Immigration and Asylum Bill (First sitting)
(4 days, 1 hour ago)
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The Chair
Before we begin, I remind Members to switch electronic devices to silent. Tea and coffee are not allowed during sittings. Today, we will first consider the programme motion on the amendment paper, and then a motion to enable the reporting of written evidence for publication and a motion to allow us to deliberate in private about our questions before the oral evidence sessions. In view of the time available, I hope we can take these matters formally. I call the Minister to move the programme motion, which was considered yesterday by the Programming Sub-Committee. Time Witness Until no later than 10.10 am Bright Blue UNHCR’s Representative to the United Kingdom Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner Until no later than 10.35 am National Crime Agency Until no later than 11.05 am Professor Richard Ekins KC, Oxford University Dr Conor Casey, Surrey University Until no later than 11.25 am Refugee Council Until no later than 2.45 pm The Migration Observatory MigrationWatch UK Until no later than 3.00 pm Fortinus Global Until no later than 3.15 pm International Rescue Committee Until no later than 3.45 pm Jacqui McKenzie, Leigh Day Professor Sarah Singer, London University Until no later than 4.00 pm CCLA Investment Management Until no later than 4.30 pm HM Courts and Tribunals Service Ministry of Justice Home Office Until no later than 4.45 pm Fix Britain Until no later than 5.10 pm Home Office
Ordered,
1. That— the Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 9.25 am on Tuesday 15 September) meet—
(a) at 2.00 pm on Tuesday 15 September
(b) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 13 October;
(c) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 15 October;
(d) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 20 October;
(e) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 22 October;
(f) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 27 October;
(g) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 29 October;
(h) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 3 November.
2. the Committee shall hear oral evidence on Tuesday 15 September in accordance with the following Table;
3. proceedings on consideration of the Bill in Committee shall be taken in the following order: Clause 1; Schedule 1; Clause 2; Schedule 2; Clauses 3 and 4; Schedule 3; Clauses 5 to 35; Schedule 4; Clauses 36 to 44; Schedule 5; Clauses 45 to 49; new Clauses; new Schedules; Clauses 50 to 53; remaining proceedings on the Bill;
4. the proceedings shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at 5.00 pm on Tuesday 3 November.—(Anna Turley.)
Resolved,
That, subject to the discretion of the Chair, any written evidence received by the Committee shall be reported to the House for publication.—(Anna Turley.)
The Chair
Copies of the written evidence the Committee receives will be made available in the Committee Room.
Resolved,
That, at this and any subsequent meeting at which oral evidence is to be heard, the Committee shall sit in private until the witnesses are admitted.—(Anna Turley.)
The Chair
We are now sitting in public again and the proceedings are being broadcast. Good morning to our witnesses. Before we start hearing from the witnesses, do any Members wish to make a declaration of interest in connection with the Bill? No. If any interests are particularly relevant to a Member’s questioning or speech, they should declare them at the appropriate time.
We will now hear oral evidence from Eleanor Lyons, the independent anti-slavery commissioner; Dr Will Prescott, head of research at Bright Blue, who will be joining via Zoom; and Vicky Tennant, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative to the UK. We must stick to the timings in the programme order that the Committee has agreed. For this session, we have until 10.10 am. Will the witnesses please briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Vicky Tennant: I am Vicky Tennant, the representative to the United Kingdom for the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR. We are the body that has responsibility under international law for advancing protection and solutions for refugees.
Eleanor Lyons: Good morning—nice to see you all. I am Eleanor Lyons, the UK’s independent anti-slavery commissioner.
Dr Prescott: I am Will Prescott, head of research at Bright Blue. Thank you for letting me join via Zoom.
Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)
Q
Dr Prescott: Obviously, reducing the number of irregular arrivals would be welcome for all concerned, but I gather that this particular session is looking specifically at the modern slavery components. We have to remember that only a relatively small proportion of small boat arrival modern slavery claimants are actually victims of modern slavery. A lot of victims of modern slavery do come here—sometimes legally, sometimes under false pretences. I am not necessarily sure that tying a reduction in small boat arrivals to modern slavery is necessarily a positive thing; I think you are slightly confusing two different issues.
Eleanor Lyons: I think there are already safeguards in place to stop any misuse of the system. There is a high evidential threshold to be recognised and acknowledged as a victim of modern slavery. There are the reasonable ground and conclusive ground stages, and you cannot self-refer to be a victim—you have to be spotted by a designated first responder organisation. Multiple Select Committees over the years have found no evidence of a widespread misuse of the system. The latest Home Office data that has been provided is only for those on high-risk deportation flights, who represent less than 2% of the number of potential victims of modern slavery identified in this country last year. I do not think you need new legislative solutions to deal with any of those challenges; the Home Office already has the powers it needs if it wants to challenge them and tackle them.
I remind the Committee that the largest group of victims in this country are UK nationals. All the changes in the Bill relating to questioning victims’ credibility if they take a long time to come forward, have inconsistencies in their account due to trauma, or have similar exploitative experiences to others—which they normally do, because organised crime groups exploit people in similar ways—mean they will also have their credibility questioned as UK nationals. For me, that undoes years of work by safeguarding professionals in understanding how victims feel scared to come forward and talk about their exploitation.
Matt Vickers
Q
Eleanor Lyons: If you took the premise that there is an issue with the system, I would focus on better training and support for first responder organisations so that they are good at doing referrals in the first place. There is a real mix in terms of how qualified and competent first responder organisations, such as local authorities, police forces and charities, are. I would also look at a higher quality of decision making from the Government. At the moment, about three quarters of negative decisions that are challenged are then accepted as having been the wrong initial decision by the Government, and are overturned. If there were more opportunities for people to be identified, better-quality decisions and a more trauma-informed approach, we would identify victims earlier in the process and there would be fewer challenges on that part. All this legislation will do is to make it very hard for us to identify or support victims who need help.
The Minister of State, Home Department (Anna Turley)
Q
Eleanor Lyons: Thank you, Minister, for your engagement so far on the Bill. It is very much appreciated. Building on what I was saying, we really need a system that allows for early identification and support of victims of exploitation. That includes all victims of exploitation, UK nationals and non-UK nationals. When I first came into my role three years ago, the big conversation was about what mandatory training would look like for first responder organisations, so that they would know how to spot a potential victim of modern slavery. Many victims themselves do not even recognise that they are being exploited. To introduce early support into the system would make a huge change on that side of things.
I am concerned about the Home Office data on already high-risk flights. Less than 2% of the total number in the national referral mechanism are on those flights. The Home Office has five days to make a “reasonable grounds” decision. It only protects a victim of modern slavery for five days if they are referred into the national referral mechanism. If the Government decide that, actually, they do not think that there are grounds for those people being a victim of modern slavery, after that point they do not get any extra enhancements for indefinite leave to remain, so I do not think that that provides extra protection for victims. All we try to do in that period is to provide them with the support and care they need in their recovery period, if they need it.
Mr Paul Kohler (Wimbledon) (LD)
Q
Eleanor Lyons: I would say that, from the evidence that we have seen—this has been looked at across the years by different Select Committees and academics—there is no evidence of widespread misuse of the system. Of the flights that did not go ahead in 2025 after 3 pm, that is less than 1% of the number of potential victims of modern slavery whom we identified in the UK last year. As I mentioned, if you make these sweeping changes in the legislation, you will also have a negative impact on all victims of modern slavery, in particular cases where we have taken too long to identify them. For example, the survivors of al-Fayed have reached out to me, and they have serious concerns, because we failed them; we did not identify them when we should have done. The Bill would have a negative impact on them, too.
Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)
Q
Dr Prescott: We have talked about this in our report. You have to be very careful about the sequence in which you do this. At the moment, there are all sorts of gaps in identifying modern slavery victims. A lot of people in first responder organisations—as Eleanor mentioned, you cannot refer yourself into the NRM—are not aware of their responsibilities. There is no dedicated modern slavery lead and, because there is no dedicated lead, everyone is responsible, which in practice means that no one is responsible.
A lot of victims also do not necessarily realise that they are a victim of modern slavery. They obviously do not understand what their rights are. In particular, if they are in an unfamiliar environment and speaking to unfamiliar officials, they will not necessarily be comfortable discussing certain practices that have happened to them. If you are going to tighten the criteria, you really need to fix the gaps in the existing system first, before you look to a much tougher approach.
Joe Robertson
Q
Dr Prescott: It does not really. There are some bits of the Bill that are quite welcome, such as requiring firms to outline the steps they need to take to reduce modern slavery in their supply chains. That is helpful to an extent, but it does not really address the issue of the lack of dedicated first responders in organisations, for example, and it does not deal with fixing the identification problem within the system that we were quite concerned about. I do not think it is quite there yet.
Eleanor Lyons: I do not think the Bill addresses the fundamental issues, because I do not think you need legislation for that. There is a challenge at the moment with the process, because we do not have that training consistently across first responder organisations. I do not think we have the substantial evidence we need to underpin a lot of the changes that the Bill is proposing. It undercuts a lot of work that has been done over the years to recognise that victims of all crime groups and of exploitation take a long time to feel comfortable speaking, and they may be scared to come forward. We are creating exceptional rules for victims of modern slavery that I think are fundamentally unfair.
I would say that the issue with tackling modern slavery in this country is that we do not have dedicated funding for police teams any more, and we have a modern slavery strategy that is over 10 years out of date. If we really want to tackle the issue, we need to look at those big picture things. The Bill is making it harder for victims to come forward, and it does not address the problem of the perpetrators of the crime. Actually, a lot of those things were introduced under previous bits of legislation, and there is already a struggle to enact them at the moment.
Mr Paul Foster (South Ribble) (Lab)
Q
Vicky Tennant: Thank you very much, and thanks for referring to the observations we shared with the Home Secretary a few weeks ago. What we essentially said is that we are very supportive of the overall objective to improve the asylum system by making it fairer, more efficient and more sustainable, and we think there are elements of the Bill that move in that direction. The spirit of our observations was very much along the lines of highlighting where we felt it could be strengthened to better achieve those objectives.
Of course, as the UN refugee agency we are very focused on what the Bill means for protections and solutions for asylum seekers and refugees. We also very much recognise the importance of public confidence in a well-functioning system—and that means not just a fair and efficient process for refugees, but the ability to return people who are found not to be in need of international protection. It means safe, regular routes for people, so that they are not forced into these dangerous journeys that we are all so conscious of. It is also about facilitating co-operation with international partners to address the challenges. We are very much coming from the perspective of recognising the challenges, and we want to work with the Government to address those. We have approached our engagement with the Bill very much with that in mind.
The observations speak to a number of areas, three of which I would highlight in particular. First, there are the very extensive provisions that deal with the appeals system and the establishment of the new appeals body. From our perspective that is not, in itself, inherently problematic, but what is essential that the body will only be able to achieve the objectives of helping contribute to that fairer and more sustainable asylum system if it has the relevant expertise firmly embedded in both the profile of the adjudicators and the role that legal expertise will play in the adjudication process.
It is clearly important that the body both is, and is seen to be, independent of the initial decision-making process, and is transparent in terms of being open to public scrutiny, including on the quality of the adjudication process. Then there are the procedural safeguards, such as access to legal advice and support, and the possibility for those with protection claims to have an oral hearing. Those are all key safeguards, and they are really essential. What you want is accurate, high-quality decisions so that appellants are not then in a position of lodging more appeals to the first-tier tribunal. We are very happy, by the way, that the possibility of further recourse to the first-tier tribunal is there, but we do not want to see it overused either; we want to see high-quality decisions at the appeal stage and, even better, at the first instance stage. That whole area of appeals is one where we feel that more information and more elements could be provided to facilitate the consideration of the Bill.
The second area—I am going to mention three—is the provision that would allow recovery of the asylum support provided to asylum seekers while their claims are looked into. First, I would highlight that asylum seekers do not have the right to work, so in many cases they are forced to rely on that support. Secondly, they have no control over the length of the process, so they have no control over how long it will take to get a decision. A high proportion of asylum seekers are subsequently recognised as refugees, and essentially saddling them with the prospect of an obligation to repay what could be a really very large sum of money is not going to help to facilitate the integration process at the moment when they should be getting back on their feet. That is not in the interests of refugees, and it is also not in the interests of communities. We also believe that there is an issue of compatibility with the refugee convention. It is quite a technical issue, and we have set it out in detail in the observations. I can say more about that if you would like, but that is an area where we would urge another look.
The third area is in relation to article 8 of the European convention on human rights. In the observations, we have not gone into detail on all the aspects of the changes to article 8—the interpretation of article 8 that is embedded in the Bill. We would just highlight how it could potentially impact refugee family reunion. We should bear in mind that, because of their displacement, refugees have often been separated from families in very chaotic and difficult circumstances. One element of the Bill speaks to the presumption that one would normally have expected cohabitation with the family member being sponsored, but that is difficult in the refugee context—it is a difficult threshold to make. Particularly in view of the suspension of refugee family reunion—that bespoke route—we feel that that could have quite a harmful impact.
Those are the three areas. Clearly, the legislation is only one part of the overall answer, so it also has to be looked at in the context of the wider policy reforms that are being pursued. As UNHCR, we have been very pleased with the level of engagement we have had with the Home Office as these reforms are seen through.
Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)
Q
“access to protection and successful integration.”
You also warn that the Bill could
“undermine conditions that support successful integration for those ultimately recognised as refugees.”
Could you outline how you think the Bill, in practice, will harm integration?
Vicky Tennant: I would say the key area is the recovery of asylum support. We understand that what is envisaged is potentially up to £10,000 per person to be recovered. Imagine that a refugee has gone through a long and difficult set of experiences before arrival in the UK, and has then gone through the uncertainty of the asylum process, potentially for an extended period of time, where they are unable to work or to start the process of getting back on their feet. Then, just as they are getting into employment and starting to rebuild their lives, the prospect of having to repay a potentially large sum of money could impede that. That was the main element that we felt was relevant to integration.
The article 8 point and the ability to reunite with family members is also relevant. Many times when talking to asylum seekers and refugees, I have seen the anguish, the disruption and the sense of something that is unfinished. Being reunited with family and able to restart family life is an element that is fairly fundamental to integration, from the perspective of not only the refugee, but the UK public and communities. We think that giving refugees the possibility to start afresh and moving them as quickly as possible into the integration journey is important, and we know that that is also one of the Government’s stated objectives.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
Q
Vicky Tennant: I go back to what I said: legislation is only part of the answer. There are elements of the Bill—particularly those that focus on trying to ensure the quality, efficiency and sustainability of the appeals process—that, if made to work successfully, could contribute to building public confidence in the system. As I said, UNHCR recognises that public confidence is what underpins the refugee convention; we can all speak about the law and the refugee convention, but what is needed to deliver these things in practice is public support for welcoming refugees and for a well-functioning system.
On what would be needed in addition, there is a lot of work under way, particularly to make the first instance decision-making process quicker and to improve the quality of decision making. UNHCR has been working directly with the Home Office on that front for some time, and we have been encouraged by the progress. As I said, it is also about the ability to remove people who are found not be in need of international protection. One can do that only if there is a well-functioning system and there is confidence that it gets the decisions right.
Safe, regular routes are a big part of a well-functioning, fair system. From the public perspective, what we see consistently in the polling and the various surveys that have been done is that the British people want to welcome refugees. There is support for maintaining the UK as a place of refuge, and the more safe, regular, managed pathways there are to do that, the more it can be delivered and that confidence can be sustained.
That cannot be a replacement for access to territorial asylum, which is where it can sometimes be very challenging. As UNHCR, we recognise the challenges the Government face in addressing the crossings in the channel. Nobody wants to see a situation where people are forced into dangerous journeys and where the business is essentially controlled by smugglers and criminals. What is really essential is that you have a good, functioning system for considering asylum claims quickly and removing people who are not in need of asylum, and that also involves the management of arrivals in a sensible way.
Partnership with international partners is an absolutely critical aspect of that, including with France but also with other international partners. That is about co-operation upstream to make sure people have alternatives and do not feel they have no alternative but to move onwards, but it is also about co-operation around the management of arrivals at UK borders. The international standards, the refugee convention and the European convention on human rights provide that common baseline that enables the UK to work with international partners in trying to find solutions to these common challenges.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Eleanor Lyons: Very briefly, touching on part 5 of the Bill in particular, I do not think we will restore confidence in the asylum system by weakening protections for victims of modern slavery. I welcome some parts of the Bill, including better advocacy for child victims of exploitation, devolving decision-making pilots, and work around tackling forced labour in supply chains, but that should go further than it does at the moment.
Fundamentally, the Bill makes it harder for safeguarding professionals to identify victims of exploitation in communities across the country, including child victims and UK national victims, and I do not think that that restores public confidence in the system. Unfortunately, I think it erodes confidence that we are not safeguarding cohorts who need our help and support, who do not get the right to remain even if they are confirmed to be victims of modern slavery.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Dr Prescott: Building on what the others have said, there are obviously bits in the Bill that are very positive. The expansion of the reporting requirements—again, you have learned a bit from the Australian experience and the Canadian experience—into public sector organisations is obviously very positive. But, to build on the earlier point, the ultimate way to improve confidence is to improve processes in the system. It is about making sure that organisations have a dedicated point of contact so that there is someone who is directly responsible for modern slavery in first responder organisations. It is about improving and standardising training so that people know what signs to look for when they are dealing with potential victims. That is the best way to stop the last-minute claims, which, though small in number—I think Eleanor said they are less than 2%—have a disproportionate psychological effect. That will also be much better for victims. A lot more attention needs to be on improving the processes, improving the training and making sure someone is actually responsible in first responder organisations.
Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)
Q
Eleanor Lyons: Most of the survivors I have spoken to—I have a summit that draws together 15 lived experience advisory panels from across the UK—did not realise they were being exploited; it took them years of help and support to understand what was happening to them and to feel comfortable talking about it. That is why the premise is there that it should be the state’s responsibility to identify victims of modern slavery and offer them support in their recovery journey. That also has a very practical implication in terms of trying to stop re-trafficking and re-exploitation taking place, and to stop harm increasing.
Clause 36, on the credibility assessment, is problematic because it says to safeguarding professionals, and it puts into law, that it is okay to question victims’ credibility if time has passed before they have come forward, if there are inconsistencies in what they have said or if they are exploited in the same way as someone else. That is an issue across all victim cohorts who have gone through horrific experiences. It is completely unacceptable that we are putting that into primary legislation. That part of the Bill should absolutely be removed completely.
Tom Gordon
Vicky, do you have anything to add?
Vicky Tennant: I have nothing to add.
