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Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered illegal immigration.
I must start by saying that our numbers in this debate are more select than they might otherwise be, were it not for the fact that many Members are taking part in the vital debate on the Government’s decision to take the winter fuel payment away from 10 million needy pensioners.
Since 1971, it has been a criminal offence for a person who is not a British citizen to knowingly enter this country without leave to do so. Yet since the start of 2021, more than 125,000 people have come to the UK illegally in small boats—about 94 people every day. In the period since Labour came to power alone, about 8,400 people have come—about 137 every day. Of course, people also come via other illegal routes, and, for obvious reasons, it is difficult to estimate the total number of people in the country illegally. However, the numbers are clearly significant. A 2020 report for the Pew Research Center estimated that at the end of 2017, 800,000 to 1.2 million people were already living in the UK without a valid residence permit, which is about 1.2% to 1.8% of the whole population.
Illegal immigration is unfair on those who have played by the rules and come here legally. It undermines attempts to get the kind of high-skill, high-wage migration that all politicians say they want and it blows a hole in our attempts to keep dangerous people out of the country. It is a huge issue.
Many of the people coming here in the small boats are, in reality, economic migrants—not all, but many. At present, the No. 1 country of origin is Vietnam, which is a friendly and peaceful country. However, as the University of Oxford Migration Observatory pointed out, it is also a country where there are lots of strong connections to organised crime for those crossing from Vietnam, or being trafficked from there.
Most of the people in the small boats are young men—nine out of 10 are men, and about three quarters are aged 18 to 39. Few have any documentation, with only about 2% having passports, which makes it difficult to prove who they are or where they are from, and, coached by the people smugglers, most destroy any evidence —pocket litter, SIM cards and the like—that would tell us where they are from.
The overwhelming majority of these people will claim asylum. They know that if they can make it to the UK, they will be able to stay by one means or another—most will be granted asylum, and, of those who are not, very few will be removed. Looking at the period 2019 to 2022, we see that only about a fifth of applications were refused, and only one in 20 people was actually made to leave the country through enforced or voluntary returns.
Asylum grant rates have steadily climbed in recent decades, from less than a third in 2004 to around four fifths now, while the proportion of people who are ultimately removed has dropped sharply over the past 10 years. Previously, around a quarter of those who claimed asylum were returned; now, the figure is only around one in 20. Many of those who are not granted asylum simply disappear. In November 2023, the Home Office admitted that it does not know the whereabouts of around 17,000 asylum seekers whose claims have been discontinued. Those coming in the small boats know the bottom line: if they can get to the UK, they can stay. As long as that is the case, more and more people will come.
The Government say they are trying to address the issue in a variety of ways, which I will work through. First, they are trying to process people faster, which, in practice, means granting more people asylum more quickly. That means that the costs of the asylum system disappear into the costs of the wider welfare system, but, of course, the costs in the real world do not go away. A number of local councils are concerned that people will shift from asylum accommodation to presenting as statutory homeless and in need of council housing.
These trends are quite difficult to get a handle on in the UK, because, while lots of other Governments are publishing more and more data, we in the UK are publishing less and less. The Department for Work and Pensions has stopped publishing data on welfare claims by nationality, and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has stopped publishing tax paid and tax credits received by nationality. The Home Office will not answer questions on the immigration status of prisoners, such as whether a prisoner is here illegally—although it has the data, it does not publish it—and it does not collect data on the nationality or immigration status of those who are arrested.
When asked basic questions such as how much it spends, on average, per night on hotel accommodation, the Home Office says such information is commercially confidential. When asked about spending programmes such as the refugee integration loan scheme, the Home Office says it does not know how much it has spent, it does not know how many loans it has made, and it does not know how many have been repaid. That is a pretty shocking way to handle taxpayers’ money and it all breeds huge mistrust, meaning that we cannot have a sensible debate about the costs and benefits of different migration policies. The first question that I hope the Minister will answer is this: will she publish the data, so that we can at least have a sensible discussion about the facts?
The second thing that the Government say they are trying to do is to increase deportations of those who should not be here, which is obviously an idea I welcome. In some ways, however, this is surprising because when the Prime Minister was campaigning to be the leader of the Labour party, he signed a letter calling for the suspension of a flight to deport 50 offenders to Jamaica and the suspension of all such future charter flights. In total, 151 Labour MPs and peers signed that letter.
Among those who escaped deportation that day were Ikiva Heaven, a heroin dealer who had already served four years in prison and who went on to be jailed again in May 2021 for dealing cocaine and heroin. If that was not bad enough, one of the other criminals who Labour Members so generously campaigned on behalf of, Ernesto Elliott, went on to commit murder.
The Prime Minister has previously claimed that there is a
“racist undercurrent which permeates all immigration law”.
None the less, I take it on trust that a new leaf has been turned over and that the Government really do want to increase deportations. However, we need some clarity about exactly what the Government’s target and promise are. The Home Secretary has said that she will
“reverse the collapse in removals that has taken place since 2010”. —[Official Report, 22 July 2024; Vol. 752, c. 386.]
As the Minister will know, I was quite critical of the last Government on this issue so I would welcome an increase in deportations. However, my question to the Minister is this: what will the Government achieve, by when? Are we talking about enforced returns or all returns? By when will we reach what level of deportations? For background, the number of enforced returns was 21,425 in 2004; by 2009, that figure had declined to 13,938. It declined further to just 9,236 by 2018. It then ran at about 3,000 a year during the pandemic, when no one was flying—fair enough. However, it then went back up to 7,119 in the year ending June 2024.
What is the Government’s ambition regarding enforced returns? Is it only to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels? If so, that would leave the figure substantially below 2010 levels and at about half the rate that we had in 2004. That would not be very ambitious. Will the Government figure also include voluntary returns? If that is the case, the Home Secretary’s recent announcement that she wanted to raise levels up to the “highest level since 2018” involves a very odd target, because returns have already increased to above that level. In 2018, they were 24,938; in the year ending June 2024, they were 29,551. She could go backwards and still hit her target, which is hardly a stretching ambition. The second question that I hope the Minister will answer when she responds to the debate is about what exactly the Government are promising, by when, and on what kind of deportations. We urgently need clarity.
That brings me to my third question for the Minister. For some countries of origin, such as Albania, we have already secured returns agreements; that has been very effective. Given that the number of people coming from Vietnam is now very high, I am sure that the Government will quickly secure a returns agreement with that country. However, what do the Government plan when it comes to countries that will not take their nationals back or countries that the Government will not want to send nationals back to—such as Afghanistan, Iran and Syria, which account for a very large share of illegal immigration to the UK? I take it that the Government will not negotiate returns agreements with the Taliban, the ayatollahs of Iran or Assad in Syria.
To solve the problem, Governments across Europe are negotiating deals with safe third countries. Last week, we got the news that a senior Minister in Germany was looking to take up the relationship with Rwanda that the Labour Government have rashly abandoned without putting any alternative in place. It is not just Germany that wants to do this; two camps will be built in Albania to house migrants rescued at sea by Italian boats while Italy processes their asylum claims. The EU has ruled that that is legal under European law. Denmark passed legislation allowing for the processing of asylum claims in third countries in 2021. The Chancellor of Austria praised the last Government’s agreement with Rwanda, saying that it was a
“pioneer for us being able to put asylum proceedings in safe third countries”.
