Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Second sitting)

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th February 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Vickers]

Q What concerns, if any, do you have about the Bill as drafted?

Jim Pearce: From a policing point of view, there would be insurance around safeguarding. For the electronic devices, for example, I understand the benefits that would come from the counter-terrorism-style powers to be able to seize electronic devices. I am confident that that is managed through the measures in place around reasonable suspicion and having to get the advice from a senior officer. It is about operationalising that, putting it into practice, and making sure that our staff understand through education and training. Any change in legislation requires training, finance and input. Those are the types of things that I would be thinking about.

Rob Jones: I agree. It is about the professional development and the guidance for officers who are using new tactics and new tools against this threat, and making sure that we are ready to go with very clear guidance on how officers should look to engage the new offences in the Bill.

Sarah Dineley: Clause 17 and one of the subsections of clause 18 create extraterritorial jurisdiction for the offences, and it would be remiss of me not to highlight some of the challenges that that will bring. We have a system of judicial co-operation, something called mutual legal assistance, whereby we can obtain intelligence and evidence from our overseas counterparts at both judicial and law enforcement level. We work very hard on building those relationships to collaborate.

To that end, the Crown Prosecution Service has a network of liaison prosecutors based across the world. Specifically, we have liaison prosecutors based in the major organised immigration crime countries—Spain, Italy, Turkey, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium—and two in France, one of whom is actually a dedicated organised immigration crime liaison prosecutor. We use them to foster and build those relationships so that we have that reciprocal exchange of information where required. That is not to say that is without its challenges. I flag that as something that we will continue to work on, but it has challenges.

[The Minister for Border Security and Asylum (Dame Angela Eagle)]

Q Starting with Rob Jones, what do the witnesses think the Bill does for them operationally?

Rob Jones: It gives us the opportunity to make the most of the intelligence dividend that we have invested in tackling the threat. We have a good understanding of the people behind small boats crossings in particular, the supply of materials, the facilitation from near-Europe and further afield, but we want momentum and greater agility so that when we are aware that a crossing is being prepared—when materials are moving—we can act pre-emptively and proactively.

As I said earlier, we do not want to be investigating after thousands of people have arrived, and trying to put together very complex investigations that may involve months of covert surveillance and eavesdropping—a whole range of covert tactics—to get us over the line for a charging decision for a section 25 offence. The new offences give us the opportunity to act when we see that jigsaw puzzle coming together, to go to the CPS when we reach a tipping point and to go earlier than we can now. That means that we can pull more people through that system, deliver justice more quickly and be more disruptive in tackling the threat. That is a big step forward. That is lacking in the current toolbox to operationalise the intelligence we have.

Sarah Dineley: The endangerment offence potentially fills a gap between the current section 24 and 25 provisions. Each boat has a pilot—someone steering it across the channel—who, by the very nature and condition of those boats, the overcrowding, the lack of lifesaving equipment, and so on, puts everyone in that boat in danger of losing their life. We welcome that clause and will draft guidance on how it can be interpreted in terms of practical application.

Jim Pearce: Police officers mainly deal with the inland clandestine events as opposed to the small boats. From my point of view, it would be, correctly, common practice to use schedule 2(17) of the Immigration Act 1971 to detain migrants and then pass them into the immigration system. On searches after that, yes, there are powers in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 after that provision under section 32, but that is mainly to safeguard; it is not to seize evidence.

On Rob’s point about early intervention and intelligence gathering, the only way you gather intelligence is through what people tell you and what electronic devices give up. The Bill gives police officers the ability to gather intelligence through defined and clear powers in legislation, so that they are not misusing a PACE power, an operational procedure or anything else. That would be the biggest change for policing.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q We often hear that organised immigration crime is very lucrative, well established and transnational, and that there is therefore no point in doing a lot about it. What is your answer to that?

Rob Jones: You could say that about all serious organised crime. Where do you go from there? I do not agree with that view. It is definitely transnational and complicated, but it is a relatively new serious organised crime threat, and it is not too late to stop it. In 2018, there were a few hundred people coming on small boats. There were 36,000 last year. We need to unravel the conditions that have allowed that to happen, and this legislation will help with that. I do not take the view that you cannot stop it.

