Refugees: Status

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, the first safe country principle is widely recognised internationally; for example, it is the fundamental feature of the common European asylum system. Without enforcement of this principle, we simply encourage criminal smugglers to continue to exploit very vulnerable migrants.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that it is time to renegotiate the original Geneva convention on refugees, which was passed when there was a finite problem of displaced persons in Europe and was subsequently extended worldwide before anyone realised that cheap mass transport and communications would make mass movement of economic refugees between continents possible? The scale of the mass movement is indicated by the US’s offer of 50,000 visas every year to a handful of countries on a lottery basis. It receives applications from 13% of the population of Albania, 9% of the population of Armenia, 8% of the population of Ghana and 15% of the population of Liberia. It is time to recognise that the scale of this problem exceeds anything the original treaty was designed to deal with.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I certainly concur with my noble friend that not only are migration patterns changing because of the nature of access to travel but that the figures all over the world are massively increasing from what they were. Renegotiation of the 1951 convention is a bit above my pay grade, but I certainly say that this country has always tried to give refuge to those most in need. To that end, we have been extremely generous.

Criminal Trials: Intercept Evidence

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, the question of how many individuals could have been prosecuted is very difficult to answer, given that the evidence was not used. I do not know if there are figures that I can give to the noble Lord. I want to make the point that we do not actually have an objection in principle to the use of intercept material as evidence, and we have tried to find a practical way to allow the use of intercept evidence in court. As I said, though, successive reviews have found that it is just not possible.

[Lord Lilley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, when I was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, something that I proposed had the unexpected effect, unknown to me, of affecting the way in which the security services carried out surveillance. I was therefore given a briefing on the different ways in which they did these things, some of which were well-known to me and the public but others were not. Surely it would be possible to allow the security services to decide which methods they are going to reveal where they are using techniques that we do not want criminals to know about.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

As I have said to other noble Lords, the costs and risks of using intercept as evidence are disproportionate to the potential benefits, and therefore we have not proceeded to intercept as an evidence model. However, we are not closed to the idea and will keep the position under review, and I totally acknowledge what my noble friend has said.

Forensic Science Regulator Bill

Lord Lilley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for introducing this Bill, and I agree with virtually everything he had to say. I welcome the Bill not just for what it does, but as the first step in recognising that scientific claims should be subject to challenge and to audit. This is certainly true of forensic science. The courts need to be sure that scientific claims are well-founded and well-based. The pandemic, during which we have constantly been told to follow the science and listen to the scientists, only to find that the scientific advice changes, has shown that there are more general issues where we ought to be looking at the quality of science.

We are taught to believe in scientists with even greater reverence than was accorded to Doctors of the Church in the Middle Ages. However, science does not depend on the authority of scientists, but on how well their theories fit the facts. If those theories cannot be made to fit the facts, they are not true. So it comes as a shock to discover that there is a crisis of replication in science more generally, not only in the sphere of this Bill. Pfizer, for example, could not replicate three-quarters of published studies proposing new drugs. The Economist says that there is

“A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists … that half of the studies”


in their area turn out to be true or replicable.

“One biotech firm, Amgen, found that they could replicate just six of 53 ‘landmark’ studies”

in the field of medical science.

The full extent and breadth of the problem, way beyond medicine and forensic science, was shown in an article by John Ioannidis. It is one of the most downloaded studies of all time and has the chilling title, Why Most Published Research Findings are False. He concluded that

“for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias”

in that field. That is why I proposed a Bill to establish an office for science quality assessment which would operate under the National Audit Office to audit scientific findings on which public policy is based, whether in the courts or elsewhere. However, I welcome the Bill before us because it shows that in one sphere in particular, such a sceptical, thorough and rigorous attitude is necessary.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 9th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the proposal of an annual cap on the number of people allowed to settle in this country, initially from the EEA but eventually applying to all countries, I hope. It is strange that such a cap has not been included in previous plans to limit immigration.

