Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 3rd November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I also have Amendments 69 and 79B in this group, which includes Amendments 29A and 31A from the noble Baroness, Lady Maclean. Amendment 29 would repeal Section 29 of the Illegal Migration Act, a section which, like others, is not in force.

Section 29, if enforced, would broaden the public order disqualification to mandate—because “may” becomes “must”—that potential and confirmed victims of modern slavery and human trafficking are disqualified from protection, identification and support; are denied a recovery period and limited leave to remain in the UK; and may be removed from the UK, unless there are compelling circumstances which mean that the provisions should not apply. I say “broaden” because it includes the deportation of people who have committed low-level offences, which takes us into the territory of Section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, which I think is now quite generally regarded as being inadequate—if not in its own terms, though there is some consensus around that, in that the offenses which are excluded are too few and it does not exclude some that are not so serious.

The clause provides a defence for modern slavery victims who are compelled to commit a crime, but it is also inadequate in the awareness of the clause, and therefore whether it should be brought into consideration in a prosecution. The Illegal Migration Act provision was criticised by a previous independent asylum seekers commissioner, who said that limiting the public order exemption would

“severely limit our ability to convict perpetrators and dismantle organised crime groups”.

I emphasise those words because the focus of this legislation is, as I understand it, intended to be on the perpetrators and organised crime groups.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights raised the same point and the Government responded, saying that this section would, if commenced, bring all foreign national offenders into scope for mandatory consideration of disqualification from modern slavery protections. I again emphasise those two words because it is not mandatory only if there are “compelling circumstances”, which is a difficult phrase—difficult ever to prove.

Amendments 69 and 79B would both restrict information sharing between public authorities when vulnerable, abused or exploited people are involved. They have particular need of protection and the concern extends not only to people who are exploited and who would like to be able to report the exploitation; it applies also to other people—their colleagues—who would like to report on their behalf but are concerned about exposing themselves. I do not want to repeat what I said in Committee, although I do not resile from it.

We had some banter then about a photograph of the Ministers celebrating the passage of the 2015 Act, if that was the right occasion. We have had some discussion about the series of photographs. I was sent a photograph as well, which included both the noble Lord and me supporting the position of overseas domestic workers. I think the Minister thinks that was an even earlier occasion. However, the passage of time has not changed the issue, even though we may look—certainly I do—rather different from how I did in that photograph. The Minister reminded us that the Bill is about tackling organised immigration crime. He used the term “turbocharge”, and I have already talked about the commitment we should have to victims. I have searched for a sort of equivalent terminology and all I have come up with is “not steamrollering them”.

The Minister referred to the NRM—the national referral mechanism—providing

“a structured, compassionate route for potential victims of modern slavery to receive help without fear of intimidation and immediate immigration consequences”.—[Official Report, 10/7/25; col. 1486.]

The problem is that they do fear, and they are deterred from reporting, whether on their own behalf or on behalf of someone else. He said also:

“In the immigration White Paper, we have made specific reference to Kalayaan”—


that is, the organisation which supports overseas domestic workers—

“and domestic workers, and I will reflect on those points as we go through”.—[Official Report, 10/7/25; col. 1484.]

I did word searches on the White Paper and I found one reference to domestic workers, though it was in another context, and I will return to all that in Amendment 44, probably on the next day of Committee—although, of course, if there has been any reconsideration to date, I would be happy to hear it. I could not find “Kalayaan”. I am not trying to make a cheap point, but, if it is there, perhaps I could be directed to it following the debate.

The most important point is that the Government recognise that there is a genuine concern around here and intend to reconsider the overseas domestic worker visa route. So any further information or news that the Minister can give the House today would be welcome.

The two other amendments in this group would retain Sections 22, 23, and 25 to 29 of the Illegal Migration Act; in other words, they would bring in Section 29, to which I have spoken, and other provisions relating to modern slavery, except one which applies to Scotland. They raise the question about how the noble Baroness considers we should treat victims of modern slavery and human trafficking, including those who claim to be victims, and what should be the future of the NRM. I beg leave to move Amendment 29.

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, to follow on from what the noble Baroness has just said, my Amendments 29A and 31A would in fact reintroduce and commence the modern slavery clauses and provisions in the Illegal Migration Act 2023. The net effect of them would mean that individuals who have entered illegally would not be able to use modern slavery provisions as a route to frustrate removal, but it is important that we continue to support genuine victims at the same time. The reason I have tabled these amendments is that, while they were necessary back in 2023 when this Act was passed, the need for them has become even more pressing now.

I declare an interest as a former Home Office Minister who led on the modern slavery support system and has seen the challenges of operationalising this system and protecting victims of this awful crime, which is what we all want to do.

