Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

Second Reading

Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland legislative consent sought.

18:09

Moved by

[Lord Hanson of Flint]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to open the debate on this important Bill and to welcome the interest shown by so many noble Lords in seeking to speak. This is a key Bill for the Government and for the United Kingdom as a whole. I will set out why this Government have brought forward the Bill for the benefit of noble Lords today.

Immigration has always been an important part of the United Kingdom’s story. But for it to be so, it must be controlled and managed so that the system is fair and works for people in this country as a whole. Proper enforcement of and respect for the rules are key to that. The Bill before us addresses a number of those areas, and the recently published White Paper runs parallel to the Bill and covers a number of other areas.

The Bill is predominantly about the issues of illegal and irregular migration, and I think it is clear to noble Lords and any observer that the current situation cannot go on. Criminal gangs have had six years to take over the English Channel unchecked and to set up and run criminal enterprises that exploit people at their most vulnerable. As a result, there is a massive strain on the already overstretched immigration and asylum system supports. It is in nobody’s interest to continue as we are. The Bill seeks to make real change.

The criminal gangs have no respect for the lives of those they traffic. Often 50 people or more are crammed into unseaworthy vessels, sometimes facing threats and intimidation when they raise concerns. As a result, we have seen individuals tragically die in the channel. Make no mistake: this is part of a broader criminal enterprise, which seeks to bring weapons, drugs and a wide array of items used to carry out criminal activity into our local communities, smuggled into the United Kingdom. The Government are absolutely committed to taking down the gangs that risk the lives of so many people in our communities.

This Government are taking the necessary actions to secure our borders, to bring the immigration and asylum system under control and to go after the dangerous criminal gangs that undermine our border security. This legislation is part of that plan for change. The Government are determined to tackle irregular migration, to bring control back to our borders and to stop the appalling loss of life in the channel. It is also important that alongside this we have a properly functioning asylum and immigration system that delivers timely decisions for individuals and makes sure that those with no right to be here are removed.

The legislation before us will strengthen the UK’s border security. It is part of a serious, credible plan to protect UK border security that sees the Government working more closely with our international partners up stream and in our near neighbourhood, enhancing operational activity nationally and internationally and ensuring that our law enforcement and operational teams have the powers and tools they need to identify, disrupt and dismantle organised crime activity.

What are the key measures in the Bill? First, the Bill places a new Border Security Commander and his role on a statutory footing and clearly explains the functions that will allow this role to be an enduring one that brings together the skills and expertise of a variety of agencies to tackle the issues faced, united behind a set of border security priorities.

Secondly, the Bill establishes landmark new offences, contained within the legislation, which will provide law enforcement agencies working across border security with stronger powers to pursue, disrupt and deter organised immigration crime. This should not be a surprise to noble Lords, because in the election almost a year ago the Labour Party stood on a manifesto commitment to introduce new counterterrorism-style powers that will give law enforcement the ability to tackle those involved in putting lives in danger and threatening UK border security. This Bill will deliver the new offences.

Among the new offences is one to ensure that action is taken against those who endanger others during sea crossings to the UK. These crossings are exceptionally dangerous, and I regret the loss of life we have seen even this year. The Government are determined to prevent such loss of life in the channel with these new powers.

The Bill will also create new powers to seize and search electronic devices where there is suspicion of involvement in organised immigration crime activity. This will build a better picture for law enforcement agencies investigating the activity of gangs. The Bill will ensure that data-sharing capabilities will be expanded to assist in developing the intelligence picture of organised immigration crime and other threats, make it easier for public agencies to share information and enhance the ability to act. For example, measures to allow the DVLA to share trailer data and for HMRC to share customs data will enhance the work of Border Force.

The Bill’s biometric provisions will provide greater flexibility when taking biometrics from individuals who are part of a UK evacuation. They will allow for the provision of biometrics at ports in Scotland, fixing the situation that has developed where law enforcement officials are needing to drive to a police station to carry out this task.

Measures in the Bill also focus on serious and organised crime and make it clear that it will be an offence to possess the articles named in the Bill, which we know are used in criminality and which harm communities. There is also an expansion of the serious crime prevention order regime, introducing new interim orders which will allow law enforcement to act immediately to tackle criminality where it occurs.

The Bill will strengthen the immigration and asylum systems as a whole. The Government had a clear manifesto commitment to end the wasteful migration and economic development partnership with Rwanda and use that funding to set up our new Border Security Command, led by Martin Hewitt.

Let me be completely clear: the Government’s plans in the previous Parliament to deal with Rwanda were wholly unworkable. They were going to cost the taxpayer billions of pounds and would never have dealt with the sheer number of migrants we are seeing in the channel. Around £700 million has been spent to date, and it is time to close it down. Only four people left the United Kingdom under the Rwanda scheme, and they left voluntarily. The legislation before us, as a manifesto commitment, repeals the costly and unworkable measure introduced by the previous Government and introduces new provisions to start to address the real challenges faced, to tackle harm and to build a more efficient and robust asylum and immigration system.

Beyond the provisions that repeal the safety of Rwanda Act and huge swathes of the Illegal Migration Act, the Bill will equip the Immigration Services Commissioner with the tools they need to identify and tackle abuses within the immigration advice sector. Under the Bill, the Immigration Advice Authority will have new powers to fine or suspend those who provide poor-quality advice to those going through the immigration process, restoring trust in the system—I hope and believe—by tackling such poor practice.

In this extensive Bill, we are also introducing measures that aim to begin taking the action needed to ensure a properly functioning, effective immigration system. The Bill will introduce a new, 24-week statutory timeline for appeals as part of the Government’s work to tackle the enormous backlog of cases we have inherited. To assist cases to move through the system and to provide individuals with clarity on outcomes, cases where the individual is in asylum accommodation—at great taxpayer expense—and cases of non-detained foreign national offenders will be prioritised as far as practically possible.

The Bill also provides for greater protections against harm in our communities, supporting—as I know noble Lords will support—the removal of foreign national criminals and ensuring that sexual offences are treated with the seriousness they deserve. For example, those convicted of Schedule 3 offences will not benefit from refugee protections in the United Kingdom. We recognise the devastating impact that these offences have on victims and our communities, and we as a Government are determined that individuals who commit them cannot benefit from our protections.

Stronger conditions will be placed on those who pose a threat pending their removal from the United Kingdom. These measures mean that those who do not qualify for asylum or protection under the refugee convention but cannot be removed due to obligations in law can have certain conditions placed upon them if they pose a threat to the public. This is another measure to try to keep our communities safer.

We are strengthening the detention powers available to the Home Office when an individual is subject to deportation on the basis that their presence in the United Kingdom is not conducive to the public good. This measure removes ambiguity around when powers may be used.

Extending the right-to-work scheme to those who fall under other working relationships will crack down on those working illegally, many of whom are being exploited for cheap labour. It is an objective of the Government to try to drive down that cheap labour market, which is an underbelly in our communities at large.

Finally, changes to the EU settlement scheme, which will be welcomed by a number of noble Lords, will confirm as a matter of UK law what the UK has sought to do in practice since the beginning of this scheme; namely, to ensure that all EU citizens and their family members with status under the scheme have equal rights in the United Kingdom.

The main priority of the Bill is to protect the UK’s border and to make changes to enable a properly functioning immigration and asylum system. We are ensuring that those with a genuine right to be here are properly supported, while those who have no legal right to remain in the UK do not abuse the system and undermine the protections that the UK has a long history of providing to those in need.

We have a responsibility to the British people, who rightly expect our borders to be secure and our laws to be enforced, and we have a moral duty to prevent further tragedies at the hands of criminal gangs. The plan before us is a clear, impactful plan for change. The Bill will restore order and trust to our immigration and asylum system, and provide law enforcement with the tools that they need to be able to tackle the people-smuggling gangs who exploit individuals and place them in perilous situations in the channel. This Government are committed to a fully functioning system, and we will debate migration as a whole in the White Paper in due course.

The Bill is about protecting those who need it, swiftly removing those with no right to be here and cracking down on criminal gangs. To date, since the Government were elected, the National Crime Agency has seized 600 boats and engines, taken down 18,000 social media accounts, ensured that 30,000 people have been returned since the election, including a 23% increase in enforced returns of foreign national offenders, and is taking action on illegal working visits and arrests, increased by 40% and 42% respectively. But the Government need more powers to improve their performance on illegal migration. The Bill before the House today gives those powers to the agencies to make that difference. I beg to move.

18:23

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for opening this debate today. It promises to be both an interesting and informative debate. I look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Harper, who I had the pleasure of working with at the Department for Transport and who I know will make a considerable contribution to the debates in your Lordships’ House. My noble friend has previous ministerial experience in the area of immigration, and I look forward to his contribution later.

I begin by welcoming the fact that, after years of opposing measures to improve border security and clamp down on illegal migration, the Labour Party has finally realised the importance of greater control over our borders. There are some positive noises coming from the Government’s actions. Clause 41 grants the Secretary of State the ability to detain a person while they are pending a deportation decision. Clause 48 reinterprets the United Kingdom’s construction of Article 33 of the refugee convention to include conviction of an offence under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 in the list of offences that constitute particularly serious crimes for which refugees may be removed. This is, of course, right: no person who enters this country and commits a crime, regardless of their method of entry or their status, should be permitted to remain.

Unfortunately, that is where our agreement with the Bill ends. Although, as I have said, the Government have begun to move in the right direction, the Bill does too little, too slowly. It does nothing to deter illegal crossings, it does nothing to expedite the removal of illegal migrants, and it does nothing to reduce the scale of illegal immigration.

On that last point, I am very pleased to see the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, which show that net migration to the UK for 2024 was 431,000—half the level of the previous year. This is all thanks to the efforts of the previous Conservative Government, as the ONS has acknowledged. Last year, my right honourable friend James Cleverly strengthened the Immigration Rules, raising the minimum income for those on skilled worker visas and family visas, and imposing a limit on the number of foreign students able to bring their dependants. It is clear that Conservative policies have delivered.

Let us look at what this Government have promised and what they have delivered. The 2024 Labour Party manifesto promised to

“turn the page and restore order to the asylum system so that it operates swiftly, firmly, and fairly; and the rules are properly enforced”.

Yet the Government have presided over the highest asylum figures recorded in a single quarter, with 31,276 people claiming asylum between September and December 2024. The number of people being given a grant of protection has increased to 17,477 in quarter 4 of 2024, up from 7,185 in quarter 2 of 2024. They have reversed the progress made by the previous Government in reducing asylum claims.

Not only this but the Government pledged to close all asylum hotels. After the previous Government reduced the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels to 29,585 by 30 June 2024, since the election those numbers have jumped to 38,079 on 31 December 2024, representing a rise of 22.3%. This begs the question: when will they end the use of asylum hotels, as they promised in their manifesto?

We heard time and again during the election, and indeed ever since, that the Government will “smash the gangs”, but it is now evident that this slogan was mere hyperbole. Can the Minister tell me how many gangs have been smashed by the policies of this Government? I look forward to receiving those figures, perhaps in his closing speech.

The Minister was keen to highlight the new role of the Border Security Commander and their counterterrorism-style powers. However, Clause 1(1) states that:

“The Secretary of State must designate a civil servant as the Border Security Commander”.


Clauses 3, 4 and 5 state the functions of the commander, the duty to prepare annual reports and the duties of co-operation, and that is it. What the Government have presented us with is simply a redesignated civil servant without the powers to command anything. That extends across the whole Bill.

The Government have talked up this legislation as comprising tough new measures to tackle the people-smuggling gangs, yet they are repealing two pieces of legislation which would have had that exact effect. Clauses 37 and 38 repeal the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023. The safety of Rwanda Act, ably taken through your Lordships’ House by my noble friend Lord Sharpe of Epsom, would have—had it not been scrapped the day the first flight was due to take off—provided a suitable deterrent to those considering taking the journey across the channel.

The Minister has pointed to the Government’s focus on the people-smuggling gangs which facilitate channel crossings. We agree that those gangs must be pursued, for theirs is a repulsive trade, but it is not enough to simply tackle supply; we must also tackle demand. While there are large numbers of people who are undeterred from paying the traffickers, the trade will continue.

The Rwanda scheme was the deterrent that would have hit that demand for small boat crossings. This built on the work of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, and I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Murray of Blidworth for steering through that legislation, which created an obligation for the Home Secretary to remove any person who arrives illegally and prevented illegal entrants claiming asylum.

The previous Conservative Government struck a returns deal with Albania, which meant that the number of illegal arrivals of Albanian nationals fell from 12,658 in 2022 to just 924 in 2023. That is a 93% reduction in Albanian nationals illegally crossing the channel.

If the Government are serious about reducing illegal migration, why remove the deterrents that the Conservative Government legislated for? We can see the effects of the Government’s policies already; noble Lords will have seen the figures over the weekend. On 31 May, 1,194 migrants crossed the channel in small boats—the highest figure for a single day this year. This brings the total number of migrants who have crossed in small boats so far this year to 14,811; that is a 42% increase on the same point last year.

This Bill not only undoes much of that work but fails to provide suitable alternatives. The offence of endangering another during a sea crossing, as created by Clause 18, is unlikely to have any real impact because it can be committed only if a person has already committed an offence under subsections (A1), (B1), (D1) or (E1) of Section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971—offences that were inserted into that Act by the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which my noble friend the Opposition Chief Whip took through this House. Moreover, Section 25 of the Immigration Act 1971 already makes it an offence to assist or facilitate unlawful entry into the United Kingdom—an offence that is punishable by life sentence thanks to the changes made by my noble friend in the Nationality and Borders Act.

Furthermore, the powers contained in Clauses 20, 21 and 23, authorising officers to search, seize and access electronic devices, already exist in Section 15 of and Schedule 2 to the Illegal Migration Act, which the Government are repealing. Would it not make more sense to keep the existing powers, rather than repealing them and replacing them with something that is virtually identical? Of course, they would not have to include these “new” powers if they were not in the same Bill repealing Section 15 of and Schedule 2 to the Illegal Migration Act.

It is apparent that this Bill presents a missed opportunity. Even after this legislation becomes law, activist lawyers will still be able to use the Human Rights Act to bring vexatious claims against the Government to prevent the legitimate removal of those who have abused our immigration system, entered the country illegally and committed criminal offences. The Government should follow our policy of disapplying the Human Rights Act in relation to immigration law, thereby ensuring the timely removal of those with no right to be here. The Government have indicated that they are willing to shift in this direction. The immigration White Paper states that the interpretation of Article 8 of the convention must be reconsidered; even the Attorney-General has indicated that he is open to reinterpreting the convention as well.

This Bill also presents the Government with the opportunity to tighten the conditions for visas and indefinite leave to remain. The Immigration and Visas Bill, presented by my right honourable friend the shadow Home Secretary, would ensure that indefinite leave to remain can be granted only if the applicant’s salary does not fall below £38,700 and if they do not apply for any form of state benefits. Being granted the ability to remain in the UK indefinitely is a privilege, not a right. As such, we believe that those wishing to obtain that privilege should have made a net contribution to our country. Raising the threshold for receiving earned settlement would ensure precisely that. Given the Government’s new-found vim and vigour for more stringent controls of legal migration, I am sure that they will be amenable to such policies.

Let us not forget that reducing the level of net migration to the UK is overwhelmingly backed by the British people. Polling by More in Common has found that 65% of the public believe that immigration should be reduced. I should add that that stretches to supporters of all political parties, given that 57% of Liberal Democrat voters and 49% of Labour voters support cutting immigration. Further, 62% of the public, including 61% of Liberal Democrats and 50% of Labour voters, agree that it is too easy for people to live here illegally. We would all do well to remember that this is the voice of the British public, and it is precisely what they are demanding of their parliamentarians.

This Bill does not deliver what the British people desire or deserve. Where are the powers to prevent vexatious legal challenges being used to thwart legitimate removals? Where are the powers to ensure the deportation of all foreign criminals? Where is the deterrent? Where are the measures to bring down the level of net migration? The answer, of course, is that they are simply not there. These are glaring omissions that could and should be fixed by your Lordships as the Bill progresses. We on these Benches will be seeking to strengthen this Bill to deliver on the British people’s priorities; I hope that the Government will want to follow suit.

18:34

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this slightly uneven Bill. It is a Bill that is both heavy and light at the same time: it is heavy on the supply side, taking strong measures to deal with the smugglers and gangs, but it is light on actions to support asylum seekers on a safe journey to the United Kingdom. I start with an initial question for the Minister: is the intention of this Bill to stop dangerous journeys by boat and other ways, or is it to stop people coming to claim asylum? The answer to this question is critical to our understanding of the intention of this Bill.

We on these Benches support a controlled, humane, ordered and planned migration system, both stopping dangerous journeys and creating a safe route to asylum, with those who do not qualify for asylum being removed swiftly and humanely. For those in the margins, there are some who may be persuaded by the measures in this Bill. However, our concern must surely be for those who satisfy the grounds for asylum in the United Kingdom but currently have a negligible or non-existent way to enter this country safely. Of those who travel here by small boat, 74% are successful with their asylum claims—and that figure does not take any appeals into consideration.

The answer to my initial question is fundamental to understanding the Government’s intentions. We welcome the measures in the Bill aimed at tackling criminal gangs and reducing deaths in the channel. We support the scrapping of the safety of Rwanda Act and significant parts of the Illegal Migration Act. However, we are concerned that this Bill’s purely punitive approach will not achieve its aims. We must be honest about the range of interventions needed to bring change. Voters are tired of tougher talk on immigration that fails to deliver promised outcomes. As a country, we cannot afford the consequences of more broken government promises on this issue.

So, although prosecuting criminal gangs is essential, as long as desperate people seek refuge in the United Kingdom without alternative routes, demand will persist and criminals will profit. Given the strong push factors for those fleeing persecution in countries such as Sudan, Eritrea and Iran, we need interventions that change an individual’s calculation. Currently, paying a smuggler to bring them to safety is seen as the best, or the only, option available. We propose building on the successful UK resettlement scheme, which has already been referred to by the Minister, and family refugee reunion, along with a capped pilot for a humanitarian visa. Using the services of United Nations bodies in-country or close to in-country, this would allow those with a basis for a successful asylum claim to travel safely to the UK in order for their application to be considered. If the Government aim to reduce dangerous crossings, this would help; the Government would control an ordered, planned process and create an evidence base to evaluate such an approach. Safe routes are not an alternative to enforcement. They complement efforts to target criminal gangs. Both approaches must work together.

We are rightly concerned at the expenditure costs of maintaining and accommodating the nearly a quarter of a million people, which includes those going through appeals, in the processing backlog. In our view, the Government have missed the opportunity to include in this legislation permission to allow asylum seekers to work after three months. Although we welcome the 13% decline in the asylum backlog, the proportion of people waiting six months or more for a decision has risen sharply over the past decade, going from 25% at the end of 2014 to 59% at the end of 2024. When the current working ban was introduced by the Labour Government in 2002, the argument about processing times was identical—a six-month target to process applications, after which those granted asylum were able to work—but the six-month target was not met then and is not being met now.

Allowing asylum seekers to work would help reduce the asylum support budget, the use of hotels and child poverty. It would assist local authorities in supporting newly recognised refugees. If someone has a job, they are more likely to support themselves quickly, reducing homelessness and state benefits claims. It would also improve cohesion between host communities and asylum seekers if they are seen to be “paying their way”. Visible delivery is what the Government need, and this policy could contribute to that, especially if communities saw hotels being closed.

