Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord German Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

There are practical implications to this. If an individual presents as a victim or witness of labour abuse but is in this country unlawfully, surely the state has an interest in understanding their immigration status, both for their own protection and for the broader integrity of our immigration system. It is vital for the well-being, safety and security of everyone involved that we understand who is here, on what basis, and whether they are at risk of further harm or criminal exploitation. This amendment would prevent that link being made. It would ask our agencies to act with one hand tied behind their back, able to hear a report of labour abuse but not allowed to use that information to cross-reference immigration records, not even for the purpose of assessing vulnerability risk or appropriate support routes. Paradoxically, this may make it harder, not easier, to protect those most at risk. Of course, there must be safeguards; of course we must build trust with those reporting exploitation, but trust cannot come at the cost of operational paralysis or the inability to detect abuse in the first place. I urge noble Lords to think carefully about supporting this amendment, which may feel principled but in practice may undermine our ability to enforce the law, support victims and secure our borders.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I need to declare my regular interest in the RAMP organisation, which provides support for me and for other Members of this House across all parties. I want to start by reflecting on Amendment 190, which is about protecting trafficked people and those coerced, in many cases, into coming into this country. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, just referred to the session a few weeks ago here in the Palace of Westminster where we heard testimonies from people and how they managed to get out of the modern slavery circumstance in which they found themselves. It is important that those migrant workers are able to report their abuse without fear of the other part of the system coming in and saying, “Well, you’re here illegally and we won’t deal with your case of being coerced to come here in the first place first”.

It is a matter of which part of the system you put first. The amendment tries to make sure that we can protect those being coerced and not subject them immediately to questions about their immigration status rather than about the coercion they have received. It would be good if these things could be worked together, but the harsh reality is that they are not. Migrant workers have heightened vulnerability to abuse and exploitation and are less likely to report it. In many of the cases that we heard of here in this Palace, people were literally running away with nothing, but they could not run away until they had someone they could run to. They feared that the authorities would prioritise their insecure immigration status over the harm that they had received. That is the balance this amendment is trying to correct.

This concern is well founded. Evidence indicates that individuals’ personal data is frequently shared between labour market enforcement agencies, the police and immigration enforcement. This occurs despite the absence of any legal obligation for labour market enforcement agencies or local authorities to verify workers’ immigration status or report those with insecure status to the Home Office. Unscrupulous employers are able to capitalise on this fear with impunity, and it pushes down wages and conditions right across the board. That is the purpose of this amendment, and I commend it to the Minister. In explanation at the end, perhaps he could say how we can deal with the issues of people trying to escape from coerced, abusive and exploitative labour and how that can be dealt with effectively when the other part of the system is working against it.

I want to refer to the amendment on which I pressed the Minister on Tuesday. I am grateful for him pointing out where it is, because the only point that I wanted to make on it was that the requirement now is for the Minister to consult the devolved Governments rather than simply to take note of them, which I thought perhaps was the indication we were getting from his earlier letter. I am pleased that the amendment requires that he should do so.

On GDPR, I understand why the Conservatives have come to this position, because they simply say that everybody coming to this country by irregular means is illegal. Of course, they do not want their cases to be heard; they just want to get rid of them again. Thankfully, in further amendments we are going to deal with today, we are going to remove that universality of approach, assuming that this House passes the Bill in the way that the Government have laid it before us. It is important that GDPR applies to everyone in the UK, including those in the criminal justice system undergoing investigations. Universality in that sense has been a principle of our law, and we should stick to it and not create illegality when it does not necessarily exist.

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

I am grateful to noble Lords for commencing this afternoon’s consideration and for the amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. Before addressing the points made by noble Lords on their own amendments, I just want to point out government Amendment 96 to Clause 33 in this group, which I will come back to in a moment.

