Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Harper and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Swire’s two amendments, which are well-intentioned, well drafted and have the right approach. Strengthening the ability of state agencies to be able collect this information would be very helpful.

However, at this point, I part company with my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough, which I do not do very often. I will not allow him to tempt me at length on this, but I do not agree with him at all on ID cards. I hope she does not find that it damages her reputation, but I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, on this point. She asked the right question: how does having ID cards solve any of these problems?

In his excellent introduction, my noble friend Lord Swire highlighted that we already require people who come to this country as migrants to have identity documents and that their biometric information is on a database. We require those who employ them, for example, to check their employment status. There is a gap in that, which we will come to deal with in later groups on Clause 45. The Government rightly are looking to strengthen that to include not just traditional employment models but some of the new employment models that are not currently captured but which have been highlighted publicly, including by the shadow Home Secretary, when talking about the problem that the gig economy, for example, and those who deliver things are not captured by the traditional models. That is important, but we already require people to check that information. Those employers who are operating illegally and choose not to do it still will not do it even if we have ID cards.

My worry about ID cards—and then I will stop talking about them, because it is not strictly within the scope of these things—is that you put the burden on those of us who are lawfully in the country and who should not have to keep being asked for ID when we have the right to use such services. All the public services that we access, including the NHS—except, rightly, for emergency care—the DWP and so on, require you to evidence that you have a right to be in the country and to access those services. We rightly do not insist that the NHS does it for emergency care, but, if you go to a hospital for planned treatment, they will check that you are entitled to have free NHS care. They may not always do so, but they are legally supposed to—those checks already exist.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I have to ask my noble friend a fundamental question. Regarding the biometric data that we currently retain across all the agencies of government, if that system is working, why have the Government—and indeed the previous Government, who he served and I supported—no idea how many illegal immigrants there are in the country? Why do they have no idea of the veracity of the estimate that one in 10 of the 9 million people in Greater London are illegal immigrants? We simply do not know the numbers. ID cards may not be perfect, but they may go some way to enabling us to have a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the challenge facing us in the delivery of public services. At the moment, we are flying blind and cannot use the data. The Government simply do not know how many people are in the country.

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[Lord Harper (Con)]

I shall deal with those points briefly. First, I do not accept that the UN is the arbiter of what the convention means. It is our job in this House and the House of Commons to make laws and set out our immigration policies. We should not subcontract that to outside organisations that sometimes have a very eccentric view of the world, and it is not one that is supported by the British people.

This comes down to the point about numbers. I am a strong supporter of our long tradition of taking genuine asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom, but we can do that only if we retain public support for it. I say to those who oppose stronger and tougher controls on who can come here and make it clear that it is only people who follow our laws that they are in danger of forfeiting that public support and confidence. If we do not deal with this issue, at some point—and I think we are getting very close to it—the public will say, “We just don’t want anybody. We’re not interested in their circumstances. We’re not interested in what’s happened. We want to control the number of people that are coming here”. I think that would be a tragedy. I say to those who oppose tougher border controls that they are running a real risk of altering public opinion so that it does not support it.

When we get these schemes right—I referenced earlier in the week the scheme that we set up for those fleeing the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine—they have huge public support. In my part of the world, I had no complaints about the Ukraine scheme. But when people think people are taking the mickey out of us, as they do with these small boat crossings, public support is not there and is not supportive. In a democracy, we should be mindful that we have to carry the public with us.

On this issue of deterrence, I think you have to have a deterrent. My noble friend demonstrated earlier the success in Australia. It was very telling that one political party in Australia opposed the scheme, and then when it came back into government it recognised that it was necessary. Although it would be politically convenient if that happened to this Government—if, in the end, what they are proposing was a failure and they suffered some political damage from it—the bit of me that wants my country to be successful, having had some responsibility for our borders in the past, does not want that to happen. I want to get this right. If we had won the election and been able to implement the Rwanda scheme, it would have been a deterrent. It would have sent a very clear message to people that paying thousands of pounds to people smugglers to cross the channel was a fruitless endeavour. The one thing we know about the people who pay people smugglers is that they expect to get what they pay for and, if they were not able to get to the United Kingdom and stay here, they absolutely would not have carried on paying people smugglers and that business model would have collapsed.

I completely accept that it was perfectly reasonable for people to disagree with the Rwanda scheme in the way that it was set up, whether it was Rwanda or a different country, but the problem the Government have is that Clause 37 repeals our scheme and, as my noble friend said, replaces it with no alternative deterrent at all. We have just seen this afternoon what the Prime Minister has announced. Obviously, we have not seen all the detail—we have just seen the headlines—but a one-in, one-out scheme has now been announced. The problem with that is twofold.