Successive political leaders from Tony Blair onwards have promised what they describe as an Australian-style points-based system for controlling immigration, but what they have planned has not been an Australian-style system. For most of this century, and indeed earlier, Australia has had a system with an overall cap on the number of visas issued, while allocating those visas on the basis of the points awarded to would-be immigrants. Australia is a vast, underpopulated country that, after the threat of Japanese invasion, decided it needed to increase its population to ensure its security, but even it does not allow everyone who happens to qualify for a certain number of points to settle there with no cap on the numbers.

We are a small, crowded island. It beggars belief that we should introduce a system that would potentially allow almost unlimited numbers of people to come and work and settle here. The number of people coming here from outside the European Union is clearly out of control already. In the last financial year, nearly 90,000 new national insurance numbers were issued to people from India alone—just one country. That is nearly double the number in the previous year and three times the number in the years before that. Of course, it was matched by similar numbers from the rest of Asia combined, not to mention those coming from other continents.

So far as I know, no one knows why this sudden surge has occurred, what jobs these people are working in or where they live, but if we had an annual cap, at the very least such surges would be smoothed out over a number of years, during which we could establish what the driving force was, and, if we decided it was reasonable to continue to allow that number of people to come, to prepare—as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville- Rolfe, said—for the numbers of houses and schools, et cetera, that we would have to build.

Whatever our personal views about the desirability of allowing large numbers of people to settle here, there can be no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the British people would like to see strict limits put on those numbers. This is not a democratic House and your Lordships have made it clear in this debate that they have remarkably little sympathy for the democratic sentiments that the people constantly express. But this country is a democracy, and our laws should reflect the broad wishes of the British people. This amendment would go some way to achieving that.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Horam, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment, to which I have added my name.

To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, I want to see more housing, both to help existing UK citizens and to help legal migrants. As noble Lords will recall, I made this point in my Oral Question yesterday. I want arrangements prioritising migration of skilled and scarce workers, but which allow the nation to plan for their housing, GP surgeries, hospitals and schools, the pressure on which is making people angry. This includes Scotland, if you listen to the figures from the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington.

It is particularly extraordinary that we should be thinking of dropping the long-standing requirement that jobs should be advertised in the UK before overseas recruitment occurs. This will encourage employers—especially big employers—to recruit overseas, sometimes without even trying the home market. We already have the benefit of 3.7 million or so EU citizens who have applied for the EU settled status scheme. Due to corona- virus and digital change, employment on the high street and elsewhere is, sadly, falling.

While I do not rule out special arrangements for agriculture and for health workers, we need our jobs to go to the home team wherever possible, whether in engineering, restaurants or universities. That is particularly the case in the wake of Covid-19. Advertising at home first seems a small price for employers to pay. Frankly, I am puzzled that the trade unions are not strongly supporting this.

[Lord Lilley (Con) [V]]

I support this amendment, which seeks to restore the resident labour test. As the noble Lord, Lord Green, said, the MAC thought that the pressure from employers to get rid of this test was symptomatic of a reluctance even to train people in this country. To my mind, that anyone should want to get rid of it when we face mass unemployment beggars belief. I understand that it was removed because of pressure from employers, and that, as MAC said, is symptomatic of deeply ingrained attitudes among many British employers that they have no duty to train their workforce, let alone to recruit locally.

As I mentioned in the debates on Amendments 82 and 93, that failure to train is as prevalent in the public sector and the NHS as it is in the private sector. The prevailing attitude in too many British companies is that you should train your own employees only if you cannot recruit people with those skills from abroad. We need to reverse that order of priorities: train your own employees first, and only recruit abroad if for some reason it is impossible to find them locally.

When I served on the Select Committee on Exiting the European Union in the House of Commons, our first visit after the referendum was to Sunderland. We met the great and the good of the business community there: the CBI, the Institute of Directors, the chamber of commerce, the local councils and most of the large employers, though with the notable exception of Nissan. I asked them what their principal concern was about the impact of Brexit. They said, “It may restrict our ability to recruit skilled labour from abroad.”

