National Security (State Threats) Bill

John Hayes Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 17th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

The right hon. Gentleman is right. It is incumbent on all parliamentarians to reflect on the platforms we appear on, and what those platforms are seeking to do. There will always be a balance to be struck with freedom of speech and other matters, but where activities lead people to fall foul of the law, they will be pursued with the full force of the law—whether that is this Bill, the National Security Act 2023, or any other part of our criminal legislation framework.

On the attacks on the Prime Minister’s home, let me just say, factually, what happened in the criminal justice system. It was not part of the prosecution’s case that there was any additional direction of that activity. That was not part of the evidence. I would not want to let that stand without making that clear about the prosecution.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The Home Secretary will know that I am an admirer of hers, and we tend to agree about much. We certainly agree about the threat posed by Iran. She will be familiar with the report produced by the Intelligence and Security Committee, of which I am pleased to be a member—indeed, I am basking in the glory of the compliments that the ISC has already received—which said:

“Iran poses a wide-ranging, persistent and unpredictable threat to the UK, UK nationals, and UK interests. Iran has a high appetite for risk when conducting offensive activity and”—

this is the critical point—

“its intelligence services are ferociously well-resourced with significant areas of asymmetric strength.”

Iran is a particular threat, and the Home Secretary will well understand that the way it uses its intelligence services is entirely different from the way that we see our intelligence services in this country. I have no doubt that she is mindful of that fact in relation to the Bill. I see this Bill as quite closely associated with how we deal with Iran. Will the Home Secretary comment on that?

On a point raised by the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and my right hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard), one way of dealing with oversight would be for the ISC to be pre-briefed by a Minister when proscription was considered, rather than it having to play catch up afterwards.

[Shabana Mahmood]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his contribution. The Bill seeks to create the legal framework by which designations will be made in future. The Bill will hopefully be approved quickly by Parliament, and I will seek to move forward with designations as quickly as possible, to deal with the threats that I am discussing in the House today.

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman would agree that the fact that I have spent some time considering the different nature of the threat posed by these three states in particular shows that we are very alive to the ways in which they use their unique positions to pose a threat to us in the United Kingdom. He is right about the way in which Iran operates; it is different from how Russia and China operate. The Government have to be alive to the different type of risks posed by these three countries in particular. At the moment, those countries account for a large proportion of the hostile activities that are monitored by our security services, but those activities are not exclusive to those three countries.

On matters of oversight, I will repeat my starting position. I do think that our current framework is robust and has stood the test of time. Of course, things change, and we would review the framework all the time anyway. I repeat my general offer—I suspect that I am making it to the whole of the ISC, given how well represented it is in this debate—of a conversation to pick up any concerns that its members have. The Minister for Security and I will make sure that we consider any additional proposals fully, but I am mindful that we do not want a position in which the Government cannot act quickly, or to over-regulate what is necessarily an Executive function, as speed is often of the essence. With that understood, a sensible conversation is always welcome.

In relation to Iran, Members will be aware that two men await trial under the National Security Act for the surveillance of Jewish sites. While investigations remain ongoing, the police are exploring potential links between Iran and the spate of arson attacks directed at our Jewish community in London. Faced with this intolerable hostility, our nation has bolstered its defences. The National Security Act, brought forward by the previous Government and supported by Labour, rightly commanded support from both sides of the House. It has given our authorities new tools and provided the legal underpinning for a series of complex and sensitive investigations, and it has secured important convictions, including of two men for gathering information and conducting surveillance to assist the Chinese state.

In addition, the foreign influence registration scheme has been in force for close to a year. Russia and Iran are placed on its enhanced tier. Anyone now conducting activity on behalf of those states faces a clear choice: identify themselves and register their activity, or face the prospect of prison.

Sanctions remain a vital tool in our action against hostile states. The UK now has more than 550 sanctions against Iranian-linked individuals and organisations, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in its entirety. Through measures like these, we have made this country a harder target. However, as we improve our defences, our adversaries respond and change their behaviour to pose new threats to our country. That has been particularly evident in the rising use of proxy groups—criminal gangs, professional enablers and front companies that do the bidding of a foreign power, against the interests of this country, in exchange for money.

There has long been a desire to ban state-linked organisations from operating in this country, and to target those who facilitate them. That is why the Government made a manifesto commitment to deal with state-backed domestic security threats in the same way that we tackle terrorism. The question was how to create the right legal power to do so. My predecessor, now the Foreign Secretary, tasked Jonathan Hall KC, the Government’s independent reviewer of terrorism and state threats legislation, with answering that question.

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[Sir Oliver Dowden]

I totally agree, and it is dangerous for this country that there is a mutuality of interests among extremists who do not share our values and hostile states who are opposed to us. This Bill should seek to deal with that overlap. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood is in certain places backed by foreign states and has an equally subversive agenda here in the UK. Although its relationship with violence on our streets is often more subtle and obscured, the threat to our social cohesion and democratic fabric is no less severe. We have seen in recent months the United States Government designate various regional branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organisations, and an excellent article by Lord Godson highlighted today how many European states are taking steps to address this issue. The west is waking up to this reality and we in this country cannot afford to lag behind.

[Sir John Hayes]

This situation is worsened, of course, by the values we seek to defend being used against us. Fair-minded British people want to believe that every side deserves a hearing, so we afford to some groups that do not deserve it a kind of equivalence—on one hand we have the west and Britain and America, and on the other hand we have these other groups. That equivalence is entirely bogus of course, because we are defending an open society and they are seeking to close it.

[Sir Oliver Dowden]

My right hon. Friend is of course entirely correct. Members on the Labour Back Benches are, given their presence in the Chamber for this debate, at the more hawkish and national security end of the left-wing spectrum, but there are elements of the liberal left who succumb to that equivalence argument and it is profoundly dangerous.

The 2015 review of the Muslim Brotherhood concluded that membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered a possible indicator of extremism. A decade later, in the current far more dangerous geopolitical environment, we need to look again at that assessment. That is why I continue to believe that the Government should take up the opportunity to do so. Some of our closest allies have done so and indeed have taken a much more robust approach. For example, the United Arab Emirates has designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation. We should ask ourselves why a country such as the UAE has such concerns about the radicalisation of its own students in our mosques that they are restricting their study here. The test under this Bill is rightly a foreign powers threat test, and there may well be other avenues for addressing this issue, but none the less I make the point that where an ideological body or a body linked to an ideological movement is acting to the benefit of a hostile state, this regime, alongside others, should apply.

Finally, I would like to address the future-proofing of this legislation, which has been touched on by some Members. Just as threat actors have evolved, so too have their methods, and foreign powers and their proxies no longer exclusively rely on the old-school methods of human surveillance, forged documents and so on. They can deploy bots that distort the democratic debate, as we have seen; ransomware to cripple business; cyber-attacks to disrupt public services; and deepfakes to impersonate trusted public figures. That list goes on, and AI will accelerate all of that—a point I made at the UN General Assembly ahead of the Bletchley Park AI safety summit. Cross-Government co-ordination to address this issue is more urgent than ever.

In this country we cannot just look at state threats purely in a physical silo, detached from the digital domain. Hostile states will use AI to automate reconnaissance, scale spear phishing, identify vulnerabilities, and so on. A criminal who once needed specialist skills may increasingly be able to purchase or access those capabilities through AI-enabled tools, and hostile states that once needed sophisticated cyber-units may be able to outsource, automate or accelerate parts of that work. Many Members will be familiar with the concerns and indeed opportunities surrounding Claude Mythos and its advanced cyber-capable AI models. That is a warning to us, but it is a warning of much more to come in this space.

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[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

I think we agree about the threat we face and about its scale. We do not need to spend the four hours allocated for this debate sharing that agreement, as the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Mr Barros-Curtis) rightly said. Our job is to scrutinise the Government’s proposed response to the threat, and that is what I want to do with my time. It is especially important to do that when the timescale for consideration of the legislation is compressed, as it is today.

I have huge sympathy with those who have spoken about the IRGC, but I would counsel against using this legislation to make the final decision about its proscription or designation. I do not want to steal the Minister’s lines, but I suspect that she will say to us, rightly, that it is important that we do not set a precedent, under this new system, of making designations in primary legislation, rather than by ministerial decision. There is an important procedural point there, which it will be necessary to maintain if we want to defend the flexibility that I think the Government are seeking in this legislation.

However, it is right to reflect on the problem that the Government are seeking to solve. The problem is clearly the gaps that they, and many of us, perceive in the proscription regime under the Terrorism Act, which does not enable them to deal with damaging behaviour by entities, including state entities, that are not captured by the proscription regime. That is the problem that Jonathan Hall identified in his report, and the problem that the Government are seeking to remedy through this legislation. They have made it clear that their objective is to present a regime that is broadly equivalent—the Government have used the word “equivalent” in their publications relating to this Bill—to the proscription regime. I want to explore that a little, to understand exactly how the Bill is going to deliver on its objectives.

I will start, as the Bill does, with the grounds for designation. The Bill is clear that in order to designate a body under this legislation, the Secretary of State must reasonably believe that it is, or has been, involved in what is described as “foreign power threat activity”, and then must consider that

“designating the body is necessary to protect the safety or interests of the United Kingdom.”

It is important to understand what foreign power threat activity is. It is defined in section 33 of the National Security Act 2023 as

“the commission, preparation or instigation of acts or threats”,

which are set out in subsection (3), and include obtaining or disclosing protected information or trade secrets, assisting a foreign intelligence service, entering a prohibited place, sabotage, general foreign interference and obtaining material benefits from a foreign intelligence service. Section 33 goes on to specify other acts:

“serious violence against another person…endanger the life of another person, or…create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.”

I set that out in detail because it is important to understand that for designation to be attached to a relevant body, it must have been involved in that sort of serious harmful activity. That is what would justify designation in the mind of the relevant Secretary of State: the body’s activities must be considered to be different from those of a normal state or other body engaged in its normal business.

In the explanatory notes, the Government give examples of things that might result in designation, such as, in paragraph 21,

“a foreign intelligence service obtaining protected information and inspecting sensitive defence or intelligence sites in the UK…a mercenary group carrying out acts of serious violence on behalf of a foreign power”,

or,

“a network preparing to carry out sabotage or threatening to commit acts that create a serious risk to the health and safety of the public”.

I set all that out because the Bill creates an offence of supporting a designated body, but in the construction of that offence, it is clear that the Government do not believe that all acts or expressions of support for a designated body are sufficient for that criminal liability. I want to understand why not.

