Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord German and Baroness Chakrabarti

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, which have been so ably supported across the Committee—pretty much every voice so far has been in support of them. They are a very useful humanitarian mirror to arguments that have been made on the previous group about the importance of data sharing for law enforcement purposes.

Amendments 97 and 98, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, very much endorse the views of the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Alton, on the need for even more breadth and possibly a government amendment. These amendments are very sympathetic to the Government’s stated policy of smashing the gangs et cetera. It is a perverse outcome to hear that people who were trying to satisfy the Government’s legal and practical requirements for family reunion are having to resort to people smugglers. So, with respect, I hope that the Minister will see that this is a no brainer in terms of the practical facilitation of government policy.

Finally, I talked about these amendments being very much the humanitarian mirror of the need sometimes to share data—in this case, biometric information—for the purpose of giving effect to lawful family reunion. Please do not shoot the messenger, but I want to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Harper, that the Data Protection Act and the UK GDPR contain very broad law enforcement exemptions, but broad is not blanket. I hope I can say to Conservative noble Lords that it is one thing to have a broad law enforcement exemption, but another to have blanket immunity from data protection. I am sure that noble Lords opposite would not want, for example, data controllers to be negligent or not to maintain a secure system so that sensitive information, even about potential criminals, was dumped on the internet, easily hacked or simply negligently maintained. Data controllers, particularly public authority data controllers, and especially of sensitive information, should at least have to maintain a proper, secure system. Yes, data should be shared for law enforcement purposes where that is necessary and proportionate, but they should not be totally negligent with this information.

I hope that provides some reassurance on that issue. In any event, if it does not, the Minister has already said that he can write.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have spoken. The amendments in my noble friend’s name, which I have signed, are, I think, well received across the Committee as a whole. On top of that, I must repeat the welcome for Clauses 34 and 35, which seek to increase flexibility when taking biometric information. I do not want to repeat the cases that have been talked about during this debate but shall simply speak about the practicalities of how this change might take place.

I have had experience of bringing people here for a short time and requiring their biometric information, which was sent from one country to another. Very helpfully, British Foreign Office officials in one country put the machine in the boot of their car and drove it to the other country—I am not going to give the details because otherwise they might get into trouble. Regularly, they have taken the biometric information of people who have visited the noble Lord’s part of Wales, among others; that that might give him a clue. I read today in the newspapers that the Government are to provide Home Office officials with portable biometric equipment. In my day, these things were small enough to go in the boot, but they are obviously going to be even smaller. So, in practical terms, taking biometric information is no longer a matter of using a large machine. Similarly, when you go to hospital for a scan, it is no longer done by big machines. This machinery is getting smaller, and we are now talking about portable methods. Clearly, that can be done, and it makes it more straightforward to take the machinery closer to people who are fulfilling the legal route that the Government have set in front of them. Of course, we should remember that, in 2024, 10,000 of those who came on family reunion were children.

The second thing is whether the Government are interested in using other bodies to take the biometric information. I do not know what the Government have already done on this matter—I saw the Minister checking his phone—but, clearly, if we are to have family reunion, and if President Macron has decided that biometrics can be taken in France, at least that might give some of the information we will need to know anyway about these matters.