The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful for the welcome, in broad terms, from the Liberal Democrat Benches and for the cautious, guarded welcome from His Majesty’s loyal Opposition—who, it must be remembered, had 400 crossings in 2018 and 40,000 in 2023. This is a challenge and a problem for which the previous Government relied on the Rwanda scheme. This delivered £700 million of costs, with further costs of hundreds of millions projected. Precisely four people were returned under the scheme, whom the shadow Home Secretary would not even acknowledge now, because they volunteered to return and were not forced to go accordingly.
In the border security Bill we are considering in this House, I am very pleased to have supported the cancellation and scrapping of the Rwanda scheme and its replacement with positive, constructive, concrete efforts. These include the Border Security Command posts that the Bill brings in and the impact that they are having—we are using the money from the failed Rwanda scheme to support the development of that scheme. There is also the international co-operation visible through the arrangements with France covered in this Statement, and indeed—hot off the press—the new engagement with the German republic to ensure that we co-operate with the German Government on similar issues accordingly.
I say to the noble Lord that the agreement is not on just the transfer of 50 people in this pilot—which is a pilot, as I, and the noble Lord, Lord German, acknowledge—but of 50 people from a date in the very near future, on a return basis, with a proper return to the French authorities. The Opposition asked what the French authorities will do with them. France is an independent country and it will process them itself. I understand that the intention is to do so away from the northern French coast. That will, again, assist in that particular challenge and, I hope, provide the deterrent that the Rwanda scheme evidently did not, given that thousands of people still crossed when it was in germination and operation. It is not just about the 50 people per week we are anticipating—which, even if operated for only one week, would see 46 more people returned than the Rwanda scheme. It also involves establishing a new French barque, Compagnie de Marché, of specialist enforcement officers with stronger public order powers to deal with action on the French beaches; the French authorities agreeing to prevent boat launches before they reach the water; training for additional drone pilots to intercept boat launches; and support for a maritime review instigated by the French.
That is alongside today’s agreement with the Germans, which is worth putting on the record as well. Today, a treaty has been signed with the Germans which increases co-operation against migrant smuggling, strengthens law enforcement and judicial co-operation, and steps up efforts on returns. Germany is introducing a clarification to German legislation on facilitating irregular migration to the UK, which will be brought to cabinet with a view to be adopted by the German parliament before the end of this year. There will be a stronger framework for law enforcement policy and the prosecution of organised criminal gangs. The regional partners of the Calais Group—Belgium, Holland, France and the UK—will develop joint approaches with Germany upstream to deal with these issues.
I put those matters on the record only because not a single one of those things happened when the peak numbers of boat crossings occurred under the previous Government. They did not happen partly because of the euroscepticism of the then Government and partly because the drive to do it was not there and they put all their biscuits in the Rwanda tin, which proved fruitless.
By all means, the noble Lord can be sceptical, critical and quizzical and ask questions. But he will have a record hanging around his neck for a while yet that he will have to defend and which is not improved by his seeming criticism of these actions as being limited actions. These are strong actions from a strong Government.
The noble Lord asked a number of questions. The European Union will make a judgment but we believe we have a legal basis for the agreement. If it is going to be tested by anybody, the French and British authorities are on the same page. The French will deal with the returns accordingly. We will view that pilot in an appropriate way. With the deterrents we have put in place, we will be accountable for the performance on these issues.
After one year in office, the actions of this Government that I have mentioned today are now bearing fruit. We will have to continue to press down on these matters over the next few years, because the legacy we received was one of easy crossings, no action on criminal gangs and allowing the figures to go up, while at the same time—this goes to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord German—not dealing speedily with asylum assessments and removals.
If we are going to talk about the record of the noble Lord’s Government and ours, in the year since the election, 35,052 returns were recorded by this Government. That is a 13% increase on the same period under the previous Government. That includes 9,115 enforced returns, which is an increase of 24%. The total returns since 5 July last year of 5,179 foreign national offenders is an increase of 14%. The figure of 10,191 asylum-related returns is an increase of 28% on the previous year under the previous Government. Those figures are going in the right direction. We are dealing with the issue. There are lots of challenges—I will never ignore that fact—but the push by the Government on all those issues is one that should be welcomed by this House.
