Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Archbishop of Canterbury Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th June 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

139C: After Clause 60, insert the following new Clause—
“Ten-year strategy on human trafficking(1) The Secretary of State must prepare a ten-year strategy for tackling human trafficking to the UK through collaboration with signatories to the European Convention against Trafficking or any other international agreement on human trafficking.(2) The Secretary of State must make and lay before Parliament a statement of policies for implementing the strategy.(3) The first statement must be made within twelve months of the passing of this Act; and a subsequent statement must be made within twelve months of the making of the previous statement.(4) A Minister of the Crown must, within 28 sitting days of the statement being laid before Parliament, table a motion for resolution in each House of Parliament in relation to the statement.(5) “Ten-year strategy” means a strategy for the period of ten years beginning with the day on which preparation of the strategy is completed.(6) “The European Convention against Trafficking” means the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings done at Warsaw on 16th May 2005.(7) A “sitting day”, in relation to each House of Parliament, means a day on which that House begins to sit.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to have a ten-year strategy for collaborating internationally to tackle human trafficking into the UK.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, I introduce Amendment 139C, tabled in my name, and Amendment 144A, which is consequential to it. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett, Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, for co-signing it.

The amendment requires the Secretary of State to prepare a 10-year strategy for tackling human trafficking, in collaboration with international partners on this issue. A statement of policies for implementing the strategy must be presented to Parliament within a year of the Bill becoming law and every following year. Each time that a statement is made, an opportunity must be given for both Houses to debate and vote on it via a Motion for resolution.

The amendment, and my second amendment, relating to a 10-year strategy for an international refugee policy, are far from wrecking or negative amendments but seek to improve the Bill, as is our duty and right in this House. As I said at Second Reading, we need a Bill to reform migration and we need to stop the boats, but this Bill does not contain within it a sense of the long- term and global nature of the challenges that we face. To deal with global challenges, we need to engage in international collaboration towards global solutions.

The trade in people is one such global challenge. In 2022, in the UK, there were 16,938 potential victims of modern slavery referred to the Home Office via the NRM—a 33% increase compared to the preceding year and the highest annual number since the NRM began in 2009. The real number of victims in the UK may be much higher. Walk Free’s global slavery index believes that there could be more than 100,000 victims living in slavery in the UK. However, that same index found that, globally, 50 million people were living in modern slavery in the world on any given day in 2021 —a 10 million increase since the 2018 index.

Not all forms of slavery counted in this number will involve people trafficking, but a significant number will have been trafficked at some point in their story of exploitation. In the UK, we are often dealing with the very end of what is a global supply chain. If we want truly to have an impact on the root of the problem, we need to follow the supply chain of trafficking back to its source and target the traffickers there and at every step along the way to people eventually arriving here. A cross-border trade requires cross-border solutions. We have long agreed that when it comes to drugs.

The Anglican Communion has a helpful perspective here, as it is present in 165 countries around the world. There are Anglicans and other people of faith present in both source and destination countries for migration and trafficking. Since 2014, the Anglican Alliance has been working on these issues in partnership with the Salvation Army, Caritas Internationalis and the Clewer Initiative, among others, convening global and regional consultations, developing toolkits to equip churches, and establishing regional and interregional communities of practice. The global reach and connectedness of the Anglican Communion allows us to connect up work that is going on upstream and downstream in the supply chain, to help to ensure that migration happens safely and to prevent trafficking and other forms of exploitation.

The Clewer Initiative, the Church of England’s national work to combat modern slavery, has also been working since 2020 with the World Council of Churches to challenge issues of modern slavery. One part of the focus is to facilitate networking between churches and partners in countries of origin and those in countries of arrival to enable collaboration and broader strategy. Ending human trafficking was mentioned explicitly in the targets of the UN sustainable development goals 5, 8 and 16, to be achieved by 2030. However, progress has been slow, and as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has highlighted, national responses, particularly in developing states, appear to be deteriorating. Detection rates fell by 11% in 2020 and convictions fell by 27%, which it says illustrates

“a worldwide slowdown in the criminal justice response to trafficking”.