There will always be people attempting organised immigration crime, but this element of it—small boats—is relatively new. There are very specific things that organised crime groups involved in it need to do. They need access to very specific materials—otherwise they cannot move the numbers that they attempt to move—and they need to be able to operate using materials that are lawfully obtained, albeit for criminal purposes. This attacks that business model because we can pursue the dual-use materials with more vigour and have more impact. It is challenging, and it is a different challenge from drugs and other threats, but it is there to be dealt with. It is a very public manifestation of the OIC threat that has always been there. This part of it relies on a very specific business model that we can attack.

Sarah Dineley: The follow-on point from that, and one that you raised, is that people are making a lot of money out of this, so the illicit finance piece is really important. These new clauses actually give us more on which to hang illicit finance investigations. There is a lot of work going on in the illicit finance sphere; in particular, and most recent, the illicit finance taskforce between the UK and Italy, was set up specifically to look at the profits being made by the people who are preying on other people’s misery.

Jim Pearce: It has been said already but I want to reinforce the point about organised crime gangs being involved in polycriminality. Organised immigration crime is one part, but so are modern slavery, serious acquisitive crime and drug running. That is felt in local communities across the whole country. In my own force area of Devon and Cornwall, you would think that modern slavery and organised immigration crime do not exist, but we have a number of investigations and intelligence leads being developed; they are being looked at by both our regional crime units and members of Rob’s team. This exists everywhere across the country. As I say, if you are prepared to effectively smuggle people into the country, or at least to facilitate that, you are prepared to get involved in very serious things indeed.

[Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)]

Q I want to look at clauses 13 to 17 and what the Crown Prosecution Service thinks of them, so this question is more directed at you, Sarah. Considering their application both inside and outside the UK, what do you think the chances of successful prosecution are? How likely do you think the CPS is to take this up? We heard earlier today that some are concerned about how wide the powers in clauses 13 to 16 could be. We were told this morning that, if I was in Calais and someone asked me, “What’s the weather like today?”, technically I would have committed a crime under these clauses. What is your view of that?

Sarah Dineley: I will deal with the second point first, as it is probably the easiest and it flows into the first. In relation to clauses 13 to 16, with any new legislation, the Crown Prosecution Service always publishes guidance on how it is to be interpreted. Certainly, the example that you gave about asking what the weather is like in Dover when you are stood in Calais would not fall within the guidance as meeting the evidential test. Of course, it is not just about an evidential test being met, but a public interest test as well. Our guidance always deals with that specific question of whether it is in the public interest, so that prosecutors can do that balancing exercise and ask, “Are there factors that weigh in favour of prosecution? Are there factors that tend away from prosecution?” They want to come to a decision that is compliant with our code for Crown prosecutors, so it is a mixture of guidance and application of the code that hopefully gets us to the right conclusion.

Going back to your first point, I mentioned that we have mutual legal assistance and that we can issue what are called international letters of request. They require the recipient country to execute the action, or to provide the information that we have asked for. One of the problems is that there has to be something called dual criminality—there has to be the equivalent offence in the country that we are making the request to, and there are some gaps across Europe in establishing dual criminality for all the immigration offences that we currently have on our books. However, we are confident that there are reciprocal laws in the major OIC countries in Europe to allow us to make those requests for information under mutual legal assistance. We are aided by the network of prosecutors based abroad, which I mentioned. We also have Eurojust and the joint investigation teams run out of Eurojust. We are well versed in working internationally and with the measures that we can deploy to make sure that we build a strong evidential case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Vickers]

Q Are there any lessons from abroad that we are failing to learn at this point?

Tony Smith: One thing I have raised is the possibility of a biometric entry/exit system, which we do not have in this country. I chair a lot of conferences around the world, on border developments, border security and border technologies. Your face will become your passport sooner or later—sooner in some countries than here. If we had the powers and authority, we could capture a digital biometric image of everybody entering and exiting the country, and we could require the carriers to do likewise—we do not have physical embarkation controls.

This is happening in America. It is happening in Dubai. It is happening in Singapore. We are going to Curaçao, which now has a walk-through border. All it does is capture your face. It matches you to the API data that you already have, uploads it into the cloud and recognises you straightaway, so you have a more seamless border. It will give proper figures on who is in this country and who is not. Your net migration figures will be a lot more accurate than they are currently, provided that we have the powers to capture and retain everybody’s facial image. That means UK passports, Irish passports, electronic travel authorisations and visas, and permanent residents. I think that is achievable, and I would love to see it happening in this country.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Migration Watch’s website says that you are worried about population projections and a

“significant fall in the percentage of the indigenous (white British) population.”

