary).
(3) A person may bring proceedings under subsection (1) only if—
(a) the person has brought a complaint relating to the same subject matter as the proceedings under a relevant complaints scheme, and
(b) a decision has been made under that scheme as to the extent to which the complaint was justified.
(4) Each of the following is a “relevant complaints scheme”—
(a) the scheme provided by virtue of Schedule 6A (the free speech complaints scheme), and
(b) the scheme for the review of qualifying complaints (within the meaning of section 12 of the Higher Education Act 2004) that is provided by the designated operator (within the meaning of section 13(5)(b) of that Act).
(5) Subsection (3) does not apply where the civil proceedings under subsection (1) are for an injunction only.”

[Earl Howe (Con)]

My Lords, we return to consider the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill for what I hope will be the final time. I thank noble Lords once again for the insightful debates that we have had on this important Bill, which is designed to ensure that the higher education sector in England is protected from the chilling effects of cancel culture which have been taking hold on campuses and in other areas of our society.

As noble Lords will recall, the statutory tort has generated some animated debate in this House. I am glad that we have now all agreed that this crucial measure should remain part of the Bill, though the final wording remains for consideration. On 2 May, the other place accepted this House’s Amendments 10B, 10C and 10D, which noble Lords voted to include in the Bill on 21 March. Mirroring Amendment 10E and building on these amendments, the Government tabled further amendments which seek to satisfy both Houses as well as academics and advocates of free of speech. These are what are now before us to consider.

The proposed new subsection (2) deals with an issue that we have discussed in this House before, in response to an amendment tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton. I said on Report that loss

“is not limited to pecuniary loss and could include damage to reputation, for example”.—[Official Report, 7/12/22; col. 207]

This amendment simply makes this point clear in the Bill. Proposed new subsections (3) and (4) mirror this House’s Amendment 10E, and (5) adds a helpful nuance to our already agreed position, that civil proceedings should be a last resort once the complaints schemes of the Office for Students or the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education have been exhausted.

Some Members of the other place expressed concern that the Bill, as returned to them from this House, would prevent individuals from seeking an injunction where swift action is required to rectify a breach of the specified freedom of speech duties. For example, if a student is expelled from their course by a higher education provider because of a freedom of speech issue, this amendment would mean that the court could make an order requiring the provider to let the student back on the course immediately, thereby avoiding the need for the individual to put their life on hold and delay pursuing their studies, which would otherwise ensue.

In a case such as this, a recommendation made by the OfS or the OIA may simply come too late to avoid such damage. We believe that such cases are likely to be rare. Seeking an injunction is financially costly. Injunctions are a discretionary remedy and the courts do not grant them easily. We are clear that the overwhelming majority of complaints that allege a breach of the freedom of speech duties will proceed, as has always been envisaged, via the schemes that are operated by the OfS and the OIA. I hope that noble Lords will therefore accept the amendments from the other place, so that this Bill can proceed to Royal Assent. I beg to move.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I seek some clarification of the new subsection (3)(b) proposed in Amendment 10F, which provides:

“A person may bring proceedings under subsection (1) only if … a decision has been made under that scheme as to the extent to which the complaint was justified”.


I seek clarification that an institution cannot delay the proceedings of decision-making indefinitely, because some institutions have quite a number of funds at their disposal and quite good administrative back-up, whereas an academic making a complaint and taking a tort action may be alone and without the same back-up. I hope that there is some provision for a time limit on an institution reaching a decision.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction of the government amendment in lieu and Amendment 10F.

When the Bill left this House with the amendments, led by the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, which was supported from these Benches, it was the Government’s own amendment at an earlier stage, aiming to mitigate the risk of legal action, and that civil proceedings should be the last resort, upon which we all agreed. Since then, the Government have amended the clause in question. The Minister explained why the Government have felt that it was necessary to do that. However, the amendment may create a perverse incentive for claimants to bypass the schemes created in the Bill in search of an injunction, including in anticipation of a breach, and it cannot possibly be the intention for this additional amendment, added in the Commons, to open doors to unintended consequences. I would like the Minister’s clarification on this because it seems that this amendment at best muddies the waters, and it might be dangerous. I would like his reassurance on that matter.

[Lord Grabiner (CB)]

My Lords, when this Bill left your Lordships’ House, it seemed that through the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, we had achieved a reasonable and workable compromise. Sensibly, the Government had accepted as axiomatic the principle that the person complaining that their freedom of speech had been unlawfully interfered with would first have to exhaust the regulatory complaints procedure before being permitted to commence civil court proceedings. The key amendment that we are now presented with will, I am afraid, blow away that compromise. These amendments will positively encourage civil court proceedings. For practical purposes they abandon the priority point, to the extent that the complaining party need not complete the regulatory process before commencing injunction proceedings. Indeed, the complainant would be entitled to ignore the regulator altogether and proceed directly to the court and seek an injunction.

I should make that criticism good by reference to the wording that has been presented to us. First, there is now an extended definition of “loss” which means loss of any kind, pecuniary or non-pecuniary. Through our previous debates, it has become obvious that a typical complainant would be hard pressed to show even nominal pecuniary loss resulting from a breach of the new duties imposed by the Bill. That is one of the reasons for the original objection to Clause 4 and why breaches of these duties should be dealt with by the Office for Students as the regulator and not by the courts.

The introduction of the concept of non-pecuniary loss suggests damages for emotional, mental or psychological distress. Again, however described, this is unlikely to produce significant damages figures, but express reference to it in the statute will be an encouragement to suitably motivated claimants to use the civil courts against universities, colleges and student unions. By itself, that would be tolerable, so long as the priority position were left in place.

Secondly, the troubling aspect of the amendments is in government Amendment 10F, to which reference has already been made, and in particular proposed subsection (5), which would displace the priority principle and expressly give the claimant the entitlement immediately to sue in court for an injunction. In my view, the claimant need not even bother to invoke the regulatory process. The claimant would be free to ignore the regulator and go straight to court. That is why I suggest that the sensible compromise previously achieved would be blown away if the Bill in this form became law.

For the record, I should make three further points. I will make them very briefly. First, our universities, colleges and student unions should not be subjected unnecessarily to the expense and unpleasant burden of court proceedings when we have an experienced statutory regulator in place. Secondly, many noble Lords—I am one of them—believe that ill-motivated troublemakers will be encouraged to invoke these provisions. We should not be encouraging divisive litigation or inappropriate use of the already clogged-up court lists.

Thirdly, the important purpose of the Bill is to encourage and improve the state of free speech in our universities and colleges. All sensible people support this excellent objective. That said, if the Bill in this form becomes law, universities, colleges and student unions would be well advised to make sure that no controversial speaker is ever invited to address the students: why would they take the risk? As a result, and ironically, freedom of speech will be undermined and not enhanced, and we will never be able to measure the extent of that damage.

I did not want my whinge about Clause 4 to be left stuck in my craw, but I also recognise that there is no appetite for more ping-pong on the Bill.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am very glad to be here, to hopefully see the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill fly through at last and become law. I am also pleased to see that some attempt has been made to restore some teeth to this important legislation. It is true that it is not the full tort that some of us argued for—indeed, the very remedy the Government themselves initially suggested was necessary to deal with the ever-growing problem of cancel culture on university campuses—but at least those who have their free speech rights impinged on can secure a low-cost injunction in a county court. That would restore some of the speaker events and debates that have been blocked—effectively censored—rather than having to rely on the hugely expensive judicial review in the High Court as the only option, or the internal methods that people have talked about but about which I am more dubious.

I also welcome the amendment’s expansion of the definition of “loss” beyond simply financial loss. Of course, loss of one’s income or of costs incurred organising an event should be subject to compensation, but, as has been said, the real loss is so often reputational: that horrendous label of “bigot” that hangs around and is hard to shake off.

18:15

I recommend that everyone should read Steven Greer’s new book, Falsely Accused of Islamophobia: My Struggle Against Academic Cancellation. Professor Greer, a former professor at the University of Bristol, had his 36-year blemish-free teaching career totally upended in 2021 when a small group of students accused him of ridiculing Islam and mocking the Koran in his course on Islam, China and the Far East. The complaint was baseless and he was totally exonerated after an official investigation, but, in his telling, the university failed to adequately defend him or academic freedom. The investigation dragged on for five months. The process was used as a punishment, in a way—so we do need the remedies. Worse, his module was withdrawn when he returned to work, fuelling the idea that, somehow, he really was Islamophobic. He felt that his reputation was tarnished—although he is now working as a research director with a progressive Muslim Imam in Bristol, so there is a happy story there.

This example urges me to stress to the Minister that it is imperative that this Government—indeed any Government—work with cancelled students and academics in drawing up the Bill’s suggested statutory code for complaints scheme and much improving it. I also hope that the soon-to-be-appointed free speech champion might initiate a call for evidence so that we might assess which issues are prone to cancellation and the scale of the problem that often goes on behind the scenes, behind the traditional no-platform headlines.

Only today, a student from St John’s College, Cambridge, Charlie Bentley-Astor, contacted me because a film showing that she had organised of a documentary, “Birthgap—Childless World”, had been cancelled. A campaign by certain student activists and Varsity magazine objected to the film’s director, Stephen Shaw—who has flown over from the US to speak at the event on Friday—because, shock horror, he appeared on a Jordan Peterson podcast. But that is all grist to the mill. Ms Bentley-Astor defended her opponents’ right to protest outside the film—because, thankfully, some students are liberal and believe in civil liberties. However, due to the mere threat of a demonstration, and despite the film organisers creating a detailed risk assessment and organising stewards, the college has now called off the film, using the familiar formula that the event would be too disruptive and it is thinking of the safety of the attendees. Therefore, I think that the threat of civil action, of something harder, is sometimes necessary.

In that instance, I also urge the Government to make this legislation a real living instrument of free speech, not a box-ticking exercise for university managers. I credit the noble Lord, Lord Mendoza, provost at Oriel, for recently hosting a Living Freedom event on the lessons we can learn from Locke and Milton about free speech. It was well attended by students. That is the kind of thing we need: to be positive, not to whinge.

Not all university leaders are quite as bold, and I want to urge that this is where we end. Last week at Edinburgh University, a film screening due to be hosted by the Edinburgh section of Academics for Academic Freedom was cancelled for a second time. The film, “Adult Human Female”, is a gender-critical documentary, and we know how controversial that is. It was due to go ahead and given the go-ahead by the university, undeterred even by the Edinburgh branch of UCU cheering on a protest comprising a loudspeaker blaring out vile, frankly sexist, speeches. However, when masked activists shut off entry to the venue, university security did not remove them. The film was not shown again. I hope that the Bill will be used to look at how we tackle such examples as the heckler’s veto: maybe injunctions are necessary. I hope that the law will encourage the likes of Edinburgh University’s leadership to personally host the film, guarantee that it happens, and show some courage—which is what we need, as well as the law and a minor tort.

I urge all of us here to proudly wield this law as a proactive instrument to increase freedom, to support those many young students who want to hear diverse opinions, and to cheer on those academics who refuse to be silenced or bullied. It is not often that I have reasons to be cheerful about legislation in this place, especially pro-freedom legislation. Sitting through the Online Safety Bill scares me to death in terms of free speech. But on this one, I think that the Government have got it right, and I am proud to say: hear hear, let us get on with it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a long process for a Bill that started two years ago. There have been five changes of Secretary of State for Education since then, more changes of junior Minister, and a certain sense that many of us have had that some of the Ministers guiding the Bill through both Houses were not as enthusiastic about it in all its forms as some of their Back-Benchers were. I regret that we have this further amendment, which I do not think strengthens the Bill. The compromise we agreed last time was better and I was not happy to read the debate in the Commons, where it was evident that the Common Sense Group was doing its best to push back to put harder elements into the Bill.

I have spoken already about the colonisation of the right wing of the Conservative Party by the American Republicans and various other right-wing foundations there. I note yet again how Miriam Cates cited various American sources in her short speech. I note that James Sunderland made the positively Trumpian remark that one of the reasons why all these left-wing blogs were attacking people like him was that they did not like the truth, which was what, clearly, the Government ought to be standing for; Truth Social is, of course, Trump’s rival to Twitter.

We need to think carefully about what we understand by freedom of speech. Members of this House will have noticed perhaps the story in the Times and “Newsnight” last week that the Cabinet Office had been looking back through social media posts of people invited to talk to senior civil servants there and cancelling the invitation if it was found that they had said things overcritical of the Government.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, has just said, perhaps uncharacteristically, freedom of speech is about diversity of opinion—and it needs to be diversity of opinion. I remind Ministers and others of the excellent Second Reading speech from the Conservative Benches which also said that universities are “autonomous institutions”. Conservatives are in favour of the principle of limited government and limited intervention in the affairs of autonomous institutions, and we need to be careful how much the state intervenes.

We have now come clearly to the end. This is an unsatisfactory compromise but, as so often, that is where we end up. The appointment of the free speech champion is now key and I hope that our Ministers here will do their best to ensure that this is seen to be as fair and open and uninfluenced by those on the right as possible. The hints we get of that appointment suggest to me that things are perhaps moving in the right direction but, if this is going to work, it is important that it is seen to be fair and acceptable to all sides.

I remind the Minister also that our universities are a huge national asset and a very important source of invisible exports, and that the damage done to our universities by the appearance of wider state interference in their autonomy, rather than leaving them to manage their own affairs—making mistakes, as even the Government occasionally do, but managing things on the whole not too badly—would damage Britain’s reputation around the world and damage Britain’s economy.

I also just remark to Ministers and those on the Conservative Benches that one of the analyses of the local election results last week suggested that the sharpest decline in voting Conservative had come from people who were university graduates. That ought to worry Conservatives. To be seen as the anti-intellectual party should be a source of unhappiness to all except those who believe in the liberal elite conspiracy theory that Britain is somehow governed by an invisible elite of university graduates, BBC presenters, academics and the like.

Having said that, I accept that we are where we are. We have come to the end on the Bill and it is time to leave it as it stands. But I hope Ministers will take back that how this is implemented and, in particular, how the next appointment is made will make a great difference to the degree of confidence that universities’ staff and students have in how the Bill is applied and, in the longer term, to the value of their international reputation and national standing.

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, we are now reaching the conclusion of what has been a long, time-consuming, complex process, and I think the process of revising and scrutinising this legislation has meant that we have ended up with a Bill that is better designed and stronger and more effective than when we started.

The further amendment which the noble Earl, Lord Howe, has introduced today, having been passed in the other place, recognises a genuine grievance. I can understand absolutely that, in some situations, you need an injunction to move fast. We heard from the noble Baroness opposite about this in a previous debate. The argument that there will be circumstances where an injunction will reinforce the freedom of speech is a powerful one.

I think the noble Lord, Lord Grabiner, was perhaps pessimistic. It will depend on decisions of courts as to whether there is a reasonable case for an injunction. I can certainly see circumstances where that is necessary, but anything more that the Minister can say about what those circumstances are would be very helpful.

I think all of us in all different parts of the House want to see universities functioning as places where people learn how to disagree. That is what we hope to see in our universities, and there is concern that they are finding it harder to discharge that role than they did.

Finally, can I just ask the Minister on three other specific points? First, there is a danger that this legislation has the opposite effect to the one intended and the panoply of regulation and legal challenge means that people try to go for the safe option of just not inviting outside speakers in the first place. It would be really helpful therefore if we tracked over time the number of outside speakers invited to and speaking at universities. Surely one simple and obvious measure of whether this legislation is working is whether the number of outside speakers rises or falls. If it starts to fall, we will have to look again. If it rises, we will be confident that the Bill has had the desired effect.

Secondly, I believe in the autonomy of universities. One of the strengths of our university system is absolutely that universities are self-governing bodies. That is what “universitas” means—self-contained and self-governing. The Minister will be aware that the ONS is now investigating the status of universities and whether they should be defined as entering the public sector. There are lots of ways in which the Government can expand the state, and one way is by intervening so heavily and so frequently that in reality these institutions become public institutions. It would be a disaster for the British model of higher education if our universities become part of the public sector. I hope the Minister will also give the House an assurance that the Government will do everything they can to ensure that this external assessment by the ONS—assessing how much autonomy universities have and whether they should be regarded now as part of the public sector—means that universities continue to enjoy the autonomy which ensures that they do not enter the public sector.

18:30

Thirdly, and finally, it would be helpful to know a bit more about the next steps, particularly the important nitty-gritty detail of the way in which the OfS will interpret the duty to promote freedom of speech. There is guidance to be written, which needs to be debated, considered and discussed. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister how that will work and what the timescale for it will be.