I was reminded then of a previous visit to that part of the world when, as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, I had gone to see the Nissan plant, which had then been recently established. I had asked the management a rather stupid question: “Do you have any difficulty recruiting skilled workers for your plant?” They were too polite to point out how stupid the question was, but they replied that there were no skilled automobile workers in the north-east of England. They added, “So we train people ourselves. They are very eager to learn and they make excellent workers.”

Recounting that conversation to the employers hosting the Select Committee, I asked them what would have happened if the Japanese had taken the same approach as them. There would be 9,000 Poles working in Nissan’s plant and 9,000 Brits would be tossing hamburgers or on the dole. They looked somewhat shamefaced, as well they might because those British workers recruited locally are now the most productive workers in the whole worldwide Nissan network. We must—and this amendment takes a very small step in that direction— encourage most British firms to show the same faith in British workers as Nissan did a quarter of a century ago.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

The noble Lord, Lord Horam, has withdrawn, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 7th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

I want to return to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, in his introductory remarks. The important amendment in this group is Amendment 2. All the others could be things that potentially fall out of a review, and so the key is to have that review and then look at the most appropriate way forward.

Many of the issues that have been spoken to in this debate are not new; we have been talking about social care for as long as I have been in the House. We could say many things about the current situation we find ourselves in, and some of the issues are fairly long-standing. One that I talk about a lot, but not many others do, is the fact that there are currently about a million people who are ageing and do not have children. Our health and social care service is predicated on the fact that you have children who will look out for your needs in any health or care setting. We will have 2 million people in that position by 2030. We have, therefore, an acute and growing need for paid social care. Also, at the moment, a number of our biggest care providers are owned by private equity firms, run at very low cost and margins—they are not about to stay in this business if they cannot do that, and to them, it is a business.

At Second Reading, the noble Baroness talked about the need for the United Kingdom to stop colluding in an international trade in low-cost care. I can understand that argument but, at this moment, given where we are, we would be the first affluent western country to take itself out of what is, in effect, an international market in care. No other affluent western country—nor Australia, for that matter—has solved its care problem by suddenly turning off all access to people from other nations. It would be a very bold statement if we were to do that, but noble Lords have today pointed out the dangers of doing so.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is right to argue that, at this moment, there is a case for a review. The Government, if they were not being so ideologically pure on the matter, would want to give themselves flexibility in addressing these issues as they arise. There is no need to do this: it is just government ideology. The Government could bring in a transitionary process, over about five years, that would enable people to get through a period of uncertainty. I therefore commend Amendment 2 to the Minister and ask her to look at some of the other amendments in this group.

[Lord Lilley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I will focus on Amendments 82 and 93, and particularly their implications for reviewing the need, or otherwise, to recruit nurses and doctors from overseas. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Patel, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for tabling them.

I suspect, however, that these amendments are based on the common fallacy that the NHS needs to recruit doctors and nurses overseas because supposedly not enough British people want to do these jobs. That is simply untrue. The latest year for which UCAS figures are available is 2019; I apologise to the House for giving out-of-date figures at Second Reading. The most recent figures show that 53,000 young British people applied to train as nurses last year, of whom 20,250 were turned away—that is 43% of applicants, or nearly half of those who applied. UCAS unfortunately does not produce figures on the same basis for those seeking to train as doctors, but it is clear that an even higher proportion of those who apply to medical school are turned away.

This is a double scandal. First, it means that tens of thousands of young Brits who aspire to serve their country as doctors or nurses are refused that chance and have to pursue less attractive options. Secondly, we have to recruit tens of thousands of doctors and nurses from abroad, mostly from countries that are far poorer, have fewer medical staff per head of population, and can ill afford to train people who then migrate to the United Kingdom.

This double scandal is compounded by the way this issue is excluded from the national debate. Why do we allow this situation to persist? We allow effectively unlimited numbers of students to study every subject from art history to zoology. The only subjects where places are numerically restricted are medicine, where they are formally restricted, and nursing, where they are de facto restricted.

