Nationality and Borders Bill (Second sitting)

Tom Pursglove Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Okay, thank you, Zoe. I will bring in the Minister at this point.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Tom Pursglove)]

Q Thank you, Ms McDonagh. I have one question for Ms Gardner. One of the real focuses of the work of your organisation is around welfare. What assessment do you make of our proposals to streamline the judicial process to process cases more quickly and, of course, remove people who have no right to be here more quickly? What do you make of that?

Zoe Gardner: I am quite confused about that being the aim of the legislation that we have in front of us. The measures that have been put forward in the Bill, as far as I can tell, will only serve to exacerbate and complicate the repeated legal claims that will be made. For example, the split standard of proof in the Bill would apply a different standard of proof to different parts of a person’s asylum claim. That will be challenged and tested in the courts and will take longer. Obviously, the delays of six months will make the system take longer. On the other side, slapping a priority sign on to somebody’s deportation order does not actually make any difference. Again, as Lucy said, that is a matter for having well-resourced court systems and a fair and efficient system, and the Bill just does not do anything to achieve any of that.

[The Chair]

Apologies, but that brings us to the end of the time allotted to ask questions. I thank our witnesses on behalf of the Committee. Many questions were asked and our witnesses gave evidence that Members wanted to listen to.

Examination of Witness

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby gave evidence .

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[Anne McLaughlin]

Q Good afternoon. I will start by saying that none of us here can possibly understand how complex the work is that you and your colleagues do. I am trying to understand some of it. I know that recently you said that you have spotted a trend of people who were arrested in drug busts claiming to be victims of slavery when you did not believe that to be the case. I think that, as a result of those concerns, the Home Secretary is overseeing plans to roll out a new public order definition that will allow police forces to refuse NRM protection to those committing serious crimes.

That turns the presumption of innocent until proven guilty on its head. Do you think that that is the most helpful way to go forward and, if so, are there other circumstances in which we should not offer support to people because we do not believe them, before they have had the opportunity to prove otherwise? If you do not think that it is helpful, how would you amend the legislation to be more helpful, while recognising that we do not know whether people are victims of slavery at the point at which they are arrested?

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby: There are a few areas there. First, the existing legislation does not apply to a lot of crime types in any event—some of the more serious crime types that you mentioned, such as kidnapping and manslaughter, and lots of offences included in the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and firearms legislation, so some of that is there already. I do not think that it is right to say that policing is turning the presumption of innocent until proven guilty on its head. What I would say is that, where we already have information and intelligence in relation to individuals and their place within a criminal hierarchy, at that point it may be appropriate to turn that presumption on its head.

To illustrate, there is a recent case in Derbyshire where an Albanian gang has been dismantled only in the last couple of weeks. There have been 24 arrests, and I think 12 of those people were Albanians, running cannabis growers and other types of criminality in the region. More than one of those people claimed to be victims, but we had a covert investigation behind us that showed their level of control, their ability to communicate, the resources that they had and various things that clearly went against that claim. Absent that information and intelligence, I do not think that we would say, “We don’t believe this person,” in the first instance. An investigator should, and in all investigations does, go into that situation with an open mind. This person could be a victim or could, in fact, be a criminal. They start at that point, not on one side or the other.

The other part of your question was about what we do to make things easier for investigators to understand the true position. I think that, again, that would be some sort of duty to co-operate, because it is quite difficult if somebody claims to be a victim and then, for example, refuses to provide a phone passcode, and so on. Perhaps a duty there would assist us. I mentioned whether a person should have to declare straightaway, because often there are delays, but I think that a lot of genuine victims would suffer that way.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q Clearly it is critical that our resources are focused on genuine victims of modern slavery. Are you able to share any examples or concerns that you have about individuals or groups taking opportunities to misuse the national referral mechanism by falsely claiming to be victims?

