Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 28th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Davies in his amendments. They seem to me to be eminently sensible. I wholly concur with him, as do most people increasingly in the country, that there is no sense of urgency, no sense of grip and a total lack of confidence when it comes to the Government’s handling of the immigration crisis.

The appointment of a Border Security Commander, and limiting that appointment to a civil servant, is a mistake, particularly when we look at other civil servants. When I was a Minister, I had excellent civil servants, and I have nothing to say against them. The great majority of them do an extremely good job. But when we have Joanna Rowland, the Home Office’s director-general for customer services, in charge of accommodating asylum seekers, standing down because of the failure of that, why should we have faith that someone just selected from the Civil Service should be appropriate to fulfil this role?

We are missing a huge mistake in this whole immigration debate. There is a huge backlog in the processing of asylum cases. Why have the Government not come forward with an idea of having an equivalent to Nightingale hospitals, which is what we had during the Covid pandemic, to process this? In my opinion, there is a whole raft of professionals in this country who are retired far too early. We in this House are the last vestiges of people who never retire, but there are an awful lot of people in this House who have retired, or been forced to retire, from their professions—be they judges, solicitors, army officers from the military or magistrates—who would willingly serve, if encouraged to do so, on a series of tribunals up and down the country, so as to better process the backlog in immigration cases.

If you look at the appointment of this incredibly important role, the Border Security Commander is in charge of liaising with Border Force, the National Crime Agency, the Immigration Service and Immigration Enforcement, and the goal is to deliver a safe and effective border. That has not happened to date. I just do not understand the rationale behind why this legislation is limiting the appointment of such a person, with the very narrow criteria that it has, to a civil servant. There must be plenty of other people out there who would be qualified to do this job who are not necessarily from the Civil Service.

I urge the Government to underline the sense of crisis there is in this country. It is benefiting parties and groups in this country that we would rather it did not, because there is a feeling up and down the country that the Government simply have not got control of our borders. There are those who may argue that the appointment of this individual is totemic, that they do not have sufficient power and that the powers will not kick in until later. Those are other arguments. My argument is that, if we have a national crisis which is set to get only worse, we should look at the whole cadre of recently retired professionals who would step up to serve, right across the board, in dealing with the backlog and this immigration crisis. We should look at the best candidates available to fulfil this particular job and not limit it to somebody from the Civil Service.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 26 in this group, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord German, on co-operation with Europol. I think the reason it has been grouped here is that it would help boost the effectiveness of the Border Security Commander.

The Government recently published the implementation report on the trade and co-operation agreement with the EU. It was implemented in 2023-24, so this was a bit out of date by the time it was published just last month. Under the section on

“Law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters”,


there is a paragraph that says that:

“Under the TCA, the UK continues to co-operate with Europol and it continues to have a strong multi-agency liaison bureau at The Hague delivering operational activity against the most significant crime groups”.


There is one interesting reference in the trade and co-operation agreement—for the nerds out there, it is at Article 568, paragraph 7. It says that:

“Liaison officers from the United Kingdom and representatives of the competent authorities of the United Kingdom may be invited to operational meetings”.


That sums up the challenge that we have outside the European Union. We only “may” be invited. We have no rights. It is all grace and favour.

I watched the recent session of the Home Affairs Committee in the other place with the Border Security Commander, Martin Hewitt, and the National Crime Agency’s director general for operations, Rob Jones. Asked about European co-operation, Mr Hewitt said,

“we retained really good … law enforcement co-operation”.

However, Mr Jones amplified that by saying,

“we have mitigated the impact”

of Brexit and

“we have recovered those relationships in terms of law enforcement”

and have positive joint operations. He also said:

“We have more people in Europol than we have ever had”.


I assume he was thinking that the committee would be impressed by that, but I believe he was making the best of a bad job. I imagine that we have more people at Europol than ever before because, whereas in the past British police officers could access European databases from their desks in the UK, now we need a host of liaison officers attached to Europol HQ to handle the red tape of individual information requests and to run around seeing whether we might be invited to meetings.