Asylum Reforms: Protected Characteristics

Carla Lockhart Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Kirsty Blackman]

There should be some methodology, but the Government are going the wrong way on this. They are looking to tighten up the modern slavery and trafficking regulations and make it more difficult for women to claim that they have been trafficked—even when they have. We know that there are women that have been held in Yarl’s Wood or detention centres after being trafficked because they do not have the correct paperwork. Of course they do not have the correct paperwork; they have been trafficked, used in sex work and forced into these horrific situations, and the Government are putting them in a detention centre and then saying that they will not get a visa because they did not have the right documentation.

We have a responsibility to protect people. It says in “Restoring Order and Control” that there are some rules in relation to the European convention on human rights and the Refugee convention around which there are not discretionary powers. For some—for example, in relation to family life—the public interest can be balanced against that requirement. However, when it comes to trafficking, the Government do not have that discretion. If they refuse to believe trafficked people, and it is later agreed that those people have been trafficked, the UK Government are putting them through more trauma. They are putting people who have experienced worse things than most of us could ever imagine through more trauma because they refuse to believe them. Then, because they may disclose this late, as they do not want to talk about the sex work that they have been forced into and the rapes they have suffered—because it is very difficult to talk about those things—the UK Government say to them, “Well, you didn’t disclose this in time, so you can’t be a true asylum seeker. You can’t be a true refugee because you didn’t come forward and talk about the most horrific moments in your life to a man that you don’t know.” That is in relation to legal aid support.

There are major issues with the continuing lack of stability. The changes away from hotel accommodation to some of the accommodation at barracks can mean that people are more isolated and less able to access support. In Aberdeen, we have little in the way of lawyers who can cover asylum cases—and immigration lawyers in general, actually—and people are having to travel significant lengths in order to get that, on their £7 or £9 a week. Someone cannot get from Aberdeen to Glasgow on seven quid a week—it cannot be done for less than about 30 quid, unless it is on a Megabus, and even that can be quite dear.

Accommodation does not take into account the fact that provision is not there. If people are going to be put in Cameron barracks in Inverness, for example, it is even more difficult for them to get to Glasgow or Edinburgh in order to speak to the right lawyer who will be able to help and be willing to take on their immigration case. Creating that extra level of isolation for people who are already struggling—putting people in an isolated community in the Cameron barracks, rather than in a community setting where they can integrate—means that people who are isolated will become even more so, and people who are at risk will become even more at risk.

We know that even in hotels, people suffer as a result of their protected characteristics, and who are at risk of harm as a result of unsafe situations. That is multiplied when people are moved out of hotels into places such as barracks.

I have a few more things to cover. In relation to the assessment of safe countries for removal, the blanket designation of a country as safe is inherently incredibly risky. It may be safe for some people to be in Syria right now, but it is not safe for everyone. It is not safe for a Syrian woman who came here as a result of gender-based violence to go back to her family in Syria—or to go back to Syria at all—because of the likelihood that her family would take action against her. It is not safe for a gay person who fled because they were correctively raped to go back to Syria.

The decision about blanket designations is really difficult, considering the Government are saying that they are looking at vulnerable groups and talking about individuals. Creating a blanket safe designation that can be changed at any point in that 20-year period means they can suddenly say to someone, “You are going to have to go back to this country where you were correctively raped, because the UK Government have now decided—with very little in the way of parliamentary scrutiny—that this country is safe.” The problem is that we have not got that information. The Minister may feel that there will be special categories in place, but we have not been told that. We have not been given the impact assessment for how that will look. We have not been told what those provisions will be. Somebody who is living here, who is terrified about being sent back, has no comfort right now, because they do not know whether their case will be considered separately or whether their country will just be deemed safe and they will be sent back.

[Carla Lockhart (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

The hon. Member speaks very passionately about this issue. Does she agree that the same can be said of those who have been engaged in rape and criminal activity in Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole, but that they should be sent back? It is a real bugbear for people that there seems to be some protection for people who engage in those types of activity, so that they are not sent back to where they came from.

