Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Matt Vickers Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 19th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)]

The Opposition join the Minister in thanking our colleagues in the other place for their work on and scrutiny of this Bill. I would like to thank my colleagues Lord Cameron of Lochiel and Lord Davies of Gower, as well as numerous members of the other place, including Lord Jackson, for their work.

The subject of the Bill is extremely important to this country and its future. I am afraid the reality is that, under this Labour Government, illegal immigration has got much, much worse. We are in the grip of an immigration crisis. Small boat crossings have surged. They are up 55% against the same period before the election. In the nine months before the election, the number of people in hotels had gone down by 47%, but since this Government came to power, it has gone up.

This country is our home; it is not a hotel. We need stronger borders to make sure that those who come to our country share our values, contribute to society, and are not simply a drain on the resources that taxpayers fund. The Bill will remove powers that allow us to detain and deport people who arrive here illegally. It will remove powers that allow us to mandate scientific age tests for those who arrive here illegally claiming to be children. It will allow people who break into our country illegally to become British citizens. Those who break into our country should not be allowed to stay.

This week, the Home Secretary announced a new plan, which she says will tackle the immigration crisis.

Lords amendment 37 would ensure transparent data on one of the key contributors to the high immigration that the Government say that they want to reduce. Transparency matters for public trust and accountability. Opposition to the amendment is completely at odds with the Home Secretary’s rhetoric, and the action that she promised us earlier this week. Once again, the Bill has been nowhere near as ambitious or radical as it needs to be to stop dangerous crossings in their tracks. The Government should be using every tool available to control immigration and make our country safer.

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[Alex Norris]

With the leave of the House, I am grateful to all hon. Members for their contributions and to those who took this legislation through all its previous stages.

Let me address some of the points made today. My hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) made some important points around online advertising and the responsibilities falling not on the providers, but on those sending those messages or putting out those advertisements. We think that is the current gap in provisions that we need to fill, but providers have a really important responsibility too. There are provisions in the Online Safety Act 2023 that relate to that work, but I reassure him that we talk to providers and will continue to engage with them to ensure that their platforms are not being used for what is the ultimate trade in human misery. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh (Chris Murray) mentioned that issue as well.

I share the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen made about conflict resolution. We talk about upstream working, and that is the ultimate upstream working—it is very much Britain’s place in the world. British Aid works to tackle famine and disease and also works on education, particularly for women and girls, which we know can be transformative around the world. I totally agree with my hon. Friend’s point about our work overseas, which the Lib Dem spokesperson, the hon. Member for Woking (Mr Forster), also talked about. That work and that international co-operation are crucial, and I assure colleagues that we are doing that day in, day out, as I always say.

We had the pleasure of hosting the Berlin process in recent weeks. I said to all my counterparts that we are dealing with these shared challenges, and they agreed. The organised immigration crime networks, which we are talking about and which are addressed in this legislation, are by definition sophisticated and global, and we are engaging with them in different ways. We have to ensure that we have as good a co-ordinated approach as possible.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh, given his long professional work in this space and his work on the Home Affairs Committee. I am grateful to him for enhancing the process of this Bill’s passage and other processes, and he is right: at the root of this issue are death and misery, which is exploited by criminals. We must tackle that, but those criminals’ networks are sophisticated, so as their capabilities increase, so must ours. That is the purpose of this legislation—both being able to tackle where those criminals advertise their services, and giving Border Security Command and others the tools they need to tackle them. I totally agree with his point about the value of data in its collective form, rather than any one strand, which I will address when I respond to the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Stockton West (Matt Vickers).

I thought that the Lib Dem spokesperson was slightly unfair—which is not in his nature—in his characterisation of what happened on Monday. Everything we talked about on Monday builds on what we are putting in place through this legislation; it is all part of the same approach to tackling both organised crime, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh said, and the supply and demand challenges in this area. I know that the Lib Dem spokesperson thinks the work on safe routes that we announced is really important. He and his colleagues are going to want to take part in that process, and of course they will have an opportunity to do so.

That brings me to the Opposition spokesperson. He has a terribly difficult job—the word I wrote down was “desperate”, but I am not going to use that word in this context. “Difficult” is what I will say to the hon. Member for Stockton West, because he wants people in this place and those watching us to believe that there is in some way anger among Conservative Members at the circumstances we find ourselves in today regarding hotels and small boat crossings, as if these are not phenomena that can be dated to within much less than a decade and started on the Conservatives’ watch. As my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said on Monday, and as I will say again, any contribution from the Conservatives that does not start with an apology will not wash with the British public.

[Matt Vickers]

Is the Minister aware that in the nine months up to the election, the number of people in hotels fell by 47%? It has now gone up, and the number of people arriving in this country has gone up by 55%, while the number of those arriving in small boats and being removed has gone down. It is just not on—it is a car crash.

