Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I was coming to this. This is where I do agree with my noble friend. There is a big difference between having ID cards—which, in effect, puts the burden on the rest of the population and would not materially affect how we deliver services or protect ourselves—and data. His point about the state needing to be better at collecting and using data is a very good one. I was always sceptical about the state using data, but we have seen how the private sector uses it effectively to deliver better services.

Having had some responsibility in the past for some of our agencies and having used their services, I know that people sometimes have concerns and have the “big brother” conversation. One thing I know is that the powers of our intelligence agencies, for example, are on a legal footing under the Investigatory Powers Act. There are very clear controls within which Ministers, who are accountable to Parliament, have to make decisions. In the past, I have signed warrants for intercepting communications, and there are very clear rules about how that works. All that is overseen by a judicial check, to make sure that the law is being enforced properly.

I think there are appropriate safeguards and that we could do a better job in collecting and using data and delivering services. The private sector does a much better job at this. This is true across government, not just in the Home Office but in the NHS and other organisations that use data. I distinguish between the two points. I absolutely support collecting and using data to deliver services, but I do not think it follows from that that we will have to require people to carry identity documents.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

To adjudicate between my noble friends Lord Harper and Lord Jackson, I think that my noble friend Lord Harper has a point. We can do something short of full-scale electronic data collection and the identity card system. The problem at the moment, frankly, is the cost, and it was a problem at the time. My noble friends may recall the cost—I think it was £3 billion or something of that order—to install a full ID system all those years ago, during the Blair Government. God knows what the Chancellor of the Exchequer would do if she was suddenly presented with the cost of a full ID system. However, I agree with my noble friends Lord Harper and Lord Swire that we need more data, particularly in the area of immigration, where we simply do not know what is going on, in London or anywhere else.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his attempt to adjudicate between me and my noble friend Lord Jackson. He makes a good point. This is where the state needs to get much better at using data to make policy decisions—by the way, this is not a criticism of the current Government; we had our challenges in office as well—and operational decisions, deal with threats and be nimble enough to recognise that those threats do not remain static but change. The state has to be much better at altering its focus to deal with the threats as they face us today.

I regret that I disagree with my noble friend, as I try not to do so, but I strongly support my noble friend Lord Swire’s amendments, and I hope that they will get a fair hearing from the Government. Even if the Government do not like the way they are drafted or whatever, I hope they will take them away and have a think about whether my noble friend’s amendments make a good point and could be incorporated into the Bill in due course.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, there is another fine detail which neither noble Lord has mentioned but which worried some of us very much—that, in offloading to Rwanda, we would be enabling a whole new business model for traffickers, because those sent to Rwanda would be such vulnerable prospective customers for the traffickers.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, I am a veteran of those dreadful, seemingly endless debates and I too recall them with some horror, including the ping-pong. But let us put this in perspective. That policy was chosen because it replicated the only purely successful means of stopping illegal immigrants coming on boats to a country—the Australian example. Instead of Rwanda, it used Nauru, near the Solomon Islands, and established over 10 years or so a successful arrangement whereby people coming on boats across the Timor Sea to Darwin and so forth were immediately detained and sent within 24 hours to Nauru to be treated. Not only did that immediately stop the boats but it has led to a cross-party arrangement in Australia that is, frankly, to die for here. The Liberal Party brought in those arrangements, the Labor Party then eventually won a general election and abolished them—

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

If I may correct the noble Lord, the Australian arrangement was offshoring, not offloading.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

That is not true; it was offloading as well, because the decisions were taken by the Government in Nauru at the behest of the Australian Government, although they obviously had a back-up situation and did not entirely hand it over. However, if the noble Lord will look at it, he will see that it was very similar to the arrangements with Rwanda. As he will recall, we had not only arrangements with the Rwandan Government but a back-up arrangement—a monitoring committee—which he acknowledged during those debates was composed of the most distinguished international lawyers and so forth, who would check whether anything was going wrong.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I want to draw my noble friend back, in case noble Lords missed it, to the very interesting political point he made—which I can validate from conversations I have had with a member of the Australian Government—that the Australian scheme was introduced by a Liberal Government, the equivalent of the Conservatives, and then reversed by a Labor Government, who realised that they had made a terrible mistake and, when they came back into government, wanted to keep the scheme. Does he think that might be this Government’s experience in trying to deal with this important issue?

[Lord Horam (Con)]

Exactly. It is such a pity. We made the point on ID cards just recently that one of the worst aspects of our system of government is new Governments coming in and instantly reversing policies carried through by the preceding Government. ID cards were an example where my noble friend Lord Jackson admitted that we might have been wrong. In some cases, we were right, by the way—we should have cancelled HS2. My noble friend Lord Harper might not necessarily agree with me there. None the less, sometimes new Governments can get it right as well as get it wrong, but the constant changing of policies of this kind between Governments is a real issue. Australia got it right: the Liberal Government brought it in; the Labor Government then rejected it and realised they were wrong. The Liberal Government brought it back, the Labor Government accepted it, and they now have a bipartisan approach which, in effect, means there is very little illegal immigration into Australia. It is the only extant example of this problem being dealt with.