[Sir John Hayes]

I hesitate to interrupt the flow of my right hon. and learned Friend, but the key point is legitimacy, as he and I have discussed. A state can be conducting legitimate activity by definition, whereas the bodies that have been proscribed previously are never legitimate implicitly. It is a difficult tightrope for Governments to walk, and that is why historically they have tended not to defer to a place where they chose to proscribed state bodies, because the implication is for the state as a whole. Where states take a “whole-state approach”—China being a good example—it is hard to walk that tightrope.

[Sir Jeremy Wright]

My right hon. Friend and Committee colleague is right in what he says, and I will come back to how and why we distinguish what the Bill proposes from the proscription regime.

On what is required to prove at least one of the criminal offences set out in this Bill, clause 2 introduces a new offence under a proposed new section 17A of the National Security Act 2023. The offence involves support for a designated body, but only if such support is given for “a prohibited purpose”, which proposed new section 17A(4) sets out is

“a purpose that the person knows, or having regard to other matters known to them ought reasonably to know, is prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom.”

That is an additional element that the prosecution must prove. That will undoubtedly make this offence more difficult to obtain convictions under, and there may be good reason for that, but if there is, I want to understand what it is.

I make two observations on the Government’s chosen approach in relation to that specific proposed new offence. The first is that this is not equivalent to proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000. I use that expression because that is the wording the Government have used in setting out their aspirations with the Bill. Although the Government intend designation to be similar to proscription in many respects—I accept it cannot be in all respects—proscription does not require an additional motive for someone who supports a proscribed organisation, but merely that they support the proscribed organisation and know that that is what they are doing. No additional motive, demonstrating some kind of animus against the welfare of the United Kingdom, is needed, and that is an important distinction.

The Government may say that the reason for that difference is to protect those who are engaging with a legitimate entity in a way that, just as my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) says, can never be possible with a proscribed terrorist organisation. In that case, however, I am struggling a little with the purpose and effect of designation itself. Surely the point of designation in the Bill is to move an organisation from the acceptable column into the unacceptable column. Surely the list of reasons why someone might be designated, which I read out earlier, is there to show us that those organisations, when they are doing those things, should not be worthy of support of any kind; but that is not, I think, where this legislation leaves us.

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[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The “2026 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community” states:

“The global security environment is becoming more complex.”

That complexity is being fed by the increasing sophistication of our adversaries. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden) talked about AI and the impact it may have in adding to that complexity and deepening the threat.

It is not just the US agencies that have come to that conclusion. The director general of MI5, in the speech referred to by the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards), said:

“My teams are routinely uncovering attempts by state actors to commission surveillance, sabotage, arson or physical violence right here in the UK.”

These adversaries, far from being remote, are real and present on the streets of our constituencies. That is why the Government’s attempts to improve the tools at the disposal of Ministers are welcome. It is why all the considerations made by Governments, of whatever hue, that are sufficient to deal with that rapidly changing threat deserve the hearing they are receiving. That is not an unqualified level of support—I shall explain my qualifications in due course—but in essence it is right that the Government look again at the legislative framework associated with keeping us safe.

There is a weakness in democracies that is not shared by most of our enemies. That weakness is that legislation passes through this House and is scrutinised, debated and considered. That takes time. Our adversaries can, at will and at a whim, change their approach. Keeping pace with that change is difficult in an open and free society. That very openness and freedom is, of course, what we are here to promote and, indeed, to defend.

The director general of MI5 went on to speak about the various enemies we face. For example, when he spoke of Russia, he said that the police have

“disrupted a steady stream of surveillance plots with hostile intent”

from the Russian state. He went on to speak about Iran. He said:

“Iran’s autocratic regime is likewise frantically trying to silence its opponents around the world, including in the UK.”

The hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley spoke about the number of plots that have been tracked in a single year. The director general went on to say:

“The UK was among the first to call out this wave of…transnational aggression”,

but in fact the problem is worldwide. On China, he said that

“clandestine technology transfer…efforts to overtly influence UK public life…harassment and intimidation of opponents”

are all features of Chinese activity here. Because China adopts a whole-state approach, it is not possible to separate the cause—China’s determination to undermine us—and its effect, in terms of the mechanism it uses to do that.

None of that is a surprise to those who have sat on the Intelligence and Security Committee. As Members will know, it commissioned a report into Russia, before I was a member, and then, while I have had the privilege of serving on the Committee, reports into China and Iran. Our China report says that:

“The fact that China is a strategic threat is not news…China’s state intelligence apparatus—almost certainly the largest in the world, with hundreds of thousands of civil intelligence officers (leaving aside their military capability)—targets the UK and its interests prolifically and aggressively.”

The Chinese are particularly enthusiastic about their activities in high-tech industries and academia. Their ability to gain a head start in the economy is partly as a result of their infiltration of the knowledge sector, their theft of innovation, and the ability to persuade, frankly, naive—I am choosing my words carefully, as I was going to say witless—individualsto be party to the theft of intellectual property.

China is active in its attempts to do harm across the world, and particularly in Britain, as the Government recognises. This and previous Governments have also long recognised that we need to update legislation to deal with that changing and increasingly complex threat—indeed, I note that both my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), present in the Chamber, and I were Security Ministers in previous Governments. The attempts by China to gain technological dominance, the attempts by Iran to infiltrate institutions, and the perpetual attempts by Russia, both in cyber-space and elsewhere, to undermine Britain’s interests and industry are clear.

The Bill is part of a fitting response to those threats, but there are questions that I want to address, some of which amplify the remarks of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), who sits with me on the ISC. There is an important matter for the Government to deal with about the relationship between the Bill and the Terrorism Act 2006, in particular, as my right hon. and learned Friend said, proposed new section 17A to the National Security Act 2023.

Essentially, the Government are creating a higher bar than that which applies in existing legislation. As was set out in the speech by my right hon. and learned Friend, we need to understand why that higher bar exists in the proposed legislation, and how it will be crossed. The purpose of the legislation is clear, but in practice it will only work if it can be supported in the courts. Designation will undoubtedly be challenged, so it has to stand up to the test of legal scrutiny. I have doubts as to whether the double bar that will be required to make designation practically possible can be straightforwardly met. Some more commentary from the Government on that would be helpful.

I would also be interested to know why a different approach has been taken for designation itself, and why there is no discretionary power in the Bill for the Home Secretary to take action promptly—such action will sometimes be necessary—as she can in respect of proscription. As I know from my time as Security Minister—the Minister, too, will know this—it is sometimes necessary to act quickly on proscription because circumstances demand it. The Bill does not allow that level of discretion and flexibility, and I think the House has every reason to wonder why.

In addition, the new statutory test for designation appears to introduce this cumulative two-pronged approach. We understand that proving that designation will protect and safeguard the interests of the UK is necessary, but that is not necessary in the case of proscription in the same way—at least, not in specific terms—and I wonder why the Government have chosen to adopt a different approach in that respect.

There are a series of quite technical challenges to the Government over whether this well-intended legislation—which I think enjoys broad support across the House, from those who understand the scale of the threats that I have briefly outlined—will work in practice. I hope that the Minister, during the course of our considerations this afternoon, will be able to address some of those matters, particularly in relation to proposed new section 17A.

The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service said recently:

“We are now operating in a space between peace and war. This is not a temporary state or a gradual, inevitable evolution. Our world is being actively remade, with profound implications for national and international security.”

She concluded:

“It also means everyone in society really understanding the world we are in—a world where terrorists plot against us, where our enemies fearmonger, bully and manipulate, and the front line is everywhere. Online, on our streets, in our supply chains, in the minds and on the screens of our citizens. We must all stand together against this.”

That means, of course, defending our values at every opportunity, in this House and beyond it; it means recognising that there is no ethical or moral equivalence between those who seek to do us harm and those who seek to defend us—whatever some of those who are either naive or malevolent might tell us—and it means being responsive to that threat, in the way that this legislation is intended to be, by having adequate resources for our security and intelligence services, and the right powers too. This Bill is an attempt to get those powers in place in order to protect us all. I wish it well, but I also press the Government to ensure that it is as effective as it needs to be.

[Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)]

As everybody in this House knows full well, protecting our national security is always the first duty of any Government, and we have heard a consensus on that today. The reality today is that the threat from hostile foreign powers and the proxies on which they rely has grown significantly in both scale and complexity. We cannot make the mistake of thinking that the threat is theoretical; it is real, it is evolving, and it is happening right here in our very own country. We have heard many examples of that today.

A lot of the focus has rightly been on the IRGC. Time and again, where we have said, “That organisation should be proscribed,” we have heard, “Can’t touch the IRGC, I’m afraid.” We have struggled with that. I am very pleased that our Government are today holding on to the Prime Minister’s promise that we will make good our defence of our country from organisations such as the IRGC.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) eloquently set out, the IRGC is at the moment—it could change in future—the prime example of a state-backed organisation. It was initially set up to defend the Islamic Republic of Iran, but what kind of defence is that? Iran is hardly a friendly power to us—it has an extreme ideology, and it seeks not just to defend its own country but to export that ideology across the world, including to our own shores, as it has done time and again. This legislation seeks to end that. We have had debates in which it has been argued, “Well, is it the equivalent of proscription, and what does the test of knowledge mean?” Those questions are right, and I am sure that the Minister will respond, either in this debate on Second Reading or later in today’s proceedings.

What I want to get across is how real the threat is. Everybody here in the Chamber gets it—I hope we do—but my big worry is that our fellow citizens in the wider United Kingdom have not necessarily got it yet. It begins with someone thinking, “I read something online that doesn’t seem right”, and then they are taken down a pathway, and behind that pathway are hostile threats—the IRGC and others.

As legislators, we have to make use of the legislative tools to try to catch up with that, but I think we also have another job: we are not just legislators but representatives and communicators. I really hope that this Bill passes, but whatever happens, we have an obligation to say to our fellow citizens, “Be vigilant. Be resilient.”

Organisations, whether the IRGC or others, will not present themselves for what they really are. They will hide behind the proxies we have heard about today and do all they can to take the people of this country and use them, either knowingly or as dupes, for their nefarious ends—and we do not always know what those nefarious ends are. Whatever the country may be—Iran in this case—those ends are not consistent with our values. We have heard about differences of views or opinion, but in this case they are not of moral equivalence. I totally agree with that point. We in this country rightly struggle to make sure that other voices are heard, but at the same time we ensure that everyone is protected. That is certainly not the case in countries like Iran, Russia or China.