Ben Goldsborough (South Norfolk) (Lab)
Q
Eleanor Lyons: The UK imports more than £20 billion-worth of goods every year that are at risk of being produced using forced labour. That is tomatoes you see in a supermarket that say they are from Italy but that are from China, or fish from North Korea. All our G7 partners have either introduced mandatory human rights due diligence or forced labour import bans into their legislation. The requirement in the Bill will ask businesses to report on forced labour in their supply chains, not to take action to prevent the harm from happening. We are hugely behind international partners in this space and we are at risk of becoming a dumping ground for the world’s goods that have been made with forced labour.
There is an opportunity to hugely enhance the measures in clauses 44 to 49 in part 5 of the Bill to turn it more towards mandatory human rights due diligence and to ask businesses to actually take steps to prevent harm from happening in their supply chains. That is something that businesses have been calling for. I worked with FTSE 100 partners last year and submitted work to the Office for Responsible Business Conduct. Businesses want this change, because they are being asked to do these things in other jurisdictions. When it comes to their supply chains, us being hugely behind in what we are asking them to do does not work.
Dr Zubir Ahmed (Glasgow South West) (Lab)
Q
Vicky Tennant: I would certainly say that the issue of asylum accommodation and the way in which the reception of asylum seekers and support to asylum seekers are managed has contributed to a crisis of confidence. As I said, the objective of restoring public confidence through a fair and efficient system is one that UNHCR absolutely welcomes. A key element is the fact that asylum seekers have been accommodated for very extended periods of time waiting for decisions on their claims. Simply by virtue of that fact, the volume of support and accommodation required while people are not able to work has grown over the years. We are pleased that there is progress in that space. It is a hugely challenging issue to address.
However, alongside the work on how asylum support accommodation is provided in a way that fosters community welcome and community cohesion, the work on the system itself has to continue. That is certainly where UNHCR has brought our international experience to bear: we have really been leaning in and trying to work closely with the Home Office to see how we can have a system that is functioning more efficiently and getting decisions out more quickly, but also getting decisions right first time.
That is where we go back to the discussion around the appeals body. The most important lever that could be pulled is to improve and ensure the quality of first-instance decision making, such as by ensuring that there is a second pair of eyes on those decisions, so that we do not see cases going into the appeals system unnecessarily. At the moment, there is quite a high rate of cases being withdrawn by the Home Office from the appeals system. That should not be the case. There is also quite a high rate of first-instance decisions being overturned. Those are cases that ideally would not be in the appeals system in the first place. That work on efficient, quality decision making in the first instance is also critical, and it then plays into the issue of asylum support and the length of time that asylum seekers are hosted in the community.
The Chair
This is our final question of the session. I ask our witnesses to bear in mind that we have a hard stop at 10.10 am.
Siân Berry
Q
Vicky Tennant: It would certainly be really helpful to have more detail on the balance between legally qualified adjudicators and lay adjudicators, what the respective roles of the two profiles will be, and, more widely, how legal expertise and subject matter expertise will be built into the process. Other jurisdictions have a mix of legally qualified adjudicators and other adjudicators. Often, they sit together in panels, and the other adjudicators will often bring subject matter expertise for the specific requirement around knowledge of conditions in countries of origin, for example. The real issue is that it is important that legal expertise is strongly reflected in the appeals body, and more detail on that would be helpful for consideration of the Bill.
The Chair
On behalf of the Committee, I thank Ms Tennant, Ms Lyons and Mr Prescott for their evidence today. We are very grateful.
Examination of witness
Helen Rance gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Helen Rance: Good morning, everybody. My name is Helen Rance. I am a director at the National Crime Agency on threat leadership.
Matt Vickers
Q
Helen Rance: Sorry, could you say the first part of the question again?
Matt Vickers
Q
Helen Rance: In answer to the second part, no—nothing specific has been omitted from the Bill. Obviously, the Bill has more direct focus on modern slavery and human trafficking—which I will call MSHT from now onwards—but in terms of the biggest thing that will help with organised immigration crime, which is a major focus of ours at the National Crime Agency, nothing specific in the Bill will fundamentally change how we investigate serious and organised criminals entering the country. What it will do is make our borders less attractive to criminals entering. That is our overarching opinion on that.
Matt Vickers
Q
Helen Rance: No.
Anna Turley
Q
You mentioned the importance of deterrence. That is critical, and it is one of the key things that we want to achieve in the Bill. Could you say a little more about how you think the measures in the Bill will help to deter people and make interventions earlier in the process of illegal immigration?
Helen Rance: In terms of deterrence, we are obviously a law enforcement agency, and we would not make specific definitive judgments on the different effects that the measures will have on deterring crossings or immigration. We very much think that deterrence is about a combination of factors, and is, ultimately, a matter for Government policy. However, we believe that the measures contribute to a system that is seen as firm, fair and less susceptible to exploitation by organised crime groups. It is likely that that will help the overall deterrent effect. The changes to appeals, protection status, asylum arrangements and the removal process might contribute to making the UK a less attractive target for the criminal networks that facilitate illegal immigration.
Mr Kohler
Q
Helen Rance: If “smashing the gangs” means reducing small boat crossings, crossings are down this year compared with last year, and the number—
Mr Kohler
Q
Helen Rance: There is a combination of factors. The law enforcement approach to reducing small boat equipment, to working closely with international partners and to using our international intelligence reach has certainly contributed to that. We would not claim that the work is complete or that we have fixed this, but our efforts have certainly contributed to the reduction in crossings.
Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)
Q
Helen Rance: Yes. We have very much moved our operational capacity towards immigration crime. Of course, like all agencies, we have a finite budget, but we are focusing it on the disruption of the highest-harm organised immigration crime, individuals and networks. I do not think we would ever say that we have enough money, because more money could always be spent on increased intelligence capability and unique capabilities that we utilise, but we have certainly done a major pivot over the last 18 months towards organised immigration crime, and we have had some excellent results with that pivot.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Helen Rance: The strongest deterrence effect will come from sustained law enforcement activity. If we can continue to disrupt facilitators, seize boats and engines, and target criminal finances, it will have an effect on the operation of organised immigration individuals and networks. The Bill makes it harder and less attractive for those networks to operate within the United Kingdom.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Helen Rance: Smashing the gangs, to coin a phrase, really comes with a lot of different measures and policies. Target hardening and making the UK less attractive is just one of those measures. I do not think there is anything specific in the Bill, other than making the UK a tougher environment for criminals to operate in and less appealing for them to exploit.
The Chair
May I remind Members that “smashing the gangs” is not part of the Bill? The Bill is about people who are already in the country and the processing of asylum claims. I would be grateful if Members stuck to the measures in the Bill.
Siân Berry
Q
Helen Rance: I am not sure that law enforcement is necessarily the right agency to approach for that answer, because we do not deal with the asylum claims.
Siân Berry
Q
Helen Rance: Sorry, I do not completely understand the question; could you phrase that again?
Siân Berry
Q
Helen Rance: No; I do not have the figures on when that increased.
Siân Berry
Q
Helen Rance: When demand rose?
Joe Robertson
Q
Helen Rance: Its deterrent effect would be the toughening up of the environment. The specifics of this Bill and the launching of boats from France are not specifically linked. This is the deterrent effect of making the UK less attractive in general. From this Bill alone, I cannot comment on the launching of boats.
Joe Robertson
Q
Helen Rance: There is nothing in this Bill that addresses the geography of where crossings leave from or arrive to.
Tom Gordon
Q
Helen Rance: I understand the question, but I do not have the statistical figures over the last—
Tom Gordon
Q
Helen Rance: Our work is on serious and organised immigration crime networks. I cannot be led to saying that they have increased due to specific measures, because a whole raft of factors make that happen. I am just not in a position to answer that.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
Helen Rance: Any increase in intelligence will certainly help the intelligence picture. It will allow us to identify vulnerable victims and help with the intelligence on organised crime networks.
Tom Gordon
Q
Helen Rance: I am sorry, but I just do not have that sort of information. You can rephrase the question again, but I am not clear that that is a matter for the NCA.
Mr Foster
Q
Helen Rance: Yes, we would investigate the gangs facilitating illegal immigration within the United Kingdom as well as those outside. Cryptocurrency is one of many methods of funding, which is why we are doing a specific amount of work on the criminal finances used. I am not going to comment specifically on how much is cryptocurrency, but there are many methods, of which cryptocurrency is one.
Siân Berry
Q
Helen Rance: That is not something that I was specifically anticipating answering questions about on this specific Bill around modern slavery and human trafficking.
Siân Berry
Q
Helen Rance: Yes, I can come back with some written evidence on that.
The Chair
If there are no further questions, I thank Ms Rance for being here today. We are grateful for your time.
Examination of Witnesses
Professor Richard Ekins KC and Dr Conor Casey gave evidence.
The Chair
We now hear from Dr Conor Casey, senior lecturer in public law and legal theory at the University of Surrey and senior fellow at Policy Exchange, Judicial Power Project. We also hear from Professor Richard Ekins KC, professor of law and constitutional government at the University of Oxford and head of Policy Exchange at the Judicial Power Project. Both will be joining us via Zoom. We have until five past 11 for this session. Gentlemen, you are very welcome. Let us start with an introduction from Professor Ekins.
Professor Ekins: You have done so already, Chair, and I thank you for it. I am a professor at the University of Oxford, and I lead Policy Exchange’s work on judicial power. I have written a great deal on migration and asylum law, including the problems, as I see it, of the application of the European convention on human rights in that context and also how successive Governments and, with respect, some parliamentarians have misunderstood the refugee convention and its protections.
Dr Casey: Thank you very much for the invitation to speak today. My name is Conor Casey. I am a senior lecturer at the University of Surrey School of Law and a senior fellow at Policy Exchange. My area of expertise includes public law, administrative law, the law of the European convention on human rights and how the convention is interpreted in the UK domestic courts.
Matt Vickers
Q
Professor Ekins: Litigation will certainly arise in consequence of these new provisions, if they are enacted; they will not end the controversy in this space. The litigation may turn on different questions, such as whether something counts as “normally”. There is a great deal of uncertainty about how the changes made by the relevant provision, clause 18, will be received by the courts.
In a sense, the legislation leaves untouched the fundamental structure of article 8 in this context, which is individuated proportionality assessment. It tries to clarify, or maybe streamline, some aspects of the way in which article 8 is understood and applied—those changes are to be welcomed, so far as they go—but it is unclear whether, and to what extent, that will restrain the courts in applying article 8.
The legislation takes for granted continuing individuated assessment. The legislation does not purport to be an exclusive code for article 8, does not displace article 8 under the Human Rights Act, and does not direct the courts to focus only on the terms of this legislation and close their eyes to the Strasbourg case law. The way in which article 8 will be understood and applied will be informed to some extent by this new legislation, but there will be arguments about precisely what it means and whether there are conditionals in the legislation at play.
It will always be open to unlawful migrants and asylum seekers who are making arguments by reference to article 8 to invite the court to go back to the Strasbourg Court’s case law and to take this legislation as, in a sense, advisory. I know that that may sound somewhat strange, but that is effectively the structure we have. Parliament is not clearly telling the courts, “Focus only on this legislation, and close your eyes to the other body of case law.” It could attempt to do so: it could go further, by disapplying article 8 under the Human Rights Act and making this an exclusive code for the relevance of family life. That would require some recasting.
To my mind, the more fundamental problem is that we are maintaining individuated proportionality assessment as the test for the lawfulness of removal. That will inevitably be somewhat—“ad hoc” is perhaps the wrong term, but it will be particular and unpredictable. A great deal will turn on the persons who are making the adjudicative decisions. The Bill obviously has something to say about that, but how it will play out is quite unpredictable.
That is a complicated answer to your question. There will certainly be litigation, and it would be a mistake to think that this new legislation will authoritatively determine how article 8 will be understood. It will make some difference, but much turns on how it is received, which you simply cannot tell from where you sit now.
Dr Casey: I agree. There are two different ways, broadly speaking, that this Bill could be received by courts and tribunals. One way—which, so far as the Home Secretary is concerned, would be the positive scenario—is that the tribunal takes very seriously the clear intent behind the Bill, which is to tighten and narrow the circumstances in which article 8 can be invoked and successfully relied on to resist a removal or deportation.
However, as my colleague Richard pointed out, a lot of the wording in the Bill gives leeway for more flexible or generous interpretations for applicants. For example, the Bill says that article 8 applies “normally” only to a nuclear family—partners residing together, or a parent and a child residing together. That “normally” suggests that judges might take a broader understanding of other types of family arrangements. With the standards throughout the Bill—unreasonable impact, “adverse” impact or “unduly harsh”—there is, again, scope to give these a much more generous interpretation, such that, for some judges, it might be hard not to find an instance where deportation could not be considered harsh or as having an adverse impact on a child, because it separates a family unit.
I can imagine some judges—not all, but some—reading these standards in a generous way that would capture a large sweep of cases and defeat removals and deportations. There is a scenario where the reception of the Bill is such that judges retain quite a lot of discretion to come up with their own understanding of the right balance between the public interest and individuals’ family life and, plausibly within the text of the Bill, to reach conclusions that are in tension with the clear policy intent behind the Bill.
I think that that is an unavoidable situation if one accepts the strictures imposed by the ECHR and its jurisprudence because a sine qua non of article 8 law, as articulated by the Court, is that the tribunal must reach its own assessment—it must reach its own assessment of proportionality. At best, Parliament may give indications of where it wants weighting to go but, to stay within the strictures of the ECHR, the courts must have the final say.
Also, in response to the question about whether, if article 8 claims are less attractive, other claims might be made under the ECHR: absolutely. I imagine that article 3 claims will probably increase. The difference between article 3 and article 8, as the Committee will know, is that article 3 is categorical—there is no qualification if the threshold is met. The threshold sometimes includes things like whether removal will lead to substandard medical care, compared with the NHS; that is ill treatment. We could see a spike in such invocations, and the Bill does not touch article 3 claims whatever.
Professor Ekins: I should add that this legislation, as the Committee knows, builds on the Immigration Act 2014, which also attempted to tighten the understanding and application of article 8; that is largely viewed as having been much less effective than Parliament intended in 2014. This legislation will go further and that is to be welcomed, but the earlier Act should be a cautionary tale about the risks of failure.
Anna Turley
Q
Professor Ekins: In my view, the legislation does not strike the right balance, because it fails—as have successive Bills, I think—to take sufficiently robust measures in relation to the problem of illegal migration and people smuggling; I am thinking of the small boats crisis in particular. That is somewhat distinct from the broader problem of unlawful migration, which is clearly a problem—people overstaying, foreign criminals and so on—but the small boats crisis has particular features that warrant a particular response.
To my mind, unfortunately, although the legislation tinkers with aspects of how the refugee convention should be understood in our law—perhaps we will come to that later—it seems, silently at least, to take for granted that persons who have contracted with people smugglers and made it across the channel are entitled to asylum and to remain in the UK. I think that that is a misunderstanding of the terms of the refugee convention, which do entitle us to expel persons from the UK, even when they are genuine refugees under the meaning of the refugee convention. That is a protection that all member states enjoy. It entitles us to expel them to other states, because they have entered in violation of our migration law. It would be different had they entered directly from a state where their lives were in danger, but no one coming from France is in that position. That makes that a structurally different position to other contexts, when people flee danger.
The legislation simply does not address that feature of the problem. The measures it takes—which, as I say, I welcome as far as they go—simply tinker with the edges and do not address the central problem. Genuine refugees will cross the channel but, so long as contracting with people smugglers is a viable route to enter and thus to settle in the UK, that will persist. It is a logical and rational expenditure of funds, and it is a flourishing business so long as you do not care about the lives of people crossing a dangerous water.
There is a failure to recognise the protections that we have as a country under the refugee convention. We may take action that would not place persons in danger—they can be removed to safe third states. As far as I can see, the Bill is focused on increasing administrative adjudicative capacity to process appeal claims more speedily. That is admirable, but it leaves untouched the central structural problem, which I and others writing for Policy Exchange have tried to draw attention to over the years.
Dr Casey: I agree. I do not see anything in the Bill that would deter unlawful channel crossings. But, as has been mentioned, , depending on how the Bill is received in the courts, it might deter overstaying on visas and the breaching of conditions of your permission to reside. That could be valuable, as those are significant numbers, but I do not see anything that would deter unlawful channel crossings in any way.
You could go further in the Bill and, for example, take advantage of provisions in the refugee convention that allow states to return those convicted of serious criminal offences or of threats to national security to their home countries, even if there was a risk of ill treatment. The refugee convention allows that, but it would not be possible within the confines of the ECHR. Article 3 puts a categorical prohibition on those kinds of returns even if the person being returned poses an enormous threat to the United Kingdom itself. So even if you did take full advantage of everything that the refugee convention permitted you to do to protect your own immigration system, the ECHR would pose even more stringent restrictions in many respects.
Professor Ekins: I agree with everything that Dr Casey has said, but I would add that that is article 3 as—in my view—misinterpreted by the Strasbourg Court. Article 3 does provide a categorical prohibition on torture and subjecting people to inhumane treatment; as I say, that has been misinterpreted in recent decades to establish a much more far-reaching bar on taking action that exposes someone to a risk of such action from third parties.
In 2021, we published a paper that addressed in close detail the misinterpretation of the ECHR and its far-reaching impact for immigration and asylum law. That Policy Exchange paper is backed by Lord Hoffmann, former judge of the House of Lords. It makes clear the problem in the Strasbourg Court’s reading of article 3—as well as its reading of article 8, I should add.
Mr Kohler
Q
Dr Casey: I think that if you want to help bring down the quite large backlog in the tribunal system, you will need more first-instance appellate decision makers. Numbers are hard to come by, but I think there are 90 salaried judges in the first tier tribunal and then an indeterminate number of part-time judges. I think the full number might not be more than 200 or 250—so not a lot when it comes to processing tens of thousands of appeals.
If you were to expand the pool of decision makers by requiring less onerous legal qualifications, it would stand to reason that you could recruit more people to process the backlog. That is the positive picture that I imagine the Home Secretary would articulate, and there is a lot to be said for it. But as I see it the risk is that on the current design you just risk moving the backlog. If you have a large pool of people without legal training applying a complicated body of law—extraordinarily complicated: ECHR law, UK domestic law, immigration rules, statutes—they will be more likely to make mistakes and errors of law. Then there would be a right of appeal to the upper tribunal, where there will still be judges. They may then grant more leave to appeal. So you might just relocate the backlog from the first-instance appeal level up to the upper tribunal. That is the risk.
