Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Baroness Kennedy of Shaws

Committee stage
Monday 8th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to reiterate what has just been said on Amendment 153. Like the previous speaker, I too have had experience of dealing with domestic servitude. I chaired an inquiry for the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Scotland which was dealing with trafficking more generally. It came as a great surprise to me, because my own experiences as a younger barrister had been dealing with domestic workers inside embassies and diplomatic circles. People would often be brought from countries other than the Emirates or Saudi; they would be Filipino, or from parts of Pakistan or India. They were collected on entry into the country, their passports were taken from them, and they were deeply exploited. I remember being involved in a number of such cases when I was a young lawyer.

As a much more senior person chairing an inquiry, it came as a great surprise to me to find that many successful business people who were running chains of Indian restaurants and all manner of businesses brought people from villages where their ancestors were from. They would say to the workers that they would be paying their parents for their services. They would be paid at the sorts of rate that people would be getting back in those countries, whether it be Bangladesh, Pakistan, or wherever. The workers often received no money—maybe just meagre pocket money. They often slept on mats in the kitchen rather than in a proper bed. They were expected to work all hours of the day and night and were not able to complain anywhere. The idea of someone with a specific visa ending up being tied, like indentured labour, to a family, and not having it made clear to them that there were other options, was quite scandalous. It was rather shocking that we made those changes to those arrangements some years back, as has already been described. Since we have this Bill before us, now is the time to put that right; we have the opportunity to do so.

Kalayaan has been doing incredible work on this front. It has done deep research into what is a form of modern slavery—a smokescreen used to deflect the transparency and accountability there should be for what is experienced by many migrant workers. The evidence that Kalayaan has compiled reports very serious abuse. I ask the Committee to take seriously the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, which I strongly support.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendments 151 and 152 and endorse and support the amendment of my noble friend Lady Lawlor. The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, will know that there have been a number of reports in local and national media about people without settled status who are seeking determination of their asylum-seeker status who have been alleged to be working as delivery drivers for food-delivery companies. Clearly, it is a potential loophole, and it is responsible for us to respond to that sensibly by an amendment that seeks to close that loophole.

On the other two amendments, the noble Lord, Lord German, will be aware that we debated this issue in Grand Committee a year or so ago, when we had quite a good debate. I always think it is a good rule of thumb that my noble friend Lord Randall of Uxbridge speaks good sense. I do not always agree with everything he says, but I was determined to agree with something he said in his remarks. We laboured in the Whips’ Office in the other place many moons ago, and he took a pastoral interest in my short-lived career in the Whips’ Office. I agree with him more than I disagree in that this is a point of principle about whether you should give asylum seekers the right to work. I think the challenge is that, despite what the noble Lord, Lord German, says, there is a pull factor. People come to the UK, which is a unique economy, because it is in the right time zone, we speak English and we have a dynamic, service-based economy. They travel over many countries mainly, in my view, as economic migrants—clearly, there are a number of genuine asylum seekers—and it is not possible comprehensively to disprove the idea that they are coming for work.

The problem with the proposal is that the most disadvantaged group of people in this country is poor white British boys. A situation where you encourage an economic model that brings in more people to drive down wages, keep conditions not much better than was hitherto the case, cut back on training and keep this addiction to cheap foreign labour is not a model for a successful, happy and contented country. That does not, in any sense, second-guess the merits of individual people who want to come to the country to make a better life.

That brings me on to the point that the challenge we have here, and the thing that the Government can take away from this debate, is that there is much more to be done along the lines that my noble friend Lord Randall outlined in terms of civic education around British values—an educative or didactic process for these new asylum seekers to understand what Britain is about and how they can contribute as decent, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens without working. If you cross the Rubicon and say that, if you arrive and claim asylum, you can automatically work and enter the employment market, that is a step too far. However, the Government have a duty and a responsibility, for the sake of the taxpayer and for the welfare of those people and their families, to give them the opportunity to volunteer, train and assimilate but not to work. That is the challenge for the Minister.

In many respects, I support my noble friend Lord Randall—and even, maybe, to a certain extent the noble Lord, Lord German, and others—but on a point of principle I cannot support this amendment. I hope that the Minister will set his face against it, but the Government, as the previous Government did, could do a lot more in terms of the training and development of people who aspire to be British citizens.