Let us pass this Bill today, but let us not stop there.

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is building to a crescendo, so I wanted to intervene before he sits down. The vigilance he calls for, which echoes what I said about us coming together to make a strong case for our values and to defend them against those who assail us, is going to become more difficult because of artificial intelligence—my right hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden) made a telling contribution in that respect. It is really important that we are not so fascinated by the novelty of innovation that we wait too long to regulate AI. It took us 25 years in this House to work out that the internet might have malign effects. Finally, the last Government introduced the Online Safety Act 2023, and this Government have now taken that further—quite rightly. For heaven’s sake, let us understand the risks that this poses in weakening the very resilience that the hon. Gentleman has called for.

[Kevin Bonavia]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He makes a powerful point on AI. I was about to set out that we are already engaged in new legislative tools in this regard, including the Representation of the People Bill and the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill, which passed through this place yesterday. But we cannot just say “Right, job done; We’ve given the Government as much flexibility as we can, so let them now get on with it.” It will hit the wall, and we do not know as of today just how powerful AI in its widest forms can be.

I have thought a bit about AI and about how in many ways in this place we are always catching up. Occasionally, we make laws that push society forward—we have made some great social reforms through legislation—which is great. However, too often we are reacting to a problem that has grown out of control. Our procedures in this place will not necessarily work in the future with things like AI. That is not a debate for today. However, I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point strongly in mind.

Although I support the Bill, I make the point that it is part of a much broader governmental, parliamentary and—I hope—whole-society approach. When we think about the tools that the Government need, from what I have seen the Bill will give the Government of the day broad-ranging powers, but I hope and pray that this Government, or any future Government, know full well that they will have to move far quicker than before to do what is needed. We as legislators in this place must be willing to support that Government in doing the job in hand. I support the Bill and hope that, as a result, it will make our country safer for all our communities.

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[Sir John Hayes]

My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to Iranian activity in Britain. In the report that our Committee produced on that, we said:

“The Iranian Intelligence Services have shown that they are willing and able—often through third-party agents—to attempt assassination within the UK, and kidnap from the UK…There have been at least 15 attempts at murder or kidnap against British nationals or UK-based individuals since the beginning of 2022.”

[Bob Blackman]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention.

Another issue, which the Committee also referred to, was that certain charities in this country are linked to or directed and funded by Tehran. At least 13 charities are under investigation by the Charity Commission. I have asked continually for action from the Government and the Charity Commission to close down those charities to prevent them from acting against the interests of this country. At the moment, there is a lack of action and co-ordination, and it is not clear to me that this legislation will catch those charities, or whether there is sufficient legislation to do so. I would appreciate the Minister addressing that issue.

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[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) (Con)]

I am grateful to be called. I welcome the Minister to her place. It is a great job—I enjoyed it, and I have no doubt that she will, too. Though she may have shorter fingernails at the end of the day than she started with, it is worth it for the opportunity to serve with some of the finest people in our Government. The intelligence services and the police that she will be working with are truly exceptional, and it is worth putting on the record the gratitude of the whole House for what they do.

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the death of my friend Jo Cox, and many of us have been wearing white roses in memory of her. When we last met, Jo and I were in one of the Committee rooms working on a report together entitled, “The Cost of Doing Nothing”. What we were talking about in that report was the action in Syria, the way in which the extremism in that country had torn it apart and how we had not acted in ways that we felt we should have done. I welcome very much what the Government are doing today, because they are demonstrating another response: they are not willing to stand aside and watch as the country gets torn apart in different ways. I will make criticisms in a moment, but I would first just like to place on the record my gratitude for the way in which the Government have approached this legislation. I agree with the broad sweep of it; I just wish they had given it a little bit more time, and I understand that the Minister will almost certainly agree with me.

Unusually, I would like to praise the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards). He made an absolutely outstanding speech and spoke brilliantly, not just for this whole House but for the country, on the threat to a particular community, which is actually a threat to us all. It is absolutely true that in too many ways the Jewish community are the canary in the coalmine of any society. When we see Jews under threat, when we see Jewish homes frightened, when we see Jewish sites vandalised—as sadly we are seeing too much—we know what is coming, and what is coming is not pretty.

But let us get back to the Bill because, while it is welcome, it makes that tragic error that we often make in this place—I know we made this error in our time as well—which is to seek the rapid answer rather than the complete one. In doing so, the Bill misses very slightly the challenge that is bound to come, because I am afraid that we do know what will come. By the way, I will no doubt support the Minister when she decides to use the powers, because she will be well advised by the teams we both know so well, but we know that when an organisation is designated, it will lawyer up, go to court and challenge her, and we will find ourselves going around the houses.

This is where I confess a failure of my own. One of the organisations that I sought to work on was the Islamic Centre of England. That organisation has the same connection to Islam that Christian organisations that claim the crusader cross, and that far-right baggage, have to the church of Christ. Let us be absolutely clear: it is a vile political organisation dressing itself up as a religious movement—there is nothing religious about it all—yet that organisation enjoys charitable status, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) identified, and sadly, despite irregularities in its business and the way that it operates, it is still able to operate.

Let me list a couple more such organisations. Darul Hikma has praised Qasem Soleimani, the late head of the IRGC, whose death is certainly not mourned here, and it praised 7 October and the IRGC. The Abrar Islamic Foundation has praised Hezbollah and Hamas, and has run antisemitic and homophobic events. There are also the Ahl al-Bait Society Scotland—sadly, this reaches across the whole of the United Kingdom—Ahlulbayt Islamic Mission and Al-Ikhlas. They have all run, in various different ways, sessions praising the IRGC and supportive of Qasem Soleimani, which is entirely against not just the interests of the United Kingdom, but very particularly the interests of the Muslin community in the United Kingdom. Let us be absolutely clear about what the natural consequence of this will be: it will stir up sectarian and religious hatred. As the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley mentioned, we are first seeing the effect in the Jewish community—of course we are—but we all know where this will lead.

There are those of us who value all communities in our society, as I know the Home Secretary does, and who want Islam treated exactly the same as any religion. I think we Catholics are the only ones who are still lawfully discriminated against, but given that that excludes us only from the monarchy, I think we can be pretty comfortable with our position. Those of us who want to see all religions treated equally know that we simply cannot have poison poured into a few ears and pretend that does not happen.

I mentioned PressTV today, as well as the vile rumours being spread about the Prime Minister and others by Russia Today, among others, to show that we need to be conscious of what we are dealing with. Let us be quite clear: this is not a freedom of speech issue. This is no more a freedom of speech issue than the invasion of a hostile army is a right-to-roam issue. This is fundamentally about the deliberate actions of a state organisation—either the Russian, Chinese or Iranian state—to undermine us and tear us apart.

[Sir John Hayes]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. Many people say that he was the second best Conservative Security Minister, and I tend to agree with that. Might he continue to build the bridges that have already been formed across the House during this debate by inviting the Minister, when she winds up, to re-examine the charitable status of a whole range of organisations that have intimate connections with the Chinese, Iranian or Russian state, as a parallel exercise to the consideration of this legislation? That would seem to me to be a sensible move that we could agree today.

[Tom Tugendhat]

My right hon. Friend, demonstrating why he leads the list of Security Ministers past and present, pre-empts me; I was coming to China. Here I declare various interests. I am a patron of United Against Nuclear Iran, an organisation that campaigns, just as the Government do, and as everybody does, against Iran having nuclear weapons. I am not sure that it is a contentious organisation to be a member of; I hope it is universally supported. Also, I am sanctioned by the Chinese, Russian and Iranian states. I want to highlight some of the issues that we are dealing with that have not quite come through in the debate so far.

Let us be honest: this Bill is shaped around the IRGC. It is shaped around a state organisation—a part of the Iranian constitutional structure—that is behaving like a terrorist group, because it is the sponsor of terrorism around the world. However, it is not alone; for example, we know that the so-called little green men who operated in Crimea were actually part of the Russian armed forces. There are Russian groups, such as the Wagner Group, that act as state-sponsored terrorist organisations in countries such as Mali. I am looking at the Home Secretary, here: I hope that those groups will be encapsulated in the Bill. It certainly reads as though it will cover them.

Let us look a little more directly at one question. There is an organisation that should be captured in this Bill but I suspect will not be: TikTok. The Home Secretary may wonder why I raise TikTok, so let me be quite clear. There are many social media platforms around the world, and I am not going to pretend that many of them are any better than a cesspit. They tend to encourage various forms of hatred. As an aside, when I meet people who have posted on those platforms in the flesh at constituency events, it turns out that they are absolutely charming people who would never be quite so rude to one’s face, but they are utterly vile online. That is quite remarkable, but there we go. I mention TikTok for this reason: other social media platforms respond to the triggers involved in advertising. Effectively, they respond to the interests of their shareholders. They may or may not like the product, but we know what they are doing. Unlike other platforms, which are edited for profit, TikTok is edited for effect. That is the difference.

Let us look at the TikTok effect after 7 October, for example. It did not push a particular ideology. It did not try to tell us, as the Soviets did in the 1920s, that more tractors were being produced in Minsk than in Manchester, or wherever. It does not seek to tell us that something is better; it seeks to tell us that there is nothing there—that it is all about hatred and division. It seeks to promote a horrific outcome that some people want, which is effectively a destroyed, torn-apart state that is hostile to itself. I am afraid that is what TikTok is doing, and not by accident. Its algorithm is controlled by the Ministry of State Security, through the Chinese Communist party, in Shenzhen. It is not based anywhere else. That algorithm effectively acts as an editor—just as a newspaper editor would. It quite deliberately promotes not one side, but both sides. If one side is promoted, we may get persuasion, but we still get unity. If both sides are promoted, we get division, anger, hostility and rage. I do not think that the Bill touches on that issue, but I urge the Minister to have a look at it in months to come.

There was a time, 20 or 30 years ago, when we would have said that a state-sponsored organisation was fundamentally human and needed people. It would have needed agents—someone to hire the car, rent the room or whatever it happened to be—but that is not true today. These organisations do not need to cross the border; they can write the code, programme the algorithm, watch the fire start, and shape it. Sadly, we have seen such division inspired in the Home Secretary’s own community, between Indian-origin and Pakistani-origin communities. We have seen the same fire being lit, not because China particularly sides with one side or the other—it does not—but because it just wants hostility in the UK, and this issue is a dividing line. When we look at the designation of organisations, we must remember that those organisations include businesses.