I am loath to say things on the hoof about complicated points of designing institutions, but it might not be a choice between having no legal qualifications and being fit for judicial office with over 12 years’ experience. You could simply require some level of legal qualification, and that would still keep the pool of possible decision makers much broader than it is with the first-tier tribunal. Those are just some initial thoughts on that part of the Bill.
Professor Ekins: For my part, I think it is too strong to say this is a move from a judicial process to an administrative process. It is certainly a change and, if enacted and put in practice, it moves us closer to a model of departmental adjudication. However, that is still not departmental adjudication, as the relevant adjudicators will be at some distance from the Home Secretary, and they will be adjudicating claims appeals and so on.
I think there could be some advantages in the proposed change, namely trying to integrate the process of reviewing particular cases more closely to the immigration and asylum system, and making the public interest in the enforcement of migration law a more pressing consideration. However, there certainly are considerable risks—not least of which, as my colleague has pointed out, is the sheer complexity of this body of law.
To my mind, part of the problem with the body of law is the fact that sometimes, in some critical respects, its application turns on the relevant adjudicator’s individuated assessment of the relevant harshness, proportionality, fairness or otherwise of removing this person who is in violation of migration law. That makes things unpredictable, and it makes the disposition of the relevant adjudicators awfully important, which I think will result in more litigation and appeals.
Changing the persons who are doing that kind of individuated assessment might well result in a different set of outcomes. I do not know who will be recruited for this, but it is conceivable, for example, that former police officers would constitute persons for appointment. They might well—I do not know—take a different view on the fairness or otherwise of removing some persons whose claims come before them from the view taken by the existing cadre of first-tier tribunal judges. However, the same body of law is being applied, and it is complex—that is certainly true—so I think one can expect a lot of appeals.
In addition to that—this a crucial point for the Committee to bear in mind—I think there could be considerable collateral litigation to challenge decisions of the new adjudicative body, and those challenges might be at a high level. If the Bill proceeds into law, when the Home Secretary comes to promulgating secondary legislation and making critical decisions about the structure and operation of the adjudicative body, many of those decisions will be challenged by judicial review. When the adjudicative body is under way, particular decisions will be challenged by way of judicial review, as well as by appeal to the upper tribunal.
Clause 1(8) looks like an attempt to limit the judicial involvement in decisions of the adjudicative body to appeals to the upper tribunal only. If that is the intention, with respect, I think it is going to fail. That is not an effective ouster clause. You can certainly expect—and I do—much litigation and ordinary judicial review proceedings challenging particular decisions of the adjudicative body. Although more adjudicative capacity is certainly welcome, and you need that if you are going to deal with the existing and growing backlog, you have to reckon with the risk that it is not quite as straightforward as is hoped.
Mr Kohler
Q
Professor Ekins: I cannot answer that question offhand, I am afraid. It is certainly the case that different common law and civil law countries take different views, especially those outside the ECHR, of the relevant role of the Department in deciding cases, and the role of courts in reviewing claims about the nature of decision making.
Certainly, if you go back not that long ago in our history, you would have had the Home Office making decisions about the application of the relevant migration law. Those decisions would have been subject to judicial supervision, but that would have been supervision with the court thinking, “Has something gone fundamentally wrong here? Is this a misconstrual of the legislation or a perverse decision, which sometimes happens?” What we have now, and have had, effectively, since a pivotal judgment in 2007, is the relevant judicial body thinking that it is its job to decide on the proportionality, fairness or justice of removal, not the Home Secretary’s. The Home Secretary takes her view, but the judge and the court take their view, and it is the court’s view that prevails. That is a different model, and it does not have to be that way.
Mr Brash
Q
Professor Ekins: I am not sure whether the Bill really does make it less attractive for people who fail to qualify. As I have said already, it rightly makes it more difficult for some unlawful migrants, who claimed asylum but whose claim has failed, to stay in the UK by relying on their claimed family connection. There are other grounds on which they may resist removal. The Bill expressly preserves the capacity for foreign criminals to resist deportation on family grounds, for example. The Bill, if enacted and well received, will make it marginally—I do not mean that dismissively—easier to remove some of those people. Major obstacles will remain, though.
The provisions you have in mind are perhaps those that concern the recovery of contributions for asylum support. I apologise if I have misread this, but I thought that that would hold regardless of whether one was a genuine refugee. The point is that the Home Secretary would have a power to recover funds from people who have received asylum support. There are limitations there, clearly: they have to have funds to make a contribution, and they cannot be left destitute as a consequence.
That may have a modest deterrent effect, but that will hold for failed asylum seekers, including fraudulent asylum seekers—not every failed asylum seeker is fraudulent, of course—and genuine refugees too. But then it is the policy of the Government, rightly so, to deter genuine refugees from attempting to enter the country , certainly by contracting with people smugglers and entering unlawfully across the channel. That provision goes to your question, but I am not sure that it will have much difference in practice. Personally, I do not think that it is objectionable in principle that, if people have funds to make a contribution to the public funds that they have received, they should make it, but I doubt that many people will be in a position to deliver.
There is the other aspect though, which we have touched on: the changes that clause 22 will make in relation to the understanding of article 33 of the convention. Those provisions concern people who are genuine refugees; it just means that those genuine refugees can none the less be expelled, even to a country where their persecutors are waiting, if they are a danger to the community or a threat to national security. With respect, I find that provision quite oddly drafted; I am not sure why it is framed in the way that it is. It seems back to front, in a sense. At least the Government, and Parliament if it supports the Bill, will be addressing that provision. It is an important protection that we will not really be able to rely on, because any attempt to remove a person who is a threat to national security or a danger to the community will be predictably blocked by the ordinary operation of human rights law, which the Bill otherwise does not tame.
Dr Casey: I agree with Professor Ekins. I do not see the logical connection between the part 2 changes to the application of article 8 and deterring unlawful crossings. As I mentioned, I could see it having a modest to moderate impact, if interpreted according to the spirit of the Bill, on deterring things like overstaying on a visa or breaching a condition of your permission. One of the features of the Bill is that tribunals are directed that a family life formed when your immigration status is precarious or when you are unlawfully present should have little or no weight, respectively. If the courts took that very seriously and that became common knowledge, that might make you think, “Okay, it will be harder to leverage article 8 to stay.” That could have a deterrent effect, but not on unlawful crossings.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Professor Ekins: We have a long tradition in our country, and in the common law world more broadly, of interpreting ouster clauses—clauses in legislation that would limit the jurisdiction of the court on judicial review—narrowly. The courts take for granted that Parliament is probably not going be excluding their supervisory capacity; if a provision is going to genuinely exclude that capacity, the courts expect it to be spelled out categorically, in black and white. There is a long history of their looking at a clause that you might have thought, especially if you had not really been attending to these clauses and their tradition and reception, did say that, and interpreting it to have a much more limited effect or no effect at all in practice, whereas the point was perhaps to exclude review.
Looking at that clause and knowing what I do about the history of the reception of those clauses, I just do not think it will be understood to mean, “There can be no judicial review of a decision of the adjudicative body that, for example, is procedurally unfair, or that is so unreasonable that no adjudicative body would have reached it.” Now what it might do, and I think this is how it would be read, would be, “No judicial review challenges to that adjudicative decision on grounds of error of law, because, if you think there is an error of law, you appeal to the upper tribunal.” Fine: it would have some limited effect there. But if the point was to categorically exclude judicial review of adjudicative decisions of this body—and I do not know whether that was the policy of the Government or quite what the drafters had in mind—it certainly will not achieve that. I say “certainly”, I think it is probably the case, but I think it is very unlikely.
If you drafted a different ouster clause, then one might have more hope that it would be effective; in a sense, you could specify and categorically exclude the particular grounds of judicial review that you as Parliament do not want this decision of the body to be subject to. Then, in a sense, you are taking full responsibility for what judicial review should look like in relation to this body after the legislation comes into effect.
Parliament has in recent years enacted some more thoroughgoing and careful, if you like, precise, ouster clauses along those lines. These are sometimes called partial ouster clauses, because they do not categorically exclude judicial review, but they very severely limit it. There is one such ouster clause in the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022, which protects some decisions of the upper tribunal from judicial review. That model could be applied here.
I should add there are some drawbacks to so doing, because this new adjudicative body, as our previous discussion may suggest and I think the structure of the Bill shows, is not a court. It will be an adjudicative body with some independence, but it will not be like the upper tribunal, which, frankly, is just like the High Court in a different mode. The constitutional case against doing it is certainly stronger than was the case with the upper tribunal; but, if Parliament takes the view that there should be no judicial review here or it should be only on these specified grounds, then there are other models available for drafting an ouster clause. If I were in your shoes, I would not rest content with clause 1(8) as it stands.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Dr Casey: Yes, I agree. I will just say that I think that, because the Independent Immigration Appeal Authority will not be a judicial body, the courts might be more anxious in scrutinising whether a clause ousts judicial review. At the moment, the way it is drafted, as a public lawyer you read a clause trying to oust and you think how a court would read it. I can imagine a court looking at that at the minute and inserting brackets and making it “A (rational and reasonable) decision of the IIAA”, and interpreting it in that respect.
Anna Turley
Q
Professor Ekins: On the article 8 point, my own view, which is substantiated in quite some detail in the 2021 Policy Exchange paper with the support of Lord Hoffman that I referred to is that, for a long time in the history of the ECHR, article 8 had nothing to do with immigration and asylum. It was not a provision that was understood to impose limits on the enforcement of migration law or on the deportation and removal of non-citizens, especially foreign criminals and so on. There was no connection there.
A connection has been established in the case law by reading article 8 very expansively and then effectively requiring each particular decision to enforce the migration law of a member state to involve an individuated proportionality assessment about the impact on the particular person being removed—or, in relation to article 8, quite often on his or her family or maybe his or her extended family—and for that to pass judicial muster.
As I say, I think that is an innovation in the case law of the Strasbourg court. I do not want to overstate its novelty—it is an innovation that has been going on for several decades—but it is not part of what the UK and other member states agreed when they agreed the terms of the convention, and I think it should be viewed as a misinterpretation of the convention.
In a sense, the joint declaration of the member states earlier this year recognises that something has gone wrong in the case law of the Court; that it has read article 8—we will come to article 3—to establish a kind of Europe-wide migration and asylum law, beyond the terms agreed by the member states. That needs to be addressed and wound back.
The thought that, in a sense, you are wronging a foreign criminal when you remove him or her from the UK so that he or she cannot maintain a connection with family is just fundamentally misconceived. In the same way, we are not wronging the offender by incarcerating him, which makes it very much more difficult to maintain a flourishing family life; the consequence is a side effect of the wrongful choice made by the offender. Something similar holds, I think, with the wrongful choice made by a person who violates our migration law.
There are harsh consequences in many of these cases, of course, but they are not harsh consequences whereby the UK sets out to wrong someone’s family. That structure has to be more fully recognised. We should see that something has gone badly wrong in thinking that the right to respect for private and family life entails, at least in some cases, a de facto immunity to the application of migration law.
Dr Casey: I agree with Professor Ekins entirely. The extension of article 8 into the domain of immigration law was a very conspicuous act of judicial lawmaking through the living instrument approach.
As recently as 1985 in the Abdulaziz v. the United Kingdom case, you had the UK Government—Sir Peter Rawlinson, the Attorney General—arguing tooth and nail that article 8 did not apply to questions about entry into the UK or removal and that it was just outside the scope. They lost that case, and that has been the EHCR’s position for several decades since then, but it was not understood as part of the original compact when the convention was ratified.
Professor Ekins: You asked us about article 3 as well, I think.
The Chair
We have an absolute hard stop at 11.05 am, so please be very succinct.
Professor Ekins: The 2021 paper I referred to chronicles the misinterpretation of article 3 as well. The categorical prohibition on torture and inhuman treatment has been wrongly extended to require the UK to avoid consequences that are not within the UK’s responsibility, such as the consequence of moving to a country with a much less developed health system, which really cannot be reasonably understood to involve a violation of article 3.
The Chair
That brings us to the end of this session. On behalf of the Committee, I thank Professor Ekins and Dr Casey for their evidence and time today.
Examination of Witness
Jon Featonby gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear from Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst for the Refugee Council. For this session, we have until 11.25 am. Mr Featonby, could I ask you to briefly introduce yourself?
Jon Featonby: Thank you very much. On behalf of the Refugee Council, I really welcome this opportunity. I am Jon Featonby, the chief policy analyst at the Refugee Council. As an organisation, we support around 15,000 refugees and people seeking asylum each year, from when they first enter the UK right through to when they get refugee status and are on their integration journey after that.
Matt Vickers
Q
Jon Featonby: I am going to focus on the people who enter the UK for the purpose of seeking asylum within the international protection regime. For us, this comes down to how the refugee convention has been interpreted and operationalised since it first came in in 1951. That has been based around countries like the UK requiring somebody to be present in the UK, in their own territory, before they can access the protection systems. By its nature, that means that people have to undertake some of those dangerous journeys to get there.
It is important to recognise that the convention talks about somebody being a refugee once they have been forced to leave a country because of war and persecution, and it is then blind to where that person is. There are obviously benefits if those people do not need to undertake dangerous journeys to get somewhere. There are benefits for the individuals who do not need to put their lives at risk—we see the really deadly consequences that has across the world—and benefits for the host countries themselves if people are able to arrive in an orderly manner and do not have to resort to the types of journeys that they have to now.
It is also part of this important international context that most refugees—most people displaced from their countries—stay in the countries that border the ones they have fled from. Some people move on, and sometimes that can be because the countries neighbouring the place they have fled are no longer safe for them and no longer allow them to try to fulfil their lives, particularly as we see refugee situations becoming increasingly protracted across the globe. That is one of the things that we see lacking in the UK’s response at the moment. It is not just the UK’s response; we have seen the deterrence measures that you mentioned being adopted by successive Governments. We have seen some impact of that, particularly this year in terms of the drop in small boat arrivals.
From the Refugee Council’s point of view, we would argue that the bit that has largely been missing from this is about how you continue to undermine the business model of the people smugglers and the people who take advantage of the people seeking safety. That is where we would talk about the importance of safe and legal routes. The previous Government opened up new routes, and we think that the Afghan and Ukraine schemes are great successes.
One of the challenges that we see at the moment is that those safe routes available to people have dropped over the last year; the number of people arriving on safe routes in the last 12 months is down by about 50%. Refugee family reunion has been temporarily suspended for over a year now, and we have seen the closure of the Afghan schemes. We have been promised that new safe and legal routes will open in the new few months, with arrivals next year, but it seems that those numbers will be quite small.
If we look at what worked in somewhere like the US under President Biden, it was having two sides to the approach: yes, the enforcement approach, but on the other side of that, quite generous, open, safe and legal routes, so that the people who genuinely need safety are able to get to somewhere like the UK without having to put their lives at risk.
Matt Vickers
Q
Jon Featonby: For the people who are refugees, it is about having an asylum system that first and foremost does what it should do, which is making decisions as quickly as it can that are right the first time. I think making sure that that happens has been a bit of a challenge under successive Governments now. For the people who are genuinely seeking protection and who need it, the system needs to make sure that they are able to access that protection when they do.
What we have also seen is the challenge at the other end. For the people who are found not to have that protection need, there needs to be a firm and fair system in place to make sure they are removed from the UK as quickly, and hopefully as humanely, as possible. That is probably where there have been challenges. Some of them are legal challenges, but some of it comes down to basic good caseworking in the Home Office.
Anna Turley
Q
Jon Featonby: The easiest way to look at some of this is through the immigration statistics published by the Home Office. Since small boats really started in around 2019, the top nationalities have largely stayed the same. There have been people from Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrea and Iran, and the reasons why people would seek safety from those places are quite well known. Within that time, there have also been spikes from other countries. Quite famously, there was a lot of attention in 2022 on Albanians, but those numbers dropped quite quickly. That was probably a slightly different route from some of the other countries.
The Refugee Council has done some analysis in the past on what you would expect the asylum outcomes to be for those nationalities. Historically, you would expect around two thirds of the people crossing in small boats to go on and get protection. That has dropped slightly in the last year because the overall grant rate has dropped, although one caveat is that because the Home Office has not published appeals outcome statistics for the last three years, it is quite hard to work out exactly what happens once some of those cases go through the appeals process.
Anna Turley
Q
Jon Featonby: There is only so much that I can say on this, with my particular focus being on the people we support at the Refugee Council. The previous panel mentioned that, with article 8 rights, there has to be a balance between having a controlled immigration system and a focus on individual cases. From the Refugee Council’s point of view, we will continue to support the individual application interpretation of article 8. We see that in our work with refugee families: for a family that has been forced to displace, it is very much not one size fits all; these families can look like all sorts of different things.
One area where we focus a bit more on article 8, particularly around how the UK defines the core family, is the future system for refugee families to be able to safely reunite. We have shared our concerns around the suspension of that route. By our estimate, there are probably 20,000 people who have not been able to apply to be reunited safely through that route since it was suspended just over a year ago. For us, the important thing to remember about that route is that, for many years, nine in 10 of the visas granted to people on it were for women and children. In terms of family reunion in the future, we see it as important that some of the most vulnerable people who have been displaced from their homes and who are in danger have access to that safe route.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Jon Featonby: There are definitely some positive signs that the Government should be quite proud of. Around the time of the election, we published a report that looked at the state of the asylum system. We described it as a “system in meltdown”, largely caused by the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which had seen productivity in the Home Office drop to its lowest level since the height of the covid pandemic. Since then, the Home Office has done a much better job of being able to make decisions quickly. The latest statistics we have show that about 75% of initial decisions are made within six months of somebody making an application. That is a good thing.
We think some Government priority should be given to how you make sure that people have confidence in the asylum system. That system needs to be doing its basics right: making decisions as quickly as it can that are right the first time; supporting refugees who are found to be in need of protection to get on with their lives, rebuild their lives and contribute fully to UK communities; and providing a way for people who are found to be not in need of protection to be removed safely and humanely. That is where we see some challenges in the Bill. We do not think it addresses some of that context.
The previous panels touched on how the backlog in the asylum system is now at the appeals stage, which is an almost inevitable consequence of dealing with the initial decision backlog. There will be more decisions and therefore more refusals, and therefore more people will go into that appeals process. There are probably three times as many people in the appeals backlog as in the asylum backlog itself. Some of that will work its way through the system as the Government get more on top of the asylum system—what officials refer to as having friction within the asylum system—where the number of decisions they are making is roughly the same as the number of people entering the system.