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby: Absolutely. I cannot give you names right now. That perhaps would not be appropriate, but in various areas of criminality we have seen that, and again it is for various reasons. One reason that I have alluded to already is to hamper prosecutions, as a tactic. Quite often we can get around that as investigators because we have been looking at the various areas that would prove or disprove a person’s status throughout, but sometimes the defence is raised in order to obtain access, we believe, to other services that we would of course want to provide to genuine victims, such as access to housing and potentially some assistance in securing visas and so on.



We do see those things. I can only say that in some cases we have proved that those people are not victims—for example, through covert activity that was already in place because it was a part of larger operations or because of things such as telecoms investigations and so on, sharing that work. There is a lot of technical detail in how it is done, but we have detected people exploiting the system for those two reasons: benefits and to avoid prosecution.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q Building on that, what, in your experience, is the impact of sequential claims and referrals, and how will the measures in the Bill help to ensure more effective process?

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby: By “sequential”, do you mean repeated?

[Tom Pursglove]

Q Just sequential claims and referrals to the mechanism.

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby: Okay, I am trying to understand where you are going with the question. I am sorry, do you mean if somebody makes a claim and is referred, and then does so again following a criminal justice process? Or have I misunderstood your question?

[Tom Pursglove]

Q It is about issues around repeat claims and those sorts of difficulties that we know exist.

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby: We see victims being referred into the system and then disappearing from it and turning up somewhere else, and then being referred into the system again, and so on. That is an indication, of course, that the control that these criminal gangs have has remained in place and they continue to be controlled, coerced and taken out of that process. Again, in general terms, the speedier the decision that is made in terms of a conclusive grounds decision and the support put in place in a substantive way, the less likely we are to see that because this would be an alternative for people who otherwise are in some sort of a holding pattern, waiting for decisions to be made, perhaps in temporary accommodation and so on. So, for me, the measures that are most effective are those that are going to cement those decisions the quickest and provide real support to those individuals—[Inaudible]—so they can be taken out of that coercive group of organised crime groups.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q I am grateful for that thorough answer. One final question: what assessment have you made of wider criminality resulting from the proceeds of criminal gangs organising dangerous crossings?

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby: Can you repeat the question? I had an issue with the connection. I apologise.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q What assessment, if any, have you made of wider criminality resulting from the proceeds of criminal gangs bringing people across the channel?

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby: The ability of gangs to bring people across the channel is a really important part of how many of those gangs work, particularly when we talk about foreign national offenders and foreign national organised crime. Again, at the risk of being boring talking about west Balkan criminality, I think it is a good way to illustrate that. West Balkan criminality, Albanian criminality, which is really what we are talking about, has taken more of a foothold since around 2017 in the UK, partly because of a real crackdown in Albania around cannabis cultivation. There needs to be a business model to support that. The gang members themselves do not want to spend long hours in uncomfortable and dangerous cannabis grows, for example, with the risk of being caught. Why would they want to do that? Similarly, if the business model is to exploit people for sexual practices then there need to be people to exploit. The ability to bring people into the country across the channel is hugely important for them.

Of course, there are other rackets such as labour exploitation and so on that have been talked about many times. Focusing on those two, they need people who can be exploited. British citizens form part of that, but people from comparatively poor areas who have comparatively few opportunities are much easier to exploit. In fact, many of those people do not initially believe they are victims—they believe that they are entering into a business deal. “You do this for this long, and then we will fly you back, or there will be some sort of benefit”. Sometimes that is the case. I would suggest that the conditions those people are living in are appalling and that the deal is a terrible one, but for some of them that is a better deal than they had where they came from.

Forgive me, that is a bit of a long answer. The point is that without the ability to bring foreign nationals in-country, those very well-organised criminal gangs—in my experience, many of them are far better organised than our own high-level criminality—would struggle to prosper in the way they currently are.

[Tom Pursglove]

Thank you, that is very helpful.

