Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Scriven

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, as we enter day two and the world of fantasy and fiction on the Bill, which is based on the premise of an untruth, I am the fiction of my noble friend Lord German—his substitute. I am a poor substitute; all the same, he unfortunately cannot be in his place today.

Amendments 18, 23 and 47 in this group, which are in my noble friend’s name and to which I have added mine, seek to ensure that Rwanda is not to be conclusively treated as a safe country where there are persons to be removed who are an unaccompanied child, a victim of human trafficking or a victim of modern slavery. Amendment 47 builds on this by ensuring that decision-makers must specifically consider circumstances where

“an individual … is … an unaccompanied child … a victim of human trafficking, or … a victim of modern slavery”

when they consider individual cases.

It is important that the courts can do this because anyone who clicks on the signatories to UN treaties, to see which countries have signed up to them, will see that there are significant and optional treaties at the UN, based not just on the rights that are required but the type of inquiry carried out on those individuals, which Rwanda has not signed up to. This is therefore significant for some of the most vulnerable people, who should be afforded extra protection because of the lack of protection that Rwanda provides them.

The amendments in this group in the name of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, also seek to protect victims of modern slavery and of human trafficking. They are drafted in a more comprehensive manner. In a later group, we will focus more specifically on children.

At Second Reading, a number of noble Lords highlighted that the vulnerable are not at all protected in the Bill. Indeed, the Bill places at risk the UK’s obligations under the European Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, to which Rwanda is not a signatory, given that victims of modern slavery and trafficking are among those who face forced removal to Rwanda. The obligations include the duty to investigate without delay and to take operational measures to protect potential victims, where there are sufficient indicators available of circumstances which give rise to credible suspicion—I emphasise “suspicion”—of a real risk of trafficking and exploitation.

Further, according to the US Department of State’s 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report, Rwanda does not

“fully meet the … minimum standards … for the elimination of trafficking”.

The 2023 Global Slavery Index tells us that the prevalence of modern slavery in Rwanda is more than twice as high as it is in the UK. The previous Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner raised concerns that Rwanda has detained thousands of potential trafficking victims without conducting adequate screening or referring identified victims to proper care and assistance; that in 2021 Rwanda investigated fewer trafficking cases and prosecuted and convicted fewer traffickers compared with the previous year; and that it

“lacked a victim-witness support program”.

We are deeply concerned that survivors will not be seen as safe in Rwanda, as they would be here in the UK. The aim of our amendment is therefore simple. It is to try to offer a degree of protection to those who are most vulnerable by ensuring that Rwanda is not seen to be conclusively safe for unaccompanied children, victims of trafficking and victims of modern slavery.

I also note that Amendment 75, which my noble friend Lady Smith has signed, tries to ensure that if those brave men and women who have helped our Armed Forces in conflict in areas such as Afghanistan who, because of the incompetence of Home Office schemes, decide to flee here because their lives are in danger, they are not forcibly sent to Rwanda. What a shame on our national reputation that we would do such a thing as a nation.

As I say, the aim is very simple. It is to make sure that these people—unaccompanied children, victims of trafficking and victims of modern slavery—are not sent to Rwanda, because it is not seen as conclusively protective. I know that my noble friends Lady Brinton and Lady Hamwee will speak in more detail about these categories of vulnerable people, who surely deserve our protection. I beg to move.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, who introduced the amendments in this group. I have signed Amendments 18, 23 and 47, but, like him, I have considerable sympathy with the others. The amendments discussed on Monday focused much on the rule of law and how the Bill sits within that. This group changes the focus to look at the most vulnerable asylum seekers, defined in our Amendments 18, 23 and 47 as unaccompanied children, victims of human trafficking or victims of modern slavery, and says that, for the purposes of this Bill, Rwanda should not be regarded as a safe country.

Noble Lords who worked on the Illegal Migration Act last year will remember that, during that Bill, these were three groups of asylum seeker where there was considerable cross-party concern about the Bill reducing their rights under domestic law and ignoring them under international law. There are amendments to follow that will go into more detail on these cases. I will not speak in detail ahead of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, but Amendments 23 and 47 would set on the face of the Bill, in Clause 2, that these groups of people should always be considered separately and not just with everybody else or as a generic group.

