Immigration and Asylum Bill (First sitting)

Anna Turley Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Vickers]

Q To get the result that we want—tackling that abuse—what else should the Home Office be doing in that space? If this is not a solution, what would you put forward as an alternative, if that abuse does exist?

Eleanor Lyons: If you took the premise that there is an issue with the system, I would focus on better training and support for first responder organisations so that they are good at doing referrals in the first place. There is a real mix in terms of how qualified and competent first responder organisations, such as local authorities, police forces and charities, are. I would also look at a higher quality of decision making from the Government. At the moment, about three quarters of negative decisions that are challenged are then accepted as having been the wrong initial decision by the Government, and are overturned. If there were more opportunities for people to be identified, better-quality decisions and a more trauma-informed approach, we would identify victims earlier in the process and there would be fewer challenges on that part. All this legislation will do is to make it very hard for us to identify or support victims who need help.

[The Minister of State, Home Department (Anna Turley)]

Q Thank you all for coming to give evidence to us. More than a third of our charter returns that fail to go ahead have involved a modern slavery referral raised after the return arrangements have been made. Can you give us some indication of why you think that is and, building on your previous answer, what would help to challenge that?

Eleanor Lyons: Thank you, Minister, for your engagement so far on the Bill. It is very much appreciated. Building on what I was saying, we really need a system that allows for early identification and support of victims of exploitation. That includes all victims of exploitation, UK nationals and non-UK nationals. When I first came into my role three years ago, the big conversation was about what mandatory training would look like for first responder organisations, so that they would know how to spot a potential victim of modern slavery. Many victims themselves do not even recognise that they are being exploited. To introduce early support into the system would make a huge change on that side of things.

I am concerned about the Home Office data on already high-risk flights. Less than 2% of the total number in the national referral mechanism are on those flights. The Home Office has five days to make a “reasonable grounds” decision. It only protects a victim of modern slavery for five days if they are referred into the national referral mechanism. If the Government decide that, actually, they do not think that there are grounds for those people being a victim of modern slavery, after that point they do not get any extra enhancements for indefinite leave to remain, so I do not think that that provides extra protection for victims. All we try to do in that period is to provide them with the support and care they need in their recovery period, if they need it.

[Mr Paul Kohler (Wimbledon) (LD)]

Q Would you reject the view that the referral system is exploited?

Eleanor Lyons: I would say that, from the evidence that we have seen—this has been looked at across the years by different Select Committees and academics—there is no evidence of widespread misuse of the system. Of the flights that did not go ahead in 2025 after 3 pm, that is less than 1% of the number of potential victims of modern slavery whom we identified in the UK last year. As I mentioned, if you make these sweeping changes in the legislation, you will also have a negative impact on all victims of modern slavery, in particular cases where we have taken too long to identify them. For example, the survivors of al-Fayed have reached out to me, and they have serious concerns, because we failed them; we did not identify them when we should have done. The Bill would have a negative impact on them, too.

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[Matt Vickers]

Q Is there a particular feature that you would have liked to see in the Bill to aid you in that objective?

Helen Rance: No.

[Anna Turley]

Q I pass on my thanks to everyone at the NCA for their excellent work. We know how important it is for disrupting the organised, industrial crime that is taking place across borders. It is critical that we intervene and prevent dangerous crossings as early as possible. I wanted to put my thanks on the record for everything that the agency does.

You mentioned the importance of deterrence. That is critical, and it is one of the key things that we want to achieve in the Bill. Could you say a little more about how you think the measures in the Bill will help to deter people and make interventions earlier in the process of illegal immigration?

Helen Rance: In terms of deterrence, we are obviously a law enforcement agency, and we would not make specific definitive judgments on the different effects that the measures will have on deterring crossings or immigration. We very much think that deterrence is about a combination of factors, and is, ultimately, a matter for Government policy. However, we believe that the measures contribute to a system that is seen as firm, fair and less susceptible to exploitation by organised crime groups. It is likely that that will help the overall deterrent effect. The changes to appeals, protection status, asylum arrangements and the removal process might contribute to making the UK a less attractive target for the criminal networks that facilitate illegal immigration.

[Mr Kohler]

Q I sit on the Home Affairs Committee and have spoken to your colleagues about smashing the gangs. The NCA has been trying to smash the drug gangs for half a century. Is there anything missing from the Bill that would help you to smash the gangs? What is your view on how far the NCA has progressed in smashing the gangs?

