UK-France Migration: Co-operation

Lord Harper Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Baroness raises a very important point on some of the pull factors and the illegal grey market and black market in employment. She will know that we spent a lot of time last night on the Employment Rights Bill. That is partly to ensure that we undertake those standards. At the Home Office, we have been engaged over the past six months in an active programme of cracking down on illegal working, removing people who are found to be working illegally and taking action against individuals who have been involved in providing that illegal work. I can supply figures to her after this discussion on the success rates of those actions.

The noble Baroness mentions ID cards. I have said many times in this House that I was a Minister in the Home Office when we had ID cards. They were scrapped by the coalition Government. There are no plans to return to ID cards, but, self-evidently, we want to ensure that we have biometric and other data for people arriving in this country, and that data is collected at a local level. The question of remittances is one that I will reflect on after this discussion, but we have to ensure, from my perspective, that the pull factors are dealt with. The key focus of the Government is to get international co-operation to smash the gangs that are dealing with the aftermath of some big worldwide problems, exploiting people, selling them false promises, putting their lives in danger and allowing people to enter illegally. We believe that on an international basis, we should have that co-operation to manage those pressures in a more positive and constructive way.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I do not blame the Minister for slightly having a bit of fun at our expense at this stage in the political cycle. However, I caution him, given that in this Government’s first year the number of people crossing the channel has gone up by 40%, that when he eventually has to return to a proper deterrent scheme it will be on these Benches that he receives the support that he needs, not from elsewhere in the House. I suspect he may need our support later in the Parliament.

I have some specific questions about this scheme. First, in her Statement to the House of Commons, the Home Secretary said:

“The Prime Minister and French President have set out their expectation that that pilot will be operationalised”—


ghastly word—

“in the coming weeks”.

She was very unspecific about how many weeks—there is clearly a large difference between four weeks and 52 weeks, for example. Can the Minister give us a bit of clarity about the sort of timescale they are thinking about? Is it a month’s time or more like six months’ time?

Secondly, as the Minister referred to, the Home Secretary said that the Government will be trying a number of approaches—very sensible—and seeing what works, and then they will want to scale up the numbers. What sort of timescale are they thinking about for running the pilots? My noble friend Lord Davies of Gower was right: if the numbers remain low—I noticed that the Minister sort of confirmed the figure of 50 a week, or at least he did not resile from it—for several years then that will be no deterrent at all. Unless the Government are going to start the pilots quickly and ramp them up quickly, this has no chance at all of deterring anyone.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. Let me put him at ease. I am not having a bit of fun with the previous Government; I am imploring the House to understand what the pressures were under the previous Government, the lack of action—that is a political opinion and my view—and how, as well as the borders and security Bill, the measures that we have taken with Belgium, Holland, Germany and, in this last week, France, in the agreement between President Macron and the Prime Minister, are designed to do what the whole House has a shared objective on, which is to reduce the crossings, hold those criminals to account and break their business model. That is what we are trying to do.

The noble Lord asks when the scheme will come into play. We plan to do the scheme by the summer, which is a definitive date. I suspect that the proposal is for the next five to six weeks, but the summer is our aim. We have not yet set a date to monitor and evaluate the pilots, but, self-evidently, it is in the interests of France, the UK and the people who are being trafficked to smash the gangs as soon as possible and ensure that we provide an upscaling of the scheme as soon as possible. I hope the noble Lord will give a fair wind to what I think will still be a deterrent. We will return to that after the Recess, to be questioned and subject to scrutiny in September, which I regard as the early autumn and late summer.