I am sure that all in this Committee agree that our target should be the total eradication of this evil, and that part of the 10-year strategy being proposed here should be plans for collaboration with international partners to set up an international anti-trafficking force, funded by Governments and mandated with the authority to target and arrest human traffickers wherever they might be found. That would be taking action upstream, focusing on the traffickers rather than their victims—an incidental effect of this Bill—and getting us closer to addressing the root of the issue. We did something similar with 17th-century piracy and 19th-century slave-trading, where we led the world. This is an equally serious crime, and we must go after perpetrators with speed and accuracy and the full force of international law.

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[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

No, I certainly did not say that the Government do not believe in strategy.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, it is as likely that the Government did not believe in strategy as to find that a bishop did not believe in God.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

It is an optional extra.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

Without wishing to channel “Yes, Prime Minister”.

I am very grateful, in addition to those who so kindly co-signed the amendment, to noble Lords who contributed to this debate: the noble Lords, Lord Hannay, Lord German, Lord Paddick and Lord Coaker. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, really worried me, because every time he said something, I found it was in my speech on the next group. That is going to make the speech shorter, which is a great advantage, but it does slightly worry me as to whether he has a hitherto unsuspected hacking habit.

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Moved by

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

139D: After Clause 60, insert the following new Clause—
“Ten-year strategy on refugees(1) The Secretary of State must prepare a ten-year strategy for tackling refugee crises driving people to enter the UK as refugees through collaboration with signatories to the Refugee Convention or any other international agreement on the rights of refugees.(2) The Secretary of State must make and lay before Parliament a statement of policies for implementing the strategy.(3) The first statement must be made within twelve months of the passing of this Act; and a subsequent statement for the strategy must be made within twelve months of the making of the previous statement. (4) A Minister of the Crown must, within 28 sitting days of the statement being laid before Parliament, table a motion for resolution in each House of Parliament in relation to the statement.(5) “Ten-year strategy” means a strategy for the period of ten years beginning with the day on which preparation of the strategy is completed.(6) “The Refugee Convention” means the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees done at Geneva on 28th July 1951 and its Protocol.(7) A “sitting day”, in relation to each House of Parliament, means a day on which that House begins to sit.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to have a ten-year strategy for collaborating internationally to tackle refugee crises driving people to enter the UK as refugees.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, I hope this section may be a bit shorter. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, already knows, because he just said it, I am rising to introduce Amendment 139D tabled in my name and Amendment 144B, which is consequential to it. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and the noble Lords, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth and Lord Blunkett, for co-signing it. I have had letters of apology from the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who are not able to be here for very good and sufficient reasons.

I particularly appreciate when we come to this that the Government are taking action—I am not suggesting for a moment that they are not. The Chişinău statement made in Moldova recently by the Prime Minister was striking, as were the recent raids by the National Crime Agency in tackling criminals involved in this area.

This amendment mandates the Secretary of State to produce a 10-year strategy for tackling the global refugee crisis—I do say “crisis”—working in collaboration with signatories to the 1951 refugee convention and others. As with human trafficking, a statement of policies for implementing the strategy must be presented to Parliament within a year of the Bill becoming law and every following year. Of course, a subsequent Government can change that. Each time a statement is made, an opportunity must be given for both Houses to debate and vote on it via a Motion for resolution.

As with my previous amendment, Amendment 139C, this amendment is intended to require the Government to consider the long-term global nature of the refugee crisis, only a very small part of which—a minute, almost unmeasurably small part of which—are we seeing on our shores in Dover, in the Canterbury diocese which I serve and where we work extremely hard with those who are arriving. This Bill currently focuses solely on our domestic situation; the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, spoke very eloquently on that in the last group. It proposes action that not only is unlikely to achieve its aim domestically but also undermines the principles of the global refugee system, which the UK was influential in setting up in the first place. The call for a 10-year strategy for international collaboration on the refugee crisis is an attempt to address this by requiring the Government to look beyond our shores and into the longer term, and to lead internationally, as this country should and as it did in 1951.

On the global crisis, some figures have come but they were for the middle of 2022: I happen to have the ones for the end of 2022 and they are worse. At the end of 2022, there were 108.4 million people displaced; 35.3 million were refugees; 62.5 million were internally displaced; and 5.4 million were seeking asylum. As I said at Second Reading, conflict and climate change mean that these numbers are predicted widely to increase as much as tenfold in the next 25 years. The number arriving in small boats in the UK—45,755 in 2022—is tiny when set in such a horrifying context. Other countries, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said, are taking far more refugees. Turkey alone was hosting nearly 3.6 million at the end of 2022. It is greatly to be admired, as are Rwanda, Uganda, the DRC and South Sudan, itself after 10 years of civil war having received almost three-quarters of a million people since the war broke out in Khartoum a few weeks ago.