As a result of the speeding-up of decision making in recent years, we have also seen a reduction in the quality of some decisions, which we think has put unnecessary pressure on the tribunal and left people stuck in the asylum system, and in accommodation, for longer than they should be, at cost to the taxpayer and to those individuals. That is borne out by the appeals statistics that we now get from the first-tier tribunal, which show that in the last year, in two thirds of appeals that were disposed of, either the tribunal granted the appeal or—as is increasingly the case—the initial decision was withdrawn by the Home Office, because once the appeal got towards the tribunal hearing the Home Office found that it was not going to be able to defend the decision. That is why we think there should be a laser focus on initial decision making and on what else can be done to reduce the appeals backlog.
One of our concerns around the IIAA is that the appeals backlog is an urgent problem that needs to be dealt with now, but the best case scenario is probably that the IIAA starts to hear some cases at the back end of next year. It may well be the next election before the IIAA is really up and running. We think that more urgent things could be done without having to rip up the entire tribunal system as it currently is.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Jon Featonby: I will take that decision making in a few stages. In terms of whether that measure will deter people from coming to the UK, I do not think it will have any real impact at all. A previous panel touched on how complicated this body of law is. For those who have engaged with successive immigration Bills, it is quite complex. To expect somebody who is seeking protection to follow it, and to expect Parliament or even organisations such as the Refugee Council to be the main place that those people get their information, does not reflect reality.
We are concerned about the potential impact on decision making because it is important to remember that asylum support is available only to those asylum applicants who would otherwise be destitute. The Home Office puts in place quite a high bar for someone to even access support. Our concern is that if people are aware that they may be faced with debts of around £10,000, that will prevent them from accessing support. Their alternative then is to remain destitute. That is obviously very bad for those individuals and families, but it is also well established that putting people in destitution has negative consequences from a public health point of view and for wider communities.
We are also concerned by that provision because, although it applies to anybody who receives asylum support, with some minor exemptions, the majority of people who will ever be in a position to even start to pay back that money are people who are going to go on to get protection. We are concerned that that will take money away from people who probably have very little in the first place and that, because not having paid back that money could be a bar on settlement in the future, it could lead to people looking to borrow the money from quite dangerous moneylenders, putting people at risk of exploitation at that point.
It is quite hard to work out exactly what this will look like because there is not much detail in the Bill, but there are potentially disincentives for refugees to work. In our work at the Refugee Council, we see that people want to be able to work—they want to contribute—and the people who we support into employment, including employment in the NHS, are contributing. We think a far better use of time and resources would be to help refugees to overcome some of the barriers that they face, particularly in employment. That would allow them to contribute far more to the UK, including from tax receipts.
Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)
Q
Jon Featonby: From the Refugee Council perspective, it is not something that we have focused on. It is not part and parcel of our day-to-day work, as it were. We certainly have not done the research into this that people on the previous panels have done. From our point of view, what is important is that those people arriving in the UK seeking protection are able to seek that protection and have their cases heard fairly and in a timely way, so that the people who need protection, as I said previously, are able to get it and people who do not qualify can be returned and removed from the UK safely and humanely. It is not part of our work to have the evidence on how particular articles of the European convention have been applied.
Siân Berry
Q
Jon Featonby: The point about asylum support is really important. One of the gaps in some of the background material to the Bill is that the Home Office does not release information about how many people in the asylum system are in receipt of support. Historically, the conventional wisdom has been that it is probably about 50% of people. That reduces and goes up over time, so it quite hard to know exactly how many people are going to be impacted by the asylum support measure. It is absolutely our concern that people who really need support will not want to access it, and that that number will go down. The other thing I did not mention before is that most people in that situation are not allowed to work, so their choice is pretty much between Home Office support, with accommodation provided on a no-choice basis, or destitution. We also have concerns about the knock-on impacts on people’s integration.
The other bit of the Bill that we are particularly concerned about is core protection—that is about not only what is in the Bill, but the wider introduction of the core protection model, some of which started back in March this year. We have already had around 2,000 people who applied for asylum from the beginning of March and were found to need protection being granted a shorter period of leave, 30 months, rather than getting five years’ leave and being on a five-year route to settlement; we understand that they will be on a 20-year route to settlement. I think there is strong evidence that that increased insecurity, and people’s feeling that they have no degree of permanence in the UK, undermines their ability to seek employment and secure housing, and has a number of knock-on impacts on people’s lives.
The other impact of those two measures is that they are going to require an awful lot of Home Office bureaucracy to run. The Home Office currently does not run anything like the asylum support charge, but it will have to have a way of knowing how much money has been paid in by everybody who receives support and what sum still needs to be paid, as well as having a mechanism for dealing with those sums. Similarly, with core protection, if people have to have reviews of their status every two and a half years—potentially they would be in the country for two years—that is an awful lot more Home Office caseworking. The Government have not published an impact assessment published around that. We have done our own assessment and we have worked out that, roughly, it could mean just over 1 million extra reviews over the first decade of the policy being fully in practice.
Alongside the core protection model, there will also be a new in-country work and study route. In fairness to officials, that is really complex to design, but it will also be really complex to run. We think an awful lot more time and effort could be spent on making sure the asylum system is doing some of the basics right. First and foremost, that means making sure that decisions are made as quickly as they can be and are right the first time, and making sure that those people who are in need of protection and are given refugee status are supported to fulfil their potential in the UK—
The Chair
Order. That brings us to the end of the time allocated for the Committee to ask questions. I thank you on behalf of the Committee for your time and evidence today.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned.—(Jade Botterill.)
Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting)
Tuesday 15th September 2026
(4 days, 1 hour ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Immigration and Asylum Bill 2026-27 View all Immigration and Asylum Bill 2026-27 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 15 September 2026 - (15 Sep 2026)
The Chair
We are now sitting in public and the proceedings are being broadcast. As no Members wish to make a declaration of interest in connection with the Bill, we will now hear from our witnesses, starting with Dr Madeleine Sumption MBE, director of the Migration Observatory, and Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK. We have until 2.30 pm for this panel. Will the witnesses please briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Dr Sumption: I am Madeleine Sumption. I am the director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
Alp Mehmet: I am Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK since 2019.
Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)
Q
Dr Sumption: I will take those separately, starting with removals and then talking about arrivals. The two measures most relevant to removals are the appeals reform and the article 8 restrictions. It is very reasonable to assume that the article 8 restrictions will increase returns, but not as much as they will increase refusals, so some people will remain in the UK having been refused. It is very difficult to predict exactly how many people will be refused as a result of the measures, or how many of them will be returned. The Home Office modelling for the impact assessment seems broadly reasonable to me. It suggested just under 12,000 additional refusals as a result of the restrictions, and that some of those people—about 14%—would leave with no involvement of immigration enforcement at all, but the modelling also suggests that just over half would remain in the UK despite the refusal. It is one thing to restrict the legal challenges and the ability of people to get grants of status, but it is another thing actually to remove them from the UK.
I am not going to get into the details of how much appeals reform will actually speed up the process; I am sure you have lots of other people to talk about that and the legal complexities. If the reform has the intended effect of speeding up final refusals, I think it is reasonable to assume that that would increase returns, because that means, in effect, that the immigration enforcement budget can be used more efficiently and that there is less chance of losing track of people during the lengthy period when an appeal is ongoing, but I do not have a view on precisely how effective it will be at speeding things up.
It is quite reasonable to assume that there would be an increase in returns as a result of the measures in the Bill. The deterrence aspect—whether that would feed through into fewer people arriving—is harder to assess, and the evidence is not as good as I would like it to be. A few studies suggest that one of the things that makes a country less attractive is a lower probability of receiving a grant of status, particularly if combined with swift return. To the extent that the measures in the Bill make returns faster, there is some evidence that, particularly for low grant-rate nationalities—people who are relatively unlikely to get asylum—there could be a knock-on effect, so long as the refusals actually lead to a return. For people in the UK who have been refused but are not returned, the available evidence—I should stress that it is quite limited—suggests that there would be less impact.
Matt Vickers
Q
Alp Mehmet: First, can I say the Bill is a step in the right direction? I commend the Home Secretary for having the courage to introduce a Bill with measures that are going to have some sort of impact. I am not sure what that impact is going to be; some bits of the Bill, frankly, are going to have the opposite effect to the one intended, and are more likely to attract people. I will come back to that later, if I may.
If we are talking about the boats, the only thing that will deter both those coming in the boats and the smugglers themselves—the gangs—will be detention on arrival and speedy action to deal with and remove them. Only that will work; I have no doubt about that. There is nothing in the Bill that will allow that to happen.
Have any measures of the sort that are being proposed worked? Nothing in the Bill reflects the sort of measures that, in certain countries, have had the desired effect of deterring people and keeping them away. The sorts of measures introduced in Australia, Denmark or—dare I mention it?—America, as well as even Greece, that have had an impact on the numbers applying for asylum bear no resemblance to what is in the Bill. Will the Bill have any major impact or deter? Sadly, I do not think it will do either.
I am afraid that the Bill is a bit of a wasted opportunity, as was the last Bill, on which I also gave evidence with Tony Smith, who is appearing after me. That Bill also, in effect, cancelled out all the deterrent factors that were already in place. While this Bill has little things here and there, it is essentially all about process as well.
I welcome the introduction of the new appeals authority, but I will add that it seems to be going back to the system that was in place 45 years ago, when I was an immigration officer in Dover and appeals first appeared on the scene. That may have an impact on gaming the system, for example, as the Home Secretary argues, but significant impact? I do not think so.
The Minister of State, Home Department (Anna Turley)
Q
Dr Sumption: Obviously, there are several different goals of the Bill, and the metric used would depend on that. For the deterrence stuff that we have just been discussing, small boat arrivals and asylum applications are the most relevant ones. Some things that cannot be tracked now—at least, not in the published data—could potentially be tracked in future.
For example, we actually have remarkably few statistics on human rights grants, including how many people are granted and what happens to refusals over time, or how many refusals are overturned in court. All those things could be tracked, but the data does not currently exist. My understanding is that it does not exist internally either, because the impact assessment used a sample of around 3,000 cases, rather than just using full statistics for many of them. I think there is probably some statistical work that could be done to try to track the impacts of the human rights measures a bit more.
Also, the data on returns could be linked to the data on what happens to people before that return. For example, one of the potentially very important outcomes that the impact assessment looks at is how many people are refused as a result of the changes, but never actually removed from the country. I think most people would qualify that as an undesirable outcome in the sense that you have people who are still in the UK. and there may be costs associated with them. If they are destitute, the local authority will have to support them, and it increases the unauthorised population. Using the current statistics, we would never know to what extent that is happening, but in theory it would be possible to track all that stuff using the data.
The other major metric on the impact of the changes to the appeals system would be how the backlog changes over time. Of course, you can then look at the numbers of onward appeals to the extent that that becomes a problem, which I am sure other witnesses here will discuss. It is about having data on people’s journeys through the asylum system and appeals system. How long does it take? What are the metrics on the accuracy of the decisions? How many decisions are overturned? I think all those would be important metrics.
The Chair
Did you want to add something to that, Mr Mehmet?
Alp Mehmet: Forgive me; my hearing is not what it ought to be. I am not listening to cricket or something; I need to ensure that I can hear what you are saying.
Anna Turley
Q
Alp Mehmet: I suppose the principal metric will be the extent to which it has sped up how long it actually takes to deal with someone who arrives, claims asylum, goes through the system and then has a decision made. It will also be the extent to which, having made that decision, appropriate action can then be taken—that is, the person is either removed or permitted to stay.
It is going to take a couple of years, which is another problem I find with the Bill. Here we are again, proposing fresh measures, and however welcome or not they are, the fact is that it will be three years down the road before we know what their impact is. I do not think that matches the urgency the problem requires. If it does indeed discourage people from coming and from making repeat appeals, one after the other, I think that is a metric that can also be used to determine whether or not what was intended is being achieved, but it is going to be at least a couple of years, if not longer, before we know.
Mr Paul Foster (South Ribble) (Lab)
Q
Dr Sumption: If your goal is to reduce unauthorised arrivals, I think most of the measures for which there is evidence that they are effective do not actually require legislation. There is evidence from other countries that physical enforcement—measures like intercepting boats, where it can be done safely—can have a large impact. There is also evidence that a lower grant rate, which the UK already has, will have an impact in reducing the number of people who apply, and that returns agreements—a much larger version of the one in, one out deal with France, for example—would have an impact. Those things are difficult for their own reasons, but none of them would require legislation.
Alp Mehmet: Needless to say, I agree with all that. I start by saying that I believe that the biggest flaw in the Bill is the further opening up of the border, effectively, with the safe and legal routes, which will allow approved organisations, institutions and employers to act as sponsors. That, if it actually works, may attract some of those who would otherwise have crossed in boats or got into the backs of lorries or crossed by other means, but I do not think it will do that. I suspect that if the number of boats coming across slows down, it will not be because of the Bill; none the less, it might have the effect of making fewer people attempt the crossing. You could argue that in itself is a success because it means that fewer people are putting their lives at risk. Nevertheless, opening up in the way that is being proposed, so that universities, employers, non-governmental organisations, and communities can act as sponsors, potentially gives an opportunity to some 120 million people around the world.
Some figures I saw from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees suggested that at the end of 2025 something like 118 million people were displaced globally. Potentially, any one of them can take advantage of this new route the Bill opens up—in effect, anyone who has a friend who can persuade an employer to take them on. Employers go out looking for these people, or universities; presumably somebody will pay for those who are going to be studying there.
My fear is that this will put the Boriswave in the shade. The numbers the measure attracts may become a serious problem, in the same way that those who arrived over the preceding five years became a problem. It is probably too late to do anything about that, but I have a feeling that, three years down the road, we will be talking about legislation to end that process. That is unfortunate, to say the least.
Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
Q
Alp Mehmet: We could start by declaring our intention to come out of the ECHR. Human rights can be dealt with perfectly well by a country like ours without our having to be signed up to the ECHR. We could also pull out of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings. We should announce that the Human Rights Act 1998 will be repealed. All of that would allow us to deal with the sort of people who are, understandably, looking for a better life. I have no problem with that, but are we really saying that anyone and everyone of 118 million will be able to come here?
This may sound relatively minor, but the other thing I would do is put the onus on arrivals—we used to call them passengers in the old days. We should put the onus on the migrants arriving to satisfy the immigration official dealing with them of their bona fides. That is what used to happen. Our courts have pushed us in the opposite direction: we now have to disprove. If we do not have any evidence to back that up, we are effectively saying, “Okay, we can’t prove it otherwise. We don’t know who you are. You haven’t got a passport, but we’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt, because the Home Office can’t provide the evidence to do otherwise.” That is absurd. It is also dangerous.
Those are the things that I would include in the Bill. Perhaps you would expect me to say a lot of that. Look at what the Americans have done. Whatever anyone feels about some politicians in the United States, they have nevertheless been successful in closing the southern border to illegal immigration. We should put in place effective measures to stop those coming across the channel not just in boats, but in other ways. If the French were sensible and serious enough to stop the whole thing, they should volunteer to take the migrants who make their way to us from there, as should the EU. That is not going to happen anytime soon, I suspect. All in all, I am a little disheartened by the Bill, the measures in it and what is likely to happen.
Dr Zubir Ahmed (Glasgow South West) (Lab)
Q
Alp Mehmet: I am not quite sure how you link what is going on at the border and Americans being shot in the street.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Alp Mehmet: Well, I think securing your borders is totally British, frankly. We have been doing it for millennia. We seem to have forgotten that we are a sovereign state and can decide who can enter our country and who cannot. That aside, the Americans have certainly locked the border. Anyone who makes their way into the United States via the southern border is returned. I am not suggesting that we put a massive wall on the south coast and just let them get on with it. However, I believe that detaining people on arrival, dealing with them quickly and returning them to France or wherever they have come from is doing something similar—in other words, stopping people from entering the country illegally.
The Danes have also introduced measures that I do not think we ever will. For example, if people arrive with money or luxury goods, those are confiscated. The Greeks are not admitting to it, but we know from reports that they are pushing boats back to Turkey. If we were to do all those things, I have no doubt that we would stop the boats coming over. The only reason the people arriving on them increased from 299 in 2018 to 41,000 last year and 18,000 so far this year—which is still massive, frankly—with over 210,000 arriving since 2018, is that they can and that, having arrived here, they get to stay. That is what we have to address, and that is what the Bill does not address.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Alp Mehmet: I am sorry, Dr Ahmed, but that is just not so. I dealt with the European Union and worked in it many years ago before I retired, and I also monitored the exchanges on the Dublin agreement and the various incarnations of it: it did not work. Very few people went in either direction, and it took aeons—months and months—to arrange everything. It was no deterrent.
The Chair
Order. I am sorry, but that brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask this panel questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank the witnesses for their evidence.
Examination of Witness
Tony Smith CBE gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear from Tony Smith CBE, the managing director of Fortinus Global Limited. We have until 2.45 pm for this panel. Could the witness briefly introduce himself for the record?
Tony Smith: Good afternoon. My name is Tony Smith. I am a former director general of the UK Border Force, and I am now an independent border security and border management consultant. Thank you for inviting me.
Matt Vickers
Q
Tony Smith: I served in the Home Office from 1972 until 2013, at all levels, from immigration officer up to director general, when I retired. I saw lots of pressures on lots of Governments of lots of different colours about the issue of how to stop illegal immigration and remove those who should not be here. So I have a lot of experience there.
Also, a couple of years ago, I went back into the Home Office as a consultant to advise on the implementation of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the setting up of the illegal migration operations command, which gave me experience with the boats issue. Fortunately for me, that was not happening during my service; people were coming in differently, in the backs of lorries or through the common travel area. The boats phenomenon is relatively recent, but I do have some knowledge and experience of it.
In my view, the only way to tackle this is to stop illegal intake—in other words, you need to stop people getting to the UK in the first place. That is what we did with the carriers’ liability legislation. That is also why we put the Border Force in France, and why we stopped people getting on ships or aircraft to come here illegally—I think that one of the reasons smugglers shifted to the beaches is that we cannot do that there. Your first priority ought to be to try to reduce asylum intake wherever you can. The second point is to swiftly remove the people who do make it through into the territory. That will then send a deterrent message to those waiting in France, or wherever it may be, to come over. Those are the two metrics.
On the issue of asylum intake, it is not just about the boats. Last time I checked, asylum intake was between 80,000 and 90,000, which is too high. People are coming with visas. You should be able to stop a lot of that, because they are all fingerprinted when they are given a visa and when they claim asylum. When I was in post, on a Monday morning, we would have a read of who had got visas and was now claiming asylum. The post would then be challenged and asked, “Why are you issuing visas to people who are then coming for asylum?”