I support this Bill, and I am very grateful to the Minister and the Home Secretary for bringing it to the House. I very much envy the Minister her place, and I am sure that she will enjoy her role.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Security (Dame Angela Eagle)]

I thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken in today’s Second Reading debate. We have had a very powerful and relevant debate, with a great deal of expertise in the Chamber from both sides of the House.

State threats are overt or covert actions by foreign Governments that fall below the level of armed conflict, but go beyond legitimate diplomacy to harm UK interests. They present a persistent and evolving risk to the UK and our allies, and that evolution and the hybrid nature of the threats we face today has come across in all the many excellent contributions we have heard from Members on both sides of the House. There is cross-party recognition that the threats we are dealing with are increasingly complex, and rapidly changing and evolving. They manifest across a wide spectrum of activity, including interference in democratic processes, acquisition of sensitive information, threats to public safety and disruption of economic security. We all know—it has been mentioned by many hon. and right hon. Members—that certain states have the intent and capability to conduct such activity to advance their objectives. We have talked about Iran, Russia and China. Such activity is often opportunistic. It is adaptive, and it is increasingly integrated across multiple domains, combining physical, cyber, economic and international tools. Increasingly, as has been pointed out, it involves new and emerging tools such as AI, as well as TikTok, cyber, AI and a range of other things.

In December 2024, the former Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley (Yvette Cooper), commissioned the independent reviewer of state threats legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, to conduct a review into the tools available in terrorism legislation to see how they might be applied to the problem of state threats. He proposed that there should be legislation to create a state threats power equivalent to that of proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000, and although the Bill does not deliver the recommendations of the entire Jonathan Hall report, it does deliver that proposal. To that extent, it is a narrow, not a comprehensive Bill. It is important that Members from all parts of the House understand that that is what the Bill does.

Rather than trying to shoehorn everything else into this Bill, it is important that we understand the nature of the Bill and what it actually does. It strengthens the Government’s ability to disrupt hostile intelligence services and their proxies by adapting counter-terrorism tools to tackle state-based security threats to the UK. It seeks to close that loophole. It creates a new power for the Secretary of State to designate organisations involved in foreign power threat activity, modelled on the Terrorism Act 2000. It introduces three new criminal offences of supporting, assisting or obtaining benefits from designated bodies. The Bill will enable proxy organisations to be treated in practice like foreign intelligence services, making it easier to prosecute those acting on their behalf. It strengthens the overall national security framework so that the UK becomes a more difficult operating environment for foreign intelligence services and their state-linked proxies.

Individuals acting for a designated body will feel the full force of our national security legislation and the potential accompanying prison sentences of up to 14 years. Designation will send a clear public signal to bodies and those prepared to assist them that their malign behaviour will not be tolerated in the UK. Our manifesto committed to adapt the approach used for dealing with terrorism to state-based security threats, and that is precisely what the Bill does.

The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns) is a passionate responder at the Dispatch Box, and her interest in this area and her commitment to getting it right are clear. The Government have been working on this legislation since Jonathan Hall made his recommendation. The Prime Minister, in the light of the arson incidents that we saw in north London earlier this year, gave a firm commitment to legislate in a matter of weeks, and we are doing just that to close this loophole on state or proxy-based threats.

To be clear, this legislation is no less robust than the Terrorism Act 2000. As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said, Jonathan Hall said that using terror legislation is

“shopping in the wrong department”.

This Bill will ensure that we are shopping in the right department.

[Sir John Hayes]

I accept what Jonathan Hall said, but what he did not say was that a higher statutory bar was needed to achieve a prosecution. What worries some of us, including my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) and me, is that the addition of that will make it quite hard to achieve a prosecution under the proposed law, not least because the Bill suggests that there must be a criminal purpose—an illicit purpose—involved in the association with a designated body. Will the Minister address that specific point?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I think that there are some necessary differences between a terrorist organisation and a state-influenced or state proxy organisation, which the differences between the Bill and the National Security Act—which deals with terrorism—seek to bring out. Jonathan Hall said that the Bill “does the job” in closing that loophole. He also told the House that he thought it would be harder to achieve the prosecutions for designated organisations than those for terrorist organisations. The Bill builds on a tried and tested series of measures in the National Security Act, and we have developed it closely with operational partners. It does the job. We do not believe that it is tougher to get appropriate prosecutions up and running in this context.

Immigration Reforms

John Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

There has been too much immigration into this country for too long, and that is certainly the view of the vast majority of the people I speak to in my constituency. I suspect it is a widespread view among law-abiding, patriotic Britons from all kinds of backgrounds.

Three myths have been perpetuated to sustain the level of immigration that we have endured. The first is that it is necessary for our economy—that we need labour. What migration has actually done is to displace investment in domestic skills, to perpetuate a labour-intensive economy at a time when we should have been automating and taking out labour demand, and to feed the greed of those employers who, rather than paying a decent wage for employees who understood their rights, were happy to take cheap labour. Those have been the effects of the arguments about the economy.

The second myth has been about multiculturalism: this curious notion that we can absorb all kinds of people into our country without a shared sense of belonging, a common sense of what being British is all about, and that these co-existing subcultures would somehow cohere. In fact, as Trevor Phillips, himself of course the child of migrants, argued long ago, we have ended up with the ghettoisation—his words, not mine—of large parts of our country, with co-existing subcultures, without the bonds that bind us together in the shared sense I have described.

The third myth is that migration would not have a detrimental effect on some of our public services. Just imagine the figures for a moment—I am speaking now of legal migration. Between April 2022 and March 2023, the number of people entering Britain was 944,000—944,000 people extra in a year—yet when we debate housing, transport infrastructure, the health service, the availability of dentists and GPs, we never consider the effect of population growth at that scale on the demand for all those services.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making an extremely eloquent speech. Of course we understand that the more people come into our country, the more the pressures on our public services will be exacerbated. The numbers he cited are post Brexit, under his former Government. If I remember correctly—I apologise if I get this wrong—net migration before Brexit was around a quarter of million people, mostly skilled labour or for specific work. After Brexit, the Europeans had to return, and we ended up allowing thousands of people to work in our care sector, in our NHS and in service industries that had too many vacancies. How does he explain the policies of his Government, which led to net migration rising from a quarter of a million to 900,000-plus, and what would he do differently today?

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is of course right. The blame for all this should not be laid exclusively in the hands of the Labour party or Labour Governments. Successive Governments have administered a regime that has been out of tune with the sentiments of the vast majority of the population, who know what I have said is true. For the hon. Gentleman is right to say, too, that those successive Governments have allowed unsustainable levels of net migration.

If we look at the history, however, we see it was once quite different. In 1967 net migration was minus 84,000, in 1987 it was just 2,000, and in 1997 it was 48,000. It is in my time in this House—although, I hasten to add, not at my behest—that migration has soared, and we have begun to accept that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people can be added to our population without taking account of the fact that that brings additional pressure on public services. That is not to say that many of those people do not make a positive contribution to our country—of course they do, in all kinds of ways—but to ignore the facts in terms of, for example, the growth in demand for housing is a dereliction of duty of which politicians across the political spectrum are guilty.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

On the issue of population change, it would appear that in the past 25 years the population of the United Kingdom has increased by over 10 million, while our economy has been largely stagnant. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that most people agree that there is a distinct difference between those who come from around the world to contribute to our society, pay their taxes, help the NHS and work, and those who come illegally? That distinction is often lost in this debate.

[Sir John Hayes]

Illegal migration, of course, is of a different order. Illegal immigration is about breaching borders. A nation means very little unless it has territorial integrity. What is the purpose of a nation that has porous borders? Indeed, it barely deserves to be described as such. The hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to the way our borders have been breached, with impunity, over time.

Bear in mind that nine out of 10 of the people who arrive in dinghies are men, and 75% are under the age of 40. Let us be clear about who is coming, and for what purpose. Many are economic migrants and, frankly, given where they come from, if we came from those places, we might come, too, because we would see a better life here and want that life for our families. I do not criticise the individuals; I criticise a system that permits that level of illegal migration.

Legal migration matters because of its scale and its character. It has led to a change in our society at a pace that many people find it impossible to comprehend, still less to cope with, so it is time that the political establishment, populated as it is by the liberal bourgeoisie—

[The Minister for Border Security and Asylum (Alex Norris)]

That’s me!

[Sir John Hayes]

Not the Minister, of course—I except him from that general description. It is time that the political establishment faced up to the fact that what they have perpetuated for too long is at odds with the intuition, experience and will of the British people. We need to cut migration of all kinds, and we need to cut it now, or they will dispense with us and elect people who will.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind Members of two things: first, interventions should be brief; and secondly, if you say “you”, you are referring to me.

--- Later in debate ---

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) on securing this important debate. Immigration is one of the defining issues of contemporary politics. Polls regularly show that it is one of the most important issues for the public. Much like my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), I am told by my constituents that they are fed up with a system that seems to work for absolutely nobody. I send surveys to villages on a monthly basis, and regularly more than 80% of those who return the surveys tell me that this issue is important to them and we need to fix the immigration system.

The Government’s attempts to reform the system are welcome. I encourage them to be ambitious. This is not about chasing Reform, as has been suggested by Members today; it is about focusing on an issue that matters deeply, certainly to my constituents. Earlier this month, I published a short report, “Backdoors to Britain”, which sets out 30 recommendations for strengthening our legal migration system. It comes after months of work and hundreds of written questions to the Home Office—I must apologise for pestering Home Office Ministers with them—which uncovered some alarming truths.

Nearly 17,000 micro-companies with five or fewer employees are eligible to sponsor visas, but there seems to be no data on how many people they have sponsored. There is a clear commercial incentive for our universities to undercut our legal migration system in exercising their power to conduct their own English language testing at the start of study. Completion of a degree, regardless of what it is in or where the individual has come from, itself acts as proof of English language competency for future applications to the Home Office.

Thousands of visa holders come through hard-to-enforce routes with minimal financial requirements. Two examples that I focused on in the report are religious and charity visa routes. We are operating a system where it is easier for someone to bring their non-British spouse to the UK if they are an immigrant than if they are a British citizen. I do not think that is fair to hard-working British citizens who want to bring their non-British spouse to the UK.

[Sir John Hayes]

I should have congratulated the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) on securing the debate and said how pleased I am that you are in the Chair, Mr Stringer.

My hon. Friend will know that the care visa system established by the previous Government brought here more dependants than care workers. Everyone who arrives in a country brings an economic value and an economic cost; they all want houses, they all want health and they all want education for their children. That was a flagrant example of what my hon. Friend described: more dependants came, and the cost was much greater than the value.