Helen Rance: If “smashing the gangs” means reducing small boat crossings, crossings are down this year compared with last year, and the number—

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[Matt Vickers]

Q Is there any risk that the article 8 provisions in the Bill could move litigation on to different questions, rather than increasing the Government’s ability to remove those with no right to be here? If Parliament wanted to go further in restricting the circumstances in which article 8 can prevent removals, what could it do beyond what is proposed in the Bill?

Professor Ekins: Litigation will certainly arise in consequence of these new provisions, if they are enacted; they will not end the controversy in this space. The litigation may turn on different questions, such as whether something counts as “normally”. There is a great deal of uncertainty about how the changes made by the relevant provision, clause 18, will be received by the courts.

In a sense, the legislation leaves untouched the fundamental structure of article 8 in this context, which is individuated proportionality assessment. It tries to clarify, or maybe streamline, some aspects of the way in which article 8 is understood and applied—those changes are to be welcomed, so far as they go—but it is unclear whether, and to what extent, that will restrain the courts in applying article 8.

The legislation takes for granted continuing individuated assessment. The legislation does not purport to be an exclusive code for article 8, does not displace article 8 under the Human Rights Act, and does not direct the courts to focus only on the terms of this legislation and close their eyes to the Strasbourg case law. The way in which article 8 will be understood and applied will be informed to some extent by this new legislation, but there will be arguments about precisely what it means and whether there are conditionals in the legislation at play.

It will always be open to unlawful migrants and asylum seekers who are making arguments by reference to article 8 to invite the court to go back to the Strasbourg Court’s case law and to take this legislation as, in a sense, advisory. I know that that may sound somewhat strange, but that is effectively the structure we have. Parliament is not clearly telling the courts, “Focus only on this legislation, and close your eyes to the other body of case law.” It could attempt to do so: it could go further, by disapplying article 8 under the Human Rights Act and making this an exclusive code for the relevance of family life. That would require some recasting.

To my mind, the more fundamental problem is that we are maintaining individuated proportionality assessment as the test for the lawfulness of removal. That will inevitably be somewhat—“ad hoc” is perhaps the wrong term, but it will be particular and unpredictable. A great deal will turn on the persons who are making the adjudicative decisions. The Bill obviously has something to say about that, but how it will play out is quite unpredictable.

That is a complicated answer to your question. There will certainly be litigation, and it would be a mistake to think that this new legislation will authoritatively determine how article 8 will be understood. It will make some difference, but much turns on how it is received, which you simply cannot tell from where you sit now.

Dr Casey: I agree. There are two different ways, broadly speaking, that this Bill could be received by courts and tribunals. One way—which, so far as the Home Secretary is concerned, would be the positive scenario—is that the tribunal takes very seriously the clear intent behind the Bill, which is to tighten and narrow the circumstances in which article 8 can be invoked and successfully relied on to resist a removal or deportation.

However, as my colleague Richard pointed out, a lot of the wording in the Bill gives leeway for more flexible or generous interpretations for applicants. For example, the Bill says that article 8 applies “normally” only to a nuclear family—partners residing together, or a parent and a child residing together. That “normally” suggests that judges might take a broader understanding of other types of family arrangements. With the standards throughout the Bill—unreasonable impact, “adverse” impact or “unduly harsh”—there is, again, scope to give these a much more generous interpretation, such that, for some judges, it might be hard not to find an instance where deportation could not be considered harsh or as having an adverse impact on a child, because it separates a family unit.

I can imagine some judges—not all, but some—reading these standards in a generous way that would capture a large sweep of cases and defeat removals and deportations. There is a scenario where the reception of the Bill is such that judges retain quite a lot of discretion to come up with their own understanding of the right balance between the public interest and individuals’ family life and, plausibly within the text of the Bill, to reach conclusions that are in tension with the clear policy intent behind the Bill.

I think that that is an unavoidable situation if one accepts the strictures imposed by the ECHR and its jurisprudence because a sine qua non of article 8 law, as articulated by the Court, is that the tribunal must reach its own assessment—it must reach its own assessment of proportionality. At best, Parliament may give indications of where it wants weighting to go but, to stay within the strictures of the ECHR, the courts must have the final say.

Also, in response to the question about whether, if article 8 claims are less attractive, other claims might be made under the ECHR: absolutely. I imagine that article 3 claims will probably increase. The difference between article 3 and article 8, as the Committee will know, is that article 3 is categorical—there is no qualification if the threshold is met. The threshold sometimes includes things like whether removal will lead to substandard medical care, compared with the NHS; that is ill treatment. We could see a spike in such invocations, and the Bill does not touch article 3 claims whatever.