[Kirsty Blackman]

The UK Government have said that they are looking at increasing the number of countries they have returns agreements with, so that people who have committed crimes can be sent back.

Let me talk once more about the LGBT issue. If a trans or gay refugee is here, and it is illegal for them to be trans in their country—they are likely to be beaten up or correctively raped as a result of being, for instance, a lesbian in their country—the UK Government expect them to live openly here, in the sexuality that they are, but with the threat of their country becoming a safe country and their being sent back. People will now know that they are gay, because they have had to live openly here, and that threat of return will now continue for a significantly longer period of time. Gay and trans people are now in a horrific Catch-22: they are forced to live openly here to have their refugee status agreed, but if their country is designated as a safe country, they may be sent back.

Pakistan is apparently safe for trans people because, according to the UK Government, people face only discrimination, not persecution, for being trans in Pakistan, despite the fact that somebody can come here as a trans refugee having been persecuted in Pakistan. The UK Government say, “It is okay, because it’s a discrimination thing, not persecution thing; don’t worry—you’ll be fine.” The Government expect them to live as an out trans person here—knowing that their cousin might see them on Facebook, or that somebody might hear about them living their real life and being themselves here—but, as a result of the UK Government’s policies, they will be forced to go back to somewhere where they are at an even higher risk of persecution.

On the Equality Act 2010, the public sector equality duty says that public sector organisations must have due regard to protected characteristics and try to ensure that people are not discriminated against because of those characteristics, despite the fact that the Government’s policies will more negatively impact people with protected characteristics. I have asked questions about the special consideration of vulnerable groups, because we need significantly more information about that. I do not expect the Minister to provide all that today, but I would like a commitment that that information will be forthcoming; otherwise, people will be terrified because they will have, hanging over them, the possibility that the Government will not take into account whether someone is trans or has suffered from gender-based violence in other places.

On the length of time before disclosure, I just do not believe that we can set a time limit when it comes to violence against women and girls or gender-based violence. We cannot tell people that they have to disclose things within a certain period of time or they will not be granted refugee status. That is not something we can force on victims. Changes need to be made in that regard.

There has been no impact assessment. I asked written parliamentary questions about equalities impact assessments, and we were told that they would come in due course. When? When will we get the equality impact assessments? I would love the Home Office to act in a trauma-informed way, but it seems that we are not going to do so. For some reason, the public interest—which is, apparently, in deporting as many people as possible—cannot be balanced with the need to look after people who, through no fault of their own, have gone through unimaginable horrors. That will have a detrimental impact on all those who are seeking asylum.

On the legal aid crisis, I would love reassurance from the Minister that the Government are going to make changes to legal aid. I do not understand how they are possibly going to manage a 30-month time period when they cannot manage the current time period.

I finish with a statement from Layla, who spoke to Women for Refugee Women about why she came to the UK and what her experiences were here. The UK Government talk about removing the pull factors, but the pull factors are not the economy or the fact that people can get jobs. Layla puts it better than I ever could. She said:

“I didn’t see the UK as a cruel type of country. The idea is that the UK is a Great Britain: we will save you, especially women’s rights, human rights. We initiate all the law, international law, you name it. The UK is a very outstanding country. But when I came here, I feel like it’s a fake, because why do you need to show that you are so good in the eyes of the world, but you are treating asylum seekers like this? It’s hypocrisy.”

--- Later in debate ---

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I have no time limit, Dr Huq, but I have only a limited number of questions. This debate is sparsely attended, but I do not think the Minister should interpret that as a lack of interest in the issue. It might well be because of where we are at in the parliamentary cycle—it is the day before our break, and there might not be the whipping on this penultimate day that there is on other days. In addition, people might not have understood the breadth of the potential of this debate when we talk about protected characteristics.

