Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Harper Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 71A is an amendment to Amendment 71 in the names of my noble friends on the Front Bench. It should be seen in the context of my comments about modern slavery in the debate on Monday. This modern slavery system now supports more foreign citizens than it does British citizens—something that the public, I am sure, are not aware of and would rightly be concerned about if they did. Modern slavery victim support is a multi-million pound cost to the public purse, as well as having an untold cost in human misery. In fact, between 2016 and 2023, the Home Office spent over £40 million through the modern slavery fund to combat modern slavery overseas and reduce the threat of human trafficking to the UK, including from Albania and Vietnam. British taxpayers are funding these projects, but they evidently have not worked, so it is time for a different policy.

The top nationalities referred to the NRM now relate to Albania, Vietnam, Eritrea, Sudan, India, Iran, Romania, Nigeria and Ethiopia. But those who have been a victim of crime in this country commonly feel that their support by the British state is inadequate, and I am sure the general public would agree that our own citizens should come first, before we distribute generous welfare to people from those countries that I have just mentioned. Therefore, my amendment adds an additional visa penalty to those that are set out in my noble friends’ amendment and would ensure that those countries which do not do enough to tackle upstream causes of modern slavery, and therefore export their victims to our shores, feel the pain of not having done enough by having their visa access restricted. It is simple: if we are providing the carrot of visa access, we should ensure that we have a good, strong stick.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lord Jackson’s Amendment 35 and to pose a few questions to the Minister. I will not repeat what my noble friend said; he set out the case very compellingly.

I note from a Written Answer that the Minister said:

“The information requested is not available from published statistics”.


I am sure that is true; the Minister will have given a truthful answer. However, what information does the department collect that it does not publish?

When I was Immigration Minister between 2012 and 2014, we were very clear about the importance of overseas students. We wanted them to come here, but we also wanted to make sure there was no abuse. The department at that point collected a lot of information about the risks involved in students coming here from a variety of countries, including, for example, the risk that they would overstay their student visa. We used that risk information to focus our checks when those students were applying for visas. I presume that work still exists. Has the department done any work on collecting information on the behaviour of overseas students in the United Kingdom—for example, criminality or other offences—that it does not put in existing published statistics? If it does collect that information, can it make it available? If that information is used by the department in decision-making and assessing risk, it is presumably good enough—even if it is not perfect and does not meet the criteria for published statistics—to be shared with Members of your Lordships’ House.

Those are detailed questions. If the Minister is not able to, or does not, answer them today, I am sure that either myself or my noble friend Lord Jackson, in his typically assiduous way, will table some Written Questions to follow them up. With that, I strongly support his amendment.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s Amendment 35. We really need the data to understand the problem and how efficacious our measures to control it are. My noble friend asked a number of different questions in a number of different ways, and he has not been given the information the House requires. We need to understand why that is. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, is not in his place, because I was about to pay him a compliment. I managed to extract a truly startling statistic from him when I asked what proportion of people in these circumstances—those who have arrived through what is now termed irregular routes—are removed from the country against their will. The answer was 4%, so there is a 96% chance of success in remaining.

In order to understand the reasons why people typically want to come to the UK, one needs to understand the strength of the regime that deals with those applications, and the chances of staying versus being deported or removed from the country through one means or another. Unless the Government can really come forward and answer my noble friend’s question, or agree to his amendment, it is very difficult to take seriously the actions the Government are taking. We know that the Government do not know who is in the country at any one time; our systems do not record exits from the country as they do people coming in. It will probably lead us to a much wider discussion about how we can get the data and know who is here and who has overstayed the terms of their visa. It is entirely reasonable for my noble friend to ask those questions, and it is the Government’s duty to respond in detail.

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[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Lemos) (Lab)]

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this debate. I am sure the noble Lords opposite will also recall that we discussed these amendments in Committee at midnight. This debate is rather better attended and has rather more contributors than that one—but we were not turned into pumpkins anyway. Let me see how I go. I heard from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, the long list of his previous attempts, so let me have a try.