Many other European countries also are taking more, including France and Germany. It is not a competition, but the UK ranked 18th in Europe for our intake of asylum applications per head of the population in the year ending September 2021. Most crucially, 76% of refugees are being hosted in low and middle-income countries—countries infinitely poorer than our own—and 70% in countries neighbouring their home countries. It is neither morally right nor strategically sensible to fail to engage with the global context or to leave other countries to deal with the crisis alone. Doing so damages our reputation as a nation, but it also risks unbearable pressures being placed on other countries and the possibility of state collapse and an ever-growing avalanche of further numbers of refugees across the world, adding to the problems we face.

The 1951 convention is a fundamental bedrock for the care and protection of refugees. To be very clear, this amendment is not proposing that the convention be scrapped or rewritten, where there might be a risk of it being watered down and protections removed. Instead, I am suggesting that the convention should be built upon and added to for the very different context we face today from 1951.

One area where work is needed is clarity on protection for certain types of refugee, such as those fleeing due to climate change or gender-based violence, who are not currently covered, or consistently covered, by the convention and would find themselves in great trouble under this Bill. Another is clarity on the allocation of state responsibility for refugees, including the safe third country principle, and the support for countries dealing with far greater numbers of refugees. Professor Alexander Betts, Enver Solomon and others have proposed a possible approach for this in the form of a state-led solidarity pact, an intergovernmental coalition of donor and host countries which clarifies respective state responsibilities and is supported by what they call the global refugee fund, administered to support host countries affected by large refugee movements.

Although the European Union’s agreement on migration, announced just in the last day or two, is a major step forward, it does not go as far as this. It does however give an example of numerous countries working out how to share their burden, and when the burden is so huge, that must be the way we go.

There have been many suggested policies and alternatives presented in this area and I am not going to waste your Lordships’ time by going into detail on them. This amendment does not specify exactly what should be pursued; it simply mandates the Government to engage seriously with other countries about the options through existing groups such as the Global Refugee Forum—whose meetings I understand the Foreign Office attends but not the Home Office, though I am happy to be corrected by the Minister. Given that refugees under this Bill come under the Home Office, that would seem to be something that might be changed. The amendment further mandates the Government to report back to Parliament annually on action and progress.

Again, if the Minister replies, as I anticipate, by saying that the Government already have longer-term strategies and that this Bill and amendment are not the place for them, I ask him to explain clearly the one place and one plan where we can find them. What guarantees are there that the Government are working and will continue to work with international partners? The amendment seeks to ensure that this Government and future Governments have to consider this rather than focus solely on the domestic context.

I regret that to date there has been little agreement in this Committee between Ministers and those on these Benches or, in fact, any other Benches—and, of course, the previous amendment was supported by every Bench, including the Conservative Benches. I wish to make it entirely clear that we are always willing to work in close partnership, as we have done with the Government on community sponsorship, on receiving Ukrainian citizens fleeing that terrible war and many other projects, including interfaith projects.

If the Government as part of their strategy wish to work in partnership with faith groups and NGOs to identify and support refugees anywhere in the world where we have a presence, we would be delighted to work with them—we normally have excellent sources of information on such things. We want the UK again to be a moral leader on the world stage. We are more than capable of it. A global crisis requires global solutions, and we need to develop them now. If all other counties adopted the approach the UK Government are taking with this Bill, the whole international refugee system would collapse. That is not in our interests—regardless of morality, purely pragmatically—nor any other country’s, never mind those in need of protection.

I urge the Government to take an opportunity for the UK to lead again in the care for and protection of refugees as we have in the past, to set their sights on effective, equitable long-term solutions to this crisis, working with international partners. In this amendment we seek, as were quite rightly challenged to do by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, to put forward a practical solution with practical ways of dealing with this and practical outcomes. If the Government have other ways of achieving the same ends which give security for the plans, I am very happy, as are my colleagues, to meet the Minister and discuss how that can be done. In the meantime, I beg to move.

