Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord German and Baroness May of Maidenhead

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness May of Maidenhead (Con)]

My Lords, I remind your Lordships of my chairmanship of the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking.

I want to address Amendment 67, which my noble friend Lord Davies has just referred to. I tabled this with a very specific issue in mind—I hope the Minister will be able to address it in his closing remarks—which is those circumstances where somebody who is in slavery is put on to a boat but is forced as part of their slavery to take charge of a child and therefore is potentially endangering that child, but they are doing so because their slave driver has required them to do it. It is a very specific point, and I hope that the Minister can address it.

The Minister will recognise that there is a theme in all the amendments I have tabled, which is recognising that there are circumstances in which people are forced to take these actions as a result of their being in slavery, as opposed to it being a decision that they have taken for their own economic reasons. There is a small group of people to whom this might refer, so this is a probing amendment to see where the Government might stand on the issue and how they will want to address this very specific case of somebody who is forced by their traffickers or slave drivers to look after somebody else on a boat.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I speak to the amendment in my name and that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. We have probably exhausted the use of recklessness—we have had it, virtually, in every other group—but, in essence, I also have a very specific issue to raise in respect of the amendment in my name, which, again, is about ensuring that the right people are criminalised. It is about those who are coerced into steering the dinghies which have been made available.

Paragraph 57 of the JCHR report refers to research by the associate director of border criminology at Oxford University, who said that

“the most common reasons for driving the dinghy were being under duress from smugglers in Northern France; needing a discount on the crossing; or having previous experience driving boats, either from previous employment or irregular journeys”.

There are differences between those groups, and it is the group of people who are under duress that are of interest in this amendment.

First, I want to be clear that the actions of criminals who run the boats in northern France are appalling. They have total disregard for human life. They are not a benevolent facilitator of asylum seekers but criminals who see this trade as a source of great profit. I was able to see a number of those dinghies in the last two weeks, and I heard from the French authorities about some of the actions and tactics that the smugglers adopted towards migrants to evade law enforcement and maximise profit by cramming as many people as they can on to those flimsy boats.

I want to explain something to people who often ask me, “Why don’t you just cut and slash the boat?” There was an example of that last week when the French authorities went into the water but slashed only one cylinder. The reason for that is that those boats have no solid base inside between the floating parts. If you slash them, the boat folds in half and drowns all the people already in the middle of the boat. Therefore, the French authorities are most concerned about taking that sort of action and are much more concerned about going for the motors, which is what I hope they will be doing in the coming weeks. It is right that those forcing people on to these boats should face the full force of the law. Having seen the flimsiness of them, I am absolutely convinced that it is all about making huge amounts of money.

The problem is that this offence is drawn more widely than the Government have set out as their intention. If we are looking solely at people who are coerced or compelled to steer the boat under duress from the smugglers, that is not very much different from the coercion of victims of trafficking, as highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady May, in this and previous amendments. As the clause is currently drafted, it is not focused sufficiently on those who the Government wish to target and would also catch those asylum seekers who are victims of coercion. I am told that you can identify the people who have been steering these boats: the heat from the very cheap engines means that people get burns on their hands as a result of doing it. I know that the British and the French authorities can easily identify who has been steering a boat; the difficulty is whether that person has been coerced into it. That is why this amendment is in place—simply to give an opportunity to understand what the Government would do in those circumstances.

I appreciate that, in Committee in the House of Commons, the Minister stated that:

“In practice, the focus will be intelligence-led and targeted at those who law enforcement believe to be working in connection with organised criminal networks”.—[Official Report, Commons, 4/3/25; col. 128.]


It was also stated that

“the CPS will exercise … discretion, and the courts will be able to consider all the circumstances when deciding the appropriate sentence”.

While prosecutorial discretion is an important safeguard, maybe it is not a substitute for clarity within the Bill itself. On that very specific matter, I ask the Minister to give his consideration.

I must also say, in respect of the earlier amendments that we have just heard, that it seems to me that the Conservative Party wants to treat everyone in the boat as a criminal. If that is the case, does the Minister agrees or disagree with that? If he agrees, what is the consequence of treating asylum seekers as criminals when they arrive in our country?