[Bambos Charalambous]

Q I have some follow-up questions to that. You mentioned the Balkan states, in particular Albania and Lithuania. Is it generally the Balkan states which are involved in the criminal gangs you have come across?

Assistant Chief Constable Dave Kirby: At the moment, there is a heightened threat from people from those areas. That is what we are seeing most of in terms of foreign national offenders in Derbyshire and the east midlands, and I am fairly confident that is also the pattern elsewhere. To illustrate, we used to see Vietnamese organised criminals involved in cannabis growing, sex trafficking and other issues, but more often than not we now see Albanians in control, potentially exploiting those Vietnamese people, or, if not, working together. Some alleged groups are so well-organised and disciplined that they are able to effectively out-perform other criminal gangs. That is the threat we are seeing most in terms of foreign national criminality.

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[Paul Howell]

Q Can we change the direction slightly? We have heard lots about the stresses that illegal immigration is putting on local councils. Looking at the Bill as it stands, can you tell me whether there are things in there that help the situation for you, and are there things that you would like to have seen in there—things that would have helped if they had been put in? I am trying to see what difference the Bill would actually make to your life.

Councillor Rachael Robathan: Yes, there are certainly some things that we would welcome, although it would be good to see some more detail when the secondary legislation comes forward. Just to back up slightly, a further issue that we have in Westminster, as many of you will be aware, is the significant number of rough sleepers. Our latest count was 171, which is actually fewer than there have been previously. We worked very closely with Government on the Everyone In programme and so on last year, which was very successful, but we still have 70 in a bridging hotel within Westminster, so there is a significant issue around rough sleeping.

Over half of those people have no recourse to public funds. All of the asylum seekers in Westminster have come through the sanctioned route, so they would be in category 1 under this Bill, but one of the concerns for us would be if there is more clarity, if you like, in terms of no recourse to public funds for category 2, whether some of those people who would have no recourse to public funds might slip into rough sleeping. There is always a draw to the centre of Westminster: it is known that an aggressive beggar can make up to £500, or sometimes more, on our streets in Westminster, so if people find themselves on the street, there is an economic pull into the centre. That could lead to increasing numbers within Westminster.

Speaking very specifically about Westminster, the issue is that we then have an issue with tented accommodation, and the point about tented accommodation—I have had a number of meetings with the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice about this—is that there is a very high bar for the police or others to be able to gain entry to the tents. Not only is it difficult to enforce against those who would be illegally there but, much more importantly, it is very difficult to address issues around trafficked women and other people who are on the streets and need support and help, because we are unable to deliver that. That is a concern.

One of the things that we would welcome—I think this has come through in what both Councillor Gough and I have said—is a more organised approach to the way asylum seekers are looked after and accommodated. More planning around the process would help. I think we have also both said that the Afghan resettlement has been much better in terms of being able to have planning and co-ordination with local authorities, so that is something we would welcome.

Also in Westminster, I welcome the measures around modern slavery, but also the greater sanctions to stop people coming back into the country if they have been convicted of criminal activity. Once again, we have people on the streets in Westminster who engage in criminal activity to earn money. That activity is not at a very high level, but they are still things that have a real impact on our residents’ lives. We would welcome the moves around electronic travel authorisation and other measures to make re-entry into the country more difficult for those people who are here to commit criminal activity.

Councillor Roger Gough: I would endorse what Councillor Robathan has said; I agree with all those points. There are a couple of specifics from our side. One slightly begs the question as to how effective the measures will be, ultimately, because others looking at the Bill can judge that better than me. The basic principle of seeking to promote safe and orderly routes at the expense of those that involve things like the small boat routes would be very welcome. There is no doubt, and it has been much emphasised, that that route is very dangerous. It creates a degree of political tension because it is so visible. It is something that we very much wish to avoid. Those issues come home to those of us who are border authorities, particularly in the case of the small boats in areas such as Kent. The measures to try to shift the balance between the two ways in which people get here would in principle be very welcome.

