Authority to Carry Scheme and Civil Penalties Regulations 2021

Baroness Warsi Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi (Con) [V]]

My Lords, as my noble friend has said, these regulations bring into force the authority to carry scheme 2021, which replaces the authority to carry scheme 2015. I apologise in advance to my noble friend about where I want to take this debate today because it is both timely and necessary in relation to these regulations.

These regulations, which protect the United Kingdom and its citizens, ensure that those whom we do not believe are conducive to the public good are not allowed to enter. They create a mechanism underpinned by financial penalties to ensure the practical application of this protection. However, they also include our responsibility to ensure that we do not allow individuals from abroad who intend to cause harm to others and to us to leave these shores. These regulations stop people from being both carried here and carried from here—as well as, of course, providing the Secretary of State a mechanism to require carriers to remove people upon deportation.

The Explanatory Memorandum published by the Home Office alongside the regulations provides further policy background detail, some of which my noble friend has referred to, so my quotation does slightly duplicate. I quote the Government’s guidance:

“Preventing individuals from travelling to or from the UK”—


the latter is my emphasis—

“is an important part of the UK’s border security arrangements. The ability to intervene, pre-departure and prevent travel has meant that, under the 2015 Scheme, the Home Office has refused carriers authority to carry around 8,000 individuals”,

as my noble friend has referred to, and she has detailed the various categories of those. The quotation continues:

“It also included one member of a flight crew who had been previously deported. These are all individuals who would otherwise have travelled to the UK and would have been dealt with at the border, with the resulting financial and time implications associated with processing, detaining and removing that individual.”


The regulations detail that authority to carry from the UK may be refused in respect of various categories of persons, of which one is children whom the Secretary of State has reasonable cause to believe are intending to leave the United Kingdom for the purposes of involvement in terrorist-related activity.

I want to ask the Minister some questions on this “from” element, in relation to what I term our responsibility to prevent our citizens from causing harm by travelling overseas, including harm to themselves—these are children we are talking about. Noble Lords will be familiar with the case of Shamima Begum, the 15 year-old girl from east London who, along with her teenage school friends, travelled to Syria to become a bride to ISIS recruits. Her tragic story is of a young women groomed, abused and now left stateless in a refugee camp, having given birth to and lost two children, both British nationals, and, five years later, at the age of 20, attempting to return home.

We stripped her of her citizenship, despite her being born a British citizen and having only ever lived here. She was deemed by the then Secretary of State to be a Bangladeshi citizen—a country she does not know and has never taken citizenship of and which has said will not grant her citizenship. It has also said that, if she tried to enter that country, she would be subjected to being sentenced to death because of her association with ISIS.

As such, I will ask the following questions, and, if my noble friend cannot answer them today, I look forward to receiving a written reply. First, how many British citizens have been prevented from travelling overseas under the scheme to date? Secondly, how many children did we protect from becoming involved in terrorism by preventing them from travelling? Thirdly, carriers face a penalty for failing in their duty to protect if they carry someone to the UK under these regulations; what is the Government’s thinking when we fail in our duty to protect by allowing a person—someone who should have been protected and prevented from travelling under these regulations—to travel? Fourthly, what practical measures do the Government take to fulfil their responsibility to prevent individuals in the categories that they refer to in the regulations from travelling?

Finally, does my noble friend agree with me that we have a right to protect our country by revoking the citizenship of those who intend to cause us harm? That is absolutely a right that we have. However, does she also agree with me that that decision should be based on the harm intended, the crime committed or a crime that may be committed, not on the British national’s heritage?