The world has changed. Since the Modern Slavery Act was passed, patterns of migration have shifted dramatically. The system that we built, for very good reasons, over a decade ago is now being stretched, and in some cases exploited in ways Parliament never intended. In particular, I can find no reference in the original debates that we intended to create a welfare and support system for victims of crime from all over the world, rather than for our own citizens who have been trafficked and abused. Yet that is exactly what is happening now.

In 2024, for the first time, 44% of referrals to the NRM reported exploitation overseas, overtaking those claiming exploitation within the UK, at 43%. This concern is shared across Parliament. I quote the Home Secretary who said, in response to the egregious situation that we saw connected to the one-in, one-out asylum-seeking individual who claimed that he was a victim of trafficking in France, that some asylum seekers were making “vexatious, last-minute claims” of being victims of modern slavery to block removal. The Home Secretary and the Government can simply use the measures already on the statute book. That is the fastest way to tackle this, if they can perhaps get over the “not invented here” objection.

When we have these debates, those who do the important work of supporting victims will claim and state, rightly, that it is impossible to provide definitive evidence that the system is being abused. I agree with that, which is why I have tabled amendments later on to address that point. But, whether we like it or not, there is a significant interaction between illegal arrivals and referrals into the NRM. Just this quarter, we have seen the highest number of referrals since the start of the NRM in 2009. The people who are being referred now are non-UK nationals: the largest groups being referred are Albanians, followed by Vietnamese. For context, in 2014, the entire system handled fewer than 2,500 referrals, yet last year it handled nearly 2,500 referrals just from Albania. This surge has placed immense strain on the system and on public confidence, and of course also on taxpayers and on the public purse, because the Government have committed to spending £379 million over five years on the modern slavery support system.

In the Lords debates on these clauses of the Illegal Migration Act that my amendment seeks to retain, my noble friend Lord Murray of Blidworth, speaking for the then Government, said:

“It is a central tenet of the Bill that a person who satisfies the conditions in Clause 2 will not have their asylum, human rights or modern slavery claims considered in the United Kingdom. It is a sad but incontrovertible fact that our modern slavery protections are susceptible to abuse by illegal migrants seeking to frustrate their removal from the United Kingdom. Whereas in 2019 just 6% of people arriving in the UK on a small boat and detained for return involved a modern slavery referral, the figure in 2021 was 73%”.”.—[Official Report, 10/5/23; col. 1784.]


Britain can be both compassionate and firm, but it cannot be naive. I follow my noble friend Lord Harper in asking this House to be honest that people will seek to lie about their experiences, especially when the incentives are so strong and the evidence threshold necessarily very low. These amendments would protect those exploited while removing incentives for illegal entry.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th November 2025 Lords Chamber

The third objection the Minister mentioned was that the two-day deadline would still leave it open for people to come on student visas under false pretences and claim asylum. I left the two-day deadline in for those genuinely fleeing persecution who fly to this country and have no option but the student visa route, but if the Minister prefers, I would not object to removing it and substituting a blanket ban. I am grateful to the Minister for explaining his objections, and I have responded, I hope, to his objections and covered the substantive one. I therefore hope that Amendment 35C will be accepted.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to address Amendment 79A, in my name, on the disapplication of the Human Rights Act for immigration legislation. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, for his support for this amendment and for the support expressed for the principle by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss.

As the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, has identified, there is presently an uncomfortable vacuum at the heart of the Home Office’s policy. We know that the “smash the gangs” mantra, which is at the heart of this somewhat performative Bill, has failed. Again, I do not wish to bore the House with the statistics; we all know them. The reality is that while taking the step identified by my noble friend on the Front Bench of abolishing the tribunals is certainly one course, and one which I would endorse, I would not expect the Government Front Bench to accept it.

In the interim, as the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, reasonably identifies, there is an alternative, and it is that set out in Amendment 79A. This would disapply the Human Rights Act from immigration cases. As we know, the vast bulk of immigration cases are derived from or directly apply human rights provisions in their construction, and in so doing prevent the effective use of border control, so it is open to the Government to accept this amendment.

I simply add this. The Joint Committee on Human Rights wrote to the new Home Secretary asking for an explanation as to what the Government propose to do in relation to Article 8. In a letter to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, dated 23 October, the Home Secretary said:

“My officials are currently reviewing the application of Article 8 of the ECHR in immigration cases. As set out in the Immigration White Paper (24 May 2025) we will legislate to reform our approach to the application of Article 8 in the immigration system to ensure that the right balance is struck between individual and public interest in controlling migration. My officials are continuing to develop these proposals, and the Government will publish more detail in due course”.


In the following paragraph, she provided a mantra, saying that,

“the Government is fully committed to complying with international law and the protection of human rights. We do not have to withdraw from the ECHR or disapply the HRA to create meaningful reform”.