The second area I want to touch on relates to age assessment. Broadly, the direction there seems to me to be a favourable one. The attempt to create a national body, not to carry out or provide support to local authorities, unless it is requested, so much as to provide some consistency and regularity to a very time-consuming process that can wrap up huge amounts of time from very qualified social workers and which often has no very obvious end to it because it is relatively loosely guided, is welcome. Establishing best practice as well as providing support for local authorities, many of which will be less experienced in this area than authorities such as mine, would be very welcome.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q First, I have a very Kent-specific question. You will appreciate that I am new in role, but for the benefit of the Committee, could you set out what pressures Kent County Council currently faces as a result of the number of people crossing the channel?

Councillor Roger Gough: We are slightly betwixt and between on that. I apologise if I give an answer that may not be quite as definite as you would like. I shall explain why. If we take this year and last year, the very specific pressures that we have been experiencing were rapid increases in the numbers of young people coming into our care, the end result of which was that social work case loads rose far above recommended levels, particularly for the specialist teams dealing with those cases. We also had reception centres that, particularly with the first wave of big pressure last year, were filling rapidly. That was the point at which placing young people in other accommodation was difficult because of the circumstances of the pandemic.

Just to be clear, it is perhaps worth saying that when we talk about unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, historically, these have been adolescent males. Indeed, if you look at last year’s figures, we have very few indeed who were under the age––or stated age––of 16. There was something of a shift in the early part of this year where, from memory, about a fifth of those arriving were of stated age under 16. That tended to push you more towards foster accommodation rather than the semi-independent and other forms of accommodation that we would provide for the 16 and 17-year-olds. That has meant that through the pressures on fostering, and to some extent on other forms of accommodation, we had to place more young people outside the county, and we were certainly heading into that sort of territory at the time when we were closing our doors again in June. That was the biggest area of concern.

One thing that is worth noting, too, and it has a longer lag on it, is care leavers: those who come into our care, or indeed the care of any authority, under the age of 18—they are taken in as children in care—then become care leavers. Councillor Robathan referred to that. Under the changes to legislation that took place three or four years ago, we have a responsibility for them through to the age of 25. While at the moment, we have around 300 under-18s in our care, we have over 1,000 care leavers. In fact, our care leaver service is more ex unaccompanied asylum-seeking children than it is ex Kent children in care. As you can imagine, that generates a number of specific pressures, too. I hope that answers your question. The only reason for my hesitancy at the start was that we have just come out of the period when we were not taking young people into our care, and therefore some of the very large numbers of arrivals that we saw a few weeks ago, of whom typically 10% to 15% would probably be unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, were not having a very direct effect on us at that point. But clearly if those numbers were to continue, we would potentially be in a different situation.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q In terms of the broader measures that we are seeking to introduce in the Bill, how pressing do residents in your communities think they are?

Councillor Roger Gough: First, there is a big variety of views in Kent, as I think there is anywhere. My inbox, my postbag, tells me that about all the issues that are raised, but as I mentioned in my earlier responses, the very visible sense of large numbers of arrivals on the coast has had an effect within the county, and therefore that has made the issue a pressing one. As I say, from a service delivery point of view, for us the most pressing element of it has been to do with the children.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q To touch on age assessments again—I know that you have commented briefly on those—there are almost three elements to my question, and I would be delighted to hear from both of you on this. What pressures do age assessments place on your local authority in resource terms? What safeguarding risks do you think exist as a result of adults successfully posing as children? How many UASCs who approach you for support do you have doubts about in relation to their claimed age?

Councillor Roger Gough: On the first question, it is a demand and I cannot quantify it at this moment, but I can give you perhaps some indications. It is a demand on social worker time, so you will tend to see that a typical age assessment involves two experienced social workers, who will carry out interviews. If you just take everything going smoothly, if I could put it that way, that would involve a couple of half-day interviews followed by extensive paperwork, research and then later stages of the process. In practice, and this goes back to my earlier comments about age assessment, there are a number of ways in which the process may well be less smooth running than that. But you need experienced social workers, and one of the areas in which we have worked with the Home Office has been through their support for us in backfilling posts so that experienced social workers can take that role on.