There are lots of things in all that, but basically the answer to your question is that you have to try to reduce the intake overseas as best you can and, when people do make it here, get that removals rate up.
Matt Vickers
Q
Tony Smith: It is more what it does not do, which is exclude people coming from safe third countries, such as France, from claiming protection. That was the intention of the Illegal Migration Act. There is also provision in the 2002 legislation where someone has come from a safe country and, under article 31 of the convention relating to the status of refugees, they are not in immediate fear of persecution. We interpreted that as saying, “If you come from France on a small boat, you could have claimed asylum there—you did not have to—ergo you will not be granted asylum in this country.” The previous Government relied on that for the Rwanda plan, and this Government rely on it for the one in, one out scheme. There is now provision to exclude people from claiming asylum if they come via that route. There is no provision to exclude them from claiming protection under human rights or modern slavery.
There are some things in the Bill that I applaud. There are attempts to tighten up on article 8 of the ECHR to stop some claims under human rights and under modern slavery provisions as well, which is to be applauded. But while you continue to run a system where somebody simply needs to get within the 12-mile zone and then make a claim for protection, and you bring them ashore and process that claim in the UK, I am afraid that that is always going to send a message back, particularly to the high-intake nationalities we are talking about, from Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia and Iran, that all you need to do is get within the 12-mile zone and claim protection, and it is very unlikely—only about 4% have ever been removed—that you will be removed. I am afraid that that still creates a factor for migrants who are unsettled in the Schengen zone, who do not want to stay in France and who are determined to come here. It also still fuels the smugglers’ business model—there is profit in this; this is international organised crime—and they will continue to exploit that market.
Anna Turley
Q
Tony Smith: The Bill is really about the asylum process, rather than law enforcement. I think the Bill last year was more about the law enforcement; this is about the asylum process. There are some good things in here. As I say, I applaud the article 8 reforms, because article 8 is often used as a lever quite late in the process. After someone has been here for quite a while and has been through the process, you suddenly get an article 8 claim because they have developed a connection in the UK. So I think that that reform is right and will help to reduce the pull factor.
I like the idea of the tighter protection arrangements—the 30 months at a time. My only counsel against that is that the Home Office, in my experience, tends to automatically grant and grant and grant, because it is a lot easier than refusing, and that might just become an automatic turnover of grants for however long you allow people to stay.
I think you ought to look at who is going home. If people go back to their own country on holiday when they have a claim for refugee status, we can establish that. We have the passenger information and can cross-match that to their asylum records. If people go back to their own country once they have been given some kind of protection status here, they should not be allowed back in, because they are clearly not in fear of persecution.
The faster appeals process is absolutely essential. The problem with the appeals process is that it went over to the Ministry of Justice years ago, when the Home Office and MOJ were split up. The MOJ does not seem to have been really bothered about it—it has other things on its plate. The backlog is over a year now, so you have to try and get a grip of that. I do not know how you get that in the Home Office and how you persuade them, but I think it is a good idea. You really have to get that end-to-end process going right.
I like the idea of recouping public funds from people, a bit like in the student loan scheme. If people have come here and been a draw on public funds, and they then get into the workplace, why would you not claw back some of that money into the public purse?
I think that all those things might reduce pull factors. They are really good reforms. I am not saying they are not good measures; what I am saying is that, in my opinion, they are not good enough to stop the boats.
Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)
Q
Tony Smith: The Border Force will enact whatever its operational instructions are, and its operational instructions are drawn from legislation, powers and authorities, so it does not matter how many boats you have out there in the channel. Currently, if someone comes within the 12-mile zone, under the law of the sea you are obliged—quite rightly, because saving lives is paramount—to bring them on board your vessel. The problem is that once they are within the jurisdiction, they accrue all of these rights to asylum applications, ECHR and modern slavery applications. I do not think it is a question of resource. I am a bit worried about resources, given what we saw in Portsmouth last week, because I do not think we have the bandwidth to cover the entire coastline any more. We have been focusing what resources we have on the short straits. Clearly, the smugglers are moving along the coast, so we need to be adaptable to be able to deal with that.
They would always take more resources if they were on offer, but for me it is more about how you get the people coming off the boats properly screened, not cleared within 24 or 48 hours—that is not long enough. Whatever your views on immigration, you have to properly and thoroughly screen people. A passport tells a story—it will tell you all sorts of things. We do not know their dates of birth or their nationalities; the biometric checks are pretty useless. All I am saying is that I think we need to be detaining people for at least longer than 24 hours at Manston if we are going to reduce the risk in any case.
The Chair
I remind Members to stay within the scope of the Bill. The resources of Border Force are not really within the scope of the Bill.
Joe Robertson
Thank you, Ms Jardine. I have taken the opportunity while the ex-director general of Border Force is in front of us. The wider point made by the Government is that the Bill has a deterrent effect, but there have been crossings without any Border Force personnel or boats being in the vicinity. A lifesaving charity, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, is being relied on to provide a quasi-policing collection service. How does the Bill help with any of that?
Joe Robertson
I am just asking whether the Bill could help with any of that, given that the witness in front of us notes on his CV, in the formal papers, that he used to be in charge of Border Force.
The Chair
I appreciate that, but could you please keep your questions within the scope of the Bill, rather than asking about the resources of Border Force?
Joe Robertson
Q
Tony Smith: Yes, I agree with you.
The Chair
Order. If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witness for his evidence, and we will move on to the next panel.
Examination of Witness
Guy Dampier gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear from Guy Dampier, who will be joining via Zoom. We have until 3 pm for this panel. Can the witness please briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Guy Dampier: Hello, I am Guy Dampier. I am the senior researcher on nationhood at the Prosperity Institute.
Matt Vickers
Q
Guy Dampier: The fundamental issue that we face, as we do in this entire crisis, is human rights legislation—whether international or domestic. It means that we have the extremely lengthy process of going through the asylum claim. It makes it very difficult to establish some of the facts and very difficult to remove people, even in cases where we have refused to grant them asylum.
Tony Smith mentioned earlier that something like 4% of all small-boat migrants who have come since 2018 have been removed. Of those, the largest number have been Albanians because we essentially had a way to send them home without breaching human rights. That is unfortunately not true for the vast majority of other nationalities coming here. Until that human rights issue is tackled, the rate of returns will always be relatively low.
Matt Vickers
Q
Guy Dampier: That is a very difficult one, because one of the big problems that the Bill does not tackle is the fact that an increased number of people are coming legally and then claiming asylum. Since 2019, I think, the number of those coming on the study route has gone up by four times and the number of those coming on the work route has gone up by 22 times. A lot of people are abusing the legal way of getting into the country and then claiming asylum, often suspiciously close to the end of their visa. Nothing in the Bill would really tackle that; that area is really missing.
Anna Turley
Q
Guy Dampier: On the strung-out appeals, the new immigration appeal authority is supposed to help tackle that. The difficulty there, which will touch on article 8, is that potentially the people being used will not be fully legally trained as adjudicators. There are examples of countries that have such a system, including Denmark, Canada and, I think, Norway, but all those have relatively high bars for people to become adjudicators—and in a lot of cases, I think that they end up being lawyers anyway.
The Australians had a similar system. I believe that they cancelled it precisely because the paperwork was being done so badly that they had to redo things or the wrong decisions were being made. Although bad decisions are being made now, the new authority could potentially lead to worse decisions, depending on the quality of the people who come in. We cannot know that quality, but at the moment the lack of qualifications in the legislation is a potential danger.
On article 8, we are seeing restrictions and a narrowing down of things, which is good and will reduce the number of people able to use it. But that will apply only to a minority of cases—even when we are dealing with people who have come here illegally. The majority of people claiming under article 8 now will not be affected. I believe that the Home Office estimates that something like 50% of those who will be refused if this legislation passes will remain in the country illegally; obviously, that is something of a problem.
The Chair
If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witness for his evidence and we will move on to the next panel.
Examination of Witness
Angela Afzal gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Angela Afzal: Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting the International Rescue Committee and myself to give evidence. I am a policy manager at the IRC, which is a global humanitarian organisation. We support people affected by conflict and crisis from the moment they are displaced until the rebuilding of their lives in safety. In the UK, we deliver integration services.
Matt Vickers
Q
Angela Afzal: We would say that we do not want people to be making dangerous journeys in order to receive refugee protection. That is why we advocate for a range of different safe routes: so that refugees have an option that does not involve risking their lives to get to the UK. We acknowledge, however, that at the moment, other than the one in, one out scheme, there is not an alternative for people to claim asylum from outside UK territory. If people claim asylum having made an irregular journey, gone through the asylum process and gained refugee protection, the entitlements they have should not be dependent on the method by which they entered the UK.
Matt Vickers
Q
Angela Afzal: To reduce small boat crossings, there will be a range of interventions. Our position would be that the safe routes need to be part of that, because if refugees do not have an alternative, they will use people smugglers. Under the Biden Administration in the US, for example, there was a mixture of a change of internal policy on the border and an extensive offer of safe routes for people. The evidence showed that when there was an alternative, people chose it, and it reduced irregular arrivals significantly.
Anna Turley
Q
Angela Afzal: Sorry; I did not catch the second part of your question.
Anna Turley
Do you think it is fair for people to be able to circumvent an international rules-based framework by going through a safe country already before coming to claim asylum in the UK, or do you think that should have no effect at all on their asylum claim here?
Angela Afzal: We have to acknowledge that the majority of refugees claim asylum and receive protection in countries neighbouring where they had to flee. Secondly, we need to acknowledge that the UK is about 14th in the ranking of EU-plus countries in how many asylum applications we have per capita—we are quite far down the list.
The nature of our geography means that people need to be able to cross the channel in some way to reach the UK for protection. At the moment, there are not significant safe routes for people to get to the UK; we are talking about hundreds of them at the moment. In the absence of safe routes for people to get here, people who arrive here and have their claims processed should be granted the full entitlement to refugee status, so that the UK plays its part according to the obligations of the UN refugee convention.
Ideally, we would want people to have the opportunity to travel here on a safe route from the region of displacement, so that they would not have to make the dangerous journeys to Europe in the first place. As things are at the moment, there is little alternative.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Angela Afzal: We welcome the safe routes that the Home Secretary has recently announced. We think that they are a positive development. There has been a wide consultation with communities and stakeholders, and the approach has allowed communities to offer consent for the refugees who come to them. There can be planning for people arriving so that services are ready. Our experience shows that that is when you get good refugee integration and good social cohesion.
We welcome the offer of complementary safe routes, so that people who want to come here to study and work, but are not able to access the usual immigration rules—
Blake Stephenson
Q
Angela Afzal: I am starting by saying that we welcome the three new safe routes; that development has gone alongside this. Our main concern with the Bill is clause 21 and the impact on refugee integration. Ultimately, we would like to see safe routes so that people can arrive here from regions and do not have to travel to Europe—
Blake Stephenson
Q
Angela Afzal: The opportunity of having safe routes means that the Government can control the numbers and where people come from. That would provide a controlled route. The Government would know where people are coming from and who they are, and could control the numbers. That is why we would advocate that.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Angela Afzal: Our focus in the Bill is the impact of the core protection framework, which is in clause 21.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Angela Afzal: Clause 21 seeks to introduce the core protection framework. Our concern is that the clause gives the Home Office very broad powers to introduce changes of entitlements for refugees.
The core protection framework, set out in the “Restoring Order and Control” statement last year, indicates that there is an intention to reduce entitlements for refugees. Our concern is that the core protection framework would have a detrimental impact on refugee integration, rather than deterring people from arriving.
I can explain in more detail why we feel that the temporary protection, removing the right to family reunion and having the work and study pathway would impact refugee integration from our experience of delivering integration in the UK.
Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)
Q
Angela Afzal: The core protection framework sets out that refugees would not be granted family reunion as a protection right. Our experience is that the family framework is the best basis for a refugee to integrate. It is the best support network that there can be. Our experience is that refugees have a much better integration outcome when they have their families with them.
For example, family reunion has been suspended since September last year. For a whole year, many clients have not been able to reunite with their families or apply for that, and that has really impacted their ability to focus on accessing language and employment. They are deeply concerned about their families—often a spouse and young children in places of danger. We are concerned that that could cause those families to resort to smugglers to reunite, when they do not see another option.
The proposal is that people would get family reunion on transitioning to a work and study pathway. We have questions about the eligibility criteria for that and the support that there will be for refugees so that they can access the pathway, given that it gives them those entitlements. To what extent will people be able to access family reunion through that pathway? Those are our main concerns.
The Chair
If there are no further questions, I thank the witness for her evidence and we will move on to the next panel.
Examination of witnesses
Jacqui McKenzie and Professor Sarah Singer gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: Good afternoon. I am Jacqueline McKenzie, a partner at Leigh Day solicitors, where I am head of the Windrush immigration and asylum team. I have been working in the immigration and asylum jurisdiction for 20 years as a lawyer, and for 20 years before that in local government.
Professor Singer: Hello, everyone, I am Professor Sarah Singer. I am a professor of refugee law at the Refugee Law Initiative at the University of London. I run our masters programme in refugee protection and forced migration studies and I am also joint editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Refugee Law, which is the leading academic publication in the refugee law field.
Matt Vickers
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: Sorry, I cannot actually hear the question.
Professor Singer: Which aspects of the Bill do you anticipate would lead to the greatest number of litigation cases?
Jacqui McKenzie: It is difficult to say, but one of our major concerns—this is purely as a practitioner, not a researcher—is about the removal of the current tribunal system and the establishment of the independent immigration appeals mechanism. We think there is considerable risk there, for a number of reasons.
The first reason relates to the separation of powers, and it is one that the Committee should be very concerned about. The whole point of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 was that it was a constitutional device set up by Parliament to have a separation of powers. However, what we will see instead is a system where the Home Secretary appoints the chair and the chief executive officer of this new authority, and that person in turn will appoint the adjudicators, which gives rise to some concern. We are very concerned about whether there is scope to challenge that. The whole idea of the tribunal system is that we have highly trained judges with lots of experience presiding over it. However, it is not clear, and there may not be a problem, because we do not know where the adjudicators are going to come from. Our major concern at the moment is their independence.
I just want to add that the whole of this is predicated on there being a backlog in the system, but it is not clear that just changing from one system to another will really address that. We saw the Home Office bring in large numbers of people to try to fast-track immigration decisions, but what we saw with those decisions was a number of errors, which have now caused problems in the immigrations appellate system. We do not envisage that that is going to change. In my practice, for instance, we regularly see decisions going into the appellate system that should not be there in the first place. The evidence of that is the fact that the tribunals are now awarding costs against the Home Office, and we had two cases recently where it was clear that the Home Office had failed to follow directions on the need to review the whole case or assess the evidence before it; it just failed to do that. If you are going to replace one system with another, but you still have very poor decision making in the first instance, you are not really going to clear the backlog.
I could go on forever, but just recently I accidentally sat in on the wrong hearing at a tribunal. I was only meant to be an observer; a younger member of my team was doing a hearing, and I thought I would like to observe it. I was sent the wrong link by the tribunal, and it took me about half an hour before I suddenly realised that I was on the wrong link—I thought this other matter was just being heard first, and mine was going to follow. I sat through half an hour, and it was a man from Iraq with no representation and no bundle. The interpreter did not really understand him, and it was a waste of time. It took about 30 minutes for the immigration judge to say, “We have to abandon this.”
That brings me to the fact that the other cause of the backlog is the large number of people who are not represented, and that is partly because of the problems in the legal aid system. I know we have recently had an increase, but if we want to get rid of the backlog, we are going to have to address the larger numbers of people coming into the system with no representation at all because they cannot find a lawyer. Most legal aid lawyers cannot make this work on the rates, so they are giving up. My own practice is currently considering giving up legal aid work, and we are one of the few that is still around doing it.
You are going to have people coming into the tribunal system requiring adjournments, and the tribunal system will have to deal with not only that, but very poor decision making coming from the Home Office. I have other concerns about the Bill, but that is my biggest concern. The thing I am exercised about at the moment is whether there is a way of legally challenging this, but I do not know yet.
Matt Vickers
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: We are worried about the provisions in the Bill around article 8, particularly as they relate to the best interests of children and the redefinition of the family, at a time when we are recognising that families come in all different types and colours—I do not mean colours in terms of race; that is probably not the best word. There is not a straightforward definition of a family. The Bill seeks almost to narrow it down to who lives in the house and who does not. That is the sort of language we are getting from the Home Office in trying to describe what it means, because we do not know yet. All we have is a template of an idea.
We have section 55 on the best interests of the child, which most of us base our work on. That enables families using article 8 to remain together in the country. In the impact assessment accompanying the Bill, I saw that fewer than 12,000 families were likely to be refused. We are going for such a draconian measure to deal with a very small number of people. It almost reminds me of Rwanda again. We spent £700 million and we got four volunteers out. Even if we had got some people out through enforcement, it would have been a very small number.
I cannot quite understand why we are targeting families. A lot of those families are actually the third and fourth generation of people who settled here and then brought over their children. In Windrush families, south Asian families and west African families, we have this concept of leaving children behind. The first came when they were over the age of 18, and now large numbers of their children are the ones caught up in the system and using article 8 to remain. Those are the sorts of people we would be targeting. This is their home. They are settled here. The numbers are small. It is not yet clear to me why we need to be doing this.
Anna Turley
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: I think I might have confused the point. There are two separate things. The point I was making about the man from Iraq was about the lack of representation. That lack of representation, and people coming unprepared to do their appeals, causes judges’ time and the entire tribunal’s time to be wasted. That goes out of the system and it comes back in. The poor decision making is a separate thing. I do not know whether the refusal of that man, which brought him into the appellate system, was a good decision or not. We did not get round to that bit, but we see considerable poor decision making.
I work quite a lot with the Windrush community. We keep seeing in the news, “They’re waiting for the Windrush generation to die.” I do not think that is true at all—I do not think the Home Office is that sinister—but we are seeing very straightforward cases taking two or three years to come to conclusion. The whole reason for that is the poor decision making. You get cases where the first decision is a zero, and then it goes up to six figures after two or three reviews. We are dealing with an elderly cohort, and these reviews go on for years and retraumatise the victims.
I see the same sort of thing across my practice: poor decision making on a number of things, including human rights applications and asylum claims. I do not know how, unless things are improved in the first instance, we will reduce the backlog in either the existing tribunal system or the new appellate authority.
Professor Singer: Just to clarify, that is bad quality initial Home Office decision making, as opposed to adjudicator decisions.
Jacqui McKenzie: Home Office decisions, yes, absolutely.
