Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Viscount Goschen Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 28th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend in his Amendment 3 and the amendments that the Government have brought forward to try to make Clause 13 more effective and appropriate.

I have a broader question for the Minister. I suspect that many of the people who may be caught by this are already committing all sorts of other offences, either provisions within the scope of the Bill or those under some other relevant legislation, such as the Immigration Act 1971. My question to the Government is: how effective do they believe Clause 13 will be? What sort of a difference do they believe it will make? They have brought forward legislation and asked this House to pass a Bill containing Clause 13; they must have a view, whether from the police, the Crown Prosecution Service or other arms of government, on how effective they believe this measure will be, given that many, perhaps even the majority, of people committing these offences will not be resident in the United Kingdom, but will be elsewhere as part of the broader supply chain.

Therefore, I am broadly supportive, but I would appreciate the Minister answering my question when he sums up the debate.

[Lord German (LD)]

I support my noble friend Lady Hamwee and will ask a couple of questions about the “concerned in” area. The Government’s Amendments 4 and 8 further expand the scope of offences in Clauses 13 and 14 by introducing this liability to be “concerned in” the supply or handling of articles. I understand that some of this phraseology is also in some of our counterterrorism laws, and I wonder whether it has been drawn from those very serious laws and just put in this in the moment.

The original intention of Clauses 13 to 17 was to target the activities of facilitators and organised criminal gangs. As my noble friend says, the worry is that the expansion of the offences risks inadvertently criminalising people who should be protected and providing unintended harms to those who are most vulnerable.

I have one other point about criminalising non-criminal actors. Perhaps the Minister could say a little word about legal practitioners. There is a certain ambiguity created by these broad offences which might risk affecting legal practitioners who provide legitimate services. Perhaps he could tell us whether that can be explicitly put into the Bill or explicitly ruled out of the amendments that the Government have put before us today.

In summary, these government amendments are seeking to widen further the extraterritorial counterterror-style offences. In turn, that requires statutory guardrails to prevent them targeting vulnerable individuals, and legal representation and legal practitioners, instead of solely the organised crime networks. I hope the Minister can put that matter to rest.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister. I did listen and—he should not worry—I am not trying to pretend that he thinks that therefore we can reduce offences by 80% overnight. It would just be helpful to have a sense of what impact this might have. I also welcome the extraterritoriality clauses, because he is right that it means that we can use extradition offences, but we can also use some of the other tools that we have at our disposal once we can demonstrate that there are offences.

My specific question picks up Amendment 14. I agree with the Minister that there should be defences, or carve-outs, for internet service providers that are carrying out their lawful activities. I want to probe him specifically on subsection (1)(b)(ii) of the new clause inserted by the amendment, which states:

“An internet service provider does not commit an offence … if the provider does not … select the recipient of the transmission”.


I want to probe this a bit. If the algorithms or techniques used by service providers or social media to push messages at people are set up so they push some of these unlawful messages, is that activity—because they are in effect selecting the recipient of those messages—potentially an offence? By the way, for the avoidance of doubt, if their algorithms are pushing messages that facilitate crime at people, then, arguably, they probably should be falling foul of this, because we want them to then take steps to make sure that their algorithms are not pushing these messages at people. I just wanted to test the extent to which they would be liable.

I have a final comment. The noble Lord is right to distinguish between those creating this material that is facilitating offences, but what liability is there if those providing those internet services are involved in this activity? The offences at the moment include imprisonment, which can be used on people but not on corporate bodies. There are also fines involved in this.

One of the debates we had on what became the Online Safety Act, which the noble Lord mentioned, is that, to get these offences to bite on large global corporations with turnovers and profits of many billions of pounds, there must be quite draconian financial penalties to get them to sit up and take notice. There was a big debate about that when the Government of which I was a Member, and the subsequent Government, were passing the Online Safety Act and the subsequent legislation.