[Blake Stephenson]

I could not agree more. That is clearly a back door to Britain, and we need to close it.

Our public sector is dependent on a huge number of worker visas, while we debate—even today, in the Chamber —record youth unemployment. As my right hon. Friend said earlier, we need to get those young people into work rather than relying on importing labour.

Perhaps more worrying are the huge gaps in fairly basic compliance data that I uncovered through my questions to the Home Office. Responses to many of my questions indicate that there is a lack of robust data in the Home Office, or that data might be available but producing an answer is simply too expensive. In either case, without robust and easily accessible data in the Home Office, I and my constituents are concerned that our legal migration system is effectively unenforceable.

Britain’s immigration system is not working for the British people. It is time that changed. As we continue to shape a new immigration system over the coming months and years, I hope the Minister will consider the recommendations in my report, which I have shared with Members and might well be in his inbox. I am more than happy to meet him to go through the recommendations if that would be of any use to the Government. My constituents want this Government—any Government, in fact—to end the loopholes, close the back doors to Britain and build an immigration system that works for British citizens.

Animals in Science Regulation Unit: Annual Report 2024

John Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind hon. Members that they should bob, but I can see that four Members already know that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

The Minister will no doubt have highlighted the work of the Government. I know the Government are committed to phasing out animal testing, but the Animals in Science Regulation Unit report highlights the horrors that we unfortunately have in the system. Does she not agree that we need to work at pace to ensure that alternative methods are explored and implemented?

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

I am renowned for my generosity in the Chair and I am extremely open minded about how debates are conducted, but it is not really appropriate to come in two thirds of the way through and intervene when everyone else took the trouble to get here at the beginning. We are all busy, after all.

[Sarah Jones]

Thank you, Sir John, and I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Of course we need to go as fast as we can.

The strategy that the Government have published includes establishing a UK centre for the validation of alternative methods and 26 commitments for delivery or initiation across 2026 and 2027. It includes a commitment that from this year

“we will publish biennially a list of alternative methods research and development priorities to coalesce UK scientists around these areas and to incentivise partnerships between research organisations”.

In our most recent debate on this subject, we talked about this being an opportunity for UK science and technology to be innovators in this space and push forward new science. We want to go as fast as we can, and we will move as quickly as the science allows. Our commitment is clear: we want to work in step with the scientific community to reduce and ultimately replace the use of animals in research.

As hon. Members know, we have a three-pronged regulatory framework. It requires a personal licence—about 13,000 people have one. The procedures must form part of an approved programme of work, which must be licensed, and the work must be carried out in a licensed establishment. Our licensing is robust, in terms of the processes that people must go through before they do something as serious as test on animals. Even before a proposed project to test on animals reaches the regulator for consideration, it must undergo multiple layers of scrutiny to ensure it is justified and ethical, including from funders and animal welfare and ethical review bodies at scientific establishments. That is important.

On the work of the regulator, the transparency that we want to deliver and the changes that we have pushed through, we want to ensure we get this right. My noble Friend Lord Hanson commissioned the Animals in Science Committee—an expert committee that advises the Government on animal protection—to provide recommendations on improving the accessibility of the publicly available animal testing project summaries, and proposals are now being considered. That reflects our commitment to openness, accountability and continuous improvement.

Several hon. Members spoke about the point at which audits are made and checks are carried out. They are concerned about self-reporting. I heard that in the previous debate, and I have heard it today; that is an important part of the conversation that we need to have with the regulator. There is an important question about whether we are doing enough unannounced audits, and I am committed to going back and testing that. With the support of hon. Members, we can look at that properly.

As lots of Members said, 2.5 million procedures were conducted in Great Britain in 2024, so this is a big landscape and we need to get it right. I recognise the potential for error and wrongdoing. I want to ensure that hon. Members and campaigners are as satisfied as possible that the regulator is doing what it needs to do. There is a programme of reform under way, and we need to test it and see whether it is enough. I am committed to speaking to Lord Vallance. If any Members want to come to a meeting with the regulator, they should let me know; that will be important.

The fact that the Government have put £75 million behind the programme to phase out animal testing shows that we are putting our money where our priorities are. I know that hon. Members across the House will welcome that, but of course we need to go as fast as we can. In that vein, I again thank the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East for securing this debate and holding the Government to account on these very important issues.

[Seamus Logan]

I thank all hon. Members who have spoken, including the hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones), the hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman)—a colleague who is no longer here once referred to him as the Member for aloha—and the hon. Members for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell), for Stockport (Navendu Mishra), for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) and for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns).

I also thank the Minister for her very thoughtful response. I cannot think of many topics on which there is such a tremendous cross-party alliance, which has included the Democratic Unionist party, the Scottish National party, the Liberal Democrats and many Labour Members. As the Minister said, virtually no MP would disagree with our intent here, so that is very encouraging.

I am particularly interested in a couple of the Minister’s comments. She said that where a non-animal alternative exists, no approval should be given—absolutely. She drew attention to the need to move as quickly as the science allows. I am sure the chair of the APPG, the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran, noted her invitation to meet Lord Vallance to discuss these issues. That would be very welcome indeed.

It simply remains for me to mention my own little pet cockapoo, Lola. Anyone who knows anything about dogs know how sentient and clever they are. They have an amazing vocabulary, and they can count. The only thing they cannot do is speak—more’s the pity—although that is maybe not a bad thing in some ways. I will conclude by thanking everyone who took part, and the members of the public who attended.

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

The hon. Gentleman, the Minister and others might like to know that there is some evidence to suggest that bees can count. I speak as a beekeeper.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved, 

That this House has considered the Animals in Science Regulation Unit annual report 2024.

Illegal Migrants: Unknown Whereabouts

John Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rupert Lowe]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention, and I completely agree with what she has said.

The girl was then pushed to her knees before being brutally raped. Another—one of too many.

Last year, a 35-year-old old Iranian small-boat migrant raped a 15-year-old girl in an alleyway. He was known to police in Germany, where he had been convicted of assault offences. He told the girl she could be his “sex doll”, and that he wanted to—I quote— “fuck her”, before dragging her down an alleyway, forcing her to her knees outside a secluded doorway, and then raping her. The poor girl’s anguished mother later asked, “Why was he in this country?” It is a question that millions and millions of British people are asking. Why are they here?

These are unimaginable horrors, but they are happening, right across our country, every day, brutally and relentlessly. This House may not like to hear this, but it must listen; it must understand; it must digest. This is a political choice, and it is one that this Parliament has made. These are men who should never have been in our country to begin with. They should have been detained, and they should have been deported, indiscriminately and without question. They were not: they were housed, fed and cared for at taxpayer expense. They were released on to our streets and allowed to roam freely—thousands and thousands of them, unvetted foreign men from barbaric cultures that have no place in our communities. Words cannot adequately describe my disgust at what has been forced on to the British people.

Since being elected, I have used what little influence I hold to try and uncover the impact of these migrants and just how severely the British people are suffering because of it. I have asked more than 600 questions of the Home Office, but I receive very few answers, particularly when the question is regarding illegal migrants. “No data”, “not centrally collected” and “disproportionate costs” are often cited. I thought that perhaps it was incompetence, but evidence has come to my attention that proves the Home Office has been misleading MPs. On 20 January, I asked the Home Office

“what information the Department holds on the number of irregular migrants defined as absconders.”

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way—I did give him notice that I was going to intervene. It is inconceivable, is it not, that Home Office Ministers would not know the answer to that question? When I was a Home Office Minister, I would ask my officials for exactly that kind of information. It is not just that the hon. Gentleman did not know; it seems that Ministers did not either. I cannot believe that. It is inconceivable.

[Rupert Lowe]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his helpful intervention.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir John Hayes]

My experience in this House over almost 30 years is that most people here—indeed, the overwhelming majority—want to do the right thing, irrespective of party, and I make that perfectly clear through you, Madam Deputy Speaker. But in that spirit, I know that you will take the view that it is critically important that parliamentary answers be full and accurate. That is something that I conjured with as a Minister, answering many, many written questions in a variety of Government Departments. Will the Minister address the specific issue raised about the accuracy and completeness of answers to questions?

[Mike Tapp]

I thank the right hon. Member for his two questions. On the first, I completely agree that the vast majority of those who come to this country are decent people. The sweeping changes to the asylum system over the past few weeks further encourage people to integrate and contribute, and further ensure that there is not the asylum shopping that we currently see across Europe. But there are bad eggs, and when we get those bad eggs, we will do what we can to deport them. That is why we have also seen changes in the last few weeks to make it easier to remove and deport people. I will come on to written questions shortly.

More broadly, we must never forget that the chronic problems we face long predate this Government’s time in office. When we took office, we inherited an asylum system overwhelmed by escalating costs, record hotel use and a backlog that undermined public confidence. We recognise that the current arrangements for accommodating asylum seekers are not suitable. The Government will close every asylum hotel, and we are on track to do that by the end of this Parliament. We are working to move asylum seekers into more suitable accommodation, such as military bases, to ease pressure on communities across the country.

It remains necessary to use hotels in the short to medium term to deliver our statutory responsibility to ensure that individuals are not left destitute, but whereas over 400 asylum hotels were open in summer 2023, costing almost £9 million a day, fewer than 200 hotels remain in use. This is not just about cost; it is about restoring control to our asylum system. International co-operation is key to improving returns, and through our landmark UK-France agreement, we have strengthened our ability to return individuals to France. Our efforts are having an impact, and they will go further.

Turning to the focus of the debate, I am aware of the interest in these issues, and specifically in absconders. I will not comment on leaked data, but I can set out to the House the steps that are taken to ensure that an individual remains in contact with the Home Office, and the consequences should they abscond. An individual granted immigration bail may be required to reside at a specified address, and to report at regular intervals, either in person to a reporting officer or a police station, or by telephone or digital messaging. In some cases, a person may also be required to wear an electronic fitted device. Where someone fails to comply with that, efforts will be made to re-establish contact through the most appropriate method, which might be a visit from an enforcement team.

Individuals can come into contact with the Department for a variety of reasons, but if they are considered to be an absconder, their details will be circulated on the police national computer. The Home Office has a range of tools to locate those who abscond, and a dedicated tracing capability, which works in partnership with the police, other Government agencies and commercial companies.