The Government have never produced any evidence that suggests that employment rights play a role in determining people’s choice of destination when seeking safety; the evidence in fact shows that employment rights are largely unknown to asylum seekers before they arrive in the United Kingdom. We have one of the most restrictive working policies compared to our European neighbours. Lifting the ban on work would align the UK with other OECD member states. In countries such as France, Spain, Italy and Germany, asylum seekers gain the right to work much earlier—after six months, three months, or even less. Faster application processing and enhanced working rights should be complementary policies. That is why we also seek a three-month service standard for asylum decisions.

We welcome the Government’s repeal of Sections 31 to 35 of the Illegal Migration Act. However, if integration is the ultimate goal for us as a society, we should not choke off a person’s chance to become a British citizen simply on the basis of how they arrived in the United Kingdom. Recent updates to the Nationality: Good Character Requirement guidance limit access to citizenship for refugees who entered the UK irregularly. This is counterproductive to integration and cohesion for those settled in the UK. The unclear policy guidance deters refugees from applying for citizenship due to the risk of wasting thousands of pounds if the application is refused out of hand.

We have deep concerns about the expansion and retention of Section 59 of the Illegal Migration Act on the safe country list. The list is problematic when decision-makers must declare asylum claims inadmissible from countries listed even where there is evidence of persecution. An example of that is Georgia, where its Members of Parliament are being locked up because they have offended the current Government. That country has been sanctioned by the UK for human rights abuses. This means that individualised assessment of asylum claims is essential and necessary. Countries may be safe for some people, but not always for all people.

We are concerned that the Bill retains and expands the detention powers in the Illegal Migration Act without implementing the safeguards recommended by the Brook House inquiry. We remain deeply concerned about immigration detention and the lack of progress since the Brook House report’s recommendations. Recent reports by the Chief Inspector of Prisons on Harmondsworth indicate ongoing significant concerns. Poor processes and case progression result in people being detained when removal is not imminent and for longer than necessary in unacceptable conditions. Vulnerable people are detained when they should not be. The indefinite nature of detention causes particular harm and places no pressure on the Home Office to deal swiftly with cases. For those reasons, we will seek to amend the Bill with a 28-day time limit on detention, following recommendations from the Home Affairs Committee, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the joint inquiry by the APPGs on migration and on refugees. This would reduce unnecessary and unlawful detention and ensure that it is used sparingly and only when removal is imminent and realistic.

We are also concerned that the criminal offences in Clauses 13 to 16 and 18 are too broad and risk criminalising those seeking asylum rather than solely targeting criminal gangs. We will seek to amend these clauses in Committee. My noble friend Lady Hamwee will expand on the modern slavery implications of the Bill later.

Finally, there is much to be done to secure action across our part of this continent. Resetting our relationship with the EU and its agencies is still in its headline stages. My noble friend Lady Ludford will examine these issues later.

I return to where I started: the fundamental question of supply and demand and the Bill being light on its ability to change asylum seeker behaviour. While the Bill may make a dent in the ability of the smuggling gangs to operate, it fails to answer the question of how we plan a safe way to manage those seeking asylum in our country. The Bill has a number of good points, many missing points and some major areas of concern—and we will try to deal with those areas during the course of our debates.

18:45

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

If I were to set our annual borders Bill debates to music, I would pick Stravinsky. It has become a rite of spring, with clashing discords from the Conservative Front Bench and ritual incantations that there can be a sacrifice of international law because we are a dualist system.

We had the Nationality and Borders Bill three years ago and the Illegal Migration Bill two years ago. Then there was the ultimate absurdity of the Rwanda Bill, where we were invited to close our eyes and, by magical thinking and Westminster decree, make Rwanda safe and make ineligible all those whom we sent to Rwanda ever to seek asylum here. The House liked none of those Bills, amended them all and was overruled every time. So it is a great pleasure to welcome the 2025 Bill, because I can find nothing in it which is in clear breach of international law—and this is the first in recent memory. Moreover, I particularly welcome Clause 37, which wipes away the stain on the statute book that was the Rwanda Act.

That is the good news—and it is very good—but the Bill is not all good news. Getting rid of the 2024 Act but only parts of the 2023 Act means that we are still left with some bits of the 2023 Act that some of us opposed, including its removal of modern slavery protections for trafficking victims coerced into criminality. We are also left with the default provisions of the 2022 Act, which many believe were, in some respects, contrary to what we like to think of as a national tradition of fairness; some of them are inhumane and others are illogical.

It is not humane that we should still be so reluctant to see families reunited, yet the May White Paper threatens to make reunions harder by imposing new language and financial tests. It is not right that Clause 31 of this Bill would deny legal redress to those unlawfully detained or that the broad powers that Clause 43 gives the Secretary of State on tagging and curfews are not tempered by legal safeguards of any kind. It is neither humane nor logical—as the noble Lord, Lord German, pointed out—that those waiting in the asylum queue should still be denied the right to find a job. Changing that would be a win-win: it would be good for them, the economy and the public purse; it would be bad only for the criminals preying on them in the black economy.

I will make two further general points. Changing the rules of the game mid-match is usually not right. I find the retroactivity in Clause 31 particularly worrying. My inbox and Friday’s Financial Times remind me that a much larger community is worried about the potential retrospective application of the proposed change tucked away in paragraphs 264 and 266 of the White Paper.

People here on work visas, which they obtained under the points-based system, have had the right to apply after five years for indefinite leave to remain, but the White Paper suggests that in future this will be 10 years. Is that just for new arrivals, or does it mean that those already here will have to stay in limbo for another five years? The uncertainty about whether their uncertainty is to be extended is worrying many, as my inbox shows.

Retrospection would be unfair—it usually is. If retrospection is not the intention, it would be very good if the Minister could reassure the many who are worried. The FT tells us that 1.5 million people are worried about the Government’s intention. I very much hope he can reassure them and will do so.

Finally, back on asylum, it bears repeating that the best way of stopping the boats and putting the criminals out of business is to provide safe and legal routes to sanctuary. But for many with a justifiable, “well-founded fear of persecution”, in the words of the convention, in practice we provide no such route. Take Sudan, the world’s biggest current humanitarian catastrophe, worse even than Gaza. Sudan used to be our responsibility and should be on our conscience. There is a large Sudanese diaspora in this country, but for those now fleeing the civil war, carnage and starvation there, there is realistically no official or safe way they can apply to join Sudanese people here. Virtually 100% of those who do get here, coming by unofficial routes and seeking asylum, are granted asylum, such is the obvious horror they have left behind. It is our fault that they have to come as they do, with many dying en route. It does not need a Bill to put that right, but it really should be put right soon.

18:51

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I really enjoyed that speech. I was thinking more of the “1812 Overture” than the “Rite of Spring”, given how many borders and immigration Bills I have been through here and in the House of Commons. I congratulate my noble friend the Minister. I thank him for his openness and willingness to listen and to discuss with his right honourable friend the Home Secretary the issues that many of us are raising with him.

The Bill, together with the White Paper, has many good suggestions and ways forward. Quite a number have been mentioned already, including the removal of criminals from our country, which actually undermine the legitimacy of our border policy and the welcome that people in this country generally wish to give to asylum seekers.

It is wonderful that we are setting aside the legacy of Suella Braverman and the absurdity of the Rwanda suggestion. Now that it has gone, the Government have been able to start processing at some real speed. The Government have started to use this terrible Civil Service phrase that has crept into speeches as well as written material and letters, which is that they are “working at pace”. It is a terrible phrase. I really hope that people stop using it. It is a bit like “Stand ready”, which means “We are doing absolutely nothing”. We really have to talk normally. But the speeding up of the processing has been quite remarkable, as has the removal of people from the country who had no right to be here, and the Government deserve real credit for achieving that over the last 11 months. Asylum has now fallen substantially, which gives us a chance, I hope, to have rational and sensible debates about what needs to be done.

Mention has been made of More in Common, which is now the favoured political polling company. The truth is, and anybody who goes and speaks to people in communities such as the one I live in and used to represent knows, that it is the small boats crossing the channel that is worrying people. By its very nature it is going to worry them, not just because of the daily count and the reporting in the newspapers, but because of the danger and worry that people legitimately have for what is happening with organised criminality.

My suggestions, which have not yet been taken up, are twofold. One is that the new relationship with the President of France that has been developed by the Prime Minister could lead us to develop a licensing scheme for parts of boats so that they could not be purchased, transported or sold to people in France. That would immediately have a major impact on the ability of the French to intervene in the warehouses and transportation. The other would be that we build on Clause 45 of the Bill, which provides for electronic visas and documentation. Given that we have got the new NHS moves to digitalisation, the DVLA electronic programme, the unique pupil identifier and the so-called government digital wallet, it is time we had a sensible identity system for everyone, and that way, we could stop illegal working and access to public services by those who did not have the right to be here.

I have a real worry about the attitude on naturalisation in the Bill and the White Paper. Naturalisation is something we should be strongly in favour of. I have had very good discussions with my noble friend the Minister about this, and I understand the difficulties he faces. Because we are setting aside the awful legislation that we had to deal with, there is no legitimacy in or excuse for saying that those whose assigned claims can be processed should not be able to move in exactly the same way as others towards naturalisation. It is really unfortunate because it undermines our credibility in every other area in which we are now taking steps to reassure the world that we are committed to our international obligations and to the way in which we carry through our legal requirements.

I ask the Minister to please think again because it is bad for integration. Why would people want to stay here and not want to integrate? If they want to go home that is absolutely fine. The real problem now is people who are here legitimately on other visas, who then attempt to claim asylum when their visa stay is over. We could deal with that very easily by ruling out asylum for those whose country of origin has not had any material changes in terms of the threat to their life and the danger to their liberty. So let us try to get some balance into this at the same time as very strongly welcoming the measures that are being taken.

I have one final, small thing to ask my noble friend the Minister: please go back to the White Paper and set aside the notion of a surcharge on overseas students. It is a particularly pernicious and unpleasant measure, and unless the Home Office and the Department for Education get their act together and understand that when people pay for a service, when that service is provided at full cost when those costs allow us to cross-reference into research and to maintain our university system, we retain our reputation across the world. When we start to pull the plug on it, we do ourselves damage for no good reason whatever. I have not met anybody, even a Reform voter, who thinks it is a bad idea to encourage overseas students to pay large sums of money to receive a service and then to go back home and tell the world what a wonderful place the United Kingdom really is.

18:58

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, it is my great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is a person on those Benches I have the most respect for when he speaks about these subjects, which he does without cant and with a great deal of knowledge and credibility.

It is important to remember that although illegal immigration attracts the most public attention, it is only a fraction of total immigration. Legal immigration is continuing at a rate which dwarfs anything we have known in our history. Indeed, it dwarfs all previous waves of immigration put together, and it will transform our country by the middle of this century or soon after. It could mean that the indigenous population will be a minority, strangers in their own land, to coin a phrase. I think that will be as much regretted by those who have come to live in this country, who wanted to come here because of the traditions that had grown up over centuries and did not really want to see them dwarfed into minority status.

The case for mass immigration was economic; when made by Tony Blair, he claimed it was necessary to promote growth and fill vacancies. Over the two decades since then, we have experienced the highest influx of migration in our history, the slowest rate of growth since the Middle Ages, and vacancies have doubled. So the thesis was absolutely discredited. But illegal immigration raises moral rather than economic issues, and I want to ask a question about the moral basis which appears to underpin the Bill.

The Minister explained that this Bill does two main things. It purports to strengthen the measures to “smash the gangs”, which, if successful, would presumably prevent migrants reaching these shores, and it removes from the statute book the Rwanda Act, which aimed to deter migrants from coming here. Why is it morally acceptable to try to prevent people leaving the beaches of France to come to the UK, but immoral and unacceptable to deter them from leaving France to come here?

We know that prevention does not work—Saturday saw nearly 1,200 people arrive by boat in a single day. Most measures in the Bill, supposedly designed to beef up prevention, appear trivial. The border security commander will be made statutory, but he will have no troops to command, only the power to convene existing operational agencies, which, I would have thought, was the duty of the Minister. He will have to produce a strategy—a frank admission by the Government that they do not themselves have a strategy. But even if these measures have some practical impact, it is clear that tens of thousands of asylum seekers will continue to cross the channel—unless, that is, the Government succeed in smashing the gangs. Then what happens? Does that mean that no asylum seekers would be able to reach this country, and there would be no one to facilitate their journey, or would they be able to come without the help of the gangs? In which case, why do they not do that now, if these gangs are so cruel, vile and horrible? There is a clear conflict within the Government’s policy. Either their policy will work, in which case it will stop people getting here and claiming asylum, or, as we know, it will not really work and will have precious little effect.

By contrast, we know that deterrence can work. Once it was made clear that Albanians would be returned to Albania, the number of arrivals from that country, or at least purporting to be from that country, plummeted. When Australia demonstrated the certainty of being returned to Indonesian waters, the influx into Australia ended. At present, given the choice between staying in France and coming to England, many migrants are prepared to take the risky crossing. But does anyone believe that, if they knew the choice was not between France and Britain but between France and Rwanda, they would opt for Rwanda? They would stay in the EU, if not in France. So, prevention will not stop illegal immigration, which means lives will continue to be lost, whereas deterrence has the potential to start to work and therefore save lives. So I repeat my question: why is prevention morally acceptable but deterrence immoral and unacceptable?

The Minister asserted that the Rwanda scheme was unworkable. He did not explain why or in what ways. Those who operated the Australian system believe that Rwanda is eminently workable, and other countries are looking at it and are attracted to it. But in any case, it is a bit rich to say that the Rwanda scheme would not work when prevention manifestly has not worked here or anywhere else.

The noble Lord, Lord German, speaking for the Liberal Democrats, argued that we should create safe and legal routes. That is often presented as if it is largely going to solve the problem of migration. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, argued the same; it is indeed a springtime tune from him, or rather, he advocates safe and legal routes in all seasons. The suggestion is that somehow, the people who would have come by boat will come by these safe and legal routes. Some of them might but many would not, and many would be refused and would then still want to come via the boats. But, once these safe and legal routes are established, many other people who at present do not attempt or consider attempting the crossing will apply. So the total number of people coming is bound to increase significantly.

I would like to know whether those who are advocating this as if it is a soft option would be happy to see these additional people coming by safe and legal routes ending up in Liberal Democrat constituencies, for example. I suspect they would find that their voters—who are never told at the local level that it is Lib Dem policy to increase the number of people coming to this country—would be very unhappy about what is proposed.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

The time is up.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right. I shall sit down.

19:05

[The Lord Bishop of Southwark]

My Lords, the diocese in which I serve covers one of the most diverse parts of the country. Indeed, arguably, south London is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world. This diversity is often represented in our churches, which have benefited, as has the rest of the country, from the great human fact of migration. It would be good to hear some recognition of this in government and Home Office statements.

It is worth stressing that the vast majority of migrants to this country come here properly under the Immigration Rules, and thus there is no proper sense in which their arrival and settlement can be described as uncontrolled. The Government of the day may, for good reasons of public policy, wish to alter the rules or introduce fresh primary legislation, but that does not mean that a system and process is not in place, that applications are not assessed and fees paid, and that the results do not match what Parliament has sanctioned.

Should this Bill pass, it will be, I think, the 13th piece of primary legislation on immigration since 1997. No one should doubt the interest of successive Governments in this subject. Indeed, I wish to congratulate His Majesty’s Government on recently publishing a White Paper on their further intentions in this area, something that had happened only once since 2002. The return of more regular engagement on major issues of policy is to be welcomed. The repeal of provisions in the safety of Rwanda Act is also welcome, although I note with concern what has been said in this debate about the weakening of the provisions of modern slavery legislation.

I wish to make a point about resources which I believe is relevant to the Bill and its impact. The Bill is concerned to a significant extent with enforcement, not least with the effectiveness and statutory footing of a new border security command. But the business of managing migration into the UK is a resource-intensive activity, and I fear that attempts to substitute more draconian sanctions in a concertina of legislation down the years is no substitute for the resources needed to train and staff border control, casework, intelligence and enforcement. The result is backlogs, asylum accommodation—which in some instances resembles a dystopian novel—and a detention estate which repeatedly fails inspection. No conceptual framework sketched out in Explanatory Notes will compensate for an absence of staff or mitigate hurried and arbitrary decisions where more nuanced consideration is required.

I appreciate that such comments are unwelcome in the closing days of a spending review, but please consider this. The pressure of those who wish to come to Europe is not mitigated by the abandoning of our commitment of 0.7% of GDP to aid. The allocation of billions of pounds of the aid budget to support asylum and refugee costs in this country is not matched by any other G7 country. In 2024, it was just over £2.8 billion. The Prime Minister, in recently announcing a further reduction in aid spending to 0.3% of GDP, stated that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is no longer to be the spender or saver of last resort. That, at least, is welcome, as is the announcement that it will no longer be expected to meet unpredicted rises in refugee costs during the year.

But these Benches have never welcomed diverting humanitarian and development aid to other purposes. On pragmatic grounds alone, to do so raises migratory pressures and increases the influence of those whose geopolitical objectives are contrary to our own. Might there be space in this Bill for something addressing safe and legal routes and the nexus of humanitarian crises, if the Government are minded to do so at this point?

The Bill references powers to detain. I end by drawing the Minister’s attention to the Refugee & Migrant Advice Service alternative to detention pilot, a community-based alternative to detention, sponsored jointly by the Home Office and UNHCR between 2020 and 2022. The cost was significantly less than that of detention, it was more congenial to participants and I understand that the absconding rate was low. Ministers at the time decided not to pursue it further. I ask the Minister whether the current Government might revisit the pilot and consider greater use of this approach. I look forward to his summing up.

19:11

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the very open way in which he has approached this whole subject, not just today but in weeks and months gone by. I also express my gratitude to the many NGOs and charitable organisations which have provided us with really superb briefing—almost too much of it. It took me most of yesterday to absorb some of it, but how helpful they have all been and how much work they have put into it. I shall say a little about relations with European Union countries, about safe and legal routes and about children, but let me start by saying just a bit about public opinion.

The whole debate about immigration and asylum has been bedevilled by the way in which public opinion has been quoted and what public opinion is believed to think. There are times when senior people in office—of either party—have a responsibility to talk about asylum seekers and refugees in ways which make local communities feel more sympathetic, rather than hostile. I remember walking down the road in Hammersmith many years ago, when we had earlier legislation, and somebody was shouting at me. Normally, when people shout at any of us, we know it is abuse, do we not? We have all had it happen to us. But oh no, she shouted at me, “Keep going with your amendments!” Not a dramatic slogan, but goodness me, I was so encouraged by it. I believe that we must, in debating these issues, be aware that public opinion has to be won over. It is no good saying that public opinion is always going to be hostile. It has to be won over. I welcome the measures in this Bill that will defeat smugglers and traffickers. There are things about the Bill I would like to see changed, and no doubt Committee will give us many opportunities to do that.

I turn to co-operation with EU countries. I understand that the Government have tried very hard to have better arrangements with EU countries, and there have been numerous discussions with France. It is a little concerning that we see or we hear reports on television that the French police do not have the power to deal with the boats once they are just offshore, and I believe the Government are going to deal with that. It is essential that we have better agreements with all these countries. We cannot defeat the smugglers and traffickers unless those agreements are based on firm and good co-operation. We have action plans with Italy and Germany; I think we need to do a little more with France. Perhaps the Minister could confirm that we are hopeful of having a new agreement before too long with the French. I welcome the Government’s firm commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Let me turn for a little to safe and legal routes. We keep talking about them; I think they matter. I have met the people in Calais on several occasions, and it seems to me that they would not be there unless there was no other way of getting to safety. Some of them have good reasons for wanting to come to this country, such as family reunion or because they had an education here or they speak English. It is notable that when we had the Ukrainian programme—and there were faults with it—the fact is that, in all that time, only five or six Ukrainians actually came across on the channel. They were persuaded that there were other ways of getting to safety, and they made use of them.

