Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Bishop of Durham Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th February 2022 Lords Chamber

Finally, there is no question that we need urgent action and we need to be decisive. But decisive should never mean draconian. Current problems cannot be remedied by harsher policies. Offshoring is an extreme solution that is practically flawed, morally dubious and destined to fail. If the United Kingdom truly wants to be firm and fair, we must not allow this clause on to our statute book. I beg to move.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, in rising to support Amendments 100 and 101, to which I have added my name, I declare my interests in relation to both the RAMP project and Reset, as set out in the register.

When people arrive on our shores seeking protection, we have a responsibility to treat them as we would wish to be treated if we had to flee for our lives. It is right that we have a process to determine who meets the criteria for refugee status, but while we determine this, we are responsible for people’s safety, welfare and care. If we move them to other countries for the processing of their asylum claims, I fear a blind eye will be turned to their treatment. How will we be sure that they are being treated humanely and fairly, and would our Government even give this much concern once they had left our shores? If we look to the experience of Australia and the refugees accommodated in Nauru, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, has just mentioned, we hear deeply shocking accounts of abuse, inhumane treatment and mental and physical ill-health.

As mentioned in relation to an earlier amendment, I visited Napier barracks last week to see improvements that have been made since the exposure of the disgraceful conditions at the beginning of last year. If what we have seen at Napier is permitted to happen in the UK, what can we expect overseas, where accountability and monitoring will be so much harder? The monitoring of asylum accommodation contractors in the UK is poor, which gives us some idea about the level of monitoring we could expect of offshore processing.

What standard will be set for offshore accommodation? Will it be detention? How can UK safeguards be enforced in another country? Will there be a maximum period of stay? Minister Tom Pursglove stated in the Public Bill Committee that

“we intend their claims to be admitted and processed under the third country’s asylum system.”—[Official Report, Commons, Nationality and Borders Bill Committee, 26/10/21; col. 397.]

This is deeply concerning. These asylum seekers are the UK’s responsibility; they came to us to ask for protection, and we cannot simply wash our hands of them. What will be the acceptable standards of a country’s asylum system for us to discharge refugee determination to them? Can the Minister confirm that, if an individual is granted asylum offshore, they will be granted any form of leave in the UK and readmitted?

We had assurance in the other place from Minister Tom Pursglove that unaccompanied children will not be included in offshoring, but will children in families be offshored? If not, can the Minister assure us that families will not be split up in this process? We need to see any such commitments written into the Bill. I also want reassurance from the Minister that offshore agreements will not be linked to international aid agreements. This would be wrong, so can she give us that reassurance?

Offshoring would be a huge cost to the taxpayer. Can the Minister tell us what work has been done on the costs? Have such costs been endorsed by HM Treasury?

The financial cost is not the only one: there would be a significant cost to our international standing. Are we so keen to tarnish our reputation as a country where human rights are upheld for this inhumane policy, rather than one that is rooted in what will actually work to reduce the need for people to have to use criminal gangs? We will discuss these policy proposals in future debates.

People seeking asylum have arrived on our shores, seeking UK protection. We are responsible for them. It is not a responsibility we can pass over to others. The potential for standards and safeguards to drop is a very serious risk, with the challenges of monitoring and accountability at distance. They would far too easily become forgotten people. Offshoring must simply be ruled out of order.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, I too support Amendment 100, in the name of my noble friend Lord Kirkhope, to which I have been pleased to add my name. I refer to my entry in the register of Members’ interests.

The question of offshore detention is undoubtedly one of the most controversial aspects of this Bill, which is designed to stem the flow of small boats from France. The stated objective of this policy is one of deterrence, but opponents of the policy have rightly been asking: at what cost?

Before we look at the issue of offshoring, I will take a moment to look at and think about the sorts of journeys taken by those fleeing violence and war. Asylum seekers are frequently exposed to intolerable levels of risk as they travel. Irregular migrants face dangerous journeys: they are unprotected, they accumulate debt, and they have no legal recourse. The limited opportunities for legal migration force individuals to use people smugglers where there is a risk of being trafficked. Asylum seekers who fall prey to human traffickers can be exploited in both transit and destination countries. During the asylum seeker’s journey, the fine line with human trafficking—the acquisition of people by force, fraud or deception with the aim of exploiting them—can be easily crossed.

Just imagine you go through all that and end up on these shores. It has taken your savings and months of your life to arrive here from, say, Afghanistan, Syria or Iran. On arrival on our shores, we greet you and, before we have even assessed whether or not you are a refugee, put you on a plane and take you back to the continent from which you came. That action alone could kill someone, but my question is also: what does that make us?