The first group is unaccompanied child asylum seekers. We have had many debates in the last three of four years, in the Nationality and Borders Act and Illegal Migration Act, about difficulties in assessing the age of unaccompanied children. We will come back to that detail next week. It is important to note that, on 22 January, the Guardian reported that at least 1,300 child refugees are at risk after being classified as adults, with some placed in adult jails after the Home Office wrongly assessed their ages. Others were sent to adult hotels without the right support. The Refugee Council, Helen Bamber Foundation and Humans for Rights Network report, Forced Adulthood, says that these children are exposed to “significant” harm. It reported that age assessments can be as short as 10 minutes. The consequences for these young people, if they are children, are serious. They breach international law, as well as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which this country is a signatory.

For victims of modern slavery and human trafficking —I will not go into the detail of the excellent introduction by my noble friend Lord Scriven—I share my noble friend’s concerns. I note that this Government appear to have a short memory. In the Modern Slavery Act 2015, promoted by the then Home Secretary Theresa May, an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner was created to improve and better co-ordinate the response to modern slavery. It introduced a defence for victims of slavery and trafficking, placed a duty on the Secretary of State to produce stat guidance on victim identification and victims’ services, and enabled the Secretary of State to make regulations relating to the identification of and support for victims. That is why the simplistic processing proposed in this Bill is completely inappropriate and why the Government need to respond to these amendments, as well as those proposed by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, in this group. We have a duty as a nation to take care of the most vulnerable asylum seekers.

I also support Amendment 75 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, which my noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham has supported. It is unconscionable for us not to recognise the very particular circumstances of those who have supported our troops in the most difficult circumstances.

This Government used to believe in supporting asylum seekers, particularly the most vulnerable, and had processes by which they could do so, but they clearly do not anymore. Can the Minister explain to your Lordships’ Committee why this U-turn has happened and on what basis it is appropriate to disregard the rules they created less than 10 years ago?

Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Scriven

Committee stage
Wednesday 26th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I have never heard such a reception before speaking. I congratulate the Deputy Chairman of Committees on the professionalism with which she handled that. Many noble Lords will know that we sometimes get through less business in a dinner hour, so well done. On a serious note, when we canter through a Bill in that way on the seventh day in Committee, it shows the lack of scrutiny it is getting.

I speak on behalf of my noble friend Lord Wallace on Amendment 404, and in moving that amendment I will also speak to Amendments 407, 409, 410, 412, 413, 421, 422 and 423. This group deals with conflicts of interest in public procurement, and getting the process and the management of those conflicts correct is absolutely vital to upholding the public’s trust in the use of their taxes when contracts are being laid. It has to be said that the new conflicts of interest provisions in Part 5 are a step forward. They impose some positive obligations on authorities to identify conflicts and give them a duty to mitigate them, including by conducting a conflict assessment. The provisions also ensure that conflicts can pertain to Ministers, not just officials taking procurement decisions. This is especially important given the issues with the VIP lane during the Covid procurement.

However, these new provisions do not go anywhere near as far as did the review by Sir Nigel Boardman, which the Government asked for and which was published in May 2021, in that they do not require a centralised register of conflicts that authorities can consult. Nor does the Bill contain sanctions for non-compliance with these measures. A central plank of the Boardman proposals, that suppliers should also be required to make conflict of interest declarations themselves, is also not included in the Bill. Boardman recommended that when there are direct awards with no competition, additional disclosure of conflicts at a more senior level should be required. Again, that is missing from the Bill.

The Boardman review gave 12 recommendations on conflicts of interest and bias. The amendments I referred to earlier try to put in the Bill the recommendations that the Boardman review gave. What is the point of doing the most detailed review asked for by government about conflicts of interest, based on recent history, if it is totally ignored when a Bill on procurement is written and when Part 5, on conflicts of interest, seems to ignore them altogether?