We wish this legislation well and all of us hope that, as a result, we see freedom of speech in our universities even more strongly protected than it is at the moment.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for their questions and comments, which I shall do my best to respond to. I begin with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, who made, if I may say so, a very gracious speech—I know that he has severe doubts about the Bill. I fully subscribe to his remarks about the need to preserve diversity of opinion in universities and about universities being national assets. The hope and belief we have is that these proposals will ensure the delivery of the cultural shift that can restore our universities to their position as the powerhouses of open debate and transformative thinking. But he is also right to say that much will depend on how the Act is applied.

Here, I think I can appropriately move to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Grabiner. He expressed his fear that the Bill as now drafted, if this amendment is accepted, will create perverse incentives and drive people towards the courts in the first instance. That is not the view of the Government. Injunctive relief, as I am sure he does not need to be told, is a discretionary remedy which may be used in limited circumstances where a court considers it just and convenient to order a provider, college or student union to take immediate—that is the key word there—action to remedy harm caused by a breach of their freedom of speech duties and where damages would not be sufficient. An example of that, as I mentioned, would be to require the reinstatement of a student who has been unlawfully removed from their course. We expect very few cases will proceed directly to court in pursuit of injunctive relief without first having exhausted the OfS or OIA schemes. The Government are clear that, aside from the injunction exception created by our amendment, the tort should be used only as a last resort where complainants are not satisfied with the outcome of OfS or OIA schemes.

I remind the House very briefly that the claimant in such a case would need to point to a genuine loss that they had suffered as a result of a breach of freedom of speech duties in Section A1 or Section A5 in order to bring a claim. We should also note that only a person specified in Section A1(2) could bring a claim. We therefore consider that they would do so only if they have suffered because of a breach of the duties, even if, for example, that loss is damage to reputation and not a monetary loss.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, asked for clarification on the extent to which we feel the injunction would be resorted to. Emergency injunctions applied for in order to prevent a breach of the freedom of speech duty before it occurs would not be subject to the requirement to exhaust a complaint scheme first, since the schemes can consider only complaints of a breach that has already occurred. It is true that those who anticipate a breach of the duties can go directly to court to seek an injunction to prevent that breach occurring. Such a complaint could not be considered by the OfS or the OIA because there would be no breach of the duty to consider. However, we are now considering the situation where there has already been a breach of the duties. In most cases, the complaints schemes will provide the best route for redress as they are free to use, but where there is a need for a speedy remedy, we have decided that we should allow immediate access to the courts. The Bill is setting up a new OfS complaints scheme and establishing the statutory tort. This is about making sure that both new mechanisms mesh together in the best way possible.

My noble friend Lady Lawlor expressed her fear that an institution might delay a decision indefinitely and draw out the process. She may like to note that it will be for the Office for Students to make the rules for how the scheme will operate, which it will consult on. Paragraph 5(2)(b) of new Schedule 6A specifically refers to how it will deal with the internal review processes of higher education providers, as it may include provision in the rules about the issues to which she referred. The Bill states that the OfS complaints scheme may include provision that a referral under this scheme can take place only after the complainant has exhausted any internal complaints procedure of the higher education provider, college or student union. In the context of the injunction, that does not apply to applications to the court for such an injunction where a swift remedy is sought, as any delay caused by making an internal complaint would be too long in such circumstances. I hope that that is helpful to my noble friend.

I was grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for what she said about the need for a culture change and, in particular, for highlighting the role of the director of free speech in the OfS. The director will bring critical external experience and knowledge from the higher education sector, and they will build strong working relationships between the OfS and the sector, providing strategic oversight for the freedom of speech programme and gathering insights from providers. We expect the flow of information to be very much two-way, and this will be critical to the OfS as it develops guidance for higher education providers, constituent colleges and student unions to help them comply with their new duties, including highlighting best practice. The OfS will be monitoring what happens.

I hope that provides an answer to my noble friend Lord Willetts, who has expressed fears all along that the Bill may in fact have the opposite effect from that intended and cause a cooling effect on universities which might otherwise wish to invite controversial speakers. We do not agree with that, but it is because the culture needs to change, and we believe we have the means to change that culture, that I think, hope and believe that his fears will not be borne out.

Reverting to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and indeed to my noble friend Lord Willetts, we wish universities to be thriving, autonomous centres of free thought, free speech and free debate, and the mechanisms that we are setting up today should be of assistance in promoting that. As I said earlier, if the House accepts this amendment today, we will have achieved the consensus required to enable the Bill to proceed to Royal Assent. I hope the House will do so, and implementation can then follow.

Motion A agreed.

18:40

Sitting suspended.

Illegal Migration Bill

2nd reading
Wednesday 10th May 2023 Lords Chamber

Second Reading (Continued)

19:01

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, in the House of Commons there is no party like the party of Marine Le Pen in the Assemblée Nationale, like Alternative für Deutschland or like Vox in Spain. The reason for that is that the House of Commons is a sensitive barometer of public opinion. MPs understand their constituents, and their constituents believe, rightly, that there is a problem of immigration. MPs of all parties know that there is a problem of immigration. That problem has been discussed endlessly today: the problem of perilous journeys across the channel, drownings, traffickers, the gangsters arranging those journeys, the cost of coping with large numbers in this country and the particular pressure on local communities.

It is worth reminding ourselves that that is why the House of Commons sent us this Bill. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said he would not be cowed by that, and I understand what he means, but it is a Bill that has come to this House from the elected House of Commons.

I do not know whether anybody else has said this, but the Prime Minister has been very involved in this Bill. I think that everyone across the House, whatever their party, would agree that he is a man who is serious, clever and decent and does detailed work, so we have to recognise that the Bill deserves very serious consideration

Of course the Bill needs to be scrutinised but, while the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said that he would want to make changes to it, I would have liked him to have gone a bit further and said he would not thwart the Bill or emasculate it. Some people in this House, such as the Lib Dems, would like to kill the Bill. The noble Lord does not, but it is important that the Bill is given a fair wind. It is important that the House approaches the Bill to make it more effective but not to destroy its purpose, but I suspect that that is some of the intention of what might occur in Committee and on Report.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is not in his place at the moment, has expressed scepticism about the Bill, but he said that we should allow it to go through and see whether the Government can really make it work. That is the right attitude with which to approach the Bill. The point that I am making is simply that we must give it a fair wind.

19:04

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury. He is a fellow Lancastrian and we always talk common sense, so I think what he said is entirely sensible.

The issue of illegal immigration by small boats, which is central to our discussion today, is not just a UK problem; it is a problem in western Europe. Greece, Italy and Spain, among others, are struggling with it, and no one is finding it an easy problem to resolve.

However, one country has actually cracked it. I refer to Australia. What happened at the beginning of this century was that people came from Papua New Guinea in small boats—quite large boats in some cases—to the northern shores of Queensland. The then Liberal Government decided that the way to tackle that was to pass an amendment to existing migration legislation, not dissimilar from the measures that my noble friend is introducing today, and at the same time establish, radically and newly, an overseas processing centre on the island of Nauru near the Solomon Islands. The boats stopped coming, and that was the end of the matter.

Subsequently a Labor Government came in who, interestingly enough, opposed all this. They dismantled it, and a second wave of boats came through. The Labor Government then changed tack and began to implement the Liberal policies that they had previously opposed, but it was too late: there was a general election, the Liberal Government were returned on a policy of national sovereignty and they produced a more thoroughgoing version of the original policy. As a result, the Labor Government changed their tune, and that policy, which stopped the boats completely, has cross-party support.

On the basis of that, Australia has produced a methodical and rational system of immigration, with total cross-party support, looking at the number of people each year that it wants to allow into the country, including those who want to come in as students, those who want to come for family reasons and those who want to come in to work. It is debated annually—a whole day’s debate in Parliament, rather like the debate we are having at the moment—and then decisions are made and the policies implemented. The numbers can go up and down. The latest interest is that the new Labor Government have decided to increase the level of migration, but within a framework that has solid cross-party support.

I will not pretend that there are not big legal and geographical differences between Australia and this country—obviously that is so—but none the less it is important to look not just parochially at what we do but across the world at what is being done. It seems to me that they have done something very wise that we could well implement. I have talked to them at some length over the past year about how they did it. They stress to me that it was essential, first, that they denied to illegal migrants the possibility of being an asylum seeker and, secondly, that they could then transfer them to the overseas processing centre near the Solomon Islands at great speed. That, in essence, is what we are trying to do here: to turn the situation around very rapidly within the framework of British laws, which are different from Australian laws.

Those who oppose the Government’s policy tend to argue that we need new pathways for legal immigration, and I entirely agree. What we have at the moment is rather unsatisfactory; it is too specific to particular countries and too narrow, and we need to expand it and have a more rational approach. However, the truth is that we need to do that while having policies to deter. We need both. We need—to use a Lancastrian term—a belt-and-braces approach to this issue, otherwise we will not succeed.

I made this point, incidentally, when we had the debate on 9 December initiated by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury—good for him, because we need debates on this topic of immigration. He argued that it was right to have more legal pathways, because if we had a new, low-cost way of getting here, it would demolish the model of the traffickers, who would no longer be in business. Sadly that is not the case, as my noble friend Lord Howard pointed out earlier. If we have a new way of coming here, the people who do not get on to that route will find a private method, either because they cannot or do not want to get on to the new route or because they find it more congenial to come via private methods. Whatever the reason, we will not kill off the traffickers’ trade if we simply offer more legal routes. We have to have a deterrent as well.

There is also a bigger picture that we ought to mention, which sometimes the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, rightly mentions: this is a small number; the big number is the 700,000 or so people who are coming across legally, and we have to have a look at them. I am sure my noble friend Lord Hodgson will elucidate on this in his remarks. We need to look at that bigger picture.

This is a small beginning but, if we can get it right and get public trust back, then we can also tackle the bigger problem.

19:10

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Horam always talks a lot of good sense, and I am pleased to be able to follow him. The House will be aware that I have a long-standing interest in absolute numbers and whether there is a number that this country can sustain, either permanently or by absorbing it on an annual basis. It is not so much where they come from or who they are; it is just that they are people who make demands on our space, whatever our space may be. It will come as no surprise to noble Lords that a Bill such as this, which in Clause 1 offers the primary objective of restricting illegal migration to this country, has my support and seems to offer a good line of approach.

I am very much aware that this leads to one being described, at best, as heartless. I reject that; I am as aware as any other Member of the House is of the dreadful circumstances in which many citizens of other countries live. Nevertheless, however difficult or painful, we have to set this whole issue in context. Sadly, the debate about levels of migration, which are inevitable as a result of our increased population, has become rather lopsided and dominated by two groups, both of which favour increasing the rate. The first can be described as the moral case, which is the underlying background to a lot of the speeches today; the other is the economic case of people to fill the jobs.

Let me quote from a recent magazine article:

“The left hates talking about immigration because it thinks any kind of controls, anywhere, are racist; the right has been running an economy, in part, dependent on endless reserves of imported labour, which it doesn’t like talking about. However, few things are more corrosive of public trust than pretending a problem isn’t there. Sooner or later the public notices”.


Where did that come from? It is Mr Andrew Marr in this week’s New Statesman. I do not often quote the New Statesman or Mr Andrew Marr with approval, but they have got this bang on the button.

Both arguments have merit, of course, but what is lacking is any counterview expressed on behalf of the 67.3 million people already settled here, 18% of whom come from minority ethnic groups. Their concerns include economic worries, of course, but also a wide range of what I call quality-of-life factors: access to open space; damage to our ecology and our environment; an ability to achieve our climate change goals; our future food and water security; increased pressure on education, health and social services; and the impact on social cohesion generally. In February this year, I commissioned some polling on these points. If any Member of your Lordships’ House would like to see the polling, I will happily send it to them. The polling revealed that across all ages, all social grades, all regions of the United Kingdom and all voting preferences, about 60% were concerned about future population growth, 51% thought that there should be a cap on the level of net migration, and over 60% were concerned that the Government had no plan in place to consider this.

Since the Blair Government first allowed—perhaps encouraged—large-scale migration, the population of the UK has gone up by 8 million people, equivalent to three cities the size of Manchester. As year has succeeded to year, Governments—including my own—have explained away the successively higher figures as a series of one-off events, but these one-off events have kept on coming and the British people have been presented with a series of faits accomplis. If we as a Parliament do not find ways to address these concerns, wilder and less attractive spirits will inevitably begin to make the running.

In addition to the general direction of travel, the Bill begins to address the problem in two specific ways. First, in Clause 51 it institutes, for the first time, a total cap on numbers—a cap which will be drawn up after consultation with local authorities and debated in Parliament. In this connection, I pay a very sincere tribute to Stephen Kinnock, the opposition spokesman in Committee in the House of Commons, who gave the Labour Party’s support to the idea of a cap. Secondly, the Bill offers fairness. There will be no reward or advantage for an economic migrant who gets on a boat to cross the channel and so jump the queue. The British people as a whole are generous but they also place a good deal of reliance on fairness, and the Bill offers this.

The House can take one of two approaches. It can follow the line of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and deny the existence of any problem—or at least, deny its existence if only people like the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, would stop talking about it—and attempt to water down the Bill, so that it becomes ineffective, or it can recognise the deeply held views and concerns of our fellow citizens, and work to ensure that we respond to them.

19:16

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I am following four consecutive Conservative speakers and, with respect, I have more in common with the first of those four, the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, than with the subsequent three. The noble Baroness rightly quoted the Statement that the noble Lord, Lord Murray, repeated in this Chamber on 8 March. The Minister said then

“let us be honest: by some counts there are 100 million people around the world who could qualify for protection under our current laws. Let us be clear: they are coming here”.—[Official Report, 8/3/23; col. 846.]

But this was not honest, and the Minister clarified and corrected the record later in the proceedings.

Globally, at the end of 2022 there were 101 million forcibly displaced people around the world, the majority of whom are internally displaced within their own country —support for whom the UK has slashed its humanitarian assistance to by up to 60%. The global figure for those seeking asylum is 4.9 million; they are still not coming here. But the 1% who are seeking it come here against a narrative which, as my noble friend Lady Kramer so eloquently pointed out, states that they have values that are at odds with ours or that they will cannibalise our society. Now we are being asked to ban claims of asylum because of the method of their arrival rather than the merits of their claim.

The House of Commons Library has showed that the percentage of asylum applicants refused at initial decision reached its high point in 2004, at 88%. Since then, the refusal rate has been falling overall and was just 24% in 2022, its lowest point since 1990. Much of this debate has been about saying that we have an emergency crisis now, but we have the most successful level of justified asylum in 30 years. Some on the opposite Benches say that this is because of judicial activism but, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, said at the commencement of this debate, we actually have tighter restrictions now than ever.

If you are a young Iranian woman threatened with being poisoned in a college, or a young Sudanese woman fleeing threats of rape by the Wagner Group in Sudan, the Government are now banning you from asylum because there are no safe and legal routes from those two countries. The Government need to be clear that there are no safe and legal routes, but their obfuscation comes time and again. I think the Government find it hard to defend the lack of safe and legal routes; that is why they are obfuscating.

The Minister referred at the start of this debate—he declined to take an intervention from me—to the global scheme, as the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who I greatly respect, has. He said that the UK scheme for resettlement of vulnerable refugees is open to anyone from around the world. It is operated through the UNHCR, but what the Government do not say is that the Home Office has asked the UNHCR to have that scheme prioritised for Afghans only, therefore limiting it for others.

The Independent Commission for Aid Impact did a review and I will quote from its report in March:

“As a result, the UKRS has almost completely ceased processing vulnerable refugees for resettlement to the UK, in effect closing a rare safe and legal route to seek protection in the UK for refugees who do not fall under a nationality-based scheme”.


Not only are we asked, for the first time in our nation’s history, to end the ability to claim asylum, we are reducing UK support in the very troubled areas people are seeking safety from. The Government do not believe that there are consequences for this, either.

I want to raise something not yet mentioned in the debate. In the 1990s, the UK opposed scoring in-country support for refugees as overseas development assistance, but this is allowed for under ODA rules. Ten years ago, this was a negligible amount. In 2021 it made up 9% of all UK ODA. ICAI estimates that now this is one-third, because the Government—unique among all developed nations—are scoring all domestic support under overseas development assistance. This means that we are now, for the first time, spending more overseas aid in the UK than on bilateral programmes addressing the root causes of the issues that we have been debating today. Because of the unlawful 0.5% cuts, this is now capped.