Before I set out my reason for asking the Home Secretary to think again about the use of offshore detention and processing, whether in Rwanda, Ghana or Ascension Island, as we have heard, I will return to the point I made last Tuesday. The best hope of a fair, just and affordable solution to the issue of the Calais boats still lies with a diplomatic solution with the French and EU nations. Will my noble friend the Minister comment on the Telegraph story on Wednesday about the French President’s apparent openness to a deal over channel crossings? As I have suggested a number of times, a returns agreement with the French is likely to be the only viable way to stop the crossings. I imagine this taking the form of an agreement that those who have crossed here irregularly are sent back to be assessed in France; in return, we commit to taking a certain number from Calais. This is a win-win solution that would genuinely destroy the economic model of the people smugglers, would cost less and would be far more humane.

Could my noble friend the Minister also provide an estimate of the cost of offshore processing? A cursory glance shows that a room at the Ritz costs between £650 and £700 a night. Extrapolate that and one finds that it costs around £250,000 to stay at the Ritz for a year. The estimates of what the Australians pay for one asylum seeker held in detention vary from that amount to eight times that. How can that be justified?

It is not only the cost that concerns me. Can the Minister provide reassurance that no children will be sent offshore and that women who are vulnerable to sexual violence will receive proper protections? The concerning stories that emerge from processing camps in other countries should give us pause for thought before we embark down this road. When there are other potential diplomatic avenues that the Government are yet to properly consider, offshoring looks like an oversized hammer being used to crack a nut, with the potential for corrupting our character as a nation and our international reputation, and increasing racial tensions domestically and the administrative burden and cost to the state. I urge the Minister to think again and for this House to give the other place an opportunity to think again.

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The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, asked about children, women and other vulnerable people. Noble Lords are absolutely right that the Minister made our position clear in Committee and on Report in the Commons. I will not go further than what he said there.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

The problem is that the Minister only said, “unaccompanied children”, and did not refer to children in families. I am sorry, but we do not have the confirmation that this addresses the whole range of scenarios—such as families being split up—which we have raised but have not been answered.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

Before the Minister replies, I also asked some questions about children and, more specifically, about when they turn 18 and whether their age will be challenged.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I thank both the right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness for those points. Generally, in the asylum system in the UK, when someone is about to turn 18, their status changes.

The right reverend Prelate is absolutely right; I did not answer questions about all children in all situations. On the previous day in Committee, I went at length through the routes by which children and families can come to the UK—there are several routes, and I think I cited four.

My noble friend Lady Stroud asked about victims of modern slavery and human trafficking. We will only ever act in line with our commitments under our international legal obligations, including those which pertain to potential victims of modern slavery.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

The Minister has made me even more disturbed. She has not said—and neither has anyone in the other place—that families and children will not be offshored.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

As I have just said, I will not go any further than my honourable friend did in the House of Common, save to say that people who—

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[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Going through the amendments this morning in preparation for this evening, I got quite tearful when I read these amendments because my family is incredibly important to me—every single one of them. I love them and I do not want to lose them or break up in any way from them. The thought that we in Britain could be the cause of families separating made me very upset.

I have signed two of these amendments, but they are all good amendments. The Government really ought to look into their own hearts and think about how they would feel if their families were broken up, through no fault of their own, because of despotic powers or other reasons. It is time to be a little bit kinder in this Bill, so please will the Government accept these amendments?

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I specifically support Amendment 117, to which I have added my name, but I support all these amendments around family reunion. I declare my interests in the register around RAMP and Reset as before.

Acknowledging that when people are forcibly displaced they end up in different places, often having lost family members, UNHCR research has shown that families often set out together but become separated along the way. Reconnecting those families, or, where some family members are lost, reconnecting people with other relatives, really matters. In seeking protection, those seeking asylum want to do so alongside the family that they have. This is better for individuals—their well-being and their future prospects—and for the community as a whole. It is therefore also better for social integration.

In my conversations with refugees and people seeking asylum, the whereabouts and safety of family is generally the number one preoccupation that they raise. This concern overrides everything. When we speak about family, it is not purely spouses and children but aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. Organisations working with refugees, such as Safe Passage, know from their work that, when people have no safe route to reach their families, they are more likely to risk their lives on dangerous journeys to reach loved ones. Many of these individuals are children and young people seeking to reunite, often with their closest surviving relatives.

No doubt the Minister will give us the numbers again of how many families have been reunited under it, but existing refugee family reunion is narrow in scope. The threshold to be met under paragraphs 297 and 319X of the Immigration Rules for an adult non-parent to reunite with a child is “serious and compelling circumstances”, which is extremely difficult to meet in practice.