In May, 15 EU member states wrote to the European Commission to back the creation of centres in third countries. The signatories included Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania.
Lots of Governments are looking at this issue and responding. In a recent letter, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission President, noted that
“Many Member States are looking at innovative strategies to prevent irregular migration by tackling asylum applications further from the EU external border”.
She promised to look at the issue during the current European Parliament cycle.
The use of safe third countries is not a new idea. Outside Europe, Australia has been intercepting boats at sea and putting people in safe third countries since 2001. Here, Tony Blair’s Government worked to get a deal with Tanzania to send failed asylum seekers there, and that Government also worked to get a deal with other EU member states that would have seen asylum processing in third countries—an idea that is clearly coming back again. Of course, there are differences between the schemes: between sending failed asylum seekers to other countries, processing asylum claims offshore or doing both the processing and accepting of asylum claims in other countries. They have different merits, but all stop failed asylum seekers from remaining here illegally.
It seems certain to me that this Government must and will end up negotiating similar agreements with third countries of their own, which is why it was so rash of them to trash the Rwanda scheme with no alternative. My third question is: having rashly handed over all the work we did with Rwanda to Germany, will the Government now U-turn and start working on third-country deals of the kinds that many other countries now have or are setting up?
I have already mentioned Australia’s policy of intercepting boats at sea, and my fourth question relates to that. What will the Government do to ensure that people intercepted at sea are towed back to France rather than the UK? That is an increasingly important point because the small boats crisis has entered a new and more dangerous phase. The average number of people in each boat has been increasing, and partly because of the success of the last Government in increasingly intercepting engines—the most difficult element of the people smugglers’ kit—we are seeing very large and increasingly overcrowded boats putting out to sea with really small engines. Those things are death traps by design; they are not even intended to get across the channel but purely to get a few miles out to sea and then rely on being rescued. Other innovations by the criminals, such as taking the hard floor out of the boats, have already had deadly and tragic consequences.
The legal argument has always been made that, under the law of the sea, those things are by definition a risk to life at sea. It has got even stronger, which shifts the argument for us to turn more of them back to France. I know that the French have occasionally allowed those boats to be towed back to France when the circumstances have been acute enough, but the argument has got stronger. Will the Minister commit to doing just that? Everything we do at every stage to disrupt the people smugglers’ business model helps to make it unviable and to stop this evil trade.
That brings me to my final question for the Minister: what will the Government do about the underlying reasons why people come from safe third countries to the UK? I said at the start that people know that, as long as they can make it to the UK, they will be able to stay. As long as they know that, they will continue to come. Successive Governments since 2018 have worked with France and other allies to improve enforcement. There have been some results from that, but on its own, it is not going to be enough. We need people to realise that crossings are futile so that they do not step into a deadly boat in the first place.
Some people think that we can solve the problem by just granting more visas for people to come here legally—so-called safe and legal routes. They are saying, “Just make illegal immigration legal, and the problem is solved”. The problem is that, unless we are prepared to have completely open borders and to impose no limits at all, there will always be people who come illegally. For example, 2,233 people from India have come on small boats. India is the world’s largest democracy with a booming economy and an impressive space programme, but we have given—over the same period that the boats have been operating—1.3 million non-visitor visas to people from India. There are loads of opportunities to come here legally from India, and yet thousands of people have still come here illegally. That shows us that we can never solve this problem by having slightly more or slightly bigger safe and legal routes.
It is true that we have created, quite rightly, a number of additional routes on top of the asylum system. Through those humanitarian routes, plus the asylum system, we have taken about half a million people over the last five years; some of them lived in my house—I had Ukrainian refugees living in my house. But sadly, we cannot have an unlimited scheme for every country in the world that is poorer or more oppressive than the UK, because that is a very large share of the world’s population. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, about 16% of all adults worldwide say that they would leave their own country permanently if they could—that would be about 900 million people. They are not wrong to want to move to a richer country, but we simply cannot take all those who would like to move here. Doing things that simply increase the acceptance rate in the asylum system to “clear the backlog” is likely only to increase the pull factor and encourage more people to take that dangerous journey across the channel.
If we look at the countries of origin that account for most of those crossing the channel, we can see that the grant rates have been increasing dramatically over recent years. Even on initial, first-round decisions, acceptances from Vietnam have gone up from about 20% to 60% in recent years. From Eritrea and Sudan, the rates have gone up from 20% to about 100%, and from Afghanistan and Syria, they are about 100%. The figures on final decisions, and on the proportion of people who are actually removed, are even starker. The share of those coming from Vietnam who are returned has declined from about two thirds in the mid-noughties to just 1%. For Turkey, it has gone from 0.5% to 1%. From Iran, from one in five to just 1%. Even for friendly countries like India—booming economies, superpowers in the making—it has gone from half to just one in 10.
There are multiple reasons why someone’s chances of remaining in the UK having come here illegally have increased so much over time. Case law has gradually broadened the definition of groups that are at “risk of persecution”, allowing more and more people to come to the UK if their own countries do not meet the very high standards of western liberal norms. The expansion by the courts of the concept of persecution has left immigration officers facing almost impossible questions of judgment: is someone really a member of this political party or this religion, do they practise their lifestyle or faith openly or quietly, or are they a prominent target? Often there is variation within countries and between time periods.
In some cases, people are not being persecuted in their own country, but they argue they would be persecuted if they returned. For example, military men from Eritrea who have left without permission can be made to do military service, which is then used as an argument to stay in the UK. Should we have to accept any young man who comes here from Eritrea for that reason? I do not think that just because someone’s country is poorer or more oppressive than the UK that gives them a right to come to the UK, but that is the direction that judicial activism has taken.
To create some accountability and transparency around this, I have pushed for the decisions of the first-tier immigration tribunal to be published rather than kept secret, as at present, but that still has not happened. Hand in glove with judicial activism, the Shaw review and the decline of immigration and detention have made the practicalities of deporting people much harder.
Far and away the biggest legal change is the growth in case law associated with the European convention on human rights, signed in 1950. While the 1951 refugee convention had no court or enforcement mechanism at the start, the convention of course has its own court in Strasbourg. Unlike Germany, the UK has a dualist legal system, meaning that treaties do not directly apply, so historically it was able to ignore rulings of the European court. However, in 1998, the Blair Government incorporated the convention into domestic law, meaning people could use their ECHR rights in the domestic courts, directly. I think Tony Blair regretted that very quickly, because in 2006 the courts ruled on the case of nine Afghans who hijacked an airliner in Afghanistan and held its occupants at gunpoint for four days at Stansted airport in 2000. The court granted them leave to remain in this country in a claim heavily based on ECHR rights.