When the Government and the Minister say that the country is “generous and welcome”, I agree with them; it is that. However, if you seek asylum—a shelter in a storm, as Churchill described it—and if you are a child, you will be denied and you will be locked up before you are sent away and we will not even listen to your case.

On “generous”, let me tell the House that, when it came to the Ukraine scheme, the Government quite rightly trumpeted their thank you payments for families of £350, which has now increased, per family hosting Ukrainian refugees. This is scored 100% on overseas development assistance, which means that the Government do not tell the family that the thank you payment has been cut from children starving in the Horn of Africa, or from those who are fleeing conflict abroad.

I think the Government know that the public are not on their side. That is why they are not giving the full picture. This Bill has no moral basis; we should not be legislating for it, and we are causing more damage around the world, which will make the problem even greater.

19:22

[Baroness Bray of Coln (Con)]

My Lords, I think we can all agree that this is a complicated and contentious issue that generates strong views. But maybe we can start with a part of the Bill on which there might be some agreement—the Government’s indication that they want to consider opening more safe, legal routes for those in genuine need of asylum in this country. The Bill states that, once it is passed and the number of illegal migrants starts to fall, the Government intend to look at possible new safe routes. An annual cap will be agreed each year, in consultation with local authorities, to determine what capacity there is, which is vital. In the event of any humanitarian emergency, it is made quite clear that the cap can be amended. This is surely as it should be, providing as much safety and support for those having to flee from threats, violence and maltreatment as we have the capacity to manage.

The biggest obstacle to this is the growing number of illegal migrants who arrive here. Some are in lorries, but most are in boats these days. If caught trying to enter the country—many are not—they often claim to be under threat in their home country, when in fact they are economic migrants, intent on taking advantage of what this country can offer. They paid huge sums to people smugglers to get them here, travelling through safe countries on the way—why do they not seek the right to settle in them?—and jumping the queue of those in genuine need who have been waiting their turn to come here.

The number of illegal migrants has quadrupled in the last four years. Last year, around 45,000 illegal migrants arrived by boat. That is slightly more than the equivalent population of two Cirencesters, the town near where I live. If we do not control our borders better, how will we keep finding more and more space every year, equivalent to two Cirencesters, to build extra accommodation for that number of illegal migrants, which is increasing every year?

Meanwhile, we read almost daily in our newspapers about the growing housing shortage. It is becoming a serious problem. Regarding our immigrant numbers in this context, there are those who are here legally and require housing—some 500,000 net over the past seven years—which is a major added pressure. There are also those many thousands who have no legal right to be here. They also have to be accommodated while their claims slowly work their way through the legal system, at huge extra cost and no benefit to the taxpayer. This is an example of how illegal immigration makes it more difficult for this country to make provision for the genuine legal asylum seekers whom we want to support.

We must put the people smugglers who encourage illegal migrancy out of business. Enforcing the new laws laid out in this Bill would permit speedy removal of all those illegal migrants they have brought here. As a result, fewer and fewer passengers would think that what the smugglers offered would be worth the huge amount of money they charged to bring them here. The dangerous risks attached to the journey would not be worth it, either.

The Prime Minister told a news conference back in March that, since a deal was agreed with the Albanian Government to take back Albanian illegal migrants—whom we now fly back promptly—the number of Albanians coming here illegally has fallen significantly. The change in the law to allow the prompt removal of illegal migrants in this country is central to how we go forward. They will either be flown straight back home if safe, or to Rwanda, which has been identified as a suitable alternative if they do not wish to return to their country of origin. Outstanding legal claims to live here in the UK will have to be taken up from where the claimants are resettled.

I would like to echo the concerns expressed by my noble friend Lord Sandhurst about the proposals concerning modern slavery. I ask my noble friend the Minister whether there is a possibility that those proposals can be reconsidered so that victims of modern slavery already in this country can safely report their condition without being sent home.

Finally, the general purpose of this Bill is to deter illegal migrants from setting out in the first place. No legal entry will be granted, except in special circumstances, to those who have already tried to enter illegally. We must deter them from trying and stop the smugglers making money out of misery. We need to change the law to do so. We cannot leave things as they are.

19:27

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in opening this debate the Minister said:

“Our broken asylum system is costing the country some £3 billion a year”.


I thought I would look up the list of Home Secretaries since 12 May 2010—Theresa May, Amber Rudd, Sajid Javid, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Grant Shapps and Suella Braverman again. Which one of those does the Minister hold responsible for our self-described “broken asylum system”? Or is it all of them?

My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb has covered the general horrors of this indefensible Bill. I am going to focus on some of the actual people, the individuals, who will be caught by it. They will be subjected to what can only be described as utterly unacceptable, inhumane and abusive treatment.

The Minister in his introduction said that 70% of the children arriving were aged over 16. So they would only spend two years or fewer warehoused here in the UK before it is time for “Happy birthday, your present is a deportation flight”. Of course, that means that 30% of cases will be facing more than two years in that situation of warehousing. For an eight year-old, 10 year- old or a 12 year-old, what would such a situation—the full knowledge of such a fate—do to their health and well-being? That that treatment breaks the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is only a statement of the obvious.

As the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister and Lady Sugg, and others, highlighted, pregnant refugees are also trapped by this Bill—a small but important victory won by cross-party campaigns in 2016 to exclude them from immigration detention would be wiped out. Their babies will be born into indefinite detention. How long will they stay in that situation? How inhuman are the Government prepared to be?

There are people with mental health conditions and refugees who arrive here with conditions often induced by torture or war, or who develop them as a result of our hostile environment. I have a direct question for the Minister. Has he read the detailed forensic examinations of the impacts of the Bill from the Royal College of Psychiatrists? It quotes the Shaw review, which found that

“immigration detention has a negative impact on detainees’ mental health”

and that

“the impact on mental health increases the longer detention continues”.

As many noble Lords have said, there are victims of modern slavery and trafficking. The Royal College report points out how frequently they, understandably, suffer from complex and difficult to treat PTSD. What will indefinite detention or removal to Rwanda do to them?

Picking up on that group, I am indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, for some information from an impeccable source—unpublished Home Office information—that shows that there is already an outrageous and persistent slavery-survivor protection gap. Of the 11,137 confirmed cases—I emphasise that figure—of trafficking and modern slavery survivors being referred for consideration for discretionary leave to remain in the six years and nine months between April 2016 and December 2022, only 738, or 7%, have been granted leave to remain. Far from refugees gaming the system, we have a system that is already a lottery, and the Bill takes away any chance for those people to establish a secure life for themselves.

On people who will particularly suffer under the Bill, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, mentioned LGBTQIA+ refugees. Rwanda is not safe for them, and neither are many of the other countries to which they might, theoretically, be shipped.

Some might say that the particularly vulnerable people I have listed are not the majority of refugees who reach our shores by non-orderly means. As the Minister said, the overwhelming majority of arrivals were adult males under the age of 40—that is a fact. They are men like the refugee now settled in Norway, to whom the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, referred. But what do the Benches opposite have against young men? Most of them were young men, once.

I finish with a couple of general points arising from the debate. First, as the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, said, asylum is a collective responsibility of all states, as the UNHCR and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, among many others, pointed out. If other nations followed the Bill’s lead, there would be a breakdown in the international system of refuge. Secondly, again highlighting the words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, this is not a small boats Bill; its provisions would affect all who seek refugee status in this country. It is a comprehensive anti-refugee Bill.

Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean—who is not in his place, unfortunately—quoted John Stuart Mill:

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.


That is a useful reflection on the amendment to this Motion—the Liberal Democrats’ bid, which has whole- hearted Green backing, to stop the Bill in its tracks now. We have heard all the usual reasons and excuses for why we should not: “We are only a House of review”, or “We are only an unelected House”. I will repeat a question that I put on Part 4 of what is now the police Act, which explicitly targets Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people. It is a direct question to those planning to vote against, or abstain on, the amendment on stopping the Bill. Is there nothing you would stop? Where do you draw the line? Surely you have a line.

19:33

[Lord Fairfax of Cameron (Con)]

My Lords, as other speakers said, we now live in an age of mass migration. As my noble friend Lord Hague often says, the population of Africa and the Middle East is expected to increase by about 1 billion people by the middle of this century. Of course this country has benefited over the centuries from immigration, but this is now an increasingly crowded island, with all that that means for our already hard-pressed housing and public services.

For many years, debate on this subject has often conflated economic migrants with genuine asylum seekers, which is why it is absolutely right that the Bill distinguishes legal from illegal migration. This very difficult issue is faced not only by this country, as many noble Lords know—you only have to look at Italy, Greece, France and Germany to see that—and our recent agreements with France and Algeria reflect an important recognition of that reality.

The Government recognise that the current asylum system is not working. As noble Lords heard, there is a backlog of 160,000 cases, more than £2 billion per year is being spent on accommodation, and, apparently, more than 80,000 people have illegally entered the UK since 2018, often having travelled through multiple safe countries to reach the UK, due to our so-called pull factor. So I welcome the Bill, as do a majority of our citizens. It is the Government’s genuine attempt to remedy our current broken system.

Today, we have heard plenty of outrage from various sections of this House but very little by way of alternative workable solutions to this admittedly very difficult problem. As an earlier speaker said, it is about deterrence —to cut off demand from the organised criminal gangs that are gaming and profiteering from our current system —and I agree with that. No doubt the Bill can be improved here, but it should not be mauled unrecognisably; in my view, that would not be understood or accepted by a majority of our citizens.

19:36

[Baroness Mobarik (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with little in the Bill, other than the broad premise that we must control the dangerous channel crossings and end the business model of the people smugglers. But the term “stop the boats” does not accurately reflect the Bill’s wide-ranging impact on asylum seekers and refugees, whichever mode of entry they take into the UK. This is a hugely complex issue, and it would be good to hear from the Home Office what strategy it is building to identify true need, rather than those wishing just to take advantage of the system, and what efforts are being made to establish safe and legal routes.

The current backlog in processing those already here and the cost to the taxpayer is clearly not acceptable, and it requires resource and efficiency on the part of the Home Office to clear. But if we seek to close our borders to those fleeing persecution without even allowing them a hearing, we are saying that we are outside the principles of international co-operation on which the global refugee system is based. We are in danger of criminalising, incarcerating and forcing statelessness, homelessness and destitution on genuine asylum seekers, many of whom are already traumatised on arrival.

There are 34 million refugees and asylum seekers in the world today, with millions more internally displaced people, and the vast majority are being hosted by countries that border the conflict areas. I have seen the Rohingya refugee camps at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. I have seen the vast refugee container camps in Gaziantep, on the Turkish/Syrian border, and the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan—a country that has already hosted Palestinian refugees for many decades. International co-operation is key to solving one of the biggest issues that the world faces: the mass movement of people due to conflict but also because of climate change. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees categorically stated that, if the Illegal Migration Bill is enacted in its current form, it would break the UK’s obligations under the refugee convention and significantly undermine the international refugee protection system, which needs support from all members.

We cannot just throw up our hands and opt out of a system that we were front and centre in helping to shape because things have become difficult. Our international reputation must be preserved, because respect from, and collaboration with, the international community is paramount for the future success of Britain. We have always prided ourselves on our sense of fairness and capacity to protect those in need. I hope that we wish to leave this good reputation for future generations: our belief in the moral imperative to be open in minds, hearts and actions.

The Children’s Commissioner, who has a statutory duty to protect the rights of children in England, including those who have arrived in the country fleeing from war and persecution, has stated that the Bill undermines other legislation, such as the Children Act 1989. I say to my noble friend the Minister: let us not forget that it was a Conservative-led Government under David Cameron who ended child detention and quadruple-locked it into legislation in the Immigration Act 2014. The safeguards and protections under that legislation are being removed by the Bill.

The oft-held belief that many claiming to be children are over the age of 18, and thus adults, is flawed, as last year alone 850 children were wrongly assessed as adults and sent to adult accommodation and detention centres, which put them directly in harm’s way. The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium says of the Bill that

“the proposals will leave children locked out of claiming refugee protection; detained; removed; if unaccompanied, accommodated by the Home Office outside the established care system; if a victim of trafficking or child of such a victim, unprotected; and denied their citizenship rights. Children will be left in limbo for years, unable to access any form of status or to rebuild their lives”—

and, I add, with the very real threat of being deported to Rwanda when they reach the age of 18. These most vulnerable young people are affected at a time in their lives when there are deep and lasting consequences. Similarly, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 enacted under another Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, is also compromised by the Bill.

In addition, some of the language used in the other place while debating the Bill has been deeply unhelpful; in fact, I am dismayed by the narrative that the Home Office has adopted. Stigmatising and stereotyping people, wherever they come from and under whichever circumstances, will do little to advance our aim to manage this most difficult issue. We all wish to see prosperity and security for our country but, I hope, with our principles and values intact. We must be on the right side of doing the right thing. The disquiet and discomfort that so many of us feel, whether we can adequately articulate it or not, is indicated by how many of us are participating at Second Reading. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will take note.

19:43

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, the more I listen to the debate—and particularly to my noble friend Lord Carlile of Berriew—the more strongly I am convinced that the Bill is morally questionable, legally doubtful and totally unworkable.

Setting to one side these wider challenges with the Bill, I will focus attention on the impact it would have on minors, whether accompanied or not. As we have heard, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, the Bill proposes that these children, if not immediately deported, may be accommodated by the Home Office outside the established care system. On reaching the age of 18, they will be deported to a third country, with which they most likely have no existing ties, and will face a lifetime ban from entering Britain. Accompanied children who are not given the right to remain will also be barred from the UK for life.

Despite this disproportionate punishment for the children, I do not believe that it would even act as a deterrent, even though the Minister said that the purpose of the Bill is supposed to be as a deterrent. People desperate enough to take to the boats will not be put off by a punishment that would be enacted many years into the future. To quote the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium:

“The Bill also undoes a decade’s worth of progress made under the Conservative government, reversing the ending of child detention and protections for child victims of trafficking”.


The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, complained that no one is providing solutions, but neither is the Bill a solution. It will not solve the migration crisis; it will just add to the massive backlog of cases waiting to be processed. I agree with my noble friend Lord Kerr of Kinlochard that the solution can be found in centres in France.

As we all know, there is a growing illegal migration crisis. We all know that something needs to be done about it, but to attempt a solution that penalises children is misguided in the extreme. This is not how a civilised society treats the most vulnerable.

19:45

[Lord McInnes of Kilwinning (Con)]

My Lords, as always, it is a great pleasure to be part of a debate in your Lordships’ House, which, no matter which side one stands on the issue, marks the breadth of the expertise and opinion in this Chamber. I respect that expertise as well as the strength of feeling on the Bill from all sides. That strength of feeling exists because this House reflects the public debate taking place outside of Parliament. I will speak in support of the progress of the Bill, not because I take some pleasure in ever-more stringent asylum policy, but—and perhaps to answer the noble Lord, Lord Purvis—because I want to secure safe and legal routes based on humanitarian need; that provides a moral imperative for the Bill to succeed and to be improved.

Public policy must always rely on a contract with, and consent from, the British people; without that consent, the Government are powerless. The Government should be able to articulate the values of this country in welcoming humanitarian refugees in a constant, evolving policy based on humanitarian need. At the moment, this country’s asylum policy is in a state of stasis, or, at best, a reactive state; it is a reactive policy that requires a public response before the Government will act. A totemic tragedy, namely the shock when the body of two year-old Alan Kurdi washed up, galvanised the Government to institute a resettlement policy of 20,000 Syrians. Likewise, the Ukrainian and Hong Kong resettlement schemes, of which we are all proud, have both been implemented fully because of public consent and reaction. Meanwhile, the Afghan scheme for resettlement, which seemed so important to everyone in August 2021, seems to have stalled quite dramatically in its initial aims.

This start/stop policy of bespoke schemes does not represent the values or implementation of a truly humanitarian policy blind to race or geopolitics. Why do we think that our policy has fallen into this stop/start approach to asylum, and away from universal legal routes? The first reason is the failure of our asylum bureaucracy and the lack of resource to process claims. The Prime Minister is prioritising that process with extra staff and support, and that is to be welcomed. Backlogs not only create needless anxiety for those seeking asylum but destroy public confidence in the system.