I will pass over the political reasons why it may have seemed wise to advocates of mass immigration to invoke the needs of the NHS and nurses and doctors to sanctify their cause. The other reason is nakedly economic: we found it cheaper, in the short term, to employ people trained at the expense of foreign taxpayers, rather than pay to train our own citizens. At the same time, relying on nurses and other health workers from abroad, on whom many other noble Lords have focused, helps to keep wages low. What a paradox it is that many noble Lords who have spoken today and railed against the level of inequality in our country pursue a policy whose prime justification, as they have made clear today, is that it depresses the wages of the lowest-paid people in this country and keeps them below what economists call the domestic market clearing rate—the rate at which we could meet our needs from our own employees.

I was at first minded to support these amendments, but, on looking more closely, I note that one thing the reports that they call on the Government to produce do not cover is the scope for training more of those aspiring to become nurses and doctors in the UK, so that we can end the plundering of foreign health services. That is a very significant omission and shows that there is a blind spot in this discussion, which I hope we will not perpetuate in future debates.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lilley Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, the two Opposition Front-Bench speeches that we have just heard raise the question, why do we restrict immigration? After all, most immigrants are good, industrious and enterprising people, welcome here as our friends, neighbours and colleagues, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said.

Some immigration is indeed good for the economy, but you can have too much of a good thing. That is why we limit immigration. Immigration is a lubricant for the economy—not, as Tony Blair appeared to believe, its fuel. If you do not lubricate your car, it grinds to a halt; if you stopped all immigration, it would harm the economy. But beyond a certain point, adding more lubricating oil does not make your car go faster, and allowing mass immigration has not made our incomes grow faster—on the contrary.

The British economy suffers from three major weaknesses, all of which have been exacerbated by mass immigration since Tony Blair lifted the lid. First, we have a major housing shortage, yet over the last five years, net immigration has averaged 300,000 people a year. We need to build a city the size of Hull every year just to accommodate those incomers, and more when they have children.

Secondly, our chronic reluctance to train people means that fewer British workers have vocational and technical skills than any of our competitors; yet encouraging employers to recruit from abroad undermines their incentive to train and employees’ incentive to upskill. After Blair opened our borders, training time per worker halved and funding for training fell by 16%. We are told that the NHS needs migrants because Brits do not want to be doctors and nurses. Untrue—there are 10 applicants for every place in a medical school, and we turned away 35,000 applicants for nursing courses last year. The NHS finds it cheaper to import doctors and nurses from poor countries, which need them more than us, rather than train British applicants.

Thirdly, we invest less per head than most of our competitors. A ready supply of cheap labour reduces employers’ incentives to invest in improved productivity, and most skilled immigrants work in low-skilled jobs.

So, we need this Bill to reduce pressure on housing, encourage training in skills and boost investment.

Home Affairs and Justice

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for asking me to complete this debate. I shall endeavour to do so—that is, up until the very important closing speeches.

I apologise for being unable to be here for the opening speeches or for all the maiden speeches, though all those I heard were of an extraordinarily high quality, not least the one we just heard from the hon. Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) and the one that preceded it from the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), who made a speech that was absolutely in the traditions of this House. He is very welcome as a Member of this House if the contributions that he is to make, and his colleagues are to make, are of that calibre and quality. He should know that many people in this House claim Scots ancestry. My second name is Bruce, and I have always been proud to believe that somewhere in my bloodstream there is Scottish blood. There is great sympathy and fellow feeling with the people of Scotland. That is one reason why those of us who are Unionists want to retain Scotland as part of the greater unity of the United Kingdom. However, that is an issue that we can discuss, and if it is done in the manner that it has been today, it will raise the level of debate very considerably.

I want to address the repeal and replacement of the Human Rights Act. I am a passionate defender of our civil liberties. In Cabinet, I defended, sometimes almost single-handedly, the right to trial by jury against attempts to limit and restrict it. Likewise, I fought against compulsory ID cards, often in alliance with my now dear departed friends in the Liberal Democrat party. I supported a free press against the Leveson attempt to introduce state control of our free media. I have advocated legalising cannabis.

However, belief in human rights and civil liberties is not the same as belief in the Human Rights Act or the European declaration of human rights. They are not identical, although of course there was a deliberate political attempt to claim ownership of human rights by enshrining the European declaration of human rights in law in our Human Rights Act.