Can you explain what your worry is, and could you define “indigenous white population”?

Alp Mehmet: First, I am a first-generation migrant. I came here as an eight-year-old. I have been here since the mid-’50s. The immigrant ethnic minority element of the population in those days was something like 4%. In the 1951 census, it was 3.9%, and it is now 25%. That has substantially happened over the last 30 years.

What worries me, if that is the right word, is the fact that people are being added to the population, and migration is the only driver of population increase at the moment. I know you have David Coleman coming up next. He will tell you a great deal more about the likely evolution of the population’s demographic mix. That is my concern. Having arrived here as a migrant, and accepted and joined this country and made it my own, I see it now changing very rapidly into something that the majority of people in this country do not want to happen.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

You still have not told us what indigenous means, but thank you very much.

[Mr Forster]

Q Karl, you talked about how the Bill does not have very much deterrence in it. What is your view on safe, legal routes? If we had safe, legal routes, would that not deter people from unsafe, illegal routes?

Tony, you talked about your perfect solution to borders. You did not mention the costs. Do you have an idea of the set-up and running costs?

Karl Williams: The short answer is that we do have safe and legal routes. The new Home Office immigration data, which was published this morning, pointed out that last year 79,000 people arrived through safe and legal routes. Since 2020, about 550,000, maybe slightly more, have arrived by safe and legal routes: Ukraine, Hong Kong, the Afghan resettlement schemes, and people arriving through UN programmes and from Syria, yet that does not stop the crossings.

The fundamental problem is that there will always be more demand to come to this country than we would probably be willing to allow for through safe and legal routes. One stat is that, a couple of years ago, Gallup did a very wide-ranging poll of attitudes on migration and found that, globally, about 900 million adults would migrate, given the opportunity—30 million of those people put Britain as their first choice. There is always going to be a longer queue to get in than we have capacity for at any given time. That is my view.

Tony Smith: I do not have a detailed financial breakdown for you, but I can say that the direction of travel in the UK and around the world is to take away officers from the border and to automate a lot of the processes. We are doing that here already: we move, I think, more people through e-gates than any other country does. This is an automated border that will reduce the number of officers required to do frontline, routine tasks, which they really do not want to do, and enable them to target the people they want to focus on. If you were to do that detailed analysis, you would probably find that it will be cost-neutral in the end.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Vickers]

Q Are there any lessons from abroad that we are failing to learn?

David Coleman: The lesson that everyone cites is the example of Australia, which, depending on which Government are in power, has a policy of diverting people right across the other side of the Pacific to an island where they were notionally safe, but where they were not able to enjoy being in Australia. That is supported or not supported depending on which Government is in power, which is one of the problems with migration policy. Generally speaking, whether the doors are tight shut, half open or fully open depends very much on the swings and balances of electoral change and is rather unpredictable. That is inevitable.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Professor Coleman, are you a member of the Galton Institute?

David Coleman: Yes and no. The Galton Institute does not exist any more; it has changed its name to the Adelphi Genetics Forum.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

But it is a eugenics organisation?

David Coleman: No, it is not. It is devoted to genetics research and has conferences every year on genetics research. It promotes research into that and has a small grant fund that people can apply for. It is a very pukka organisation.

If you have any doubts about it, I suggest that you look at its publications and its website. You will find something by me on that that is only slightly connected to genetics: “New Light on Old Britons”—it is about palaeontology and human evolution. That is one of the things that the organisation was interested in. You are quite right that it started off as the Eugenics Society, and before that it was the Eugenics Education Society. That was in the days when progressives of every kind clustered around to support eugenic ideas because they were thought to be improving and beneficial to society. Society has changed its mind—

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Eugenics was discredited because of the rise of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, was it not?

David Coleman: It got a terribly bad name for that reason—exactly so. That is why, over the last century, opinion has moved against using that word and using those notions. But I respectfully point out that it has nothing to do with asylum seeking.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Do you believe in universal human rights—that all human beings are equal and deserving of universal human rights?

David Coleman: I suppose, as a rather bad Christian, I am bound to believe that, but the problem with human rights definitions is that they tend to be infinitely extendible. All kinds of entitlements that started off being universally accepted by almost everyone of good will tend to get expanded beyond reason.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q You mentioned that trying to deal with the problems of illegal or irregular immigration can mean being, in some ways, “nasty to the smugglers”, which the Bill is, but also nasty to asylum seekers. Do you want to talk about what you mean by that?

