King’s Speech

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Monday 18th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak on leave to remain, but first I want to comment on the background policy papers the Government published on the upcoming immigration and asylum Bill. If you read the beginning of certainly one of those papers, it seems to suggest that somehow the UK suffers more with asylum seekers than other parts of Europe. Let me make it clear that this is not the case. The numbers of asylum seekers in Germany, France, Italy and Spain are well ahead of the number here in the UK. If you look at it on a per capita basis, countries such as Greece, and many others, are well ahead of us in terms of statistics.

Let me come on to indefinite leave to remain. I have in my close family a guy—my step-grandson, in effect—who has leave to remain. He works hard, pays taxes and has no intention of claiming any benefits whatever—that would be against his moral compass. He is well integrated into his local community and is a great father. He is able to do all this because he has the certainty of indefinite leave to remain, which gives him stability and allows him to be a positive member of British society. However, the Government have plans, via this Bill in the King’s Speech, to continue their agenda of not allowing people to acquire that position for 10 to 20 years. This is fundamentally wrong. It creates cost for those individuals and, as I understand it, everybody’s situation is going to be looked at again after two and half years. That is a huge bureaucratic burden on our Civil Service at a time when it is under great stress anyway, with backlogs of appeals and the number of asylum seekers still coming into the country, although that may be reducing. It is particularly bad, in terms of its retrospectivity, for those who are already here and now see those horizons moving far ahead to 10 to 20 years’ time.

I just wanted to make the point that changing the rules in terms of years is wrong. For those individuals who want eventually to become British citizens—and we should encourage that—and officially part of British society, it can lead to alienation rather than the integration that we want. I ask the Government to think again about those timetables.