On safeguarding, clearly there is a significant concern—it is quite hard to specify the full details of it—where you have adults in what one would take to be a young person’s space. Clearly, you will have a challenge over those who are, if you like, on the cusp. What happens—this ties in, perhaps, to your third question—is that we have had historically quite large numbers of young people being put through by the Home Office where doubts have been raised by Border Force regarding their age. There are some of whom they would say—interestingly, recent court findings have helped with this process a bit—“Look, this person is definitely, in our view, out of the reasonable range to be considered a child,” and they would be into the adult part of the process.

That can sometimes come back. For instance, where asylum seekers have been placed in hotels elsewhere, disputes about age assessment then come back as an issue for the new local authority. I know of a number of places across the south-east where that has happened, but in our case, there are a number of cases where any local authority, I think, would take the view that, where it is very hard to establish—again, the guidance around this is relatively loose—that a young person is definitely out of that age range, there is precious little point in pursuing that further.

That still leaves you with a material number. At one point, at the height of things, around half the young people who were arriving arrived with doubts raised about them by the Home Office. We would then probably in practice seriously investigate, because it was considered viable to do so, only a portion of those, but they would very often go into cases where the age dispute would be pushed to the point of saying that this was indeed an adult.

Councillor Rachael Robathan: As Councillor Gough said, this is very time consuming. As he stated, almost all of the UASC are late-teen boys, and it can be very difficult at the best of times to tell someone’s age, so it involves a huge amount of time on the part of the local authority. There is a very clear safeguarding issue, because once someone has been accepted as UAS they are put into a child setting—schools and other child settings—where there is a very clear safeguarding issue. That is something that we are all very conscious of, clearly.

The other point, as we said earlier, is that there is an ongoing responsibility to these young people, because the responsibility to support them carries on until they are 25, so if you have someone who presents as a 16-year-old, let us say, that means that you have almost 10 years during which you will support that young person. In terms of ensuring that there is the best use of public funds, which we all know are always very stretched, we need to ensure that the people coming into the system are the ones who really need that support, and who are legitimately there.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q I noted the broad support for the national age assessment board approach that we are proposing to try to deal with some of this, but what impact do you believe the current judicial review-based processes for settling disputes of age assessments have on your organisation? I am conscious, as a former councillor, that it is not always just financial; it is also around officer time in particular, and the impact on services more generally. What would you say about that?

Councillor Rachael Robathan: Anything that moves towards a uniform process will greatly help. At the moment, involving the local authorities and putting the responsibility on them is very difficult for what are very often stretched institutions. Having a uniform, joined-up process would be very welcome.

Councillor Roger Gough: Already when you see changes in, for instance, what the courts have found about what is a reasonable basis on which a challenge can be presented by Border Force, as we have seen recently, that has made a huge difference. The proportion of young people coming to us age disputed is significantly lower than it was before that.

When you get changes in the process, it can make a material difference. Authorities like ours are at least experienced in this area, even if we are in the eye of the storm. As dispersal happens, or when, as I mentioned earlier, those who have been placed as adults launch a challenge within their own authority, issues may arise for an authority that is not nearly as well set up to deal with them as we are.