I appreciate that we cannot offer protection to all extended family members, but we can do this for some out of kindness, and it would divert them from using criminal gangs. Once they arrived in the UK, they would enter the asylum system to have their claim for protection decided.

Of course, we would prefer people not to have to make the dangerous journeys as far as Europe, and I expect that the Minister will cite pull factors to Europe as a rebuttal. With an ambitious resettlement scheme—which we will come back to—a broader definition for family reunion, as well as an increasing commitment to aid and constructive engagement with our near neighbours, I believe that any such pull factor to one safe route will be mitigated. The alternative is that people come anyway but in an unplanned way, risking their lives and causing further trauma.

I urge the Minister to at last give way on one item: consider this proposal as a pragmatic response to the need to find durable solutions for desperate people dying on our borders in order to reach their family.

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I support all these amendments. I have signed three of them, and the only reason I did not sign the fourth was because my name did not get there in time; there were already four names on it.

Let me talk most particularly for the moment in favour of Amendment 117. In one sense, we are going back to the Dublin treaty, Dublin III and the discussions we have had in the past. At the risk of taking up an extra minute, I will go in for a little moment of history. We had an amendment—which passed in this House and the Commons—to the 2017 Act which said that the Government should negotiate to continue the Dublin III arrangements even after we left the EU. That passed in the 2017 Act.

We thought we were there—but along came the 2019 Act, and it was taken out again. We could not understand why. It was fairly innocuous in one sense, but it was pretty important in another. I was summoned to a room, I think here, and there were three Ministers: the noble Baroness; Brandon Lewis, who was the Immigration Minister; and one of the Ministers from the Commons. There were seven other officials there, one from the Cabinet Office, and just me arguing with them—I thought the odds were pretty fair. Anyway, I was assured that we would lose nothing by abolishing that provision in the 2019 Act. It was never explained to me why the Government wanted to abolish it. If it was going to make no difference, why abolish it? If it was going to make a difference, why take a step backwards?

By all standards, the Dublin III provisions for family reunion were working—not brilliantly, not fast enough and not for enough children, but they were working. I was assured that everything would be all right, but I am afraid that the evidence is not there. We cannot say often enough that where there are safe routes, the traffickers do not get any business. If we close the safe routes, the traffickers get business. It is logical, even for the Tory party. It is market economics, is it not? I do not understand how that can be contradicted.

I am worried about quite a number of the Government’s provisions. The Minister wrote a letter, which I have here; it is slightly depressing, but very helpful. However, I am worried that, on the whole, children in particular who got to Europe fleeing for safety are going to be ignored. I have not been there recently because of the pandemic, but the last time I visited what remains of Calais, people were sleeping under tarpaulins in terrible conditions. It was very depressing, and there were very depressing scenes on the Greek islands. I went to Lesbos, to Moria camp, just before the big fire there. Again, I am out of date now, but I understand that it has not got better. There are young people there who are desperate to join family members in this country. There are not many of them altogether, but there are enough for it to be an important point of principle. Surely, our test of humanity must be whether we support family reunion and whether refugee children can join their families here.

Safe Passage—a small but brilliant NGO with which I am happy to work and be closely associated—suggests that the majority of the children who qualified under Dublin III in the past would not qualify now. For all the optimistic noises coming from the Home Office, the fact is that the situation has got much more difficult in terms of getting children here.

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[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure that I should support a Liberal Democrat policy this evening; none the less, I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said about the importance of targets. I am sure that one of the reasons that local authorities are reluctant to accept more people is the uncertainty that they have at the moment. They genuinely have a shortage but, inevitably, they hold back when they do not know exactly how many are expected.

I have long argued for targets in this area; I think they are an important part of it precisely because you need sensible planning, frankly, and this could be a way forward. Whatever the numbers may be, we ought to have a proper debate each year on refugees, asylum seekers and immigration as a whole, in which the Government’s plans are set out and we can all make a contribution, in the Commons as well as here, and decide what should be the targets for the following year. This would give everyone, including local authorities, some confidence and certainty about what they are expected to do.

I am afraid I do not think that that will actually reduce the numbers of people coming across the channel—I am sorry to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, on this point—for the reasons that I spelled out previously. Demand is so great that people would still try to cross the channel, even if we expanded the number, for certainty, of people coming across under safe schemes. None the less, the idea of having transparency and target setting is very valuable.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

I will try to edit my speech as I go. I support Amendment 118, to which I was pleased to add my name. We all agree that we do not want unsafe journeys, and there is no silver bullet: the situation is complex. If a deterrent was really the answer, securitising the Eurotunnel and the ferry ports has not worked; it has just created even more dangerous routes. So we must have more safe and legal routes.