First, as my noble friend said, I am not sure what the legal underpinning of that is. It would be helpful if the Minister could set out whether the scheme that has been announced today, in both its pilot and its full form, will require any further primary legislation to make sure it can be implemented, and if it does need primary legislation, whether it is going to be inserted into this Bill before it leaves the House. Also, I fear it will be subject to enormous legal challenge and the Government will have exactly the same problems as we had with the Rwanda scheme. It will take them ages to be able to scale it up. The final flaw is that the public want to stop the volume of people coming here and, although a one-in, one-out scheme might alter the composition of the people coming, by definition a one-in, one-out scheme will not reduce the numbers. If we can only send somebody back to France and get another person, we might change who they are, but we are not going to deal with the numbers problem at all, so for a lot of the public the scheme will be a failure by its very definition.

As I said, I strongly support what my noble friend said. I think the Government are making a terrible mistake with this clause—not from my perspective, but from their own perspective. They are going to find that, welcome though some of the measures in this Bill are that support the powers the Government have—I have already referred to some of the later clauses that strengthen the controls on those working illegally, and where the Bill has measures in it that are strengthening the system, I support them—completely removing a deterrent without putting anything in its place, not amending it but completely scrapping it, is a mistake, and I fear that the Government will come to regret it. That will not be a good thing. It might be a short-term political advantage for us, but it will not be a good thing for the country. I would rather, if they had some disagreements with the detail of the scheme, that they had reflected on that and altered it.

If there was a clause here that was making changes to the Rwanda scheme—for example, the way it was dealing with the processing, or maybe even picking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, about who did the processing—that would have at least been an argument that we could have entered into, and it would have been a better argument than scrapping it overnight without anything at all to replace it. I fear the Government will come to regret having done so. We will know from the robust remarks of my noble friend that we did our best to stop them making that terrible mistake. I only hope that we are not proved to be correct.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I remember those long evenings over the last two years when we debated the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. The words of Pyrrhus come to mind, because noble Lords on the then Opposition Benches, particularly the Cross-Benchers and the Liberal Democrats, eventually prevented the Act from happening by a circuitous route. As Pyrrhus said, “One more such victory and we are doomed”. I think that the Government will reap the whirlwind of overpromising to smash the gangs and potentially not delivering.

It is important to make the point again that there is no plan B. We have spent £209 million this year giving money to the French, and yet we are told that we might send back 50 illegal migrants a week. That is one in 17 migrants. At the time when the Rwanda policy was developed, the number of illegal entrants crossing the channel was 45,700 in 2022. We are now in a position where we have had a 55% increase in those channel crossings in the last year, so it is not working.

Of course, my noble friend Lord Horam is right to make the point that it is impossible to judge the efficacy of the policy because it was never rolled out properly. It is no good the Minister complaining about that because his Government, for purely cynical political reasons, decided to draw a line in the sand and curtail and end the scheme. The scheme was popular with the public. Even after the Supreme Court hearing and judgment in November 2023, a Savanta poll found that 47% of people supported it and only 26% were against it.

For too long, our asylum system had been overwhelmed by those who sought to abuse our generosity and bypass legal immigration routes. The current system was not only unsustainable—it still is—but fundamentally unfair to those who follow proper procedures and wait patiently for their applications to be processed through legitimate channels. The Rwanda scheme was always about breaking the business model of people smuggling. The Rwanda partnership addressed the root cause of this crisis by fundamentally disrupting the business model of the criminal gangs that profited from human misery—I think we agree that that is the number one priority.

When people understood that making dangerous channel crossings would not lead to permanent settlement in the UK, the economic incentive for these perilous journeys disappeared. This was not merely theoretical: as my noble friend said, there have been examples of countries working together—Australia, for instance, but also Denmark and Israel—to return irregular or illegal migrants. Far from abandoning our humanitarian obligations, the legislation strengthened our ability to help those most in need. By creating an orderly, managed system, we could better focus our resources on genuine refugees who required our protection. Rwanda, as a safe third country with a growing economy and commitment to refugee protection, offered a new life with dignity and opportunity.

The Act reasserted parliamentary sovereignty in matters of immigration policy. The British people voted repeatedly for Governments committed to controlling immigration. This legislation ensured that elected representatives, rather than foreign courts—I know some noble Lords do not like that term—determine how we implement our policies.

There were economic benefits. We always hear from Ministers how expensive the Rwanda scheme was, but, actually, by the time of the general election, the National Audit Office found that we had spent something like £318 million. That is not an insignificant amount of public money, of course, but the Minister quotes a £700 million figure—I would like him perhaps to write to me to outline how he gets that breakdown, because I am not sure that the NAO would necessarily agree with him. But we are now spending £4.7 billion every year on the asylum system and hotels. So, on a cost-benefit analysis, a scheme that potentially reduced the pull factor was probably better value for money.