To pick up on the point that Councillor Robathan made, it is worth emphasising what a difference going into the children’s system or the adult system makes. As we have both said, first there are children in care and then there is the care leaver process, all of which, quite properly in their own way, have particular requirements for children’s services departments in authorities. The process around adult dispersal clearly still makes demands on council services, but in the first instance it is a housing-related issue, from which a number of other things follow. It is not quite the same as building in what can be a seven, eight or 10 year process of somebody being part of the children’s services operations of the council.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Q I thank the witnesses for their evidence so far. I have a couple of follow-up questions on age assessments. You have spoken about the safeguarding issues that arise if somebody who is an adult finds themselves in a space for children, but of course the opposite can also happen; there are huge safeguarding issues if somebody aged 15 or 16 ends up being put in a hotel with adults or dispersed to some other part of the United Kingdom with limited supervision. It is in all our interests to get that absolutely right. Would it make any difference, for example, if we took the pressure off these decisions—I am thinking slightly off the top of my head—by continuing UASC leave to a higher age, say 20 or 21?

Councillor Roger Gough: Sorry, could you just run your last point by me again?

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[Anne McLaughlin]

Q My second and final question is on international relations. The UK lags behind other European countries in terms of numbers. The British Red Cross said that we were the 17th highest in terms of the number of people that we took in. The Bill basically says to the French, among others, “Not in my backyard—your problem”. What does that do to international relations and what could the UK Government do? I accept what you say about other Governments having to come into these bilateral agreements, but what could the UK Government do to reach out to other countries in Europe to try to work on this together?

Tony Smith: I would dispute those figures. We are probably about fifth in Europe in terms of asylum intake, but you are right that other countries have more asylum applications every year than we have. That is not necessarily because those numbers have been invited by the EU to go and live there. It is because they are unable to control their own external frontier. Because of the Schengen arrangement, asylum seekers can choose where they would like to go. Many drift north to Scandinavia, Germany, Holland or France, where they would rather be than in some of the southern or eastern European states.

The EU has its own difficulties in determining the allocation of asylum seekers across the Schengen zone because they do not agree among themselves about how they should be distributed. The bigger question is not necessarily a European one but a global one. No doubt you will hear evidence from experts on this. The need for international resettlement is a huge problem. We have seen it in Afghanistan; we have climate change; and we have migratory pressures coming up from South America to the US border. People are going to continue to move in great numbers over the next 20 or 30 years. The question is how the western world is going to cope with that.

I am quite a big fan of the refugee resettlement programme. UNHCR has been going out to western countries for some years saying, “We have 80 million people displaced, and 40 million in different countries in our camps already. These are refugees who have already fled war zones whom we would like you to take.” Even though we were taking only about 5,000 or so, we are still third highest in the world, so we are not really getting to grips with the global challenge of resettling refugees through the resettlement route. It has picked up a bit since Afghanistan, and we are doing more. There is certainly evidence that we are trying to do more, and I think we could become global leaders on refugee resettlement programmes, but it is going to be difficult politically for anyone to sell that when we are seeing uncontrolled migration across the English channel.

It is finding the balance. How can we help to contribute to genuine resettlement for genuine refugees, but at the same time take back control of our borders, which is clearly the Government’s stated intent?

[Tom Pursglove]

Q Is it reasonable to think, based on your many years of experience, that if we do nothing—if we just stand back from the challenge of illegal crossings—the number of crossings will increase and crossing will become even less safe? Do you think that the principle of deterrence is important in all this?

Tony Smith: I do think that. It is absolutely important in all this. While I would not defend the turn back strategy, I can understand why the Government are looking at those kinds of measures to stop the boats. It must be extremely frustrating not to be able to do anything about the ever-increasing numbers, particularly when a succession of Home Secretaries have come in saying that that was what they would do. A number of my successors—civil servants—have given evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, saying that they were going to make the route unviable. I am afraid it is not within their gift to make the route unviable within the current frameworks. One would hope that the new legislation would change things. It certainly changes the dynamic. We can now say, “We know that you arrived by this route. We know that you are not immediately fleeing persecution.”

