Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules

Lord German Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2026 Grand Committee

I have one more question to put to the Minister. I note that the Home Office, speaking to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, said that it expected that between 400 and 600 cases per year would be eligible for this process. This compares to about 128,000 people receiving initial asylum decisions in March 2026. What savings do the Government expect? It is hard to see for what reasons, other than cost savings, this is being implemented. What savings do the Government expect to be made from this change? Are they not concerned that there will be further costs—both human and financial—down the line if bad decisions are made?

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I first declare my interest that, like others, I am helped and supported by the RAMP organisation. I thank those who have already spoken. A huge number of remarks and questions have been addressed to the new Minister; in that context, I welcome him. He may not be as happy as he would like in this particular role because this topic of course causes great controversy within our House. An enormous number of issues need to be raised and dealt with, and we expect to find answers from the Home Office which are sometimes lacking.

Having previously spent three years as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, I am able to recognise an excoriating report when I see one, and this is clearly such a report. It is not often that the committee goes to such lengths to make such important points when it does not get answers from the department concerned. The challenge is that the committee itself will address its concerns back to the Home Office and will get answers from it. If it does not get the answers, that will be mentioned in the report and when it does not find that the answers are sufficient it will mention that, too. This report does that and Members on all sides have said clearly that there are questions to be raised and questions that need to be answered as a result.

I am glad about the changed name. When you merge things, you are perhaps supposed to do the merging in turn, but it was clearly an unsuitable title and I am glad that it has been changed, even though it now presents perhaps the same critique and problems that the original title suggested anyway. One of the challenges we face in addressing this issue in this changed piece of guidance and legislation is whether it is a minor change or a major change. I draw on my musical experience here. Things that are minor are usually sad and things that are major are things that we can judge in a more content manner. Clearly, this is not something which can be treated as being of a minor nature.

Paragraph 10 of the report notes that these words were deleted:

“Where the personal interview is omitted, the applicant and dependents shall be given a reasonable opportunity to submit further information”.


The deletion of that sentence suggests that applicants may not be able to suspend the decision-making process to seek expert advice. The major change here is an operational one, bringing together two systems to try to shorten the process for a small number of cases, so we are assured.

What we do in this country and the way we address people’s individual needs for protection are judged against that background. People are not part of cohorts and not to be treated as part of some system that systemically makes things easier; every case deserves to be looked at on its merits. The individuality of assessments is not just present in this country but across the whole of Europe, though sometimes we have to pull those changes up and look at them in a critical way as well.

When you put together two systems, remove such a sentence and make this operational change, which is of some significance because you are reducing the opportunity of individual assessment, it is right that people around this Room ask: where is the legal aid provision? Where is the advice? Where is the training for those who will support people who are genuinely suffering from trauma and other mental health problems that come with the journeys that they have been on?

People faced with life-or-death decisions leave in a traumatic state. That state does not improve just because they have arrived here. They are nervous and their understanding of what will happen to them needs to be addressed. That is why a personalised assessment is so important. The problem with what we have before us is that there was no consultation, not even with the Government’s own consultative body. That was brought in just with the intent of speeding up the process. There was no impact assessment, because the Government maintain that it a minor change rather than a major one. I maintain that the operational aspects are entirely different from what they were before. For people going through this system, the nature of the operation is now entirely different—before there would be a process by which people’s cases would be individually understood.

Finally, as the report says, and as we have asked for, when the Government make changes to the rules of this sort, they should produce the draft guidance alongside the changes. Then we can judge whether the rules are being adjusted for a purpose that is actually accurate, rather than one of simplicity, which is what I think the original intention was. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that, in future, when changes are made to the Immigration Rules, which are of a major nature or can be interpreted as being such, the Home Office will do all three things: a consultation exercise, an impact assessment and guidance, which may be in draft but certainly would help us to make decisions about these matters.

I would like to talk about the trouble with shortcuts. If you take a shortcut and get a back lane instead of going down the main road, sometimes that can lead to barbed wire where the roads are closed at the end or where it is a bit dangerous to proceed. Shortcuts should be taken only if you know where the end is and whether the route is clear or not. That is particularly relevant here. This is a shortcut which has not yet determined whether the right end product is there and available.

The problem with changes that allegedly relate to a particular group of people is that, without a definition, we are left blank as to whether these people will be worse off than they were before and whether the cohort decision will blanket their approval or disapproval because of situations that are not of their making. A lot of strong messages have been sent to the Home Office, both in this debate and in the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s report. I hope that the Minister has listened to and heard them, and that he will act on all those matters.

I want to raise one final matter on the changes to the Immigration Rules. It concerns a case with which I, along with the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, dealt. I have now succeeded in getting the approval of the two people concerned, in order to take this matter forward, but I raise a related question around the Immigration Rules on people with religious occupations.

The case I referred to is that of two nuns from Lesotho who were seeking to come to stay with an order in Humberside. They were being looked after by the same order to which they belonged, of course, and they were going to come and spend time with it. I do not reckon that that was a religious occupation; I reckon that they were building religious certainty and confidence, and were being helped. However, they failed at the border not because they did not have the appropriate visas but because of money: they could not determine how much money they would need to look after themselves in the United Kingdom. The answer, of course, is that holy orders and religious communities, including this particular religious community, have communal funds—that is, worldwide funds, not funds that are communal in the area they are in. So being “treated”—in inverted commas—to a break and a stay with another community of nuns in Merseyside was denied to them because they did not have the money in their pocket.

These two nuns come from Lesotho, which is, as anyone who has been there will know, one of the poorest countries in Africa. I declare my interest as the honorary consul for the Kingdom of Lesotho in Wales. So it is a matter of some importance to me that, when we deal with issues that are related to the Immigration Rules, we see people for what they are: individual people. They need to have their cases looked after properly, and we need to ensure that we do that.

In conclusion, we need—I suspect that everybody in this Room wants this—a fair system in a world where people’s decisions to come to this country for protection are matters of life and death for them. We need to ensure that they are protected properly. I hope that the Minister will take all of these points on board and make sure that the Home Office behaves, as this document says, in the appropriate manner for what I regard as a major change.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, this is the first proper opportunity I have had to welcome the Minister to his new role. I very much look forward to working with him in future. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, for this opportunity to debate the changes to the Immigration Rules, and I am equally grateful to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for its careful consideration.

As always, although I respect the concerns that have been expressed, I believe that it is important that we keep sight of the central issue. These changes do not alter the substantive legal tests for refugee status, humanitarian protection or human rights protection—rather, they are a procedural reform designed to make the asylum system operate more efficiently in a small and tightly defined category of cases.

The key change relates to what the Home Office describes as the “merged registration process”. Instead of requiring both a screening interview and a later, more substantive interview, certain claims considered suitable for accelerated handling will be dealt with through a single interview process. The objective is to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and allow scarce case-working resources to be focused on more complex claims.

The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has highlighted the concerns raised by external organisations that this represents a significant change to asylum procedures and may reduce fairness for applicants. Yet the Home Office has been equally clear that claimants will continue to have the opportunity to explain the basis of their claim, provide evidence, seek legal advice and submit further representations before decisions are taken. It said that where indicators of vulnerability, trafficking, safeguarding concerns or indeed complexity emerge

“the case will be removed from the Merged Registration process and routed into the standard asylum process”.