David Coleman: I mean making the prospect of life in the country of intended asylum less attractive than otherwise might be the case. That is what the Rwanda policy was. I suppose I was speaking slightly tongue in cheek in calling it “nasty”, but it certainly is not the same thing as being welcoming, is it? The idea of the Rwanda Bill was to secure the safety from persecution and risk of death for asylum seekers, which is the aim of asylum, without admitting them to Britain and all the benefits of being in a rich country.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q But the reality was that tens of thousands of people had arrived and could not be processed, because of the Illegal Migration Act and its flaws. They were just living in hotels forever, as they were not able to be processed and not able to be sent anywhere else. How is that a solution to the issues that we are trying to deal with?

David Coleman: I am not here to defend the Rwanda policy, although I think that, in principle, it had some merit. That is a problem that would arise whether there was a Rwanda policy or an Illegal Migration Act or not, because of the sheer pressure of asylum seeking from all corners of the world. That has been the case in the past for a long time and will continue to be the case. We now have asylum claims up to 99,000 in the last year, so it is not just to do with the Illegal Migration Act; it is a worldwide process.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Of course, asylum claims are up because they were not being processed, but now they are. That is dealing with the backlog that was caused by the problems with the Illegal Migration Act.

David Coleman: I do not know how important the Illegal Migration Act was in increasing the number of the backlog, to be perfectly honest. In the past, it has been the same height without the Illegal Migration Act. About 15 or 20 years ago, it was also 90,000 per year, and that was way before any of the past legislation was enacted.

[Pete Wishart]

Q I was actually very excited when I found out that there was a professor of demography coming to this panel; I have a particular interest in population demography. Using your vast knowledge of the subject, could you explain what the population and demographic trends will be for practically every European nation towards the middle part of the century and the end of the century? How will these nations cope with population stagnation, population decline and the assorted problems with a smaller working-age workforce supporting an older generation, with a falling birth rate around the world? What will they do to deal with that?

David Coleman: This is a formidable tutorial group to try to give such an answer to. If I could say with any kind of confidence what was going to happen by the middle of the century, I would deserve a Nobel prize.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Professor Bell, do you think that in a democracy it ought to be the elected Members and the Government who decide who can come to our country, rather than criminals and people smugglers?

Professor Brian Bell: Yes.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Therefore, do you share my view that, when we see the establishment along our borders of serious organised immigration criminals who are profiting greatly from their illicit activities and putting people’s lives at risk, we should try to do all we can to put a stop to it?

Professor Brian Bell: Absolutely, but that is sort of true of all crimes: if someone is committing a crime, you want to stop them doing it. I think the difficulty is in the question: if you stop one criminal doing it, what happens? Is there a substitution effect where you just get the next organised crime organisation taking action? The risk is that you may well succeed, but the overall macro effect of that may be not as positive as you might hope.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q But of course that is not a reason for not doing it, is it?

Professor Brian Bell: Absolutely not.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Could you therefore comment on whether the new powers in the Bill will have an effect on our ability as a society with law and order to crack down on some of that abuse?

Professor Brian Bell: It is likely to have some positive effect. In some sense, it cannot have a negative effect, so it must have some positive effect. The difficulty is that, as almost everyone would accept, it is impossible to judge ex ante what the size of that effect will be, but that sort of tells you that you should try it and see how it works.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q We are taking evidence to see whether people think these things will be effective. I am not asking you to produce a crystal ball and tell us in advance, but I am trying to get a handle on whether you think this is an effort worth making. It seems to me that you are saying that it is.

Professor Brian Bell: It is an effort worth making, but I would caution that in other areas of police and crime activity, the impact of being tougher with sanctions and new offences does not necessarily lead to very substantial changes in crime rates. The overall crime rate in the UK is almost certainly driven more by incentives and economic outcomes in the long run than it is by particular offences and statutes that are passed.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Is it desirable to use counter-terrorism-style powers to disrupt so that we can prevent some of these crossings from happening rather than waiting until after people have died in the channel and then trying to pick up the pieces?

Professor Brian Bell: Completely.

[Mr Forster]

Q How would the changes to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs data sharing improve border security?

Professor Brian Bell: I do not have expertise in that area. I am confused as to how significant it will be. As I understand the Bill, it will allow HMRC to share customs data with other parties. It is not clear to me what that achieves. It would be wrong of me to imply that I have any particular operational understanding of how that will help operations.