Anna Turley
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: We have that; we have a review mechanism. The Home Office is meant to review; once you load something up on the tribunal portal, the Home Office is meant to review the decision. That is why we are getting costs in these cases, which is almost unheard of. I have been doing this work as a lawyer for 18 years—it is two years for training—and I have never seen anything like it. We are getting costs in these cases because of the poor decision making at the Home Office, even when there is a built-in review mechanism. A formal part of the process is that things go back to the Home Office for it to review.
Professor Singer: I would add that if the problem this new mechanism is seeking to address is the lack of sufficient capacity among decision makers, the way that that could be most expediently addressed is simply by expanding the eligibility criteria for the existing tribunal system, to increase the pool of decision makers, rather than by having to staff an entirely new body, which the impact assessment itself says would be incredibly challenging.
Joe Robertson
Q
“No weight should be given to a private or family life”,
rather than that those issues should be “disregarded”, which I think is the normal phrase you would find in law, rather than “no weight”—it is hard to understand what “no weight” means. Also, the ouster provision in clause 1(8) seeking to try to oust the jurisdiction of the court in certain circumstances is drafted in a very loose way, when we know from case law that courts want very specific ousters if they are going to accept them. Does that not run the risk that this entire Bill is actually going to increase litigation just so that the courts can try to define and understand what some of this novel and peculiar wording actually means?
Professor Singer: I have to say that I have questions about the drafting of the Bill in its entirety. I do not think that the Committee can appropriately scrutinise the Bill, because there is a significant lack of detail in so many of the provisions, in addition to very odd drafting. With due respect, a lot of it is back-of-the-envelope-type stuff, which has clearly been rushed through the legislative drafting process.
For example, in the previous panel, I heard the Committee questioning the clause on the introduction of a core protection status. The clause does not actually set out the eligibility or content, in terms of what a core protection status is; it gives the Secretary of State significant powers to make regulations in respect of what eligibility for a protection status would be and what the content of that status would be.
Similarly, in the provision on asylum support, we do not have any details about the actual operation or functioning of that system. The provision gives the Secretary of State power to make regulations in respect of this scheme. In relation to the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority, we do not have the rules of procedure to scrutinise, to be able to ascertain whether there will be due process, which will be appropriately followed, and fairness.
I agree with you that there are strange inconsistencies in the drafting, but, additionally, I think the whole content of the Bill is quite lacking in many respects.
Mr Foster
Q
Professor Singer: There are a lot of much more financially effective ways to address the backlog. As was already intimated, a lot of the current tribunal backlog is caused by the fact that initial decision making was paused for a significant amount of time when the Rwanda scheme was being pursued. Once that was opened, there was a huge investment in making a large number of initial decisions on a very quick basis. That was roundly criticised on a number of counts as leading to speed over quality. A number of very poor-quality decisions then went through to the appeal system, leading to the backlog at the initial tribunal system.
That can be addressed by not having inconsistencies in the rate of initial decision making in the first place; improving the quality of initial decision making within the Home Office, hopefully leading to fewer appeals; making sure that there is legal aid provision for those who are entitled to it, so that they are not wasting time in the tribunal system; and ensuring that the Home Office uses its review mechanism appropriately. I am sure my colleague can speak to this at much more length than I can, but at the moment initial rejection decisions tend to include a large number of copy-and-paste grounds for refusal. When it gets to tribunal, the decision maker has to go through every single one of those grounds, which is incredibly lengthy. If a Home Office official reviewed that in advance and conceded the grounds that were not arguable, it would speed up the decision-making process within the tribunal system.
As I have already intimated, if there really is concern that there are not enough sitting judges in the first-tier tribunal, there is provision to expand the eligibility criteria within the initial system. Surely that would be a much more effective and speedy way to address the backlog than creating a whole new body and system, with its own mechanisms and staffing requirements. Although the stated intention of creating this new body is to address the asylum backlog, in reality, as we can see from the terms of the Bill, the true intention is to give the Home Secretary much more control over the operation of the tribunal system than she currently has.
Jacqui McKenzie: I will just add, in defence of lawyers, that we see stories every now and again of a dodgy practitioner here and there, but the vast majority of lawyers are helping. I have a small team of immigration and asylum lawyers. We do about 20 appeals a year, and 18 or 19 are won in the tribunal. None of them should have been anywhere near the tribunal. We work to a very high standard of putting in the evidence—the subjective evidence, the objective evidence, expert evidence, all that sort of thing. We do not take cases where we do not think there is a case. We are not bucking the system in any way. It is so frustrating to see those cases get refused by the Home Office, when they ought not to be. There is then the period of scrutiny called the review, and they get rejected there again. Then people spend another year or two in the asylum system before their appeals are ultimately allowed.
Lawyers are actually helping. They are trying to work with the Home Office. There is the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, which works with the Home Office. There are Windrush groups that work with the Home Office. I have been part of it. I worked with former Home Secretaries Sajid Javid and Priti Patel on trying to get things right. It is wrong to blame lawyers. We are doing our job, a job we train for many years to do, and we are trying to help the system. But it is a fact that poor decision making and structural problems around legal aid, which mean that we do not have enough practitioners, or enough high-quality practitioners, are causing a backlog.
Mr Foster
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: I do not know that the Bill does that. That is the point I am making. I think Professor Singer is making the same point, and others are also making it: the networks, the immigration organisations and associations, a lot of academics, immigration judges and a lot of people up and down the country in organisations representing children and representing refugees. There is no end of evidence of people saying it is not going to achieve that.
I accept that there is an issue: even if the Home Office was to get every application right—and that will never be possible, because nobody gets everything right—there are still large numbers of people in a system that is not designed well. It needs to be better designed. The Home Office probably needs more resources. When I sat on the Windrush lessons learned review independent advisory group, one thing that came out—you are hearing evidence from Daniel Hobbs later—was that the Home Office is a large organisation that is very unwieldy. It deals with the nice things, such as granting visas and so on, but also with law and order and so forth. Maybe it needs breaking up. Maybe it needs more resources.
Overall, my view, and you may not agree with me, is that the UK gets very few people coming here, and certainly very few people coming in small boats. It gets very few people coming as asylum seekers. One of the witnesses earlier talked about 118 million people being displaced, but we have the data—I do not need to keep repeating it, but we see that very poor countries have the burden of asylum seekers and refugees. There are 1 million Rohingyas in Bangladesh and 2 million Venezuelans in Colombia. A small Caribbean island next door to an island where my parents were from, which has a population of just over 1 million, has 200,000 refugees in it. We really do not get that many people coming here, either through legal routes or in small boats. Because those numbers are static—in fact, they are declining—we need to resource the Home Office properly with more skilled or highly skilled people. I am not having a go at the people who are there, but something is very wrong there. That is what is causing the major problems that we see at the higher levels, such as the appellate courts.
Professor Singer: Even aside from questions surrounding the number of arrivals that we have, setting up an entirely new body would be a huge waste of public resources. The Home Office’s own impact assessment for the Bill states:
“The set up of the IIAA will require the recruitment and/or redeployment of an executive board, adjudicators, and supporting staff. This represents a significant operational undertaking and is expected to incur substantial recruitment and onboarding costs.”
It then states that the recruitment will be
“challenging and may not be achievable, increasing the likelihood of operational pressure and higher than expected costs.”
There is the additional factor of transitioning the first-tier tribunal judges over to the new board and/or the financial costs of the obligations that are owed to judges if they are retired. It is a huge waste of public resources to set up an entirely new board. Those resources would be much better spent on properly staffing and resourcing the Home Office and the first-tier tribunal system that we currently have. There is a lot that can be done within the structure of the existing system to make it better. That would be a much more effective use of public funds.
Siân Berry
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: That first instance that you are talking about is asylum claims, where people go in themselves, claim asylum and they have a screening interview and a longer, more elaborate and substantive interview and then lawyers tend to get involved in putting together all the evidence that is available to support the claim— [Interruption.] Sorry—there is an awful fly. It has kind of made me lose my thoughts. The other day I was here it was a mouse; now it is a fly. What is going on in this building?
The issue is about training. Very rudimentary errors that you see—the wrong country, the wrong gender and the wrong names of people—are partly to do with what Professor Singer picked up on: very often, it is a cut-and-paste approach. I almost know the decisions off by heart, because you see the same paragraphs. When you have been doing it for as long as I have, you know what you are going to get.
I am not casting any aspersions on people who are probably working very hard in their jobs, probably not for the best of pay, but I suppose there are some perks—it is a career and there is a pension at the end of it and all that sort of thing. It is difficult. I understand that they have targets; somebody in the criminal casework department told me they even had a star sheet on the wall, and each time they got someone deported, they got a little star. I do not know what sort of place that is, but I think it needs more people—it needs expansion—and better training. I do not think the numbers of people who are coming through the system are going to increase exponentially—in fact, we are seeing a decrease.
Siân Berry
Q
Professor Singer: I will defer to my colleague on that front, if that is okay.
Jacqui McKenzie: What more could be done to improve—
Siân Berry
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: It does not. I do not know whether that is a target in the Home Office—I do not know how the internal operations work—but it seems to me that the Home Office want everything to go through the tribunal. They refuse almost everything that they can, and then it goes through the tribunal, and there is the review mechanism, which they ignore. Even when they are directed to do things like reviewing the evidence or reviewing the decision, they do not do it. This is mainly in deport cases, which I suppose are difficult in terms of how they play out in the public and so forth, but even when you win a case in the tribunal that has been allowed on very strong grounds and very strong evidence, they appeal again to the upper tribunal. Sometimes, these things are in the system for three or four years, so it does need a root-and-branch change in how it all works.
Siân Berry
Can I ask one final question, Ms Jardine? Are there more Members waiting?
Siân Berry
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: Maybe for the future, because I totally accept Professor Singer’s point: one of the issues about the new authority—I keep getting its name wrong, because it has changed its name three times—is that it is going to be expensive and unwieldy. For much less money, we could probably make the current system work. I know that these are difficult times for the country with budgets and so forth, so I do not necessarily want to propose something that is going to be very expensive. However, in the long term, the bit of the Home Office that makes these sorts of decisions probably needs to be a separate entity.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: Sorry, can you just repeat the first part of the question?
Dr Ahmed
I think it was either yourself or Professor Singer—
Jacqui McKenzie: Oh, the numbers—sorry. The number that I referred to as being small is the number of cases that the Home Office say will be refused under this new system, which I think is 11,700.
Professor Singer: It is 11,700, and the Home Office impact assessment estimates that 55% of those will, in any case, remain in the UK, because it is not possible to remove them back to their home country due to legal or logistical challenges. It is anticipated to have quite minimal impact in practice, so it is quite a significant legislative change to make for quite a limited impact overall.
Most of the public attention is focused on the issue of foreign criminals, for example, but the House of Commons Library briefing for the Bill indicates that, at present, only 3% of foreign criminal appeals are allowed on a human rights basis, whether under article 8 or otherwise. Again, the impact is quite minimal. The most significant impact that the changes to article 8 will have is on children and families. We will see more children without their parents and more separated families, and I think in quite unconscionable ways that will actually be quite upsetting for the public.
For me, setting out an interpretation of article 8 in domestic legislation does not change the meaning of article 8 as a matter of international law, and it does not change what the UK’s obligations are. Decisions are either in line with the UK’s obligations, in which case the legislation is not necessary, because the courts are already doing article 8 determinations themselves and doing their own balancing exercise on the basis of the existing legislation that we have, or they are more restrictive than the UK’s current legislation, which puts the UK at risk of not complying with its obligations under the European convention on human rights and the convention on the rights of the child.
Jacqui McKenzie: I agree with that. I think you are aware that the figure I referred to as being small was not the overall 77,000. What we think of the 77,000 is another matter; some of us might say even that is not a huge number of people, especially when we look at how long some of those families have been settled in the UK, and the reasons why some of them are still in the immigration system, when their parents and grandparents may well have been settled. It is this point about redefining what a family is and breaking families up that concerns me more than anything.
Ben Goldsborough (South Norfolk) (Lab)
Q
However, one of the issues that both of you have raised is backlogs, which we have seen increase under the Rwanda scheme and others. One of the concerns that many people have, especially my South Norfolk constituents, will be that the courts simply do not have the ability to keep up with the amount of casework coming to them. That is because we have a system that does not have enough clarity, especially on article 8. The Bill obviously has a goal and ambition to give clarity to the courts on that issue. Is that something to be welcomed?
Jacqui McKenzie: Possibly, but you are conflating some issues. The numbers for Rwanda are tiny, as most of the people who were carded for Rwanda have been granted asylum, so are not in the backlog at all. Article 8 will not really affect those sorts of people; it will affect families, and children, many of them born in the UK—as you know, under the British Nationality Act 1981, since 1 January 1983, you do not automatically become British by being born here.
There are people here in this country without any status whose families go back decades, for example families from the Commonwealth territories. That has happened for all sorts of odd reasons, usually because parents left children behind and brought them to the UK when they were over 18, so they had no status, and they then had children who have no status. In my practice, and those of many of the people in my jurisdiction who I have networked with, those are the sorts of cases we use article 8 for, and for which we see article 8 being successful. I do not think that anybody would want to see those families being removed from the UK.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: The Bill does not do that, though. If that is what you want to see happen, the Bill will not do that. Instead, we have this popular culture, mainly perpetuated through the media, around article 8. Every now and again, you get a story about somebody and their cat, or somebody who did not like chicken nuggets in Albania. First, those are very minor cases, and secondly, they are never the whole story. That is usually just one feature of a number of grounds on which someone has been granted leave to remain under article 8, but that is the one that the journalist sat in the back of the court decides to write about. Because that is happening, the public have a concept of article 8, but they do not understand it. It is our job, and the job of parliamentarians, to try to educate them.
Professor Singer: We already have quite a detailed domestic legislative framework around article 8, introduced in the Immigration Act 2014. That is very detailed and sets out in statute the different factors the courts should take into account. This Bill adds further complexity to that, and in many senses is more restrictive on interpretation. It does not add any clarity, as such. As I mentioned, according to the Home Office’s impact assessment, the impacts are expected to be minimal.
Mr Foster
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: I have not heard the Strasbourg courts say that; I have no idea why they would be saying that.
Professor Singer: I have not heard that either.
Mr Foster
It was mentioned in the Committee’s evidence session this morning.
Professor Singer: You can look at the most recent decisions from the Court of Appeal; for example, the decision on IA and others v. Secretary of State for the Home Department a few months ago was a very restrictive interpretation of article 8 being applied to deny those appellants the right to family life. I do not see the courts taking a particularly liberal approach to article 8. As I mentioned, we already have a domestic framework in place.
Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: What I am referring to are those decisions that are badly made that end up in the appellant system. Those are the ones that I see and that go on, after two or three years, to be allowed, and the person gets to remain in the UK.
Those are not the initiatives where people coming from particular countries have been granted asylum, and there has been a whole discussion on whether that is due process or not. Generally speaking, of the appeals that we see in my practice—my practice is limited; I am not sitting here trying to extrapolate across the jurisdiction—the vast majority, if not nearly all of them, could have had a different decision in the first instance, and did not need to go into the system. Of course, if people’s lives are dependent on them fleeing persecution or maintaining their family ties in the UK and they get a negative decision, they are going to appeal. That is just the way things are.
Mr Brash
Q
Jacqui McKenzie: Then there would not be appeals. If there was better decision making, there would be far fewer appeals. What I am saying to you is that from my practice, most of what I deal with as appeals should not be appeals.
Professor Singer: In the asylum system at the moment, 66% of cases are either accepted on appeal or they are withdrawn—the implication being that the Home Office had withdrawn that case. That is 66% of asylum appeals that could be effectively wiped out if the initial decision was better made.
The fact that initial decisions by the Home Office are bad is a fact—you can look at the National Audit Office review of Home Office decision making or the Home Office’s own assessment of the quality of its decisions. That is a fact. If you have a better standard of initial decision making and, in effect, fewer refusals where there should not have been refusals, those cases will not go on to appeal, so there will be fewer appeals.
There are going to be appeals anyway; there are always going to be appeals, so we want to have the most efficient and effective system that we can, while making sure that it is fair and follows due process standards that have to be applied when you are making very serious decisions, such as potentially removing people to somewhere where they will be at risk of very serious harm or their life will be threatened. You need to have due process in that place, so what is the best way we can do that?
Is it by establishing an entirely new body that is going to need to be staffed and resourced and will need to work out what its rules of procedure are—we do not know what they are; we have no idea how it is going to be—using decision makers who are not legally qualified to decide decisions on some of the most complex areas of domestic law that we have? Do we really think that that is going to speed up decision making?
The Chair
This will have to be a very brief last question, because we are just about out of time for this panel.
Mr Brash
Q
Professor Singer: No, my solution is that the Home Office not reject cases that should not be rejected, plus better resourcing the Home Office in order to do that, and better resourcing and making adjustments in our initial tribunal system, rather than handing the whole process to a Home Secretary-governed independent body that is not independent of the Home Office, despite its name.
Could I finish on one final note that I wanted to make sure that I got across to the Committee? As I mentioned, there are provisions in the Bill relating to a new core protection status and also around asylum support. I do not feel the Committee can scrutinise that without having the regulations that the Secretary of State plans to adopt before it. My recommendation is that the Secretary of State should be forced to publish those regulations before the Committee can make its determination on those areas.
The Chair
Thank you. That brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank the witnesses for their evidence.
Examination of Witness
Dr Martin Buttle gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Dr Buttle: I am Martin Buttle, Better Work lead at CCLA Investment Management. We are a £15 billion asset manager investing for churches, charities and local authorities. Those clients care very deeply about modern slavery. They give us a mandate to invest responsibly. We have been managing a coalition of 60 investors with trillions in assets under management and asking companies to find, fix and prevent modern slavery. We also benchmark the top 100 UK listed companies—for all intents and purposes, the FTSE 100 and the top 100 companies globally—on what they do to address modern slavery.
There is undeniably a strong moral case for tackling modern slavery. Beyond the moral case, businesses that fail to undertake sufficient human rights due diligence open themselves up to operational, supply chain, reputational, legal and financial risks. As long-term investors, we are concerned that those can compound over the long term and can affect the value of the businesses we invest in. That is why we address modern slavery in our stewardship work. I am here to give evidence on the strengthening of the section 54 provisions in the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
Matt Vickers
Q
Dr Buttle: I think that the provisions as they currently stand ask businesses to report on what they are doing. It has now mandated particular areas, but there is a difference between reporting and performance. There is still an opportunity for companies to just take a tick-box approach, complying with the letter of the Bill and the clauses rather than actually taking action. So there is an opportunity for companies still to not do the human rights due diligence in the way that this Bill is currently drafted.
