Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by saying how sad I am to see the Home Secretary depart from her job today. I had very high regard for her; she brought great legal expertise and determination together. At the same time, I wish Grant Shapps well in his new job as Home Secretary. He was my neighbour in Hertfordshire and is a long-standing friend of mine. I hope that he will pursue with equal diligence the obligations we have and the commitments that we had in our manifesto.

However, there is little point in tidying up the law in the way that we are doing today if the law itself can be turned inside out by the courts. It is pretty clear that that is what has happened time and again in recent years. As a result, we have some 250,000 rejected—failed—asylum seekers in this country who, since 2005, have not been returned to their countries or removed from this country. That is in addition to the 125,000 who have been granted asylum.

The rate of acceptance on first application in this country suddenly doubled after the Windrush scandal, although it is hard to see what the logic of that doubling was. The effect is that we now accept twice as high a proportion of asylum seekers on first application as does France, on the other side of the channel—which is doubtless one reason why people choose to leave France and come here, even by dangerous routes.

Can I just deal with three or four delusions, illusions or mistakes that are very prevalent? The first is that we have no safe routes into this country. The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, made some very sensible points, particularly about the constant change in the regulations we face. We have some 13 different routes and they have exploded in numbers over the last year. We have seen the best part of 300,000 people arrive in this country and be accepted by safe migration routes, including 150,000 from Ukraine. That is a wonderful way we are responding to the problems in Ukraine and almost all of them want to return if and when peace returns to Ukraine. Sadly, that may not be immediate and many of them will put down roots in this country, so will add to our population. They are wonderful people, but we have to take into account the fact that we have a massive increase in our population. There were 120,000 from Hong Kong—again, one understands why—and 20,000 from Afghanistan. All arrived by safe routes. So when President Macron says that the problem with Britain is that is has no safe routes, he is simply out of touch with what is happening in this country.

The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, said that there can be no doubt about the desperation of people who cross the channel in small boats to come to this country. Let us be quite clear: they are coming from France, Germany and Belgium. If they are desperate, what is it about those countries that makes them desperate? They are not coming here from Afghanistan or Iran by boat; they are coming from France and Germany. One of the reasons can be that they have applied or could apply in those countries but know they would be rejected, whereas here our system—having been degraded by constant legal undermining of the rules—makes it much more likely that they will be accepted, even if other countries would not consider them legitimate asylum seekers.

The third point I want to make is that it is an illusion to say we have taken back control of immigration. Over the last year we have given over 1 million visas to people to come and settle in this country. Where are the houses going to be?

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

Great.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

“Great” says the Liberal Democrat noble Lord.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I was agreeing with him about the numbers who have been given visas—a tiny fraction of whom are asylum seekers. I am not applauding the millions of people who are being given visas; I was agreeing with him that that was happening.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I misinterpreted his “Great”; he was saying that I am great rather than that the number is great. That is good.

It is an extraordinary thing: 1 million people. The problem with immigration is not that immigrants are different from us, but that they are exactly the same. They need homes to live in, medical facilities, schools and everything else. We have not got enough for the existing population, so we ought to be thinking very clearly: is it wise to issue 1 million visas for people to come and live in this country?

Finally, it is constantly asserted that migration is good for economic growth. In the last decade and a half, we have had the highest rate of immigration to this country in our history and the slowest growth in productivity. I rest my case.

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[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, I add my support to the Government and the aims and objectives of this immigration statement of 11 May. Respectfully, I do not support the regret Motion tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hylton. I found it very interesting to listen to the arguments of my noble friends Lord Horam and Lord Lilley, with which I agree.

Of course I empathise with the terrified people whose desperation is so great that they risk their lives, and their families’ lives, to seek a safe refuge. This is an unimaginable position for anyone. However, I also accept that something effective must be done at our borders to stop criminals intent on abusing these fears and risking people’s lives. It cannot be right that a country such as ours, which stands proudly for protecting the vulnerable, standing strongly with those who have been wronged and upholding the highest standards of human rights and justice, should at the same time, due to inaction or inefficient action, be facilitating conditions for this injustice to occur.