I will begin by addressing the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, which have been reflected elsewhere. He may know that during the passage of what is now the Modern Slavery Act, we as the Official Opposition and I as the then shadow Immigration Minister moved amendments. I do not need to see—with due respect now—a 10-year-old photograph of us to reflect on that, but if he wishes to pass it to me, I may have to. In the immigration White Paper, we have made specific reference to Kalayaan and domestic workers, and I will reflect on those points as we go through. We want to look at the visa rules to ensure that they are operating fairly and properly. It is not related directly to the amendments before us today, but I just wanted to place that on the record again for the noble Lord.

Government Amendment 96 in my name does indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord German, said, amend the consultation requirements in relation to the Secretary of State’s powers to make regulations about the purposes related to policing in connection with the trailer registration data that may be used by the police and onwards shared by the police and the Home Office in accordance with the provisions of Clauses 30 and 31 of the Bill. Clause 33(8) creates a power to make police regulations to specify the purposes related to policing and, as currently drafted, the clause creates a duty to

“consult such of the following persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate”,

and lists Scottish Ministers, the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland and police representatives.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, which have been so ably supported across the Committee—pretty much every voice so far has been in support of them. They are a very useful humanitarian mirror to arguments that have been made on the previous group about the importance of data sharing for law enforcement purposes.

Amendments 97 and 98, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, very much endorse the views of the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Alton, on the need for even more breadth and possibly a government amendment. These amendments are very sympathetic to the Government’s stated policy of smashing the gangs et cetera. It is a perverse outcome to hear that people who were trying to satisfy the Government’s legal and practical requirements for family reunion are having to resort to people smugglers. So, with respect, I hope that the Minister will see that this is a no brainer in terms of the practical facilitation of government policy.

Finally, I talked about these amendments being very much the humanitarian mirror of the need sometimes to share data—in this case, biometric information—for the purpose of giving effect to lawful family reunion. Please do not shoot the messenger, but I want to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Harper, that the Data Protection Act and the UK GDPR contain very broad law enforcement exemptions, but broad is not blanket. I hope I can say to Conservative noble Lords that it is one thing to have a broad law enforcement exemption, but another to have blanket immunity from data protection. I am sure that noble Lords opposite would not want, for example, data controllers to be negligent or not to maintain a secure system so that sensitive information, even about potential criminals, was dumped on the internet, easily hacked or simply negligently maintained. Data controllers, particularly public authority data controllers, and especially of sensitive information, should at least have to maintain a proper, secure system. Yes, data should be shared for law enforcement purposes where that is necessary and proportionate, but they should not be totally negligent with this information.

I hope that provides some reassurance on that issue. In any event, if it does not, the Minister has already said that he can write.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have spoken. The amendments in my noble friend’s name, which I have signed, are, I think, well received across the Committee as a whole. On top of that, I must repeat the welcome for Clauses 34 and 35, which seek to increase flexibility when taking biometric information. I do not want to repeat the cases that have been talked about during this debate but shall simply speak about the practicalities of how this change might take place.

I have had experience of bringing people here for a short time and requiring their biometric information, which was sent from one country to another. Very helpfully, British Foreign Office officials in one country put the machine in the boot of their car and drove it to the other country—I am not going to give the details because otherwise they might get into trouble. Regularly, they have taken the biometric information of people who have visited the noble Lord’s part of Wales, among others; that that might give him a clue. I read today in the newspapers that the Government are to provide Home Office officials with portable biometric equipment. In my day, these things were small enough to go in the boot, but they are obviously going to be even smaller. So, in practical terms, taking biometric information is no longer a matter of using a large machine. Similarly, when you go to hospital for a scan, it is no longer done by big machines. This machinery is getting smaller, and we are now talking about portable methods. Clearly, that can be done, and it makes it more straightforward to take the machinery closer to people who are fulfilling the legal route that the Government have set in front of them. Of course, we should remember that, in 2024, 10,000 of those who came on family reunion were children.

The second thing is whether the Government are interested in using other bodies to take the biometric information. I do not know what the Government have already done on this matter—I saw the Minister checking his phone—but, clearly, if we are to have family reunion, and if President Macron has decided that biometrics can be taken in France, at least that might give some of the information we will need to know anyway about these matters.