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While I have sympathy for the underlying issues that this amendment seeks to explore, I am again not persuaded that it would be appropriate to legislate for a 10-year strategy as proposed here. Of course, we need to take a long-term view of these, but we need also to tackle the here and now, and the challenges we face this year, not in years to come. Combating the tens of thousands seeking to enter the country through the dangerous and illegal channel crossings is properly the focus of the Bill. Having had the opportunity to air these issues, I invite the most reverend Primate to withdraw his amendment.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, I am very grateful to those who have contributed, as well as the co-signatories to the amendment, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord German, in encouraging us to look beyond ourselves. I accept willingly—well, reluctantly—the apology from the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for going to Oxford.

I was very worried about what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham was about to say; if you had sat with him over the last 10 years in the House of Bishops, you would be worried too. But it is well known that, on these Benches, we do not use whips—I leave the imagination of noble Lords to run riot. In fact, over the past 10 years, I have noticed that, when it comes to Report, as often as not these Benches cancel themselves out by voting in different directions. So when the Minister is doing his calculations, he may find that encouraging.

Turning to what the Minister said, I am again disappointed but not surprised. But I genuinely think that it is unwise—I am not saying that it is bad, just unwise. Surely the role of Parliament is to contribute to the Government’s thinking and to call them to account, and to do that not by having to burrow into the highways and byways of policy and commitment but to be able, as we do on defence and other areas where strategies are published, to have the opportunity to look at the whole at once and take a global view. Not being able to do that is, I think, not of advantage to the way this country is governed or to what the Government do or, particularly, to the way that this House operates.

I am happy to be corrected but I think the Minister slightly misunderstood the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in suggesting that he said that Britain could not take a lead and it had to be the UN. I think it was more or less the opposite. One of the great privileges of the last few years has been to have a growing relationship with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, with whom we work extensively in Mozambique, the DRC and other places, through our local bishops and clergy. One of the things he would say again and again is that for the UN to work it needs leadership, not from within but from members of the P5. Their leadership makes an enormous difference. This country provided the first Secretary-General as one of the key founders of the United Nations. Of course we should do it through the United Nations—no one could doubt that—but what is there in us that we should lose confidence in our ability to lead the world? We have done it for hundreds of years, morally and brilliantly at times. Let us regain our confidence and not hide back and hope that someone else creeps forward on to the front line to deal with this issue. I appeal to the Minister: let there be less fear and more faith in this country. It deserves it.

Finally, there is one other way of dealing with this—the boats must be stopped—which is by increasing the speed of returns and getting the current system working effectively and efficiently. We can make an enormous difference, and not be putting people on barges. I was in Weymouth, in Salisbury diocese, over the weekend, meeting 130 community leaders. There is going to be a barge in Weymouth Harbour; it is being fitted out at the moment and will be there in the next few days, I believe. The mayors and the MPs were there— everyone was there—and I asked how much consultation there had been from the Government. The answer was none whatever—none, zero, zilch. That is an example of the consequences of lack of strategy. Strategy sends a group of people down from the Home Office, a task force, to work with local people. As the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said, we are a kind, hospitable and gentle nation who would receive people happily.

I am aware of the time—it is almost 10.40 pm. I feel that there are probably two minutes more of words that I need to say.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I thought the most reverend Primate the Archbishop would welcome my support for what he said about our country regaining its confidence. To reassure the Minister, I was talking about the international bodies, and the United Nations in particular, but with Britain playing a leadership role in those organisations to bring about the change that we would all want to see across the world. I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for allowing me to reinforce the point he made on my behalf; it is an exceedingly important one.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. This is an international problem, and it requires an international strategy. Britain has the capacity to deliver it and lead on it. We must stop the boats. We require an international approach to do that.

We must control our borders. That cannot be done simply by cutting off people who arrive; it must be done by cutting them off far further back. To cut them off simply when they arrive is like what happens in the parts of the Diocese of Canterbury which are prone to flooding: thinking that by putting up sandbags at the front door, you can stop the water coming in round the back.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

The point was made earlier in relation to the previous amendment about our international obligations: we cannot expect international collaboration and to provide the kind of leadership that is being talked about if we do not meet our international obligations. One criticism of the Bill is that it does not do so, and that it undermines our international obligations.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and the noble Baroness have made the same point with great eloquence. It is obviously essential.

I have a final quote. I am going to quote the Bible —I am sorry about that but it is sort of my job. It comes from the Old Testament, where one of the prophets asks: “What are we called to do?” We are called to love mercy, to act justly and to walk humbly with our God. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 139D withdrawn.