That is why I support the statement from 11 May and believe it will help with the immigration crisis we face on our shores. The statement has introduced new permissions to stay where a person is granted on a protection route and made a pledge finally to define what “claim for humanitarian protection” means, so people who really need the help most know clearly who they are and their application can be completed swiftly, with the most minimal of delays. A clearer definition for the exceptional circumstances which warrant children coming to join refugee parents or relatives will also provide more transparency and clarity and make it easier for children to join loved ones sooner and more safely.

It also provides some different allowances for when a person comes to the UK via another safe country. I think this is fair enough. Maybe the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, stuttered, but he said that people come through another safe country, and then slightly retracted the comment. We must deter dangerous journeys and encourage asylum claims to be made in the first safe country. Differentiating between people who come here first and people who come via another safe country is important and fair.

I support all these measures and the Government’s other moves on immigration, such as amending criminal offences, with increased maximum penalties for people smugglers and boat skippers, and the ability to impose visa penalties where countries pose a risk to international peace and security, to name but a few. These will ensure that those most at risk and most vulnerable will be welcomed and protected while those who use current loopholes for their own criminal gains and risk other people’s lives in the process are stopped in their tracks. We should get on with this without delay.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, it has been an interesting and wide-ranging debate, bearing in mind the subject of the regret Motion, but we support the regret Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and we are very grateful to him for bringing these changes to the attention of the House.

The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, regrets the implementation of plans, set out in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, to treat refugees differently depending on how they entered the United Kingdom. The issue is yet to be tested in the courts, as it inevitably will be. We maintained at the time, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has said, that it was a breach of the UK’s international obligations under the UN refugee convention—a view supported by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has an interesting perspective on the backlogs in asylum applications. Some 10 or more years ago, we had double the number of asylum applications and a fraction of the backlog. We were deporting far more overstayers and illegal immigrants than we do now. All this points to a catastrophic failure by the Home Office—nothing more, nothing less.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, the Government have been very generous on the basis that they expect and hope that the vast majority of those people will return to Ukraine, once peace has hopefully been restored. It is a very different situation.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that rather than taking back control of our borders, we have thrown them open. As the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, said, there is nothing now to stop people coming here with visa-free entry, which is not only still open to residents of all EU countries, but the Government have added 10 more countries to that list. These are people who can put their passports in the e-passport gates at the airport, disappear into the country and nobody knows who they are, where they have gone or whether they ever leave.

I am a little confused about the arguments on identity cards. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who apparently supports the idea, told us how difficult it is to open a bank account. Tell me about it—I have been trying to open a bank account for the last two weeks. I have shown my passport and I have gone to the bank; it wants to know where my income comes from—most of it is a Metropolitan Police pension. Yet, apparently, we need identity cards as well, to try and control things. I think things are difficult enough as it is.

But we digress, widely. The Minister may argue that our objections were debated during the primary legislation that these rule changes are based on, and the majority of this House rejected those arguments. The specifics—for example, that group 2 refugees will get permission to remain for only what I thought was 30 months but the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, thinks is shorter—were not on the face of the Bill, and this is the first time that Parliament has had the chance to debate the specifics in legislation.

We should not expect details of safe and legal routes to be included in the Immigration Rules, but when refugees are to be treated differently depending on whether they have arrived by a safe and legal route—that is, group 1 refugees—or otherwise as group 2 refugees, Parliament has the right to expect the Government to set out what safe and legal routes are available currently and those that are planned, including any limits on those numbers. Without knowing how many or what proportion of asylum seekers will fall into each group, how can Parliament make a judgment as to whether to agree these changes to the Immigration Rules?

As the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, said, group 2 refugees will be disqualified from family reunion, so we are going to have far more unaccompanied child refugees coming to this country who will not be able to be joined by their families.

This week, the BBC reported that 181 of these unaccompanied asylum-seeking children aged 18 or under have disappeared since they have come to this country. They are put into hotels with no supervision, and they disappear. How many more unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are going to be lost and potentially abused, whether through modern slavery or through child abuse, if they are not allowed to bring their families to join them and look after them? Why is there not a risk assessment around how many more unaccompanied child refugees are going to be placed at risk as a result of these changes?

