Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Lord Kerr of Kinlochard

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I support these two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for the very reasons she gives. Clause 34 is very welcome and I am very glad that the Government have put it in, but it is very narrow. There is a considerable overlap between family reunion cases and evacuees, and this is about evacuees. I would like to bring the two together, as the noble Baroness said. The top five countries from which family reunion cases come are Syria, Sudan, Iran, Eritrea and Afghanistan, so we are in exactly the same territory of facilitating evacuation. It does not work very well at the moment, for the reasons that the noble Baroness spelled out.

The double journeys point is really worrying. To collect the visa, you have to go to a visa centre. In the top five countries I have listed, there are no visa centres, for obvious reasons—in most of them, there is no embassy—so you have to cross a frontier. When we are talking family reunions, more than 50% of those involved are children. Are we asking them to cross a frontier and go somewhere that could be a very long way away to get their visa? No, we are not; it is worse than that. We are asking them to go twice: once to give their biometric details and, secondly, to collect the visa—they cannot get it the first time. Could they not have the biometric details taken when they pick up the visa, when the family reunion case has been established and they are going to be let in? They would then need to make only one journey. It seems to me that this simple improvement to the process would save a lot of heartache and probably a lot of lives, in cases where it has been decided by the system that family reunion is appropriate and should be facilitated.

I support the two amendments ably moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, but I hope that the Government will go a little further and think hard about changing the procedure for the collection of the visa so that the biometric details could be given at the time the visa is picked up and thus the double journeys could be avoided.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support. I, too, am supported by RAMP, and that is in the register—that is done for Committee now. I warmly welcome Clause 34 as well, but the amendment being proposed is a very modest one, which would not be difficult for the Government to accept. The case has already been well made and I will not reiterate it, but I will give an example from the British Red Cross, which I think has made a very persuasive case to Members of the Committee. It gives the current example of Iran:

“The visa centre in Tehran has been temporarily closed since 15 July 2025. This visa centre was the base for many Afghans and Iranians to submit their family reunion applications. Now families are unable to access the centre and will need to take a dangerous journey to a neighbouring country just to submit their biometrics and have their application processed … This amendment would allow biometrics to be taken at different locations within Iran where people could travel to safely rather than crossing borders”.


Safety must be one of the criteria that we use in thinking about displaced people. It is a very modest amendment and I hope that my noble friend will be able to look kindly on it.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Baroness Lister of Burtersett and Lord Kerr of Kinlochard

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome Clause 37 very warmly. For some of us it is the best bit of the Bill. I am really pleased, for once, to be able to unequivocally support my Front Bench and my noble friend the Minister.

My noble friend the Minister did not have the pleasure of sitting through the debates about the Rwanda Bill in this House; I do not really want to put him through it all again, because it is like a nightmare in my mind and it is quite difficult to recall everything that was said at the time. But I remind the Committee that, on a number of occasions, your Lordships’ House rejected key bits of the Bill, and it went through only because of the majority in the Commons. We had ping-pong, ping-pong, ping-pong, and eventually we had to give in. To now try to resurrect it through this clause stand part device seems a bit perverse.

I will just remind noble Lords why we were so opposed to the Rwanda Bill. First of all—I have to see whether I can read my notes here—there was the failure to meet the concerns of the Supreme Court. Saying Rwanda is safe then and for always does not make it safe. I can remember noble and learned Lords and others on the Cross Benches—one of whom may well want to speak today—saying, “We’re being asked to say that night is day and put that into legal form”. It was ridiculous. So, for the lawyers among us, it was really quite distressing that we were having to put our name to that.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees had concerns, at the heart of which was the belief that the Act was not compatible with international refugee law—the refugee convention. There was the disapplication of the Human Rights Act, highlighted by the Joint Committee on Human Rights—the current chair is no longer in his place, but I am sure he would agree with what the previous committee said. That committee emphasised the universality of human rights, which this piece of legislation rode a cart and of horses through.