We all in this House support human rights. We did so before the Human Rights Act, we do so now that we have a Human Rights Act and we will continue to support human rights if the Human Rights Act is repealed. There is no controversy in practice about the core of each right. There is no controversy about the fact that Governments should not be entitled, willy-nilly and at whim, to deprive us of our liberty. There is no conflict or debate about whether Governments have the right to deprive us of our life if we are innocent and are not committing any acts or doing anything that requires self-defence.

The issue at dispute is: where rights conflict, who or what institution should decide the balance between those rights, and who should set the outer boundaries or the lower limits of triviality where rights apply? No right is absolute and unlimited. There is a right to freedom of speech, but there is no right to libel or slander, to spread hatred or stir up breaches of the peace, or to invade another person’s privacy. We have the right to life, but we do not prosecute soldiers who, legitimately and under orders, take lives in war. We do not allow the courts to decide whether the woman should make the decision over the right to life of an unborn child, or to decide that such a right to life should be deemed absolute, as is likewise the case with suicide and euthanasia. There are boundaries to every right, and the balances between rights have to be resolved.

Balancing conflicting rights, as well as setting boundaries and limits to their triviality, is intrinsically a policy or political matter. In the last resort, that is why such issues have been decided by the political process in Parliament, not by the legal process in the courts. Where the boundaries of conflicting rights have not been drawn by statute, the courts do their best to interpret the law to create law, in the way they have learned to do in the common law process in this country, to fill in the gaps left by Parliament. Ultimately, however, Parliament has always been able to redraw the boundaries if it so wished to establish a statutory right or a limit to a right.

That is the process, with Parliament supreme over the courts, under which human rights have developed in this country from Magna Carta onwards. That charter was laid down not by judges but by barons. It is paradoxical that so many advocates of human rights—or self-declared owners of belief in human rights—now assert that the parliamentary supremacy under which those human rights evolved is a threat to human rights, and therefore argue that Parliament must be subordinated to the courts. But if judges are given the intrinsically political role of deciding on the balance between conflicting rights and the outer boundaries of rights, we will inevitably and ineluctably politicise the judiciary.

Such a politicisation has happened in the United States, where the Supreme Court is the supreme court—the supreme arbiter of the rights laid down in the constitution. As a consequence, the appointment of judges is highly political—it is one of the most highly political decisions any President takes—and the political, cultural and social views of candidates, not their legal abilities, are paramount in the choice of candidates for the Supreme Court in America and their ratification through the political process. Indeed, Presidents try to embed their views for long after they and their elected term of office come to an end by appointing to the Supreme Court the youngest, fittest and most intransigent fellow believers, in the hope that they will continue to enforce their views when the President is long gone. Of course, even local judges can be elected in the States. Do we seriously want to go down that route in this country—the route of politicising the appointment of our judiciary?

The second consequence of giving judge-made law supremacy over Parliament-made law is that we take away the most important right of all of the British people: the right to hold their lawmakers accountable. The voters can turf out MPs if they do not like the way we interpret their rights, or if they believe we have infringed them in any way. We are accountable to the electorate, but judges are not accountable. In my view, they should not be politically accountable—they should not be removed or appointed as a result of the political process—but if they are given a political role and remain unaccountable, that lack of accountability will undermine respect for the law, as it is already doing.

I very much hope that we will repeal the Human Rights Act and restore a proper balance between Parliament and the courts, but we should not just replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights that gives judges supremacy over Parliament—that would merely recreate in the domestic forum the problems we have created internationally. However, there is the issue of the European declaration and the European Court of Human Rights. When I was in the Cabinet, the renewal of our membership of that declaration, or our adherence to it, came up. I proposed that we resile from it at that point. It so happened that the Foreign Office had just made Croatia’s adherence to the convention a condition of our recognition of it. It was felt that it would look odd if, having made that a condition, we resiled from the convention. I was quite happy to overcome that little problem, but that was why my advice was not taken.