Professor Ekins: I should add that this legislation, as the Committee knows, builds on the Immigration Act 2014, which also attempted to tighten the understanding and application of article 8; that is largely viewed as having been much less effective than Parliament intended in 2014. This legislation will go further and that is to be welcomed, but the earlier Act should be a cautionary tale about the risks of failure.

[Anna Turley]

Q Thank you very much; I appreciate your responses. May I step back from just the article 8 measures and talk about the Bill in the round? What is your view on whether it strikes the right balance when it comes to honouring our obligations to refugees under the conventions? Are we balancing that with taking stronger action to deal with the challenges that we face internationally on illegal immigration? Is the Bill striking the right balance, or can we go further?

Professor Ekins: In my view, the legislation does not strike the right balance, because it fails—as have successive Bills, I think—to take sufficiently robust measures in relation to the problem of illegal migration and people smuggling; I am thinking of the small boats crisis in particular. That is somewhat distinct from the broader problem of unlawful migration, which is clearly a problem—people overstaying, foreign criminals and so on—but the small boats crisis has particular features that warrant a particular response.

To my mind, unfortunately, although the legislation tinkers with aspects of how the refugee convention should be understood in our law—perhaps we will come to that later—it seems, silently at least, to take for granted that persons who have contracted with people smugglers and made it across the channel are entitled to asylum and to remain in the UK. I think that that is a misunderstanding of the terms of the refugee convention, which do entitle us to expel persons from the UK, even when they are genuine refugees under the meaning of the refugee convention. That is a protection that all member states enjoy. It entitles us to expel them to other states, because they have entered in violation of our migration law. It would be different had they entered directly from a state where their lives were in danger, but no one coming from France is in that position. That makes that a structurally different position to other contexts, when people flee danger.

The legislation simply does not address that feature of the problem. The measures it takes—which, as I say, I welcome as far as they go—simply tinker with the edges and do not address the central problem. Genuine refugees will cross the channel but, so long as contracting with people smugglers is a viable route to enter and thus to settle in the UK, that will persist. It is a logical and rational expenditure of funds, and it is a flourishing business so long as you do not care about the lives of people crossing a dangerous water.

There is a failure to recognise the protections that we have as a country under the refugee convention. We may take action that would not place persons in danger—they can be removed to safe third states. As far as I can see, the Bill is focused on increasing administrative adjudicative capacity to process appeal claims more speedily. That is admirable, but it leaves untouched the central structural problem, which I and others writing for Policy Exchange have tried to draw attention to over the years.

Dr Casey: I agree. I do not see anything in the Bill that would deter unlawful channel crossings. But, as has been mentioned, , depending on how the Bill is received in the courts, it might deter overstaying on visas and the breaching of conditions of your permission to reside. That could be valuable, as those are significant numbers, but I do not see anything that would deter unlawful channel crossings in any way.

You could go further in the Bill and, for example, take advantage of provisions in the refugee convention that allow states to return those convicted of serious criminal offences or of threats to national security to their home countries, even if there was a risk of ill treatment. The refugee convention allows that, but it would not be possible within the confines of the ECHR. Article 3 puts a categorical prohibition on those kinds of returns even if the person being returned poses an enormous threat to the United Kingdom itself. So even if you did take full advantage of everything that the refugee convention permitted you to do to protect your own immigration system, the ECHR would pose even more stringent restrictions in many respects.

Professor Ekins: I agree with everything that Dr Casey has said, but I would add that that is article 3 as—in my view—misinterpreted by the Strasbourg Court. Article 3 does provide a categorical prohibition on torture and subjecting people to inhumane treatment; as I say, that has been misinterpreted in recent decades to establish a much more far-reaching bar on taking action that exposes someone to a risk of such action from third parties.

In 2021, we published a paper that addressed in close detail the misinterpretation of the ECHR and its far-reaching impact for immigration and asylum law. That Policy Exchange paper is backed by Lord Hoffmann, former judge of the House of Lords. It makes clear the problem in the Strasbourg Court’s reading of article 3—as well as its reading of article 8, I should add.

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[Blake Stephenson]

Q That is very helpful, thank you. Do you want to add anything, Dr Casey?