Starting with Amendment 35 from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, at the outset I should say, as many noble Lords have acknowledged—including the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, as well as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley—a vital economic and academic contribution is made by international students to this country. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, nodding too. I take very seriously the challenge from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, that we should not taint everyone with guilt by association. That is absolutely central to the argument we want to make.

As your Lordships know, the Immigration Rules already provide for the cancellation of entry clearance and permission to enter or stay where a person has been convicted of a criminal offence in the UK or overseas. Where a student’s permission is cancelled, as a person without leave to enter or remain, they are liable to removal from the UK. Foreign nationals who commit a crime should be in no doubt that the law will be enforced, and where appropriate we will pursue their deportation. I think I said in Committee that I know from my previous life, as the lead non-executive director of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, what an important priority that is.

On the specifics of the amendment about publishing data, as was set out in Committee, the Home Office already publishes a vast amount of data on migration statistics, including information on visas, returns and detentions. I hope your Lordships do not think this frivolous, but if rather more attention were paid to the data that the Home Office publishes already, we might have a better-informed debate about some of these issues than we do.

I want to respond both to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, and the follow-up from the noble Lord, Lord Harper. We do publish stats on the number of asylum claims from people who initially came to the UK on a visa, by the type of visa on which they entered, in our quarterly immigration system statistics. In relation to the question from the noble Lord, Lord German, we also publish asylum data on routes and nationalities separately. Before the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, takes his decision about whether to divide the House, it is important that we are at least clear about what is currently published. I hope it is some reassurance to the noble Lord that this Government recognise that there has been heightened interest from parliamentarians, the media and the public in learning more about the number and types of criminal offences committed by foreign nationals in the UK, and about what happens to foreign national offenders after they have been convicted and completed their sentences. We discussed it only the other day.

The Home Office is assessing what more can be done to improve the processes for collating and verifying relevant data on the topic of foreign national offenders and their offences, and to establish a more regular means of placing that data into the public domain alongside other Home Office statistics. I entirely accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, and the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, that without proper information on this and a number of other matters, it is very difficult to have an informed public debate. The Home Office does propose to publish more detailed statistical reporting on foreign national offenders subject to deportation and those returned to countries outside the UK. I think I have gone a little further than I did in Committee, and I can give the noble Lord that assurance.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

Can I just press the Minister on my specific question, which was not just about the published data but about the information that the department collects to make decisions about the risks from people applying for student visas? Does it collect any information at all about the propensity of people from different nationalities to commit crimes and use that in its risk-based approach when making decisions about student visas?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harper, for reminding me about that specific point. As a former Immigration Minister, he is much more familiar with the data than I am, or at least what it was when he was there. I take very seriously the general point about data for risk assessment, and I understand what the noble Lord is driving at. I cannot give him that information today, but I will be very happy to write to him. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, might raise a wry smile at yet another letter from a Home Office Minister, but on the specific question about risk assessment and data that is collected for it—which is different from the specifics of some of the data that I have already discussed—I will be very happy to write to the noble Lord.

Amendment 35C from the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, seeks to widen the scope of existing inadmissibility powers so that any claim made by a holder of a student visa lodged more than two days after they arrive in the UK must be declared inadmissible, unless there is evidence that political circumstances have changed in the person’s home country such as to endanger their life or liberty. I acknowledge that the noble Baroness has recognised some of the questions that were raised, not just on our side but from her own Front Bench, in the way that the amendment is now presented to the House, and that there has been a change there. But I am afraid that the other objections I raised in Committee, which the noble Baroness set out, still remain. Let me try to explain a bit better.

The likely consequence of the amendment—I think the noble Lord, Lord German, referred to this—would still be to refuse to admit claims to the UK’s asylum system, but without an obvious way in which to return those individuals who make them without potentially contravening the key principle of non-refoulement in the refugee convention. The noble Lord, Lord German, referred to that. This would still, I am afraid, leave any affected individuals in a state of limbo with no certainty, and—this is the point that makes for the difficulty—we would have no certainty as to whether they qualified for refugee status. It is not just a question of where they would be returned to and whether that would be safe; it is about whether they would be able to claim refugee status at all. The Government’s view is that sorting that out would potentially prove extremely cost ineffective, so I am afraid the view of the Government is that it just would not work in practice.