The noble Lord, Lord German, raised a number of questions, which I will try to answer as best I can. First, he is absolutely right to say that this undermines the criminal gangs’ model—that is the purpose of it. I welcome his support and thank him for it. Imaginative suggestions from all sides of this House to help undermine the criminal gangs are very much welcome. It is a pilot, which we will monitor. Self-evidently, a pilot is designed to be expanded. In the event of expansion, we will look at both the continuing analysis of the people arriving and being returned to France, and the safe and legal routes from France that will now be open. This limited pilot will be monitored and looked at in due course.
Again, some of the savings from the Rwanda scheme have been put into recruiting nearly 1,000 additional asylum officers to speed up the claims for asylum and to ensure that people move through the system much more quickly. That means that once their asylum claim is approved, they can be accepted as asylum seekers or refugees. If their asylum claim is refused, they can be returned, as we are currently doing.
The noble Lord asked about detention. We operate a policy of ensuring that we have detention because that is important until claims are assessed. I will examine that point in detail and get back to him in due course.
Safe and legal routes are important, as the noble Lord mentioned. Because of the time limit on our discussion, I will leave the other questions and come back to him in writing, but they are important points. I am just conscious that 20 minutes is up, and therefore I want to allow Back-Benchers to have their say.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)
I declare an interest as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but I am speaking in a personal capacity today.
The Minister has given a spirited defence of all the international actions that the Government are taking to try to battle this pernicious trade. Closer to home, in terms of our internal domestic actions, he has been remarkably silent on President Macron’s exhortation to our Government to do more in domestic law to challenge what happens here, not least our very lax labour standards in the large grey market, which is the pull factor that brings so many people to come here in such treacherous journeys.
Will the Government contemplate looking at two things proposed by Sir Trevor Phillips, a member of the Minister’s own party? One is digital ID cards, also proposed by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and rolling them out. The objections of 2006—I remember them well—are no longer as palpable as they were then on the part of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives because you can design the system very differently with technology now.
The second thing would be to tax remittances because the whole point of someone coming and trying to work here is so that they can improve things at home. Remittances have apparently gone up from £6 billion to £9 billion, so that would be a lucrative way of filling the black hole. I wonder whether the Minister would comment on those things.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness raises a very important point on some of the pull factors and the illegal grey market and black market in employment. She will know that we spent a lot of time last night on the Employment Rights Bill. That is partly to ensure that we undertake those standards. At the Home Office, we have been engaged over the past six months in an active programme of cracking down on illegal working, removing people who are found to be working illegally and taking action against individuals who have been involved in providing that illegal work. I can supply figures to her after this discussion on the success rates of those actions.
The noble Baroness mentions ID cards. I have said many times in this House that I was a Minister in the Home Office when we had ID cards. They were scrapped by the coalition Government. There are no plans to return to ID cards, but, self-evidently, we want to ensure that we have biometric and other data for people arriving in this country, and that data is collected at a local level. The question of remittances is one that I will reflect on after this discussion, but we have to ensure, from my perspective, that the pull factors are dealt with. The key focus of the Government is to get international co-operation to smash the gangs that are dealing with the aftermath of some big worldwide problems, exploiting people, selling them false promises, putting their lives in danger and allowing people to enter illegally. We believe that on an international basis, we should have that co-operation to manage those pressures in a more positive and constructive way.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, I do not blame the Minister for slightly having a bit of fun at our expense at this stage in the political cycle. However, I caution him, given that in this Government’s first year the number of people crossing the channel has gone up by 40%, that when he eventually has to return to a proper deterrent scheme it will be on these Benches that he receives the support that he needs, not from elsewhere in the House. I suspect he may need our support later in the Parliament.
I have some specific questions about this scheme. First, in her Statement to the House of Commons, the Home Secretary said:
“The Prime Minister and French President have set out their expectation that that pilot will be operationalised”—
ghastly word—
“in the coming weeks”.
She was very unspecific about how many weeks—there is clearly a large difference between four weeks and 52 weeks, for example. Can the Minister give us a bit of clarity about the sort of timescale they are thinking about? Is it a month’s time or more like six months’ time?