Many appeal to the origins of the European convention on human rights and to chauvinistic sentiment. They say that the convention is ultimately British and that it was written by a British Attorney General and other British lawyers; that it simply codified British human rights that had evolved over centuries, including the right to jury trial and so on; and that there was therefore absolutely nothing to worry about. Of course, those who codified and enshrined the convention did not realise that they were changing the process by which law was made. Instead of being made ultimately by Parliament, it was ultimately made by courts, often of a political composition but unaccountable to any electorate. Although it was inevitable and foreseeable, they did not anticipate that the courts, once they had been given the right to interpret a rather abstract document, would do so in an extensive and continually elaborated way.

The result is that judges have reached the sorts of decisions that would never have been reached had we not signed up to the European Court of Human Rights and the European declaration of rights, and had we not enshrined it in our law. There have been judgments on relatively trivial issues, such as on whether prisoners should have the vote. I can see quite a good case for giving prisoners the vote—it would force hon. Members to go and campaign in prisons to win those votes, and we would learn more about prisons than most of us have done. I have only ever learned about prison when my friends have been put in it and I have had to go and visit—no names, no pack drill.

Whether or not prisoners are given the vote is essentially a political decision. It is not something that judges automatically know best. Underlying the belief in making judges supreme over Parliament is a belief that judges have an innate ability that others do not have to discern what is right and true, or the belief that the document that judges interpret is a revealed document, a bit like the Koran being interpreted by an ayatollah. It is not, of course. It is a rough summary of what had evolved in this part of the world, and leaving people to interpret it as they will gives them great and unaccountable power that they should not have.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a most thoughtful speech. It is worth articulating the exact legal and constitutional position. We signed the convention in the early 1950s, and the Human Rights Act was not passed until the late 1990s. If this Parliament were to repeal the Human Rights Act, it would be entirely our choice as to whether we stayed in the Council of Europe and remained wedded to the convention. We would not be expelled.

[Mr Lilley]

I am sure that my hon. Friend is right, although I am not sure that it would matter terribly if we were expelled from the Council of Europe. We might just as well belong to it, and I am sure that we could continue to belong to it even if we did repeal the Human Rights Act and no longer accepted the supremacy of the European Court of Human Rights.

The essential issue is whether political decisions should be taken by politicians and judicial decisions by judges. Those who believe that the Human Rights Act should remain on our statute book ultimately want judges to take political decisions, leaving us deprived of that right and the electorate deprived of any ability to hold those who make those laws accountable—or to throw them out if they make decisions the electorate do not like. It is very important that we recognise that that is the issue, not whether we believe in human rights. We all believe in human rights, but we need to decide how the balance between rights is to be determined and how the full extent of any right is to be limited. If that is the question, I am sure that the whole House will agree with the measures that the Secretary of State will develop after consultation and, in due course, bring before the House. I welcome every measure in the Queen’s Speech, but above all the prospect of the repeal of the Human Rights Act.

UK Drugs Policy

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

It is a great privilege to take part in the debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). I am not sure whether it will cause her or me more embarrassment among our supporters that we find ourselves sharing company and the same side of the argument.

Some years ago, when the debate about drugs erupted, as it does from time to time, the media went round more or less every Front Bencher and asked whether they had ever smoked pot. I was one of the very few who never had, and I have no intention ever of doing so. That gave me a clear enough head to look at this issue on the basis of evidence, which is what the hon. Lady’s motion urges us to do.

I focused on the important distinction between soft and hard drugs, and on whether cannabis should be treated differently from hard drugs. I concluded that it should be, and that we should move to the legalisation of cannabis. We could have a small number of legal outlets while banning the active marketing and promotion of cannabis, its sale to minors and its consumption in public places.

I concluded that a move to legalisation would have a number of advantages. First, about 80% of the effort in the so-called war on drugs goes on trying to prohibit cannabis. Much less effort and resources go into the prohibition of hard drugs, which cause the greatest harm and the greatest danger. Therefore, if we could provide some legal outlets for cannabis, we would be able to focus more of the effort on the drugs that do the greatest harm.