Case law has shifted the meaning of some of the very vaguely defined rights in the convention in a way that would have stunned the original signatories. As an example, a Government consultation listed some cases showing how the balance has shifted. I will mention some of those in this debate. Take case X, a foreign national who had leave to remain in the UK, who committed a series of crimes including common assault, battery, destruction of property and grievous bodily harm. The immigration and asylum tribunal found it would be a disproportionate interference with the appellant’s rights to deport them, given their relationship with their child. If we take case AD, a Turkish national who was convicted of an offence of grievous bodily harm and sentenced to 54 months’ imprisonment, in September 2019, the first-tier tribunal allowed his appeal against deportation on human rights grounds. After protracted litigation relying on his period of lawful residence and marriage to a UK national, the upper-tier tribunal allowed the appeal on article 8 ECHR grounds.
In the case of OO, a Nigerian national convicted of intent to supply crack cocaine and heroin and two offences of violence, in 2020, the first-tier tribunal allowed his appeal against deportation, again on article 8 ECHR grounds, and the upper-tier tribunal upheld these findings, relying on what it called OO’s “significant obstacles” to integrating back in Nigeria.
I do not think that any of these decisions were what Winston Churchill intended when he set up the Council of Europe. Jonathan Sumption, one of our leading jurists, is right to say that these incredibly vaguely defined rights are “dangerous for democracy”. ECHR rights are being used to block us from doing many of the things that we need to do to prevent people who arrive here illegally from lying about their age.
A recent freedom of information response released by the Home Office makes it clear that many people are lying about their age. We can now see that supposedly there are 50% more 16-year-olds arriving here than 18-year-olds, and there are also 50% more 20-year-olds than 18-year-olds, leaving a suspicious dip in the numbers around the age of 18. However, the medical examinations that would enable us to stop people lying about their ages are often barred by ECHR rights. We saw a tragic case of a dangerous person lying about their age with Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, who claimed to be 14 when he was 19, and went on to kill Tom Roberts, an aspiring Royal Marine. That awful and dangerous case showed in multiple ways how the system elevates the rights of dangerous people over the rights of people in this country who just want to stay safe.
Enforcement is very important, and I hope the Minister will let us know when the head of the new border security command is going to be appointed, as several months have passed now. It is essentially a rebadging of existing measures, but it is still not good that the post has remained vacant for so long. Perhaps the Minister will tell us that someone has finally been appointed.
There are, however, limits to what enforcement can do. Tony Smith, the former head of Border Force, has pointed out that just relying on enforcement alone is like playing whack-a-mole. One gang can be shut down, but another one will always pop up. That is why he calls the decision to scrap the Rwanda scheme “rash”. Those who come on the small boats know the bottom line. If they can get to the UK, they can stay. Until we change that, more and more people will force their way into this country illegally. That is not fair on British citizens and it is not fair to legal migrants to this country. It brings significant costs to the British taxpayer and lets dangerous people into our country.
During the election I met many people who were in despair about the small boats. They felt it was profoundly unfair, and that the rights of people who forced their way into this country were considered more important than their rights. They are right to feel that way. I was critical of the previous Government, but I am not optimistic about the current Government fixing any of these things. Perhaps the Minister will prove me wrong when she responds to the debate.
At the very least, I hope that the Minister will answer some questions directly. First, will the Government publish the data that the DWP and the Home Office keep secret? Secondly, will the Government set out a clear, measurable and specific target for removals with a date on it? Thirdly, will the Government U-turn and start talks to create third-country agreements of the kind that they have just abandoned? Fourthly, will they start to tow boats back to France, given the overwhelming risk to public safety and the clear legal arguments for doing that? Finally, and above all, will the Government start to address the deeper reasons why illegal immigrants and people-smugglers know that, if they force their way into the UK, they will be able to stay?
Several hon. Members rose—
Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
I remind Members that they should bob if they wish to take part in the debate. Given the length of the opening speech, and the amount of time available, I will try to limit each Member to about five minutes, with the exception of the two Front Benchers. I call Fred Thomas.
Fred Thomas (Plymouth Moor View) (Lab)
Thank you, Sir Mark. I will not take five minutes. Like many of my neighbours and the people I represent in Plymouth, I served our country in the armed forces. We are really proud of the armed forces community. For us and our families, national security and the security of our borders is paramount.
We came into government nine weeks ago and inherited a dire situation from the outgoing Conservative Government. Unfortunately, they had lost control of our borders. I am proud that the Labour Government will regain control of the situation by creating the border security command, which will draw together the best of British security personnel, from the National Crime Agency, Border Force and the finest intelligence officers in the world. Together we will better protect our borders and, for the first time in many years, go after the criminal gangs that are facilitating and profiting from these crossings.
There is a huge human element that is often left out of these conversations. Last week, we saw a truly horrific loss of life in the channel. There were 12 deaths, including six children and a pregnant woman. That was one of many such incidents so far this year alone. We must never allow ourselves to become inured to that kind of tragedy and the loss of life, especially of children. Sadly, the one set of people who do not care about that loss of life is the smuggling gangs who are responsible for putting people on those terribly overcrowded boats. That is why, to tackle the small boats crisis at its source, we must smash the criminal gangs.
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Reform)
We keep hearing this slogan, “smash the gangs”. Does the hon. Member not realise that when a gang is smashed, there are another 20 gangs ready to take that gang’s place and carry on the people smuggling? I am sure that he will agree that what we need in this country is a deterrent that stops people wanting to come here in the first place.
Fred Thomas
For me, the UK is the best country in the world; I do not think we should make our country a less good place so that fewer people want to come here. That is not the route to go down.
Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
I have worked for the National Crime Agency in the past, and also in a counter-terror role. There are ways we can deal with this. The fact is that what the previous Government set up only dealt with the processing of those who arrived. The new border security command can bring in not just enforcement but disruption, which will ensure that people are not even getting on to the boats. There is not just one way of cracking this nut. If we bring in the likes of MI5, with new counter-terror powers, tools and a culture of disruption, then it can have a massive impact. I have been part of that in the past and have seen it happen, so it can work and I have full faith—
Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
Order. I ask for interventions to be quite short. Those who are intervening are subtracting time from those who want to speak later in the debate.
Fred Thomas
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) for his intervention and his fantastic service to the nation. He worked in those organisations that keep us safe, and is not just commenting from the side.
The inheritance from the previous Government was dire. When Labour took office it was against the backdrop of record small-boat crossing numbers. The last number I saw for this year so far was 13,489; that is an astonishing number that represents a total loss of control. Of course we are not going to turn that around within nine weeks of being in office. Let us not forget the situation that we are inheriting.
Net migration has trebled since 2019. Meanwhile, the Rwanda scheme, which we have heard about today, has already cost taxpayers more than £700 million; we have sent four volunteers to Kigali—that is an expensive trip. Had the Conservatives returned to power, they intended to spend £10 billion over six years on the same failed policy. Will the Minister assure my neighbours, the people I represent and the armed forces community in Plymouth, that the situation is going to turn around under the new Labour Government?
Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Reform)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I thank the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O'Brien) for securing this important debate. It is a shame that there are not more Members here today.