There is no risk assessment on this at all, but there is precedent in the past for impact assessments to be published alongside changes to the Immigration Rules. In September 2020, the Government published an impact assessment for changes to the Immigration Rules for students. In November 2020, they published an impact assessment for changes to the Immigration Rules for skilled workers. The changes we are debating today are arguably the most fundamental changes to the Immigration Rules ever enacted—so where is the impact assessment?

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[Lord Horam (Con)]

The noble Lord says that that is an effective deterrent, but, with respect, it would have to be tested in reality, just as the Government’s measures are being tested in reality—or not tested in reality yet.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

Arguably, the Government’s policy is being tested in reality, because the threat hangs over everybody who crosses the channel that they could be sent to Rwanda—albeit that there is a stay on it because of the action before the courts—yet there are record numbers coming across the channel. So, I would argue that we need to try something else.

The whole disgraceful Rwanda policy is designed to avoid the UK making any decision about whether someone is a genuine refugee or not by simply removing them to Rwanda and letting the African nation decide. The change in the rules ensures asylum seekers who arrive in the UK, other than through what I would argue are practically non-existent “safe and legal” routes, will automatically be removed without any consideration of the merits of their claim for refugee status. Can the Minister explain, for an unaccompanied child refugee who claims asylum in the UK because they were in danger of persecution in both their country of origin and the country from which they travelled to the UK, do these changes mean that their persecution in the country from which they fled immediately before arriving in the UK will no longer be considered as grounds for eligibility for humanitarian protection because it was not their country of origin?

Has the Home Office thrown the baby out with the bath water through these changes? If, as the Minister claimed earlier today, the Home Office will consider the vulnerability of asylum seekers before sending them to Rwanda, why can it not consider at the same time whether the application for asylum has any merit, rather than refusing to even consider it and sending people to Rwanda?

We objected to almost every provision in the Nationality and Borders Act and it is therefore no surprise that we regret these Immigration Rules, which give effect to the primary legislation. In recent years, asylum seekers have amounted to only around six in every 100 immigrants to the UK. If anti-immigration advocates, such as the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, believe there is a problem that needs to be addressed, we on these Benches believe the focus should be on the 94% who are being given visas, not the most vulnerable desperately seeking sanctuary in the UK.

There appears to be a glimmer of light in the former Home Secretary’s resignation letter to the Prime Minister today in which she said that

“I have had serious concerns about this Government's commitment to honouring manifesto commitments, such as reducing overall migration numbers and stopping illegal migration, particularly the dangerous small boats crossings.”

The resigning Home Secretary says she has serious concerns about the Government’s commitment to stopping illegal immigration. Can the Minister enlighten us as to what she means?

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, this has certainly been a wide-ranging debate. I intend to concentrate on the regret Motion from the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, which we fully support. We welcome the Motion and the opportunity to discuss matters relating to asylum and immigration in general.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Horam, that while I do not agree with some of his policy prescriptions, I totally agree with him—which is why I was nodding—on the complexity and sometimes impenetrable nature of trying to understand what is actually going on. That is really unhelpful to any of us debating these matters. We all have different perspectives on this, but all of us are seeking an immigration and asylum system that works and is fair. We will debate how that is achieved but, in order to achieve it, we certainly have to understand what is meant and, frankly, that is sometimes quite difficult. I very much agreed with the point the noble Lord made about that.

I say gently to the Minister that it is extremely unhelpful to the whole debate on asylum, immigration and refugees to have the chaos we have at present. The Home Secretary has just resigned. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, just quoted her letter, which appears to suggest that although there was a security or national security breach—we are not sure yet—there was also a furious row in government about what was happening with respect to migration targets, visas, refugees, small boat crossings, et cetera.

Whatever our view, how on earth can we debate these matters without being certain what the Government themselves believe in? What is the Government’s policy? Are the new Immigration Rules, which we have debated and discussed and which my noble friend Lord Dubs referred to, government policy? Does the new Home Secretary agree with the Immigration Rules or will he disagree with the Prime Minister? We just do not know. I am not trying to make a political point. I am making the point that from the point of view of this it is extremely important that the Government sort out what they are saying: otherwise, who can have confidence around any of this?