Tracing foreign national offenders will always be a priority, and tracing is just one of the ways in which contact with an individual can be re-established. Many individuals who are out of contact may also re-engage with the Department voluntarily or decide to leave the UK. Individuals are also encountered through routine immigration enforcement and police activity. In all cases, the Home Office will consider the most appropriate action, including arrest and detention.

Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation

John Hayes Excerpts

Monday 20th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I draw the Chamber’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests and the support that my office receives from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy Project. This is a really important debate, and I congratulate my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan) on his eloquent introduction to this difficult issue.

The previous speaker, the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler), alluded to the fact that the Home Affairs Committee has undertaken an inquiry into asylum accommodation and a report is coming out on Monday. I will be speaking in a personal capacity as well, but there may be some overlap in our conclusions. One thing that was patently clear to us as we undertook a 15-month inquiry into asylum accommodation was that it has been a complete disaster. It has been disastrous for the local communities where asylum seekers are being housed and for the local authorities that are trying to provide services. It has been disastrous for asylum seekers; we found numerous pieces of evidence of safeguarding issues. It has also been disastrous for the public purse. It has cost an unbelievable amount of money, considering the terrible externalities it has created.

How did we end up in this situation? Asylum is not a new concept. The UK has faced asylum challenges for decades, but until six years ago we never had asylum hotels. It is clear to me, based on the 10 years for which I worked on asylum issues before coming to this House and my last 15 months on the Home Affairs Committee, that we must follow the money. The smoking gun in this scenario is the asylum contracts that the Conservative Government signed in 2019, when they handed over all responsibility and discretion to three private providers.

That has cost £7 billion of taxpayers’ money, of which hundreds of millions have gone on profits, but there is no effective oversight of these contracts by the Home Office, no holding the providers to account for failure and no grip on spiralling costs. There has been poor management of where public money is spent, and, as the hon. Member for Wimbledon said, poor use has been made of clawback clauses.

The providers would argue that they have never breached the profit share that the Conservatives baked into the contract at 7%, but as costs spiralled following the pandemic and the disastrous Rwanda scheme, they had every incentive to move people into hotels and keep them there. As the clear financial incentive grew, the Conservative Government put nothing in place to stop the runaway train. One of the owners even entered The Sunday Times rich list. Over the weekend, The Times covered reports of a property owner bragging on TikTok from Dubai about how easy it is to get rich by leasing his properties to Mears, Clearsprings and Serco. We have also seen real scandals in the Clearsprings subprime supply chain, about which there still needs to be more transparency.

The asylum accommodation contracts are a public procurement failure of the highest order. They were signed in 2019 by the Conservative Government, and they are fully that Government’s responsibility. The scandal is why they did nothing to derail the train when they could see it coming. The worst part is that we have nothing to show for that £7 billion of taxpayers’ money. It has gone on receipts to hotels and profits for private providers. We have no buildings or new social housing; we have nothing about which the public can say, “At least we got this as we accommodated asylum seekers.” I do not know about other Members, but I think about what could have been done if I had been given the share of that money for my city of Edinburgh and asked to look after asylum seekers and invest in housing stock. The things the Conservatives could have done with that money had they been able to get a more effective grip on public spending!

The Conservatives locked the country into these asylum contracts in 2019. It is a crowded field, but I think that is one of their most appalling legacies. Next year, as has been alluded to, is the break clause, where the Government have the opportunity to substantially rewrite or break these asylum contracts at no penalty. My questions to the Minister are: what is the Home Office’s assessment of how these contracts have been handled so far? What is his view of how Home Office officials have managed the contracts and their capacity to get a grip on them? Is he looking at the break clause and thinking about whether he should use it?

It may sound a bit technical and dry, on such an emotive issue, to be focusing on contracts, procurements and supply chains, but I have always believed that the role of Government is to drill down into the nuts and bolts, deal with manifest failures and make the system work. That is what I think the petitioners are asking us to do—not to posture, to grandstand or to use inflammatory rhetoric, but to solve the problem. We can do that by getting a grip on these asylum contracts.

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

We now move to the wind-ups. We have plenty of time, not that that is an invitation for speeches of an undue length. Members should keep it poignant but pithy. In that spirit, I call the Liberal Democrat spokesman, Will Forster.

--- Later in debate ---

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir John. I thank the Petitions Committee, my constituency neighbour, the hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Tony Vaughan), for presenting these petitions, and the hundreds of thousands of people who have made their voices heard by signing them. Despite the clear wishes of the British people, successive Governments of different parties have failed to control immigration, both legal and illegal. This is a complete scandal and is probably the single biggest reason for the declining trust in our politics.

It is a particular scandal that, as an island nation, we have failed to stop people from coming to this country illegally, as my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) rightly said. Since the small boats crisis began in 2018, nearly 200,000 people have come to Britain via that route. In 2025 alone, more than 35,000 people have made the crossing. On arrival, more than 95% of those people have claimed asylum, and having done so, they are afforded generous support, including direct cash transfers. Often, they are placed in hotels, where they can pose a risk to local people, particularly men posing a risk to women and girls. We have already heard about one such horrifying case from the hon. Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank) today, and I am sorry to say that there are many more.

Illegal migrants can stay in the asylum system for years, launching endless appeals. Increasingly, our system is approving asylum claims on the thinnest of grounds. The incentives are clear: come to Britain and be fed, housed and given full healthcare and money to spend, all funded by the British taxpayer. If the Government were really serious about ending the small boats crisis, they would put a stop to asylum support and close the hotels as these petitions request. Those who have arrived here illegally would be sent back to their home country, if it is safe for them to go, or to a third country. Those who make the crossing in future should be detained and swiftly removed. Anybody who arrives here illegally must never be able to apply for asylum.

This is a generous country, as many hon. Members have said this afternoon—remarkably so—but allowing access to Britain to tens and tens of thousands of young men who are willing to break our laws by coming here from the safety of France is not generosity. It is unfair, unaffordable, democratically illegitimate and dangerous. British taxpayers must not foot the bill for a crisis that they have voted to stop and that was created here in Westminster. We can end it, and we must.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford) is right to say that Britain deserves better. Many hon. Members have mentioned that the previous Government failed to fix the crisis, which is true, but we have had a Labour Government for well over a year and it is their job to control our borders. Instead of doing any better, the situation has got worse. Will the Minister commit today to preventing those who arrive here illegally from applying for asylum? If not, will he please explain why not? Will he please commit today to a concrete timeline for the closure of asylum hotels, and to fully tracking, including in the welfare system, the lifetime costs of asylum claims?

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

I call the Minister, and ask him to allow a moment or two for the mover to sum up at the end.

UK-France Migration: Co-operation

John Hayes Excerpts

Monday 14th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I do think we should be working with international partners; that is how we will get co-operation. If criminal gangs operate across borders, then of course we need Governments and law enforcement to co-operate across borders to take those gangs down and to get returns in place. The Conservatives claimed that they were going to get bilateral returns agreements in place: that is what they claimed in 2020; that is what they claimed in 2021; that is what they claimed for years; and that is what they claimed they would seek to do again in 2023. But they failed to do it year after year, because all they did was shout at France and other countries, instead of doing the hard graft to get agreements in place.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

This is about principle and practice. The principle is that every country has the right and indeed the duty to secure its borders, and in practice ours have become porous. I agree with the Home Secretary that global instability continues to drive illegal migration, I agree with her that we need co-operation upstream and I agree with her that previous Governments have done far too little, but the scale of the problem requires more than she is offering today. The trend is up. If it continues, 85,000 people will cross, each one knowing that they are coming here illegally. This requires much more emphatic action. Everyone who comes should be incarcerated and all those who can be returned should be. We must recognise that the asylum system is being gamed on an industrial scale. Will she answer this very straightforward question: what evidence does she have that hostile states and organised criminals are using this as a route to get people to this country to do still more harm?

[Yvette Cooper]

Let us be clear: we need action right across the board, from strengthening prevention—working in partnership with countries like Iraq—right through to law enforcement and increased action on the criminal gangs. We are taking action on border security itself, with action along the French coast and in the channel in French waters, and strengthening the returns arrangements. We are also taking action here in the UK, whether on illegal working or on reforms to the asylum system. We need to be clear that there must be strong standards on issues of criminality: anybody who comes to the UK through whatever route needs to abide by our laws, and that must be enforced. The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that we have put in place new measures to strengthen the criminality checks in the asylum system and to have much stronger action as part of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. I hope he will support that legislation rather than voting against it.

Crime and Policing Bill

John Hayes Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Johnson]

Every jurisdiction has a democratic right to do as it chooses and I respect that, but it is a tragedy when we hear of cases where late-term abortions have not been supported by medical care or the law, and women and infants have suffered significant harm as a result.

I want to raise the case of Stuart Worby. Some people say that this issue is about protecting vulnerable women, but in this case, which was prosecuted in December 2024, a man who did not want his partner to be pregnant, when she did want to be pregnant, decided to take matters into his own hands. He asked a woman who was not pregnant to get the pills for him. He put them in a drink and gave them to his partner, inducing a miscarriage. He has rightly been put in jail for that, but the case demonstrates that there are men out there who will obtain tablets with the help of a woman. That could not have happened if women had to have an in-person appointment, because the woman arriving at the clinic to get the abortion pills on the man’s behalf would be clearly seen not to be pregnant, so would not be able to obtain the medication. My amendment seeks to protect women—women who are wrong about their gestation or who are mistaken in thinking they have had a bleed or whatever—to make sure that they have a safe termination using the right mechanisms.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I am delighted to tell my hon. Friend that I, too, will be supporting her amendment. There has been a lot of talk in this place in recent weeks about coercion—in a different Bill and in a different context. The kind of coercion that she describes is a reality. It is all fine and well to have a fanciful middle-class view of the world, but as I said in respect of a different Bill, there are many wicked people doing many wicked things. The kind of coercion that she describes is the truth; it is the reality.

[Dr Johnson]

I agree with my right hon. Friend, and I shall come to coercion a little later. First, let me go back to new clause 1, which decriminalises the woman having an abortion in relation to her own pregnancy. It seems to me that what many wish to do is decriminalise abortion up until term. That is a legitimate position that some people take.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I think we all agree that there are concerns about vulnerable people and abortion law in this country, but we disagree about how to address them. I propose new clause 20 as a way to address those concerns and recognise that the issue of abortion access is increasingly under attack, not just in our country but around the world. If we think that we face these challenges because we have outdated laws in this country, why would we retain them in any shape or form rather than learning from best practice around the world for all our constituents?