I am afraid that that is just inconsistent and plainly wrong. If the Government want an effective border control policy, they will have to take a measure such as that identified in this proposal or, I am afraid, the current state of chaos will continue.

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to the two amendments tabled in my name in this group, but, before doing so, I will say that I strongly support the comments made by my noble friend Lord Murray and the noble Lord, Lord Faulks. My amendments are to Amendments 47 and 68, and would ensure that modern slavery claims and appeals cannot be singled out in some way and still be used as a loophole for the merry-go-round of asylum claims that we see. The Home Secretary herself highlighted the vexatious last-minute modern slavery claim that was put in, in the case of the one-in, one-out asylum seeker. We have heard other examples as well.

Last year, noble Lords might wish to know, we saw that 65% of referrals to the NRM were found to have no reasonable grounds. This was compared with only 16% four years ago. So there is evidence that this is increasingly being used for last-minute, spurious claims, and I would like to make sure that these amendments are as bulletproof as possible. We should seek to restore public confidence in the modern slavery system, to make sure that it is doing what it was designed to do and what this Parliament designed it to do: that is, to be a lifeline for victims of horrific abuse. It was not designed, as it has increasingly become, as a route for Albanian men arriving on small boats.

The British citizens who are referred into the system are overwhelmingly children. I am sure that most people would agree that that is the right thing for the state to be doing. Foreign citizens referred in tell a different story: these are mostly adult men from Vietnam, Albania, Eritrea and Sudan. Supporting them is not the right priority for the taxpayers of this country. My amendment therefore ensures that only genuine victims can make use of our generous support and that these vexatious claims can definitely be thrown out.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise very briefly to speak to the amendment in my name, but only in passing, because I cannot better the excellent remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, and my noble friend Lord Murray of Blidworth. They made a very strong case. I also associate myself with Amendment 68. But I really want to talk to Amendment 46, the first in this group.

We all have a vested interest in protecting the integrity of the criminal justice system, and the faith and trust that our citizens have in that system. At the present time, I fear that people are losing faith in it. They are losing faith in the capacity of the judicial system to deliver fairness and equity for the British taxpayer. I think it is perfectly possible to have a strong modicum of compassion for those people driven to seek asylum in this country by poverty, famine, war and despotic dictatorships. However, a system that is intrinsically designed to be gamed—for young men to come to this country and use legal loopholes to settle in one of the wealthiest countries in the world—is no longer a situation that we can tolerate. That is why we need to take what would appear to be immoderate and draconian action in the first instance, because we are in the middle of a crisis.

I do not often quote Labour Members of Parliament, but Mike Tapp, the Member of Parliament for Dover and Deal—I think he is the Minister’s colleague—has been criticised for quite rightly complaining about the fact that people who are criminals are coming to this country and there is effectively nothing we can do about it. We can do nothing about it because this Government set their face against the Rwanda scheme and scrapped that scheme before it had a chance to work. Yet they go scrambling around parts of eastern Europe seeking an alternative scheme to put in place.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is absolutely correct; it is incumbent upon this Government, after 16 months, to come up with an alternative. With all due respect to the Minister, the speech he gave to the Chamber on Monday was exactly the same speech, verbatim, that he gave on 8 September on undertakings to bring forward legislation and to the review of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is quite right that we are now in a position where a significant number of member countries of the Council of Europe are sufficiently concerned that they are putting a very great deal of pressure to change things, because the system is broken.

If the system breaks, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is absolutely right that it gives rise to people who are not moderate, who are extreme and who will scapegoat honest, decent people seeking to make a better life. It is incumbent on us to come up with solutions. Look at some of the egregious cases we have seen in recent years from the First-tier Tribunal and Upper Tribunal. “Egyptian migrant is ‘danger to the community’—but can stay in Britain”. “Cannabis dealer claimed deportation would destroy his marriage”. “Albanian who battered man with umbrella can stay because the attack was ‘one-off’”. “Asylum seeker can stay in Britain after having affair”. “Afghan drug user allowed to stay in the UK because Taliban is harsh on addicts”. “Migrant avoids deportation because he lost his phone”.

We may have a wry smile at some of those cases, and I accept that they are a minority of cases, but they are corrosive of the faith and trust people have in the system. That is why Amendment 46 is so important. If the Government are truly of the view that nothing is off the table, they have to be able to bring forward costed alternatives and not just fall back on the fact they are reviewing, they are looking at the European Convention on Human Rights and they will bring forward legislation. They have had 16 months; they need to take firm action to deal with this immigration crisis. On that basis, I strongly support the excellent amendment from my noble friend Lord Murray and, of course, the other amendments, including Amendment 46 from the Front Bench.