There were particular concerns around the treatment of LGBTI+ people, who would potentially not be treated well, as well as concerns about children, which was one of the main issues that I took up during the passage of the Bill. On the treatment of age-disputed children, there were fears that they would be removed to Rwanda because they had wrongly been assessed as adults, and then there was a difficult provision, if they could prove that they were children, for them to be sent back to the UK, in effect as parcels. Many of us thought that was dehumanising of children and went against children’s rights.

I am sure my noble friend the Minister will be terribly pleased to hear that we will be debating age assessment later in Committee. But it is worth pointing out at this point that just yesterday, the i newspaper published the latest analysis by the Helen Bamber Foundation of FoI data. That found that in 2024, at least 678 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were initially classed as adults but then found to be children by local authorities, and that was over half of those who were so referred. Had the Rwanda Act been in operation now, how many of those children might have been sent to Rwanda and got stuck there? That is the question that I would put. In addition, there was never a proper child rights impact assessment or anything like that.

Finally, the noble Lord talked about a deterrent. I seem to remember that, in all the paperwork we were given—it was probably an impact assessment or something—that there was a very clear reference to academic work which suggested that there was no evidence of a deterrent effect in this kind of legislation. The noble Lord also talked about us being a soft touch for illegal migrants. Please can we remember that most of those who come across on the boats, putting their lives at risk, are seeking asylum? They have an international right to do so. Please do not let us write them off as “illegal migrants”.

That is all I wanted to say. I warmly welcome that the Government have taken this step, because it is a very positive step in the name of human rights and international refugee law.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I think the noble Baroness was a little unkind to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, who made an admirable speech: gallantry in a hopeless cause is always extremely impressive. I thought Owain Glyndŵr was speaking to us. I was reminded of the gallant knight in “Monty Python”, who has all his limbs struck off, but bravely says, “No, no, it’s only a flesh wound”, and fights on. It was tremendous.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, also slightly abbreviated the history of the Rwanda Act in this House. It began with the Rwanda treaty, which this House recommended, on the advice of its International Agreements Committee, could not and should not be ratified until the various supervisory and legal constructs needed—and set out in the treaty itself—existed. Because they did not exist; they were to be set up. Various judges were to be appointed, courts were to be formed and supervisory monitoring procedures were to be put in place—none of that existed. This House recommended that the treaty should not be ratified.

The Bill itself had three fundamental problems for this House. First, as the noble Baroness said, there was the fundamental “Alice in Wonderland” absurdity that we can, by so voting, change facts: we can make Rwanda safe by declaring Rwanda safe. The noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, spoke powerfully on that subject.

Secondly, there was the problem of our international commitments. It was impossible—in the view of this House, which voted several times on it—to reconcile the Bill and the treaty with our international commitments. We were telling people, “You may never have your claim for asylum heard in this country. You may claim asylum in Rwanda. You may claim from the Rwanda Government the right to become a citizen of Rwanda. But you may never claim the right to become a citizen of the United Kingdom. We are going to send you to Rwanda, we are never going to let you come here and we are never going to hear your case”. To make that fit with the refugee convention is impossible—that is what this House determined. Keeping the Rwanda Act on the statute book would be absurd. If we mean what we say about a rules-based, legal global order, we really need to pay attention when what we are doing ourselves is clearly in breach of a central plank of the rules-based order.

That is completely different from what this Government are, as I understand it, seeking to do with offshoring the exercise. Although I do not like that—it is a very bad idea that people’s claims should be considered abroad, because it will be harder to ensure that they get appropriate legal advice and age assessment, if their asylum case heard in a foreign country—it is completely different from what we were going to do with Rwanda. With the Rwanda Act, we were not just offshoring but offloading; we were putting on the Rwanda Government the responsibility of considering the future of these people. We were saying, “It’s absolutely nothing to do with us and we refuse to touch it”. That simply will not do.

We have to applaud the noble Lord, Lord Davies. I note that his Scottish colleague was cunning enough to disappear before we came to the question of whether Clause 37 should stand part. I am a Scotsman and know that there are some battles that it is best not to fight. It is very gallant of the noble Lord to be here to make his case, but it would be absurd if he were to succeed.