I will not go through all 12 recommendations, but some of them are quite important. Recommendation 18 says:

“Cabinet Office should strengthen its model for the management of actual and perceived conflicts of interest in procurements, following the ‘identify, prevent, rectify’ sequence.”


That is completely missing from the Bill. The Minister may say that some guidance will come out on that from the Cabinet Office. The difference is that this is primary legislation. If an expert has recommended that this should be the prescribed way that the Government do things on procurement to improve it around conflicts of interest, why is the “identify, prevent, rectify” sequence not identified in the Bill?

Recommendation 20 indicates:

“Declarations of interests should be recorded and logged alongside the departmental gift register and, where appropriate, this and other, relevant information should be made available to those responsible for procurement and contract management.”


I ask the Minister where, or if, a central register of conflicts of interest will be made available so that all public sector bodies that are procuring can have access to it. Remember, it is not just government departments at Whitehall that we are talking about: the Bill relates to all public sector bodies apart from the NHS which, even if it is procuring outside this, should have access to conflicts of interest on a central register.

The Boardman review also goes on to suggest the types of people who should be required to declare conflicts of interest; it goes much wider than the Bill. Recommendation 23 says:

“All guidance should make it clear that the requirement to declare and record actual or perceived conflicts of interest applies to all officials or those working on behalf of Cabinet Office equally, including civil servants, contractors, consultants, special advisers, and other political appointees.”


Where do they sit in the Bill? It is not just individuals whose job it is to procure; there are others who will have potential conflicts of interest that need to be made public, and people need to be aware of them.

Recommendation 24 says:

“There should be a clear process for managing risk regarding conflicts of interest.”


Where in the Bill are the process for managing conflicts of interest and the sanctions? What are the sanctions? Will they be left to each individual contracting body, or is there a central view of what the sanctions for dealing with conflicts of interest should be?

Recommendation 28 of the Boardman review says:

“Suppliers should be required to follow similar processes regarding declarations of actual or perceived conflicts of interest at the outset of a procurement, with appropriate sanctions for non-compliance.”


Where in the Bill is such provision? How will the conflicts, or potential conflicts, of interest of those looking to supply be dealt with?

I wish to speak to other amendments in this group that talk about not just direct employees. For example, Amendment 423 says that people who have left public service but are then employed or subcontracted by or give paid advice to a company should not be allowed to do so for a period of six months. That is not just for government but for all public sector bodies. If that is not in the Bill, it will be left to individual councils or individual procurement bodies to make their own rules and there will not be a uniform approach across the public sector. Is it the Government’s view that there should not be a uniform approach across the public sector for conflicts of interest for people who leave the public sector and are going to be employed, subcontracted or paid to give advice, or should it be down to each individual contracting authority outside of government departments to make up their own view? If so, how will suppliers be able to understand that individuals are complying, based on the complexity that will require?

Amendment 422 is a probing amendment to understand how the Government anticipate managing conflicts of interest and to make sure, again, that that is standardised across the public sector, not just what happens under the procurement rules for government departments.

There are a number of issues here, and I know that my noble friend Lady Brinton will raise the NHS and Palantir, where senior officials who were working on a multimillion-pound procurement for IT left the Department of Health and subsequently went to work for a company that was bidding for that particular contract.

These are serious amendments, which, as the new Prime Minister said on the steps of Downing Street yesterday, seek to rebuild trust. Rebuilding trust to ensure that taxpayers’ money is used appropriately and no one is getting an unfair advantage means that we have to have a standardised system to deal with conflicts of interest across the public sector, for all bodies, and a system of managing those in a way that is appropriate. I hope that the Minister will be able to answer those questions. I beg to move Amendment 404.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Scriven. I have signed Amendment 423, but I support all his amendments and those of my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire in this group.

My noble friend Lord Scriven has set the scene for the reason why these amendments are needed, with the background of the Boardman recommendations. I want to give one example of how the culture has allowed one particular firm to get its feet very firmly under the NHS desk over the last three years—it is now a bit more than three years—and why, had stronger conflict of interest arrangements been in place that did not permit very senior staff to go and work for someone who is about to bid for NHS contracts, in line with these amendments, we would have benefited.

