Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Viscount Goschen and Lord German

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.