[Alex Norris]

Again, I know that the hon. Gentleman has to try hard to desperately defend the previous Government’s record and their failure. He knows as well as I do that the original sin in this area was the six-year head start that he and his colleagues gave to organised crime, and he will now chirp from the sidelines while we break that cycle. We are getting on with the job while the Conservatives talk about it.

Let us talk about the removal of the deterrent—that is not quite within the scope of the amendments made in the other place, but the hon. Gentleman talked about Rwanda, as his colleagues did the other day. I would gently say that from the day that the Rwanda deal was signed to the day it was scrapped, 84,000 people crossed the channel, so the idea that it was in some way a deterrent is for the birds. Until and unless colleagues on the Opposition Front Bench enter the real world, they are going to struggle for credibility.

[Matt Vickers]

Those people who arrived in this country illegally were going to Rwanda. Where are they now?

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Gentleman will know that in this Government’s 16 months in office we have removed 50,000 people who had no right to be here.

[Matt Vickers]

Will the Minister give way?

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Gentleman can ask the questions, but he cannot give the answers as well. I am afraid that I will not give way again—I am going to finish my point. When it comes to removing people with no right to be here, our record in office is a 23% increase on what the Conservatives managed to do.

On Monday, we heard something very interesting from the Leader of the Opposition. She committed Opposition Front Benchers to co-operating with what she said was such an important shared endeavour, and we have an opportunity to test that today, because the hon. Member for Stockton West heard what I said in my opening speech. He heard about my belief in transparency in this area and building public confidence through transparency in the statistics, which he also expressed in his contribution.

[Matt Vickers]

Will the Minister give way?

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Gentleman really does have to let me finish my point before I give way. He heard about this Government’s commitment to that, and about the work that is under way. Having known each other for as long as we have, I hope he will take it in good faith that we are committed to publishing stats that will mean people know what is going on in this area. On that basis, the hon. Gentleman does not really need to support the Lords amendment, but I will let him make his case.

[Matt Vickers]

People out there are really concerned about people arriving illegally in this country claiming to be children, and the impact that that can have on our education and care settings. This Bill removes our ability to scientifically age-verify some of those people, but more than that, since this Government came to office, they have stopped publishing the data on age disputes on arrival. What do they have to hide? Why will they not publish that data?

[Alex Norris]

I am afraid that panto season is starting early, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Alex Norris]

We want to bring forward a whole set of data on this issue that helps people get a picture of what is going on—I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew) heard me say that, but the hon. Member for Stockton West certainly did. I have made that commitment from this Dispatch Box, and that is what we will do.

[Matt Vickers]

Will the Minister give way?

[Alex Norris]

I will not give way, as the hon. Gentleman has more than had the opportunity to make his case. We have said that that is what we will do, and that is what we will do. On that basis, there really is no need for Lords amendment 37, but as I say, we will test the co-operation of Conservative Front Benchers. Will it last even 48 hours? From the hon. Gentleman’s demeanour, I suspect it will not.

It is so important that this legislation reaches the statute book quickly. The need for these powers is urgent, and we are down to one point of disagreement with the other place. This Bill is central to the Government’s actions to strengthen border security. It includes new, transformative measures to deliver on our manifesto commitment to identify, intercept, disrupt and prevent serious and organised crime through new criminal offences, expanded data-sharing capabilities and improved intelligence. It will disrupt the business models of organised crime groups and reduce unlawful migration to the UK.

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[Alex Norris]

That is always the challenge, because we live in a world of misinformation, disinformation and, I am sad to say, occasionally bad faith. However, my antidote to that is the same as my hon. Friend’s: better transparency is the best way to see our way through. He is exactly right that we already publish a vast amount, including on visas, returns and detention. He is exactly right that we keep things under review in line with the code of practice for statistics.

I say gently to Opposition colleagues that we have made a commitment. Many of them did not see my opening speech, so it perhaps bears repeating. We understand the heightened interest from parliamentarians, the media and members of the public in the number and type of criminal offences committed by foreign nationals and what happens to them. It is in everybody’s interest for that to be known. It is also in everybody’s interest for that dataset to be as good as possible.

[Matt Vickers]

People out there are concerned about 30-year-olds trying to get into classrooms with 13-year-olds. They want to know how often it is being tried. Why have the Home Office and the Government stopped publishing the data around age verification?

[Alex Norris]

It is getting to the point where I might not be able to help the Opposition spokesperson, because I have answered the question. It is in nobody’s interest, as I say, for important information to not be available. We are preparing it as a whole dataset. I said that in opening, and I have said it in response to him at least once, and I have said it again. [Interruption.] I hear the question, “When?” As soon as we can accurately publish it, that is what we will do.

There is a danger that we are down to the narcissism of small differences on this Bill. I do not really think that this is the hon. Gentleman’s principal objection, but I know that he has committed from the Opposition Front Bench, as did the Leader of the Opposition, to co-operation in ensuring that we tackle the pernicious crime of organised immigration crime and that we have order and control at our borders. I look forward to their co-operation.

Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 37.