That public confidence is, I am afraid, why this legislation is required. From 300 asylum seekers arriving in small boats in 2018, we have now reached 45,000. The toxin of this seeming lack of control and unfairness then denigrates all asylum seekers across the world. For those of us who want to ensure safe legal routes based on humanitarian need, it is very difficult to find the public consent necessary to permeate public policy beyond the bespoke schemes I have already discussed. Before 2018, there was an opening after the success of the Syrian resettlement scheme for wider schemes in conjunction with the UNHCR, but that discussion and debate has been paralysed by illegal crossings pushed by the malevolent people traffickers.

I accept that the Government must make every effort to stop the boats if we are to see an expansion of the legal routes on a humanitarian basis, which the vast majority of us in your Lordships’ House want to see. If we do not use all legislative tools at our disposal and rebuild public confidence, I do not believe that any Government, Conservative or Labour, or even a Labour/Lib Dem amalgam, will be able to fully implement a humanitarian legal route process with public consent. I hope my noble friend the Minister will be able to put further flesh on the bones of this legal route process to maximise support in this House.

As well as the survey of accommodation of local authorities to identify their cap, I ask that the Government give further commitments to work with the UNHCR, and that that work forms part of the regular statement that the Home Secretary lays before Parliament. I want a commitment to be given, as we progress the Bill, that routes will be identified to offer asylum to humanitarian asylum seekers, wherever they come from in the world. Transparency in a new process will provide the sunshine and hygiene required to build public confidence and rebuild pride in our humanitarian policy in this country. That is not to say that in the future there will not need to be bespoke policies responding to crises across the world, but they cannot be the basis for our asylum policy.

There are always going to be vulnerable people who will not have the media focus required to launch a bespoke scheme in this country. There must be a credible answer to the question Tim Loughton MP asked the Home Secretary at the Home Affairs Select Committee on routes for those outwith—to use a good Scottish word—the bespoke schemes. The Government will have to provide further assurance to get more support in your Lordships’ House. This Bill is sadly necessary if we are to help the most vulnerable across the world. I will not be able to support the fatal amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, later. Were it to be successful, I fear that the very people who need us to act for them would see safe and legal routes at the scale required becoming an ever more distant prospect.

19:52

[Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a bit much being lectured on what is and is not constitutional when this Bill, like so many other recent Bills, impinges on what ought to be the rights and duties of devolved Administrations. It is further evidence that the UK Government would happily undo the arrangements of the past 20-plus years and reduce or remove the powers of the other Parliaments. They might not be quite as ready as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, who is not in his place at this point, when he wrote recently on devolution that it was time to stop. His criticism was that the electors in Wales and Scotland kept voting for the wrong parties.

The spur towards devolution was the fact that, for many years, Scotland and Wales rejected the Conservative Party but had no way of mitigating the impacts of Westminster legislation until the referendums in 1997. The difference between the Welsh and Scottish Governments and the UK Government has never been as stark as in their approach to people seeking sanctuary through asylum and immigration. On this issue, the Conservative Party has no support outside—or outwith—its own ranks, and even many of them must be mortally embarrassed.

The rights established by the European Convention on Human Rights are written into Scotland’s devolution settlement and have been fundamental to the work of the Scottish Parliament over 20 years. The convention’s incorporation provides fundamental safeguards which ensure that, in Scotland, executive powers cannot be abused. Scottish Ministers cannot act in a way that is incompatible with the convention, and all its legislation must be compatible.

I think there is a consensus in this Chamber that the Bill will breach the convention and leave the Scottish Parliament in an invidious position under international law. Those involved in human rights in Scotland have described the Bill as creating an urgent human rights emergency. The Scottish Refugee Council condemns it as “morally repugnant” and “practically unworkable”, saying it

“will have severe impacts on women, men and children seeking safety”.

JustRight Scotland describes the Bill as “cruel, unnecessary and unlawful” and says it

“condemns people to living a life in limbo and strips them of all support”.

The Government’s delegated powers memorandum makes it clear that the functions of local authorities in respect of looked-after children are a devolved matter. This is recognised in Clauses 15 to 18, which state that they apply only in England, but there is a very real threat contained in Clause 19, which states that the Secretary of State may make regulations in future enabling Clauses 15 to 18 to apply in the devolved Administrations, again using secondary legislation. Clauses 23 and 24 will remove duties and powers that currently oblige the devolved Administrations to provide support and assistance to victims of trafficking and their families, including children. Instead, it will attempt to compel devolved nations to violate the duties set out in international law. This is contrary to Scottish legislation, as set out in the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015.

In almost all other countries, this Bill could not be tabled, as it breaches treaty obligations and is contrary to basic human rights. If the UK had a written constitution, this would be unacceptable. If the powers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were protected, this would not be allowed to happen. Under this Government, we are experiencing endless Bills that contravene natural justice and encroach on devolved powers. At some point, we have to say that this must stop. This Bill should be where we draw the line and say, “Not in our name”.

19:57

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, one of the advantages of speaking relatively late on in a debate such as this is that it affords one the opportunity to hear so many contributions from noble Lords and the passionate positions that many, quite understandably, have. On the whole, this debate has been conducted in a very even-handed way, and I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on setting the tone right at the outset. A debate such as this was always going to be emotional and controversial—on that, at least, we can all agree.

Having looked at the fatal amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, I will not be supporting it, although I think it includes some interesting points. I believe that the proper place for the Bill to go is Committee, where it can be properly scrutinised and, where necessary, improved. I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, who said that your Lordships should not be cowed or intimidated by the other place. It is surely our role to do exactly what we are about to do, otherwise it seems to me that we have no point at all—I do not think we need ChatGPT to tell us that. That having been said, I entirely concur with the view of my noble friend Lord Sherbourne, who pointed out that the Bill, with amendments, has already gone through the other place and is a key part of the Government’s policy to stop the boats. We should bear that in mind as we go into Committee.

The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who is in his place, spoke about one of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, has in his fatal amendment, at paragraph (4), about the failure

“to include measures to eliminate the backlog of asylum cases”.

I want to press my noble friend the Minister on this, because it seems to me that this is one of the worst problems confronting us today. Our inability to process those who are already here is a stain on our national character, leaving many of them in a kind of no man’s land, waiting for their future to be decided in conditions that, frankly, in some places are deplorable. Is it because of the legal challenges that are mounted every time a case comes up and, if so, how will this Bill change that? Is it the incompetence of those tasked with processing this? Is it a lack of resources? If so, can the Minister commit to more resources, as any Bill should address those who are already here?

Point 5 in the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, is on the failure to include measures to tackle people smuggling gangs. The whole idea of this Bill is that there will be no need for such gangs if we can get it out there that, once you come here illegally, you will not be able to come here again. However, we need to make sure that that message goes out loud and clear. I remember that the Foreign Office was tasked with endless campaigns all around the world to bring the human trafficking Bill to the public’s attention in the localities where it was based. Once this Bill becomes law, as I believe it will, the Foreign Office will be tasked once more with pointing out all around the world that if people come here illegally then they will not be able to stay.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury reminded us of the huge increase in the number of displaced people. Many millions more are anticipated by 2050 as a result of climate change or conflict. We see today what is happening in Sudan. If climate change gets worse, whole swathes of sub-Saharan Africa will become uninhabitable. We talk about the difference between internally displaced people and displaced people; I submit that, if they cannot live somewhere, soon those internally displaced people will have to seek lives elsewhere, creating huge migratory pressures.

The result of all this is that it is incumbent on us to have a fair and enforceable migration policy. Frankly, nothing I have heard this afternoon or since we started this debate suggests that any of those criticising this Bill have come up with a credible, workable alternative. We are left with a policy that is fair neither to those already here nor to those seeking to come here through legal channels. It is manifestly not fair to anyone.

The Greens seem to have something against Rwanda. Those of us who went there for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting last year saw a very different country to that depicted by some whose knowledge of the country may be a little second-hand or out of date. It is known as the Switzerland of Africa; I believe it is well placed to receive asylum seekers. I would like to tease out from my noble friend the Minister a little more on the deal with Rwanda and what discussions the Government have had with its Government about the guaranteed freedom of people whom we are sending there and their ability, once they are there, to return to their homelands if that is what they seek to do.

For too long as a country, our successive Governments have shirked our responsibilities by failing to enact a fair and enforceable policy on asylum and migration. Difficult and controversial though aspects of this Bill certainly are, it is a positive move to address this. I therefore welcome the Bill and will support it. If not this, then what?

20:03

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I too fully support this necessary Bill. I thank the trade unions UNISON and the RMT for their briefing. I have noticed over the years that the Labour Party no longer seems to mention unions; it may be a bit embarrassed that it might win the next election and God knows what it would do with this Bill. This week it has backpedalled a bit on what it might do with legislation that our Government are passing.

It has struck me that so much of this debate has been about refugees and not much about the people who live in Britain. They are not racist or dislike people, but this is a matter of democracy; the people of Britain are fed up to the back teeth with a Government who appear unable to control the boats. It is as simple as that. They are not against legal migration or immigration, but they fail to understand how we can have a Government who cannot manage to stop a dinghy in the middle of a bit of sea. In many ways, this is a matter of democracy and fairness to many people. The people who have welcomed refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan have done so because they see them as legitimate refugees. These people are not.

We have heard a lot about international obligations. We had an international obligation to the European Union, but the people revolted against it. There are all sorts of international obligations—to NATO, the Council of Europe and the United Nations. While we are at it, I remind noble Lords that Churchill, who is always quoted as being for the Council of Europe, was basically pretty disinterested in it. All the work on it was done by Ernie Bevin, the Labour Foreign Secretary. Churchill showed virtually no interest in the Council of Europe, but he did admittedly read a couple of speeches which I doubt he understood. Let us get away from this idea that Churchill and Maxwell Fyfe were the great godfathers of international co-operation, which cannot be broken.

Time has moved on. The refugee system set up in the late 1940s was to deal with the forcible removal of citizens of German background from Poland and Czechoslovakia. It had nothing to do with migration from Africa or anywhere else like that. In my earlier years in this House, I sat on the EU External Affairs Sub-Committee, until the Whips decided to get rid of me. One of the things we looked at was Operation Sophia, the EU operation on migrants. The sub-committee titled its report Operation Sophia: A Failed Mission, because it found that we could not control the boats in the Mediterranean.

My main worry about this Bill is not that it is too stringent but that it will not work. The key to making it work is that the Government must somehow find a way of stopping the boats. It is as simple as that. If you cannot get across the channel, you will not try, but if you are told that you will wait for 10 years before being deported, of course you will come across, because you will think, “Oh, well, there’ll be a couple more government changes before then. They’ll probably get fed up and run out of money, and we’ll all be allowed to stay”. I say to the Minister that the key to this is working out a way of stopping the boats. Unlike Australia, we do not have a nearby island on which we can put people. We could try Ascension Island, but I do not think there is anything much closer. We have to make it clear that there is no future in landing in the UK.

On the two unions I mentioned, we must make it clear that the legislation will not give powers to anyone to ask social care workers, UNISON workers or railway workers to perform illegal acts. They cannot be subject to being asked to do things that are in any way dubious. I hope an indemnity will be written in for them if they are.

I am pleased to support this Bill. I hope it works, but the key is to stop the boats crossing the channel.

20:10

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the wisdom of my noble friend Lord Balfe.

Defence of the realm is the first duty of government, so this Bill is essential if unpalatable. Without control over our own borders, Parliament, lawmaking and evidence-based policy become side-shows. It is not dehumanising for our Government to strain every sinew to stop the boats; we do not want anyone else dying in a flimsy boat in our waters. This trade is doing untold harm to our country as well as to those putting family fortunes and precious lives into the hands of people smugglers. What is being traded is not simply money for unsafe passage; it is also our physical and social infrastructure.

Many speaking against today’s Bill habitually, and rightly, hold this Government to account for lack of housing and access to essential services—particularly children’s social care but also family doctors, education and everything else our people rely on for quality of life. Can I ask my noble friend the Minister if he can provide any detail as to the current strain on children’s social services? Are there any projections of how this could worsen without action?

One of the first rules of economics is that wants are unlimited but resources to satisfy them are limited. The basic instinct of many here is to scoop up the dispossessed, especially vulnerable children, and give them the benefits of living in Britain. However, whilst we might want to do that, we need to pay attention to the electorate. It is not pandering to ask what people who voted for this Government want Ministers to prioritise; over two-fifths said their second-greatest concern, after the cost of living, is illegal migration routes such as small boats; more than those who said NHS waiting lists.

We are heading in the right direction in an incredibly difficult area of social policy, but we cannot be half-hearted. The small boats’ business model is ruthlessly pursued; therefore, this Bill must not be so watered down that the loopholes are big enough to drive an armada through.

The electorate are not closet little Englanders—and I choose my words carefully. Scotland has taken a disproportionately low number of asylum seekers, while England has stepped up to accept most of those entering through safe and legal global routes, on which we have a proud recent record.

We are certainly not ducking out of the United Nations refugee convention and the UK’s international responsibilities. As we have heard, our country-specific routes have provided refuge for 150,000 people from Hong Kong, 160,000 Ukrainians and 25,000 Afghans forced to flee the Taliban. Another 50,000 people have come to the UK via non-specific country routes, including through the family reunion route for those with a qualifying family member in the UK. Yet, as we have heard, 74% of illegal arrivals are adult males, many of whom came directly from safe countries such as Albania, and all travelled through safe countries such as France where they should have claimed asylum.

Neither are the electorate heartless, but they are concerned about the £6 million daily cost of housing illegal migrants, and other expenses like the manpower needed to deal with them. I am in and out of prisons, and one reason they find it hard to maintain staffing levels is that Border Force absorbs so many of their trained officers.

As mentioned earlier, people are particularly concerned about the already stretched social services backdrop for British children, such as the lack of foster carers and other pressures, which mean that many are placed far from home in residential settings. Those who argue that unaccompanied children should automatically become looked after by local authorities and certainly not be sent back need to be wide-eyed about the knock-on effect this is already having. Children who are sent on ahead to benefit from the British system further strain our social care infrastructure and make it even harder to address current failings.

Commons amendments mean that return happens only if unaccompanied children’s countries of origin are safe, or they are to be reunited with their parents. Putting it bluntly, if parents are not dissuaded from sending their unaccompanied children on these boats, smugglers will likely focus their trade on this new area of weakness. The vast majority of illegal migrants are not pregnant women and children, but that could change if we do anything to provide a magnet to attract them; we cannot tread so timidly as to be ineffectual.

Every day, people on the coast are dealing directly with this growing problem of illegal migrants, who have to be housed and medically treated, sometimes as a result of their perilous journey. I am sure this Bill will attract an abundance of amendments, but these should not be laid cynically to prevent progress on small boats before the next election. We, and the electorate, need action this day.

20:15

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is good that one thing seems to unite the whole House, and that is the fact that we all deplore the backlog and agree on the need for it to be addressed. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned all of the Conservative ex-Home Secretaries who were responsible, but going back much further during the 13 years of the Labour Government we had exactly the same problem—I remember as a constituency MP this was one of the issues that came up time after time.

I will be supporting this Bill in its Second Reading tonight and will be opposing the wrecking amendment. It is important that the convention to allow government Bills to have a Second Reading is adhered to, no matter how strongly we may feel about the legislation. We will all have the right to amend this Bill—as normal, we can table amendments and vote on them— and I may put down some amendments myself. For me, the principal aim of this legislation is to act to stop the small boats coming here in the first place.

Around 18 months ago, I had a three-hour debate here on migrants, sadly on the day that 27 lives were lost crossing the channel, and much was said then about how that could never be allowed to happen again. Since then, the numbers coming over on dinghies have escalated: in 2021 when I spoke, around 28,500 people had come through already; in 2022, there were 45,755; and, from 2018 until now, nearly 100,000 people have arrived at Dover. It is legitimate to say that our country has lost control of our own borders—certainly that is what the public think when they look at the pictures on television.

Some of these new arrivals—not many, but some—have been identified as a terrorist threat, and many have disappeared with us having no idea where they have gone to or what they are up to. The security of our own country must be a priority of government, and so must the social cohesion of our communities. Moving hundreds of mainly young men—I often think “Where are all the women?”—into areas where they will not be able to intermix is a recipe for problems. The public are not stupid, nor are the vast majority prejudiced against genuine asylum seekers, but they see at first hand the impact on their community and know that it is unsustainable.

I visited Dover two years ago to see for myself how the arrivals are processed. We cannot ignore the fact that the way we treat arrivals is far superior to what happens in France or elsewhere. Therefore, we cannot ignore that there is a pull factor to the United Kingdom; otherwise, I cannot see why so many want to leave the safe countries that they have come to in order to come here. Of course, there are some with family connections, but we already operate a system that would allow legal entry for them—maybe that can be looked at to make it better.