Dr Casey: Yes, I agree. I will just say that I think that, because the Independent Immigration Appeal Authority will not be a judicial body, the courts might be more anxious in scrutinising whether a clause ousts judicial review. At the moment, the way it is drafted, as a public lawyer you read a clause trying to oust and you think how a court would read it. I can imagine a court looking at that at the minute and inserting brackets and making it “A (rational and reasonable) decision of the IIAA”, and interpreting it in that respect.

[Anna Turley]

Q I am keen to come back to some of your comments on article 8. What is your analysis of how it has, slowly over time, come to protect those it was never originally intended to cover, and how can we safeguard against that in the future? Picking up on your point about the potential knock-on effect to article 3, Dr Casey, what mechanisms can we use to prevent article 3 being abused, essentially, on the back of our changes to article 8?

Professor Ekins: On the article 8 point, my own view, which is substantiated in quite some detail in the 2021 Policy Exchange paper with the support of Lord Hoffman that I referred to is that, for a long time in the history of the ECHR, article 8 had nothing to do with immigration and asylum. It was not a provision that was understood to impose limits on the enforcement of migration law or on the deportation and removal of non-citizens, especially foreign criminals and so on. There was no connection there.

A connection has been established in the case law by reading article 8 very expansively and then effectively requiring each particular decision to enforce the migration law of a member state to involve an individuated proportionality assessment about the impact on the particular person being removed—or, in relation to article 8, quite often on his or her family or maybe his or her extended family—and for that to pass judicial muster.

As I say, I think that is an innovation in the case law of the Strasbourg court. I do not want to overstate its novelty—it is an innovation that has been going on for several decades—but it is not part of what the UK and other member states agreed when they agreed the terms of the convention, and I think it should be viewed as a misinterpretation of the convention.

In a sense, the joint declaration of the member states earlier this year recognises that something has gone wrong in the case law of the Court; that it has read article 8—we will come to article 3—to establish a kind of Europe-wide migration and asylum law, beyond the terms agreed by the member states. That needs to be addressed and wound back.

The thought that, in a sense, you are wronging a foreign criminal when you remove him or her from the UK so that he or she cannot maintain a connection with family is just fundamentally misconceived. In the same way, we are not wronging the offender by incarcerating him, which makes it very much more difficult to maintain a flourishing family life; the consequence is a side effect of the wrongful choice made by the offender. Something similar holds, I think, with the wrongful choice made by a person who violates our migration law.

There are harsh consequences in many of these cases, of course, but they are not harsh consequences whereby the UK sets out to wrong someone’s family. That structure has to be more fully recognised. We should see that something has gone badly wrong in thinking that the right to respect for private and family life entails, at least in some cases, a de facto immunity to the application of migration law.

Dr Casey: I agree with Professor Ekins entirely. The extension of article 8 into the domain of immigration law was a very conspicuous act of judicial lawmaking through the living instrument approach.

As recently as 1985 in the Abdulaziz v. the United Kingdom case, you had the UK Government—Sir Peter Rawlinson, the Attorney General—arguing tooth and nail that article 8 did not apply to questions about entry into the UK or removal and that it was just outside the scope. They lost that case, and that has been the EHCR’s position for several decades since then, but it was not understood as part of the original compact when the convention was ratified.

Professor Ekins: You asked us about article 3 as well, I think.

[Anna Turley]

Yes, I did.

[The Chair]

We have an absolute hard stop at 11.05 am, so please be very succinct.

Professor Ekins: The 2021 paper I referred to chronicles the misinterpretation of article 3 as well. The categorical prohibition on torture and inhuman treatment has been wrongly extended to require the UK to avoid consequences that are not within the UK’s responsibility, such as the consequence of moving to a country with a much less developed health system, which really cannot be reasonably understood to involve a violation of article 3.

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[Matt Vickers]

Q If you think that the outcome of entering illegally should be the same as the outcome of entering legally, is there any other deterrent in that space? If the immigration consequence is not used as a deterrent, is there anything that the Refugee Council might accept?

Jon Featonby: For the people who are refugees, it is about having an asylum system that first and foremost does what it should do, which is making decisions as quickly as it can that are right the first time. I think making sure that that happens has been a bit of a challenge under successive Governments now. For the people who are genuinely seeking protection and who need it, the system needs to make sure that they are able to access that protection when they do.

What we have also seen is the challenge at the other end. For the people who are found not to have that protection need, there needs to be a firm and fair system in place to make sure they are removed from the UK as quickly, and hopefully as humanely, as possible. That is probably where there have been challenges. Some of them are legal challenges, but some of it comes down to basic good caseworking in the Home Office.