I will choose my words very carefully in this debate, because words and language are important. We need to get tough in this place about the problem of illegal migration. I hear time and again that these people are fleeing war-torn countries—they are desperate people fleeing persecution. Well, let me say, I have been to France and it is quite a nice place. There is no war in France and they are not persecuted there. I served on the Home Affairs Committee for two years. I went to the camps in Calais, and the first thing we noticed was that it was all young men—there were no women, children or families. They were young men between the ages of 16 or 17 and 30. They all said the same thing to us: they would point at the white cliffs of Dover and say, “El Dorado”. They wanted to come to this country because they thought that the streets were paved with gold—and they are paved with gold, if someone is coming from a country such as Eritrea or Sudan.
The most annoying part for me was that there was a charity there called Care4Calais, which would attract those people. It would give them the co-ordinates in whichever country they came from, and it would take weeks or months for people to get there. Once they got to the camp, Care4Calais would set up a school to teach them how to speak and write English. It would give them new phones with data, give them shelter, and get them ready for the crossing to the UK. I take issue with the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, who said that once they get to England they are never leaving—it is once they get in the channel. Once they get in the channel they are picked up and ferried to our country. When they get to our country, they are placed in hotels—[Interruption.]
Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
Order. There is a Division. We normally add injury time to debates such as this. As soon as everybody is back in the Chamber, I will be in the Chair and any time we have lost as a result of the vote will be recouped.
Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
With injury time, the debate will now continue to 4.15 pm. I call Lee Anderson to continue.
Lee Anderson
Thank you, Sir Mark.
Once the illegal migrants—let us get the wording right: they are illegal migrants—get into this country, there is no way they are ever going to be deported. It only happens in very rare circumstances.
The most important thing for me is to get the terminology right. They are illegal migrants. They are young men coming into our country. Quite frankly—people can say what they want about me—I do not want these people in my country. They have broken into our country. They have thrown their documents away. They are undocumented. We do not know where they have come from. We do not know what they have been up to in their own country. We do not know whether they are criminals. We do not know what their intentions are when they get here.
We are a soft touch. These are illegal migrants posing as asylum seekers. We have heard some horrific cases over the past two years, with some of these illegal migrants being granted asylum status and then going on to commit horrific crimes—again, abusing our asylum system.
I get reports as a Member of Parliament, and I know my colleagues do, of young, undocumented men roaming around our town centres, intimidating people. That has to stop. Yet we see the non-governmental organisations, the lefty lawyers and the Labour party together encouraging these illegal migrants to come over the channel by using the same old slogan: “smash the gangs”. I am telling everyone in this room that that slogan is a complete nonsense. We have to stop the pull factor for people coming to this country.
Once these young men in northern France—I have to been to the camps—get into the channel, they are in this country. We may stop 100 boats a month, but those same people will get on to another boat and keep coming. Once they are in this country, they are going absolutely nowhere, and they are costing us a fortune. At the same time as we are waiting for the results of a vote to rob our pensioners of their winter fuel payment, supported by the Government, we are spending nearly £6 billion or £7 billion on illegal migration.
In the minute I have left, I will tell a quick story. In 1941, my grandad Charles William Waterfield left the Nottinghamshire coalfields. He left the pits before mining became a reserved occupation. He put a uniform on and went to north Africa. He left a wife and two children behind to fight for King and country. He did that. He did not run away. He did not go to another country and leave his wife and children behind, which is exactly what these young men are doing. They are leaving women and children behind in a supposedly war-torn country. Quite frankly, I do not want these sorts of people in my country and neither do the vast majority of the British public.
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) on securing this debate and on his excellent speech. I also congratulate the Minister on her appointment to the Home Office. She won the lottery with that job.
The starting principle of a functioning immigration system is that it has to work in the interests of the citizens of this country and we must decide who comes here. Illegal immigration destroys this principle for all the reasons set out by my hon. Friend in his speech. That is why we must have no tolerance for the channel crossings, and why we need a policy that breaks the link between entering the country illegally and staying here for good thereafter.
Just before the summer recess, the Home Secretary made a statement in which she set out the Government’s policy on illegal immigration, including getting rid of deterrents through deportation to third countries and scrapping the retrospective element of the duty to remove that was set out in the Illegal Migration Act 2023. She said that her policy was instead to consider the asylum claims of all illegal immigrants subject to the retrospective duty and admitted, in the impact assessment if not in her speech, that that meant granting asylum to up to 70% of them.
I will come to the cost of that decision, but I want to address the Home Secretary’s claim about the cost of the previous Government’s policy. She claimed that by making the change, she would save the taxpayer £700 million a year for a decade. Labour MPs are repeating that statistic, not knowing that they have been sold a pup, because the claim is clearly ridiculous. After that statement, word soon reached me that Home Office officials were appalled that it had been used. If any Labour MPs want to dispute that, I suggest that their Ministers speak to Home Office civil servants as often as I do.
I wrote to the permanent secretary on that news, and went through the impact assessment. The numbers were the result of what might be called the Reeves method, because they were a work of political fiction. We know, for example, that the Home Secretary’s calculation double-counted costs. On the one hand, Sir Matthew Rycroft in his letter to me said it included expenses for implementing the Rwanda policy, while on the other hand, the impact assessment assumed Rwanda would never be implemented.
Indeed, the impact assessment assumed not a single migrant would be deported under the Conservative policy and that migrants would have stayed in hotels for 10 years, which is clearly an absurd proposition. However, the Labour policy excluded massive costs from welfare bills and categorised them as housing policy, which it admitted as “significant” and that it
“could undermine…this impact assessment”,
yet the results of the impact assessment were presented to the House of Commons as unquestionable fact.
The impact assessment reveals the real Government policy: to deal with the huge number of claims by accepting them and to deal with the cost by hiding the numbers from the public in the welfare system. The Home Office admits that 63,053 illegal immigrants previously due to be deported will have their asylum claims heard instead, and up to 70% of them—that is 44,137 people—will be successful. But it also admits that, for those refused,
“the scale and timing of removals is highly uncertain”,
and that
“the Home Office may continue to support a number of”
them.
These figures are just the beginning, because they apply to only one cohort of migrants, with the duty to remove unlikely ever to be implemented by Labour. Unless the Minister corrects me by naming a start date, the Home Office admits its policy
“is expected to increase the number of asylum claims”,
which “consequently increases…costs”. Instead of facing deportation, hundreds of thousands more migrants will stay here for good. The policy is to shift migrants from the Home Office budget, the costs of which are published clearly, to the welfare and local authority budgets, the costs of which are not published clearly.
The impact assessment says:
“Any asylum seekers who are granted asylum will have full access to…the welfare system”,
and local authorities will also “incur costs”. So lacking in transparency is this approach that the impact assessment says the Home Office has
“not been able to establish a generally usable figure.”
That is obviously ridiculous.
We know from studies in Europe that the average channel migrant will be a net lifetime recipient of public funding, not a contributor. In a Danish Government study, immigrants from the middle east, north Africa, Pakistan and Turkey were shown to cost a net £10,000 per year. A study at the University of Amsterdam calculated that, over a lifetime, the average asylum migrant costs the Dutch public more than £400,000.
