Illegal Migrants

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I hate to disappoint the noble Lord, but no, I do not think it was a tad rash. The Rwanda scheme cost £700 million, four people went to Rwanda as a result of it—voluntarily—and boat arrivals increased in the period between January and July this year, when the Rwanda scheme was operating. The noble Lord is wrong. It is smoke and mirrors to think that Rwanda was helpful to this situation: it was not. In his job in the Home Office, he should have secured action on criminal gangs, but his Government failed to do so.

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that the amount of legal net migration is 10 or more times that of illegal migration? When will the present Government take action to deal with the legacy of the previous Government?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

As my noble friend Lady Smith of Malvern said, legal migration is people who come to university, who come to create jobs and who bring skills to this country. We need that managed migration, and to ensure that illegal migration is cracked down on. That is the objective of the Government: to ensure that we have a sensible net migration target that we can control, at the same time as making sure that illegal migration and the criminal gangs that exploit people are tackled. This will be a difficult process—nobody said it is easy—but border control and border command have focused us on doing that. We will take action to ensure that we use migration for the benefit of the UK economy.