Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I have signed both Amendment 58 and Amendment 80, which is consequential to Amendment 58. We have just heard very eloquently from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, about why it is important. I will just highlight a couple of very brief points.

First, I lived in Hong Kong until 1960 and my family knew Anthony Grey, the Reuters journalist who was imprisoned by Mao Tse-Tung in 1967. As a young teenager, I wrote to him at his home in Peking where he had been imprisoned. Anthony died last week. His family have said that what China did to him, keeping him in solitary confinement with no charges or anything else for over two years, affected him for the rest of his life. We see an echo of that today in the treatment of people such as Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong in prison. Hong Kong is not a safe place for some people to be.

I just want to add that, two years ago, there were a number of incidents with border staff not understanding the British national overseas route and treating Hong Konger arrivals as if they were asylum seekers. They were not. I was grateful that, after our intervention in your Lordships’ House, Ministers ensured that this error was corrected.

Last week in your Lordships’ House we discussed the changes to the extradition arrangements for Hong Kong; again, I am very grateful to the Minister for those discussions. The reason that both these issues were important to the Hong Kongers who have come here to safety as British nationals, holding British national visas, is that their life here is very unsettled. Threats to their personal safety in the UK are bad enough, but their families are also threatened in Hong Kong as well.

The whole point of the BNO visa was to keep our word to fellow British nationals after 1984. We made that real in 2021. The tiny things that have been going wrong also add to the unease that many Hong Kongers feel in this country. Making sure that no decisions are changed on the BNO visa route other than by Parliament is exactly what needs to happen to give them the confidence that the UK still stands by them.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 70 and 85 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who is not with us today for reasons I explained earlier. We listened to what was said in Committee and this amendment mirrors what was placed on the agenda then. But, in tabling this amendment, we have made some changes, one of which is the need for biometrics to be taken prior to travel, and the amendment also proposes a capped scheme to control numbers and an initial pilot of 12 months minimum in order to have the opportunity to evaluate it.

To try to explain this scheme, which is basically about a legal route into the United Kingdom, I will just refer to the United States. A similar scheme to the one we are proposing—not exactly the same, but similar—was instituted there, and the US Government were able to reduce illegal border crossings from Mexico across the US border by 77% between December 2023 and August 2024: that is, in nine months.

It was achieved through a three-pronged approach, one of which was, of course, diplomatic efforts to make sure that there was a strong ability to manage the system in the countries where people started, and also then taking a tough approach to the irregular border crossings, significantly reducing the chance of successfully claiming asylum for those arriving without permission, and a substantial official scheme through which people could apply to come to the country. That is the bit that, of course, the humanitarian travel permit relates to.

The result in the United States was that it simply was not worth the expense of paying the smugglers any more and it undermined their business entirely. That is because you cannot look at just one side of the demand-supply equation. The demand is being met by the smugglers, and we have to touch both sides. Without a form of legal route, you will not get that demand reduced.

I will try to explain it very straightforwardly. In the United Kingdom, we put up with queues. We may not like them, but we follow, if there is a queue, in a proper and orderly manner—mostly. If somebody pushes in, either they do not get served when they get to the front, or they get sent to the back of the queue. This scheme means to do exactly that—to provide a scheme where there is a queue in which people can come to the United Kingdom. If you decide to jump the queue by taking the smugglers route, you get put to the back of the queue again.

That means, of course, that you have to have a quota attached to the scheme, and because the law in this country says that you cannot make a claim for asylum unless you are here, you have to have a travel permit in order to come here. But that would be controlled right back at the beginning of the journey. If you have paid a slab of money to a smuggler back in Egypt or Libya, you are certainly not going to be put off when you get to the end of the route. It is certainly the case that you need to tackle this right back at the beginning. This whole scheme is about trying to create a legal route and being tough on anyone who tries to jump the queue by coming in irregularly and moving them to the back of the queue.

It does not matter if the queue is not moving very quickly; what matters is that it is moving. It is surprising that people will be prepared to wait, as they did in the United States, where, in the case of Haiti, instead of 10,000 people turning up at the US border, it was just a handful every month. That is because people said, “It’s not worth my while doing that”. They saw that joining the queue meant that at some stage they would get to the front of that queue.

It works much better, of course, if you are doing it with other countries as well, because you can collectively create these routes, which can be dealt with in a very efficient way. That way, we control the borders. That is what this is about. It is a different sort of approach from what is suggested by putting your hands up and saying, “You can’t get in”, and “We’ll stop you in every way possible”, and all that stuff. That did not work.

It may be that, in time, the pressures to try to deal with this across the channel may well work in reducing the numbers. But we are looking at changing the whole model so that the smugglers’ model does not work. It has been tried and tested. That is why, if we are going to use this in a European context, it is important that it is done with a capped model, with one particular country perhaps, and certainly for 12 months, so that we can find out whether we can make this work here in Europe as well.

This system, this scheme, is one that is designed to provide safe routes and to take away the business of the smugglers. It will not solve it all, but if it reduces it by 77%, as was the case in the United States of America, it is certainly worth doing.

That is what this amendment is about. The other amendment, with which it is associated, is simply to create a pilot scheme with a capped number of people in it. I hope that we will consider this when we come back to it later in this debate.