Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Kirkhope and Lord Kerr, and the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, for adding their names to my Amendment 164. I also lend my support to the right reverend Prelate’s Amendment 162, which he has just outlined, and to Amendment 163 in the name of my noble friend Lord Alton.

I brought a variation of this amendment to the House in Committee. As I said in that debate, it is very simple. Amendment 164 is designed purely to place a duty on the Government to do what they say they intend to do anyway—introduce safe and legal routes. As I said in that debate, the moral credibility of the entire Bill depends on the creation of more safe and legal routes. The basis on which we are disestablishing illegal and unsafe routes is that we are creating legal and safe routes. The lack of a substantial commitment in primary legislation to this end is a serious omission which this amendment gives us an opportunity to address.

In the previous debate, the Minister said that the Government intend to outline new safe and legal routes in the January report and to implement them “as soon as practicable” and

“in any event by the end of 2024”.—[Official Report, 14/6/23; col. 1982.]

I am grateful to him for making this commitment. My primary motive in bringing this amendment back is to ensure that this commitment from the Government is enacted and that the commitment made from the Dispatch Box to enact safe and legal routes is in the Bill and carries as much weight as the commitment to disestablish unsafe and illegal routes.

I have heard commitments to policy positions from the Dispatch Box which have not been fulfilled and, while I have the greatest respect for the Minister, legislative certainty is what this House needs. I am particularly concerned by the promises made about the establishment of safe and legal routes at an indeterminate point after the next general election.

This brings me to the timeframe which has been introduced to this revised version of the amendment. We have chosen the timeline of two months after the publication of the Government’s report on safe and legal routes for two reasons. First, this will be eight months— I repeat, eight months—after the enactment of the legislation, which is more than enough time to develop and implement a serious proposal. Secondly, it will ensure that the commitment, as set out in legislation, should not cut across a general election or purdah next year. If the Minister would like to propose putting an alternative timeline into the legislation, I would welcome that conversation, but we do need to put the duty into the legislation now.

I was grateful for a conversation with the Immigration Minister in the other place, when he assured me that the Government would consider the importance of clearly demonstrating that they are committed to fulfilling their word on safe and legal routes. To restate: this is something the Government actively want to do, and for that reason I will want to test the will of the House this afternoon.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, and to endorse everything she has just said; if she does decide to test the opinion of the House, I certainly will support her in the Lobbies. I support the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham in his Amendment 162, and Amendment 165, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, and Amendment 166, in the name the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws.

My own Amendment 163 takes me back to an issue I raised in Committee. It concerns the provision within the designated safe and legal route, which I warmly welcome and I applaud what the Prime Minister said about the principle of doing this. The amendment contains within it an element and a number, to be determined by the Secretary of State, for people with protected characteristics under Section 4 of the Equality Act 2010. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart, who is in his place, will recall that I raised this issue on an earlier amendment on Report.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, but also to the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, for signing this amendment. I will listen carefully to the Minister’s response. A few moments ago I heard him say that there will be a consultation process; perhaps he could flesh that out and say even that the principle in this amendment is something that could be consulted on—that would go some way to meeting my concerns.

I have raised this issue a number of times previously. I tabled an amendment to the Immigration Bill, debated in your Lordships’ House on 21 March 2016, which specifically focused on those groups of people, such as the Yazidis and Christians, persecuted and even facing genocide because of their religion or belief. I raised it again during the Nationality and Borders Bill, debated on 8 February 2022. I focused on the Yazidis, an ethno- religious group targeted by Daesh for annihilation as a clear-cut case of genocide.

Earlier this afternoon, the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and I held a meeting with officials from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office about the continued failure of the United Kingdom to respond to the genocide of the Yazidis, even though a German court has now determined that such crimes have been committed against the Yazidis. I visited northern Iraq in 2019 and took evidence from the groups I have just described. Germany, along with Canada and Australia, famously opened its doors to the victims of this genocide, offering them sanctuary and a safe haven. By contrast, we have used the absence of safe and legal routes to prevent these vulnerable and targeted communities being able to find a way of accessing refugee or asylum status in the UK.

If our present mechanisms are working as intended, why have Yazidi victims of the Daesh genocide in Iraq not been granted resettlement in the UK? Of course, we may not be able to help all victims but why can we not help a few? This is unacceptable, which is why I have tabled this amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

The issue with remote admissions is that you completely lose control of the system, because it is run on a multibased system around the world. We need, quite simply, to be clear about the number we could admit into this country, under all these worthwhile systems—they may be run in the way the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, wishes, or the way the noble Lord, Lord Alton, wishes—and keep faith with the country’s ability to absorb it without undue social and economic strain.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

I draw the noble Lord’s attention to proposed subsection (2) in Amendment 163, which specifically deals with numbers and a cap, and the regulations that would be available to the Secretary of State to control the very issues that the noble Lord raised. It would allow us to deal with emergency cases of the kind that the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and others described.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

Absolutely—that is why, in my opening remarks, I said that the noble Lord’s Amendment 163 was movingly produced and discussed. My question on the cap was aimed at Amendment 164, which I stand ready to be corrected on, and the generality of Amendment 162, where no numbers are mentioned at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, in supporting the amendment tabled by the most reverend Primate.

The figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees alone are justification for this amendment: over 110 million people displaced in the world today. We cannot tackle that alone, and we cannot ignore it either. Therefore, we have a duty to come together with other nations and to take this issue as seriously as we have rightly taken the climate crisis. The COP is not a bad model to look at in the context of the 110 million people.

Why is this great country of ours not taking the lead, as we did with people such as Eleanor Rathbone and Sir Winston Churchill in the period after the Second World War, in convening an international forum to drive an agenda that deals with not the pull factors about which we hear so much but the push factors that send people on these desperate journeys? I was recently in north Africa on the very day that a ship went down off the coast of Greece, killing more than 70 people. Why were they making those desperate journeys? It was mainly to escape destitution and conflict.