I am not a big fan of the criminal justice system for migrants. It has not really worked. I am a fan of it for smugglers and facilitators, but putting migrants in prison is not necessarily going to be the answer and will lead to more challenges. The question is how we disrupt the smugglers and break that business model. The only way is to start seeing people going back to France. Then people will see that there is no point putting their life at risk in a small dinghy. There will be no point in more and more of them spreading up to Calais because that business model is broken. The big difficulty for the Government is how to persuade the French that we ought to have a policy like that and negotiate an agreement, and how to counterbalance that with the other problem of significant numbers of people around the world seeking resettlement. How are we going to contribute to responding to that?

[Tom Pursglove]

Q Notwithstanding what you have already said about collaboration between us and the French to tackle this, what assessment have you made of the work that is already in train to try to improve the situation? Do you think it has improved the situation somewhat?

Tony Smith: Without a doubt. I support the investment of resources in France, and that is something that we have been doing for a long time now. The French could legitimately say, “Actually, why would you not help us to contribute to border security?” Let us not pretend that the French operational arms, including the police aux frontières, the douanes, the various coastal agencies—I used to talk to them regularly when I was in the job—are not supportive of preventing criminality at an operational level.

We can be quite pleased with the work that we have done to at least try to disrupt the smuggling gangs. Quite a few have been prosecuted on the French side, albeit, sadly, more the middle men rather than the big fish who are behind human smuggling gangs. You will hear from other witnesses more qualified than me to tell you about that level 3 criminality, but it is really difficult. How do we disrupt the business model? It is about deterring people from coming. We owe a duty under the 1951 refugee convention to give refugee status to those who are genuinely in need, but I am not sure that it is the same duty for those who are arriving in this way, from a fellow original signatory to that convention, than those coming through evacuation processes such as we have seen recently in Kabul.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q Mindful of the breadth of your professional experience in previous roles, how crucial do you think the streamlining of the processing of applications is to tackling some of these challenges?

Tony Smith: We lived through this before. We had something called the new asylum model when I was in the UK Border Agency, before taking the top job in the Border Force. Previously, I was regional director for UKBA London and the south-east, which meant that my teams were the ones who were processing asylum arrivals coming into the country. I was actually responsible for removals.

Yes, we did have targets in the Home Office in those days for enforcement. It was part of my mission to ensure that those who did not qualify to stay, either because they had arrived under safe third country rules, or they were coming on a manifestly unfounded route, were sent back. The trouble is we have seen a good deal of judicial overreach by the European Court of Justice, and significant interpretations and European directives, which kind of hindered those arrangements on returns. We have now got to a point where we are not really returning anybody who is coming across on these boats, and people notice that. If we do not start returning people, the numbers will continue to rise. We need to find a way of segmenting those applicants who we know have a genuine claim for asylum in this country from those who have probably been in Europe for a long time and may have had applications for asylum rejected—they have had a notice de quitter from Schengen, sometimes two or three notices—who are not genuine asylum seekers but who would just like to come to live here. That is not effective border control.

It is going to be really, really difficult, but I applaud the authors of the Bill, because it finally gets to grips with the difficulty of the way we have interpreted the 1951 refugee convention and put up what I think is the right interpretation of it in not conflating two different arguments, which is human smuggling across the English channel by criminal gangs, putting lives at risk, and the genuine need to resettle refugees from different parts of the world.

[Chair]

We only have a few minutes, so I call Jonathan Gullis.

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[Bambos Charalambous]

Q You also mentioned some other countries, such as Belgium, Germany and Turkey. Are you working closely with them?

Rob Jones: We are, absolutely. We have very positive relationships with those countries. The supply of boats to northern France and of engines in the infrastructure that supports these crossings is something that those partners can help us with.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q I heard your answer in relation to modern slavery, but in terms of wider criminality and what you are seeing on the ground, what impact do you think the proceeds of small boat crossings are having on criminal gangs?

Rob Jones: We know that that route is more and more attractive to organised crime. That is why we need to break the momentum that is pushing the viability of that route. People who are involved in the facilitation of migrants are also involved in drug trafficking and other serious organised crime. We have seen that polycriminality with HGV companies that will one day smuggle drugs and another day smuggle migrants.

