Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Lord Alton of Liverpool and Baroness Stroud

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.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Alton of Liverpool and Baroness Stroud

Report stage
Wednesday 30th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, as in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has made a very eloquent, powerful and compelling case for supporting this modest Amendment 91. I am happy to be a signatory to this amendment again.

In Committee, the noble Lord and I, with the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, asked the Government about a hospital being built in China in connection with a British company. I thank the Minister for the parliamentary reply about that hospital, which she gave me on 29 November. But I am concerned to learn that the company involved, International Hospitals Group, has a continuing hospital partnership in the People’s Republic of China.

I draw the House’s attention to the words of the British Medical Association, which describes China as a country where there is

“evidence of medical involvement in the Chinese state’s genocide against Uyghur people”,

and the statement of the China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, which describes the “significant scale” of enforced organ harvesting throughout China, all of which should surely encourage us to think very seriously about what more we can do, as we did on the Health and Care Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said. All of us who heard the arguments then went into the Lobbies to support him, and I hope that if it becomes necessary—which I hope it will not—we will do the same tonight.

I am also a signatory to Amendment 141, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud. This is an argument, again, that we have had in previous legislation—again in the health Bill—about the use of slave labour in Xinjiang. I draw attention to my being vice-chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Uyghurs. It is an issue that I have raised again and again, and mentioned here again during debates on this Bill on Monday last. I will not try to curtain-raise for the noble Baroness—she is more than capable of doing that for herself.

My purpose, therefore, in rising, is to specifically draw attention to and speak to the cross-party Amendment 94, which is in my name and, not for the first time, in the name of my noble friend Lord Blencathra —to use a phrase the Minister used earlier on. I do so because the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is my noble friend in so many respects, and we have joined common forces. Old Chief Whips should stand together on such matters, and I am always pleased to be in the same Lobby as the noble Lord. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, who has been so formidable, and the noble Lord, Lord Fox, who again has been formidable on these issues throughout, are also signatories to this amendment.

The amendment would require the Government to set out a timetable. In a way, we have already been given half a cake, and I want again to be grateful to the noble Baroness. She was able to say to me that she accepts the substance of our case, but what she has not been able to accept—I hope we will convince her to do so this evening—is that there should be a timetable determining when we will prevent further surveillance cameras entering the United Kingdom and being placed often in very sensitive positions, as I will describe. This amendment would remove them from the Government’s procurement supply chain where there is established evidence that the supplier has been involved in modern slavery, genocide or crimes against humanity.

It is particularly topical, as we read reports today of the use of surveillance technology in arresting, imprisoning and re-educating protesters caught up in the wave of unrest in China. There are reports in British and American newspapers today about how surveillance technology—some of the very things we are debating in this amendment—has been used to arrest young people, who then have the whole of their personal histories seen through the devices that they own. Some of their friends have been arrested as a result of access to that information and been arraigned in police stations.

As a result of the hangover from the Government’s so-called “golden era” of relations with the PRC, which the Prime Minister said in his Mansion House speech on Monday was over, we have allowed our surveillance and technology supply chain to be dominated by Chinese surveillance companies with credible links to the genocide taking place in the Uighur region. I am not using that word in a rhetorical way. It was a word used by the former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, Liz Truss; it was her word that “genocide” was under way in Xinjiang. It is a word that Secretary of State Blinken has used in describing events there, and many others have, too.

Both Hikvision and Dahua Technology, two of the companies in question, have been blacklisted in the USA for their links to the internment camps in Xinjiang and their role working hand-in-glove with the CCP to construct the largest authoritarian surveillance state, which has surpassed even George Orwell’s wildest dreams. There is little distinction between these Chinese technology companies and the state that they serve. They not only work on behalf of the PRC but receive generous state subsidies to do so, which allows them to undercut their rivals and dominate the domestic UK market.

It is therefore little surprise that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has attacked any notion of the United Kingdom Government banning the use of Hikvision and Dahua cameras as “unreasonable suppression” of Chinese companies. I appreciate the engagement from Ministers on this topic, from the noble Baroness but also the noble Lord, Lord True, who met with me privately on this matter on a couple of occasions. During one of those meetings, we were told that there are now 1 million—I repeat, 1 million—Hikvision cameras in the United Kingdom alone.