I therefore want to understand this: if there were social media or internet service providers who were helping this, or not taking steps to mitigate this, what offences would they potentially be guilty of? Does the Minister think the potential sanctions are sufficient that those organisations, particularly those based overseas and not easily reachable by our legislative tools, would be sufficiently able to be reached by them?

Just so the House is not in any doubt, I say that I strongly support this range of amendments to create these offences. It is quite clear that, in all the coverage you see of all the people coming into the United Kingdom illegally, they all have phones and electronic communication devices: it is a key part of how these crimes are committed. I strongly support the law being strengthened to deal with it and the Minister has my support.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I also commend the Government on bringing forward this suite of amendments. My remarks will follow and parallel quite closely those of my noble friend Lord Harper.

This is a very difficult area of the law. Social media and the internet are very fast-evolving and extremely difficult to define. So the approach that the Government have taken recognises that this is essentially criminals advertising criminal services—theirs over the next gang’s—and it ought to be addressed. We ought to focus on it, for two reasons. The first is to try to tackle the individuals and organisations behind these activities. The second is to try to get them taken down as soon as possible. We know that is extremely tough to achieve—we have seen it in other pieces of legislation—but that does not mean that we should not try. I certainly think we should.

I am also with my noble friend Lord Harper on his applying a modicum of pressure on the Government by asking how effective they believe these provisions would be. When I asked that very question on a previous amendment, I was given an answer which essentially said, “Well, even if they save one crime, that’s good enough”. The Government should really come forward with a slightly more comprehensive argument. Although, on this suite of amendments, I am less bothered by that, because it is perfectly obvious that what we are talking about here is a large-scale, international, very sophisticated criminal enterprise.

One of the things we have not talked about that much in the House during the passage of this important Bill is the fact that people coming here through these means are very often paying very considerable sums of money indeed: these are not trivial sums. We tend to lump people into groups or buckets and forget that they are often making a very conscious choice, looking at the price and the chance of being either diverted or sent back when they arrive in the UK. From the information that the Minister provided to me by way of a letter, we know that the chances of being removed are around 4%— there is a 96% chance of being successful in remaining—so we have a huge prize for people who wish to come to the country through illegal means and we need to do everything possible to disrupt that. So I hope the Government have got more or less the right approach and I wish them every good fortune in the effectiveness of those amendments.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Viscount has just referred to illegal means, so let me just get into Hansard “safe routes”, if they are needed.

The noble Lord, Lord Harper, presents a very intriguing scenario. If he or I went on to the internet to look up information about any of these issues, would we find an algorithm identifying us as being interested and trying to push unwanted information at us, in rather the same way as, if you buy a lawn-mower, algorithms seem to think that you might want to buy further lawn-mowers, and so on? I had not really thought of that, but I take the point.

On Amendment 14, perhaps I can ask the Minister a couple of questions. New subsection (2)(a) uses the terms “automatic, intermediate and transient”. In the next subsection, the words are “automatic, intermediate and temporary”. Are they different? If they are not different, why is the same term not used?

On Amendment 13, on the underlying offence, it is a very broad offence with a very narrow defence. Of course, I understand why the Government are looking at this. I do not suppose there is any way of not being left with a feeling that, in this area, one is always playing catch-up. I said it is a “broad offence” because

“the person knows or has reason to suspect”.

That is pretty difficult. It is certainly something that might be the case without reaching “recklessness”, for instance. It is another of these offences where there is a defence to prove the purposes of your action. I do not know what the standard of proof is for that. The purposes referred to include work as a journalist, which is not just carrying out work but facilitating it, and the publication of academic research. Why is “facilitating research” not included as well, replicating the first paragraph?

It has been put to me that the proposed offence will place a real burden on small organisations, which will have continuously to investigate the activities of their staff and members to ensure that, through the organisation, material is not posted online that might be construed as having the effect of promoting these services—I am sure that would be a dismissible offence, but even so.