I am concerned about immigration detention, and I hope that we can look in detail at the proposals for immigration detention, new detention powers and what safeguards there are for people who are being held in detention, not because they have necessarily committed any criminal offences. I am also a bit concerned about the Home Secretary’s powers to impose tagging and curfew requirements on anyone with limited leave to enter or remain in the UK. I have confidence that the present Home Secretary would use those powers properly, decently and responsibly, but, of course, it may be that the Home Secretary is changed from time to time, and we have to give them powers which do not depend on the humanity of the individual holding the office at the moment.

About 18 months’ ago, I visited Calais on one of many occasions, and I met children and young people who were trying to get to the UK. There were some from Sudan who said to me very clearly, “We can’t afford to pay a trafficker. We haven’t got the money. The only way we can get to the UK is if there is a trafficker who says, ‘You steer the boat over and you’ll get a free trip’”. That, of course, means that they are committing a criminal offence in this country. So it is a way, sadly, of making victims the people who are going to be punished. We have to be very careful about the way in which they use the criminal law in such a way. Of course, like everybody else, I would like to see the traffickers got rid of and their miserable, dangerous trade disappear.

I think the Bill should give an opportunity for family reunion, including for children who are outside the UK to be able to join family members here. We have had such legislation before, and it was passed, but somehow or other it then disappeared under the last Government as well. I hope that the Minister will be able to indicate what assessment the Government have made of the White Paper proposals to restrict family reunion rules. I think there are some restrictions there, particularly if the language and financial requirements are too onerous for people who do not have the money. I hope the Minister can respond to that. I wish the Minister well, and I thank him again for his willingness to be so open and discuss these issues both here and, of course, outside.

19:17

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and I, too, have visited Calais and I totally agree that no one would live there if they had a choice. Those people are clearly desperate, and one can perhaps understand why they are taking desperate routes. I am also speaking before the noble Lord, Lord Harper, so I cannot tell him what a wonderful speech he has just made, but I am sure it will be excellent.

I listened to the two opening speeches with something close to despair, because I get the sense that the Labour Government want to do something right, but I think they have missed opportunities here. Of course, the Opposition had 14 years to put this right and what we actually saw was 14 years of draconian rules and legislation that focused public attention on stopping the boats but at the same time allowed a huge abuse of the system with billionaires in private jets siphoning off taxpayers’ money during austerity and the Covid crisis. We had 14 years of a hostile environment and 14 years of draconian rules, and what did we actually get out of it? Rwanda was the most ridiculous threat, and I am delighted that that has now gone.

Certainly, in those 14 years, the criminal gangs got richer and the people who were letting out their hotels to refugees also got richer, but, of course, the number of people arriving by small boats has kept on climbing. Under contracts signed by the previous Conservative Government, Clearsprings, Mears and Serco made a combined profit of £385 million since 2019. That has grown, because the Government deliberately allowed a backlog in asylum claims as part of their failed policy of deterrence. The “Bibby Stockholm” refugee barge was yet another failed deterrent, with the taxpayer picking up the bill for things such as the high-cost docking fees at Portland Port.

The last Government tried deterrents. They did not work and led to much higher bills for taxpayers but not to any real advantage. Refugees do not want to live on ships or in hotels. They want to become citizens and build new lives for themselves as previous waves of immigrants did. Whether descended from the Huguenots, German Jews, Ugandan Asians or other families that have fled persecution and war to make a good life here for hundreds of years, the vast majority want to contribute to society. They are grateful to be taken in and allowed to live without danger.

Most of today’s refugees want to earn a living and not rely on handouts, but our Government will not let them. Most want to contribute and benefit our economy, but our Government make them a problem instead of part of the solution. The problem is not the refugees; it is the Government’s failed attempts to deter them, which have not worked but have made things much worse and created bigger problems. I know that Labour wants to sort out the huge delays in processing asylum claims and to cut down on the use of hotels, but they are keeping most of the draconian rules that were passed by the previous, clueless Government.

Why are this Labour Government retaining provisions of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 that when in opposition they condemned as immoral and destructive of human rights commitments? They even voted alongside the Greens and the Lib Dems to defeat the previous Government 19 times on those draconian rules that they regarded as unacceptable. Why have His Majesty’s Government failed to make any provision for safe routes to this country for people seeking asylum—including people with close family and other connections here? The Government expect us to pass a law that says, “If you arrive here via a small boat, or in the back of a lorry, you’re not regarded as a person of good character and are therefore ineligible to settle”. However, because no additional safe routes are set up, the only way that you can be a person of good character, according to Labour, is not to arrive here at all. These are not the actions of a Government who treat vulnerable people with fairness and decency, and, quite honestly, they are not a Government who deserve to be in power.

19:22

[Lord Harper (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. She started off her speech so well with her kind remarks about a speech that I had not yet given. Having listened to the rest of her speech, I fear that this is one subject on which she and I are destined not to agree.

It is a great privilege to be a Member of this House and to have the opportunity to continue in public service. I thank Black Rod and her team, the doorkeepers, the clerks and the Lord Speaker’s team, who all made me very welcome before my introduction and subsequently. I also thank the catering team, who looked after my guests so very well. I should also thank, for supporting my introduction, my noble friends Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Taylor of Holbeach, as well as my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie, who, whether or not he thinks it an honour, has been assigned as my mentor to keep me out of trouble.

Although I served in the other place for 19 years, I am well aware that this House is very different. I fear that this is the time to make a confession. In the coalition Government, the Liberal Democrats, as a matter of great principle, insisted that the coalition Government tried to reform your Lordships’ House. I was the lucky junior Minister tasked with preparing a Bill to elect this House. Noble Lords will be aware that this was kiboshed by my then colleagues in the House of Commons, who saw that it was a threat to the primacy of the House of Commons, and that Bill made no further progress. However, since I have been here, I have been very pleased to see that so many of those Liberal Democrats whom I worked closely with in the coalition Government have felt able to serve in this House for many years. I hope to see them here for many years into the future. There is hope for us all.

After the coalition Government, we had the election in 2015, at which the Conservatives won our first majority for 23 years. My noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton asked me to be the Government Chief Whip. I hope your Lordships will indulge me: I should put on record a tribute to the late Sir Roy Stone, who was my principal private secretary when I was Government Chief Whip. He served in that capacity for over two decades. A finer and wiser public servant you could not wish to find. All those who came across him professionally will miss him, but the biggest loss will be felt by his family—his wife Dawn and his children, Hannah and Elliott. A fulsome tribute was paid in the other place. I wish to put mine on the record in your Lordships’ House.

When I was Government Chief Whip, I worked very closely with my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who was the Government Chief Whip here. He made it clear to me that whipping in your Lordships’ House is a much subtler art than it is perhaps at the other end of the building. You do not have the same tools at your disposal. However, I did not realise quite how different it was until I sat in on my first few sessions of Oral Questions here. I marvelled at the magical abilities of the pen of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, which is amazingly able to select who can speak when there is a clash. I felt a certain level of envy that I did not have that power when I was the Government Chief Whip at the other end of the building. I suspect that his pen is authoritative, because noble Lords think that he exercises it with a certain amount of fairness and judiciousness. I hope that level of fairness extends, perhaps especially, to those of us who have been Chief Whips, so that we get a fair crack of the whip.

Turning to the subject matter at hand, I have some experience in this, having served as Immigration Minister when my noble friend Lady May was Home Secretary. The Minister shadowed our home affairs team for a number of years. A couple of weeks ago, he referred in this House to Labour having always had a very robust policy on migration. My noble friend and I were a little surprised. We had not spotted that enormous support when he was in opposition. However, it is always nice to see a sinner repenteth.

On this Bill, I will say a couple of things. First, when I was the Immigration Minister, I tried, as I know my noble friend Lady May did, to put in place tough measures but talk moderately and reasonably about this subject. I feat the Government are in danger of doing the opposite—talking tough but not having sufficiently tough measures. I will draw out a couple. First, we have seen illegal migration via small boats rise by 30% since the election and, secondly, the Government have removed with this Bill the deterrent, the Rwanda scheme, without replacing it with an alternative. There is not time now to dwell on these matters, but I give the Minister notice that I will be doing so in Committee and on Report. I look forward to our clashes perhaps across your Lordships’ House in due course.

19:28

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Harper on a very deft, excellent and accomplished maiden speech. It is a pleasure and a privilege to follow him. My noble friend was introduced to this House as recently as 13 May, so in speaking so soon he has helped to prove an important point, which is that if one is of sufficient seniority and knowledge, one should not be afraid here to get stuck in. My noble friend is of great seniority and knowledge as a former Minister for Disabled People, as a former Minister for Constitutional Affairs—he referred to some of his travails in that duty—as a former Secretary of State for Transport at Cabinet level and as a former Chief Whip, where he always conducted himself with the discretion that we associate with those who have held that office.

Above all, of course, he is a former Minister for Immigration under the leadership of my noble friend Lady May, who is in her place. He therefore knows how the nuts and bolts of the system work. I look forward to the Minister responding to what he said. I congratulate him once again on his maiden speech; we look forward to hearing from him many times in the future.

Today, however, I want to follow a slightly different path. His speech was focused on what the Bill will seek to do, whereas I want to address whether it is capable of doing it. I ask at the very start: how much do we really know about migration into and out of the country? How many migrants are in Britain today? Where do they come from? For how long are they entitled to be here? What are they doing while they are here? How many overstay and how many are removed? Finally, are they making a net contribution to the economy or are they a cost to the taxpayer? I ask these questions in the wake of data uncovered by my Commons colleague, Neil O’Brien. He has discovered that benefit claims by households with at least one foreign national have doubled to nearly £1 billion a month in the past three years.

Finding answers is made no easier by the absence of systemic exit checks and the asymmetry of entry checks. On exit checks, we rely on advance passenger information from carriers, selective Border Force checks and administrative data—council tax information, DVLA data, NHS records and so on. On entry checks, the bedrock of the system, the International Passenger Survey, was designed to monitor tourism, not migration. The databases used by different departments to record migration often define it differently. Further, published ONS statistics break down migration data only into EU, non-EU and British categories, but not specific nationalities. Anyone coming to the country on a visitor visa to see family or for tourism, for example, is excluded from migration statistics by default, as is anyone on a temporary work visa.

Therefore, what will this Bill do, in its sharing of information provisions under Part 1 or elsewhere to: on exit, increase the number of exit checks and standardise the information received from them; and, on entry, ensure that the databases used by government use the same definitions of migrant and can talk to each other? Additionally, what will the Bill do, if anything, to break down migration data into specific nationalities, so that we can find answers to some of the questions that I posed at the start of my speech? Further, what impact will the Bill have, if any, on the Inter-departmental Task Force on Migration Statistics, set up as long ago as 2006, to improve the quality, coherence and accessibility of migration statistics?

To return to those who overstay on visitor visas and temporary work visas, how many of the roughly 2.2 million people who arrived last year on visitor visas and the 78,000 people who arrived on temporary work visas overstayed? Is it correct that, annually, 92,000 visa nationals across all visa types, and up to 250,000 non-visa national visitors, may not depart on time? Is it also correct that as few as 1,000 visa national overstayers of these 92,000 or so, and as few as 500 of these 250,000 or so, are removed each year? To look at visa types more closely, is it correct that as many as 15,000 non-EU student visa holders may overstay annually, and as few as 1,000 of these are removed each year; that as many as 5,000 family visa holders may overstay annually, and as few as 500 are removed each year; that as many as 30,000 asylum seekers may become unauthorised annually by remaining in the UK after their claims are refused and their appeals exhausted, and as few as 5,000 of these are removed each year; and that as many as 900 people enter the UK irregularly each year without claiming asylum, and as few as 50 are removed each year?

Regardless of whether these totals are accurate or not, what targets do the Government have to increase the number of removals for this year and future years, if any? I do not expect the Minister to answer this barrage of questions when he replies to the debate at the Dispatch Box, but it is vital that we get them, both for the purposes of planning for the future and for maintaining confidence in the system. Will the Bill enable us to craft a more selective and efficient, as well as a more restrictive, immigration system? That should be a key test for the Bill.

19:35

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, from this side, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Harper. Whether or not he always agrees with the indefatigable noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, I hope that he will find this House capable of always disagreeing well.

It is not so much a declaration of interest as a description of context to say that I am the daughter of late and lawful 1950s Commonwealth migrants to this country and a human rights lawyer of just over 30 years. For the avoidance of doubt, and at possible risk of confounding some potential expectations, I accept this Bill’s underlying premises of both border security and immigration control.

A democratic political community is of course defined by its borders as well as its values and laws. It has a prerogative to assess and balance its social, economic and cultural needs, including some desire for reciprocal international work, study, trade and tourism on the part of its own citizens. As a matter of logic and international law, it retains considerable discretion on the question of how many and what kind of visas to grant to non-nationals seeking to enter its territory for various purposes. This should be exercised, I would suggest, with considerable care, given the often competing interests of different economic actors in particular. Some employers, and—dare I say it—government departments, may have a strong instinct towards importing large amounts of skilled, and even unskilled, workers. This may be laudable, and at times vital to fuel innovation or fill gaps in services or the labour market, but less so if it is designed to suppress wages below what is fair or even sustainable for living.

Since World War II, however, there has been—rightly, in my view—far less discretion about how to treat a much smaller number of people for whom travel comes not from preference, but persecution. Let us please always remember that we have a refugee convention, a European convention and so on, as a direct result of some of the worst atrocities of the past century and the plight of those who were denied safe passage to, and asylum in, countries such as our own at that time.

The 1951 refugee convention in particular enshrines the principles of non-refoulement, sending people back or onwards to their peril; non-penalisation, not punishing them for the desperate and even clandestine means of their escape; and non-discrimination against them. All three of these principles were violated by the legislation of recent years, in particular the Nationality and Borders Act, the Illegal Migration Act and the legislative lie that is the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act. The Government are to be commended for seeking to repeal so much of that toxic legacy. However, I am sure that we will explore in Committee how that repeal does not go far enough, in a number of respects, to achieve either the legality or simplicity that I hope most of us want to see.

Before even the legislation came the politics for which our leaders are just as responsible. In my opinion, a grand political swindle was perpetrated upon the British electorate in recent years. Notwithstanding Brexit slogans about controlling borders, large numbers of international workers were consciously invited into the UK, while a fraction of those numbers of asylum seekers, mostly genuine refugees and often from sites of Britain’s previous overseas military adventures, were demonised beyond recognition. That is dishonest, dangerous and, frankly, immoral.

As we examine both the broad brushstrokes and detailed drafting of the Bill, I hope we can work with care and precision to distinguish between immigration control and refugee protection. I accept that the latter is a responsibility we share with other rule-of-law-loving territories, which, as my noble friend Lord Dubs has said, must be discharged in greater collaboration, including to avoid wherever possible desperate people taking perilous journeys. But it is one thing to criminalise traffickers and smugglers and another to dehumanise, deprive, detain and deport their desperate human cargo, who are not and have never been illegal, let alone criminal.

In life and in politics, just as much as legislation, words matter. They have consequences beyond the next headline. I was born just over a year after Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech. A few months later, my then young parents were violently attacked by violent thugs trying to take their baby from her pram in a London park. That may be too long ago for the bright young things who draft political speeches to remember, but surely not for your Lordships’ House.

19:41

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction earlier and the many organisations who have sent us briefings. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harper, on his maiden speech. I say from the Lib Dem Benches that, despite the fact we are here, we still would like to see reform of your Lordships’ House.

I support everything said by my noble friend Lord German earlier, and will try not to cover those areas too much. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, who spoke with her customary clarity and power.

In some ways, the Bill is disappointing, but the Government are right to repeal the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. We always said in opposition that Rwanda was not safe. The cost—with not one person deported—must still be an embarrassment to those on the Conservative Benches. Some think that perhaps the whole Illegal Migration Act should go the same way; that was yet more unworkable migration legislation designed for newspaper headlines—much of it not commenced.

Earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, cited More in Common’s research on migration as a whole, but he failed to mention that, in questions further down most of those polls, when people are asked whether they would like to see more vacancies remaining in social care or for nurses in hospitals, they tend to say no. That is partly because people get confused between the migration that we describe as “regular” and asylum seekers and that which is irregular. We need clarity about migration, in particular the distinction that those seeking asylum are not coming here for economic needs. We know that the vast majority of migrants arrive here legally, yet the public spin has muddled the irregular with it and continues to do so.

I do not think anyone other than the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has spoken about student migration numbers yet. We know that they form part of the OECD data, which is why we always have to have them there, but there is nothing to stop the Government making sure people understand that international students are good for universities, good for economies locally and nationally, and good for the future of ground-breaking science, research and technology.

Over the last 10 years, a number of noble Lords have spoken regularly about the status and plight of children in the many migration Bills. This Bill, sadly, does not remove the concerns that some of us still have. The last Government set up the National Age Assessment Board, NAAB, using so-called visual assessment methods and scientific biological methods—which, by the way, qualified doctors refused to use. During the passage of what is now the Illegal Migration Act, the then Government cited that other European countries were using scientific age-assessment techniques, ignoring the fact that someone being assessed was also given legal support to protect them, which was not available in this country. Since last year, a number of European countries have stopped using this technique because it is unreliable and has resulted in children being put into adult accommodation with no facilities for them. That is a breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as a breach of the UN convention on the rights of refugees. I hope the Minister will reassure the House that that will be reviewed. Some of us may even lay amendments to that effect.

We need change because of those errors, but there is a further issue around how to safeguard children who are assumed to be adults and are then charged under the Bill with an offence of illegally entering the country or any of the other offences cited in the Bill. At present, a child refugee mistaken as an adult is automatically treated as an adult under criminal proceedings. We do not do that for children in our domestic criminal justice system for a very good reason. Can the Minister say how these age-disputed children facing criminal proceedings will be protected?

Along with other noble Lords, I am concerned that this Government’s proposals, especially the new financial burdens on asylum seekers, will limit and reduce the number of refugee families travelling safely to the UK to reunite with a family member. For children, this is particularly traumatic.

Clauses 34 and 35 have sensible provisions on flexibility in taking biometric information. We remember the success of Op Pitting during the emergency evacuation of Afghanistan and how the British Government were able to make change happen very quickly. However, there are concerns about the proposed extensions to use these biometrics, which can, in practice, be impossible for asylum seekers, especially women and children, to achieve. Taking the example of Afghanistan, they might have to travel over a border into Iran to try to get to a British consulate to get the biometric data sorted, and then get back to Afghanistan, which they want to leave. We will raise this in Committee because we are concerned that it is a problem. The Government’s intention is a good one, but how will it work in practice?

My noble friend Lord German, and in another place my honourable friend Lisa Smart MP, raised the important issue of those seeking asylum being allowed to work after more than three months and, importantly, to pay their way in this country. On the plus side, for asylum seekers, the right to work would give them the chance to use their skills and restore their confidence and morale as they build their new lives. These people will also help our economy, especially in skills shortage areas. Earning wages would mean contributing to taxes and national insurance, and paying for their own food and accommodation, thus reducing bills. I look forward to Committee, where many different issues will be raised.

19:48

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to support the Bill and to follow a characteristically comprehensive and persuasive opening speech by my noble friend the Minister, as well as the well-informed and forensic contribution of my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti, and the excellent speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.