Secondly, I concluded that the effort of trying to prohibit cannabis was ineffective. Until recently, we had a higher prevalence and usage of cannabis in this country than in Holland, where there are legal outlets. Prohibition was therefore ineffective.

Thirdly, I concluded that we were undermining respect for the law by having a law that was widely disregarded, and one that was harder to justify in a country which, after all, legalises the sale of alcohol, which can do at least as much damage as cannabis, and legalises the sale of nicotine and cigarettes, which can have more lethal consequences in the long term.

One key argument often used by those who advocate keeping cannabis on a par with hard drugs, and criminalising and prohibiting its sale in this country, is that it is supposedly a gateway drug, meaning that it leads people ineluctably to sample cocaine, and then tempts them to go on to heroin. They say that, therefore, its sale should be prohibited. I believe that the reverse is true: because the sale of cannabis is illegal, we drive soft drugs users into the arms of hard drugs pushers. They can obtain cannabis only from criminal gangs, who will want them to upgrade to drugs that are more addictive and more profitable.

[Dr Wollaston]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the real gateway is tobacco use? Most people smoke cannabis with tobacco, and that poses the greatest risk of long-term harm.

[Mr Lilley]

I will, for the sake of argument, agree with my hon. Friend, but I think that is a rather different argument from the one I am addressing.

The most important single reason for legalising the sale of cannabis is to break the link between the sale of hard drugs and the sale of soft drugs. There are only two coherent and rational policies as far as soft drugs are concerned. The Swedish approach is one of toughly enforced prohibition. I looked briefly at the report and thought it was a bit weak on analysis of the Swedish situation, but I will look at it more deeply. The other is a version of the Dutch approach, which is now the approach of a number of countries, where legal outlets are available. The worst option is falling between two stools and decriminalising use while leaving the supply in the hands of drug gangs. That leaves us open to driving soft drugs users into the arms of hard drugs pushers.

I say these things not as someone who is soft on drugs believes there is nothing is wrong with taking drugs. I believe that even if there were no health disadvantages from using drugs, there is a moral case against using them. However, just as I want to decriminalise and legalise, I do not want to de-moralise drugs. Ultimately, wherever possible moral choices should be left to individuals. In so far as we are going to be no worse off—the Dutch experience shows not a higher number of users, but fewer people pushed into harder and worse drugs—let us look at the evidence closely, and be willing to accept that although drug use may be wrong it does not automatically have to be criminal.

Lots of things are wrong. Adultery is wrong, but we do not make it a criminal offence. Lots of other things are against the moral law in which I believe, but we do not make them a criminal offence. Let us look at drugs without going to the opposite extreme of saying that any use of drugs is desirable and entirely value-free. Let us look at the evidence and see whether the policies we have been pursuing in this country have been ineffectual, have focused the effort where it is least needed and not where it is most needed, have undermined respect for the law, and have driven soft drugs users into the arms of hard drugs pushers. I hope the House will support the motion.

Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Friday 17th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend is, as ever, quite right. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the US is one of the most developed nations.

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

The largest.

[Mr Nuttall]

It is certainly the largest developed nation.

I do not want to detain the House for too long, because I am keen that the Bill should proceed through the House today.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I will happily make a statement now. There are no plans at all to change the definition of immigration. A student who comes here for three years or more is as much of an immigrant as somebody who comes on a work visa for two years or more. There is an international definition of immigration which covers everyone who moves to another country for more than a year, so students who come here for more than a year are included in that definition.

[Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend reject any pressures to change the policy on students coming here in the light of the fact that the OECD estimates that a quarter of students subsequently stay on, 120,000 of them settle and 120,000 seek and are granted extensions of their stay while they are here, and there are some 150,000 outstanding illegal immigrants who came here on university visas?

[Damian Green]

My right hon. Friend makes a number of powerful points. There is, of course, no cap on genuine students coming to study genuinely at genuine institutions, and some of our universities, which are indeed the best in the world, benefit hugely from that. Nevertheless, we have driven out a huge amount of abuse in the student visa system. More than 500 colleges that used to take foreign students can no longer do so because we put in a proper checking and accreditation regime.