I want to talk about the protected characteristic of age, which includes children and young people. We identified age as a protected characteristic and we have signed up to the UN convention on the rights of the child. A group of 100 organisations, the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, have come together to provide an excellent briefing—I will send to the Minister, if he has not received it. Their main objective is to protect the rights and safety of young migrants and refugee children. I do not think I can get across the depth of concern among those who have been engaged in dealing with refugee children in particular over the years.

I have to say—I am trying to be as diplomatic as I can on this—that some of the language used by Ministers has been a disgrace. A Minister putting out tweets saying, “Deport. Deport. Deport.”, does not reflect what we are about across the House and all parties. That is not what we are intending to do. We are trying to uphold the British tradition of welcoming people here who seek sanctuary and to put in place a system that deals with their needs. Many of us have argued that the best way of doing that is safe routes, fast processing and more support for integration. I am not sure, and I think many people are anxious about this, that some of the statements made by Ministers reflect the view of the House overall—as I say, across all parties. I regret that. I was shocked even by some of the language used by the Secretary of State on the day that the statement on asylum policy was made.

Maybe I have repeated this too often, but in my constituency, I have two detention centres, and I have been dealing with them now since when I was a councillor in the Greater London Council—40 years. There are 2,500 asylum seekers in hotels in my constituency, and I welcome them. My community has held together very well on that; we rub together pretty well. There have been some recent demonstrations in one small area of my constituency, but that has largely been provoked by outsiders pursuing their own political ambitions. Overall, we have welcomed asylum seekers.

I congratulate my community on the work that they have put in. Various local community organisations and religious groups, across the whole field of religion, have provided support. From that experience, when we have discussed over the years those who have suffered the most, in many instances it has always been the children. I welcome Government Ministers to sit down with some of the professionals who are working with these children. I declare an interest: my wife is an educational psychologist and she works in the schools in our community that asylum children go to. Many of these children are deeply traumatised by their experience in their country of origin and by their journey here. Now they are being traumatised by some of the treatment they are receiving as a result of some of the political campaigns going on in our society.

There can be nothing worse for a child or family than to look out of their hotel window and see baying crowds outside, demanding that they go or that they be evicted. A few weeks ago, we even had a group of masked men who turned up at one of these hotels and tried to break into it. The police valiantly addressed that situation, but some of them were injured as a result.

Those children have gone through experiences that none of us would ever want our own children to go through. I am worried that we are in the process of introducing reforms that could retraumatise them in a way that some of them will never recover from.

The Government are on the first steps of the path of the new system that they are proposing, but a lot more debate and discussion needs to take place. I think this debate is about trying to make it clear to the Government some of the issues that we need more information about and that need to be addressed in a much wider-ranging consultation, not only with MPs, but with those on the frontline who have to deal with them.

Basically, I have five specific issues that I want to raise today. The first is indefinite leave. The second is family reunion and the third, linked to that, the review of article 8, which we have been told will happen. The fourth is financial support and the final one is appeals. I am sorry if some of what I am about to say repeats anything that has already been mentioned by other hon. Members.

On indefinite leave, the Government are now introducing this core protection status. I chair the Public and Commercial Services Union parliamentary group. PCS includes the civil service workers who process these claims, and I have not yet met one of them who thinks we have the ability or resources in place to conduct a review of every case every two and a half years, because that is what we are talking about. We cannot process the cases as they are now.

I congratulate the Government on the work that they are doing to speed up the processing. The reason we are in such difficulty is that the previous Government had started to speed up the process—I actually went on to the Floor of the House and congratulated a Tory Minister on doing so—but then they introduced the Rwanda scheme and everything stopped. It is no wonder that we now have a backlog. This Government are speeding up the processing, which I welcome, but then to load on to that system a new review every two and a half years—it just cannot be done. No one believes that it can be done. The proposal has no credibility

There is also the issue with regard to the individual country reviews. Exactly as the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) said, it is about more than individual countries; we are talking about case-by-case reviews, which will be necessary. In addition, some of the Foreign Office assessments of individual countries are either out of date, or do not reflect the reality of what is happening on the ground there now. As a result, the system will place people here in positions of immense vulnerability.