Indeed, while we have been speaking, there have been rumours that the Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip have resigned—which are as yet unconfirmed. Here we are—the noble Lords, Lord Lilley, Lord Horam and Lord Paddick, the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, and my noble friend Lord Dubs—and that is going on all around us. Whatever our view, that just cannot go on.

These are real people, families, refugees and people in need. Even if we think this or that should happen, we cannot have a situation where the Government are falling out among themselves with all that going on. I will just say, because this is the opportunity to do it—I know the Minister will take this—that we simply have to know where we are in order to debate these things.

I found this an interesting debate, which showed the House of Lords at its best. Many of us were Members in the other place, and even where views and arguments clash, out of that comes better public policy, which is what we want.

I want to concentrate on the regret Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hylton. I will reiterate some other points that were made, because it is important for us to put these on the table and then ask some specific questions.

The Statement of Changes in Immigration Rules published in May reflects changes made by the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said, as well as covering a number of other issues. The key change which the regret Motion quite rightly focuses on is to implement the provision in the Nationality and Borders Act to have two tiers of refugees, with the support a person is entitled to based on how they travelled to the UK rather than their actual need. As the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, outlined, can the Minister clarify what support is available to the different groups: the length of stay, the support that they will or will not get, the nature of any detention that they would face should they be put in group 1 rather than group 2, and so on? It is unclear to me, reading the Immigration Rules, what they mean with regard to all that, so we need some clarity. The statement makes some changes to definitions, including changes needed to allow for the effective operation of the migration and economic development partnership with Rwanda, and there is some clarification on the family reunion rules.

This Chamber and His Majesty’s Opposition and others raised detailed and sustained objections to the Nationality and Borders Act during its passage. The Act did nothing to address the backlog of asylum claims and in fact clearly risks making things worse. In our view, it did nothing to create genuine safe routes to prevent dangerous journeys. Instead, it put barriers in the way of refugees fleeing war, persecution and unimaginable situations, as well as victims, including children, who are trying to escape modern slavery.

In this House, multiple votes were won calling for proper planning of safe routes, preventing offshoring, calling for international co-operation—a point my noble friend Lord Dubs made with specific reference to the need to work with France—and ensuring safe family reunion routes for unaccompanied children in refugee camps. As the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said, many children are going missing on arrival in this country; we do not know where they are, which is completely and utterly unacceptable. The House also called for protecting the rights of modern slavery victims, and addressed many other issues. Unfortunately, the elected House, as is its right, insisted on the Act remaining and rejected many of the changes that your Lordships put forward. The regret Motion that the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, has brought forward seeks for us to look again at some of these issues and to raise certain questions.

I point out to the Minister that whatever system you have, there has to be greater effectiveness of the bureaucracy. There is administrative chaos with much of this, and it simply has to be resolved. I will give the Minister some statistics, and perhaps he can say what is being done about it. The number of basic asylum decisions being taken each year by the Government has collapsed. Decisions have fallen from 28,000 to only 14,000 last year. What an earth is going on? It does not matter what system you have; if the number goes from 28,000 to 14,000, there is a real problem. That is fewer decisions than either Belgium or the Netherlands, let alone Germany or France.

According to the Red Cross in the submission it gave us for this debate, of the applications submitted in quarter 4 of 2021, only 7% received a decision within six months. The equivalent of that was 56% in 2018 and more than 80% in 2015. What on earth is going on? What on earth is happening? Irrespective of the system you have, if you get a collapse in the effectiveness of the administration, nothing will work. All you get is undermining of the system. That backlog costs the taxpayer huge sums of money and prevents the system operating effectively. Can the Minister confirm how long—that is, how many years—the average wait for a basic decision to be made on an asylum claim now is?

The creation of group 2 refugees, who will receive only temporary asylum leave, will require the system not only to make the initial decision but to retake that decision multiple times. What impact assessment have the Government done on that change—the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, made this point, I think—where multiple decisions must now be made? What are the Government doing to address their backlog and how will the system, which is already struggling, cope with the additional burden that this measure places on it?