Not only that, but the success of the bipartisan approach in Australia enabled them to go on to deal with legal immigration very transparently. There is a debate every year with a proposal from the Government on how many legal immigrants should be accepted into the country, broken down by different categories— students, families, workers in various categories, asylum seekers and so forth. That is then is debated in parliament and a view is taken. That is a model of what we are all trying to achieve here. If we could get to that position here with a bipartisan approach and an open debate every year in Parliament, that would be wonderful. This may seem like “Monty Python” land in some ways in its fantasy, but it is a reality in Australia.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I see the point that the noble Lord is making, but it is important that he recognise that what the Australian Government did, and did again, was to arrange for Australian asylum hearings to take place offshore. What we were arranging was for people to be told that they could never have a United Kingdom asylum hearing; we were going to forcibly send them to Rwanda where, if they wished, they could have a Rwandan asylum hearing. That is completely different.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

With respect, it is not completely different. The fact is that the Australians arranged a successful deterrent, which is what all Governments are trying to achieve. What the last Conservative Government were trying to achieve was obviously not entirely the same as the Nauru/Australian example, but it was broadly the same, and, as the noble Lord must agree, with many checks and balances to ensure that people were properly treated.

That is what the present Government are throwing away. All that effort, finance, agreement, and legislation—three Bills, I think—are being chucked aside for, in effect, nothing, because this Bill gives no deterrent factor. It is completely absent. We all agree that the gangs should be smashed, and that work can carry on side by side with any other work on a deterrent, but there is no work on a deterrent going on of the kind that the previous Government had. We need a deterrent.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Can we just nail this myth? It was not a deterrent. Between the signing of the partnership with Rwanda on 14 April 2022 and 5 July 2024 when this Government took office, 83,500 people arrived by small boats—some deterrent.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

It was never deployed as a deterrent. As my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower said, it was never put into operation. The idea that the Minister can say that it did not work is nonsense, because it was never actually tried. First, there were all the judicial reviews and additional challenges that were sustained, and then there was the general election, so it never actually happened. It is a myth to believe that it somehow did not work or that it was not a deterrent. We do not know, frankly.

The great pity about all this is that we will never know whether it would have been a deterrent. I fully confess that I do not know whether it would have acted as a deterrent or not; no one could say until we saw the effects. Indeed, in the case of Australia, it was quite a long time before people realised that this was an effective deterrent. It took about 10 years before it was fully realised that this did work and was a means of doing it, and that would likely have been the case here. A policy without a serious deterrent is not really a policy at all; that is the problem.

I am sure the Minister will say that what the Government are now doing with France has considerable potential as a means of deterring people from coming across, but that depends on relations with France. I am all in favour of having favourable relations with France. I believe that the UK and France are particularly important countries in the European context these days, and I fully commend what happened over the last couple of days—I think King Charles in particular played a blinder in bringing the countries together—but none the less, we have to look at whether this will work as a deterrent. I understand that the talks on this are going on this afternoon, and that therefore the Minister may not have much information and may be unable answer questions, but currently only 6% of people will be sent back under this scheme. It is hardly a deterrent to say that 94% of people will stay here and only 6% will be sent back.

Obviously, it is sensible to start in a small way and ramp it up as time goes on, and I am sure that the Minister will argue that, but if you have a whole gamut of people coming over and only a small proportion are returned, what sort of deterrent is that? Will it not also fall foul of the problems that the previous Government had, where any individual who is asked to go back to France immediately has recourse to a lawyer who seeks to keep them here, and maybe succeeds in that effort, and therefore the whole scheme begins to unwind in a morass of legal challenges? That is what happened to the last Government: they became bogged down in a whole series of legal challenges. That is the danger, and that is why we are becoming afraid of the ECHR. The Government have had a year to think about all this. Unless they have a clear plan that encompasses these other extraneous elements that protrude into the problems they have, there is no serious possibility of stopping the boats.

Therefore, while I understand why the Government, having decided not to go ahead with the Rwanda plan, have given themselves the resources that were devoted to Rwanda and used them in a new way to develop the Bill, they will have to go very much further if they hope to stop the boats. I am afraid that we need a much more decisive, thorough and holistic approach to this problem than that we have had so far.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. Unlike a number of noble Lords here, I was unable to take part in the earlier iterations of debate on the Bill. I was a very strong supporter of it, but, as a member of the Government, it was not within my area of responsibility, and I was, sadly, excluded. Therefore, unlike others, I relish the opportunity to volunteer my support for it this afternoon.

Fundamentally, this argument is about whether or not you believe in the deterrent effect. As was mentioned in Tuesday’s debate, and on previous occasions, the challenge we face—and I think the noble Lord, Lord Alton, highlighted this in the Joint Committee’s report when he was introducing his amendments earlier in the week—is the enormous number of displaced people around the world who, under the refugee convention, would potentially have a claim for asylum. The fact is that those volumes cannot all be accommodated here. The extra challenge we get from the issue of small boats crossing the channel goes directly to one’s interpretation of that convention; this was the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, raised when she talked about people coming across the channel from France.

It is the Joint Committee’s view, but it is not a universal view and it is not my view, that the refugee convention protects people fleeing persecution who come directly to the United Kingdom. Most of these people enter the European Union on the southern borders, so they have crossed—