One of the good things about these provisions is that they, to coin a phrase, level up the sentencing for people involved in the facilitation of migrants with that for those who are dealt with for drug trafficking. It cannot be right that, at the moment, if you smuggle 20 kg of class A drugs, you could face a life sentence, but if you conceal 20 people in a false floor in a lorry, which is one of the things that we encounter at the border, it is 14 years. Some of the provisions here, including the life sentence for facilitation, are a useful deterrent that we feel will help with that broader organised crime threat where some of this money is reinvested in other crimes.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q I agree with you very much on the penalty. It would seem obvious to me that closing down that line of revenue for these criminal gangs is a sensible and obvious thing to do. One other area in relation to penalties in the Bill is the issue of returning foreign national offenders. At the moment, I think the penalty is six months. We are proposing to increase that penalty to five years. How valuable do you think that will be in terms of some of the issues with which no doubt you end up grappling, with foreign national offenders returning to this country and then carrying out further crimes?

Rob Jones: That is another helpful element that has, we hope, a deterrent effect. Criminality linked to the western Balkans, and really determined people who will be deported and then engage in a merry-go-round using false ID cards and clandestine entry to come back to the UK to continue committing crime, is something that we need to deal with. Those provisions would be helpful in that context.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q I am interested, on a broader level, in what challenges you think our country faces from organised immigration crime more generally.

Rob Jones: It is now recognised by organised crime groups as something that can generate a lot of revenue quickly. The previous witness talked about pull and push factors. The UK is a very attractive destination, and people will pay significant amounts of money—thousands of pounds—to smugglers. As we move forward with more pressure—we have seen what has played out with Afghanistan—and with more irregular migrants moving, there is the opportunity for organised crime to capitalise on that. Having a strong deterrent and being able to project our response and deal with organised crime groups upstream is really important to us, because there will be more and more pressure on the system, which inevitably will be exploited by smuggling gangs.

[Tom Pursglove]

Q Presumably trying to focus our approach on safe and legal routes is also very helpful from a national security perspective.

Rob Jones: Absolutely, with the normalisation of clandestine entry, where people are allowed to hide in a crowd. When this problem began, a big day was 100. We are now looking at a big day as being over 700. Within that, you get an increased risk that people will enter the country in a truly clandestine fashion. The more that you can do to offer safe and legal routes, and to disincentivise the business model through deterrents and a range of provisions, the more effective we can be at tackling the organised crime element, because we can then concentrate on the worst groups, which pose the highest risk and will potentially be moving people with a criminal history, whom we are most concerned about.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Q Thank you for your evidence, Mr Jones. I do not think that anyone would beg to differ on the need to deter and disrupt the smuggling gangs and to support safe legal routes; the issue is much more about where we draw the line in trying to deter people who use those gangs, whether it is appropriate to criminalise them, and so on. May I ask you about another challenge on which I think you have given evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee: the use of social media companies and encryption to try to organise these sailings, and so on? Back then, I think you indicated that there was a lack of co-operation from a lot of the social media companies, which was posing a lot of challenges. Has there been any progress in that regard?

Rob Jones: There has been some progress. We have been working constantly with the social media companies to get a better response, and to ensure that their platforms are not being used to promote dangerous crossings, and there is progress. We are working in a voluntary environment. We are, in some ways, short of regulation, particularly in relation to this element, but we continue to work with those companies on a day-to-day basis to take material down. That response has improved. It is still not as good as I would like it to be, and we are working to an action plan where we have a common agreement of standards in terms of takedown and our aspiration to prevent adverse outcomes in the English channel, which is ultimately what this is all about. It has got better. It is not as good as it could be. Your point on encryption and some of the closed spaces that we cannot see that are being used to promote these crossings remains an issue for us.