Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I add my compliments to my noble friend Lord Harper on his characteristically deft maiden speech. With his great political experience, he will always command a hearing in this Chamber, although perhaps a few people will hope fervently that, as a former Chief Whip, he does not write his memoirs. However, we shall see about that.

In view of the lateness of the hour, I simply want to confine myself to one particular point, which is that we will not stop illegal immigration across the channel until we have a significant and strong deterrent. That is the fundamental fact of the matter, and that, of course, was the basis of the previous Government’s policy. That policy, which the current Government have now abandoned, was based on the experience of Australia. I remind the House that in 2001, a large number of people began to come across from Indonesia to the Northern Territory of Australia and the then Government, the Liberal-National Party coalition, enacted a series of legislative proposals that built up a system whereby people coming illegally into the north of Australia were detained and flown out to Nauru and the Solomon Islands. As a result of that, when it was finally in place, the boats stopped. Within two months, no more boats came from Indonesia or anywhere else.

In 2008, the Labor Government came in and immediately abolished that system. Immediately the boats came back, and within 18 months, 50,000 people were coming across the Timor Sea to northern Australia. The then Labor Government realised that they had made a mistake and hastily tried to reintroduce the Liberal-National proposals, but unfortunately they were too late and lost the general election. In 2013 the Liberal-National Government brought back the proposals in the form of the sovereign borders arrangements, and then the boats stopped again.

Sensibly, the Australian Labor Party then accepted the proposals and a bipartisan approach emerged. Not only that, but the bipartisan approach that was then adopted throughout Australia led to them dealing with not only illegal immigration but legal immigration, on a very understandable basis: there was a cap for each particular element of the legal elements, whether it was students, skilled workers, family people or asylum seekers, and a total. All that is discussed in parliament in an annual debate and is now bipartisan policy, and the Labor Government who accepted this have been re-elected to continue with this eminently sensible policy, which is, frankly, the sort of policy that we can only dream of in this country, and that was based on a bipartisan approach.

Of course, there are differences between the Australian situation and the UK’s: the Timor Sea is not exactly like the Channel Tunnel, the scrutiny that we get from the media is probably much heavier in this country than they have in Australia and the Australians do not have a European Commission of Human Rights to obey. But the fact is that, although there are differences, there are clear lessons from the Australian experience. First, deterrence is essential, as Martin Hewitt, the new Border Security Commander, recognised. The Times said:

“Martin Hewitt, who was named on Monday as Starmer’s border security commander to lead efforts to tackle the small boats crisis, is understood … to have advised that deterrence also needs to form part of the government’s strategy”.


This echoed an internal National Crime Agency memo that

“concluded that efforts to stop migrants crossing the Channel would fail without a deterrent such as … Rwanda”.

That is the first point: deterrence is essential.

The second point is that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, has just been saying, we need to update human rights law. As even the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, has said, events move on; law should not be set in concrete and we need to look at it again. Nine European Union countries have already demanded that exactly that be done. Of course that will take time—there are 46 signatories to the ECHR—but in the meantime we need to separate out and disapply the elements relating to asylum and illegal immigration of this kind, with the hope that the whole thing can be resolved over time. That is the second point.

The third point is that we should also strive for some element of bipartisanship. It has been achieved successfully in Australia. On our own continent, Europe, Denmark has a bipartisan policy. In Australia the bipartisanship has been led by a centre-right party and in Denmark by a centre-left party. Surely the UK can do as well as those two countries. If not, why not?