Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Faulks and Lord Gascoigne

Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My Lords, I am conscious that this has been a long group already, and I know that the Government Whips will be staring at me with glaring eyes. I did not intend to speak in this debate; this is my first raising of my head into the fray of the Bill. I was listening to what my noble friend and others have said. As some will recall, I was answering from the Dispatch Box on behalf of the Home Office at the tail end of the last Government, and I confess to the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, that, I am sorry to say, I was involved in the drafting of the then Rwanda deal in No. 10 when one of the previous Prime Ministers was there. It was good then; it is good now.

[Lord Faulks (Non-Afl)]

The noble Lord says that it was good. There was a provision in the Rwanda Bill which said that, notwithstanding deeming that Rwanda was safe, it might not be safe for the individual, so the Bill would not even have worked.

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

I suppose that was a slight defect of the Bill, but that ship has sailed. The crucial point, which I will come back to—and I respect the noble Lord enormously—is that the Rwanda deal had a deterrent, and that is what we are lacking. It may have been only for small numbers, not anywhere near the numbers we wanted, but it was a deterrent. It was one part of a series of steps that we should have taken, but, as I say, that ship has sailed.

I am backing the amendments from my noble friend Lord Murray and my noble friends on my Front Bench, certainly not because I have been asked or told to, and, as my noble friend Lord Jackson said, this is not about pulling out of the ECHR or the refugee convention, nor—as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, was saying—about saying that we do not want to accept any refugees, but because it is about tackling illegal migration and the crossings we have had.

We have seen one so-called spectre raise its head today in the form of the elected President of the United States. There is another spectre on the horizon that we have not yet heard about, but I am sure we will at some stage: Reform UK and Farage. It is certainly not a view that I share, nor is it that of Reform voters. I am not saying that the Ministers do not know this, but I echo what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said: outside this hallowed hall there is a genuine, deep, growing sense of unease, anger and frustration, which is building. I know that it is not unique to this Government, as it has been growing for some time, but it has grown exponentially of late because of this sense of injustice and lack of control.

As I think the Government have said—which the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, alluded to—crucially, we need a deterrent to tackle the crossings. We have to grip this; we have to tackle the numbers and, as I think my noble friend Lord Goschen was saying, we have to tackle the pull factor. There is no deterrent in the Bill as it currently stands. That is why I wholeheartedly support my noble friend, and the two amendments from my Front Bench.