In April 2020, the United States tech firm Palantir was awarded a contract for an NHS Covid datastore under the Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 Framework. This meant that it did not need to be publicly tendered or the results published. During 2020, campaigning organisations Foxglove and openDemocracy, as well as a number of parliamentarians in both Houses, including my noble friend Lord Scriven and me in the Lords, raised repeated concerns about the contract. It then emerged that part of the cost-effectiveness of this contract was that Palantir bid very low in return for access to every patient’s medical and personal data held on the Covid datastore. No permission had been asked for or given by any individual about this highly confidential data, and of course it breached GDPR—that is not formally within the scope of this Bill.

The first contract, from April 2020, was for three months, and the value of that contract in return for the data was £1—not £1 million but £1. A further continuation contract for a further four months was for £1 million, and in December 2020, a two-year contract was issued, again under the same arrangements, for £23 million. As details started to emerge, and after the public outcry, the contract was ceased in April 2021—not least because Foxglove and openDemocracy had initiated a court case against the Department of Health and Social Care.

What has emerged is that, in 2019, a number of private meetings were held between senior NHS managers and senior managers of Palantir, described by the NHS managers as very positive—I bet they were. A November 2021 National Audit Office report on government contracts during the Covid pandemic found that a lack of transparency and adequate documentation was very evident.

During 2020, Palantir did not just have contracts with the NHS, it had contracts worth £46 million with UK government or public bodies. Palantir, which in conjunction with Cambridge Analytica provided data support for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign and for the Vote Leave campaign, is known for working below the radar. I am very mindful of the comments that the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, made earlier about people gaming the system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am grateful to the Minister for allowing me to intervene. I absolutely accept the point about the change to civil servants’ arrangements. The example that I gave is outside the Civil Service, as would be many other contracts issued through this Bill when it becomes an Act. Can she assure me that every member of staff in any body or agency would be covered in the same way?

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

Before the Minister answers that, a number of times in my intervention I highlighted that there must be a standardisation not only for the Civil Service. Billions of pounds of procurement is carried out by non-central government departments. The rules need to be clear and uniform across the procurement process for the whole public sector, not just for government departments. That is a key issue and why many of these provisions need to be in the Bill, so that they are applicable to all public sector procurement bodies.

Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Scriven

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 13A and 13B. I want to comment on my noble friend Lady Buscombe’s contribution a minute ago. I am not sure that it helped the Minister. I think it explained why we need Amendments 13A and 13B, because the most important thing about implementing Prevent is to recognise that each of our communities differs and that each community, area and specified authority should have due regard to the impact in order to understand it and to pass that message back to central government to understand the change in the nature of terrorism and radicalisation.

That is why I believe that Amendment 13B is valid. It is an extra tool in the box to make sure that we are monitoring what is happening, at whatever level and in whatever specified authority, to the range of people it is going to affect—including, interestingly, pupils who are under sixth form and under student age. What is happening is not consistent across the country. There may be young girls in one area talking about going to Syria; there are young Muslim British girls in other areas who are appalled by that. As a society we need to understand the nuances of that. The briefing that we have had from the Muslim Council of Britain sets that out very clearly. The one thing that we must do is to make sure that we do not have alienation on a grand scale. We need to understand that what is happening is not the same in every single community.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend in Amendment 13A. I want to share my experience as a former leader of Sheffield City Council to say how difficult this is. We make a grave mistake by talking about the Muslim community as though it is a homogenous group of people. They are people with many different beliefs, different processes and different understandings of what is happening worldwide. When I was leader of Sheffield City Council, very strict central guidelines came in with Prevent. That ended up setting not just community against community but different people of the same community against each other, because we were not allowed to have leeway to make judgments or to put in place policies and practices that were relevant to our local context.

What became clear to me, and to many other council leaders across the country, was that unless we got it right from a bottom-up approach, by working with and for those different people in the community, we would alienate more people than we brought in. One of the key findings of the Audit Commission report on the last Prevent programme back in 2008 was that there should be more of a bottom-up than a top-down approach. I have no doubt that the Government’s intentions are well meaning. I have no doubt that there is a view that if you have a set of guidelines from somebody in Whitehall, it is applicable across the country. However, my personal experience tells me that it is best to be more bottom-up than top-down on these issues, otherwise we will not just set community against community but cause tension because of the people within those communities who have different opinions.

