UK-France Migration: Co-operation

Lord Empey Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. Let me put him at ease. I am not having a bit of fun with the previous Government; I am imploring the House to understand what the pressures were under the previous Government, the lack of action—that is a political opinion and my view—and how, as well as the borders and security Bill, the measures that we have taken with Belgium, Holland, Germany and, in this last week, France, in the agreement between President Macron and the Prime Minister, are designed to do what the whole House has a shared objective on, which is to reduce the crossings, hold those criminals to account and break their business model. That is what we are trying to do.

The noble Lord asks when the scheme will come into play. We plan to do the scheme by the summer, which is a definitive date. I suspect that the proposal is for the next five to six weeks, but the summer is our aim. We have not yet set a date to monitor and evaluate the pilots, but, self-evidently, it is in the interests of France, the UK and the people who are being trafficked to smash the gangs as soon as possible and ensure that we provide an upscaling of the scheme as soon as possible. I hope the noble Lord will give a fair wind to what I think will still be a deterrent. We will return to that after the Recess, to be questioned and subject to scrutiny in September, which I regard as the early autumn and late summer.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, the Minister referred to a number of his international engagements, but one thing the Government are stubbornly refusing to look at is discussing with our allies a revision of the 1951 European refugee convention. I have asked Parliamentary Questions twice and both have come back with a negative response. It seems to me that talking to allies about something that was done after World War II which is relevant to all this is worth doing, and I hope the Government will do that.

While in broad terms I do not resile from the fact that the Minister is having a go at all this, and I am quite supportive of that, I am far from convinced that the European Union will be happy with it, for a variety of reasons. I hope it works, but it will have no impact whatever on the total increase in our population, which is the thing that we are studiously ignoring in this Parliament and have been for 20 years. Even in a good week, we are still increasing our population by 10,000 people per week. In 2023, we were increasing our population by 23,000 people a week, but no one in the Government or Parliament seems to join the dots between that and the housing shortage, health waiting lists and a stagnant economy.

I will support the Minister in all the measures he has taken with our European allies because I think they can be small contributing parts, and of course the Rwanda scheme never got off the ground and so we will never know whether it would have worked. The fact is that the gangs are not smashed; they are still trading well and they have weeks of good weather ahead of them. I hope that, when we come back after the Summer Recess, we are not sitting here talking about numbers still being 56% up. This scheme must be designed as a deterrent but there are many other pull factors, including our legal approach to all this and how we are dealing with it, subsidising legal actions against our own Government. That in and of itself creates a pull factor.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises a number of key points. As a Government, we are committed to our international obligations. The noble Lord mentioned the 1951 convention. As he knows, a letter has been circulated by some European Union member states calling for that to be examined. We want to maintain our international obligations, and it is important that we do so. In doing that, we still have to undertake the actions mentioned—I am thankful for the noble Lord’s support on those today—as well as other actions.

The noble Lord mentioned the EU’s interests. On 30 March and 1 April this year, we had a border security summit on organised crime that brought together 50 countries that are impacted by this, including key members of the European Union such as Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, and other countries such as Turkey, Tunisia, Bulgaria, Albania, Nigeria and Pakistan. It is very important that those longer-term issues are addressed.

The people who arrive in northern France have usually entered the European Union via southern Italy or Greece, and sometimes via the borders of Poland and eastern Europe. It is in the EU’s interests to examine the French-British scheme and to ensure, if there are positive lessons to be learned, that it is expanded. It is in nobody’s interest to have criminal gangs operating throughout the EU and in the United Kingdom and the channel. As well as the challenges of that movement, the profits those criminal gangs make are going into drugs, guns and other activity that fuels further crime. I hope that the noble Lord’s fears will not be realised and that we can take action.

The noble Lord said that a large number of people are arriving here. I point him to the figure of 10,191 asylum-related returns that took place last year because of the speeding-up of the asylum-claim process. We are speeding up the asylum-claim process and weeding out those people who have paid for a small boat trip and arrived in the UK but have no legitimate asylum claim whatever, having arrived as economic migrants who did not go through a legal route. Those people are being removed.