Immigration System

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Thursday 15th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

As I have said—I hope I can say this again for the benefit of the House—students contribute to the cultural, economic and soft power of the United Kingdom. We have welcomed students and we will continue to welcome students. But we also have to look at the impact of students on the migration system. At the moment, many students stay in the United Kingdom beyond graduation. What we are trying to do in the White Paper is reduce the time they can automatically stay on and put in place a number of caveats so people will then have to go through the normal migration system and being a student is not seen as a back-door way of coming to the United Kingdom in the longer term. That is a reasonable proposal, which does not stop our soft power or investment in universities but looks at what students do in the long term.

I take the point that my noble friend made about language, which is important. It is really important that we focus on what the Government are trying to do. The five key principles that I have set out are the direction of travel. We want to see better integration. I am pleased that my noble friend mentioned that language is important to that, but integration is also, to go back to the point made by the right reverend Prelate, about churches and other faiths talking to each other. It is about neighbourhoods being mixed neighbourhoods, and about understanding and respecting differences in our culture. At the same time—and this is where the Government are coming from—it is about trying to put a framework around all that to ensure that there is some level of management and control over how immigration is used and how our skills base is raised. I hope that that reassures my noble friend. I shall look at all the points that he has mentioned and continue to have a dialogue with him, because I know that it is a matter of some importance to him.

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

I should like to declare an interest as president of Migration Watch UK. Indeed, I have spent 24 years on this subject, but I promise to be extremely brief today.

Much of what the Minister said has addressed the issues that we now face. What this discussion has not faced is the sheer scale of the problems that have emerged in recent years. We had net migration of nearly 1 million in one year, and 700,000 in the subsequent year. These are immense changes, and I welcome the remarks that the Prime Minister made that show some understanding of public opinion on this, which is now becoming very strong.

I make just one point to the Minister, which is that he is going to need a target. I understand very much the breadth of what he has covered and his reluctance to set a target, because it makes life very difficult in future years, but if he wants to persuade the public that he is serious about this, he had better have a target and get very close to it.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The Government have made a judgment, and in the White Paper we are trying to make a judgment about a number of issues. There is legal migration and the issues of who comes, how they come and under what circumstances. We are trying to put a framework around that, which also tries to raise the level of skills of English and British-based citizens who are currently economically inactive to try to meet some of our skills shortage. We are trying to put a target around the impact of universities, both on soft power issues and on longer-term investment in skills and what people do in graduate-level jobs afterwards.

We are trying to look at a range of issues around integration and community coherence, which I think resonates with what the noble Lord has said. But I do not think that setting a target would be a good thing. For us, it is the wrong issue; we are trying to ensure that we put a framework in place to manage those pressures, and to look at what the UK economy needs, at how we build those skills and at how we build integration. Outside of that legal migration route, there is the real challenge, which I know the noble Lord is also concerned about, of illegal migration. A whole range of measures will come before this House very shortly, on 2 June, in the immigration and borders Bill around what we need to do to stop illegal migration and put it to one side.

There are immense challenges, but I hope that noble Lords and noble Baronesses can not only look at the White Paper and be critical of it in parts but look at it in terms of how we are trying to develop a framework and contribute positively to it, rather than look at what is not in it.

Asylum Seekers: Hotels

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I declare a non-financial interest as president of Migration Watch, but I shall speak personally today. This is a very difficult subject. Many good-hearted people have been working on these issues for years. Sadly, the situation has got steadily worse, and I suggest that it is now time for an entirely new approach, changing the legal system as necessary.

I will make four brief points. First, asylum is serious, but it is far from being the main issue. Legal net migration in the year to June 2024, at nearly 1 million, was more than 30 times the number who crossed the channel illegally in that year. It is high time that this massive legal inflow was tackled with the seriousness it deserves. At present, it seems that the Government are focusing on asylum to distract attention from the huge scale of legal migration that they have inherited.

Secondly, as regards asylum, it is absurd that we should accept, effectively without penalty, applications from asylum seekers who have destroyed their documents. As a result, claimants have a clear incentive to move on to the UK from the safe countries that they have already reached.

Thirdly, those who arrive without documents should no longer be accommodated in hotels, free to come and go and with some £40 a week to spend. Instead, they should be held in secure campsites until their cases have been decided. Any who left this temporary accommodation without permission should have their asylum claims automatically dismissed. The word would quickly spread, the numbers and costs would fall, taxpayers’ money would be spent on genuine cases and the numbers drowning in the channel would fall sharply.

This would be a radical change and would take time, but we simply cannot go on as we are—still less can we take the approach that the Government are now taking. I refer to the terms of the Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill, which is currently going through this House. As noble Lords will know, the current position allows entry to the UK only for parents, partners and children under 18. They have averaged about 6,500 a year over the past 10 years. The Bill proposes that family members of a person granted protected status should include parents, spouses, unmarried partners, children, adopted children and others dependent on the above. It even goes on to include

“such other persons as the Secretary of State may determine, having regard to … the importance of maintaining family unity”,

including

“the physical, emotional, psychological or financial dependency between a person granted protection status and another person”.

This is crazy. It is the exact opposite of what the present situation requires. The likely scale of the resultant inflow would have a very serious impact on community relations in this country. The public have had enough of being ignored by Governments on these matters. This Government would be well advised to amend their draft legislation and to do so soon.

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.

King’s Speech

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly about one issue that has not been covered in our debate so far—or, as far as I know, in this House for many years. I put it to your Lordships that our country now faces its most serious challenge for nearly a century, yet nobody seems to be willing to discuss it. I refer to the sheer scale of current immigration and its implications for the future scale and nature of our society.

Over the past 20 years, the UK population has grown by 8 million. That is roughly eight times the population of Birmingham. Some 85% of that growth has been due to the arrival of migrants and their subsequent children. As a result, the ethnic proportion of our population is now already 21%. Recent Conservative manifestos for 2010, 2015 and 2017 all promised to get net migration down to tens of thousands. In 2019, the manifesto promised that

“overall numbers will come down”.

What actually happened? Despite all those commitments, we now face by far the highest levels of net migration in modern history. The total for the last two calendar years taken together was nearly 1.5 million. That outcome is no accident. It results from specific decisions by the previous Government to cave in to pressure groups such as universities and the care sector. That is the result, and it has not yet been tackled.

The response of the new Labour Government has so far been non-committal. There are no serious measures to reduce net migration and no targets have been set. Instead, Labour has focused on asylum, which accounts for less than one 1/10th of the overall net inflow. Even if Labour was able to achieve a reduction in net migration, let us say to 350,000 a year—about a third of the present level—the population of the UK would increase by 9 million by the mid-2040s. That is roughly the population of London. The impact on housing and public services will be immense.

The social aspects are no less important. Unless the new Government get a firm grip on immigration, it is likely that children born today to an indigenous British couple will find themselves in a minority in our country by the time they reach their late 40s. Yes: a minority in their own country.

Change on such a scale, and against the oft-repeated wishes of the current majority, carries very serious risks for the future stability and cohesion of our society. It is now time for some courageous leadership from our new Government, including a clear commitment to get net migration down as close as possible to 100,000 a year. That is a goal which, as we know from surveys, 80% of the public would favour, including, as the Government must know, many of their own supporters. Action on this barely even addressed matter is essential if really serious difficulties are to be avoided in the future.