It would be impossible in six minutes for me to engage with any substantial amount of the issues that have been alluded to or discussed; everything that has been said thus far in today’s proceedings has been wide ranging and reflective of the broader debate on these questions. So, mindful of time and of the specificity of previous contributions, I plan to restrict myself to one or two observations about the Bill’s provisions, as well as the broader challenges that they seek to engage. Given the nature and tone of other contributions, I do not intend to belabour the point about the inheritance bequeathed to my noble friend the Minister and the Government by the party opposite, but it is worth emphasising that the measures we are debating today are necessitated by 14 years, or thereabouts, of largely ineffectual policy, with occasional performative harshness here and there in that period.

Here, I will depart from my script to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harper, on his excellent maiden speech. I look forward to debating with him and hearing him debate in future.

I welcome the commitment in the Bill to cross-agency working under the aegis of the new border security commander. It is unquestionably true that previous efforts to reduce illegal arrivals in the UK were hamstrung by a lack of co-ordination and a tendency for government departments and agencies to work in silos. Under the provisions of Clauses 3 and 5, partner authorities in their activities must only “have regard” for the strategic priorities document produced by the commander. Thinking over the strength of those provisions, I read the Second Reading proceedings in the other place, and while picking my way through the comments of the shadow Home Secretary, I realised, peering through a mist of disbelief and astonishment on some occasions, that I found myself responsive to one, but only one, element of his remarks. He suggested something supported by a briefing from the Law Society of Scotland, which other noble Lords may have received; that the title “border security commander” is something of a misnomer, given that these provisions presuppose a system based on co-operation rather than compliance. What precedent have the Government drawn upon in coming to the decision that the commander and partner authorities should have regard for, rather than comply with, the priorities in the strategic document?

Clause 37, repealing the entirety of the safety of Rwanda Act, is, of course, entirely welcome. I cannot help but be struck by the criticism levelled at the Government by the Benches opposite in this context. We have been told on a number of occasions already that we are removing a deterrent that could have a transformational effect on the inflow of illegal migration. In order to take this critique seriously—which, frankly, I do not—we have to accept that, having finally found a silver bullet for a problem that has bedevilled this country for years, the previous Government did not discharge it or receive a consequent wave of acclimation from a grateful nation, but called a general election before the first flight had taken off. This repeal only confirms what we already knew: that this scheme was performative rather than substantive in conception and intent.

In this context, I should also mention those voices who urge the UK to disregard elements of international law to ensure that we can take appropriately severe measures to discourage illegal migration. Apart from comments already made in this speech, although this is a national problem, it can be solved only with international co-operation. The new agreements that this Government have reached with Germany, Iraq, the Calais group and the G7 are testament to this. Displaying a disregard for international law before asking for co-operation with international partners, would, to say the least, represent a somewhat quixotic approach.

On the wider point of the international picture, I have a question for the Minister about the retention of Section 59 of the Illegal Migration Act. As noble Lords will be aware, Section 59 makes any asylum or human rights claim by a national of a safe state inadmissible, save in exceptional circumstances. I know that the Section 59 powers have not been commenced, but if they are not going to be used, why not use this Bill to remove them altogether? To take but one example of the commencement of these powers possibly posing a problem, which has already been alluded to, Georgia was added to the safe states list by the previous Government but is an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ people. Given that the Home Office recently granted asylum to people from Georgia, the purpose of Section 59, even in abeyance, is somewhat questionable.

Mindful of time, I limit myself to one final question. On 10 February, the Home Office published significant changes to the good character requirement guidance for British citizenship applications. The updated guidance stipulates that asylum seekers who previously entered the UK illegally will typically be refused citizenship regardless of the time elapsed since their entry. I accept that, where safe and legal routes exist, taking the alternative of illicit entry can legitimately be seen as evidence of an absence of good character. However, if someone has a legitimate claim to asylum but came from a country with no safe legal route in place at the time they entered, is this really evidence of want of good character? I would be grateful for the Minister’s reflections on that question.

19:54

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, I add to the welcome to my noble friend Lord Harper. It is good to see him here bolstering our side of the House, although I hope his plea for preferential treatment for former Chief Whips is ignored in the way that it should be. But it is very good to see him here.

The Bill we are debating this evening could not have come on a more embarrassing day for the Government, with 1,194 illegal immigrants having come over in 18 dinghies on Saturday alone—the fifth-largest number in a single day, totalling 38,053 since the election. Britain has lost control of its borders: those are not my words, but the words of the Secretary of State for Defence. If it is true that Britain has lost control of its borders, the exam question is, does this Bill give us control back over our borders or does it in some way fall short?

We have discussed various matters, and we will have plenty of time in Committee to flesh those out, not least the role of the border security commander. Many of us have not been impressed by the work over the years of either the UK Border Agency or Border Force, and it has always been my view that there is a huge cadre of people in this country whose employment we terminate far too soon. I am talking about senior military figures, senior civil servants, Foreign Office people and so forth. We let them go at a point when they have many years of useful life left in them. I would have thought that we should look very carefully at making part of their retirement a secondment to boost this part of government. They would bring expertise, greatly improving the processing of applications and so forth, which we all want to see. I hope the Government will give that some consideration.

As the noble Lord, Lord Browne, who spoke before me, said, this all depends on co-operation. Can the Minister update us on our current relations with the French? Of course, we are an island; we are dependent on the French. We have given them some £476 million in a three-year deal, and seeing their behaviour over the past few days, I wonder whether we are getting any value for money from that. What discussions can we have with the French? How can we further incentivise them? Of course, if you are in France, inevitably, you do not necessarily want to retain people—you want to see them go—but why are we giving the French money if they are simply not fulfilling their part of the deal? What discussions about this legislation has the Minister had with the Irish Government in Dublin, given that another way people can come into this country is through Northern Ireland?

There has been a lot of discussion about Rwanda, and we can argue about that until the cows come home. It was oven-ready, and I understand why those who did not want to proceed with it did not, but what has it been replaced by? On his recent visit to Albania, the Prime Minister met with a rebuff. So what other countries are we now talking to? I hear that the Balkans are under increasing Russian influence. We are told that the SIS has advised the Government against the Balkans, which are a tinderbox at the moment. Who else are we negotiating with? What is the expectation that we will get a deal? What is the timeline? Crucially, what is the fallback if we do not get a deal with any third country?

This Bill deals with the future, but very little is going to happen immediately and, crucially, it ignores the population of this country. I have always said that you cannot have a grown-up conversation about how many people you want to live in this country and how many people you want to come to this country unless you know how many people are living in this country. We do not, and this Bill does nothing to address that. It talks about guaranteeing the security of our borders, but it says nothing about guaranteeing the security of the country within its borders. Can the Government guarantee that those who have come here over the years illegally wish the country well and do not present a credible threat at times?

That brings me to my conclusion and an issue which I shall be raising in Committee. It follows on from what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said about the introduction of biometric ID cards. This moves towards that. The Minister is falling into the trap, because he is going to raise again the fact that I was in a Government who passed the Identity Documents Act 2010 to get rid of them. I went to the Library to check how I voted. I was a Northern Ireland Minister of State at the time, and I was rather hoping I would not be here, but of course, the Minister will appreciate the principle of ministerial collective responsibility. Equally, I think one is allowed to change one’s mind over 15 years.

There has been a huge change in circumstance. There has been a huge change in the accretion—if that is the right word—of our identity; we all cede it the whole time to the NHS, to credit card companies and so forth. It is staring us in the face. If we had a good biometric ID system here, we could work out who is in this country first and foremost before we then decide how many more people we want to come, and that is something I believe we should debate better.

This is a contentious subject, but by doing nothing or not enough about it we are playing into the hands of parties such as Reform. The Government are understandably nervous about the inroads that Reform is making in northern seats in particular. I say gently to everybody in this House that the less we do about this, the more it plays to Reform. I still believe there is a gap between what people expect from the Government on immigration and what politicians are delivering. The wider that gap—the more it is allowed to exist—the more it will play to those on the extremes, which I believe we all wish to avoid.

20:00

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harper, on an excellent maiden speech and welcome him warmly.

I broadly welcome the Bill, and I believe that many of the enforcement measures it contains will assist in the fight against organised immigration crime. They had better, because this scourge is a growing threat to the cohesion of our society and the credibility of our democratic institutions. That is true not just here in the UK but across the whole of democratic Europe. People are losing trust, so it is essential that we are realistic and honest about what we face. It is clear that mass migration on the scale we are now seeing and the organised crime gangs that profit from it are drivers of a weakening faith in democratic institutions, bringing the rise of dangerous forms of political extremism—again, not just here but across Europe.

These conditions are fuelling nationalism and xenophobia throughout the democratic world, and the failure of mainstream democratic parties and Governments to deal with the question has played an important part in the installation by popular vote of authoritarian Governments, not just on our own continent but on others. It should be clear to everyone that if parties of the centre, centre-right and centre-left do not deal with this issue and all that flows from it, there is no shortage of parties on the political extremes that will be happy to do so—and if they are ushered in by discontent over migration, they will do much else besides.

The reason why I believe the Bill can only begin to touch the hem of the problem is that the policy challenge is broader and deeper than a simple question of law enforcement. It is the context created by the United Nations refugee convention of 1951 and its protocol of 1967. The refugee convention was created in the shadow of the Second World War and was generally understood to be a response to the horrors of that conflict, particularly to the barriers faced by Jewish people seeking to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The 1967 protocol broadened its terms to include within its compass the entire world.

I will make just one point to illustrate the historical context of the refugee convention and its striking contrast to the world of today. At the time of its enactment in 1951, it was considered that there were around 2.1 million refugees under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2024, according to the UNHCR, there were no fewer than 122.6 million internally displaced persons around the world and no fewer than 43.7 million refugees. In addition, in the 74 years since the adoption of the convention, the world has become smaller, knowledge of conditions in developed countries more broadly available and travel over distance across seas and whole continents far easier. In the light of that, why would millions of people not seek better lives, more opportunities, and to escape with their families from violence and oppression? What could be more natural? Why would millions of people not avail themselves of the services of organised criminal gangs promising a better future in some newly reachable, unimaginably rich country?

It is in the light of the changes since 1951 that I believe the rubric of the refugee convention must be considered. It says that anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution in their place of abode is entitled under the convention to asylum when they arrive in a contracting state, but that characterisation applies to literally tens of millions of people worldwide and may plausibly be claimed by tens of millions more.

So what are we to do? It is no answer just to shrug; again, we have to be realistic because at some stage we are going to have to deal with this. My own view is that we may have to revisit the refugee convention to make it fit for the modern world—to create an architecture that allows, for example, for the application of quotas between nations and of course the admission of those grievously at risk, so that we may fulfil our humanitarian function without damaging our own social and political cohesion. Discussions are already taking place across Europe about how arrangements under the European Convention on Human Rights may be reordered to allow countries more effectively to define and regulate their borders. As a strong supporter of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Strasbourg court, I urge the Government to become an enthusiastic participant in those discussions.

As long ago as 2016, the distinguished Columbia University academic professor Mark Lilla wrote in his fine book The Once and Future Liberal that parties of the centre-left that espouse identity politics, that atomise people by race, by so-called privilege, sex and gender, building great hierarchies of polarisation and grievance, would never be able to create winning electoral coalitions across socioeconomic divides. Indeed, such an obviously misguided and solipsistic ideology would succeed only in alienating the left’s natural supporters and ushering in an age of populism. The result would be social division and the strengthening of political reaction. Although Professor Lilla once told me that the response of some of his university colleagues to his book was to label him a white supremacist, history has plainly proved him right. Today, a weak and confused response to an unprecedented surge in mass migration holds the same danger. That danger is particularly acute for parties of the centre-left, and we are a maximum of four years away from our next general election.

20:06

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I too very much enjoyed the excellent maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Harper, who showed us a glint of steel, heavily disguised by wit and deftness of touch. I think we all look forward very much to hearing more from him, including on this Bill, when he can withdraw his sabre completely.

My overriding impression of this debate has been that there has been far more that unites us than divides us. In the full range of contributions from the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, to my noble friend Lord Lilley and all in between—if they will accept being the bookends of this excellent debate—there is a general acceptance that it really is the legitimate expectation of those we serve as parliamentarians that the Government must be able to defend and control our borders, described in the Explanatory Notes as “a vital strategic asset”, and indeed to remove those with no right to be here. It really is as simple as that.

Despite our island geography, we clearly do not have security at the border, and successive Governments have failed in this regard. We really should move on from ownership of historical policies and, to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bach, in his contribution to the previous debate on sentencing, take some of the heat and the blame game out of this. To move towards common approaches towards a complex problem is an admirable objective.

There really is a question of competence in government, and the public are tired of failure. People look to government, and indeed to Parliament, not for explanations about how difficult this is but for solutions. If the legal and regulatory framework, either domestically or internationally, is the obstacle, then, in partnership with our European partners and with other nations, we should seek to find proper, pragmatic, fair and humanitarian solutions that change the international regulatory regime. I listened with great interest to the previous speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, who gave an excellent explanation of the imperative so to do in a pragmatic and fair way.

There is much that is admirable in this Bill. An awful lot of it feels very technical. Some of it feels just a little presentational, such as talk of commanders without too much to command, which has already been noted. It does not contain some of the ID card proposals that my noble friend Lord Swire, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and others talked about. Those would of course be much greater technical and policy moves than is contained in the Bill.

I suspect that much of our debates in Committee and thereafter on Report will be more about what is not in than what is in the Bill. I certainly welcome the pragmatic and sensible measures, many of which I was surprised are not already available to law enforcement authorities. However, I would like to ask the Minister what level of impact he believes the package of measures he is bringing forward in this Bill will have. There is a wealth of data on the situation; no doubt the Government have undertaken detailed analysis on the projected efficacy on the combination of these initiatives. What are the targets for improvements? What are the KPIs which the border security commander will be tasked with delivering? What does success look like?

In order to discuss the solution, one first has to understand the problem. People are travelling through numerous European safe countries before making the extremely hazardous trip across the channel to access the UK. Can the Minister respond in detail—if he does not have time this evening, perhaps he would be kind enough to write to me—on the factors in the intelligence the Government have which they believe drive people to risk their lives and those of their children and families to come to the UK rather than to stay in another safe country, namely France? This may be in terms of how they are treated when they arrive, the opportunity to remain in the UK, benefits when they settle here and any other factors that he considers relevant. We need to have a proper understanding of that in order to work out what the solution is.

The biggest issue is clearly the perverse incentive which rewards those who come here through illicit means. Until we can make a statement, backed up, supported by and compliant with international law, that if people come to the UK through illegal means, they will extremely prejudice their changes of staying in the country, we are not going to win and will undoubtedly fail.

Much has been made of the Australian example and the efficacy of its deterrent measures. I note a statement made by Rear Admiral Justin Jones, then commander of the Australian Maritime Border Command in a public video in 2022. He said, “Australia is resolute. Our border protection policies will not change. No one who attempts to travel illegally by boat will be allowed to settle here. No matter who you are or where you are from, our borders are closed to illegal migration. The only way to Australia is with a valid visa. You have zero change with illegal migration”. That is an interesting comparison, but the emphasis is on politicians in the United Kingdom and our European partner nations to look at the international regulatory settlement together to come up with a solution.

20:13

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare the support I receive from RAMP and start by warmly welcoming the repeal of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act and partial repeal of the Illegal Migration Act.

However, I share the disappointment expressed by many organisations—I am grateful for their briefings—that the Bill does not go further in repealing the whole of the latter and parts of the Nationality and Borders Act. The Law Society, for instance, describes the latter as

“a detrimental piece of legislation”

that will become

“the default directive in many places”.

Could my noble friend the Minister explain why the Bill leaves in place a number of provisions in both those Acts that we roundly condemned at the time?

In particular, why are we retaining Section 12 of the IMA? To quote the UN High Commissioner for Refugees it

“leaves in place a risk of arbitrary detention of asylum-seekers, refugees and stateless persons”.

Why are we retaining Section 59 which, in denying claims from countries deemed safe, ignores—again to quote the UNHCR—

“the requirement for an individualised assessment of an asylum claim”

thereby giving

“rise to a risk of refoulement”?

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium warns that

“children and young people are particularly at risk”

because Section 59 denies them

“proper consideration of their vulnerabilities”.

The RMCC, with support from the British Association of Social Workers, is also critical of the retention of the age assessment provisions of the NBA and calls for their repeal. The RMCC points out that neither the National Age Assessment Board nor the development of so-called scientific age assessment methods—which, as already noted, have been widely criticised—has tackled the key problem of children being wrongly treated as adults on arrival.

I was therefore alarmed to read in the parallel immigration White Paper of plans to explore

“scientific and technological methods to ensure adults are not wrongly identified as children”.

It is worthy of Alice in “Through the Looking-Glass”. I am nevertheless grateful to my noble friend for the constructive meeting we had with members of the RMCC recently to discuss age assessment. He will not be surprised to hear that I plan to table amendments on this issue.

Some of those children wrongly identified as adults could be prosecuted under the new criminal offences contained in the Bill and end up spending months in adult prisons. Concerns have been raised more widely by a number of organisations, including the Law Society and the UNHCR, about these provisions, which in their breadth and vagueness, risk criminalising both vulnerable adults and children who are risking their lives in search of safety. This exposes the gaping hole in the Bill which, as already noted, is the absence of any provision to expand safe routes. The safe routes coalition, while recognising the need to tackle the exploitation of unsafe routes by smuggling gangs, which is the Bill’s main focus, argues that it is missing a golden opportunity to address why people are taking these dangerous journeys.

I cannot understand why the Government appear to be so deaf to the widespread calls to improve safe routes for children and others, including from the APPG for refugees, of which I am a member. Instead, the immigration White Paper includes plans that will weaken the family reunion route. The White Paper also includes proposals to double the length of time most people will need to wait before they can apply for settlement. This is not the place to argue against this damaging proposal, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it, given the large number of emails I am receiving from those already on the five-year route to remain.

In the absence of any clarification about whether the new rule will apply to those already here, the emails express acute distress, a sense of betrayal and a loss of trust in the UK’s integrity and consistency. As already asked for, can my noble friend at the very least clarify whether those people will indeed now have to work here for 10 years before being able to apply for settlement, having come here in good faith on the assumption of five years?

The welcome repeal in the Bill of Sections 31 to 35 of the IMA, which rendered refugees who enter the country by irregular means ineligible for British citizenship, has now been undermined by the administrative sleight of hand that achieves the same outcome through changes to the Nationality: Good Character Requirement guidance. Having welcomed the repeal as

“a positive step that recognises the importance of naturalisation, both for the individuals concerned and for social cohesion”,

the UNHCR expresses concern that the new guidance

“may result in breaches of Article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention”,

which, it argues, is central to the convention’s “object and purpose”. It recommends that the guidance be revisited

“to ensure that it is applied in a manner consistent with the UK’s international obligations”.

The Law Society echoed the Article 31 point and noted that

“this is a significant change in policy which has been made with no consultation and therefore no scrutiny”.

In conclusion, although I repeat my welcome for the repeal of many of the damaging provisions made by the previous Government, I wish I could welcome this Bill unequivocally. As the daughter of a refugee immigrant, I welcome the fact that I live on an island not of strangers but of diverse groups who have enriched our lives. We have a responsibility to them, and to those who seek to come to our country in future, to ensure that we build a fair and inclusive immigration and asylum/refugee system.