I ask the Minister to consider this amendment very seriously. Past experience of my own and the Audit Commission report of 2008 make it very clear: a top-down approach which does not take this into consideration as a major part of implementing Prevent will have unintended consequences and will mean that we have good intentions but bad implementation of something that we all support.

Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

Debate between Baroness Brinton and Lord Scriven

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want to make a couple of brief comments on Amendment 103A. I echo my noble friend Lady Warsi’s comments about a review of the Prevent strategy, for all the reasons that others have spoken about. We also need to look at where different approaches have been taken. I think I spoke at Second Reading about Watford, but what I did not say is that Watford took only the community money; it did not take the surveillance money. Actually, Watford was the one place in which, on the Sunday after the Paris shootings, the traditional march in honour of the birth of the Prophet became a march in honour of those who had died. Members of the community other than those of the Muslim faith joined in that march. That is where community work through Prevent is at its best. My worry is that we have not seen a proper survey of Prevent, although it has been in operation for the best part of a decade.

I return briefly to Amendment 103A. My noble friend Lady Sharp said that the reasoning behind this probing amendment might seem slightly contradictory, but it seeks to get to some word definitions. There is a further problem around definition: the Bill itself talks mainly about “terrorism” while the statutory guidance talks about “extremism”, but the balance between the duty on extremism versus terrorism is quite distinct. I certainly cannot marry up the clauses in the Bill with some of what is set out in the guidance. I would be grateful if my noble friend could help with this as well.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for not having taken part in the Second Reading of the Bill, but I was out of the country. I wish to speak to this amendment because I was the leader of Sheffield City Council at the time when the Prevent strategy came in. I think that we may be going down the road of repeating past mistakes. When Prevent was brought in, it was not statutory but it was driven by a lot of central guidelines. It became clear to me and many council leaders that these central guidelines were not appropriate to our communities. The community of Sheffield is very different to the community of Bradford just down the road. The complexity of dealing with something like radicalisation requires a deep and thorough understanding of the community and context within which people work. Statutory guidance will mean that flexibility will go and straitjackets will come in because someone at a top-down level will decide that they know, from Whitehall, what is best for every community in this country

The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, made a very strong point. Until we know what actually works, how can anyone write evidence-based statutory guidance? Work has been done on this internationally. Rik Coolsaet, an expert at the University of Ghent, who used to be the adviser to the European Commission on Radicalisation, said very clearly that we do not yet know internationally what does or does not work on a deradicalisation strategy. Exactly what is going to be evidence-based in the statutory guidance? I asked a Written Question, which was responded to on 26 January:

“how many public bodies as defined in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill do not meet the provisions of the Prevent duty guidance consultation document, according to each category of public body”,

but the Minister was not able to answer. The Government do not know. This is a really important point: if we do not know exactly what is happening out there already, if we do not have an evidence base for what works, how can we say to public bodies, which understand the context of their locality far better than anybody else, “You have to do this to prevent people from radicalisation or extremism”?

Furthermore, it is important to understand that where the best international examples exist—noble Lords have already given two examples, particularly that of Hayat—it is not on a statutory basis nor via a statutory body but it is a community, bottom-up approach that is dealing with this, in not just a sensitive but an effective way. While I do not for one minute doubt the genuine and important reasons why the Government have started on this road, I believe that it will have unintended consequences that will not help the problem but could mean that statutory bodies at local level will have to deal with a greater and more difficult problem. I therefore ask the Minister: what evidence base will go into the statutory guidance which will help, and can he guarantee that it will be contextualised for the different and varied communities around this country?

[Baroness Brinton]

I would like to add to that last point and ask the Minister for an evidence base post-2009, because much has happened in the university and college sector since that date. It would be helpful to know this, given that his letter to those of us interested in this issue referred only to incidents before 2009.