Asylum Policy

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend. We are seeking international reform of the application of Article 3. We will work with partners to reform the application of the ECHR’s prohibition on inhuman or degrading treatment. That means we have to discuss it with our partners and get joint agreement, but it is an objective to which the Government are committed. It is one that will be tested. It will be in our consultation in due course. We will bring forward primary legislation with a definition of family life for the purposes of Article 8. That will be subject to scrutiny, but it will be within the spirit of maintaining our commitment to the European Court of Human Rights application. Those are fair and legitimate objectives, and I hope that my noble friend will support them in due course.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, the Home Secretary ended her Statement by saying that her reforms

“are designed to bring unity where others seek to divide”.

My greatest worry about them is that making refugee status only temporary, and subject to review every 30 months and deportation, will have the opposite effect. It will not bring unity, it will not encourage community or integration, and it is not very British. The Attlee Government did not try to deport the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, in 1945. The attempt to send trucks round south London to generate a hostile environment and tell people to go home was called off very quickly because of the public revulsion. I remember being very warmed to see crowds in Glasgow blocking the streets to prevent the deportation of their neighbours.

I have two questions for the Minister. First, he did not answer the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord German, about retrospection. Can he assure us that the change from five years to 10 years or 20 years will not be applied retrospectively to those people who are here, have been allowed to stay here and came when the rule was that they could obtain citizenship after five years? It will not apply to them, I trust.

Secondly, the Statement says that

“as order and control are restored, we will open new, capped, safe and legal routes into this country”.

Does “as order and control are restored” imply a sequence: that we need first to see order and control restored, then we will open safe and legal routes? If it does, is that not wholly illogical? The best way of putting the traffickers out of business and ensuring that there are no deaths in the channel is to open safe and legal routes. Will the Minister also tell us how a system of capping safe and legal routes will work? How will the caps be set and how will they be made compatible with our obligations under the refugee convention?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I will try to answer the three broad issues within that. The first is the reduction in time from five years to 30 months. It is not, “At the end of 30 months you are deported”; at the end of 30 months, an assessment will be made about whether the country the person has come from is safe, to go back to the point from the noble Lord, Lord Howard. I hope that we will not have long backlogs on asylum claims in the first place. That is why other measures are being sped up. Part of the problem, and the reason why people are waiting for five years and beyond, is that asylum claims are not met. From our perspective, if an asylum claim can be met and sped up then a decision can be taken to grant asylum, in which case the individual has asylum—admittedly with a longer period for final settlement—or they are removed from the country under a deportation route. The purpose is to try to put some energy into the system to get that sped up very quickly.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, asked about safe and legal routes, and the annual cap. The Home Secretary will examine and consult on this as part of the proposals, but it is perfectly reasonable to try to set an annual cap, in discussion with our refugee convention and other obligations, to see what the country can bear in terms of housing support and everything else so that annual cap is based on community capacity. We can then look at safe and legal routes that help support individuals to come here so they do not use the illegal routes that are universally condemned across the House. We will maintain the flexibility that we have for things such as the Ukraine scheme and the Gaza scheme. If I had been putting this before the House six years ago, we would not have been talking about a Ukraine scheme. Who knows what will happen next? We retain our international obligations to do that.

The noble Lord asked about retrospection. That will be part of the discussion and consultation. Legislation will be brought forward to address what will happen, and that will be subject to tests by both Houses of Parliament.