20:19

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the Bill so succinctly. I welcome my noble friend Lord Harper, who is not in his place, and wish him very well in this House.

The Bill seems to have two aims and to be speaking to two different audiences. One of the aims is to control the borders by tackling the criminal gangs who ferry migrants to the shores of this country. A number of clauses—Clauses 1 to 12—will introduce a new Border Security Command to tackle the gangs. There will be new offences—in Clauses 13 to 18 and 21 to 23—with new powers and data-sharing powers. The Bill aims to address the very wide concern in this country about levels of immigration, both legal and illegal or irregular, but it aims also to tackle the asylum and immigration system, to strengthen and build confidence in the border system, and—to do that—to repeal certain parts of Conservative legislation.

That part of the Bill is addressed to people on the left who see the streamlining and processing of the asylum system as paramount. It is not a matter of tightening the rules, and I welcome the Minister’s outlining some of the more peripheral ways in which these will be strengthened—in Clauses 41, 43 and 45, for example. It is also not a matter of reviewing the international agreements from the post-World War II period for Europe to protect people who were displaced by the war, by the defeat of Germany and by the new arrangements with the Soviet Union to give it some sphere of influence over eastern Europe.

From the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, on the Cross Benches, we have heard something of the numbers involved then. We are speaking about 2.1 million people of European origin, displaced mainly in Europe. However, we are now looking at a world where, globally, people are on the move. The figure mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, is 400 million refugees. These are very significant numbers. He rightly alluded to the 1951 refugee convention and some of the international framework of law. Many people like to pooh-pooh those of us who feel it needs to be reviewed because it is totally unsuitable for today’s global world, with millions of people on the move. Therefore, I will concentrate on what kind of figures we are dealing with in this country alone for immigration and asylum. I fear that streamlining and processing the system is not enough to help reduce the overall numbers.

In the year in which the new Government came to power, there were 224,742 asylum cases in the system in June 2024. For the year ending March 2025, around 50% of claims had been granted at an initial decision, giving 45,084 people refugee protection, according to Home Office figures. Some 40% of asylum claims were granted between January and March. This is a significantly higher rate than historically; the rate was 29% in the period from 2001 to 2018. It was 18% more than in 2023 and 5% more than in 2022, and it includes almost all small boat immigrants, whose claims by and large tend to be successful—77% of them.

With such numbers arriving after the Conservative Government’s measures to deter, I am very worried about Clauses 37 and 38, which are going to repeal those parts of the Act that acted as a deterrent. The figures speak for themselves. In 2023 the numbers of people arriving—they are just astonishing—fell to 36,699, a figure substantially lower than the 54,702 the previous year. I cannot think it right to say that the measures that the Conservative Government introduced, the Rwanda scheme and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, did not serve as a deterrent. Those numbers do speak. I agree that it is too late for Rwanda, but certainly there are the measures in the Illegal Migration Act.

To close, I welcome those parts of the Bill that aim to strengthen the borders, strengthen control of the borders and bring in offences, but I rather fear that they will not be strong enough to deter illegal migration. I fear that in trying to speak to two different audiences, we will end up pleasing neither those who want a more streamlined immigration system that will allow more asylum applications and more claims to be granted nor those in the country who, by and large, want immigration, legal and illegal, drastically cut.

20:27

[Baroness Warsi (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, colleagues in the other place and in this House have raised concerns about this Bill—from the impact it may have on the victims of human trafficking, undermining the work done and progress made in that area, much of it led by my noble friend Lady May, to concerns over the provisions that may criminalise asylum seekers rather than those who seek to exploit them, the expansion of counterterrorism measures and the lack of an attempt to deal with the vexed issue of no safe routes for those fleeing persecution.

I am sure that many of these and other concerns around the Bill will be debated in detail in Committee—but today I want to focus on how we debate this policy area, the consequences of what we do in Parliament and in government and its real impact on people’s lives. I do not put forward an ideological position on migration: I am neither for open borders nor for ever-increasing draconian measures that seem not to achieve their stated aim, instead often raising the temperature on this issue and then agitating further a disappointed public.

In a former life, I have represented both the Home Office and applicants in immigration proceedings. However, I am pragmatic enough to acknowledge, as I presume most in this House would, our demand for a constant supply of a Labour force over decades to underpin our economy. It has meant that we have tolerated the numbers. Like most in our country, I simply want a system that works, does not oversell and underdeliver, ensures that we meet our international obligations and is in line with our stated values.

Migration, the movement of people, which both in the UK and around the world is overwhelmingly legal, has always existed—the movement of people between different geographical areas across boundaries during the years as seasons changed; the movement within state boundaries from rural to urban areas in recent centuries; and the movement in the past of large numbers of Europeans, from the global North to the global South, the global East and elsewhere. From the mid-1800s to the First World War, it is estimated that up to 20 million people migrated from the United Kingdom. Over a period of 80 years nearly 50% of the British population moved, travelling to parts of the British Empire, colonising lands and establishing settled communities.

This was not unusual; the same pattern was seen across most European nations. Some 48 million indigenous—to use the description used by my noble friend Lord Lilley—Europeans left Europe to become permanent communities across the globe and now rightly call themselves indigenous there. These numbers and percentages far exceed the subsequent migration back from many of our old colonies, including many like my grandfather, who some 70 years ago arrived in the UK, starting his “on these islands” relationship with Britain, his actual relationship having started many decades before then as a subject in British colonial India, which included over two decades of service in the British Indian Army. He was the embodiment of what the now Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, passionately said in 2018 in the other place:

“We are here … because you were there”.—[Official Report, Commons, 30/4/18; col. 9WH.]


Indeed, it was only after the Second World War that Europe stopped becoming the source of most migration, starting to become a migration destination.

I raise these issues for context, for proportionality and for us to consider the statements we make and will make as these changes are introduced and the Bill passes through both Houses; statements such as those suggesting, as many have done already, including in the Explanatory Notes, that what we are seeing is unusual or unprecedented. It is neither, if we look at history. Facts, stats and language matter: as my noble friend Lord Harper said in his excellent maiden speech, tough measures in moderate language. It matters because it leads to better debates, better policy and better policy-making, and ensures that migration policy remains just that, not a cloak for culture wars and division.

We need to be mindful of the impact on all communities in the UK and how what we say in positions of power can green-light dangerous behaviours in those with malign intent. It has consequences for cohesion and can become a platform for extremist views. How we have developed our policies in the past has not necessarily worked. The race riots post-Southport showed us how quickly people from racial minority communities became migrants, became asylum seekers, became illegals, became security risks, and how our fellow citizens, British Muslims, became fair game. After all the sloganising during the Brexit decision, we neither took back control of our borders nor reduced the numbers coming into our country, with legal migration increasing from around 500,000 to 700,000 annually to 1.3 million in 2022 and 1.2 million in 2023. However passionate and at times inflammatory the rhetoric, not only did the policy of restricting and reducing numbers simply not happen; in reality, the opposite did.

In conclusion, I urge noble Lords to be careful in the language we use during these debates; to be accurate in our facts; to base our arguments on evidence, not ideology; to focus on outcomes, not political posturing; to tell the full story on migration; to speak of numbers and needs, not composition and culture; and to find a way to talk about migration that is inclusive of all our fellow countrymen and women. We owe it to all of them to get this right.

20:33

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords, I speak on this Bill as someone who has spent much of my political life focused on home affairs, justice and border security, including as a former Immigration Minister and as a spokesman in the European Parliament. I begin by welcoming the Government’s renewed focus on these vital matters, but I urge Ministers to draw a clear and consistent distinction between immigration and asylum. They are two very different issues, each requiring its own approach and solution.

Our immigration policy must be rules-based, fair to those who follow the system and firmly rooted in the national interest, supporting our economy, our public services and the social fabric of this country. But please remember: immigration, as opposed to asylum, is entirely in the hands of Governments. They set priorities, categories and numbers. And please do not be deceived by the term “net migration”. Regardless of numbers entering the country, if more people leave, the figures come down; if fewer leave, they go up. Too many valuable people leaving is also surely not in our interests.

Asylum must be firm but fair. We must honour international commitments and offer protection to those who flee from persecution. We must also be resolute in removing those whose claims have failed swiftly, humanely and without unnecessary delay. Justice must be seen to be done, and public confidence depends on it. Immigration, when managed responsibly, is a source of strength for society. However, long-term success requires more border controls; it requires integration, communication and trust. That is why I encourage the Government to return responsibility for community and race relations to the Home Office so that it sits alongside immigration policy and supports a more coherent and co-ordinated approach and ensures—as I tried to do—better integration and acceptance of those admitted to our country.

The number of irregular small boat arrivals rose by 22% in the year up to March 2025. That is a sharp increase despite the growing success of the French authorities to deter them. The public are right to expect firm action, but the loss of legal routes and facilities at UK representations around the globe has certainly not helped. More must be done to disrupt the criminal gangs to end the perilous journeys and secure our borders. However, lasting solutions can come only through serious practical co-operation with our neighbours, not schemes that involve sending asylum claimants thousands of miles away for processing—which are, at best, legally questionable, expensive and ineffective.

I note the Government’s interest in creating overseas hubs as temporary locations only for failed asylum seekers but not for applicants. This might be helpful, but it should never replace the return of such people to their source countries. Applying pressure on the Governments of those which are reluctant to receive back and protect their citizens is an appropriate and at times necessary action. It has been done before with positive effect.

Acquiring asylum is a precious thing with clear criteria. Over the last few years, we seem to have been extending improperly those criteria, leading to far greater numbers being granted asylum than I think is correct under the terms of the 1951 convention on refugees. Although I fully appreciate the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, a short time ago as to some changing circumstances since 1951, there have recently been signs of stricter enforcement and better understanding and interpretation of the rules, which is welcome.

In that context, I welcome the UK-EU common understanding, particularly part 6 on irregular immigration, which rightly highlights the importance of information sharing, something I have long championed. The previous Government began developing I-LEAP, a platform to improve data exchange at the border. That work must continue and accelerate, and I urge Ministers to prioritise and, crucially, pursue renewed co-operation with European partners to restore UK access to the Schengen Information System, which I played a part in introducing.

SIS II is the most widely used and largest security and border management information sharing system in Europe. In 2019—the last year the UK had access—it was checked by British police over 603 million times. That level of operational intelligence is essential to protecting our citizens and securing our borders. Its loss, with real-time access, was one of the many negatives in our leaving the EU.

We now have an opportunity to modernise our systems, to act with purpose and to rebuild trust in how we manage our borders. That means processing and removing failed asylum seekers in a timely manner, stopping dangerous crossings and working in genuine partnership with allies. If we are serious about border security, we must be serious about the tools and co-operation that make it possible.

20:39

[Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the Government on their aim of repealing the Rwanda Act and some of its modifications to the Illegal Migration Act, both of which were despicable pieces of legislation and contributed to the widespread negativity about supporting people who are escaping conflict and other dangers.

If we want a model for how to treat people fleeing war zones, we have it in the way we supported Ukrainian nationals seeking refuge in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion. Ukrainians were able to pass the residence test to receive fast and substantial help, including a temporary leave to remain if they left because of the Russian invasion. They could work here and apply for universal credit if they did not have a job, could not work or were on a low income. Ukrainian refugees were generally presented in a positive light by the media and in Parliament.

What we see here is the humanity that we should expect from a relatively wealthy country giving support to people whose lives are in danger. We offered a safe space to live, where children could go to school and where parents could legitimately work and provide for their families.

To echo the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, about the terrible war taking place in Sudan, of course Sudan was, in effect, a British colony, and the divisions it helped to create resulted in decades of on-off war. The UK is an obvious place for Sudanese refugees to turn to because of its colonial history and because English is one of the two national languages. In return, the UK recognises the terrible situation there and that there are genuine grounds for accepting claims for asylum.

Have any special measures been put in place to allow Sudanese in danger to come safely to the UK? No. A hopeful asylum seeker must first be able to arrive in the UK. If they use the standard visitor’s visa, they must apply three months before travel. They cannot apply as an asylum seeker in advance, even if they have family or other support waiting for them. Instead, they will have to find a route to the UK and on arrival expect an interrogation, to be fingerprinted and treated as a potential criminal. I ask the Minister: why are the two cases treated so differently? Are there deserving and undeserving people fleeing war?

For many years now, immigration has been treated as a criminal activity. I was shocked when I attended a Labour Party National Policy Forum some 25 years ago to find that immigration policy was included in the crime and justice section. No one could tell me why that was the case.

Unfortunately, the Bill reinforces the idea that people coming to this country are a threat and a danger rather than part of the centuries of movement of people around the world described so eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. Many of our predecessors came here in that way. I accept the need for border controls, but safe routes must be part of those controls. Currently, we only pay lip service to helping even the most vulnerable threatened groups and individuals.

In our attempt to keep people out and deny them safe and legal routes to arrive in the UK, we have helped to create the space for criminals to take over immigration. The appeal for safe routes is a recurring theme in many of the briefings provided by NGOs and campaigners, and in fact in the speeches today. The Safe Routes Coalition briefing paper argues:

“When safe routes are well run and well managed, they can be very effective and reduce dangerous journeys, such as channel crossings”.


The Bill can be strengthened to improve the role that safe routes can play in ensuring that the UK offers controlled and sustainable ways to support refugees fleeing war and persecution.

Amnesty International points out that one of the consequences of not having safe routes is that refugees will continue to endure severe hardship and trauma in their search for safety, even when having family in the UK or other strong connections here.

We must look closely at the Bill with a view to including provision for safe routes, not only because this is fair and humane but to stop the need for genuine asylum seekers having to deal with criminal gangs and put their lives in danger to have access to what we surely all believe is a human right.

20:45

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I will be brief. These matters are not new; indeed, it is now 24 years since I co-founded Migration Watch, together with Professor David Coleman of Oxford University.

I listened with great interest to the Minister’s clear summary of the Government’s proposals. Sadly, I have to say to him that they will not work. They will not bring the scale of net migration down to a level that is acceptable to the public. Indeed, the Bill barely scratches the surface of the massive problems that our country now faces as a result of the enormous increase in immigration over recent years. We now know that net migration was approaching 1,000,000 in 2023 and was about 400,000 in 2024. These massive numbers are completely without precedent in our history and will have very serious consequences for public services such as health and education, as well as for demand for housing, as the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, pointed out earlier.

More importantly, these numbers point to the prospect that, in the foreseeable future, the white British will become a minority in their own country. It is already the case that all of our population increase is a result of immigration. Meanwhile, births to the present white majority have been very low for some years. They could increase, of course, but there is currently no sign of that. Birth rates among immigrant communities vary but are usually higher—sometimes much higher—than those of the white British.

That said, the major factor by far is now net migration. Even if it is held at the current figure of 430,000 a year, we can expect the white British majority to become a minority in the UK about 30 years from now. Of course, that number—30—is crucial. It depends on what other numbers you use in your calculation, but this is, in essence, a likely outcome if no serious measures are taken.

The Prime Minister recently had the courage to put his toe into this delicate water when he spoke of the risk of our becoming “an island of strangers”. He was right, and the public feel in their bones that he was right. We now need serious consideration of the policies required to put the brakes on this process. These include having the political courage to set a clear target for net migration, backed up by specific measures; I regret to conclude that the Bill before us today will achieve virtually nothing of the kind now needed.

20:48

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I offer qualified support for the Bill. I do so in the firm belief that, unless we seize this moment to regain credible control over all forms of migration, we shall betray both the national interest and the public trust. Regrettably, my own party failed to properly deal with the issue in government and to honour the pledges made in general elections between 2010 and 2019 to lower immigration—a policy currently supported by over 80% of the public in polls. Hence net migration increased massively in the last three Parliaments. We also did nothing to address the pernicious misuse of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights.

In fairness, the Bill does give Parliament a coherent framework: new powers for intelligence-led interceptions, faster inadmissibility decisions and tougher criminal offences for those who facilitate irregular entry. Yet legislation alone is not enough unless we confront the scale of the problem with unflinching candour. The net migration figure in 2022 was 764,000—that was the peak—but even last year the figure was 431,000. That number of people is equivalent to a city the size of Bristol, yet we built only 218,000 homes in England last year.

Some 81% of those migrants were from outside Europe, presenting major problems for integration and challenges related to shared identity, values, culture, history and way of life. Only 14% came to work, while 149,000 were family dependants. Figures released over the weekend show that over £900 million is claimed by foreign national households—one in six households—each month in universal credit, which is barely two months’ worth of the winter fuel allowance.

Mass uncontrolled migration is bad for the economy. It is astonishing that per capita GDP, at $49,464 in 2023, is less than it was in 2008—17 years ago. No civilised country can absorb such numbers year after year without acute pressure on housing, health care and social cohesion, particularly in the very towns and cities that feel least heard by liberal, metropolitan opinion-formers—who are of course well represented in your Lordships’ House.

At the illegal end of the spectrum, the channel crisis persists. More than 36,000 people arrived by small boat in 2024—up a quarter on 2023—and the death toll tragically reached 77, the worst year on record. On Saturday, as we heard, over 1,200 people crossed the channel—so much for smashing the gangs. Behind every dinghy is an organised-crime business model that mocks our sovereignty and imperils vulnerable lives.

The key question is: will the Bill be a real, effective and significant deterrent for people traffickers? The Government’s pointless and performative repeal of the safety of Rwanda Act—while begging last month for the support of the Albanian Prime Minister, in vain, for a resettlement hub—was entirely unnecessary and predictable, and destroyed such a deterrence. Meanwhile, the fiscal costs mount inexorably. Hotel accommodation for failed asylum seekers and those in the ever-lengthening backlog now drains £8 million every single day—money that could have trained 260 nurses or built three primary schools each week. Labour promised to reduce the number of asylum seeker hotels, but they have increased in number since July 2024.

That said, the Government deserve some credit for establishing the Border Security Command and their efforts to develop renewed bilateral returns agreements. But the command must be given teeth: it needs real-time data-sharing across MI5, the National Crime Agency and Border Force, and an unflinching mandate to disrupt the smugglers’ logistics upstream, not merely a mop up on our southern beaches.

Crucially, the Bill must address legal migration. Skilled worker and student routes, laudable in their intent, have become porous. Employers in the care sector are now permitted to import labour at a minimum salary that undercuts our own workforce, while overseas students—commended for their tuition fees—import 150,000 dependants a year. This is not an immigration system; it is an open invitation. Even the Defence Secretary said this week that the Government have lost control of our borders.

We need to insert a statutory annual cap on gross immigration, set by an affirmative resolution of both Houses, for work and study visas allocated by auction, to ensure that they are allocated to the areas that need them most. We need a new system of sureties for visa holders that ensures a financial penalty if they do not leave the country when their visas expire. We should require the Migration Advisory Committee to publish full displacement and wage-suppression effects, not just labour-market shortages. We need to disapply Section 3 of the Human Rights Act and Article 8 of the ECHR where they would thwart the deportation of serious criminals or those who have entered clandestinely.

The Times editorial was quite right on Saturday to excoriate the Attorney-General’s ill-judged and intemperate comments on those questioning the workings of the ECHR and to point out that many European countries are seeking sincerely to reform the convention to eject illegal immigrants and strengthen the asylum rules. I wonder why, if the Minister will answer the question, the UK has declined to support such an effort—for what reason? These measures are not draconian. They are proportionate, democratic and entirely consistent with our obligations under the 1951 refugee convention, properly interpreted, notwithstanding the fetishisation of international law by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and other noble Lords.

