Asylum Seekers: Hotels
Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts(3 days, 15 hours ago)
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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(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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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(5 months, 4 weeks ago)
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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.