The major reason I support the idea of a humanitarian visa is that it is a further safe and legal route. It also addresses the issue of people coming from the countries where there are smaller numbers who face persecution and so on, for whom bespoke schemes are never going to be created. Last year, only 93 people arrived from Iraq, five from Yemen, none from Iran and 36 from Sudan. That is all those who were resettled last year. The focus became so heavy last year on Afghanistan and Hong Kong, through the BNO scheme, that all other refugees appeared to be forgotten, so we need this kind of visa. I hope the Minister will not pick holes in the way the amendment is worded because the point is that this kind of visa needs to be looked at.

I also speak in favour of Amendment 116—it is very nice to speak with the noble Lord, Lord Horam, on one occasion. During the Syrian crisis of 2015, a target was set of 20,000 and it helped galvanise everybody with a vision of what could be done. It helped local authorities to understand what kind of numbers they might expect and so on. We also saw through that process the creation of the community sponsorship scheme, so we came up with a new thing through a targeted number. Ten thousand is a number widely supported, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, noted, by huge numbers of refugee organisations because the UNHCR has identified that it is, roughly speaking, our fair share across the world. It is not a number plucked out of thin air but from looking at our fair share across the globe. I hope that we will hear positively the idea that it can happily include the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme. I shall stop there because we need to keep moving.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, this is the safe-route group and I associate myself with so much of what I have heard already, although I signed the amendments in the names of my noble friend Lord Dubs and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, who is absent. We have heard already about the many ways in which the Government try to have it both ways in the Bill. On a previous group, we heard from the Minister how, for example, European precedent is to be hugged if it is deleterious to the refugee but shunned if it means co-operation and burden-sharing. We have understood that the Government, essentially, want to make it harder with the Bill to get here but if you manage to get here, it will be harder to qualify for protection because we are rewriting the convention.

The Government tell us that they do not want people coming via unsafe routes, in little boats and so on, yet they do not provide adequate safe routes—or maybe they do, but if so they do not want it to be in statute because while it is important to fetter judicial discretion in statute, Home Office largesse should not be similarly constrained, structured or put in law. This group deals with the final two contradictions in particular: providing the safe routes and putting them in statute. For those two reasons I really hope that the Minister, who I know to be a compassionate and logical person, will see the need for something in statute to go with sentiment about safe routes.

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[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I will probably refer to my colleagues in the FCDO for further information on that, but I shall certainly take those points back.

It is important at this stage to take into account our capacity in the UK to support people, as I have said, so that we can continue to resettle people safely and provide that appropriate access to healthcare, et cetera. Sorry, I have just gone back on my speech; I was talking to the noble Lord about the VPRS and the whole issue of genocide. I shall provide further information on all that—but I would add that we cannot support these amendments, which would create an uncapped route, whereby anyone anywhere could make an application to enter the UK for the purposes of making an asylum claim. The UN estimates there to be around 82.4 million displaced persons worldwide. Under these proposals, UK caseworkers, who already have a stretched workload, would be bound to undertake an in-depth examination of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals’ circumstances to assess the likelihood of their protection claim being granted, as well as seeking to understand factors, including the individual’s mental and physical health, their ties to the UK, and the dangers that they face. This suggestion is totally unworkable.

I remind my noble friend that the number of people we are able to support through safe and legal routes depends on a big variety of factors, including local authorities’ capacity for supporting refugees. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, acknowledged that, and acknowledged the extreme stress that they are under. An unlimited, uncontrolled scheme such as that which my noble friend proposes would overwhelm our already very strained asylum system, as well as our justice system, and put significant pressures on to our local authorities.

Finally, Amendment 119E seeks to bring the UK resettlement scheme into statute and produce a report on refugees resettled through the scheme annually. In a non-legislative way, we have already done resettlement schemes operating outside of the Immigration Rules and on a discretionary basis, providing the flexibility to respond to changing international events. As demonstrated through the VPRS, we have stuck to and exceeded our commitment, and we will continue to build on the success of previous schemes; the numbers resettled annually will depend on a variety of factors. I hope, with that, that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, will feel happy to withdraw his amendment.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

At Second Reading, we were encouraged to come forward with proposals for new routes and so on. We have done so. It is not good enough for the Government to say that we need more safe and legal routes, and then knock down every idea that we present and not present alternatives themselves. Will the Minister undertake to give us some examples on Report of safe and legal routes that the Government will support? She knows what we will do otherwise.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

What I encouraged noble Lords to come up with at Second Reading were solutions, not new routes. I have consistently said, and written to noble Lords on this, that we have a number of very good safe and legal routes.