Secondly, as the Minister referred to, the Home Secretary said that the Government will be trying a number of approaches—very sensible—and seeing what works, and then they will want to scale up the numbers. What sort of timescale are they thinking about for running the pilots? My noble friend Lord Davies of Gower was right: if the numbers remain low—I noticed that the Minister sort of confirmed the figure of 50 a week, or at least he did not resile from it—for several years then that will be no deterrent at all. Unless the Government are going to start the pilots quickly and ramp them up quickly, this has no chance at all of deterring anyone.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord. Let me put him at ease. I am not having a bit of fun with the previous Government; I am imploring the House to understand what the pressures were under the previous Government, the lack of action—that is a political opinion and my view—and how, as well as the borders and security Bill, the measures that we have taken with Belgium, Holland, Germany and, in this last week, France, in the agreement between President Macron and the Prime Minister, are designed to do what the whole House has a shared objective on, which is to reduce the crossings, hold those criminals to account and break their business model. That is what we are trying to do.
The noble Lord asks when the scheme will come into play. We plan to do the scheme by the summer, which is a definitive date. I suspect that the proposal is for the next five to six weeks, but the summer is our aim. We have not yet set a date to monitor and evaluate the pilots, but, self-evidently, it is in the interests of France, the UK and the people who are being trafficked to smash the gangs as soon as possible and ensure that we provide an upscaling of the scheme as soon as possible. I hope the noble Lord will give a fair wind to what I think will still be a deterrent. We will return to that after the Recess, to be questioned and subject to scrutiny in September, which I regard as the early autumn and late summer.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, the Minister referred to a number of his international engagements, but one thing the Government are stubbornly refusing to look at is discussing with our allies a revision of the 1951 European refugee convention. I have asked Parliamentary Questions twice and both have come back with a negative response. It seems to me that talking to allies about something that was done after World War II which is relevant to all this is worth doing, and I hope the Government will do that.
While in broad terms I do not resile from the fact that the Minister is having a go at all this, and I am quite supportive of that, I am far from convinced that the European Union will be happy with it, for a variety of reasons. I hope it works, but it will have no impact whatever on the total increase in our population, which is the thing that we are studiously ignoring in this Parliament and have been for 20 years. Even in a good week, we are still increasing our population by 10,000 people per week. In 2023, we were increasing our population by 23,000 people a week, but no one in the Government or Parliament seems to join the dots between that and the housing shortage, health waiting lists and a stagnant economy.
I will support the Minister in all the measures he has taken with our European allies because I think they can be small contributing parts, and of course the Rwanda scheme never got off the ground and so we will never know whether it would have worked. The fact is that the gangs are not smashed; they are still trading well and they have weeks of good weather ahead of them. I hope that, when we come back after the Summer Recess, we are not sitting here talking about numbers still being 56% up. This scheme must be designed as a deterrent but there are many other pull factors, including our legal approach to all this and how we are dealing with it, subsidising legal actions against our own Government. That in and of itself creates a pull factor.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Lord raises a number of key points. As a Government, we are committed to our international obligations. The noble Lord mentioned the 1951 convention. As he knows, a letter has been circulated by some European Union member states calling for that to be examined. We want to maintain our international obligations, and it is important that we do so. In doing that, we still have to undertake the actions mentioned—I am thankful for the noble Lord’s support on those today—as well as other actions.
The noble Lord mentioned the EU’s interests. On 30 March and 1 April this year, we had a border security summit on organised crime that brought together 50 countries that are impacted by this, including key members of the European Union such as Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, and other countries such as Turkey, Tunisia, Bulgaria, Albania, Nigeria and Pakistan. It is very important that those longer-term issues are addressed.
The people who arrive in northern France have usually entered the European Union via southern Italy or Greece, and sometimes via the borders of Poland and eastern Europe. It is in the EU’s interests to examine the French-British scheme and to ensure, if there are positive lessons to be learned, that it is expanded. It is in nobody’s interest to have criminal gangs operating throughout the EU and in the United Kingdom and the channel. As well as the challenges of that movement, the profits those criminal gangs make are going into drugs, guns and other activity that fuels further crime. I hope that the noble Lord’s fears will not be realised and that we can take action.
The noble Lord said that a large number of people are arriving here. I point him to the figure of 10,191 asylum-related returns that took place last year because of the speeding-up of the asylum-claim process. We are speeding up the asylum-claim process and weeding out those people who have paid for a small boat trip and arrived in the UK but have no legitimate asylum claim whatever, having arrived as economic migrants who did not go through a legal route. Those people are being removed.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I remind the Minister very gently that his Government have a duty and responsibility to the tax-paying, law-abiding citizens of this country, not just to supranational legal entities such as the European Court of Human Rights.