This is a necessary start, but without the amendments I have referenced it will be neither sufficient nor credible. We have a brief window—perhaps the last in a generation—to restore a balanced immigration policy that is fair, lawful and, above all, trusted by the British people. In conclusion, I commend in principle the Bill, but give notice that I and other noble Lords will table amendments to deliver the effective border control and the sustainable legal migration regime that this country both expects and deserves.

20:55

[Lord Sahota (Lab)]

My Lords, I wholeheartedly agree with the Government’s aim and the purpose of the Bill, which is primarily to stop people crossing the channel from France in dangerous boats. Since this route was exploited by the criminal gangs a few years ago, almost 100 men, women and children have tragically lost their lives attempting to cross the English Channel. In the Mediterranean Sea, thousands have perished over the years trying to reach Europe. These organised criminal gangs, who profit from the desperation of vulnerable people, must be stopped by whatever means necessary.

This is one of the most tragic aspects of our time: people fleeing poor countries, seeking a better life for their families, and escaping authoritarian and corrupt regimes. I speak as the son of an immigrant who, in the 1940s, left his country and moved from place to place before finally settling in the UK, in 1957. I know first hand the feelings of these refugees—I cannot help but feel empathy for them.

This refugee crisis is not new. Throughout history, thousands have fled their own country to escape prosecution and mistreatment. It saddens me to say that some politicians in Europe have used the misfortune and desperation of these refugees to advance their own political careers. They have stirred up hatred and xenophobia to win votes, rather than showing understanding and compassion. They should be ashamed of themselves. They have used these unfortunate people as a political football, instead of treating them with dignity and humanity.

However, as I have often said in your Lordships’ House, the UK remains one of the most tolerant, inclusive and welcoming countries in the world. I am proud that my father settled here and that his great-grandchildren are now part of Great British society.

Returning to the substantive issue of this debate, while I support the core intent of the Bill, we must be mindful of unintended consequences. As noble Lords know, I am not a solicitor—I usually leave such matters to the great legal minds in your Lordships’ House. However, here are some of my observations as a layman and long-standing supporter of Amnesty International and a staunch believer in the European Convention on Human Rights. I always place great value on the human rights and well-being of the underdog. I therefore ask the Minister to clarify some of these points.

One of my concerns is that some of the new offences in the Bill could inadvertently criminalise genuine asylum seekers and deter victims of modern slavery from coming forward. Does the Bill comply with the UK’s international obligation under the 1951 refugee convention regarding the rights of the individual seeking asylum?

Secondly, what consideration has been given to expanding safe and legal routes for genuine asylum seekers as an alternative or complementary approach to the enforcement measures in the Bill? Thirdly, what provisions are there to ensure that genuine victims of modern slavery are not inadvertently disqualified from protection or deterred from engaging with authority due to the new immigration offences or powers? Fourthly, does the Bill ensure robust judicial oversight of detention decisions, and does it prevent the disproportionate detention of the individual seeking asylum?

Finally, can the Minister assure me that the sharing of customs information by HMRC and the sharing of trailer registration information from the DVLA to catch organised immigration criminals will not result in a snoopers’ charter affecting the wider public?

While we all want to stop the ruthless smuggler gangs and save lives, we must also uphold our proud tradition of compassion and human rights. A just and human approach alongside firm border security is the only way forward.

21:01

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Harper, on an entertaining maiden speech—although, like my noble friend Lady Brinton, I stand fully ready to vote to abolish myself.

I was as disturbed as many others were by the Prime Minister’s warning that without strong migration rules,

“we risk becoming an island of strangers”.

Of course we need a well-managed asylum and immigration system. But not only is that kind of inflammatory language alarming and unhelpful; neither recent political statements nor any measures in the Bill do anything to promote the integration that would seek to make newcomers well-settled residents and contributing citizens. I much appreciated the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi.

Indeed, much alarm has been created by the heralding of tougher requirements for obtaining both settlement and citizenship, as the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, described. I will never understand why, having allowed people to legally reside, any Government think it useful to make it harder for them to convert that into permanent settlement and then citizenship, which anchors their belonging here.

I would love to say more about other parts of the Bill, but I want to concentrate on European aspects, and my noble friends are well covering other topics.

The common understanding which resulted from the UK-EU summit two weeks ago pledged to reinforce co-operation on law enforcement, including through Europol, on analysis of threats, and on exchange of information and operational action.

Although we cannot yet go back to the golden era of British pre-eminence in Europol, when one of our nationals held the directorship of that agency for a decade, we can encourage maximum exploitation of these opportunities, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, about seeking access to SIS II. My Benches will table some amendments on Europol, such as equipping the National Crime Agency and police forces to participate in Europol’s anti-trafficking operations, establishing joint taskforces, and requiring the border commander to meet the director of Europol.

I want mainly to talk about Clause 42, on EU citizens, and I welcome the intention to clear up some of the muddle of the past caused by the way in which the EU settlement scheme was devised and implemented. But I fear that further confusion may lie ahead—even another Windrush—due to the Government’s reluctance to jettison the whole of the baggage of the past.

The problem comes because Clause 42 holds back from declaring that everyone given EU settled status actually comes within the citizens’ rights provisions of the UK-EU withdrawal agreement and the EEA and Swiss equivalents, such as the ability to rely on the direct effect of those rights. It says only that all those granted the right to stay under the UK’s EU settlement scheme will be treated as if they had such rights.

The UK’s EU settlement scheme was in one sense generous, in that it swept up EU citizens simply because they had been living in the UK for the requisite time. But in doing so, successive UK Governments acted on a presumption—although this is contested—that some did not have rights under the withdrawal agreements because they had not been, in the jargon, “exercising their treaty rights”, which broadly involved being a worker rather than a non-employed person.

No actual test was applied, even though the withdrawal agreement allowed that, so EU citizens were never told their legal status. As the Independent Monitoring Authority, the watchdog for the rights of EU citizens in the UK, described it in initially welcoming Clause 42:

“There are people who have status under the EUSS who may not be entitled to rights under the Agreements. This is a complex area”—


you are telling me—

“but there is a lack of clarity as to who has rights under the Agreements and who does not … The concern is that there could be potential instances where it would matter whether a citizen with EUSS status does have rights under the Agreements or not. In these situations, citizens who are within the true cohort”—

I think your Lordships gather what that means—

“might need to re-prove they were residing in the UK in accordance with EU free movement rules at the end of 2020. As time goes by it may become more and more difficult for citizens to find the relevant evidence, such as payslips, to prove they met the free movement rules at the end of 2020. We do not know what implications this could have in the future for these citizens or future generations of citizens.”

Are your Lordships getting echoes of another scenario?

I imagine that the IMA thought that Clause 42 would wash away the relevance of this distinction and the possible need to go back and establish rights from years ago, but the absence of legal clarity identified by the IMA remains. Despite good intentions, past gremlins could pop up in future and catch people out precisely because the legal position has been left as unclear as it was in 2020.

That is no doubt why the Independent Monitoring Authority now seems to have had a bit of a rethink, commenting 10 days’ ago in regard to the Immigration White Paper that

“the vast majority of the proposals that the government is consulting on should not affect the majority of citizens with EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) status who have rights under the Agreements.”

Quite a few caveats there.

I have to finish, but as Sir Humphrey might have put it, it is not only unwise but brave, Minister, to risk recreating the Windrush miscarriage of justice. I suggest that the Government should take the wiser course, even if it goes against every instinct of the Home Office, and junk past practices and start with a clean sheet. Hence, my Benches will be tabling amendments, which I hope might be signed by others, to try to get the Government to do just that.

21:08

[Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Harper, on his maiden speech. I thought he was not going to be in his place, so, in his absence, I was going to risk his reputation by saying that when he was Transport Minister, I think the unions always had a good-faith relationship with him.

I welcome the repeal of the scheme that saw £700 million of taxpayers’ money squandered on sending four volunteers back to Rwanda. We should also commend the Government’s determination to crack down on organised crime which trades in human desperation. Those gangsters are not the only ones who have raked it in. The likes of Serco have also profited hugely from past failures to process asylum claims quickly and effectively, so I am pleased to see this Government tackling the backlog, which not only racked up hotel bills but left traumatised refugees in limbo, barred from work and unable to contribute to society. Labour’s approach must be clear: we punish the villains, not the victims. We need a system that is not only firm but fair and humane too.

This Bill focuses primarily on people who come across the channel in small boats. However, as we have heard, that is a small part of the immigration picture. In the second half of the 20th century, Irish, Caribbean and Asian immigrants helped to build our NHS and transport system, often facing racism and discrimination for their trouble. This century, we face the challenge of an ageing population and falling birth rate; unfilled vacancies, not least in health and social care and in construction; and universities, which critically rely on international students’ fees.

We do need to tackle the root causes of people’s concerns about migration. There are radical right forces, well organised and resourced, which seek to scapegoat migrants for all of Britain’s ills. However, migrants did not slash funding for skills training, schools, hospitals and youth services. They did not sell off our utilities and abandon whole towns to rot. They did not neglect building council houses in favour of luxury flats or jack up private rents. The blame lies elsewhere and the remedy, including urgent investment in our public infrastructure, is clear.

Alongside this Bill, the Government need a clear strategy to ensure that we are welcoming to newcomers and that we are good neighbours to each other. Let us remember that, before funding was cut, free classes in English for speakers of other languages helped to build community cohesion and friendships.

I want to raise three specific issues. The first is modern slavery. The Bill repeals many of the most harmful provisions contained in the Illegal Migration Act 2023 but retains provisions—notably Section 29—which would disqualify modern slavery victims from support, safety and protection because of detention or convictions which had resulted from their exploitation. This could put the UK in conflict with its duties under the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings and put vulnerable people at risk of re-trafficking. As well as repealing those provisions, will the Minister consider granting modern slavery victims who are in the national referral scheme the dignity of a right to work?

Secondly, the Bill makes no mention of safe routes for asylum seekers, yet people risk only their lives taking dangerous journeys to reach sanctuary and loved ones, when safe routes are not available. Also, the current family reunion rules are complex and, for many unaccompanied children, almost impossible to access. To break the people smugglers’ business model, will the Minister consider, as we heard from my noble friend Lady Bryan, building on the success of the humanitarian scheme for Ukraine to create more safe routes?

Thirdly, regarding workers, those who genuinely care about stopping those employers who abuse migrant labour to drive down wages should back the Employment Rights Bill. It must include more fair pay agreements, so that everyone, wherever they were born, gets a fair rate for the job. In the wake of extreme exploitation scandals, including in social care, domestic service, food production and the fishing industry, can the Minister ensure that there is a proper risk assessment of employer exploitation before sponsorship licences are issued? Can he also ensure that, as in Australia, workers on visas have the right to report bad employers without fearing the risk of destitution or deportation as a result?

21:14

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, as we have heard already today, there are serious concerns in the country about the security of our borders. Of course, this is motivated by keeping ourselves safe, but it is also motivated by wanting to make sure that those who deserve to claim asylum and are refugees who want to travel here are able to use a fair system, that they have a good reception when they arrive and that we are able to plan for a larger population. I am afraid that, at the moment, I am not at all clear that we are managing migration in such a way that that we are able to plan for it in any great way. I will give a couple of examples of where this really matters.

I get increasingly frustrated in this place. Almost every day, we hear of a Government, this one or the previous, being blamed for things. That is the nature of politics but, just last week, we heard accusations that it was someone’s fault that nine more reservoirs are needed, and we have regular complaints about lack of housing and lack of electricity. There are many other things that we do not seem able to cope with.

I suspect that one reason is that our population has grown so quickly. When I took over the Met in 2011, the population of London was about 7.4 million; by the time I left, it was 8.4 million and, today, it is about 9 million. A significant number of the people who have come to the UK have ended up in our major economic centres, such as London. This is a very significant shift. Some of the symptoms of that growth were that, in places such as Newham, around 50,000 people were living in what are called “beds in sheds”. These places were not designed to hold people—they were garages that had things added on. When people are living in such conditions, you are just waiting for epidemics or other things to happen. I am afraid that, unless we plan well to make sure that all the facilities are there, everyone suffers. Probably those who suffer most are the migrants who arrive but who we did not anticipate in the way that we should have.

There are two major categories of migration in this country. The first is legal migration, which is allowing those who want to enter our country for economic reasons and asylum seekers or refugees who need our help. At some point, the previous Government got things a little wrong with legal migration because, by some of the measures that they took, legal migration went out of control and up to around 800,000. The noble Lord, Lord Green, mentioned at the time that some of the levers—it is not easy to predict how people will react to them—were probably set at the wrong level. The previous Government changed those levels, as mentioned earlier. This Government are now using those levers to make sure that legal migration is more under control.

This Bill, however, is about illegal migration and improving how we can stop it. I think it has some good ideas, but I am honestly not convinced that it is comprehensive, forensic or ruthless enough to deal with all the issues that we face now and will face in the coming years. I have four tests for this Bill to see whether it will improve the situation in which around 1,000 people a day have been seen to cross the channel to land on our south coast.

My first test is whether the Bill will deter people who have no right to be here from trying to get here. We have said that we do not want them to cross the border. At the moment, there are thousands of people each year who broadly say, “We do not respect your rules but are confident that, having crossed the border, we will not be removed”. I do not see any great change in this Bill that will affect their motivation.

My second test is what happens to people who have arrived here and been found to have no claim to remain, particularly where they have a criminal record. I have no confidence that those whom we wish to remove will be removed, even where they have a criminal record. Often in this country, we do not know the backgrounds of the people who are here, because we do not know their identity. Consequently, we are not very familiar with some of the things that they have done or been involved in, in the past.

My third test is whether the Bill will deter and detect those who commit organised crime and arrange for people to bypass the rules for profit. I see very little in the Bill that shows me that the Government will ruthlessly and massively go after the assets of the criminals. If we can take the profit from the business, we can exert some control. There are some incremental steps in the Bill, but it does not convince me that we will see more than marginal improvements in the seizure of criminals’ assets.

My fourth test is whether there is anything in the Bill that will allow the courts to distinguish better between valid and invalid claims for asylum. In particular, how will they either change the European Convention on Human Rights or its interpretation, which presently seems to give precedence to the failed asylum seeker or the convicted criminal against the rights of people who are properly using the legal system and the victims of crime?

In closing, I highlight a particular concern I have about the Bill. It has been mentioned already by the noble Lords, Lord Swire and Lord Browne. The Border Security Commander is, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said, a misnomer. The Border Security Command has no people to command, and the organisations that do have people to command are not commanded by it. At best, it tries to co-ordinate those who have a duty to manage our borders, which includes the border agency, the immigration service, the National Crime Agency, security services and local police forces. Each of those organisations is accountable for its own actions. The commander cannot order them to take any particular action. I am not persuaded that the commander having a board, as proposed by the Bill, will make any difference to that.

The Government found their leadership voice today on defence. They made an excellent announcement about our future defence and sent a clear message to our enemies. Does this Bill send the same clear message to the organisers of illegal migration? I am not convinced that it does. It needs to speak clearly about the profit they are making and the fact that if they continue there will be a serious penalty. At least two or three noble Lords have mentioned that if the Government do not do that, people like Reform benefit, which does not benefit many people at all. Unless we get some better answers to some of the things that I and others have identified, that is the way it will go.

21:21

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. Listening to the different views makes me think of saying, “Here we go again”. I asked the Library how many Bills there have been since I came into the other place in 1989 that contain the words “immigration”, “asylum” or “migration”. I remember a number of those debates. I was astonished to find that there have been 14 Bills since 1989 called things such as the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill and the Immigration Asylum and Nationality Bill.

Each Government, including the Coalition Government, brought in different Bills. They all had the same words. I looked at some of the Home Secretaries’ Second Reading introductions to the Bills, and they all talked about how this was going to transform things, improve things, strengthen the borders and so on. Really, of course, if we are honest, none of them achieved what was promised.

The Minister, who knows I have huge respect for him, made a much franker opening by saying that, hopefully, some of the things in the Bill can make a difference. I welcome some of the measures, but we must face up to the fact that the world is changing. People keep telling me that it is, so why do we not genuinely look at changing the refugee convention and work out the bits of it we can work with and the bits we cannot?

We should also genuinely look at the European Court of Human Rights. Time has moved on, and things have changed. The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, has already mentioned this, but I was very disappointed when our Attorney-General, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, accused anyone who said that we should talk about the European Court of Human Rights of working under some kind of Nazi ideology. I know he has apologised, but it was a very grave mistake.

We have to face up to the reality that nothing will change fundamentally until we have a look at those two ideas. We have seen over the years that United Kingdom judges—I know there are a lot of lawyers in this place, and they get upset when you criticise anyone in the legal profession—have adopted ever more expansive definitions of ECHR articles in immigration tribunals, including allowing dangerous criminals to stay here, giving all sorts of reasons why they should stay and ridiculous reasons why people should not be deported. There are thousands of examples of the definitions of the articles—not just Article 8 but Article 3—being stretched and stretched over the years beyond any definition of common sense, and certainly beyond anything intended by the people who originally framed them.

Back in November 2021, shortly after I came into this place, I was lucky enough to have a debate on migration. It was, sadly, two days after 27 people were lost crossing the Channel—one of the biggest number of deaths that had happened. As I mentioned then, one noble Lord said to me before that debate, “I really don’t think we should be having this debate, because it’s going to be divisive”.

That is our problem. We have not been prepared to be honest, to face up to and talk about what people out there are talking about when they see pictures, as they saw over the weekend, of that very large number of predominantly young men. I went down to Dover during the previous Government with a group to see what was happening there. When you see all those young men coming off the boat, obviously relieved and pleased to be there and to be safe, and you realise that they are all 18 to 24 year-olds—yes, there might be one woman on the boat, or there might be a couple of babies that the criminal smugglers are very keen to put on board—the reality is that they cannot all be asylum seekers.

I know the figures that have been given. Supposedly 76% of the people who come have been given asylum. I have a number of questions for the Minister on this. Can he tell me how many extra people have been taken on to interview asylum seekers? Can he tell me what the training is and how long it takes before they are able to start meeting asylum seekers and assessing whether they are genuine? Some members of the public might think this is happening because we want to speed up the process and get the numbers down, but is there some kind of unwritten convention that it is much easier to tick the box and let the person stay? What happens to all the people who are turned down, who have thrown away their documents so we have no idea where to deport them back to? What has happened to the thousands—I am sure it is thousands—who have come in the past few years and literally just disappeared? Where are they all? Have we got figures on them? Those are things we need to know if we are going to get to the bottom of all of this.

Also, we have a very open border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Jim Allister, the TUV Member of Parliament for North Antrim, asked a Question for Written Answer at the end of April:

“To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what procedures are in place to check the movement of people over the Northern Ireland-Republic land border to identify illegal immigrants with no right to access the Common Travel Area”.


The answer was very clear:

“no immigration checks are undertaken on the Northern Ireland-Republic land border”.

Yet at the same time the Republic of Ireland is doing checks the other way at the border, even though it is the country that said that there should be no border there.

We have to be much more realistic, and much more honest. We cannot continue like this. It is unsustainable for any country to have so many people coming in who are not necessarily anti-British—of course they want to come to this country because the pull factor is huge—but we have no idea what their ideologies are. We have no idea whether they are going to get involved and genuinely become British citizens sharing some of our values. It is a drain on our public services, and most of all, it is shattering our cultural community feeling of togetherness. We need to accept that we have to do something. We will not smash the gangs unless we stop the boats. If we stop the boats, we stop the gangs.

21:28

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I add my compliments to my noble friend Lord Harper on his characteristically deft maiden speech. With his great political experience, he will always command a hearing in this Chamber, although perhaps a few people will hope fervently that, as a former Chief Whip, he does not write his memoirs. However, we shall see about that.