Those who manage the boats—the people smugglers —are well acquainted with what happens in our own country. They know that there are at least five different avenues to challenge a negative asylum claim result, and if all that fails, another asylum claim can simply be launched in a fresh application. Then we see that when someone who commits a hideous crime such as murder here is being deported, one of the many agencies will assemble a mass of MPs, and probably noble Lords, to stop the deportation—all of which is usually paid for by public money and legal aid. We cannot go on with people being allowed to bring multiple claims and judicial reviews. It is a lawyers’ paradise, but it is the hard-working British taxpayer bearing the cost.

Making it clear, as the Bill does, that if you come here illegally you will not be considered for asylum and that you will be deported will be a deterrent. I want to see fulfilled the commitment given by the Home Secretary that, once the small boats have been stopped, the Government will look at more safe and legal routes for genuine asylum seekers. I want that to happen, and we will keep an eye on this to make sure that it does. However, we really need to differentiate between economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Even if some noble Lords do not differentiate, the public do, and that is what is important. It is also important to note that people have complained about the language used by some Ministers. Sometimes the language used by people supporting the Bill—who are making some quite rational and sensible points—is then almost portrayed as racist. We have to be careful about our language just as much.

In my view, the reality is that only tough and unambiguous legislation will stand any chance of succeeding and dissuading people from risking their lives by jumping into dinghies and heading for Britain in the expectation that, once here, they will be permitted to stay. We have to send a signal that we are not an open door, and that we will not continue to allow the industry of lawyers making millions from the whole asylum system to continue. The Government are unwise, I think, to seek to give the impression that the Bill will solve all our illegal immigration problems—it will not. However, it certainly is a start, and we have to try. The Bill is now with us, and with some improvements, it should be supported.

20:21

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords, “Stop the boats” is a worthy aim, and the Prime Minister is right to consider it a priority of the Government, but the Bill as currently written will not achieve it. Let me assure my noble friend straightaway that, although I have great concerns about this text, I will not be opposing the Bill’s Second Reading today. My concerns are numerous, and my probing questions require some clear answers from my noble friend. My remarks are made partly from my background as an Immigration Minister in the UK, partly as a former spokesperson in the European Parliament, and partly as a lawyer—not a lefty lawyer.

I begin by telling my noble friend that the ways chosen by the Government to alleviate the undoubted suffering of persecuted people fleeing tyranny will have the opposite outcomes to those suggested, and in implementation they will both break solemn laws and treaties and provide greater sustenance to the real criminals—the people traffickers and smugglers—who should be our first targets. The number of detected human trafficking offences has increased substantially in recent years, and we must not allow them to profit from vulnerable people. Why are we not doing more to catch these real criminals, some of whom are here in the UK?

As a lawyer, my noble friend must understand that I will never vote in favour of our Government breaking the law—and I trust that it is the same situation for him. The Government have claimed that they have taken advice from the “finest legal minds” in this country. Can he please name these fine legal minds? To clarify, I am satisfied, as is the UNHCR and other organisations, that no asylum seeker per se can be illegal. There is a clear difference, as my noble friend ought to know, between migrants who come here illicitly or deceitfully and are in breach of our tight Immigration Rules, and asylum seekers who present here and claim asylum under the strict criteria of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees. In the first case, those who break our Immigration Rules should and must be deported speedily. In the second case, applicants for asylum should be quickly put to proof that they meet the fundamental criteria to be granted refuge. If they cannot, they should then be returned to whence they came.

When I was the Minister in 1996, I committed extra resources to the removal process, because I believed that our system must be seen by our people as firm but fair. We had to sometimes apply pressure on foreign Governments to achieve that. Those who succeeded in complying or proving their status were afforded the traditional and vital hospitality that this country was, until now, noted for. The Government are instead trying to recategorise asylum seekers as themselves being criminals, before their cases are even heard. They are using extreme rhetoric and, in implementing their Rwandan scheme, flagrantly ignoring laws—not only the 1951 refugee convention but other international agreements and, of course, the European Convention on Human Rights.

Regarding the Rwanda scheme, the Bill sets out to diminish the UK courts’ powers to suspend deportation and sets a dangerous precedent about the way in which they look at judicial review. As a lawyer, can my noble friend really defend this behaviour? When he replies, can he please give us the precise details of that part of the agreement which obliges the UK to take Rwandan asylum seekers back here? I refer him to section 16 of the memorandum of understanding.

Changes to the Bill were made in the House of Commons. Some were made in deference to extreme demands; one was also made relating to the issue of safe and legal routes to this country for asylum seekers. We are all aware of those routes, which come from UN programmes. Indeed, I was the Minister responsible for that from Bosnia in 1996. We are also aware of special UK programmes from favoured countries. Noting the wish of the Government to have an annual limit on such arrivals, how can my noble friend describe what the new arrangements might look like? The concession in the Commons does not really give us much to go on.

All UK embassies and consulates, in my view, should be a potential application post for entry where processing can take place. That is the least we should accept. Of course, the Foreign Office maintains a list of safe countries, and I accept that it will be more difficult for those from such countries to meet the criteria for asylum, but the opportunities for applicants must be spread across our presence, wherever in the world it might be. We need to increase our resources to deal with cases quickly.

Let us go back, finally, to the channel and the boats. I was a drafter of the Dublin agreements when we were in the EU; they at least made it easier to send back asylum seekers within the law. Since we have left the EU, we must rely on bilaterals with our neighbours. I welcome our discussions with the French, but these need to go further, with good will on both sides. Breaking international law certainly will not help. We also need to become reassociated with new EU initiatives to handle the large number of migrants who try to enter the Schengen area every year. Together, we have a better chance of achieving this.

There are various ways in which we can bring about change to protect lives and our borders at the same time, but that does not include breaking international law; leaving the European Convention on Human Rights; curtailing the powers of the UK courts; criminalising innocent victims; and harming as a result our race and community relations in the UK, which a lot of us have worked so hard over many years to improve.

20:28

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, who made one of the best speeches we have had in this debate. He made it very clear why this is a bad piece of legislation.

“Across Europe, we live in times in which feelings that so many of us had thought outdated now appear to be re-emerging and spreading”. Pope Francis spoke those words when he reflected on the rising tide of intolerance on our continent. He went on to talk about the feelings of suspicion, fear, contempt and even hatred towards individuals or groups who are judged to be different based on their ethnicity, nationality or religion. Britain will face a state of moral decline if bigotry, intolerance and hatred feel at home in our country. Intolerance of people because they are different will dehumanise our society.

Recently, we have seen politicians stoking up intolerance of refugees and migrants, but the Britain of my lifetime has been a beacon of freedom, tolerance and justice, and that is how I want it to remain. British people have actively built links across communities, challenging hatred, welcoming refugees and standing up for those who are victimised. I believe we have seen no greater evidence of this harmony, tolerance and community than the scenes we have witnessed across the country in the last few days following the Coronation of the King and Queen.

It is a privilege to sit in this place, but with that privilege goes a duty not to allow vile ideals to grow and spread without challenge. The great social reformer Leo Abse MP, who was a dear friend of mine, once said: “Tolerate everyone, tolerate everything, but never ever tolerate the intolerant”.

I believe we must seek to resolve the issue of migrants crossing the channel in small boats. Several of us from this House and the other place raised this matter when we met French parliamentarians in July, and we urged them to press their Government to work with ours to find a common approach and see what we can do. But I very much regret that this piece of populist legislation is no answer and will solve nothing. Rather, it will stoke up ill-feeling towards some of the most vulnerable and desperate people on the planet—refugees—and all for short-term gain. I ask the architect of this Bill to do one thing: to heed the words of Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who said:

“History is apt to judge harshly those who sacrifice tomorrow for today”.


My especial concern about this Bill is the awful impact it will have on unaccompanied migrant children. These refugee children not only have need of our protection but are entitled to it, because we have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet across our continent, the health and well-being of unaccompanied refugee children is being compromised, as I well know from a report I did when I was a member of the Council of Europe. Thousands of refugee youngsters are suffering; they are being abused, they are being trafficked, they are self-harming, and there is plenty of evidence that some are taking their own lives.

We must challenge those using toxic rhetoric about migration and displaying intolerance and prejudice which violates basic human rights. Political point-scoring about refugees, most especially refugee migrant children, should not be allowed to deny these children the help they need.

We should all be concerned about this Bill, because the Government do not have a good record of dealing with unaccompanied migrant children. Some 4,500 unaccompanied migrant children, some as young as 10, have been placed in hotels; 200 have gone missing and have not been seen again. Section 20 of the Children Act 1989 gives local councils alone statutory child protection powers, which include caring for unaccompanied migrant children. It does not give such powers to the Home Office.

There appears to be no legal basis for placing unaccompanied children in hotels operated by the Home Office. I twice attempted to discover which Act of Parliament has allowed the Government to do this; indeed, I asked the Minister last week. It is a simple question, and I ask it again: which Act of Parliament allows the Government to put these children in hotels?

This Bill will make the plight of unaccompanied migrant children even worse, denying them the right to claim refugee protection and making provision for them to be detained; and it will allow them to be removed from this country, despite their being youngsters unaccompanied by an adult. Is the United Kingdom seriously going to deport traumatised, in-need and unprotected children? If we do, shame, shame, shame on us.

20:33

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, there is a legitimate debate to be had about how the UK manages its borders, and like every other noble Lord here, I have opinions on that too. However, it should exclude those who are already subjected to abuse through the heinous crime of modern slavery.

A former Prime Minister said in the other place:

“It has always been important to separate modern slavery from immigration status”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/4/23; col. 809.]


Regrettably, this Bill brings modern slavery into the heart of the immigration debate through Clauses 21 to 28, and it is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The UK has had a proud record of seeking to protect victims, prevent modern slavery and prosecute traffickers—the three Ps, based on the UN Palermo Protocol. I am pleased to say that the Bill I introduced in 2013 in Northern Ireland, which passed in 2015, has played its part. It is therefore with great sadness and dismay that I contemplate the outcome of this Bill for victims across the United Kingdom and in Northern Ireland particularly. The Bill does not measure up to the three Ps: we are not protecting victims and we cannot prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes, without which we cannot prevent exploitation.

The modern slavery strategies of the devolved nations will go up in smoke, without any consultation, and the ability to care for victims under devolved legislation is undermined by the Bill. The Minister may say that these measures are necessary to prevent abuse. We heard that last year in the debate on Part 5 of the Nationality and Borders Act, which came into effect only at the end of January. We know that, since then, the number of victims who have received a reasonable grounds decision has plummeted. In the last quarter, where the Home Office’s new guidance applied for two out of the three months, only 49% of adults received a positive reasonable grounds decision, compared with 87% in 2022.

I expect the Minister might refer in summing up to the number of people who are referred into the NRM from immigration detention. The Minister, in response to a PQ tabled by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, argued that it was individuals arriving by small boats who are referred from detention who are abusing the system. No one self-refers into the NRM; it is first responders who refer, based on evidence of exploitation.

Of course, we do not want people abusing the system. However, the number of people who are referred from detention is small, relative both to the number of people who come across the channel and to the number referred into the NRM. The Home Office admits that the number of decision-makers has not kept up with referrals, leading to long delays in decision-making.

All this leads me to conclude that Clauses 21 to 28 are disproportionate and will negatively impact genuine victims. I hope that the Minister will update the House on how many referrals there have been from detention in the first quarter after the NBA reforms.

Finally, I come back to Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is of the view that the EU trafficking directive rights still apply to victims in Northern Ireland under the protocol. The Government have argued—wrongly, in my opinion—that they can deprive victims of support on public order grounds under the European convention against human trafficking. In Northern Ireland, victims have another recourse: Article 11 of the trafficking directive. I hope the Minister will address this issue as he sets out the Bill’s impact on victims in the devolved Administrations.

20:38

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, it is no easy matter to follow so many of your Lordships, who have raised some difficult and problematic questions about the Bill. Can it, as it aims, prevent and deter migration, particularly by unsafe and illegal routes? Does it comply with UK and international law? Some noble Lords have raised interesting questions in supporting the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, in wanting to see it gone.

I agree that this is a tough and apparently uncompromising measure: not only does it oblige the Home Secretary to detain and remove those arriving in breach of immigration controls, it prohibits a challenge on human rights or asylum-seeking grounds, disapplies some modern-day slavery protections, and bans those subject to Clause 2 from gaining immigration or citizenship status in future. It also seeks, as your Lordships have pointed out, to avoid the prospect of our own courts or the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg holding up removal.

However, the Bill is necessary and proportionate on a number of grounds: for the functioning of our democracy under the rule of law—laws made in Westminster; to take account of the changed circumstances since the 1950s and the new character of immigration into Europe in general; and for the effective working of the asylum system, as so many of your Lordships wish.

Our laws are made in Parliament. Our judges apply them and, where necessary, interpret them, but ultimately Parliament, not the judiciary, must legislate. It does so on the authority of the people, who vote and choose a Government with a particular mandate. The voters have made it clear on a number of occasions that they want the borders controlled, and on this Bill, the House of Commons has given strong backing, with a majority, as has been said, of around 60 in most Divisions. I follow some noble Lords in saying that it is not for this Chamber to reverse the direction of policy backed by voters, the Government and MPs, but of course there will be room to improve the measure.

Circumstances and costs have changed significantly since the pioneering agreements about which your Lordships have spoken so illuminatingly. Not only has international travel risen to mass proportions, but the costs of immigration have also risen, far beyond what we could have imagined in those pioneering days when Parliament first debated Beveridge’s blueprint for the welfare state. Then, in 1943, the premise was that benefit, and the benefit system, would depend on individual contribution. Each individual paid a contribution and benefit was linked to it, although there was discretionary provision for exceptional assistance. By 1951, the year of the convention, potential deviation from the contributory principle, even over such a thing as a qualifying period for old age pension, was a most serious matter of debate.

Today, the system is significantly different. It is more expensive and far more reliant on tax funding, with higher expectations for social security, healthcare and education. As families struggle to pay the bills, it is right to tackle the rising costs of illegal migration, for which we are all paying through an increased tax base for that and other things. I need not remind your Lordships that the UK is now at almost its highest tax extraction since the Second World War.

This is not a UK problem alone: the small boats may be, but not the general problem of people wanting to settle in western European countries. Already, as has been mentioned, Rule 39 of the European Court Rules is being reconsidered and reviewed, with representations from a number of member states. Although I wish the Government well with their transfer arrangements, there is less appetite for transfer or return agreements than may have existed 20 years ago. Immigration has moved centre stage in all our neighbouring countries. In France, President Macron’s immigration Bill is having a not very happy reception from left to right, with demonstrations in the streets. Earlier this month, the Italian Foreign Minister cancelled a trip to Paris because the French Interior Minister had said that the Italian Prime Minister was incapable of controlling migration. That was barely months after the dust settled on the diversion by Italy of a humanitarian ship carrying 300 refugees to France.

Those of us, and I am one of them, who want a safe and legal asylum system for people fleeing persecution and danger to life, and an immigration system that supports the UK’s economic needs, recognise that we must manage both effectively. Removing illegal migrants from this country while their applications are processed may sound drastic, but if the alternative is to billet them into local hotels or disused barracks, there is a danger of undermining social cohesion and the rule of law. The laws of this country matter. They are, and have been for centuries, fair and welcoming to those who flee persecution in their homelands, generous to the many thousands—including me—who came to this country to take advantage of its unparalleled opportunities.

Voters now want their borders controlled. I support this Bill because it is necessary to tackle a particular problem; because the UK, like its fellow European countries, must recognise the political imperative; and because it is a duty on all those responsible for fiscal and economic affairs to control expenditure. Above all, I support it because the laws which govern this country should protect the liberties of all its people, be fair and proportionate and have the support of the people in whose name the law is made.

20:45

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, one of the few compensations of speaking so late is that it enables me to try to respond to some of the points made in this fascinating but, I think, worrying debate over the past few hours. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is not here, but I will come back to the challenge he raised right at the beginning when he asked whether those who oppose to the Bill were not concerned about the plight of these poor people coming over at perilous cost, often to their lives, in these small boats, having been exploited by these international criminal gangs. Of course we are concerned about those people, but on whether this Bill is the right way to deal with the issue I have very severe doubts. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, also challenged us to come up with a coherent alternative, which I think is somewhat disingenuous, given the scepticism that so many of us have about whether this Bill will actually achieve its stated intentions.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury really laid it out in the debate on 9 December. Why do we not hear more from the Government about having a rigorous approach to combating smugglers? Why do we not hear more about the provision of safe and legal ways for people to get here, receive assessment and, where appropriate, get protection? The most reverend Primate also argued for an update to the 1951 refugee convention to meet modern circumstances. It seems to me that international co-operation based on human rights is a much more effective way to develop a plan to deal with these issues.