On that basis, for those granted asylum in just this one cohort, the lifetime cost of Labour’s new policy is £17.8 billion, which is far more than the bogus £7 billion figure cited by the Home Secretary, which she said was the cost of the duty to remove policy. Hundreds of thousands more people will be claiming asylum here in the next four to five years, so the final cost of the new Labour policy will be many multiples more expensive than that. That is the reality of the Government’s illegal immigration policy—more illegal immigration, not less, and vastly higher costs. For that, we will all pay the price.
Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
I apologise for my late arrival after the vote, Sir Mark. My constituency is Dover and Deal, so I have been engaging on this serious issue for a number of years and it means a lot to my constituents. The Labour party has made it clear that what matters to voters matters to us, too, and that is why we are taking this so seriously.
In 2018, 299 people crossed in small boats. Since then, we have had 136,000 crossings. The asylum backlog reached record highs, which has cost £8 million a day in hotels. The hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) made the point that we will speed up the processing and therefore grant more asylum claims, but the alternative is to have a backlog of five years that costs £8 million a day. We will also deport those who should not be here, which the Conservatives completely failed to do.
Our plan is sensible and pragmatic. The border security command, as I touched on earlier, is not the same as what was previously in place to deal with those arriving at the borders. It will work upstream and bring in counter-terror powers. Let us give that a chance—we have had eight weeks, so I am surprised even to be having this debate right now. We have had 13 flights off the ground, one of which was the largest on record. That is a show of intent as to exactly how seriously we take the matter.
My final point is that the Labour party has strong values on this. We believe in secure borders, but we play the ball, not the player. Those seeking a better life are doing nothing wrong, but we will secure the borders and take out the smuggling gangs.
Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
The number of Members wishing to speak has dwindled slightly since the Division, so I will relax the time limit from five to six minutes to more like seven to eight minutes. Members will have a bit longer. I know that does not help those who have already spoken, but they spoke before the vote.
Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
It is a pleasure to serve under you, Sir Mark. I hope to stay within five minutes, just about.
When we see pictures of boats entering Dover packed full of supposedly desperate asylum seekers, I want to ask, “Where are the women? Where are the children?” The craft are filled almost exclusively with men—young men. How did they secure the rumoured £5,000 to pay for the cost of their crossing? Even according to the Home Office’s own 2022 figures, 87% of these people were men. We must be abundantly clear and honest with the British people: these are foreign males looking to take advantage of our soft borders and our incompetent establishment. They are not, in the vast majority of cases, people genuinely fleeing war and persecution.
Now we are told we should refer to these people as “irregular migrants”. Language matters. The vast majority of these men are not “irregular”, or asylum seekers; they are illegal immigrants and should be labelled as such.
What have we done with these males who have illegally entered our country—unchecked, undocumented, unknown individuals? We have spread them across the UK, often putting them up in luxury accommodation—all at our expense—and damaging the fabric of our country, particularly in my constituency. They are free to come and go as they please. Why? If any reach our shores, they should be securely detained until rapid deportation can be arranged. Allowing thousands and thousands of foreign young men free rein across our country is pure, unadulterated insanity.
The public are furious. In no way does that justify any violence, but we must accept the reasons behind so much of the anger. Starmer has misread the room badly, and the fury will not dissipate until the crisis is taken seriously by the Government. The boats could be stopped virtually overnight with the correct will. Put the Navy in the channel, send the boats back to France, and ensure that no one setting foot here illegally stays. That means deportations, and lots of them.
The Australians deployed a zero-tolerance approach. It worked. We must do the same, and urgently. The first step to delivering that is to declare a national emergency. Send a clear message to the illegal migrants and the smugglers: if you come here illegally, you are not welcome. Until that happens, more and more will come.
Does the Prime Minister have the political will to tackle this crisis? The British public will not forgive him and his colleagues for failure to deliver now. Tony Blair opened the floodgates in 1997 via the Human Rights Act, and the Tories accelerated the process. The Prime Minister must now close them as a matter of urgency. Illegal migration is mortally damaging our sovereign nation. Given that the Department is having trouble maintaining its staff, as are most Government Departments of which I have experience, none of us believes that smashing the gangs has any hope of getting any traction.
Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)
I thank the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) for calling this debate. He must find it excruciatingly embarrassing how badly the previous Government dealt with this issue.
With my strong connection in Kent and Sussex with the commercial fishing industry, the angling trade and indeed the lifeboats, I started to feel in early 2020 that —after the odd boat had crossed in 2018 and 2019, as the hon. Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) mentioned—something big was about to happen. The gangs had realised that the chances of deportation from this country were very low. So I went out repeatedly from Dover into the English channel, filming boats and meeting face to face with boatfuls of the young men who have been described—in many cases, very aggressive young males.
I also got to the bottom of the use of the word “escorts”. I kept being told that escorts were crossing the channel. I was not quite sure what that meant, to begin with, but then I understood that it was the French navy—that the French navy literally escorted boats across the English channel and handed them over to Border Force or the Royal National Lifeboat Institution —so I made a bit of a fuss about the whole thing. I said that unless something was done, huge numbers would come. I said that there might even be an “invasion”, a word that got me in very big trouble. Given that we are pushing up towards 140,000 who have come, I do not think I misused the word.
The efforts of the last Government to deal with this were frankly pretty pitiful. Rwanda might have worked in theory, but of course in practice it was not going to work. All the while, we are subject to that Court in Strasbourg, as we saw that evening. More interestingly, the incorporation of the convention into British law means that actually British judges will always rule in favour of the ECHR, so we have to face up to that reality.
I also believe that what we are facing is a national security emergency. When ISIS boasted in 2015 that it would use the Mediterranean to get its operatives into Europe, perhaps the European Union should have taken it more at its word. It was interesting to note that Sir Keir Starmer himself used the phrase “national security emergency” during the general election, so he is going to have to act accordingly.
Appointing a new border chief commander? Yes, we may get some better intelligence—fine, but the French, whom we have given hundreds of millions of pounds, already stop a lot of dinghies from crossing. They put knives in the dinghies, but the problem is that the prospective illegal immigrants just hide in the dunes and come back the next day. So that is not going to work.
Smashing the gangs? Well, I don’t know. What I have been hearing for the past 30 years is that we are going to smash the drugs gangs in this country, and yet there are more class A drugs being taken today than there ever were before. A good operative gang, working out of those sand dunes in northern France in a reasonable week of weather, can expect to make at least €2 million. The financial rewards are very, very high.
Really, what this comes down to is two things. No. 1 is political will. Successive Australian Prime Ministers attempted to deal with the problem; they all failed. They tried offshore processing and so on, until in the end Tony Abbott just towed the boats back to Indonesia. There was international outrage from the UN, the EU and indeed the Foreign Office.
Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
Order. Can I just say that if somebody intervenes, you should sit down?
