Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Baroness Ludford and Lord Lea of Crondall

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Tuesday 1st February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I think the House would be grateful if somebody, in one sentence, expressed appreciation for the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham. No one doubts that, over the past 50 years or so, he has been a beacon of liberalism within his party. The point he made in this connection is that there is a great dilemma facing us all. Apart from climate change, the dilemma is that, for governance systems in parts of the world—Africa is the continent that springs to mind—we will have to have a new arrangement for crossing the Mediterranean whereby we do not get into all these problems, which are getting worse. That speech is not easy to make, but I just want to say that the honesty and the examination of the dilemmas we all face has been a credit to this House.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I remind everyone that Clause 11 is not only not about immigration, let alone illegal immigration; it is not even about asylum seekers. It is titled “Differential treatment of refugees”—people who have been recognised and accepted as entitled to asylum in this country. What Clause 11 means is that the Government want to penalise a certain category of people who have been accepted as refugees. On the one hand, we accept them as refugees, but then we are going to turn round and penalise them in various ways for how they arrived. I have agreed with all the critics of Clause 11, and I agree that Clause 11 as a whole needs to get the chop.

Clause 11 wants to penalise people with a much-reduced permission to stay; by requiring several frequent applications for further permission to stay; by keeping them in uncertainty for many years; by excluding them from public funds; and by delaying or denying altogether a visa for family reunion. I suggest that this is not only pernicious, as everyone has said, but costly. It is costly to that individual and it is costly to society, because it is not good for society when you have people who are unable to integrate and living with instability, isolation, possible destitution, homelessness and separation from family. They have been recognised as refugees, which means that we expect these people to be part of our society. I cannot see that it is good for society.

I had the opportunity, when the Minister was kind enough to meet me, to receive the great news on CSI. I come at this with an approach of both principle and practicality. As I say, I cannot see that it is in the interests of either society or the Home Office to have people living in this constant fear of what their futures are going to hold. We are told that the asylum system is broken. We know about the 125,000 unresolved applications. We know about the time and delays; on average, it now takes a year to decide a case. When I was an MEP, I had people who had been waiting three and a half years for an initial application, with the harm it did to them physically and mentally and to their status within their family as well. How is it going to help the Home Office to have more administration in constantly having to review these applications to decide whether it is going to deny public funds or renew the permission to stay?

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Baroness Ludford and Lord Lea of Crondall

Monday 23rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

For once in his life, my noble friend may care to pay a little more attention to what I am about to say, and he may even be convinced by it. I think that there is scope for an inter-party agreement on the preparation of a statement of intent, as it were, between the two camps that neither will accuse the other, or even the Government, of bias, if not dishonesty, simply as a consequence of having conducted an insufficiently robust analysis of the distinction between the facts—the known knowns—and the unknowns. What I am saying may prove to be true or untrue, but on the percentage chance that it is true, can we follow up the worries of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, about tsunamis by saying that they will be prevented only if we can avoid charges of bad faith when these reports are published? Therefore, the leaders of the two campaigns should swear an oath—as in ancient Rome, or some such—that they will accept that the assessment is dispassionate and that neither side will try to shoot the messenger, as and when these surveys are produced.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I back up what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, with which I entirely agree. To make the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, happy, I should say that my receipt of a pension from the European Parliament is on my declaration of interests. As far as I know, I do not have to mention it every time we discuss the EU, as that would bore the House greatly.

I wish to amplify two of the points in Amendment 24C, in the name, principally, of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. The Prime Minister said recently that the EU was essential—I cannot remember whether he said “essential”, but he at least meant that it was very important—to the UK’s national security. I think that is the first time he has made that very valid point. Therefore, it is important that the report the Government promise to publish in the very welcome amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, should cover the law enforcement, security and justice point because the public have a right to know what that consists of. For instance, the report should state that we are a full member of Europol and not stray into the domain covered by Amendment 25, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, by implying that if we are not in the EU we will not be a full member of Europol, as Norway is not—it has a sort of observer status. The same applies to referring to Eurojust as a sort of club of prosecutors which makes sure that we catch, and can prosecute, these major criminals.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, we have full membership of the European arrest warrant. We could even push for reform. I wish that Ministers, the Government and the Commission would take up the report that I wrote as one of my last acts in the European Parliament. This was about multilateral reform of the European arrest warrant. We could not do that simply as law takers outside the EU, even if we had some kind of other arrangement.

On proposed new paragraph (d) in Amendment 24C and the rights of UK citizens living in another country, a lot of work is being done here, to which the UK, being in the European Union, has a great deal to contribute. This work is about complementing the rights of free movement. We have maybe 2 million citizens living in the rest of the EU. We can take a leading part, with our strong civil as well as criminal legal traditions, in influencing the work on the mutual recognition of documents and of civil partnerships and marriages, including of course same-sex marriages, and on the rights that help our citizens in their daily lives in other EU countries.

It is important that our citizens understand the full implications of those EU measures, and the rights and obligations that arise under EU law enabling us to help defend our national security and ourselves against terrorism, to catch criminals and to help people taking advantage of free-movement rights through civil-law issues. I hope the Minister will say that the report will have some focus on these sectors of law enforcement, security and justice, including civil justice.