Secondly, I want to come back to a point made right at the start of the debate by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton. He referred to the fact that, under the Immigration Rules, there is no asylum visa route for an individual refugee to enter the UK and claim asylum. This means that, unless the person falls within one of the four settlement schemes or asylum is sought by someone who is already legally present in the UK, a refugee’s arrival in and entry into the UK will inevitably be illegal. As the noble and learned Lord said, this is therefore not a “small boats” Bill. The provisions in it will affect all who seek refugee status in this country and are entitled to protection under the 1951 convention.

Thirdly, I want to refer to the Home Secretary’s extraordinary intervention this morning, in which she sought to tell this House what she considers to be our duty. I think that this House is well able to make up its own mind on that. For me, upholding the rule of law and our international law obligations, preventing unfettered power being given to the Home Secretary through this Bill, questioning the retrospective nature of some of the Bill’s provisions and seeking to retain the protections contained in the Modern Slavery Act are matters that should weigh rather more heavily on our deliberations than the Home Secretary’s crude attempt to distract from her own lamentable performance by indulging in dog-whistle politics of the worst kind.

Fourthly, I want to question the Minister on the Government’s assertion in relation to modern slavery that the Bill is needed to prevent people gaming the system. The leading modern slavery charity, Hestia, which supported more than 2,700 victims in London last year, says that it has seen no evidence to suggest that the Government’s modern slavery process is being exploited by individuals seeking asylum in the UK. This is backed up by a number of other modern slavery charities that have written to us over the past few days. Just look at what the University of Nottingham and the Human Trafficking Foundation said:

“Victims of modern slavery may not know they have entered the UK illegally; traffickers may deliberately withhold information and documentation as a means of control and may have offered to arrange travel on behalf of those they are planning to exploit. Potential victims therefore may be unaware of their status or need for entry documentation, believing traffickers have arranged this for them”.


Earlier, the Minister spoke of the generosity of the British people, to which a number of noble Lords have referred. I agree but I suspect that that generosity extends to wanting to retain the protections that we have in the Modern Slavery Act. Rightly, the Government took great credit internationally for the provisions in the 2015 legislation—I applaud them for it—but now, they are ruining that. They are throwing it away recklessly and, with it, the protections for some of the most vulnerable people.

I will end by commenting on the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, which he spoke to with such force. I must say, it is interesting that the Liberal Democrats have always questioned the legitimacy of this Chamber, yet they seem to have rather changed their minds and now feel that it is legitimate for us to reject a Bill. That is not what we do. We have the ability to scrutinise this wretched Bill thoroughly; I hope that we will do so.

20:51

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, one of the striking things about this interesting debate is that, in many cases, noble Lords on all sides of the Chamber have spoken as if they were proceeding from a fundamental principle of great importance to them. For some, it was the vision of what our country is; for others, it was the universal principle of humanitarianism or a commitment to internationalism as a means of resolving problems. There were others, too, of course.

My fundamental starting point is more mundane: the international legal principle that no country is obliged to admit foreign nationals and that, if one does so, it may impose conditions on that entry. Of course, we in this country mitigate that right—our right to refuse to admit foreign nationals—in ways that we have chosen to do in the past. For example, when we were members of the European Union, we gave free access to this country to citizens of EU member states. Another way in which we have abridged that international right, of course, is by entering into the refugee convention. Inevitably, these sorts of arrangements involve some sort of international agreement and so can be categorised as falling under the heading of international law.

I am not a lawyer, nor making a legal point, but we must take account, as my noble friend Lord Balfe said—he has just disappeared—of the circumstances in which we entered into those arrangements and whether those circumstances continue to apply, because we have a degree of flexibility about how we apply them in the light of changing circumstances. The circumstances in which we entered the refugee convention contemplated broadly the care of often large numbers of people displaced by war and other catastrophes, usually in adjacent countries and on a temporary basis, until they could return safely to their home. A lot of people would ask how, by means of the same convention, we are having a debate this evening about transcontinental travel facilitated by profitable travel agencies that are run as businesses—they may be criminal enterprises, but they are profitable travel agencies that are run as businesses—with a view to permanent settlement. This is a very long way indeed from where we started.

Some people may say, “The world has changed since we entered the convention, and this is what it is like now. We should share our burden”. I fully accept arguments that Britain, as a leading international power, should share burdens. There are ways in which we can share burdens; by doing things for people who are displaced, not necessarily by their coming to this country but by helping them in the places where they are displaced. We could do more on that front.

I cannot resist saying that I find it very hard to accept comments from many noble Lords about the European Convention on Human Rights when we so lightly pass over the fact that the rights of our own people in Northern Ireland to a say in the laws that they live under is abridged by the Northern Ireland protocol and by the Windsor Framework that has followed it. When it suits us, we are all for the European Convention on Human Rights, but we are willing to blink it when it does not. There is a degree of double sightedness on that.

It is not all good news for my noble friend on the Front Bench; I have some concerns about the Bill, including that, as has been alluded to glancingly by some noble Lords, it deliberately catches some British citizens within its scope. It is possible to be a British citizen and still be an illegal migrant under the Bill, denied access to British citizenship by being an illegal migrant. That is because the drafters of the Bill—from the Home Office, I assume—as so often in the past, have deliberately conflated the concepts of naturalisation and registration. They have treated them separately, in separate clauses, but have imposed the same penalties and the same process. Not for the first time I remind noble Lords that the two things are entirely different. Naturalisation is a concession whereby the British Government gives citizenship to people of foreign nationality. Registration, introduced by the post-war Labour Government, is a process whereby the British state acknowledges an existing right to British citizenship which has been difficult to establish, either through the vagueness of circumstances or the want of proper documentation. It is akin to the sort of blunders that we fell into which led to the Windrush scandal.

The Bill needs to be amended and looked at very carefully to ensure that those entitled to British citizenship by way of registration are not denied those rights because they arrive in the country irregularly. I hope that other noble Lords will come back to this in Committee.

20:58

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as an immigrant— a proud immigrant. This country has given me so many opportunities; to build from scratch a consumer brand loved by this country, Cobra Beer, a household name in the UK; to be the youngest university chancellor in this country from 2005 to 2010, at the University of West London; to be the first Indian-born chancellor of a Russell group university in this country, the University of Birmingham, which is the third-largest university in this country; to join this House as one of its three youngest Peers, 17 years ago; and to be the first Zoroastrian Parsi to sit in this House. I hail from the smallest minority community in the world, the Zoroastrian Parsis. There are just 100,000 of us. We fled from Iran—Persia in those days—to escape religious persecution. We went to India, and I am proud to say that, over the centuries, per capita of achievement it is probably one of the most successful communities in the world.

That is because good immigration has always worked. The 14% of immigrants here contribute so much to make sure that this country, with 1% of the world’s population, is still the sixth largest economy in the world. The immigrants in this country and their children are reaching the very top. There is no better example than our Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.

The Minister started the debate by saying that the purpose of the Illegal Migration Bill is

“to prevent and deter unlawful migration, and in particular migration by unsafe and illegal routes, by requiring the removal from the United Kingdom”.

Yet, as we have heard from so many noble Lords today, the Bill creates a hostile image of immigration, even more so than Theresa May did. From 2010 to 2019, when she was Home Secretary and Prime Minister, she created a hostile image of, and approach to, immigration. For example, in 2012 she removed the two-year post-graduation work visa for international students, which I spearheaded in 2007-08. Boris Johnson brought it back, to start again in 2021.

The Bill is focusing on the boats, one of the Prime Minister’s five pledges. We all want the boats to stop. That is not the question. It is how we do it that matters: not in an inhuman way, not in a way that breaches international law, not in a way that breaches international commitments—the Bar Council considers that the Bill as currently drafted is incompatible with the principles which underlie the rule of law—and not in a way that removes this country’s centuries-old reputation for fairness and justice, which is respected around the world.

The Bill is meant to be a deterrent, but let us put this in perspective. The 45,000 people who came across in those boats last year make up less than 10% of the net migration of 500,000 people into this country. A fear of immigration is created—a fear that led to David Cameron and Theresa May wanting to bring it down to the tens of thousands. Where are we, in the tens of thousands? It is at 500,000. It is a fear of immigration created, for example, by Angela Merkel, when she said she would allow 1 million refugees to settle in Germany in 2015 at the height of the Syrian crisis. Whether we like it or not, that fear played a major part in the Brexit vote turning out the way it did.

Yet look at today: according to a study brought out by King’s College London on 23 February this year, the UK public have among the most positive attitudes to immigration. The study ranks the country at the top of an international league table as the most accepting of new arrivals. So where is this will of the people? There it is. This is the latest study that has come out.

Will the Minister please explain to me why our international students are included in the net migration figures? International students have now reached a record high of 680,000, and this is primarily because of the two-year post-graduation work visa being brought in. They are not immigrants; on the whole, they return to their countries. In fact, if you look at the immigration figures, the highest number is of students—it is higher than people who come to work. This is because the UN says that, within one year, you have to categorise people as immigrants. Even a one-year master’s degree means an international student is categorised as an immigrant. Other countries exclude them from their net migration figures.

Why are the Government making a rod for their own backs? Why are international students being used in this way? Is it being used to create a fear of migration? Is it being used to create a hostile approach to immigration? I just do not understand it. I am like a stuck record: in his winding up, please can the Minister address this point? I am co-chair of the All-Party Group on International Students and president for the UK Council of International Student Affairs. International students bring £30 billion into this country and are one of our strongest elements of soft power.

To conclude, of course we want to address the asylum claims: the backlog of 138,000 is unacceptable, and we need to process them quicker. Of course we need to address, tackle, and stop the illegal immigration and these awful, dangerous and tragic small boats crossing the channel. But let us never take for granted the good immigration that has benefited this country, and for which we should always be grateful and appreciative: the good immigration has made Great Britain great.

21:04

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak following the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, particularly on this issue of illegal migration which cuts right to the core of who we are as a nation. I want to use my time to ask three questions. First, will the stated objective of this Bill be achieved? Secondly, do we have the right target in our sights? Thirdly, are there things that could be done to ensure the new system reflects the values of our nation?

First, will the stated objective of this Bill be achieved? As we have heard over and again, the purpose of this Bill is

“to prevent and deter unlawful migration, and in particular migration by unsafe and illegal routes”.

The fact that this Bill has very similar objectives to the previous one requires us to take a hard look at what we are doing and ask ourselves whether it will be effective.

I agree with the premise—as do most of us in this House—of both last year’s Bill and this year’s Illegal Migration Bill that we must take back control of our borders and break the business model of people-smuggling networks. However, my concern is whether a focus on deterrence will in fact achieve these objectives. The Government themselves have admitted that the evidence of the efficacy of deterrence measures is limited. So, presuming that this legislation has only limited efficacy and that channel crossings continue in some form or another after this Bill has been passed, I ask my noble friend the Minister to outline how His Majesty’s Government intend to implement the mass detention of irregular arrivals that will continue and how they will support those who are not able to be removed after 28 days of detention because of a lack of returns agreements.

In international terms, we are taking an unorthodox approach to our asylum system. It is clear that we are not confident this approach will be effective, so I also ask my noble friend the Minister whether he would include a review mechanism in this Bill so that Parliament has a chance to evaluate the success of this novel approach and, if it proves to be ineffective, to disapply it.

The second question is whether we have the right target in our sights. With this piece of legislation, our sights are firmly set on the asylum seeker and the trafficked, not the trafficker. If we were to put as much energy into targeting the real criminals, into imprisoning the criminal gangs, we would be standing on firmer ground. It is not illegal to cross a border and claim asylum —this is a protection set out in the refugee convention of 1951—we are choosing to make it illegal. Over 70% of the people who come via these routes are granted asylum by our own system and our own definitions.

But we are also dismantling much of the modern day slavery legislation by going after those being trafficked rather than the traffickers. The removal and exclusion from support of those victims who have been exploited in the UK will drive victims underground, making them less likely to come forward. This will not only hinder victims’ recovery but damage the chances for prosecutions. Without support and if removed to another country, most victims will be unable to co-operate with investigations. I believe that this House will want to pick up the amendments tabled by the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May in the other place.

But I also want to engage constructively with this Bill, so I ask whether there are things that could be done to ensure the new system reflects the values of our nation. We have always been a place that welcomes those who are genuinely in need. Our commitment to the refugee is founded on our Christian heritage. There has been much said during the passage of this Bill about safe and legal routes. In this Chamber, during the passing of the Nationality and Borders Bill, I supported an amendment that would make provision for 10,000 to come to the UK through safe and legal routes as a way of ensuring we created the infrastructure that would care for people properly rather than us lurching from one emergency situation to another. The Government have indicated they are willing to do this, but there are some factors that it would be worth us exploring together as part of this.

We will need assurance that these safe and legal routes will be set up to welcome those who need protection whatever country they come from, and will not just be country-specific schemes, be they for Afghanistan, Yemen and most recently Sudan. We need to work with the grain of local communities, not against them. A recent study from More in Common showed that, when community sponsorship of refugees is an option, a majority of people are in favour of accepting more refugees into the UK. I therefore encourage the Minister to explore safe routes that include schemes such as Homes for Ukraine that would save the taxpayer millions while also allowing refugees to integrate into British society.

Finally, as we have heard from others tonight, this is all part of a much bigger picture that will be resolved only as we reach for diplomatic solutions. Ultimately, stopping channel crossings and taking back control of our borders can be achieved only through diplomacy, not through domestic legislation. Therefore, I urge the Government to negotiate a returns agreement with France and the European Union and to lead the way in instigating a global solidarity pact with likeminded states that would update the international refugee system and make it fit for the 21st century.

I look forward to working as a House to support the Government to achieve their stated objective of stopping the boats, but doing so in a way that balances control with compassion. I believe we can find a way to put people smugglers out of business and end the exploitation of vulnerable people, while also ensuring that this new chapter in the story of the United Kingdom is founded on international responsibility and human dignity.

21:11

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Your Lordships’ House will have an opportunity to scrutinise this very large and complex Bill and its details, so I will focus on general principles. Perversely, although I think this Bill is politically, constitutionally and morally an imperative, I agree with the comments made by the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Green of Deddington, because within the wider context it is only because we have a failed and dysfunctional legal migration regime that such a Bill is necessary, notwithstanding the geopolitical refugee crisis affecting the rich world.

The British people did not vote to take back control of our borders in 2016 for any Government to preside over a net migration figure of more than 500,000 each year, for special pleading from big business for more cheap foreign labour, for 5 million people on out of work benefits, for £1.9 billion per week spent on social benefits for working age people, for welfare dependency and the stalling of social mobility and productivity, and for pay and training for UK citizens to be reduced over time.

Actually, I predicted this. As Member of Parliament for Peterborough in 2006, in the wake of the European Union free movement directive, I made it clear that there would be serious ramifications on the delivery of public services. For that I was met by hyperbole and allegations of racism and xenophobia and of being a Little Englander—but even Tony Blair conceded that that piece of legislation was in error.

I would rather not support this Bill, and I agree with other speakers who have said that the British people are decent, fair, compassionate and welcoming. One need only look at the figures that the UNHCR produced that show that we are the second most welcoming country in Europe for refugees. Who does not believe that it takes great courage to cross continents to seek a better life and a better future for one’s family and children? However, it is naive and irresponsible to ignore our obligation to propose solutions based on real-world experience. Responsible government is about difficult choices and competing interests, and that is why the Liberal Democrats’ fatal amendment is both irresponsible and an abdication of our duty to respond to legitimate public concerns about this growing migration crisis.

It is also naive and foolhardy not to recognise that of course people traffickers will abuse and exploit the loopholes around modern slavery. I have to say respectfully to my former colleague, the former Prime Minister Theresa May, that she perhaps should have a word with the Home Secretary who presided over the drafting of the Modern Slavery Bill in 2015, because to ignore the ramifications and that exploitation is wrong. That said, I think that the amendments that she has proposed and that noble Lords have proposed are certainly worth looking at.

It has to be said that this House has no mandate whatever to block or wreck the Bill. It is a manifesto commitment from the 2019 general election. It is popular, has public support and was passed by a significant majority in the other place.