The announcement last week, then, by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster that the Government are following the example of the Department of Health and Social Care in banning Hikvision cameras from sensitive areas and removing existing cameras from the network, which mirrors the action from the US that I have just referred to, and has just finalised a permanent ban on the sale and import of Hikvision and Dahua Technology cameras, is a welcome one. This is an issue which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and I have raised on the Floor of the House in regret Motions, in months gone by and in previous debates.

Now that the Government have finally recognised the security and human rights concerns of having Hikvision and Dahua cameras in government departments, the question arises: will they commit to a plan for their removal from the public sector supply chain in its entirety? That is what the amendment is about. As the Government will note, successive freedom of information requests from IPVM, Big Brother Watch and Free Tibet, and Parliamentary Questions, have revealed that Hikvision and Dahua are deeply entrenched in our public sector supply chain. Local councils, NHS trusts, schools, prisons, jobcentres and our railway network all have Hikvision and Dahua cameras in their supply chain and their physical infrastructure.

Do we really want the prying eyes of an authoritarian state that has been accused of genocide, and which, as the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, said just last month, is the

“biggest state based threat to our economic security”,

in our schools, hospitals, and local council buildings? Similarly, how can the Government justify public contracts and taxpayers’ money going into companies where there are credible links of complicity in genocide and the internment camps in Xinjiang? This requires more than “robust pragmatism”, whatever that may mean.

The Government urgently need to come forward with a strategy to remove Hikvision and Dahua Technology cameras from the whole of the procurement supply chain. In the words of the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner, Fraser Sampson, whom I met last month, these cameras are built on “digital asbestos”. We need a serious government-led plan for their removal. That might take several years. It is the same issue that we had to face with Huawei. We should also develop technology to mitigate the risks these cameras pose in the meantime. We can do that by looking at issues such as connectivity through software, which Canadians are developing at the present time, which might not require the physical removal of all cameras.

Such a plan could emulate a similar timetable that Ministers set out in the then Telecoms (Security) Bill—to which I moved amendments—for the removal of Huawei from the UK’s 5G network. This would include setting a hard date to phase out and remove Hikvision and Dahua technology and hardware from the procurement supply chain; looking at provision and support that can be offered to cash-strapped local authorities to help with the removal; and considering following the USA in banning the sale and import of these cameras in the United Kingdom.

I welcome the leadership that Ministers have shown recently in banning the use of Hikvision and Dahua cameras in government departments, but I urge them to consider applying that same leadership to the rest of the procurement supply chain. The Government are no longer saying that they are unaware of the security and ethical concerns of using these cameras and they cannot wish away the existence of these cameras in the wider procurement supply chain. We need an urgent timetable and a plan to remove Hikvision and Dahua from the UK supply chain in its entirety. I hope the Minister will further consider accepting the entirety of this amendment so that such a timetable and plan will be put in place.

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 141, which is in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Alton and Lord Coaker, and of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, demonstrating cross-party support for it. I add my support to the other amendments in this group.

I also underline my gratitude to the Government and my noble friend the Minister for seriously engaging with the amendment over the summer. I know that we share a desire to mitigate the two key risk areas in public procurement that the amendment covers: first, the possible UK dependency on authoritarian states; and, secondly, the risk of modern slavery in government supply chains. I covered these areas in Committee, so I will keep my comments brief and seek to address any concerns that my noble friend might have raised.

To recap, proposed new subsection (1) would place a burden on the Secretary of State to create regulations that reduce public bodies’ dependency on authoritarian states. As we know, there is no agreed definition of what constitutes an “authoritarian state” in UK law or regulation. Therefore, proposed new subsection (2) would adopt the categorisation contained in the integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy, allowing the legislation to adapt to contemporary geopolitical developments in line with the latest iteration of the review. The countries the amendment would currently apply to as “threats” are Iran, Russia and North Korea, and, as a “systemic competitor”, China. As we have heard, this perspective on China was reiterated by the Prime Minister only this week.