To start, let me put on the record that I take seriously all the concerns raised across the House about abortion. I recognise that this is a complex issue, I hear strongly the stories about investigations and prosecutions, and I want to see change, but I also recognise that change does not come without consequences. New clause 20, therefore, is based on what is good abortion law—what many of us have worked on. It is based on what the sector itself used to say mattered, which was that abortion law in England and Wales should recognise developments in modern abortion law in Northern Ireland, delivering on the promise we made in this place in 2019 that abortion was a human right, that safe care was a human right for women, and that we should see a progression of minimum human rights standards on abortion, including through the proposals of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.

I want to start with how the new clause would do that. I want to be clear that only this new clause would provide for decriminalisation. Decriminalisation, as defined by Marie Stopes, means removing abortion from the criminal law so that it is no longer governed by both the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life Preservation Act 1929, because that would protect both clinicians and those who are at threat of criminal prosecution. Decriminalisation would not impact the regulations on safe medical use, medical conduct, safeguarding—I recognise that is a serious concern—or the distribution of medicines, and neither would it stop tackling those people who seek to use abortion as a form of abuse or coercion. I want to explain how,

In decriminalising and removing the laws that have caused those problems, the new clause would keep the 1967 Act not as a list of reasons why someone would be exempted from prosecution but as a guide to how abortion should be provided. Many of us in the House would recognise the shock for our constituents that abortion is illegal in theory and that the guidelines in the 1967 Act are the settled will of this place. To resolve any regulatory challenges, the new clause would require the Secretary of State to comply only with sections 85 and 86 of CEDAW—the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. Those sections are about minimum, not maximum, standards of care, and that is only if the Secretary of State believes there appears to be an incongruence that needs to be addressed.

[Sir John Hayes]

I am trying to reconcile the two things that the hon. Lady has said. She talked about the significance of the 1967 Act. When Lord Steel—David Steel as he was then—spoke on its Second Reading, he said that it was not his aim

“to leave a wide open door for abortion on request”,—[Official Report, 22 July 1966; Vol. 732, c. 1075.]

yet she has said that it is a human right and so people should have the right to an abortion. How does she reconcile her advocacy of what she described as the “settled will” of the 1967 Act—not having abortion on request—with the right to have an abortion on request?

--- Later in debate ---

[Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)]

In recent weeks and months in this House, we have become familiar with votes of conscience. The amendments that I shall speak to—new clauses 1, 20 and 106—are also matters of conscience. Although I am responding for his Majesty’s official Opposition, Conservative Members will have free votes, so the views that I express will be my own, and I fully recognise that there may be Conservative colleagues who disagree with me.

I recognise that the hon. Members for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) and for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) tabled new clauses 1 and 20 with the very best of intent. I have no doubt that all Members who signed them did so with the objective of supporting and safeguarding the rights of women, and I can unequivocally say that I share those aims, as do my hon. Friends the Members for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez), for Reigate (Rebecca Paul), for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith), and for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), and my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who have also spoken. However, I do not believe that new clauses 1 or 20 achieve the safeguarding of women that Members seek.

Views on abortion do not have to be absolutist. Being pro-choice is not incompatible with being pro-life when the foetus is at a stage at which it is inherently viable. Believing that women should have autonomy over their bodies does not negate the need for a system that safeguards women from physical and emotional harm. As we have heard, new clause 1 would ensure that pregnant women were not criminalised for accessing an abortion during their pregnancy. It would, however, retain the law relating to the provision of abortion in healthcare settings as it stands. Effectively, a woman in England and Wales would legally be able to abort an unborn child by her own means up to the moment prior to a natural birth, but a healthcare professional would be breaking the law if they tried to help her do so outside the 24-week limit.

[Sir John Hayes]

There is a calumny at the heart of this, which is that these new clauses are compatible with the ’67 Act. When breaching an Act of this Parliament ceases to be unlawful, it loses its force and therefore its purpose, and that calumny cannot be allowed to stand on the record.

[Harriet Cross]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention.

On the one hand, abortion would be decriminalised for women; on the other, restrictions on her ability to access that same procedure in a safe, controlled and supportive setting would remain. We must be careful not to create a law that has unintended and potentially harmful consequences, especially for those it is designed to help, and especially when those who are likely to rely on it are likely to be in a state of stress or distress.

New clause 1 raises many questions. Is it tenable to legalise all but full-term abortions in England and Wales, but not in other parts of the UK? What would be the legal implications if a woman in Gretna travelled 10 miles across the border to Carlisle to have an abortion after the 24-week limit that is in place in Scotland? Under new clause 1, how do we monitor such abortions that occur outside a healthcare setting? How do we ensure that mothers’ physical and mental health is protected and supported? And what happens to the once-delivered foetus, if the abortion is outside a healthcare setting?

As we have heard, new clause 20 goes further than new clause 1 in many respects, so many of the same concerns apply. New clause 106 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham would mandate an in-person consultation before a pregnant woman was prescribed medication to terminate a pregnancy. This new clause is not about making abortions harder to access. An abortion should, of course, be readily available to those who need and want it, and of course abortion medication should be easily accessible during the appropriate stages of pregnancy, but this new clause is about the safety of the mother and the unborn child.

Face-to-face appointments are commonplace for patients with a wide range of medications and conditions, particularly when new medications are being prescribed. A private, in-person consultation allows a doctor to be as sure as they can be that the woman is acting of her own informed free will, and ensures that her mental state is assessed and understood. It also reduces as much as possible the likelihood of medication being misused or abused.

Telemedicine, while it has its place, can never be a replacement for the patient-doctor relationship developed during face-to-face appointments. It has serious shortcomings. There have been many cases where abortion medicine has been misused following telemedicine, and there have been many more hospitalisations of women following the use of telemedicine. However, I stress that not all of these cases will be down to misuse; we should all be aware of that. New clause 106 does not attempt to restrict access to abortions, and I would not support it if it did. Instead, it would act as an important safeguard to protect women from emotional trauma and physical harm.

Draft Investigatory Powers (Codes of Practice, Review of Notices and Technical Advisory Board) Regulations 2025

John Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd June 2025 General Committees

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I am pleased to be able to contribute briefly to this important Committee. As the Minister suggested when he nodded to me during his brief contribution, the original legislation received Royal Assent when I was the Security Minister, and I was proud to take it through the House with cross-party support. I took a profound interest in it at that time and have continued to do so since it became law. I worked with the last Security Minister in the previous Government, the right hon. Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), on the 2024 Act, partly in my capacity as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister. First, that Act, to which this statutory instrument gives life, as it were, changed the process whereby warrants are issued, inasmuch as it enabled the Prime Minister to appoint five Secretaries of State, the assumption being that they would include the warranting Secretaries of State—the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary and, I presume, the Deputy Prime Minister, as well as the Prime Minister himself. Will the Minister say a word about that? It is not that I have an objection to it—it is important that these things are dealt with practically—but it would be good to hear the Minister’s views on that, as it is before us today with these codes.

Secondly, on the codes that relate to part 7A of the IPA, on bulk personal data, it would be helpful to have a further word about datasets with a low expectation of privacy. That is what the changes to the codes deal with, and it is what the amendments to the original Act addressed. As detailed in the explanatory notes, the public consultation to which the Minister referred was disproportionately focused on exactly that matter. A further word from him about that might be helpful.

Finally, how this is understood more widely is critical. There is still a lot of misunderstanding about the original Act, the 2024 Act and, I guess, these codes, too. This is not about collecting everyone’s data and making it widely available. As the Minister and other Committee members will understand, there are strict restrictions on how it can be accessed. The double lock—in some cases, it is now a triple lock—that we put in place in the IPA holds firm and ensures that this material is available only as needed, and the bar to access it is very high. I am sure that the Minister and the shadow Minister will want to reassure people about that. As they know, the way that this is perceived publicly matters a great deal to the security services, the National Crime Agency and others who might take advantage of these powers.

Immigration

John Hayes Excerpts

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

There has been too much immigration to this country for far too long. I have great regard for the Minister for Border Security and Asylum, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle), as she knows, but regard allows for sharp disagreements, and if she did not know that we disagree, she will after this speech. That level of immigration has damaged our economy, our shared sense of belonging on which social cohesion depends and our public services, by increasing population to an unsustainable level.

Let me first turn to the economy. The effect of mass migration on the economy has been to displace investment in domestic skills and in recruitment and retention of labour. It has displaced investment in the modernisation of our economy and it has therefore damaged productivity by inhibiting it. It has essentially created an economy that is low-skilled and dependent on the provision of relatively cheap labour, and is therefore unfit to compete in a high-tech, high-skilled world. That is what mass migration has done to our economy.

For evidence, one has only to look at the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs report, which says:

“we have found no evidence for the argument, made by the Government, business and many others, that net immigration—immigration minus emigration—generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population.”

The reason for that is that 70% of migrants are in low and medium-skilled roles. They are not the brightest and the best; they are not the people who we need to fill the vacancies that cannot be filled otherwise. Essentially, vacancies are being filled rather than providing opportunities for the vast majority of those Britons who cannot get a place in the labour market.

Mass migration has certainly damaged social cohesion by undermining our shared sense of belonging. We simply cannot import that number of people—many of whom do not speak English as their first language—without significant investment in integration; yet even if we were integrating at pace, the sheer volume would make it impossible to hold many communities together. We have seen social fracture, with a risk of complete fragmentation, in many communities.

Hon. Members from across the House will have visited schools where the headteacher has said proudly, “Of course, the children here speak 15 different languages,” as though that were a cause for celebration. Without a common language, there can be no currency for learning about one another and there can be no means by which we can share what makes us British. We have to promote the English language and we should abolish any attempt by any authority to translate things into foreign languages: let us make that a rallying cry from today.

Finally, the population of this country is growing at an unsustainable rate. We have heard already that successive Governments, beginning with the Blair Government, then the coalition Government, Tory Governments and now this Government, I am sorry to say, have failed to recognise that if we increase net population by 700,000 to 900,000 people a year, a number that equates to the combined populations of the five cities of Cambridge, Norwich, Hull, Lincoln—

[Mr Brash]

The right hon. Gentleman knows that I hold him in high regard, but he has mentioned the figures of 800,000 to 900,000 following his list of Governments. Will he confirm that those increases only ever happened under a Conservative Government?