On the specific issues, other jurisdictions consider this to be close to a crisis and have actively considered the derogation of Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This Government are not even looking at that. Why is this the case? If Spain, Italy, Germany and other countries can do it, why is it impossible for the UK to at least review the situation? The noble Lord, Lord Empey, is quite right that the 1951 convention is out of date, and it is apposite and totally proper for the Government to review it and how it works for Britain.
The other issue is asylum accommodation. Six months ago, when I raised the issue of the Dragonfly Hotel in Peterborough, which has 146 male asylum seekers, the Minister reassured me that his department would improve its communication with local authorities and other key agencies where new asylum facilities and hotels were being opened. Is that the case? Has there been a demonstrable improvement?
My final question comes in the wake of the rather humiliating rebuff that the Prime Minister received in Albania in May. The House will know that the Government are not in principle against a third-country processing facility. What progress has the Government made to date in identifying an alternative to the Rwanda scheme to facilitate the processing of asylum seeker applications?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful, as ever, to the noble Lord for his questions. I reassure him that the taxpayer is at the forefront of this Government’s thinking about the costs of this illegal migration and the criminal gangs that drive it. It is for those very reasons that we are taking action, not just to secure our borders but also to secure taxpayers’ resource. That is why, this time last year when we inherited the positions we proudly hold now, we were paying roughly £8 million a day in hotel fees: because the then Government were not processing asylum seekers and were not taking the actions we have taken in the last year to have a deterrent effect, in our view, against the criminal gangs. We have managed to reduce those hotel costs to around £6 million a day, saving the taxpayer £2 million a day so far, and we intend to drive it down further.
So I hope I can reassure the noble Lord that border control, dealing with asylum and dealing with the impact of people being returned have a cost to the taxpayer. That is why, as I said—without repeating the figures—we are upping returns, upping processing and making sure that we are taking foreign national prisoners out. We are doing that to reduce the illegal pressure on the United Kingdom’s borders.
The noble Lord asked a very fair question about consultation with local authorities. It is the Government’s intent that we consult with local authorities and, if possible, with elected representatives outside those local authorities—Members of Parliament and others—to ensure that they have an understanding of where that dispersal accommodation goes. If he wants to supply any examples of where that is not working, I will certainly look at them with my ministerial colleagues. It is important that we get that right so that there is consent.
On the international agreements the noble Lord mentioned, as I said, it is the Government’s intention to support our international agreements. Any change from that will be done on an international co-operation basis. We keep everything under review. As the noble Lord knows, in the immigration White Paper we have said we want to redefine Article 8 and how that is interpreted by the judges. We will keep things under review, but this Government will not move from our international obligations. Also, it is not a foreign court; it was established with UK support after the Second World War.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the Government on reaching an agreement with Germany. My understanding is that the German law has to change before Germany can prosecute smuggling gangs operating on German soil. How confident is the noble Lord that the agreement to change German law will be reached this year?
The noble Lord mentioned the importance of the EU agreement. The EU normally operates by reaching an agreement among the 27. We have reached an agreement with France and now Germany, but surely, he would wish to reach an agreement with the whole EU to make sure that the smuggling gangs can be tackled at source: Greece and Italy, where most of the people are entering the EU.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Baroness is absolutely right. It is extremely important that we reach out to our European partners—they are still partners, although we are not members of the community—to ensure that we tackle this issue across the board. That means the flow through the Mediterranean into Italy and Greece in particular, the flow from eastern Europe into Poland, and the flow from France across the channel, accordingly. As I have said, the Calais group operates with Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, looking at the particular pressures there.
On the agreement with Germany announced today, I say again that Germany remains an independent nation, so it is responsible for its law change. But we have an agreement in the treaty that says that the German Government are
“introducing a clarification in German legislation concerning the facilitation of irregular migration to the UK (to be brought to Cabinet with a view to be adopted by Parliament as soon as possible, within 2025)”.
The Germans are responsible for the Germans, but in the treaty we have signed today, they indicate that they are hoping to make that change and—as any UK Government would—going back to their parliament and securing parliamentary support by the end of 2025. But it is entirely right that we deal with this issue on a cross-Europe basis because it is a cross-Europe challenge.