In view of the lateness of the hour, I simply want to confine myself to one particular point, which is that we will not stop illegal immigration across the channel until we have a significant and strong deterrent. That is the fundamental fact of the matter, and that, of course, was the basis of the previous Government’s policy. That policy, which the current Government have now abandoned, was based on the experience of Australia. I remind the House that in 2001, a large number of people began to come across from Indonesia to the Northern Territory of Australia and the then Government, the Liberal-National Party coalition, enacted a series of legislative proposals that built up a system whereby people coming illegally into the north of Australia were detained and flown out to Nauru and the Solomon Islands. As a result of that, when it was finally in place, the boats stopped. Within two months, no more boats came from Indonesia or anywhere else.

In 2008, the Labor Government came in and immediately abolished that system. Immediately the boats came back, and within 18 months, 50,000 people were coming across the Timor Sea to northern Australia. The then Labor Government realised that they had made a mistake and hastily tried to reintroduce the Liberal-National proposals, but unfortunately they were too late and lost the general election. In 2013 the Liberal-National Government brought back the proposals in the form of the sovereign borders arrangements, and then the boats stopped again.

Sensibly, the Australian Labor Party then accepted the proposals and a bipartisan approach emerged. Not only that, but the bipartisan approach that was then adopted throughout Australia led to them dealing with not only illegal immigration but legal immigration, on a very understandable basis: there was a cap for each particular element of the legal elements, whether it was students, skilled workers, family people or asylum seekers, and a total. All that is discussed in parliament in an annual debate and is now bipartisan policy, and the Labor Government who accepted this have been re-elected to continue with this eminently sensible policy, which is, frankly, the sort of policy that we can only dream of in this country, and that was based on a bipartisan approach.

Of course, there are differences between the Australian situation and the UK’s: the Timor Sea is not exactly like the Channel Tunnel, the scrutiny that we get from the media is probably much heavier in this country than they have in Australia and the Australians do not have a European Commission of Human Rights to obey. But the fact is that, although there are differences, there are clear lessons from the Australian experience. First, deterrence is essential, as Martin Hewitt, the new Border Security Commander, recognised. The Times said:

“Martin Hewitt, who was named on Monday as Starmer’s border security commander to lead efforts to tackle the small boats crisis, is understood … to have advised that deterrence also needs to form part of the government’s strategy”.


This echoed an internal National Crime Agency memo that

“concluded that efforts to stop migrants crossing the Channel would fail without a deterrent such as … Rwanda”.

That is the first point: deterrence is essential.

The second point is that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, has just been saying, we need to update human rights law. As even the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, has said, events move on; law should not be set in concrete and we need to look at it again. Nine European Union countries have already demanded that exactly that be done. Of course that will take time—there are 46 signatories to the ECHR—but in the meantime we need to separate out and disapply the elements relating to asylum and illegal immigration of this kind, with the hope that the whole thing can be resolved over time. That is the second point.

The third point is that we should also strive for some element of bipartisanship. It has been achieved successfully in Australia. On our own continent, Europe, Denmark has a bipartisan policy. In Australia the bipartisanship has been led by a centre-right party and in Denmark by a centre-left party. Surely the UK can do as well as those two countries. If not, why not?

21:34

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, immigration is constantly presented as a negative—something to be scared of and to be feared. The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill tries to address these fears, dealing primarily with illegal immigration, which we unanimously want to stop.

After all, 150,000 people on small boats came to the UK between 2018 and 2024, and 99% of them claimed asylum. Small boats have been the predominant recorded entry method since 2020. Some 86% of illegal irregular arrivals are from small boats. The most recent arrivals bring the annual total to almost 15,000, which is up 42% on this time last year and up 95% from 2023. Of course, we know of the more than 1,100 who arrived on Saturday.

The channel crossing crisis has placed an enormous burden on our asylum system. The National Audit Office says that it is going to cost over £15 billion over 10 years. I am a trustee of Policy Exchange, which reported that the annual cost of the small boats crisis was in the region of £3.6 billion. This is costing us; there is no question about it.

The noble Lord, Lord Sahota, spoke about the people smugglers and the traffickers who cause untold misery. Some 138 people have sadly died attempting to cross the channel. Of course, there are other methods of transport, such as container lorries; let us not forget the sad incident of the 39 Vietnamese nationals who died in a lorry in Essex.

There is the organised immigration crime—OIC—business model. Criminal groups are increasingly using sophisticated methods to smuggle migrants across the border with fraudulent documents. They are using social media. It is appalling. Surely the good news is that resetting our relationship with the European Union, particularly on security, will enable us to work closer and prevent these awful criminals.

The noble Lord, Lord Green, pointed out that the net migration figure went from 1 million to 430,000 last year. Let us put this into context: illegal immigration is around 10% of this figure and 90% of the immigration to this country is legal immigration. He then spoke about birth rates. Let us get real; I do not know what the noble Lord is talking about. Our birth rate in this country is 1.44. We need a birth rate of over 2.0 to actually maintain our population at the moment, which is nearly 70 million.

The net migration figure was unusually high in the year ending June 2024, which was driven by two reasons. First, there was the demand for workers in the health and care sector. Secondly, there was the increase in international student numbers. We keep including international students in net migration figures. We should remove them. Would the Minister agree?

As a former president of the CBI and currently as chair of the International Chamber of Commerce in the UK, I know that there are labour shortages in just about every sector of our economy. When it comes to resetting our relationship with the European Union, I am delighted that the Erasmus scheme has come back to give so many opportunities to our young students to be able to travel abroad.

What about the scheme for young people moving for three years between the EU and the UK? Could we have some clarification on that and on the post-graduation work visa, which I worked very hard to institute in this country? It is two years post-graduation for international students and three years for PhD students. There is talk that this will come down to 18 months. This does not make sense. Could the Minister clarify this because the Migration Advisory Committee last year reported that it is working very well as intended?

The international student figure has now reduced from 680,000 to 450,000. The reasons for this are immigration policies, the expense of studying over here and the cost of visas. The value of international students is £42 billion to our economy. Far more important is the soft power that international students bring to this country; 25% of world leaders today have been educated in the United Kingdom.

There are these negative perceptions. I worked very hard on the UK-India free trade agreement, which we have just agreed. It took over three years. Yet there was this whole focus on the national insurance waiver for three years, which goes both ways between the UK and India. This is only fair, and it is to do with workers who come here on the points-based system and mostly the transfer of workers between companies.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in his excellent speech, said that everyone should have an identity card. Why do we not have an identity card system in this country? India has the Aadhaar cards for over 1 billion people, giving financial inclusion, digital inclusion and security. We have only 70 million people. We have a model; India has offered us that model. We have no exit checks at our borders. Every other country in the world has exit checks at the borders. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, spoke about integration. I am all for integration—not assimilation, but integration. He spoke about international students as well.

To conclude, the bad immigration which this Bill is trying to address is bad—full stop. But this country has always had a reputation for fairness and justice, and welcomes genuine refugees and asylum seekers. It is the good immigration that has made Great Britain great. Without the 18% of ethnic minorities in the UK, this country would not still be the sixth largest economy in the world.

I came to this country as a 19 year-old international student from India, as a Tata scholar, a Mahindra scholar and a Sethna scholar. I have had the opportunity to live the British dream. The Indian diaspora in this country is 2 million strong, out of 70 million. It is the largest ethnic-minority community and, I say with pride, the most successful one in this country, reaching the top in every field, from business to academia to politics. So let us not fear immigration; let us celebrate the good immigration that this country has always benefited from and that we should be proud of and grateful for.

21:40

[Lord McInnes of Kilwinning (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Harper on such an accomplished maiden speech. I look forward to future contributions in this debate and other debates in the House.

It seems a lot longer than two years ago that I spoke in the Second Reading debate on the previous Government’s Rwanda Bill. In that contribution, I tried to make a case—perhaps unconvincingly—that in terms of the social contract with the British people on immigration, we, the political establishment, were in the last chance saloon. I tried to make the point that the inflows of illegal migration, and indeed the explosion of legal migration, meant that it was becoming impossible for any UK Government to create, with any significant public support, more routes for the very people who were desperately seeking refuge. I said all this with a heavy heart. I am afraid that the social contract between government and people on immigration has only deteriorated over the past two years.

I am sad to say that it seems difficult to imagine a Government commanding public support for a Syrian, Afghan, Hong Kong or indeed Ukraine resettlement scheme at this point in time. This is not a party-political point; I fully acknowledge that much of the collapse of public confidence in the immigration system came on this side’s watch. I therefore looked forward to a new Government with a fresh mandate carrying on a radical programme to ensure that we as a country could rebuild the trust and confidence required to operate a properly regulated and controlled border—and, importantly for me, to once again give the public confidence to support future resettlement schemes that are currently politically impossible for government to introduce.

There are elements in this Bill that I of course support: the creation of new offences, longer sentences for breaking immigration law and incorporating all sex offenders within Article 33(2) of the refugee convention, on refoulement. I also fully support the international efforts that the Government have made in addressing the root causes of illegal immigration, most especially the small boats. However, I ask the Minister: do the Government really think that the measures contained within the Bill will act as a deterrent for what is a hugely lucrative industry, in the form of people smuggling, when the prospective victims of people smuggling can see waves of new arrivals every week? Do they really think that the measures contained in the Bill help to build public trust in the current state of our border controls?

I was a reluctant supporter of the Rwanda scheme, but I understood that it was bold and radical enough to act as a deterrent and, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Horam, similar schemes had had success in Australia and Denmark. The Government have proudly abandoned the scheme in the Bill, but, at the same time, No. 10 Downing Street continues to brief out attempts to find a partner for offshore processing. The writing is on the wall. The Government will get into a situation where a scheme very like the Rwanda scheme will need to be applied. However, we will first go through two years of angst-ridden incremental steps that achieve very little and further build public exasperation. I understand this because that is exactly what the Conservatives did over the last few years. Only in the last years of the previous Government were we able to take the steps that halved legal migration and achieve parliamentary approval for the Rwanda scheme, which would have acted as a deterrent for illegal migration.

Getting control of our borders is not for me, I assure your Lordships, some nativist, nostalgic look to the past. Failure to act and rebuild public confidence by drastically reducing illegal migration only harms one group in the end—the very refugees who would be granted asylum through resettlement schemes that could command public and therefore political support. With every day that passes without real action, the ability of this country to help the most desperate recedes.

21:45

[Baroness May of Maidenhead (Con)]

I join others in congratulating my noble friend Lord Harper on his entertaining and eloquent maiden speech.

In his opening speech, the Minister said that one aim of this Bill was to provide a properly functioning immigration system. To do that, it is necessary to ensure that there is no abuse of the system. One way of making sure there is no abuse is to ensure that the Government do not operate a rigid points-based system but allow discretion to immigration officers. I have raised that point in this Chamber with the Minister before, and he—inadvertently, I am sure—failed to respond to the issue when I raised it. But I would like the Government to consider this as an important aspect of the immigration system.

The main point that I would like to refer to is one that has been raised by a number of other speakers in this debate—namely, the impact of this legislation on the victims of modern slavery and human trafficking. Despite all the protestations from the then Opposition Benches about the impact on the victims of slavery and trafficking of the Nationality and Borders Act and the Illegal Migration Act when they were passing through Parliament, the Government have retained aspects of those Acts, which will have an impact on the victims of modern slavery and human trafficking. Indeed, they have introduced new measures in this Bill which will make it harder for us to identify those victims and harder for us to provide support for them, and therefore less likely that they will come forward.

Modern slavery and human trafficking is the greatest human rights issue of our time. That alone should make the Government reconsider those elements of this legislation. But more than that, if it is harder for us to identify the victims of modern slavery and human trafficking; if it is more difficult for those victims to come forward because of lack of support; if it is easier for the slave drivers and traffickers to use government legislation as a threat to hold people in exploitation, then it will be harder to smash the gangs—and I thought the Minister said, in his opening speech, that smashing the gangs was one of the aims of this Bill. As regards the impact on the victims of modern slavery and human trafficking, the Government need to think again.

21:48

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I would like to say “More, more” to that. I thank the Minister for his straightforward introduction. I think that he would be worried if he had received a unanimous welcome for the Bill today—and we have heard some rather different views. To pick up the phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Harper, from his maiden speech, which I really enjoyed, we on these Benches are destined not to agree. I congratulate him on his speech.

At this time of night, I do not want to spend time on matters on which, over quite some years, we have spent a lot of time and emotion opposing. As my noble friends made clear, we welcome what we can—and there is a good deal to welcome. The repeals take up so little space in the Bill that it might be easy to spend too little time on them, but we will not shy away from probing the principled detail and workability of a number of provisions. There are several where we are some way from sharing the Government’s approach.

The Bill includes policies on which, as others have said, many organisations in the sector are providing very useful comments: we thank them. We will seek to persuade the Government of a number of policies and actions for which we have argued over some years—sometimes alongside the Labour Party, though we will try to be tactful about that—including allowing asylum seekers whose claim is not determined to work, retrieve their dignity and pay their way, in jobs which are much less restricted than those in the shortage occupation list. If applications are dealt with within a reasonable time, this should not be too much of an ask.

Where we can within the Bill’s scope, we will try to head off some of the plans trailed in the immigration White Paper, or introduced by recent rule changes, which are causing so much anxiety and distress. The new criteria for the good-character requirement for citizenship and the doubling, retrospectively, of the period of settlement are high on our list, as are the language and financial requirements—these are, to me, a somewhat skewed way of looking at integration. It is clear that a lot of UK citizens’ family members are affected by what the White Paper heralds, and the more the Minister can clarify the details of the residence requirements tonight, the better.

If public trust in the system is to be regained, respecting immigrants and asylum seekers as individuals, not some anonymous other, must be one way to do it, rather than conflating asylum and immigration. As has been said tonight, we must be clear in our language. I welcome the reflective speeches we have heard tonight that have focused on how we debate these issues. We must ensure too that people who have been, and in some cases still are being, exploited and abused are protected and supported, not punished. That is our responsibility.

The Minister will not be surprised that we will argue for practical mechanisms and safe routes to provide refuge for more people who need refuge because they come from conflict-afflicted areas—Sudan has been mentioned several times—or because of who they are. We know that we cannot provide for everyone, but we must do better. I refer any noble Lord who thinks we have been coy about our policy on safe and legal routes to look at our manifesto at the last election.

Nor will the Minister be surprised that we will again be seeking a more humane approach to family reunion, especially where children are involved. We continue to resist the notion that lone refugee children are a “pull factor”; it is push factors that make them lone refugee children. I have no doubt that we will spend time on children’s protection and needs: my noble friend Lady Brinton and others will see to that.

I turn to the Bill with which we are presented. We welcome the repeals of extreme and cruel legislation, but it does not go far enough. My noble friend mentioned detention. It is disconcerting and worrying that the Government are not dealing with clauses that adversely affect victims of modern slavery and human trafficking. As I say, we need more repeals. We know that positive action and support are needed to make the UK world-leading again. We did not stay here one night till 4.16 am to vote on age assessment not to address now all the concerns that we still have.

For myself, I am underwhelmed by the clauses relating to the Border Security Commander. As the post was established, I think, the day after the general election, and that must in large part have been presentational—a very useful term—what have we been without for the last 10 months? I have to say that I do not care for the notion that responsibility does not sit squarely with the Home Office.

This is perhaps something and nothing compared to what is under the heading “Other border security provision”. Of course, smugglers are to be condemned and responded to as organised criminals, with money, a lot of it, as their objective, and never mind who is damaged on the way, but some of the offences as drafted will criminalise people who must be recognised as victims forced into certain actions. When smugglers’ victims are, by definition, on hand to be forced to steer boats, for instance, how is this a deterrence to the real criminals or indeed to those who are simply seeking refuge?

TPIMs-type conditions which are lacking in safeguards cast people as criminals, and I accept some who will be affected are, but will these become routine? Will they be used routinely on people who are on immigration bail or who actually have limited leave? What about detention with retrospective powers,

“while the Secretary of State considers whether to make a deportation order”

and “always having had effect”?

I know that the Government do not propose to tag students, though it seems to be possible, but—especially in view of what is happening in the US—let us promote the UK’s universities, not send out a message that they, among others, are viewed with suspicion rather than to be welcomed.

Why is Part 3, “Prevention of serious crime”, in this Bill when we have a Crime and Policing Bill coming along? Mind you, I know it is already very chunky. We certainly resist any suggestion that asylum seekers as a group should be categorised as serious criminals or indeed criminals.

I am pleased that my noble friend Lady Ludford—like my noble friend Lord Oates, who cannot be here today—is prepared to take on the brain-scrambling Clause 42.

Over the years, we on these Benches have expressed our discomfort—to put it at its lowest—with civil orders which can morph into criminal penalties, and we will want to be very careful with serious crime prevention orders.

I have mentioned Clause 41. Powers of the Secretary of State to make regulations or use discretion are the bread and butter of this House’s work. Before anyone interrupts me, I am aware of the report of the DPRR Committee’s report.

Who could oppose cracking down further on bad immigration advisers? However, what would help more would be more legal aid and not having IAA fees at a level which may have an adverse effect on the numbers of skilled advisers; there is so much unmet need now.

Clauses about data always need our care. I am interested in the point made by one organisation in the sector that the UK should have safeguards to ensure it is not transferring biometric information in such a way that it may place the subject at risk.

It is not a matter for legislation, but on Saturday I received a plea for help with a long-outstanding application for ILR, with the Home Office writing that that there are “technical reasons” for the delay—this is not the case on which I have been in correspondence with the Minister, including this morning. One gets the feeling that there must be piles of too difficult, non-standard applications left on one side; improving efficiency is not only about numbers, but about the tricky cases too.

We look forward to what the JCHR has to say about the Bill, and maybe the Constitution Committee too.

We will strive to turn this Bill into legislation that is focused not on deterrence—which we do not think is likely to be effective—nor on punishment, but a positive response to one of the big issues of our day. By Committee, I might have thought of some music relevant to it.

21:58

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate today, over the course of this evening. The Bill’s focus, as the Minister stated at the outset, is illegal or irregular migration. I am grateful to him for laying out the rationale and context for the Bill, though I depart from him on much of the substance.

I particularly commend the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Harper. Given his long and distinguished career in the other place, as well as his time in government—as an Immigration Minister at one point—it is perhaps unsurprising that his excellent speech today was both illuminating and incisive. I for one look forward to many more contributions from him in the years ahead.

This debate has made for a stimulating and wide-ranging discussion on one of the most important areas of responsibility for any Government: the control of our borders. That phrase is an interesting one, because it was only at the weekend that we heard a member of the Government admitting that the UK has lost control of our borders. This was a startling admission from the Secretary of State for Defence, no less, on a weekend that saw the highest daily total of arrivals this year—1,195 people on 19 boats—and the fourth highest figure ever recorded.

However, I admire this frankness—we need to be frank. We need unflinching candour, as my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough put it so elegantly. Controlling our borders is fundamental to our national security and to our integrity as a sovereign nation. Despite the decades of peace and globalisation we have all experienced over the last 80 years, it remains the first and foremost duty of any Government. We also need to recognise that controlling our borders is a way in which we define, sustain and protect our national identity, not just our national security.

I mentioned the events of the last weekend, because the situation we are seeing now is dire. Small boat crossings are up 30% on last year, and since this Government were elected last July, the numbers have increased. Almost 37,000 people crossed the channel in small boats in 2024. Of those who arrived that year, more than 23,000 did so after the election.