I agree with the right reverend Prelates that we need to legislate with compassion, but those of us who support the Bill are no less caring or empathetic to the real-world horrors of modern slavery and people trafficking. Frankly, I have to say as an Anglican that I find it dispiriting that the leaders of my own church, who were silent over the impact of 20 years of uncontrolled immigration, should seek to mischaracterise those of us who have the courage to support these bold measures as morally deficient. That is not the case.

My penultimate point is this. Much talk has been made of breaking international law. We should not regard supranational legal entities and their obligations as shibboleths and theological tablets never to be questioned. It may be unusual, but our dualist treaty regime in this country preserves the rights and duties of legislators against an overmighty Executive and a potentially politicised judiciary, and this House is part of that durable and well-understood constitutional settlement. After all, our first duty is the safety of our own citizens, of whatever background.

In conclusion, today we have heard much criticism, exaggeration, outrage, some intemperate language and cries of “Shame!”—but very few, if any, real, workable alternatives. It is a perfectly noble viewpoint to believe in open borders, mass migration to a country with the highest population density in Europe, a housing crisis, infrastructure pressures and a debt mountain, but let us be honest about it: what does that policy really mean? The shame would be to do nothing, give sustenance to the evil people traffickers, betray the British people, betray those who came here legally and hope that it will all go away. Well, it will not. I welcome and support the Bill, and I wish Ministers well in its possibly quite difficult journey through this House.

21:17

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, it has been a long day and I will not detain the House for too long before the winding-up speeches. However, opportunities to whole- heartedly support the Government on their legislation arise perhaps less often than I would ideally wish and, when I do so, the Government have developed a distressing habit of filleting or spiking the legislation afterwards. However, I am very confident that that will not happen on this occasion, so I want to take this opportunity to speak strongly in support of the Bill.

The basic principle that we must not forget is that a democratic nation state such as ours has, and should have, the right to control its borders and determine who gets to live here and on what terms. Until quite recently that would have been an uncontroversial statement—and, in my experience, it still is the further one gets from London SW1. Still, in recent years this country lost that right as regards EU citizens, and the general principle has been subject to sustained attack from those who perhaps do not always see the point of international borders at all. The result of all this has been the difficulty that the Government face in enforcing their immigration laws and, in recent years, very high and unsustainable levels of legal migration.

As my noble friend Lord Moylan pointed out, the basic principle of the right to control borders is of course shaped by the many commitments that we have taken on, such as our membership of the ECHR, the refugee convention and much else, including our own sua sponte commitments on modern slavery. However, all those commitments must and indeed can be implemented only in a way that is in accordance with practical reality.

Governments do not have the luxury of being content with just words; they must deal in reality, not concepts. One obvious reality is that tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of people could establish an asylum claim if they could get to this country, and many want to. So, if we acquiesce in illegal arrivals, the numbers will continue to grow. If we open new legal routes, they will quickly be overwhelmed and we will be back to the illegal ones. It is simply not possible to make what has amounted to an open, unlimited offer to anyone who can get here.

That is why the Bill is necessary and why, if it becomes law, no one who arrives in this country illegally, with some reasonable but limited exceptions, will be allowed to stay here. Contrary to what some noble Lords have said tonight, that specific principle is strongly supported in this country. Indeed, YouGov polling from March shows that it is supported by an absolute majority of public opinion.

We are told by some who we have heard today that to enshrine these principles in a Bill is in some way—these words have been used during the day—shameful, inhuman, immoral or even evil. I disagree with that and actually rather resent it. It is with the greatest trepidation that I debate morality with the high prelates of the Church, but I cannot agree that we are not living up to our moral responsibility if some of us, in this fallen world, come to different judgments about the implications of the words of Jesus in Matthew, chapter 25.

We are told by others on the Benches opposite that, because everyone who gets to these shores has a potentially huge contribution to make to this country, it is immoral and self-defeating to turn them away. Of course I agree that every person who comes here has the same potential as every other human being. I do not think any of us believes that asylum seekers are bad people; they are people doing the best for themselves and their families. But everyone who gets here imposes a burden as well as making a contribution, and it is true to say that some communities have integrated into British society and life better than others. It is the job of the Government and of the British people to decide where the line should be drawn, and the Bill draws one element of it. There is nothing immoral in that; if you think there is, you must think it is immoral for British Governments to pay proper attention to the views of their own citizens.

We have also heard that the right way forward is to renegotiate the international framework covering refugees. That is certainly desirable, but anyone who thinks it could be done in the short term—or perhaps at all, on terms that we would wish to see—is kidding themselves, I am afraid. The same is true of those who think that spending vast sums on development or on mitigating so-called climate migration is going to do anything to deal with the real problem we face now.

All the arguments against the Bill are, I am sure, based on deep reflection and conviction but, in the end, I cannot think that they deal with the real-world problem. The real-world choice that faces this Government is simple. It is to choose to put in place an organised set of provisions for a limited number of genuine refugees, in numbers that this country can cope with, and make clear that others will not be able to stay; or to live with the current and worsening situation of an open-ended but de facto constrained arrangement for refugee arrivals, constrained not by any rational arrangements or judgments but by the readiness of those poor trafficked people to travel, to pay and deal with criminals, and to bear terrible risks.

There will certainly be important technical improvements that we can make to the Bill, and this House should certainly give it proper scrutiny, but none of that removes the real need for the fundamental principles behind it. I urge the Government not to be deterred by the arguments they have heard today but to push on with the Bill, and strain all the sinews of the state to deliver on it when it becomes law.

21:23

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the House for allowing me to speak in the gap.

Only days ago, the King made solemn commitments to justice, equity and mercy—and here we are, dismissing those values in this Bill. I find it repugnant to hear the spurious use of market-force values as an argument for the Bill: that the need to crush traffickers, the supply side, involves having to crush demand, as though the demand were not human beings with needs. They are often people who have been persecuted or who have watched other members of their family being slaughtered. They may have suffered torture themselves and witnessed the women in their family being raped. But we have to crush demand, so to devise a scheme as cruel and as vicious as possible is necessary to deflect people from crossing. We have to devise a scheme that has no due process—which has been one of the fundamentals in our rule of law—and we are going to lump together those who are asylum seekers with those among them who possibly might be here simply to better themselves. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, has just talked about this, but described those people as being asylum seekers. The conflation of those who might be coming for economic reasons and those who are asylum seekers fleeing persecution is one of the problems of this Bill.

I want to speak to the fact that this Bill is having a huge impact on our global reputation. I am the director of an institute for the International Bar Association, so I travel to conferences regularly; I was only last week at the UN in New York. Judges and lawyers talk to me about their concerns with what is happening around issues of law in our country. They say, “What is happening to Britain—the Britain that led the world in championing the rule of law; that was the flagship nation in creating the rules-based order after World War II; that drafted the European Convention on Human Rights and was key to so many conventions, including the refugee convention, and created the model for the modern slavery legislation that is being taken up in other countries?” “We have always looked to Britain”, they say, “As a beacon that we have all been persuading our countries to follow, but what is happening?” We are putting at risk that reputation. Our stature in the world will be greatly damaged by Bills such as this and by our dismissal of our treaty obligations and commitment to international law. The fear expressed is that Britain, by showing a reckless disregard for law, will bring about the collapse of that rules-based system because in other countries authoritarianism is growing, as we know, and so many places will be only too happy to follow suit.

I remind us all of the law of unintended consequences: once you start unravelling these things—such as, for example, rule 39, which we have used since 2005; we used it only last year in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—it will be used as evidence that we have failed to comply with it when we come to bring people such as Putin before the international courts for war crimes. Please do not unravel law which has been so important in creating a unity across the globe that has been vital in securing justice and in our attempts to secure peace.

I advocate what the most reverend Primate the Archbishop has advocated: that we should cling to those international obligations and sets of principles, make use of them and engage with other countries to try to meet the challenges here. We should set up proper, swift systems to determine who are asylum seekers and who are not.

I hope this Bill will be amended out of existence because it is unworkable and unlawful, and it is immoral, I say to all of you. We have to ask ourselves: is this what we are standing for in the world?

21:28

[Baroness Gohir (CB)]

I thank noble Lords for being provided with the opportunity to speak in the gap. It is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. I will focus my comments on pregnant migrant women. A lot has been said already by the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister, Lady Sugg and Lady Brinton, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, and many others.

Like them, I am gravely concerned about the safety of pregnant women, new mothers and their babies. The legislation in its current form may result in them being detained indefinitely and being taken out of the UK. Pregnant women and new mothers are among the most vulnerable in society and we have a duty to safeguard them. We therefore need to provide them with the right nutrition, healthcare, and physical and mental health monitoring to detect problems.

Making them stay in overcrowded centres can increase the risk of infectious disease and result in poor mental health. They cannot be provided with the right care at the right time. Why cannot these small numbers of pregnant migrant women be housed in the community? I say that because, this morning, the Minister mentioned that most illegal migrants are men. What risks can these pregnant women pose in society? If I remember rightly, this morning it was mentioned that the measures in this Bill are needed to keep us safe.

The Government already have a terrible record on pregnant women who are detained. For example, women in prison have a probability of suffering stillbirth that is up to seven times higher than in the general population. Pregnant women returning from abroad during the Covid pandemic were put at risk when the Government made them stay in quarantine hotels. I remind this House of what happened to Amna Bibi: when she returned from Pakistan, she was in a quarantine hotel and asked for help, but someone decided that she had gone to the hospital too many times and, at 34 weeks, she lost her baby, nearly bled to death and was in intensive care.

As noble Lords will be aware, maternity disparities have had a lot of publicity. I declare an interest as the CEO of Muslim Women’s Network UK and an officer of the APPG on Muslim Women. We produced a report on maternity disparities that, like many other maternity reports and the statistics on maternity care, shows one thing very clearly: minoritised women and their babies have a higher mortality rate and are more likely to have a miscarriage. Women born outside the UK are more likely to have worse maternity outcomes.

The Government pledged to address these maternity inequalities, so how can they, on the one hand, say they will reduce harm for pregnant women, while, on the other, bring in legislation that will create a system that will cause harm to pregnant women and their babies? It is cruel, heartless and inhumane—I say to the noble Lord, Lord Frost, that I am using those words again, and I do not apologise for them. The medical and maternity experts all state that the government proposals are putting pregnant women and their babies at risk of physical and mental harm. Among them are the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Royal College of Midwives, Doctors of the World, Maternity Action and many more. Disregarding expert opinion and safeguarding is shameful.

Timely, safe and adequate maternity care can be received only if pregnant women live in the community. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, mentioned that the UK could become a magnet for pregnant women—I respectfully and strongly disagree with that point. Therefore, I urge the Government to do the right thing and not to detain pregnant women.

21:32

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the House will forgive me for not namechecking individual noble Lords. I have heard it said a number of times of the Bill that “This is not who we are as a nation”. This is also not how I used to think of the Conservative Party; I rarely agreed with it, but I respected it. I look to the Government to lead, not to stoke up both prejudice and fear. These are human beings who, in very large part, are fleeing conflict, torture, persecution and danger. They are human beings as we are, but I see no attempt to walk in their shoes and see each as an individual with his own character and history, or to see each child as a child—many of them vulnerable.

The Minister wrote to Peers, saying:

“As you will know, over 45,000 people illegally crossed the Channel in small boats last year, abusing our laws and asylum protections”.


No, I do not know that 45,000 people did that, but I do know that this is victim blaming. I acknowledge Refugees Welcome and other support groups and individuals, who see asylum seekers as people in need of support.

I know that the Bill is immoral, although it is presented as moral: “We must save people from the dangers of the channel”. Of course, but even if it will, what about the dangers from which asylum seekers are escaping? The very presentation of some so-called safe countries, designated in the Bill as safe for men or women only, indicates that the Government know the human rights problems, but there are no nuances or caveats. Safe and legal routes are not irrelevant, as suggested; they should be the precursor to legislation.

The Bill is misconceived. It will not act as a deterrent to asylum seekers, so it will not deter the traffickers. It will create a new market for smugglers among people removed to countries which are not appropriate.

The Modern Slavery Act should be strengthened, not weakened. In January, changes were introduced to address false slavery claims by bringing into force the Nationality and Borders Act, but it is far too soon to assess those changes. Allowing a victim to remain in the UK just so long as is necessary for a prosecution says a good deal about the Government’s refusal, against professional opinion, to understand that few victims are able to produce a complete statement without considerable support and often over a long period. How is that trauma-informed?

Noble Lords have spoken of giving traffickers another tool; they will be able to say, “Go to the police and you’ll be removed from the UK”. Why cast asylum seekers as the wrongdoers? Overstayers, who had visas, know they have no right to be here; they outnumber asylum seekers by many times. Of course, we have heard a lot about total migration numbers. I am grateful for the mention of the report by the Select Committee, which I am lucky enough to chair, on the way the Government should go on immigration.

The Government used to be good at soft power. What a clever strategy: to seek to load things on our nearest European neighbours. This refusal to acknowledge the global situation and to address what might truly be a fair share is the very opposite of seeking global co-operation. It is more than a closed door; it is drawing up the portcullis.

There is deep concern about the impacts on the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; it is not apparent that the Government considered or consulted on that. In addition, how is the Bill perceived by minority communities in the UK? Let us not forget community cohesion and integration. It is clear that the benefits of diversity passed the Government by.

The Bill is illegal, and the House will, as always, be glad of its lawyers. Let us take its retrospective effect. Legal certainty requires clarity at the relevant time—which is not, in this case, 7 March 2023, with Parliament being taken for granted at that point. It is a central tenet of the rule of law. The Court of Appeal called it

“a requirement of good administration, by which public bodies ought to deal straightforwardly and consistently with the public”.

The Minister says that the Section 19 position is “legally untested”. I thought the Government were critical of people running off to the courts to test legality, and of the courts treading where the Government think they should not.

I confess that there is a good deal about the Bill that puzzles me: that there is a reliance on a writ of habeas corpus, which is about the lawfulness of detention, when the legislation makes the detention legal; and that the party that claimed to be good housekeepers does not focus first on the efficiency of the Home Office. Detention is used as instant punishment before any infringement is established. Legal avenues are blocked, and the courts are blocked from getting on with their job to a proper timetable. What happened to necessity and proportionality?

I could almost say, “Thank goodness the Bill will be unworkable” but for what it will mean for so many children and adults. It is not even as good as having a life on hold; they are driven towards exploitation, not protected from it, and driven to the underground economy. How much will we know of that? Presumably the numbers will not appear in the Home Office applications backlog, because the claims will be inadmissible and so not counted. It is immoral, misconceived and illegal.

Obviously, it is not possible to cover in a few minutes every point made, as the many organisations which have briefed us so extensively—and to which we will continue to look during later stages—will realise. A fundamentally unacceptable Bill does not become acceptable by amending it at the edges.

The Parliament Act is a red herring. Even if there were time to ram the same Bill through—it is not that straight- forward—there would be no time for implementation before the next election. To those who say that opponents of the Bill should be setting out their policy, I am sure that they would have said, in response to speeches setting out that policy, that this was not the time, especially given the Bill’s Short and Long Titles.

By the way, our policy is not to admit everyone. Like the most reverend Primate, my noble friend did not say we would.

Finally, perhaps the most egregious aspect of the Bill is that it deprives people of hope, and hope is so precious. My own default mode is to look for compromise and consensus, but I cannot do so here. I feel contaminated by the Bill.

21:40

[Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)]

My Lords, I too will not attempt to namecheck everyone who has spoken in this debate. It has been a fascinating but a worrying debate and I thank all the many organisations that have sent briefings, many of which have been referred to during the debate.

The headnote for understanding the Bill is that it attacks the ability of people to come to the UK irregularly and claim asylum or make human rights claims. It shuts them out and imposes a duty of removal. In the absence of agreements on removal or readmission to their home or third countries, these people will remain in the UK without status, either in detention, potentially for an indefinite period, or supported at public expense because they are unable to work. It will manufacture a growing and potentially permanent population of people in the UK who are, for all practical purposes, unremovable, and who are a burden on the public purse. It is ineffective and it breaches international treaty commitments.

The Bill contains a number of things that disrupt the established relationship between the Government and the courts. For example, it revises the ability to seek liberty from being unlawfully detained. It also removes protection from people who are victims of trafficking, in order that they may be treated as irregular arrivals as well. In the media, noble Lords will see that the motivation for the Bill is the problem created by people crossing the English Channel in small boats, but in reality the Bill affects all people arriving irregularly. It also extends to human rights claims made by EU citizens in the UK, and that can affect their family life and their private life rights—I think this was a point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton. I believe this will create additional problems in our relationships with EU member states.

