Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 5th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I think I have taken enough interventions.

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[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

As I say, I am afraid the impact assessment will be published in due course.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My noble friend must accept that the Bill can be expedited and the House can be satisfied if a proper impact assessment is produced in time for Report. The whole purpose of Committee is to probe, as we are doing this afternoon and so on. However, when it comes to Report, when the House has to make significant decisions on the most sensitive piece of legislation that has been before Parliament for a very long time, it is crucial that we have all the facts at our disposal.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

Of course, I hear what my noble friend says.

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[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, it is a challenge for a mere male to follow the three previous speakers, but my name is on Amendment 22, so I must attempt it. Amendment 22 would prevent unaccompanied children being automatically deemed inadmissible if they came by an irregular route.

Overall, 86% of the unaccompanied children currently going through the asylum process are given permission to stay, including nearly 100%—over 99%—from Afghanistan, over 99% from Eritrea and over 96% from Sudan. But only 6% of these children granted protection and found to have a valid case for asylum here came through the official government schemes. They had to come by an irregular route because there was no other way for them. Putting these two facts together, the Bill asks us to rule out the possibility of even considering the vast majority of unaccompanied children’s cases. That seems not to be in keeping with British tradition, and it is certainly not in keeping with Articles 3 and 22 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989.

Therefore, although I support all the amendments in this group, I strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, to which I added my name.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, spoke movingly about her connections with the Conservative Party. Along with my good and noble friend Lord Tugendhat, I was privileged to enter the other place on 18 June 1970, almost 53 years ago, along with her brother Michael Havers, who of course became a distinguished Lord Chancellor and, tragically, died very young. But, when she made those references, I thought of him and us, and I thought that our motivation could be summed up in that well-known term “one-nation Conservative”. I am extremely proud of what my party has done over the centuries—it has a long history—and I am troubled about some of the Bill’s implications.

I apologise for not being able to take part at Second Reading, because of my wife’s illness. This is my first full day back, as it were, although I will be off again soon. I thought of those great figures of the past: my parliamentary hero, William Wilberforce, as well as Shaftesbury and others. They could not have signed up to what is before us today.

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[Noble Lords]

He’s not listening!

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

I hope my noble friend is listening, because I hope he will realise that he too is an inheritor of a great Conservative tradition; we must not be a Government who turn our back on that. Of course, the problem that the Bill is seeking to deal with is real, but it can be dealt with using a greater degree of sensitivity, generosity and, I dare say, Christianity. I urge him to take on board the points that have been made this afternoon, particularly by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss.

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I will return to the amendments, particularly Amendment 22. I think that the Committee will permit me to refer briefly to the impact assessment argument, because it has a particular relevance to Amendment 22. The charity Safe Passage, some time after the Bill was first published, sent a freedom of information request to the Home Office to ask about the number of unaccompanied children who would be affected by the Bill—that is to say, those arriving in the UK through irregular means, including via small boats. The response stated that

“the Home Office does not hold the information you have requested. Whilst our reporting centres can ascertain the age of someone at the point of an event, we cannot establish from our electronic datasets who is accompanied or unaccompanied”.

That means the Government have no idea of the number of unaccompanied children that will be impacted by the provisions of the Bill.

I do not think that I need to say any more—because the argument about the impact assessment has been well aired already—except for one further thought. If the Government have no idea what the effect of the Bill will be, or any particular part of the Bill, I do not understand why they are putting it forward. That point has already been made, but it still puzzles me.

The point of my amendment is to exempt from inadmissibility claims for unaccompanied children, as has already been referred to in some of the other amendments. Under Clause 4(2), those claims will not be considered; they will have no right of appeal; and there will be no possibility of considering such a claim. Although the argument has already been put forward in some of the other amendments, it is a fundamental point, because the children from the countries with very high grant rates for refugee status are forced to make dangerous journeys because there are very limited options for safe routes to the UK. Many of the children come from those countries, and, of those children who have had their cases determined, the vast majority were permitted to stay and rebuild their lives in the UK under the present legislation. That means that the equivalent of those children who are now coming would not be allowed to stay, regardless of the merits of their claim under either the 1951 Geneva convention or the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I want to make two or three other points. If a child is to be removed on reaching their 18th birthday, unless they are actually in detention they will quite sensibly say, “I do not want to go back. I am frightened of going back to where I escaped from”. They will disappear—of course they will. We would all do that if we were in their position; we would not hesitate. It seems to me that we are in danger of saying that we are going to lock them up until their 18th birthday before removing them. It is a preposterous policy.

The Government’s history on children has been somewhat mixed. I remember in the 2016 Act I put forward an amendment for unaccompanied children to come here, and it eventually passed both Houses—it went back once or twice—and became part of the Act. The Government then said: “Ah, but it applies only to 480 children”. That was an arbitrary figure, plucked out of the air, for which there was no rationale at all, except that the Government said that local authorities could not provide foster places, which was quickly disproved.

We then got on to the 2017 Act, at the time when the future of the Dublin treaty—or certainly the parts under which asylum-seeking children in one EU country could claim to join their families in another EU country—was in jeopardy. We passed an amendment in this House that the Government should negotiate to retain the provisions of the treaty. That was eventually accepted, having gone through both Houses. In the 2019 Act, the Government simply removed it. Without wishing to go into long periods of history, I was incensed about all these things but particularly incensed about that.

An upshot was that I was invited to a meeting with three government Ministers and seven officials, including one from the Cabinet Office, to engage in a discussion about the rights of children. I found that quite flattering—I thought the odds of 10:1 were quite favourable to me, given who was on the other side. I was given assurances. One of the Commons Ministers said: “Don’t you trust me?” I looked him in the eye and I lied: “Yes, I trust you, but I don’t trust the Government”—so it was half true—“And anyway, who is to say that you will be in your job in few weeks’ time?” He was not; he was moved on, and I am not sure whether he is in the Government now or not. But I was given certain assurances that were not adhered to, and the number of unaccompanied children who came fell rapidly from that point on.

The Government have in the past given assurances about unaccompanied children and they simply have not stuck to them. That is why I believe that this amendment is important. It will protect the rights of some of the most vulnerable young people fleeing from appalling horrors such as war, enforced conscription into armies, threats of torture and parents being killed. These are terrible things, and we are saying to them that it they get to this country other than by a prescribed route, of which there are hardly any, we will not consider their claim. That is appalling.