Nigel Farage
Just a few weeks ago, for the first time, Border Force did an emergency pick-up on the other side of the line. Rather than bringing the people back to this country, as previously Dover lifeboat and Dungeness lifeboat had done, it actually took them into Calais. That is the way we do it. Yes, these are far flimsier vessels, but the principle of taking people back whence they came is the point that I am trying to make.
We can do this. We can do it under the international law of the sea. I ask the Minister to say that, given the money that we have given to the French, we will no longer accept escorts from the French navy. The day after 12 people died in the channel, a French naval vessel escorted a dinghy from a couple of hundred yards off Wissant all the way to our 12-mile line. No more French naval escorts—I think that is vital.
We need political will. The Germans, of course, are now showing it. The Germans will ignore the ECHR; the Germans, by the way, sent a plane full of young men back to Afghanistan the other week. With political will and by leaving the ECHR, we can solve this.
I promise the Labour Government one thing. This issue caused great pain to the Conservative party, and it had an impact in the general election. This issue of illegal migration and the crime that it leads to, which is a conversation that has barely started in this country but that in France and Germany is now very big, will do massive damage to Labour’s electoral chances. You are going to have to get tough, and I am afraid your leader is going to have to rethink his position on the ECHR.
Several hon. Members rose—
Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
Order. Before we move on to the Front-Bench contributions, may I remind some of the newer Members, who have been saying “you” or referring to other Members by name, that the convention is to refer either to the office that a Member holds, such as Prime Minister, or to the seat that they represent?
Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) for securing this very important debate. As he says, people are arriving here confident in the belief that they will get to stay, and that must change. The cost to the taxpayer is increasingly beyond scrutiny, and we have yet to see the targets set out by Labour.
I echo the comments of colleagues about the concerns associated with illegal immigration, which are undoubtedly incredibly serious and shared by many of those we represent. The hon. Member for Rother Valley (Jake Richards) talked about the real and horrendous human cost of this issue, as we have seen in recent weeks, which is one of the many reasons we need to work urgently to get a grip on it. My hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) talked about the bizarre creative accounting put forward by the Government in an effort to defend the scrapping of the deportation deterrent, and the fact that moving the cost from one Department to another will not solve the problem.
The hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) made valid observations about the nature of the many people arriving and their motivations. The hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) asked why it is that people are fleeing from France. He talked about the important need to stop the pull factor that draws people to get into the small boats. The hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) told us of his learnings about escorts and the issues created by the ECHR, which have been debated many times in this place and will continue to be debated in the coming weeks, months and years. He talked about the concerns that those issues rightly pose for national security.
With the other business going on in the House today, it seems apt to start by looking at the cost of illegal immigration. Asylum accommodation is costing the taxpayer over £8 million a day and now looks set to keep rising. We have seen this Government grant an asylum amnesty to 100,000 arrivals, without any proper costing in their impact assessment. Government is about priorities. This amnesty is seeing the Government pulling up a chair for people who have entered the country illegally, at the same time as turning off the heating for our pensioners.
Journeys by small boat across the channel are illegal, dangerous and unnecessary. They are unfair on those who are in genuine need, and the country’s finite capacity is taken up by people coming into the UK from a place of safety in France. Furthermore, they are unfair on the British public, due to the huge impact that they have on public services. Thanks to the measures brought forward by the last Government, migrant returns in the year from June 2023 to June 2024 rose by a fifth, enforced returns rose by a half, irregular arrivals fell by 26% and there was a 36% reduction in the asylum backlog. Most importantly, the previous Government changed the law so that when people arrived here illegally, they should not have been able to claim asylum in the UK and so they could be returned to their home country or a safe third country.
We need a deterrent to discourage people from paying the criminal gangs of people smugglers who profit at the peril of others; to prevent people from leaving the safe country that is France, on the assumption of a soft-touch approach here in Britain; and to protect our already overburdened public services and housing supply. This Government’s first act on illegal immigration was to scrap that essential deterrent. It is a deterrent that the National Crime Agency says is essential to tackling the issue, a deterrent whose removal the former chief immigration officer says will create open season for small boats, and a deterrent that is now being looked at by 19 EU countries.
Lee Anderson
I thank the shadow Minister for allowing me to intervene. Does he agree that if the previous Conservative Government had had the political backbone and courage to get that first Rwanda flight off and ignore the ECHR, it might have stopped this?
Matt Vickers
The hon. Gentleman has walked through the Lobby with me and has been as frustrated as I have in trying to look for a solution to this problem. With the removal of the deterrent, we are basically doing a U-turn on everything that we have put forward and everything that looked as though it could make a difference. We have seen what is happening in Ireland as a result of it. The deterrent would work. If people can arrive in this country and know that they are never going to be sent back, we are going to have a problem.
Just this week, Germany asked the EU if it could use the accommodation that we—British taxpayers—have built in Rwanda, so that it could send asylum seekers there. It is clear that the Conservative Government were making progress on this issue and that Labour is behind the curve. Labour has wasted taxpayers’ money on scrapping this deterrent, and now the EU wants to copy the UK’s scheme. Usually it is the Labour party that wants to copy the EU. The reality is that the new Government have no plan to stop the boats and nowhere to send asylum seekers who cannot be returned home. Where are they going to return the people from countries like Afghanistan, Iran and Syria? If it is not Rwanda, is it Romford? Is it Richmond? Is it Redcar?
Labour got through this election talking tough and saying that it would smash the gangs, but it is quickly realising that it is not a workable policy. Over 8,000 small boat arrivals have landed in the UK since Labour took office, and it still has not even appointed a head of its new border command. More press releases and warm words simply will not cut it now that Labour is in government. In recent months, most people in this room will have knocked on thousands of doors and heard real concerns from residents about what uncontrolled illegal immigration can mean for their community, the pressure on public services and housing, questions around integration, and the tough choices that have to be made about public spending.
When the Minister gets to her feet, will she finally tell hon. Members when the new Labour Government formally told the Rwandan Government that the Rwanda scheme was scrapped? What advice has she received from the National Crime Agency about the need for a deterrent? How many more small boats will cross before the Government appoint a new border command? Will asylum hotels be reopening in the autumn? Where does she plan to send asylum seekers who cannot be returned home?
The Minister for Border Security and Asylum (Dame Angela Eagle)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O'Brien) on securing the debate—he made it here with 30 seconds to go, after taking part in several very important votes. We were wondering whether the debate would be able to start on time, but he managed to make it, although somewhat out of breath.
Listening to the debate—I am sure it will be the first of many we will have in this place and other places—it struck me that there are some things we agree on across all parties. First, we have to stop irregular immigration and deal with the appalling gangs behind the small boat crossings. Those gangs care only about the profits they make, which fuel other criminal activity, and are careless, to say the least, of the lives they put at risk in these dangerous crossings. In the recent past these gangs have grown increasingly violent; they have attacked the police and those on the beaches in France whom they have promised to transport to safety. It is therefore vital that we dismantle the gangs and strengthen our border security—I think all of us can agree on that.
The crossings have increased hugely in recent years, and the boats are becoming more and more crowded, unseaworthy and dangerous—a point made by several hon. Members.