Matt Vickers
Q
Dr Buttle: At CCLA we have been advocating, in addition to reporting requirements, for a smart mix of legislation that would include a mandatory human rights due diligence Bill and potentially a forced labour ban for the UK.
Matt Vickers
Q
Dr Buttle: As I say, we have been evaluating companies’ modern slavery statements for three or four years now. There is also another investor coalition that we are part of, which is Rathbones’ Votes Against Slavery initiative. That has identified 194 instances of companies in the FTSE 350 not complying with section 54 over the past six years. That is quite widespread and companies are not actually complying. In our benchmarking work, we have identified some of the largest companies in the world that have exposure to modern slavery. They operate in high-risk geographies. They have supply chains that reach into high-risk geographies and they are in sectors that we deem high risk that are not currently complying with section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act. So we do think there is a risk at the moment, and we think that financial penalties would mean there is a risk of not complying with the legislation. On the way that the Bill introduces penalties of £1 million or up to 1% of turnover, that should be sufficient to make businesses consider this more seriously.
Anna Turley
Q
Dr Buttle: I think it will, but the other thing to note is that there has not been very much enforcement by the Home Office of the Modern Slavery Act in the past. In addition to the penalties, we need some enforcement by a body; we would consider that in future that may not be the Home Office, and that the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade might be a better place to enforce this. If there is no enforcement, companies may still consider not complying with the regulations.
The Chair
If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witness for his evidence.
Examination of Witnesses
Neal Barcoe, Daniel Flury and Alison Hewett gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Daniel Flury: I am Daniel Flury, the operations director for HMCTS. I am responsible for the operations of the first-tier tribunal immigration and asylum chamber and the upper tribunal immigration and asylum chamber.
Neal Barcoe: Good afternoon, everyone. I am Neal Barcoe, the director for civil, family, tribunals and the administration of justice in the MOJ. That means I deal with most of the policy on the non-crime courts side of things, so the tribunal space is one of my areas.
Alison Hewett: Good afternoon. My name is Alison Hewett. I am migration and borders director in the Home Office, and I am the senior responsible officer for the operationalisation of the IIAA.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Neal Barcoe: Thank you for that question. It is important to start by recognising that judges and the court system have responded very strongly to the significant increase in demand coming through the system. They have increased capacity and improved productivity, but demand is growing considerably faster. On receipts, back in 2023 we had about 58,000 cases coming into the system. In 2025-26, that was up to 118,000. The outstanding caseload has risen in that same period from about 50,000 to 150,000 cases.
The courts have tried to look at every available option and opportunity to improve productivity in the system. They have increased the number of legal officers in the system by 70%, and have expanded things such as the virtual region to make sure that more cases are being heard on any given day. They have looked at case progression and how you can speed up cases, so that cases are ready for court more quickly. They are looking at all forms of technology to improve productivity and have improved their listing practices, too.
We have sought to grow the judicial workforce as quickly as possible. Since last year, we have seen a net increase of about 21% in the number of judges. We are up to just over 300 now, with 65 fee-paid and 25 salaried judges starting earlier this year, and more recruitment in train.
While we have had that recruitment success, it has demonstrated an upper ceiling and a real challenge to going further and faster. The pool of candidates is relatively constrained: if you want to come in as a fee-paid judge, you need five years post-qualification experience in a relevant field; and, traditionally, if you come in as a salaried judge, you need to have had previous judicial experience, too. Taking on a salaried role also means giving up your practice, so on immigration and asylum matters, we have struggled to go further and as fast as we would like.
The process is not quick—it takes 12 to 18 months to recruit judges—so I think that the proposition for the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority is that, if we are able to recruit trained adjudicators from a broader range of professional backgrounds, it should be possible to increase capacity and add more flexibility, while retaining their legal support, and ensuring that there are proper assurances on quality and that we have the upper-tier oversight. That is the thinking on where we are.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Neal Barcoe: That might be better addressed to MOJ Ministers, but as a civil servant, I do not think that this is a waste of public money. It is vital that we address the cases that are in the system, and that we look at all ways to do that properly while retaining quality. That is what we are trying to do, to manage that process as well as possible, but with 150,000 cases in the system, it is taking much longer than anyone would like for those cases to be disposed. Something that increases capacity in this way—if we can protect the quality—has to be a good thing. It is about being flexible as well, and I think that that is what the new body brings—we can flex that capacity.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Neal Barcoe: Again, as an official, I think that it does and can improve the system—
Blake Stephenson
Can or does? Is it an objective or a political assessment?
Neal Barcoe: If done well, it can absolutely improve. If we can ensure that the quality is there, that it is staffed up properly and that we have the right levels of independence, as set out in the Bill, I think it would be an improvement on the current system. I recognise what underlies your question—we have had a lot of immigration and asylum bills, and that change of perspective is difficult for people in the system, which it undoubtedly is—but I think there are very sensible things in the Bill that seek to improve the current situation. One of the things—the Public Accounts Committee has spoken on this, and the NAO—is about how Departments come together and co-operate more effectively in this space, looking at the whole system. I think that that is what the Bill is about; it is about trying to look at the whole system as one. As I say, at an official level, we are doing that much more than we were before.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Daniel Flury: Clearly, as the IIAA grows, the expectation is that the work of the first-tier tribunal will decline. I am the senior responsible officer for a programme that is essentially managing that decommissioning process—that decline. As Neal says, there is still a pretty significant backlog of just under 152,000 appeals sitting in the system. There is still quite a bit of work to be done. The current approach in HMCTS and the judiciary is simply business as usual until further notice. We are striving to sit more and be more productive. We are striving for output, and I feel that we are partially succeeding this year. Over time, in the years ahead, that work will decline and we will eventually wind up the operations.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Daniel Flury: In terms of how quickly it could happen, I think the expectation is that this should all happen as quickly as possible. We are working with the Home Office on a number of assumptions around its expansion and our contraction. It is quite difficult to put a timescale on it just yet, but I think the expectation, certainly from the Home Office, is that it should happen pretty quickly. Our overall planning assumption is that we expect it to be somewhere between one and three years.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Daniel Flury: It is principally the judge’s role to manage the complexity of a case, obviously supported by legal representatives. In terms of the support that HMCTS can offer, we have a programme, which applies to all courts and tribunals, of reasonable adjustments that we offer appellants, claimants, defendants and so on. The rest is primarily provided through legal aid, legal representation and the judge safeguarding them in that case.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
Daniel Flury: Well, it is certainly the intention that the new body will speed up appeals through the system, but I could not say. As Neal said, you would need to ask a Minister, or maybe the Home Office would like to offer a view.
Neal Barcoe: My short answer is yes—that is absolutely the intention and the systems are being designed to deliver it in that way. I do not know whether my Home Office colleague wants to add anything more.
Alison Hewett: Clearly, my responsibility here is to support the delivery, as laid out in the Bill. The IIAA will have ownership of its own procedural frameworks. Those will be set in train. We have quite a large transformation programme, and we are working very closely together, as my colleagues have indicated, because this is a whole-of-system effort. We will put mechanisms in place and, because it is an independent authority, the transformation programme will transfer its responsibility over to the chair at a certain point, once it is set up. From then on, the authority will establish its own detailed practices and processes.
I can say a little more about the statutory roles that will support that. There is a lot on the face of the Bill that is hardwired to protect the integrity of the overall system, provide justice and address, at pace, some of the issues that colleagues have already referred to.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
Alison Hewett: You mentioned the chair, and of the four statutory roles—the chair, the chief executive, the chief appeals officer and the PSO—the chair and the PSO will be independently appointed through the public appointments process. As the Committee will be aware, that is a standard process, and it will be the Home Secretary who makes the initial appointment.
It is important to note that the chief executive and the chief appeals officer are independent from the Crown, and that is hardwired into the Bill. They are employees of the IIAA, and the chief executive will be responsible and accountable for achieving the goal and aim of the IIAA, which is, as we have said, to increase efficiency while protecting the integrity of the decisions being taken through the adjudicators. He will be accountable to the chair and will ultimately be required to present annual reports to Parliament, and the IIAA will have to go through an annual review process undertaken by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration. There are a number of mechanisms throughout the Bill that allow for that independence.
Ben Goldsborough
Brilliant.
Alison Hewett: Forgive me—the PSO is the professional standards office. My colleagues will be cringing as they listen to this.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
You just raised an interesting point about parliamentary scrutiny and oversight. Comparing and contrasting the system we live under now with the proposed system under the Bill, would you say that it will give Parliament more tools to scrutinise the effectiveness of the system, in terms of reporting?
Alison Hewett: I am probably not best placed to comment from a delivery perspective. I can say that under the Bill, as the SRO, I will be required to deliver a programme that gives effect to these changes and requirements. It is probably for our policy colleagues and, potentially, Ministers to opine on that.
Matt Vickers
Q
Daniel Flury: It currently takes about 56 weeks for an appeal to clear the system in the first-tier tribunal, which is only going to worsen in the years ahead as more of the claims that have been sitting in the backlog for some time are concluded. It is even longer for appeals —that 56 weeks is all appeals. As to where we think it could get to, I do not think any of us could say yet, unless the Home Office wants to offer something. I think we can all agree that it needs to improve substantially, because 56 weeks is unacceptable in any jurisdiction.
Matt Vickers
Q
Daniel Flury: I could not say from an HMCTS perspective.
Alison Hewett: Not at this stage. We are undertaking quite a lot of detailed modelling, but that is very much a work in progress. It would be inappropriate to get into that level of detail at this point.
The Chair
If Members have no further questions, I will thank the witnesses for their evidence and move on to the next panel.
Examination of Witness
Stephen Webb gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Stephen Webb: I am Stephen Webb, director of programmes at Fix Britain. Before that, I was at Policy Exchange and, before that, I spent a long time as a civil servant, including 10 or 15 years in the Home Office, where I dealt with some of the issues covered by the Bill.
Matt Vickers
Q
Stephen Webb: In a sense, the Bill seems mainly to look at the stock rather than the flow, looking at people already in the country. I know the Government have legislated previously on the actual crossings. I suppose the question is, within the way the Bill is structured at the moment, what would make the biggest difference in deterring people from starting the journey in the first place? That is quite hard to say, because there are lots of changes around making it more difficult to make claims, particularly under article 8.
My main point is that I feel, as I have written before, that it is not just article 8, but article 3 that gives asylum seekers an extremely high chance of staying in the country. Although the Government have chosen to toughen, somewhat, the way that article 8 will be treated, the Bill is silent on article 3. That is slightly disappointing, given that the Chişinău declaration, back in May, talked about reforming both and suggested areas where the courts—both domestically and in Strasbourg—could potentially tighten things up. I would see that as the main area.
Matt Vickers
Q
Stephen Webb: You obviously have a combination of both the article 8 definitions and the decision-making body, with a new appeals structure. The appeals structure could be very helpful. There is a significant problem of public confidence in the immigration tribunals as they stand, so I welcome the Government’s measures essentially to phase that out.
It is very hard to say how decision makers and people on appeal are going to interpret this. There clearly is a toughening-up here, certainly on article 8. There is nothing at the moment that does much on article 3 claims, which, as the Committee knows, have been broadened very widely by the courts over the last 20 years into things like whether there is an equivalent health system in the host country and the receiving country, and into areas that are really quite surprising for something that is supposed to be an unqualified right.
Anna Turley
Q
Stephen Webb: The problem with the immigration tribunals at the moment is that the reporting on judgments, in some cases, has been pretty shocking. The judiciary have not helped themselves in the way that most first-tier judgments are not routinely available. The only time you really hear about them is when they go up on appeal and are quite often turned down. The point about the famous chicken nuggets case is that it was not actually upheld on appeal. It was turned down, but it gave people a taste of the sort of things that might be happening in the tribunals. Obviously, there are recorded cases of tribunal judges coming from quite an activist background, which again seems very odd—I think the public would not expect that.
From that point of view, there is an opportunity to reset and to have clear rules about impartiality. There is also considerable scope to speed things up, which will definitely be helpful. Certainly, a lot of cases are lost because of the time it takes to get to a hearing, so people can build a case. Maybe they will get involved, rightly or wrongly, genuinely or not, in making a political case. Maybe they will create it. They might start developing religious reasons or, indeed, article 8 reasons related to relationships formed in the country. The quicker a decision is made, the more likely it is that it will be rapidly upheld at that first stage. Those are all positives. It is going to be a big process to find these people—identifying them, training them and getting them ready—but in principle, I think it is a good idea.
The Chair
If Members have no further questions, I thank the witness for his evidence and move on to the next panel.
Examination of Witnesses
Rt Hon Anna Turley MP, Dan Hobbs and Bas Javid gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Anna Turley: Good afternoon. I am Anna Turley, the Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum.
Dan Hobbs: Good afternoon. I am Dan Hobbs, the director general for migration, borders and international policy and programmes in the Home Office.
Bas Javid: Good afternoon. I am Bas Javid, the director general for immigration enforcement at the Home Office.
Matt Vickers
Q
“Little of the appraisal is quantified and most impacts are…uncertain.”
What measurable difference do the Government expect the Bill to make? How many additional removals will it deliver? How much faster will cases finally be resolved?
Anna Turley: The Bill is a really important part of our armoury for dealing with illegal immigration and securing our borders in this country. In introducing it, we have tried to be clear that this country has fundamental values of decency, fairness and tolerance that we hold dear. We have an historic role in providing safety to those fleeing war and persecution but, as we have heard today from lots of witnesses, we must recognise that the world is changing.
The current system was not designed to cope with a world that is so volatile and insecure, or with people travelling through multiple safe countries before crossing the channel, particularly by boat. We have to confront the situation facing our asylum system, which is one of the most permissive, compared with other countries in Europe. Unfortunately, it is acting as a pull factor, providing a perverse incentive for people who have arrived illegally to switch to the asylum system once here. The Bill, as part of our wider process, tries to tackle that.
The Bill is part of a range of measures we have in place to tackle issues raised by the shadow Minister, such as removals. I just want to set it in its context, because we have had a lot of conversation today about whether the Bill will be the silver bullet to stop the boats. I think it is really important to see it in the broader context of all the other measures that we are bringing in.
As you know, we have established the Border Security Command, which has been part of the reason why—together with our one in, one out deal with France—we have already seen small boats down by over 40% this year. We have stopped 38,000 channel crossings, and the number of asylum claimants we have awaiting their initial decision is at its lowest since 2019. We are now down to fewer than half the hotels that asylum seekers had been placed in, and we have seen 80,000 removals since the last election, including 11,000 foreign national offenders. As I said, the Bill is one part of the armoury that we want to use.
The problems we want to tackle are clear. Some 41% of asylum claims are from people who are already here and hold visas from another form of entering the country. As colleagues have heard, the first-tier tribunals have 156,000 appeals outstanding, with 72 weeks being the current average for asylum appeals. We have a number of late claims mechanisms that people use to threaten removals, and at the moment 95% of asylum decisions get appealed. That is the context we are trying to deal with through the course of the Bill’s passage.
We have obviously talked about the Bill’s measures today, and we are confident that they will start to address, as part of that broader armoury, some of the pull factors that are leading to us being seen as having one of the most permissive processes in Europe.
Matt Vickers
Q
Anna Turley: I do not want to put a specific figure on it. I am pleased with the statistics we have seen, and I want people to judge us on the outcomes of the measures we have introduced so far, which have seen 60,000 removals and 48,000 crossings stopped. We will have our metrics to measure this, but I do not want to put a specific figure on the impact at this stage of the Bill’s progress. We know the measures are specifically designed to tackle the blockages in the system and the reasons why people are able to frustrate and string out appeals. The Bill is targeted at the specific issues that mean people can string out the process, which are why the system is not functioning.
Matt Vickers
Q
Anna Turley: Bas, you have an example—we discussed this earlier today.
Bas Javid: With all the measures in the Bill, we want to address what potentially gives people the opportunity to frustrate removals, either in bad faith or just by being late, whether that is article 8 appeals or national referral mechanism issues. I would highlight two things that frustrate operational removal. One is the successive number of issues that people raise, but not necessarily all together, and there is also the fact that it is done very late, often on the steps of the plane, particularly on charter flights.
To give an example, in 2025, on all the charter flights that my teams ran, over a third of the people frustrated their claims through late NRM referrals. That is just an example of the kind of things that happen, and that obviously also puts a lot of extra cost and wasted resource into the system, where I would otherwise use that resource to remove people legitimately.
Matt Vickers
Q
Anna Turley: I have one example that we saw in the past. We had an Albanian man who become a British citizen but falsely claimed to be the father of eight children between 2022 and 2024. He was sentenced to six years in jail in October 2025, but having a British father on the birth certificate meant that the children could be registered as British citizens, meaning that they could then be an anchor for the Albanian father and Albanian mother. That is an example of where it is currently being used to thwart a fair process. That is the kind of example that we would seek to use.
Matt Vickers
Q
Anna Turley: Of those who have been granted leave to stay here on the basis of article 8, 71% had entered illegally or overstayed. That gives you a sense of how often this provision is used by people who have thwarted other means to be in this country. This is meant to be a safeguard, but we had 77,000 applicants for article 8 in 2025, which again gives a sense of the scale at which it is being used. As my colleague said, that is really affecting our ability to enforce our rules and protect those in genuine need.
Matt Vickers
Q
Bas Javid: I do not have an exact number on the total. When we look at it in individual categories, such as people in the appeal system where the appeals right is exhausted, that is in the thousands—tens of thousands in many cases. In terms of individuals in particular cohorts or groups, we can break that down. I can get those figures for you—I do not have them to hand—but it is several thousand.
Anna Turley: I have one figure to add to the point on article 8. For those who were granted an article 8 right to remain in 2025, the cost to the taxpayer is £4.9 billion. That again shows the scale and the impact on the British taxpayer.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Bas Javid: Everything we do within my team and the wider system, we do with compassion, respect and dignity. For every person we come across, whether that is a voluntary return or an enforced return or a foreign national offender, we follow the rules of policy and law. Our strapline is stop, manage, remove and protect; safeguarding and vulnerability form a huge component part of what we do, day to day, and how we run and manage our operations.
On the benefits that the IIAA will bring in terms of speeding up and discontinuing successive claims, it will obviously allow us to manage and process people much quicker, and it will certainly separate the people who have legitimate claims from those who potentially do not.