[Sir John Hayes]

I did say that it was under successive Governments. The reason for that is that the liberal elite of this country—I do not count the hon. Gentleman among its number—that controls far too much of the Establishment and wields too much power is at odds with the understanding which prevails in his constituency and mine of ordinary, everyday working people, who recognised what I have just said long ago but were told by people who should have known better that net migration at that level was not only tolerable but desirable. It is a complete nonsense to pretend so, and every piece of analysis justifies that.

[Steve Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for giving way. Does he agree that this concern about the high levels of immigration is also an issue of democracy and the sense of people not being heard? I noted the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) expressing support for deportations of foreign-born criminals, but unless the Government use levers—restrictions on visas for those countries not taking people back—we will again see too many foreign-born criminals in our prisons instead of being deported back to their native country.

[Sir John Hayes]

I of course agree with my right hon. Friend, who as usual has brought a particular insight based on his long experience to our considerations, and let us just take one example of that. Some 647,000 migrants received health and care visas from 2021 to June 2024; 270,000 of them were workers and an extraordinary, outrageous 377,000 were dependants. Even—[Interruption.] Even, I say to those on the Liberal Democrats Benches, those remaining members of the liberal elite who still perpetuate the conspiracy of silence about these matters must understand that everyone who comes to the country brings an economic value and an economic cost, and many of those dependants will not have brought economic value. That is not to disparage them in any way—they are perfectly nice people, I am sure—but they are not adding to the economy and certainly not adding to the per capita productivity or growth in the economy. In fact, they are detracting from it.

[Cameron Thomas]

The right hon. Gentleman speaks of the liberal elite but he is being generous there to me, a guy who was state-educated; I am very much just a bloke, but I thank him. One thing the Liberals were elite at was pointing out the fact that Brexit was not going to work. The promise of Brexit was of course to take back control of our borders; what does the right hon. Gentleman make of the fact that immigration is now four times higher than in 2019, following his own party being in government?

[Sir John Hayes]

Of course Brexit and particularly free movement led to a massive influx of people. When David Blunkett, now Lord Blunkett in the other place, was Home Secretary, he estimated that as a result of free movement 13,000 people would arrive in this country. In fact, the figure was in the hundreds of thousands and when settled status was granted it turned out to be millions. So the hon. Gentleman is quite wrong about the effects of Brexit.

[Dr Caroline Johnson]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Sir John Hayes]

I will not because I know others want to get in and I am already testing the Deputy Speaker’s patience.

The truth of the matter is that we need to address migration not only for the reasons I have given about population growth and the damage to social cohesion and the economy, but because unless we do so the British people will assume, and rightly so, that people here just do not get it. Well, I do, and I hope those on my Front Bench now do, and the Government need to wake up and smell the coffee pretty soon.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

I do not think the Conservatives give much thought to anything in this particular field, so I would not even venture to give an opinion on that.

As I was saying, the Conservatives are in fourth place in the polls, and their entire vote has practically gone wholesale to Reform. This scrappy, desperate motion represents a vain attempt to stop that leakage and get some of their vote back. Let me also say to the hon. Gentleman that it does not matter how hard they try—and they are trying—because they will never outperform Reform, who are the masters of nasty rhetoric. The Conservatives are mere amateurs compared with the hon. Gentlemen of Reform who just so happen not to be in their places again.

The whole debate about immigration is descending into an ugly place which seems to fire the obnoxious and the unpleasant. I am talking not only about those two parties but about the Government too, and I am now going to direct my blame at some of the things they are doing. A new consensus is emerging in the House. For all the faux arguments and fabricated disagreements, the three parties are now more or less united in a new anti-immigrant landscape in the House. The only thing that seems to separate them is the question of who can be the hardest and the toughest in this grotesque race to the bottom on asylum, refugees and immigration.

The fear of Reform percolates through every sinew in this House. It dominates every single debate, and everything that is going on. Reform is killing the Conservatives, but Labour seems to want a bit of the self-destruction action too. Everything the Government do on immigration is now looked at through the prism of Reform, and they have even started to get the Prime Minister to use Reform’s language. The hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) could not have been more generous in his tribute to the Prime Minister for his contribution to nasty rhetoric. The thing is, the “island of strangers” speech could have been made by any one of these three parties.

[Sir John Hayes]

I reassure the hon. Gentleman that I have not changed my mind about this; I have believed it forever. I only change my mind about anything about once a decade. The truth of the matter is that he must know that, according to the ONS, the scale of population growth will be equivalent to the population of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Peterborough, Belfast, Cardiff, Manchester, Ipswich, Norwich, Luton and Bradford added together. That cannot be reconciled with the quality of life and standard of living that his constituents and mine expect.

[Pete Wishart]

I know the right hon. Gentleman does not change his mind, and it is something that we all love him for in this place. Maybe we should look forward to what is on its way in a couple of decades. I think he knows that a spectacular population decline will start to kick in around the mid-part of this century. Spain and Italy are already doing something about it. All we are doing in this place is stifling population growth through the two-child benefit cap—something that works contrary to what we require.

All Labour is doing is climbing on the anti-immigrant bandwagon, and that is alienating its supporters. I am sure that everybody saw the Sky News report this morning on the intention of former Labour voters. Sky News found that only 6% of lost Labour voters have gone to Reform. Labour has mainly lost votes to the Liberal Democrats and the parties of the left. In fact, Labour has lost three times as many voters to the Liberal Democrats and the left as it has to Reform, and 70% of Labour voters are considering abandoning the Labour party to support the parties of the left.

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[Connor Naismith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)]

The Conservatives have the brass neck to come to this place and get Member after Member to stand up and talk as if they are commentators. They are completely ignoring their role over the previous 14 years, when their record on immigration was appalling. It started with David Cameron, who promised to get migration down to the tens of thousands. That was followed by a conveyor belt of Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries who ratcheted up the rhetoric almost as high as the number of people coming into the country. Finally, we had the Boris wave, which saw net migration hit almost 1 million. I have to say that, when I was listening to the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) talk about the liberal elite, I wondered if he was referring to Boris Johnson, because it happened on his watch. Boris’s betrayal was perhaps the worst, given that he led a Brexit campaign that famously centred on control of our borders. The Conservatives’ 14 years in power prompts the question: if they want a binding cap on migration, who on earth would trust them to keep to it?

There is a strong case for control over legal migration, and I wholeheartedly welcome the steps outlined in last week’s immigration White Paper, which I believe will contribute to that aim. My constituents do not object to people from around the world coming to this country to contribute to our economy and enrich our culture. We have a proud history of that. However, it must be carefully balanced with preventing exploitative labour market practices that create a race to the bottom on pay and conditions in crucial sectors such as health and social care, as well as the need to build strong, united and integrated communities.

[Sir John Hayes]

I take the hon. Member’s point. As I did say, successive Governments are to blame for this, beginning with the Blair Government or perhaps even earlier. Would he, however, acknowledge that we cannot increase the population on the scale we have been doing without putting unbearable pressure on demand for housing, access to GPs and health services, and other public services?

[Connor Naismith]

This Government are committed to bringing the numbers down. Regretfully, the right hon. Gentleman forgets the role of austerity in putting pressure on public services, housing and the other things he mentioned.

Turning to the issue of small boats, I first want to acknowledge that this country has a proud history of providing refuge to people fleeing persecution, and I think most people believe in those traditions, but this should not be determined by one’s ability to cross a continent or pay huge sums of money to people smugglers. What we need, quite simply, is fairness and control. That is why I welcome the steps the Government have taken to speed up processing, disrupt the smuggling gangs and work alongside our international allies, whom the previous Government unfortunately spent a lot of their time alienating.

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[Katie Lam]

I wish to make a little progress.

Fixing this broken system is the single biggest thing that we can do to restore trust in our politics. That means control of the borders and an end to mass migration; we need a system that works in the interests of this country and its people. Those who have come here legally and not contributed enough should be made to leave. Those who are here illegally, either by crossing the channel or from overstaying their visas, must be removed. The era of taxpayers funding accommodation, education, healthcare and legal challenges against their own Government for those who have no right to be here must end forever.

[Sir John Hayes]

We should deport the approximately 1 million people who are here illegally. We also need, as I hope my hon. Friend will acknowledge, to look at the indefinite right to remain. All kinds of people—with extremely dubious pasts, presents and possibly futures—have been granted that status. Will she commit the Opposition to relook at that, because indefinite does not mean permanent?

[Katie Lam]

We already have committed to that and will continue to do so. It is a clear amendment both to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill and to the deportation Bill in the name of my right hon. Friend, the shadow Home Secretary.

Unless and until politicians of all stripes can deliver the migration system that the British people have voted for time and again, there will be no reason for them to trust in our political system, and they will be right not to. We have seen no indication from this Government since they came to power last year that they are willing to do what needs to be done to give the British people the immigration system that they want and deserve. The debate today, I am afraid, has been no different.

The Minister clearly wished only to speak about the record of the previous Government. But they are in charge now—and what do we see? My right hon. Friend, the shadow Home Secretary, points out the facts. He says that Afghans are 20 times more likely to be sex offenders, and Government Members say, “Outrageous!”. Well, it is outrageous; saying so is not. He points out that over 70% of Somalis live in social housing, and they call it race-baiting. That is exactly the attitude that has allowed our political class to ignore the reality of the world that we live in. No party and no Government who continue to treat the British public’s very legitimate concerns with such scorn will ever rise to meet the challenge of securing our border.

The hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) called for more safe and legal routes, but demand to come to Britain will always dramatically outstrip our supply. There is no number of safe and legal routes that will ever stop people making the dangerous channel crossing. The hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) called for this House—not foreign courts—to decide who can stay in this country. I admire his stance, and I look forward to the launch of his campaign to leave the ECHR.

My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) made a characteristically insightful speech about the substantial challenges of integration, and rightly connected that to the volume of immigration. No country of our size could ever hope to integrate that many people each year, and he is right to say so.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

John Hayes Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 12th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I wish to get on with discussing the amendments, but because I served with him on the Intelligence and Security Committee, I will give way to the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) .

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Is not the truth of the matter that showing humanity means recognising, as the Minister has implied, that some people are coming, perfectly understandably, for entirely economic reasons? If you thought you could get a better deal in Britain for you and your family, you would turn up and say you were claiming asylum on all kinds of grounds. That is the real truth of it. The system is being gamed and it has to stop being gamed.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Yes in some circumstances, but no in others, because some people who come over are genuine asylum seekers. Even under the right hon. Gentleman’s Government—when he, too, was in the Home Office—such people were granted asylum. As always, there are many different circumstances and each case has to be looked at and judged on its merits.