Lee Anderson
The Minister is making some good points, but does she agree that while the Prime Minister is smashing the gangs, it will be more difficult for boats to get into the sea, so more people will clamber on to the boats and we will have more deaths in the channel?
Dame Angela Eagle
We have to do what we can to disrupt this trade. We have already seen that the boats are becoming more unseaworthy and that more people are getting on them. Just because that is happening, it does not mean we should do nothing to get in the way of the supply of boats and engines that criminals use to facilitate this trade. Even though they have not agreed on the wherewithal, all Members in the debate have agreed that we should be doing our best to stop this trade. No Government would not want to be in control of their external borders—I think we all agree on that. It is therefore important that we take a much more sophisticated and integrated approach to dealing with these increasingly integrated cross-border gangs.
We must not leave the gangs to flourish or organise, reaching even deeper back into places such as Vietnam, but instead harass and disrupt them and their financing. My hon. Friend the Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) was spot on to say that this has been done before in different contexts, particularly drugs and international crime, and it can certainly be done with this trade. We should try to be a bit more optimistic about the potential for concerted, cross-border action among states to deal with the issue.
A different approach must be workable. We believe it must respect international law, which is why the Government scrapped the partnership with Rwanda. The Opposition, and particularly their Front-Bench spokesperson, the hon. Member for Stockton West (Matt Vickers), have been acting as if the Rwanda deal was somehow a deterrent, but from the day it was agreed to to the day it was scrapped, more than 84,000 people crossed the channel in small boats. That does not sound like a deterrent. Since it was scrapped, the number of small boat arrivals has gone down 24% compared to the same period last year, and down 40% compared to the same period in 2022. If it was a deterrent, it worked in an extremely odd way.
Nick Timothy
Can the Minister explain why, in calculating the figure the Home Secretary presented to the House of Commons—as part of the claim that scrapping the retrospective element of the duty to remove would save £700 million a year for 10 years—the impact assessment assumes absolutely no deportations to Rwanda at all? In a letter to me, the Home Office permanent secretary said that the cost of removing people to Rwanda is included in the number.
Dame Angela Eagle
I have not seen the letter to the hon. Gentleman, but I am happy to write to him if he wants a further explanation. We must remember that in its three years in existence, the Rwanda scheme cost hundreds of millions of pounds. We were going to pay £150,000 per person deported to Rwanda; that was part of the agreement. In those three years, only four people were sent to Kigali, and they went voluntarily, so I do not think the Conservatives’ view that the Rwanda scheme was an answer to all their problems and prayers was borne out by the experience of it. Scrapping it has not made a blind bit of difference to some people’s desire to get into this country.
Jake Richards (Rother Valley) (Lab)
On the Rwanda scheme, does the Minister agree with the comments, reported in the press, of the right hon. Member for Braintree (Mr Cleverly)? When he was Home Secretary he clearly understood that it would never work, when the Leader of the Opposition was Chancellor he clearly thought it would not work, and in the three years of its existence it did not work, so the fact that Conservative Members are still clutching on to it does not bode particularly well for their prospects of coming back to reality.
Dame Angela Eagle
I agree with my hon. Friend’s observations. Rather than clutching on to something that was clearly very expensive and has not worked, the important thing is to get down to doing the day job. While the Rwanda scheme was being developed, the Home Office stopped doing a lot of other things that it should have been doing. Returns completely plummeted: the Illegal Migration Act 2023 made it impossible to process a range of people, so they were literally sitting in hotels, costing £8 million a day.
There are no easy answers—I am not the first Minister for illegal immigration and asylum to say that there are no easy fixes, and I will not be the last—but we have to be able to administer the system, deal with returns and do all the things we have to do to make asylum system outcomes meaningful. If a person’s asylum application fails and their country is safe, they should be returned; there should be a consequence to the asylum decision. The Government have a duty to speed up the asylum system and make it fair, but there must be a consequence if the outcome is not what the asylum seeker wants.
Neil O'Brien
I want to press the Minister on the question I asked about third countries. Tony Blair has advocated third-country agreements, and many other European countries are signing them, although there are countries that we would not, for obvious reasons, want to return even failed asylum seekers to. Are the Government ruling out any such third-country agreements?
Dame Angela Eagle
I am unsure what sort of third-country agreements the hon. Gentleman is talking about. There are various agreements that might be relevant, such as the return agreement with Albania, and hopefully work we are doing with Vietnam to return people. Returns for failed asylum seekers and those who have no right to be here are an important part of ensuring the system works properly. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman is going down another path, so I will give way if he wants to come in again.
Neil O'Brien
I thank the Minister for giving way again; it is kind of her. The question is not about return agreements but about third-country agreements, whereby those seeking asylum in this country are sent to a third country that is not their home country if their application fails or to have their processing done. That is the kind of agreement that Tony Blair argued for. The Italians, for example, already have one up and running, and many European countries are setting them up.
Dame Angela Eagle
At this stage, eight or nine weeks into the job, I would not want to rule out any such thing, but tests would have to be applied to it. It would certainly have to be in keeping with international law, and we would have to ensure that it provides value for money and has a reasonable chance of working. I do not want to come here at this stage of the Government’s life and rule anything out, but we would have to think about certain issues—such as schemes according with international law and being good value for money—which would apply to any such potential scheme. However, the Government’s key priority at the moment is to deal with the channel crossings in small boats. That is why we are focusing on creating the border security command, which will help us to get a grip on this difficult but important issue.
Border Force maintains 100% checks for scheduled passengers arriving into the UK and facilitated 129 million passenger arrivals last year. The UK is recognised as a global leader in the use of automation at the border, embracing innovation to simplify processes for legitimate travellers, including families, alongside improving the UK’s security and biosecurity. As part of the ongoing development of the entire system, we will extend the use of automation, such as passport gates and e-gates at the UK border.
However, we also need to stop those who come here in an irregular manner. Border security command will bring together our intelligence and enforcement agencies, with hundreds of new cross-border police, investigators and prosecutors. It will be equipped with new powers to disrupt and dismantle criminal networks upstream and to prevent the boats from reaching the French coast in the first place. That will be led by a new border security commander, who will provide cross-system strategic leadership and direction across several agencies. That includes the National Crime Agency, Border Force, policing, our intelligence community, immigration enforcement and the Crown Prosecution Service.
Work is advancing on the planned border security, asylum and immigration Bill, which will be introduced to this House at the earliest opportunity—I am sure I will see some hon. Members here taking part in the Bill Committee and other processes as the Bill makes its way through this place.
The Sandhurst agreement, signed by the last Government, is important, and we have always supported it, but it does not go far enough. It focuses on the French beaches, but we should be stopping the gangs and the boats long before they get that far. This issue is a threat to our security, and that should be reflected in our approach. Our co-operation with key international partners must be as robust as it is for terrorism and other security threats. We will therefore be looking for closer partnerships, with different and better ways of making these criminals pay.