Dr Ahmed
Q
Anna Turley: I think you are absolutely right. This is such an important issue to all of our constituents across the country; it is one of the biggest things that comes up on the doorsteps in all the conversations we have. Everything is seen through the prism of fairness in this country, and rightly so. That is what the Bill is aiming for, through a number of measures, such as repayment of support and so on.
This is about fairness; if people come here, we want them to integrate and to settle. If they have a genuine right to be here, we will always provide that, but we also have to be conscious that, in a country where our resources are not infinite, we have to have a managed system, where we remove those who have no right to be here and ensure that we support people in a way that is compliant with our international obligations, but does not go over and above them, which perhaps in the past we have done too much.
In 2024-25, for example, the entire cost of asylum was £4 billion. At a time when our public purse is under strain, that is a challenge. We are working hard to do everything we can, all the way up to the source, to prevent the illegal movement of people across this country—the people trafficking that we have seen—and to disrupt the industrial network of gangs that exploit desperate people who wish to come to this country. We are doing that through doubling our investment in the National Crime Agency, working with the French to reduce the number of boat crossings, and processing and removing people.
The key part of the Bill is the speeding up of appeals. That is one of the most important ways that we can accelerate the process. Nobody should have to wait 72 weeks for an asylum appeal. No one should be able draw things out and exploit the system through last-minute loopholes, using provisions that are designed genuinely to protect people but that are being exploited to draw out cases.
This is a matter of fairness and due process, and of making a system that is fair and well managed so that it is fair both on the taxpayer and on those who are here genuinely fleeing persecution.
Joe Robertson
Q
Anna Turley: I think my biggest cause of concern is that things cannot go on the way that they are. We want to make sure that we introduce legislation that deals with that. Of course there will be things that we will, with the due process of Parliament, continue to work on as the Bill progresses. But the reality, particularly when it comes to the appeals process, is that the system as it stands is falling over and not serving anyone.
It is important that we build a new structure, which I believe is more flexible and swift, and which has all the right safeguards. We have not had a chance to discuss some of those safeguards. Some of the witnesses were critical of the process, but we are talking about building into the system a high degree of training and legal support, high professional standards, numerous levels of oversight, and the opportunity to go on to a tribunal appeal. We have great civil servants, who are not legally trained, but who manage the process. We want to build a body, and do it carefully and do it right, in a way that means that we no longer rely on the judicial capacity, which is falling over. We can then make those decisions swiftly, but with a properly, professionally trained body. That will enable us to make good, swift decisions on those appeals and then refer to tribunals as and when that is needed.
Joe Robertson
Q
Anna Turley: I take the challenge about the quality of decision making in the Home Office, but I think 95% of decisions are appealed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool flagged earlier, we are in a situation where people know that by appealing they can lengthen their stay and draw out the process. Of course, we are always looking to improve the quality of initial decision making—we will look to do that—but we are in a world where we are going from the decision making to a hugely bureaucratic, expensive, slow, burdensome system that is just not working. Introducing the appeals tier is about getting a better quality of decision making at a swifter rate, although it is always incumbent on us to improve the quality of decision making at the Home Office.
We have invested a lot in the judicial capacity. We have increased the amount that we spend by 21%. The number of sitting days is up 19%. We have done a lot to try to tackle that, but the number of appeals is still going up. The outcome of appeals has stayed constant, but the number of appeals is going up. That says to me that people are recognising that this is a way to thwart and draw out the system.
Dan Hobbs: As the Minister said, we are tackling a number of issues. Some of this is groundbreaking, in terms of asylum cost recovery. We are defining article 8 and bringing it back much closer to the Strasbourg jurisprudence, in terms of qualifying family members and setting out clear stipulations for both decision makers and the courts as regards the definition around family life. Again, that is a big area of attrition. As the Minister set out, 77% of people using article 8 had either arrived illegally or overstayed. A large number of foreign national offenders use article 8 as a means to either delay or avoid removal from the country. The Bill seeks to ensure that that is interpreted in line with how ECHR article 8 is due to be interpreted.
With the appeals authority, it is about having all the safeguards—the regulatory training, the procedural training and the professional ability to deal with these cases, backed by senior adjudicators who have legal training. It is also about having a fair and efficient system, because part of the challenge we see at appeal now is that there is a long gap between someone’s initial decision by the Home Office and when that comes before a judge. During that time, a whole series of events can happen, which means the case before a judge is often different from the one the Home Office made its initial decision on.
Joe Robertson
Q
Dan Hobbs: I think the overturn rate is actually declining, so the Home Office is getting more successful overall with those decisions that go before a judge. But, to my point earlier, what the judge decides can often be very different on the facts, compared with what was presented to the Home Office at the beginning, because of the passage of time. The Minister talked about upwards of 68 weeks between someone’s appeal being lodged and concluded, which means that a whole different series of facts come before the judge. So the evidence can change in that time, but our overturn rate is broadly coming down.
Joe Robertson
Q
Dan Hobbs: Broadly, about 50% of the refusals are then overturned. That is coming down, but equally the refusal rate has gone up. As the Minister said, we are refusing more cases, but the overturn rate is broadly similar.
Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)
Q
I want to speak to that point because that is what comes up most in Stafford, Eccleshall and the villages. It is not just one side of the political spectrum that has concerns about our immigration system; it is across the board. It is interesting when we hear consistently from both sides that there is a lack of faith and confidence in the system, because that does speak to a fundamental issue. I hope you can explain how setting up the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority will help to address that across the board.
Anna Turley: We are in a situation where there is a crisis in confidence and a crisis in outcome. That is why it is really important for us to restore that faith by building a professional, reliable and independent appeals process.
We have talked about some of the ways in which the authority is independent, and those are on the face of the Bill. It is a statutory body in its own right; it is not a Crown body. Ministers have a statutory duty to uphold its independence, and it is really important to us that we maintain that independence. As we have heard, the adjudicators will be appointed by a chief executive, and these will be merit-based appointments. Importantly, there will be external annual reporting to Parliament, and there is still that right of appeal to the upper tribunal.
However, it is important to recognise that the authority cannot operate in isolation—I think that that is part of the reason why there has been a bit of a crisis in public confidence. It is really important that it is part of the wider immigration and asylum process. It is going to be accountable for its performance through statutory reporting, scrutiny and oversight, which is not the case at the moment, with the separation of the judiciary. By making it accountable to Parliament, we are providing another mechanism to make it accountable to the British people, and to try to rebuild the trust and faith that they should have in their asylum process and in their Government to manage our borders.
Leigh Ingham
Does anyone else on the panel want to come in on that question?
Dan Hobbs and Bas Javid indicated dissent.
Leigh Ingham
Q
Anna Turley: An important thing to clarify, and that we have not heard today, is that it will be up to the family to decide what they want to do. If somebody is removed, the family can go with them if that is what they want to do. We will always put the rights of the child at the forefront of everything. It is important for us to say that.
It is also important that we set out our aims in doing this with article 8. There have been a variety of interpretations of article 8—it has been applied very loosely and inconsistently—so defining and codifying the concept of family life in primary legislation is important for fairness and consistency. We are bringing it in line with existing immigration regulations codifying and clarifying family life, and trying to ensure that it is fair, consistent and written on the face of the Bill. On safeguards, it is important to reiterate that our priority is always the welfare of the children.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Dan Hobbs: We are really clear about article 8, as we have set out in the impact assessment and elsewhere. Article 3 is used much less, and would normally be tested through the asylum claim. An article 3 breach would normally fall within the asylum and protection angle. Article 8 is already a qualified right, so I do not immediately follow the logic that people would then make article 3 claims, because that would already be considered under their asylum claim. If people had article 3 rights, they would be raised and are raised. We get article 3 challenges in various elements, so it is used now, but I am not clear how an article 8 right, which is a qualified right, can transpose into article 3, which is an absolute right.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Dan Hobbs: With the immigration system, we always have to think about displacement and human behaviour, which is not entirely predictable. We will go away and review that point with the Minister, but I cannot not immediately see how someone could use a subsisting relationship under article 8 as an article 3 barrier.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Anna Turley: Sorry, which clause was that again?
Blake Stephenson
Clause 1(8).
Dan Hobbs: This provision is about decisions on errors in law going to the upper tribunal. That is the case now: first-tier tribunal challenges on errors in law go to the upper tribunal. What we are setting out there is the procedure. Appeals against decisions of the new authority on the basis of law go to the upper tribunal.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Dan Hobbs: On the basis of today, I think we will take that away and verify it. As I say, I do not think we intended that. I will go away and check.
Blake Stephenson
Q
Anna Turley: As I said at the beginning, it is an important part of our armoury for reducing the numbers in small boats. We have evidence clearly showing that people who come to the country think we have, essentially, a more liberal system than many other countries in Europe. Of course, there are other reasons why people want to come to the UK, but people generally think that we have a looser interpretation of some of our responsibilities than other countries. It is important to us that we are clear, through the Bill, that we will fulfil our obligations, but also that we will ensure people cannot exploit the system or find loopholes, and that we will have a system that is fair, efficient and effective. This is one part of our armoury that, alongside all the other measures we are putting in place, will see our trajectory of reducing small boats continue.
I am convinced that the Bill will certainly speed up the time it takes to undertake removals and deal with some of the last-minute claims. You have heard from my colleague about people finding yet another opportunity to thwart the system when they are literally on their way to the planes.
Bas Javid: I would add that the very act of removal, when it is done properly and legitimately, acts as a deterrent in itself. For people who are looking to come to the UK or to remain illegally after a legal arrival, the very act of removal, done in the right way, is a deterrent.
Mr Brash
Q
Anna Turley: As I said, it is part of our armoury. I recognise very deeply, as you do, the sense of fairness that people feel in communities such as ours, which are struggling on all kinds of levels, whether access to public services, employment opportunities, levels of poverty or the broader social fabric and community cohesion challenges that we face in this country—those are important issues. As a Labour Government, we always want fairness to be at the heart of everything we do.
Although it is part of a broader armoury, the priority for the Bill is to move to a system in which British people do not feel that their sanctuary is being exploited or that others have the opportunity to access what they might not be able to access. Where we do extend a hand and help people to find a life of safety and sanctuary in this country, and they are able to integrate and become part of our communities, they will be responsible for repaying that support. Fairness, responsibility and contribution are at the heart of everything we should do in this country, as we uphold our international obligations, of which we are rightly proud.
Siân Berry
Q
The Refugee Council said there was no information on the proportion of people claiming asylum support as opposed to living off their own means while they are here, or not living off any means and being exploited. That is important information to know about in the context of the repayments clauses. Could you try to get that information for us before our line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill? The Government need a baseline for the outcome that they are seeking.
Anna Turley: I appreciate that. We may have that information, but I do not have it to hand today—apologies. I am more than happy to have a look internally, have discussions and see if we can get that information to the Committee, if we have access to it.
Siân Berry
Q
Anna Turley: I take your point on the core protection point and on destitution. Our intention was always to set out that detail in due course. On any legislative changes, we want to ensure that we lay that out properly for proper scrutiny, so I will endeavour to do that for the Committee.
Siân Berry
Q
We have established that claims that should have been approved in the first place are a burden on the courts. There is also human error in the Home Office. Have you managed to engage with any asylum seekers on solving their problems, or about their views on the Bill? We have heard from witnesses representing asylum seekers, but engagement with the people who are affected would be useful, so I wonder what the Department has done.
Anna Turley: I am always a believer in service user feedback, including from people who have been through the process and have lived experience, to help us develop better policymaking. This Bill process notwithstanding, I would be keen to look at that more broadly. In terms of the Bill process, there was a consultation after the Home Secretary’s statement—before my time, I believe—which everybody would have had the opportunity to feed into.
I reflect on the point about perhaps looking at specific users’ experience that they might not have been able to share during the process for fear of compromising their situation. On whether there is another means by which we can talk to people who have been through the process, we are always trying to improve our processes.
Dan Hobbs: Most of our consultation is done through the advocacy group. There is a national framework of stakeholder engagement with various different aspects—children, accommodation and elements like that—that the asylum group runs. Much of that lived experience is expressed through those groups. That is done in partnership with organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Refugee Council. Bas also has a community engagement team that gets a lot of information from people who use our services.
Bas Javid: We have two very distinct elements of engagement. I have a national community engagement team, which links with local authorities, charity groups, churches and other places of worship, and communities more generally—just on immigration, not necessarily on enforcement. Only this week, I have set up a new command, called the returns assistance and engagement operations. The primary focus of that command is people who are failed asylum seekers, still in the UK, and would need some returns assistance. Part of that is engagement and communication, as there are often language barriers and other communication challenges, and part is building up a level of trust. The focus of the command is entirely on trying to increase the voluntary returns, which is my primary focus. I would much rather do a voluntary return than an enforced one—it is safer, cheaper and quicker, and it is more dignified.
Siân Berry
Q
Bas Javid: Yes. On when we pick up feedback from people, particularly around the system, for example, one of the things that we recently rolled out is different apps and communication systems that we did not have before. We are much more on the front foot about contacting people at an early stage of a removals process, rather than later. When we do that, we feed back to our asylum colleagues any information or feedback relevant to assisting them to improve the process.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
Anna Turley: It is good to have the opportunity to talk about the modern slavery aspect because it is something we are obviously proud of in this country. It is important to us and we are committed to ending modern slavery. As a Government, it is really important to us, but we want to ensure that we support and protect the processes that support and identify modern slavery victims. The number of modern slavery referrals has increased by more than 900% since 2014, which shows us not only the growing scale of identification, but its growing application in immigration processes.
We are very concerned about the number of late claims—it feels deliberately used to thwart returns. As we heard, a third of the failed removals involved modern slavery referral. Three quarters of those were raised between 3 pm on the day before removal and 6 am. We are keen that we give people the opportunity all the way through their experience to raise such concerns with us. Sometimes trauma and experience lead to a delay in reporting, but individuals going through this process have multiple opportunities to disclose exploitation from the moment they arrive, such as through contact with first responders—we have heard about them, and they are highly trained in identifying modern slavery—immigration enforcement, police, local authorities and NGOs. Those people come into contact with a vast range of individuals. We always encourage people to identify; we want people to identify the issue earlier in the process, as soon as possible, so that we can deal with it and not have it thrown in at the last minute as a means to thwart removal.
As I said, just to conclude, I am very proud of our record on modern slavery, but something definitely does not quite stack up for me when I read that the UK refers more victims than the whole of the rest of Europe combined. In 2023, the UK referred 17,000 victims of modern slavery, compared with 10,907 for the rest of Europe. That says to me that we care very passionately about this—we want to get it right—but that we must also ensure that we protect the integrity of the process as well.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
Bas Javid: My starting point is, first of all, just to acknowledge that the national referral mechanism plays a vital role in safeguarding and supporting victims. That, even in an operational sense, is right at the forefront of my team’s training and focus. What we have seen increasingly, year by year, is what the Minister just referred to: some of the timings of the late claims. The statistic that I would share—I mentioned it before, but I will reiterate it—is that if we take just the year 2025 and all our charter operations, which is up to nearly 100 that year, one third of all the people we had to remove from flights were because of late claims. To give the context of an average case—I have case studies that I can speak to—there are a number of first responders, both statutory and non-statutory, with whom people have the opportunity to raise their claims, but they just do not do it. They do not do it for one simple reason: doing it late will absolutely thwart the process.
We have to make a very quick judgment on reasonable grounds, which in itself means you have to remove people from the process and obviously consider their grounds and case. More often than not, the reasonable grounds are not met, so you then go back and it is a waste of effort and cost. Operational dysfunction could be avoided by the improvements that are being made through the Bill.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
Anna Turley: I am pleased that the Bill introduces financial penalties for people if they fail to comply with transparency requirements in their supply chains. For me, that is just one step, and I know that the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade is in the process of conducting a review of responsible business conduct, of which modern slavery in supply chains is a key part. I look forward to seeing the evidence, and I hope that there will then be a strong lead on actions to drive out modern slavery from supply chains around the world.
Ben Goldsborough
Q
Anna Turley: Yes. I noted that one of the witnesses said that compliance and enforcement was an issue, so I undertake to take that issue away and have a look at it. For me, the key thing is introducing the legislative framework so that we can then start with the implementation. It is important to get these measures through, working with DBIST, and to ensure that we are not only introducing the legislative framework, but enforcing it.
The Chair
I ask Members to be brief so that we can get everyone in, because we are running very short of time.
Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)
Q
My other question is about the Good Friday agreement requiring the European convention on human rights to be embedded in Northern Ireland. Are there any concerns about the applicability of those issues and how they have been engaged in the Bill, or how it could be challenged in the courts in Northern Ireland? The last thing anyone wants is more Bills being dragged through the courts.
Dan Hobbs: This has been the subject of litigation already, which I think has concluded that it does not relate in respect of people who do not have lawful status in the United Kingdom; it related to citizens of the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As I say, I think there is case law on this, as a case was brought against previous legislation. The courts found that it was consistent and that the alignment issues you talked about did not directly relate to immigration law. We can write to you with full details, but the immigration legislation applies right across the United Kingdom.
Matt Vickers
Q
Anna Turley: We can certainly get back to you on that figure. As I said, we know that there were 77,000 applicants in 2025. We also know that 70% of our foreign national deportation appeals were allowed on article 8 grounds. We can probably do the maths and get back to the Committee.
Matt Vickers
Q
Anna Turley: I would not want to give incorrect figures. If it is okay, I will reply to the Committee in writing with that information.
Dan Hobbs: There is data in the Bill’s impact assessment on the loss that we see, both on the national referral mechanism and the removals, and where it would be our intention to reduce that attrition as much as possible from them both. There are a number of elements to this: the late claims process, the new procedures under the IIAA and the changes in terms of treatment of credibility under the national referral mechanism. Bas can probably talk more to that, but you will see people using multiple channels. The intention of the Bill is partly to ensure that there is an appeal that deals with all those issues and that, if they are brought late or after the notifications, they are treated as bad faith—that is the intention here. There are a number of elements, so isolating just the individual bits relating to the article 8 clauses will be quite difficult to assess.
Anna Turley: To build on that, the impact assessment says that article 8 reforms will result in an additional 3,600 people per year being removed. That is on the basis of our analysis finding that 31% of people who were refused article 8 applications were removed from the UK or claimed asylum. The 3,600 figure is estimated by applying the 31% proportion to the 11,700 total number of people estimated to be refused an article 8 claim due to the measures in the Bill. Hopefully that gives a little more clarity, but I am happy to write to the Committee.
The Chair
If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witnesses for their evidence. That brings us to the end of today’s session. The Committee will meet again at 9.25 am on Tuesday 13 October to begin line-by-line consideration of the Bill.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Jade Botterill.)