All people in this House agree that small boat crossings should be stopped. Smugglers are profiting from the desperation of people risking their lives to reach our shores. Also, there is no doubt as to the size of the challenge in dealing with the number of asylum seekers already stuck in the system, as well as those making their way here right now. The main question we should address ourselves to when looking at the Bill is: will it make things better, or will it make them worse? Will it stop the dangerous crossings and lead to serious consequences for the people smugglers? Will it protect those most at risk from exploitation, violence and torture? Does it protect children? Does it help those we have made promises to, like the Afghan interpreters who missed the last flight from Kabul? Will it ensure that we create the safe routes that it is said asylum seekers must use instead of using channel crossings—safe routes that hardly exist at all? Does it deal with the large backlog of asylum claims which continues to build up, and will it prevent people from getting stuck in accommodation and hotels, waiting seemingly indefinitely for their asylum decision? Does it maintain our long-standing commitments to international co-operation and law? Does it maintain our international reputation as a fair country that takes our role in the international community seriously?

Members across the House have provided many answers to those questions. They have said that the Bill will not help, that it will hurt, and that it is indeed a worrying Bill. It will further damage our asylum system, trap more people in limbo within it, and result in even higher costs. It will hurt children, trafficked men and women and those fleeing war who are unable to take safe routes to get here. It will hurt our international reputation and our relations with countries across the world. It will not provide real consequences for the people smugglers profiting from human misery on our shores. We will work across the House to amend the Bill so that we maintain current levels of judicial oversight, live up to our international obligations and maintain the original principles of the Modern Slavery Act.

21:44

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Murray of Blidworth) (Con)]

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken. It is a measure of the importance of the issue before us that there have been some 80 speakers in this debate. As we have heard from noble Lords across the House, as well as from my right honourable friends the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, it is clear that we must stop the boats. That much, at least, is common ground.

Our approach is driven by a desire to do right by the people of this country and guided by that most British of principles—fairness. The present situation is anything but fair. The case for decisive action could not be clearer. I say again: ours is a generous and compassionate country. We will continue offering sanctuary and refuge to those fleeing persecution, conflict and tyranny, but we will not accept mass illegal migration to our shores. That is why we need this Bill: to stop the boats and address this challenge once and for all.

I turn to the matters raised in the debate, including the points addressed in the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. First, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and other noble Lords were right to place the Bill in its moral context. Proceeding with this Bill is the moral course. We must put a stop to the dangerous channel crossings putting lives at risk and splitting families. We must end the callous exploitation of vulnerable people by the people smugglers, uphold the law and ensure fair play for those who abide by our Immigration Rules.

A number of noble Lords commented on the fact that, on the introduction of this Bill in your Lordships’ House, I made a statement under Section 19(1)(b) of the Human Rights Act. I think it is fair to say that there has been a misunderstanding of the effect of such a statement. We have designed a scheme that is novel and ambitious; as a result, we have made a Section 19(1)(b) statement under that Act. This simply makes it clear that we cannot say definitively that we will win a challenge in Strasbourg. However, we are confident that Strasbourg will respect the will of Parliament and our domestic court processes. We make no apologies for taking this approach. This is what the situation demands and what the British public expect.

Section 19(1)(b) statements have been made by Governments of all stripes. One was made by the then Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, when bringing forward the House of Lords Reform Bill in 2012. Similarly, Tessa Jowell made a Section 19(1)(b) statement in what became the Communications Act 2003. It is noteworthy that, when that Act was later challenged in the European Court of Human Rights, it found in the Animal Defenders case that there was no violation of the convention.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, argued that this Bill breaches our international obligations. There were some equally forthright contributions making the contrary and, in my view, very persuasive case from my noble friends Lord Howard of Lympne, Lord Lamont, Lord Wolfson KC and Lord Sandhurst KC, some of them drawing on the work of Professor Ekins KC and others at Policy Exchange, which has written extensively on this topic. The Government take their international obligations, including under the ECHR, very seriously. There is nothing in the Bill, including in Clause 53, that requires the UK to breach its international obligations.

In any event, it is not correct that a failure to comply with interim measures invariably involves a breach of international law. There are exceptional circumstances where non-compliance with an interim measure is not a breach of international law.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, among others, argued that the Bill breaches the refugee convention. I can assure the House that we are satisfied that the provisions in the Bill comply with the refugee convention.

It is a long-standing principle that those in need of protection should claim asylum at the earliest opportunity in the first safe country they reach. This is an established part of international asylum procedures and applied across the EU, such as through the Common European Asylum System. This concept seeks to ensure that migration from safe countries does not undermine concerted efforts to help those most in need. Plainly, all illegal arrivals across the channel come from a safe country, mostly France; as my noble friend Lord Dobbs, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, rightly pointed out, their lives are not in danger in France, and they are taking the place of those in genuine need.

In December, the High Court upheld the lawfulness of this principle—that those in need of protection should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach —concluding that the Government can relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda, for their claims to be determined by Rwanda rather than by the United Kingdom. We look forward to the Court of Appeal’s judgment on this question in the near future.

This addresses the concerns in this regard expressed by various noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Ladyton, Lord Howarth of Newport, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. We have always made it clear that no one will be returned or removed to a country where they may be persecuted, and this will not change.

The noble Lord, Lord German, argued that, in disapplying Section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998, the Bill was transferring powers from Parliament and the courts to the Secretary of State. However, the opposite is the case. The Human Rights Act, especially Section 3, has in some cases shifted the balance away from Parliament towards the courts. We are already proposing to repeal Section 3 of the Human Rights Act in the Bill of Rights Bill, so our courts will no longer be required by that Act to rewrite legislation passed by this Parliament. Ahead of wider reforms to our human rights framework, we are implementing this disapplication to the provisions of this Bill to avoid courts adopting an interpretation which is inconsistent with Parliament’s intentions.

A number of noble Lords, including my noble friend Lady Helic, have been labouring under a misapprehension that the Bill removes judicial oversight. I would gently invite those who think this carefully to read the relevant clauses of the Bill. In all cases, individuals will have the opportunity to make suspensive claims with judicial oversight in the Upper Tribunal—these claims are suspensive of removal.

In all cases, individuals can institute other legal challenges, including judicial reviews on human rights grounds, in the normal way. However, these claims are non-suspensive of removal. These claims can continue remotely, as they have done historically for other immigration claims, for example in the case of the refusal of a spousal entry clearance application. Additionally, the Bill provides for continued judicial oversight of detention as it will be open to any detainee at any time to apply to the High Court for a writ of habeas corpus or its equivalent in Scotland.

Many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, questioned whether there is evidence of the misuse of our modern slavery protections. The modern slavery clauses are fundamentally about preventing dangerous and illegal crossings that pose a threat to public order. However, it is clear that the national referral mechanism offers world-leading protections to victims of modern slavery, and we must be alert to the risk that these protections will be used to frustrate removal action. Last year, 17,000 referrals took on average 543 days to reach a conclusive-grounds decision, making modern slavery protections susceptible to misuse.

Modern slavery referrals from detention and prison have also increased. In 2020, 27%—that is, 1,005—of the people detained within the UK following immigration offences were referred as potential victims of modern slavery, and only 1% of individuals detained within the UK following an immigration offence who made a modern slavery claim—I repeat, only 1%—were returned. The NRM referral rate for people arriving in the UK on small boats and being detained for return has risen from 6% of detentions ending in 2019—that is, 50 people —to 73% in 2021. The referral rate has since fallen slightly to 65% between January and September 2022. In contrast, where people were not detained for return, less than 3% of people who arrived in the UK on small boats in 2021 were referred to the NRM within three months of entering the UK. Modern slavery laws are, therefore, an inextricable part of an immigration system that is open to being misused in order to block removals.

My noble friends Lady Mobarik and Lady Stroud, as well as other noble Lords, including the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, expressed concerns about the impact of the Bill on victims of modern slavery. The Government are committed to tackling the heinous crime of modern slavery and supporting victims. The Bill ensures that individuals who arrive in the UK illegally will no longer have the potential to misuse modern slavery protections to thwart their removal from the UK.

The measures are not a blanket approach. If a person needs to stay in the UK to help support an investigation into and the prosecution of their people traffickers, they will be exempt. If someone is identified as a potential victim of modern slavery, the Government will ensure that they are safely returned to their home country where possible, or to another safe third country, such as Rwanda. This will mean that trafficking victims are given modern slavery support and that traffickers can be brought to justice, while preventing people from abusing our modern slavery laws. These provisions are consistent with our international obligations. Indeed, under Article 13 of ECAT, the UK has a right to disqualify individuals who pose a threat to public order. However, we recognise that this is a significant step, and that is why the modern slavery provisions in the Bill are time-limited; unless renewed, they will cease to apply after two years.

A good many noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, argued that the solution to the small boats problem is to open up more safe and legal routes. I am sorry to say that this is of itself no answer. The UK has a long and proud history of supporting refugees, and we are committed to maintaining clear, well-defined, global safe and legal routes for people in need of protection. The UK, working with the UNHCR, currently operates a number of safe and legal routes which support people directly from regions of conflict and instability. In addition, we operate country-specific schemes for those who are eligible from Afghanistan, Ukraine and Hong Kong. But with worldwide refugee displacement now standing at around 100 million people, as observed during the debate, the United Kingdom cannot help everyone. I think there is agreement on that point around much of the House.

It is important to add that those seeking protection should claim asylum in the first safe country. This is the fastest route to safety. The Prime Minister has committed to introduce a cap on the number of people coming via safe and legal routes, which will be based on the capacity of our local authorities, agreed by Parliament and amendable in the event of humanitarian crises.

The Bill delivers this, and I welcome the support from the Front Bench opposite for the principle of a cap. I too well remember the most reverend Primate proposing such a cap during his debate in December. The cap is necessary if we are to ensure that the number of individuals we welcome through safe and legal routes does not exceed the capacity of the UK to integrate and accommodate them effectively—a point well made by my noble friend Lord Farmer in respect of stretched children’s services. This is the right way to ensure that we can continue to provide sanctuary to those in need of international protection as part of a well-managed and sustainable migration system.

As now provided for in the Bill, the Government will publish a report within six months of Royal Assent on current and any proposed additional safe and legal routes. I repeat: we will implement those new routes by the end of next year.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, argued for the exclusion of children from the duty to remove or the detention powers in the Bill. We also heard calls to exclude pregnant women from the detention powers. I am glad to tell the House that, to date, there have been very few pregnant women in the small boats. Let me say to the House that such a move would only serve to incentivise the people smugglers to target particular groups or those with certain characteristics. The result could well be that more children and pregnant women were put into flimsy boats, putting more young lives at risk, splitting up families and encouraging adults to make false claims that they are a child.

I can assure your Lordships’ House that families will be kept together wherever possible and that children will be detained for as short a period as possible in age-appropriate accommodation. Moreover, as we have already made clear, our policy is not to arrange to remove unaccompanied children before they turn 18, save in very limited circumstances, as now set out on the face of the Bill—for example, for the purpose of reunion with a parent or where removal is to a safe country of origin; and they may only be detained in specific circumstances, to be prescribed in regulations.

On the issue of detention more broadly, contrary to what a number of noble Lords opposite have said, the Bill does not provide for indefinite detention. It does enable detention for the purposes of removal, and in doing so codifies in part the long-standing common-law principles governing immigration detention, including that a person may be detained only for a period that is reasonable in all the circumstances. They will not be, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, put it, interned in legal limbo indefinitely.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, expressed concerns regarding the provisions strengthening scientific age-assessment methods. It is critical that the Government take action to disincentivise individuals who are deliberately mispresenting their age in order to cheat the system, as well as to protect genuine children. Determining the age of a young person is an inherently difficult task, and we are aware that no single age-assessment method, scientific or not, can determine an individual’s age with precision. However, we believe that considering a wider range of evidence will enable more informed and robust decisions. I can assure the House that regulations under Clause 56 will not be made to introduce an automatic assumption of adulthood until the science is sufficiently accurate to support such a finding. Moreover, the assumption will only be applied in the circumstances set out in regulations if an individual refuses to undergo scientific age-assessment without good reason.

It is important to note that negative consequences such as automatic assumptions are applied, with variations, by ECHR signatories, including the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. So it is the UK which is the outlier, as one of very few European countries that does not currently employ scientific methods such as X-rays as part of age assessments.

The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and others asked about the detention capacity required to give effect to the Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to deter people from coming to the UK illegally, as they know they will be swiftly returned to their home country if it is safe to do so, or to a safe third country. When the Bill is implemented, this will mean that numbers will start to come down, and that will reduce pressure on accommodation and services in the UK.

We are absolutely committed to making this legislation work and to find further solutions to scale up our detention capacity, but the first step is this change in the law, which is why we are focused on getting the Bill through the House.

Various noble Lords challenged the deterrent effect of the Bill. We have always said that there is no one solution to the global migration crisis, and certainly no overnight fix, but doing nothing is not an option. The Bill will remove the incentive to pay criminal gangs and attempt dangerous channel crossings in the hope of settling in the UK. Its provisions are designed to deter such dangerous and illegal activity.

My noble friend Lord Horam reminded us of the instructive Australian experience of what happens when illegal routes are rendered unviable, and as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, correctly warned, every amendment to soften the Bill will weaken its objectives. My noble friend Lady Lawlor put it well: this Bill is stringent but necessary and proportionate, but it is not the only step we are taking. It comes alongside our partnership with Rwanda, bolstered enforcement action to bear down on the criminal gangs and the co-operation with France, as my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne rightly pointed out.

This Government will always act in the interests of the law-abiding majority. That means securing our borders, delivering a fair and effective immigration and asylum system, and stopping the boats. Enough is enough. The British people want this problem dealt with. The Bill will enable us to do exactly that, and I commend it to the House and invite noble Lords to reject the amendment standing in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick.

22:06

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, our reasoned amendment sets out why this House should decline to give the Bill a Second Reading. Contrary to the assertions made by the Minister, we believe that the Bill

“undermines the rule of law by failing to meet the United Kingdom’s international law commitments and by allowing Ministers to ignore the directions of judges; … undermines the UK’s tradition of providing sanctuary to refugees by removing the ability of refugees to exercise their legal right to claim asylum, by removing protections afforded to modern slavery victims and by increasing the number of people in indefinite detention, including children; … fails to provide safe and legal routes for refugees; … fails to include measures to eliminate the backlog of asylum cases; and … fails to include measures to tackle people smuggling gangs”.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester for pointing out that when, in 2007, the former Labour Government passed the Fraud (Trials Without a Jury) Bill in the other place by a similar majority to this Bill, the House of Lords carried a fatal Motion at Second Reading. The Bill was never reintroduced. The list of those noble Lords who voted against its Second Reading is illuminating, and included two Bishops. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, who earlier today described overturning the will of the other place as a

“complete abuse of this House”

and said,

“I do not think that any Member of this House who respects its values and its role could possibly go through the Lobbies and vote for that amendment”,


must have had a road to Damascus experience.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

I am sure the noble Lord would not want to mislead the House; he has obviously looked into that matter. That Motion was that consideration of Second Reading should be deferred by six months, not that the Bill should be destroyed.

[Lord Paddick]

The noble Lord will know exactly what Erskine May says about the Motion that was passed, which is that Parliament considers that to be a fatal Motion against the Bill. A hundred and 23 other Conservatives also voted to refuse the Bill its Second Reading, including 59 who are still sitting Members of this House. Perhaps they have also changed their minds and perhaps, when they find themselves in opposition, they will change their minds again.

If I thought that this Bill would stop the boats, I would not seek to divide this House, but it is not likely to do so. This Bill is all pain and no gain. This is a question of principle. I wish to test the opinion of the House.

22:10

Division 1

Amendment disagreed.

Ayes: 76

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Liberal Democrat: 65
Labour: 8
Green Party: 2
Crossbench: 1

Noes: 179

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Conservative: 166
Crossbench: 8
Independent: 3
Labour: 1
Ulster Unionist Party: 1

22:20

Bill read a second time.

Commitment and Order of Consideration Motion

Moved by

[Lord Murray of Blidworth]

That the Bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole House, and that it be an instruction to the Committee of the Whole House that they consider the Bill in the following order:

Clauses 1 to 5, Schedule 1, Clauses 6 to 14, Schedule 2, Clauses 15 to 67, Title.

Motion agreed.

House adjourned at 10.21 pm.