We should try to walk in that child’s footsteps. What will it be like for that child to know that, every 30 months, they will not necessarily be going to the same school, living in the same place, or having the same friends, but will risk being shipped back to a country of origin that some of them barely know? We need to think.

The hon. Member talked about working with those who are trauma-experienced. It is vital that the Government now do that, and sit down to discuss with professionals in this field the worries and fears that they have. Indeed, it is also worth the Government sitting down with some of the asylum seekers themselves, just to get an understanding of what they have gone through: the trauma that they have experienced is not only caused by what happened in their country of origin; the traumatising journey that they have had to make is also bad and, as I have said, when they get here they have been faced, under previous Governments in particular, with a “hostile environment”. That insecurity has led to deep psychological concerns. For us to revisit all that on children on a regular basis is cruel as well as unworkable.

Regarding the process itself, I still have not got my head around the way people can qualify for reduced routes—the five-year route, or the 15-year route. There is real anxiety that, if anyone receives any form of public assistance by way of social security, benefits or even accommodation, they will somehow be debarred from the 20-year route. There was even an example reported in the press a few weeks ago where someone had been trying to borrow money to pay back the benefits that they thought they had received because that would disqualify them and force them into the 20-year route. There needs to be a great deal more clarity about how that works.

As the hon. Member said, 92% to 93% of family reunion visas—I think about 1,200—in the last year were for wives and children. In my experience of dealing with asylum seekers over the years, the family has simply sat down and taken the decision that it will be the male who will seek refuge first because they are concerned that the female and the children will not survive the route. If we consider our own families, that is exactly what we would do: we would try to get at least someone to safety, and often it would be the one who has the best overall chance of surviving. Once that person is here, they want their family to join them. That is not exploiting the system; that is how the system should work. That is how refugee systems work across the world. By denying any element of family reunion—I look forward to the detail of the review on that—we are penalising the child by preventing them from being with their parents in the future.

[Carla Lockhart]

I have to disagree with the right hon. Member. I believe that if he were fleeing a war-torn country, he would want to see his wife and family—particularly his family—brought to safety first. Sadly, we do not see that. We see young males making that trip. That is not right and they should be sent back.

[John McDonnell]

The hon. Lady and I will have to disagree on that. In my experience, the decision for the male to come here is often made on the basis of the family itself asking, “Who can get here? Who can survive that journey? Who can get through?”. That provides some hope that the family can join them. There is a difference with those that move into the next country in close proximity—but, again, we have to fulfil our responsibility to the whole family. I am concerned that if we start in any way undermining that right to family reunion, the people who will be penalised most will be the children deprived of being brought up with their parents.

We are told that the article 8 review will take place in 2026. It would be invaluable to have the earliest and broadest consultation possible. Exactly as the hon. Member for Aberdeen North said, we need early impact assessments on all the decisions being made so that we have the detail of what the impact could be. We can consult the wider public. A lot of false information goes out into communities about the whole asylum process and causes resentment. If we are going to review article 8, we need to explain how it operates now, what its intentions are, what changes could be made when it is reviewed and what impact that would have. I am hoping that the review is about beneficial impact, rather than being a prejudicial attempt to prevent family reunion from taking place overall.

Let me explain very crudely my anxieties about financial support. The Government are going to revoke the legal duty to provide housing and financial support and make it discretionary for some bodies. I have a Conservative council. Its housing policy at the moment has changed the length of time that someone has to be within the area. It was five years; it is now 10 years to be able to even get on the housing waiting list. As a result, I have families who wait 10 years and, by the time a property is allocated to them some of their children have grown up and they no longer qualify as a family. We go through that process. If we make it discretionary, we need to know from the Government what happens to the organisations, such as my council, that are not willing to fulfil some basic duties and responsibilities.