For all the condemnation we have heard tonight of the Rwanda Act, let us not pretend that the last year under the current Government has been anything other than a resounding failure in terms of illegal crossings. The gangs, self-evidently, have not been smashed.

This situation is untenable, but it is also, tragically, costing lives. The UN estimates that at least 78 migrants died in 2024, making it the deadliest year on record. It says that at least 225 migrants have lost their lives when attempting to cross since 2018. This is an unlawful route of entry into the UK, overseen by gangsters, that is, tragically, taking its toll of human life. That is why, among many other matters, we have to deter people from making this journey. None of this should be controversial.

I am sure that I am joined by noble Lords from across the House when I say that it is incumbent on the Government as a matter of supreme urgency to introduce measures which are courageous, bold and definitive enough to stop this level of illegal migration from happening. With regret, I do not believe the legislative proposals we have before us will achieve this.

Given the scale of the problems we face, I hope the Government will seriously consider the many concerns that have been raised today by those who have called for more stringent measures. My noble friend Lord Davies of Gower outlined many of these issues in his opening speech.

In a moment, I will concentrate on some specific points where we believe there are significant problems with the Bill, but before I do so, I would like to address its context; namely, the provisions which are designed largely to undo the work of the last Government in terms of the Illegal Migration and safety of Rwanda Acts.

It is unsurprising that a new Administration will seek to undo some of the policies of their predecessor of a different political hue—that is democratic politics, after all. But let us be clear about the reality of what this will actually mean. It will mean that the Home Secretary is no longer duty-bound to make arrangements to remove illegal migrants to their home country or a safe country; it will mean that some illegal migrants are allowed to obtain British citizenship; and it will mean that asylum seekers will no longer be treated as over 18 if they refuse to take a scientific age assessment.

Those are just a few of the reasons why we believe the Bill will not succeed. If you were contemplating an illegal crossing into the UK, would a degree of protection from removal, British citizenship, and a bypass of age checks make you more or less likely to attempt the trip as an illegal migrant? More likely, of course.

As my noble friend Lord Goschen said, it is important to ask why people try to come to the UK illegally. The answer to that lies in part in the provisions of the Bill, I contend. In removing these key provisions, the Government propose to replace them with new offences, which are one example, we say, of where technical measures simply will not work in practice. The Bill creates a new offence of selling and handling small boat parts for use in channel crossings. The Bill will also make it illegal to supply life jackets suspected of being for use by people-smuggling gangs and to supply forged ID documents. These are very specific, technical points.

However, simply as a matter of logic, criminalising such activity makes little sense. These supply chains are based in Europe. The boats are coming from France to the UK. The point at which the lifejackets, boats and any forged documents get to the UK is when they appear on the beaches where illegal migrants are landed—at which point, I am afraid, it is far too late. It may be that there is provision in the Bill for such offences to occur outside the UK, but the reality is that, by the time perpetrators are prosecuted, the boats will have arrived. In essence, the Government are proposing to tear up laws that created a direct disincentive to make the journey in the first place and replace them with a list of new offences, which in practice will operate only once migrants are already here.

Other problems with this Bill include the proposal for a new Border Security Commander. Despite the title, if we dig a little below the surface, as my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower said, we find that what the Government are actually proposing is a civil servant acquiring a redesignated role and, if I may add, a somewhat vague remit—and that is before we get to the potential for duplicating the work of the Small Boats Operational Command. This proposal does not appear to add value at present.

The Explanatory Notes for the Bill set out that the Border Security Commander will be responsible for setting the Government’s strategic priorities for border security. Surely that strategic priority is simple and can be stated in one sentence: stopping illegal migration and protecting our borders. The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary do not need a new agency or office to tell them this.

Does the Minister believe that, in addressing this issue, we need to take tougher steps to crack down on organised crime in this area? Would he support amendments that might be tabled in Committee to strengthen the powers of the Border Security Commander so that, when the Bill leaves this place, it proposes a cogent and effective office, able to tackle head on the crisis that we are discussing?

I turn to the importance of a deterrent and its absence from the Bill—a point that many noble Lords have made. We need to prioritise stopping people making the journey in the first place. As my noble friend Lord Lilley said—far more eloquently than I can—the only way we can address this problem is by creating a substantial and meaningful deterrent. If we want illegal migrants to stop coming, we must give them no reason whatever to want to come to the UK; otherwise, they will go to any lengths to circumvent even the strongest legal prohibitions.

The numbers I cited earlier show that people-smuggling gangs are circumventing the law as it stands already—and that is before the Government repeal large swathes of the last Government’s immigration legislation. Surely the Minister cannot be confident that this Bill contains a serious, coherent deterrent to people who are weighing up the decision to cross the channel. The changes proposed to citizenship and staying in the UK simply will not deter people who want to come here illegally. As my noble friend Lord Harper said, the Bill might lead to the removal of the Rwanda Act from the statute book but it contains no deterrent itself. This point was also made by my noble friends Lord Swire, Lord McInnes and Lord Horam, and others.

We have some suggestions for the Minister, which I hope he will consider seriously as we progress to Committee. I have suggested some of these policies already in the Chamber. The first is that we automatically deport anyone who arrives into our country via an illegal, unlawful route. We are a caring and considerate nation. People across this country have opened their homes and their family lives to refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan. There are other successful resettlement schemes. We have safe and legal routes for people to seek asylum in our country, so we should not tolerate people skipping the queue by trying to enter illegally. The British people possess a profound compassion, but they also have a deep sense of fair play. When that kindness and fairness are exploited, we should not tolerate it—especially as it comes at the expense of people who do use legal, recognised routes to seek asylum.

Secondly, we propose that the Human Rights Act be disapplied from all immigration matters. This would prevent foreign nationals from exploiting our courts with tenuous human rights arguments designed to avoid deportation or exploit the asylum system. The Human Rights Act is of course designed to protect and uphold fundamental rights, but this is demonstrably not how it is used in matters of immigration. I speak as someone who, in a past life as a lawyer, has acted for asylum seekers. The Human Rights Act has been used to prevent the deportation of convicted foreign criminals. It is tying the hands of government and preventing the deportation of those who cause harm in our communities.

I note with interest what the current Government have said about the interpretation of Article 8 in immigration cases. There is an acceptance by the Home Secretary herself that the application of Article 8 of the convention raises significant concerns. Those who have little respect for fundamental rights should not be able to hide behind such rights when their actions catch up with them. This is a sensible proposal that will ensure that foreign criminals are no longer able to impose themselves on the communities they harm.

Finally, we on these Benches encourage the Government to adopt a legally binding annual cap on migration, voted on by Parliament. A measure that limits levels of migration requires political courage, as the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, stated. This would ensure that migration levels are determined by the British people through their elected representatives. For decades, the British people have demanded, and politicians have promised, dramatically lower immigration. For decades, successive Governments—and, of course, I freely accept that that includes the previous one—have not delivered. It is now time to deliver what the public want. We propose that the Government should be legally tied to a cap—a promise in law to control immigration in line with what communities up and down the country are telling us is their limit. I anticipate that the Minister will welcome a proposal of a cap. If he and the Government are confident that the measures in the Bill will reduce the numbers of people coming here illegally, making themselves accountable to the British people is surely something they will support.

To conclude, the debate has raised many interesting points. I am sure that we all agree that this is a profoundly serious issue and one that is of fundamental importance to people across the United Kingdom. The simple fact is that we need to stop people coming here illegally, and I do not believe, with respect to the Minister, that the proposals in the Bill will do that. We need a system closed to criminals and which is intolerant of those trying to exploit its structures and free to take the necessary steps to protect our borders and communities. More than anything, we need a forceful, effective deterrent to stop people coming here illegally in the first place.

We intend to push our proposals in Committee to make this a Bill that does deter illegal migrants. I look forward to working with noble Lords across the House as we progress to the first day in Committee. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this important debate.

22:13

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate. We commenced at 6.09 pm, and four hours and four minutes later we are coming to a conclusion. I sense, however, that this has been only an hors d’oeuvre for what will come in Committee as we consider this matter further.

We have had a thoughtful debate, and I echo the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, and my noble friend Lady O’Grady in saying that language and tone are extremely important in how we approach these debates. As the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, mentioned, there are forces who will exploit these matters if we—both Houses of Parliament—do not deal with these issues effectively.

Before I turn to the Bill, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Harper, for his maiden speech. He was right that I shadowed him for a while in the House of Commons when he was the Minister. I did indeed go to Calais in 2014 and tried to put some points to both him and the then Home Secretary. While we had our disagreements, I do not think that we fell out over those issues. We had a civilised relationship, which I hope will continue. He gave a confident maiden speech today, and I particularly welcome his comments about the late Sir Roy Stone, who served in the Whips’ Office for all parties for many years.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, talked about an orchestra. We have had some cohesion in the sense that there are some areas of agreement today: we have agreement that we need to look at the issues of prevention and that we need a deterrent, although we disagreed about what that deterrent should be. We have had some discussion about safe routes, and I will come to that in a moment. We have had agreement on the security command and the need for that co-ordination, and we have had agreement on international obligations being met. I want to assure my noble friend Lord Sahota and other noble Lords who raised this that we will maintain our international agreements and co-operation as currently set out in law. I will talk to each of those points in a moment.

The debate also covered a range of issues to do with the role of students, employment, family reunion, net migration, exit and entry, regulation, integration, pressure on homes, the value of migration and statistics, which the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, mentioned and are important. I say to noble Lords—and that includes the noble Lords, Lord Bilimoria, Lord Jackson, Lord Green, Lord Blunkett, Lord Goodman, Lord Macdonald, Lord Hogan-Howe, Lord McInnes, Lord Kirkhope and Lord Sahota, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Lawlor, Lady Brinton and Lady May—that those issues are at the heart of the immigration White Paper, which does not form part of the Bill but is a good background to the issues that have been raised and will form part of the Government’s ongoing strategy to develop an approach to migration issues. While they are important, I do not want to ignore them, but I do not want to focus on them today because today’s focus is about the question of this legislation and what we do about the predominantly illegal migration—irregular migration—that is taking place.

I ask the noble Lord, Lord Davies, who kicked off this debate, how we have got to where we are today. The issues with hotel accommodation, asylum use and levels of small boat incursion did not happen since 4 July last year; they are long-term systemic issues over which his Government presided. Collectively, we have to look at solutions.

There have been many views on the Bill and its provisions put forward today by Members of this House. The Government are trying to put some measures in place to deal with those key issues. The first of those—and this goes to the heart of a number of points that were made, notably by the noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord Horam, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor—is on the question of deterrence.

We have taken a decision to repeal the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act. That was welcomed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bryan of Partick, Lady Brinton, Lady Lister, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady O’Grady, the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark. But there is a clear difference of opinions on the Rwanda Act between the noble Lords and the current Government, and that is that we need a deterrent. The deterrent is about capturing boats, looking at assets and putting measures in place to disrupt those gangs, but it is not the Rwanda scheme as determined by the previous Government. That already spent £700 million of taxpayers’ money to send back only four people who went voluntarily.

During the period after that Bill became law to when this Government determined that it would be repealed, 84,000 people still crossed the channel. That was not a deterrent for those individuals at that stage. So we need a deterrent, and the deterrent we need is the type of arrests that the noble Lord asked me to look at and which we have made already: arrests among a Syrian organised crime group linked to 750 migrants from the UK and Europe since 4 July; the arrest of a Turkish national suspected of being a supplier of small boats; the conviction of two men from Wales who ran a smuggling gang; the arrest of six men in Belgium; NCA support for German law enforcement operations with 13 arrests across Germany and France; and the NCA establishing, with authorities in Libya and Kurdistan—a region of Iraq—how we actually tackle smuggling at that upstream level. Those are deterrents, and we need a deterrent. I and the Government do not believe that the Rwanda scheme was effective.

The question of what we do in place of that is very important. The Bill establishes Border Security Command. The noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, rightly asked, “What are the key performance indicators on that?” For us, they are a reduction in the number of migrant crossings, an increase in prosecutions and a disruption of the gangs, and we will discuss that as the Bill goes forward. The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, my noble friend Lord McInnes and the noble Lord, Lord Sahota, raised that issue. The commander in place will provide strategic cross-system leadership, is already engaging with nations in the European Union about what we need to do together, and has already worked with the NCA, the Home Secretary and others to establish both the Iraq scheme that we put in place and new co-operations with the imaginatively named Calais group to look at how we can reduce the number of crossings at that level.

There are indicators that need to be put in place, and we will be judged on those indicators and on those manifesto commitments. But our work with the French already has prevented 9,000 crossings this year. Germany, through the work of the Border Security Commander, is looking to change its laws so that it can prosecute people upstream on supply. We have secured the landmark agreement with Iraq and have set up the new border command with £150 million-worth of support. Yes, there need to be indicators, as the noble Viscount mentioned, but I believe that is an important issue that we have undertaken.

Just to help the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, as well as the actions that we have taken to date, we scrapped the “Bibby Stockholm”, which she mentioned; we have taken a range of actions to do with current accommodation; we are committed to reduce the level of asylum hotels; and we are committed to use the resource from the scheme that we have scrapped in Rwanda to speed up the processing of asylum claims in order to determine who has a genuine asylum claim according to our international obligations, who does not, and then to remove them. Part of the importance of the Bill is to put that framework in place.

A number of noble Members raised the question of safe and legal routes, including the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, on the Liberal Democrat Front Bench, the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark and my noble friend Lady Bryan of Partick. The UK has a strong history of providing protection through our safe and legal routes, and we want to continue to welcome refugees and people in need. As Members will know, we already have bespoke routes to sanctuary, such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes, and in relation to Sudan we have already accepted 300 nationals to be resettled through our schemes as of September 2024.

The safe and legal routes are there. Do we need to review them and look at how we meet our international obligations? Yes, we do. Again, I refer to the immigration White Paper before us. On the safe and legal route option—my noble friend Lord Dubs discussed his family reunion option—there are safe and legal routes that we can look at, but I am sure I will discuss with my noble friend, as I have done already, his concerns during upcoming stages, and I will give consideration as to how we can improve understanding, knowledge and action in those areas.

Noble Lords and Baronesses have mentioned the wider work with the EU: my noble friend Lord Dubs mentioned that particularly, as did the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Ludford, and the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Ladyton, Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate and Lord Bilimoria. It is extremely important, and one of the things that the Government will not do is stand back from Europe. We will not revisit the Brexit debate—we cannot do that—but we can look at how we can improve co-operation on key issues. That means law enforcement but also a whole range of things. We have extra support with Europol, and we had the EU-UK summit on 19 May, where a new wide-ranging package of measures that address all elements of the global challenge was discussed.

Again, deterrence is also about understanding the problem; the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, mentioned very clearly how we understand that problem. One of the things we need to do is to work with our European partners—not our European Union partners any more but still our European partners—to assess and examine the challenge of irregular migration upstream. That is one thing that we are trying to do collectively to improve that European work.

Turning to the question from my noble friend Lord Dubs, we have done a lot of work with France on organised international crime, because it is a shared problem in which all nations have a role to play. It is really important that we have, through Border Security Command, operational activity at a local level with the nations that border us. The results of that have seen 600 boats and engines already taken down, 30,000 returns since the election—a 12% increase over the previous period—a 23% increase in enforced returns and an increase in foreign national offender removals. Those are important issues. They are in the Bill, but they are also areas that we need to look at as part of the immigration White Paper as a whole.

Let me turn to modern slavery, because I understand and note the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady May, and others. The sole modern slavery provision in the Bill would allow more foreign national offenders to be considered for disqualification from modern slavery protections on public grounds. The Home Office has committed to working with partners to agree priorities on long-term reform as part of the national referral mechanism. I understand what the noble Baroness said, but I will look at that issue, because I do not want to see watering down of modern slavery provisions. I supported the Bill, now an Act, that she took through as Home Secretary some 10 years ago, and I want to make sure that we deal with that. But the purpose of the modern slavery provision that we are looking at is dealing with foreign national offenders who are involved in modern slavery. I heard what she said today. We will look at that, and there is an opportunity to examine those issues as we progress the Bill.

The noble Lords, Lord McInnes and Lord Swire, mentioned third-country processing. That is not the Rwanda scheme. Examinations are ongoing with partners across Europe. Scoping work has shown that it is a model that could meet our international obligations and reduce the burden of illegal migration on UK shores. We will work closely with international partners to look at the global migration crisis as a whole.

I will end with a couple of other issues that have been mentioned. The EU settlement scheme was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. The clause on EU citizens’ rights is designed to confirm as a matter of UK law what the UK has sought to do in practice since the UK settlement scheme was established. Again, I have heard what she said. I hope that when we look at that in detail, we can take on board those issues and debate them in full, but I hope we can give her some satisfaction on those issues as well. The noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, also raised a number of key points. Again, I will reflect on those, as I hope she knows I will.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark mentioned the detention pilot. I give him an assurance that the department is going to keep under review the feasibility of the alternatives to the detention pilot, taking into account effectiveness and cost-efficiency, as part of our plans to transform the asylum and return system. Again, I will refer to him in due course on those issues. Our international obligations are extremely important. The Bill does not include them, but there is an opportunity within the discussion on the Bill to outline still further what we are doing on those issues.

We have had a wide-ranging debate on migration and immigration issues today. Much of that is outside the scope of this Bill. I understand why it been linked to the Bill, but it is outside its scope. The Bill is designed to focus predominantly on illegal migration. In doing so, we have established Border Security Command, which we are giving the power to track and confiscate mobile phones. We are looking at how to deal with downstream suppliers and doing what we said we would do in our manifesto, which is to disrupt and spoil the gangs that are operating this evil cross-channel trade. That is what the Bill will do, and I defy anyone in this House to say any that of the measures in the Bill to take action against those criminal gangs should not be undertaken.

We will have an honest debate about the deterrence issue and about the repeal of the Rwanda Bill. We believe that we have alternatives to that, but the measures in this Bill are worthy of support. How we look at integration, employment and students, how we encourage family reunion, how we build a society in which people are respected but also integrated and how we value the people who have come to this country over many years and through many generations are issues in the White Paper, which will be debated.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his very comprehensive and helpful summing-up of the debate. He will understand that the current discussions around reforming the ECHR are germane to this Bill and wider immigration issues. There are nine countries doing that. This Government have not availed themselves of the opportunity to take part. If he cannot answer now, will he undertake to write to me, and put a copy of the letter in the Library, explaining why that is the case?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

We are aware that a letter has been circulated by countries, which is perfectly legitimate. They are countries within the European Union; we are outside the European Union now. We will look at the provisions of Article 8 and how we can interpret them but maintaining—very importantly for those Members who have raised these issues—our integral role as a member and supporter of the ECHR. That is a critical part of our international obligations, but it does not mean that we cannot look at interpretations and examine how we implement those regulations in a UK context. We will do that. I will certainly give the noble Lord a fuller reply in a letter, but I hope that reassures him that we will look at those issues.

I will look at Hansard in detail. I have sat through every minute of the debate today and heard every contribution in full. I look forward to the debates we will have on specific amendments and specific clauses. However, I look to this House to give support to the Government’s proposals to tackle criminal gangs who are exploiting people and bringing people to this country in an illegal way, even if those people have legitimate asylum claims. This is being done by criminal gangs for illegal profit. We need international co-operation to tackle the downstream issues and to tackle the gangs at source.

I commend this Bill to the House today in order to continue that progress and to ensure that we have a full debate in Committee on its contents and the suggestions that will undoubtedly come forward from all sides of the House.

Bill read a second time.