We have already spoken to the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, and to interior Ministers in Italy, Germany and Turkey, about how to strengthen operations against criminal gangs. We have begun supplying other European countries with more intelligence gathered by the UK on people-smuggling into their countries. We also support Italy in its Rome process, and irregular arrivals to Italy decreased by 17% in the year ending June 2024 compared with the previous year. But we lack important information and are seeking much stronger data-sharing agreements with partner countries. That is how we can actually ensure that the intelligence we share deals with some of the cross-border threats.
Those with no right to be here must be removed. The Government have established a new returns and enforcement programme to ensure that asylum and immigration rules are properly respected and enforced. By the end of the year, more of those with no right to be here—including foreign criminals and failed asylum seekers—will have been removed than in any other six-month period over the past five years. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dover and Deal said, we have also had 13 bespoke return flights, which have been chartered since 5 July, returning individuals to a range of countries, including Albania, Poland, Romania, Vietnam and Timor-Leste.
Neil O’Brien
Can I press the Minister on my specific question about what the Government’s target is? The hon. Lady talked about getting to the highest six-monthly rate by the end of this year. What is the Government’s longer-term target? If we were to believe what the Home Secretary said when she was the shadow Home Secretary, they are going to reverse and get back up to the level of deportations we had in 2010—that is the logical reading of what she said. Is that the Government’s target? Are they going to get deportations back to 2010 levels?
Dame Angela Eagle
We certainly have the ambition to do so. If we have a look, returns plummeted during the period when the last Government were in office. In 2023, 3,225 returns were made; in 2010, we returned 7,157, and of course, in the meantime, levels of illegal immigration have grown exponentially, so we certainly have the view that we want to return to those kinds of levels and do much, much more to ensure that if someone gets to the end of the asylum system and they have failed, there will be consequences and they will be returned.
We have also, at the same time, been taking some time to invest in intensive immigration enforcement operations. Over the last few weeks, we have targeted rogue businesses suspected of employing illegal workers. More than 275 premises have been targeted, with 135 receiving civil penalty referral notices for employing illegal workers; 85 illegal migrant workers were detained for removal. We are rapidly expanding this kind of work and certainly have the ambition to continue to do so. We also have voluntary return schemes, which we will continue to use.
In order to reduce the foreign national offender prison population and support the Ministry of Justice in alleviating current prison capacity issues, we are also focusing on those who are serving custodial sentences and on maximising returns directly from prison. We are taking rigorous action against foreign national offenders living in the community by actively monitoring and managing cases and resolving barriers to removal. So it is our intention, I emphasise again, to make certain that we can do a lot better than the previous Government did in removing foreign national offenders, which is why immigration removal centres, which can play a vital role in controlling our borders, need to be strengthened and we are increasing our estate capacity to ensure that we have enough detention space for swift, firm and fair returns.
The Government are working at pace to optimise the use of the current immigration return estate in the immediate term, and expect to deliver an extra 200 male beds by the end of September. A further 78 beds are expected to be delivered by March 2025. Alongside that uplift, we are increasing vital ancillary provision such as healthcare, legal services and welfare facilities, so that we can expedite returns.
I think this is probably the first of many such debates we will have. Actually, I think there is quite a lot we can agree about in terms of the requirement to secure our borders. I can see the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston leaping up and down, so I am happy to give way.
Neil O'Brien
The Minister is kind to give way in the middle of her peroration. I just wondered whether I could press her on the point about towing more of the boats back to France. The legal arguments are so strong: the chances of us saving lives at sea are so strong that the legal arguments are absolutely crystal clear. Is it the Government’s ambition that a greater share of these boats will be towed back to France rather than towed to the UK?
Dame Angela Eagle
Well, it is difficult—a difficult thing to do. I think that part of what we need to do in our relations with France is do things in co-operation. It is quite difficult to try to work across the border if you alienate the people that you are working with, so any such things have got to be done operationally with agreement. The co-operation from that point of view is crucial, as is, obviously, saving life at sea. If there is any danger with respect to towing boats, it is very, very difficult to intervene in what is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, in a context where the boats that are being put to sea at the moment are extremely flimsy and are actually falling apart in the water and often, as we saw tragically last week, contain people with no effective lifejacket and no way of staying afloat. So we have to be very, very careful.
We have to work with our colleagues in France and co-operate operationally on where we take those in the water; many are returned to France, as it happens, when rescues happen in French territorial waters. It is a balance. I will certainly keep it under review, and I am happy to keep the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston in touch with thinking as it develops.
I was on my peroration when I was interrupted very politely by the hon. Gentleman. I congratulate him once again on securing this debate, and congratulate and thank all Members who have contributed to it. I know this is an issue to which we will return.
Neil O’Brien
I thank all Members who have taken part in what I thought was a good-tempered and interesting debate, in which many made good and important contributions. I actually agree with many of the things that the Minister said, such as her point about the powerful link to wider criminality from the criminal gangs that operate the illegal trade across the channel. Her comments also give me the opportunity to thank our European partners with whom we have been working intensely, over the last couple of years, particularly in Bulgaria, to stop the flow of boats and engines to the criminal gangs. This is a shared European challenge and it can only grow over time, because of the growth of the population—particularly the young population —in the countries of origin. So there are things we do agree on.
We got some interesting answers to the five questions that I asked. I am afraid we did not hear much on data. There are lots of interesting pieces of data that the Government really should be—but are not—publishing at the moment. I encourage the Minister to start publishing things that the public really deserve to know. On the deportations target, which has the ambition to get back to 2010 levels, I will support anything that will increase levels of deportations. It was interesting that the Minister did not rule out signing third-country agreements of the kind that other European countries have. I encourage her to get on with that, and to go as fast as she can towards doing that. On the question of towing boats back to France, the Minister said it was tricky and that she was thinking about it. I encourage her to really go for it, because that will help us profoundly to disrupt the people smugglers’ business model.
However, what we did not really get into—I thought this was interesting in some of the comments made by Labour Members—was the point about the underlying causes, pull factors and reasons why so many people come, which is because they know they will be able to stay. There were some interesting and important contributions on enforcement, but I encourage the Members present to listen to three Tonys: one is a Labour politician, one is a Liberal and one is a civil servant. One is Tony Smith, the head of UK Border Force, who said that enforcement on its own will never be enough; he is right about that. He has said it is rash to scrap the Rwanda scheme. The second Tony we have to listen to is Tony Blair, who was trying to set up third-country agreements. I hope that will persuade Labour politicians that they need to be doing the same thing—even Tony Blair agrees that it is the right thing to do. The third is Tony Abbott, the former Australian Prime Minister, who pioneered interception at sea and ended Australia’s small boats crisis by towing the boats back to third countries, as we should be doing here between the UK and France.
There are things we can agree on. But I think there are things the Government say about enforcement that imply that no one has thought of enforcement before, and that we have not worked with lots of European countries before—we have; we have been doing this for years. However, that on its own is not enough. At some point—perhaps it has already happened—the Minister will realise that is the case. I hope that when she does so, she will join us in thinking about how we can tackle the underlying reasons that so many people are getting into these deadly boats and putting money in the hands of dangerous criminals to risk their lives crossing to this country.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered illegal immigration.