The legislation demonstrated Britain’s commitment to international co-operation in addressing global migration challenges. Of course, the Government approved of this in principle. In May, we saw the slightly unedifying sight of the Prime Minister travelling to Albania to go cap in hand to the slightly dubious Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, seeking offshore processing facilities in Albania. Unfortunately, he was several months too late. The Italian Government had gone in before and the charms of Madame Meloni surpassed those of Mr Starmer—I cannot think why. The Government obviously believe in the principle of offshoring the processing of asylum seekers, and it is disingenuous to say that that is not the case. We wish them well if they wish to pursue other opportunities to explore working and collaborating with other countries.

The safety of Rwanda Act 2024 represented compassionate but firm governance—compassionate towards genuine refugees who deserved our protection and firm in our determination to prevent abuses of our asylum system. The legislation delivered on our manifesto commitment of 2019.

But as I said, Labour Peers, Cross-Benchers, Liberal Democrats and Bishops—all unelected and unaccountable —conspired to thwart this legislation; to undermine, traduce and attack the Bill at every turn; not to improve it or to scrutinise it but to wreck it. We should not be surprised at the specious claims by lawyers in this House that the legislation was “unlawful”, which demonstrated their own anti-democratic inclinations and propagated the fiction that unelected courts have sovereignty over our own elected Parliament and a Government with a strong electoral mandate. That is completely wrong. Parliament is supreme, as a casual reference to Sections 7 and 23 of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 makes clear.

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[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, on the overall issue, I strongly support the various provisions in legislation to make sure that victims of modern slavery and trafficking are properly protected. There is, however, a balance to strike, because the people we want to protect are actual victims of modern slavery and trafficking. We have to be very careful because, if you have a blanket exemption for anyone who claims to be a victim of modern slavery and trafficking, you just create a massive gap in our laws where anybody who is then intercepted ends up claiming to be a victim of modern slavery and trafficking to avoid being removed from the country. That has two incredibly damaging consequences. One is that they are able to undercut our immigration control, but they also damage public support for and acceptance of genuine victims of modern slavery and trafficking. We have to have a system which recognises that there are many bad actors out there who will take advantage of every weakness in our legislation.

I do not support the first amendment in this group, which seeks to get rid of the Home Secretary’s ability to remove people who have sought to use modern slavery protections in bad faith: the sorts of people I have talked about who try to use these provisions, where they do not apply, to try to avoid our immigration controls. I think it is reasonable that the Home Secretary is able to do that. I know from my experience, and I have no reason to suspect it is now any different, that the officials in the Home Office who look after this area of policy are expert, competent people who do their very best to try to make these decisions.

I have met victims of modern slavery. I met the people who implemented this legislation when my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead was Home Secretary and I was in the Home Office, and I have a lot of confidence that they get the decisions right—not in 100% of cases, because people are not perfect, but I think we have a good system—but we have to have the power to deal with people who act in bad faith.

Amendment 117 repeals a whole bunch of sections of the Nationality and Borders Act that actually provide the protections for victims of modern slavery, such as their ability to get leave to stay in the United Kingdom for a period of up to 60 months and to have a recovery period. Those are all very valuable protections that ought to remain, so I do not support that amendment.

Very briefly, given that my noble friend Lady May is not able to be here, I briefly support the thrust of her amendment, Amendment 183. That looks at making sure that people who are victims of modern slavery and perhaps have committed criminal offences but under duress are not then punished for a second time as a result of only having committed those offences under duress.

I think that amendment has a lot of merit. If my noble friend Lady May were to bring it back on Report, I would consider supporting it. If there are any flaws or weaknesses in the way it is drafted, it would be good if the Minister were able to set them out today or would engage with my noble friend and the people who have supported the amendment to deal with them so that we could have an agreed position on Report.

With those relatively brief comments and mindful of time, I will sit down.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 172. I would genuinely press the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, to elucidate the meaning behind it, because I find it quite confusing. The amendment seeks to prevent the proper authorities gaining any information about a person. I read the wording very carefully. It refers to

“suspected victims of slavery or human trafficking”.

It could be that that status changes, and that a person was originally suspected of being a victim but when further inquiry took place it proved not to be the case. Therefore, I find it odd that under this restrictive amendment—I am happy to be disabused if I have got it wrong—a public authority would be speaking to, for instance, adult social care or adult social services, children’s services and others but would be prevented on a statutory basis from talking to anyone else on the chance that, somewhat down the line, that person may have criminal charges laid against them. At that stage, they may be found not to have been truly a victim of slavery or human trafficking.

To specifically rule out

“a customs official ... a law enforcement officer … a UK authorised person”—

I am not entirely certain what that is—or

“the government of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom”

seems pretty draconian and restrictive. Perhaps the noble Baroness might wish to enlighten us about the meaning behind this amendment. However, for the reasons I set out, I do not think it would be appropriate to incorporate it into the Bill, and on that basis, I oppose it.