I have one final point—I can see, Dr Huq, that you are getting anxious about time. On the replacement of judges with adjudicators in appeals, we need to see the detail, such as adjudicators’ qualification and training, and how they will be selected and monitored. The adjudicator is only one process, however. Unless there is proper representation and resourcing, particularly of legal aid access, the system will grind to a halt, there will be bad decisions and we will be back to appeals. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North said, the bulk of victories will be on appeal because the system is not working effectively. I hope for a response from the Government and for detailed consultation, as rapidly as possible, on all these matters.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon]

My hon. Friend and colleague is absolutely right—I will refer to those matters shortly. There is no use saying that what he refers to is not happening or that there is a small number of asylum seekers—that is not the case. The images of small boats show overwhelmingly that they carry young men. They are more economic migrants—most of them look extremely fit and well. They are illegal immigrants coming by the backdoor to seek greater help in the benefits system, rather than the families I want to stand up for, who are fleeing oppression and threat to life.

[Carla Lockhart]

I thank my hon. Friend for his speech; he is doing an excellent job. Does he agree that people are concerned about spiralling costs? Asylum seeker accommodation costs are set to rise to £15.3 billion across the UK over the next decade, including from £100 million to £400 million in Northern Ireland. When our services are already at breaking point, that is frustrating people. Surely the Government have a duty to look after the people who are born and raised here before committing to that spend.

[Jim Shannon]

My hon. Friend and colleague is right. I know that the Minister will consider all these matters, and I hope that he will give us an answer to that question. I can understand why so many are outraged that we would take winter fuel payments away from our own hard-working pensioners while doing nothing about migrants who seem to want an easy way of life. People have that perception about those who come along on plastic boats from Calais to Dover. I want us to put those migrants aside very quickly.

I try to be compassionate and understanding in everything I do in this House—although I am no better than anybody else—but I see a very clear difference between an economic migrant who wants to use the benefits system and a family who have no safe place to be. That must be highlighted. As a member of APPG for international freedom of religion or belief, Dr Huq, you will understand only too well that many Christians are persecuted in Syria and across the middle east, and in India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Myanmar. All being well, on 8 January we will have a Westminster Hall debate on the persecution of Christians in Myanmar.

The previous Government had a Syrian resettlement scheme, and six Syrian families came to Newtownards. They did not have a big grasp of the language, but our community drew together and supported them. Those six families are still there. They have had children there, they have jobs, they have learned the language, they have children at school, and they have houses. They did so by their own bootstraps, so to speak, and that should be recognised as something good that happens.

I believe that the Government must make changes to the system and take a hard line, returning those young men back to France or wherever they have travelled from or through, but I have a genuine fear that these changes may prevent those who are truly in need of asylum from claiming it. By the end of 2024, 132 million people had been forced to flee their homes. I have a large number of figures here, and I do not have time to mention them all, but there are 42.7 million refugees, 5.8 million people in need of international protection and 4.4 million stateless persons. It is clear that we cannot take them all in. That is why we must have a robust system in place to provide foreign aid to help where we can and take those who specifically need our help.

We cannot and must not allow the abuse of the system to end the system in its entirety—the goodness of the system that the Minister and the Government are trying to bring in—in the same way that we do not allow the abuse of drugs to prevent doctors from using the rules and regulations to prescribe them. Across the world, there are almost 74 million internally displaced people and 8.4 million asylum seekers. Again, we cannot take them all, but we can take some—I think we have a duty to do so.

We need a fit-for-purpose system that allows those who are persecuted for their faith to find a refuge and build a life with their families, such as those Syrian families who came to Newtownards eight or nine years ago. They are integrated—part of us—and contributing to society there. They want to assimilate, become British and espouse our values. We must remind ourselves of our all-important British values of tolerance and compassion as we address this problem without literally throwing the babies out with the bathwater—or English channel water, as the case may be. I thank the Minister in anticipation of his answer. I also thank the two Opposition spokespeople, who I know will make valuable contributions. I wish you, Dr Huq, and all colleagues a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.