[Anna Turley]

Q We share your commitment to safe and legal routes; they are an important way to fulfil our obligations. However, as you see, we have large numbers of people who are coming here through irregular means. What proportion of those arriving by irregular means does the Refugee Council think are genuinely fleeing war and persecution? Do you have a view on that?

Jon Featonby: The easiest way to look at some of this is through the immigration statistics published by the Home Office. Since small boats really started in around 2019, the top nationalities have largely stayed the same. There have been people from Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrea and Iran, and the reasons why people would seek safety from those places are quite well known. Within that time, there have also been spikes from other countries. Quite famously, there was a lot of attention in 2022 on Albanians, but those numbers dropped quite quickly. That was probably a slightly different route from some of the other countries.

The Refugee Council has done some analysis in the past on what you would expect the asylum outcomes to be for those nationalities. Historically, you would expect around two thirds of the people crossing in small boats to go on and get protection. That has dropped slightly in the last year because the overall grant rate has dropped, although one caveat is that because the Home Office has not published appeals outcome statistics for the last three years, it is quite hard to work out exactly what happens once some of those cases go through the appeals process.

[Anna Turley]

Q What are your views on article 8 specifically? We know that the majority of our article 8 grantees have a history of immigration breaches. How can we best protect the immigration system while safeguarding family rights?

Jon Featonby: There is only so much that I can say on this, with my particular focus being on the people we support at the Refugee Council. The previous panel mentioned that, with article 8 rights, there has to be a balance between having a controlled immigration system and a focus on individual cases. From the Refugee Council’s point of view, we will continue to support the individual application interpretation of article 8. We see that in our work with refugee families: for a family that has been forced to displace, it is very much not one size fits all; these families can look like all sorts of different things.

One area where we focus a bit more on article 8, particularly around how the UK defines the core family, is the future system for refugee families to be able to safely reunite. We have shared our concerns around the suspension of that route. By our estimate, there are probably 20,000 people who have not been able to apply to be reunited safely through that route since it was suspended just over a year ago. For us, the important thing to remember about that route is that, for many years, nine in 10 of the visas granted to people on it were for women and children. In terms of family reunion in the future, we see it as important that some of the most vulnerable people who have been displaced from their homes and who are in danger have access to that safe route.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q Mr Featonby, thank you, and your counterparts at the Scottish Refugee Council, for the work you do to look after the vulnerable; we are very grateful. Of course, that work can go on only if there is public confidence in the system. As you know, applications have risen steadily since 2021. From your perspective, what is the urgency for a change in the legislation to return the trust and confidence in the system that have been eroded over the last few years?

Jon Featonby: There are definitely some positive signs that the Government should be quite proud of. Around the time of the election, we published a report that looked at the state of the asylum system. We described it as a “system in meltdown”, largely caused by the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which had seen productivity in the Home Office drop to its lowest level since the height of the covid pandemic. Since then, the Home Office has done a much better job of being able to make decisions quickly. The latest statistics we have show that about 75% of initial decisions are made within six months of somebody making an application. That is a good thing.

We think some Government priority should be given to how you make sure that people have confidence in the asylum system. That system needs to be doing its basics right: making decisions as quickly as it can that are right the first time; supporting refugees who are found to be in need of protection to get on with their lives, rebuild their lives and contribute fully to UK communities; and providing a way for people who are found to be not in need of protection to be removed safely and humanely. That is where we see some challenges in the Bill. We do not think it addresses some of that context.

The previous panels touched on how the backlog in the asylum system is now at the appeals stage, which is an almost inevitable consequence of dealing with the initial decision backlog. There will be more decisions and therefore more refusals, and therefore more people will go into that appeals process. There are probably three times as many people in the appeals backlog as in the asylum backlog itself. Some of that will work its way through the system as the Government get more on top of the asylum system—what officials refer to as having friction within the asylum system—where the number of decisions they are making is roughly the same as the number of people entering the system.

As a result of the speeding-up of decision making in recent years, we have also seen a reduction in the quality of some decisions, which we think has put unnecessary pressure on the tribunal and left people stuck in the asylum system, and in accommodation, for longer than they should be, at cost to the taxpayer and to those individuals. That is borne out by the appeals statistics that we now get from the first-tier tribunal, which show that in the last year, in two thirds of appeals that were disposed of, either the tribunal granted the appeal or—as is increasingly the case—the initial decision was withdrawn by the Home Office, because once the appeal got towards the tribunal hearing the Home Office found that it was not going to be able to defend the decision. That is why we think there should be a laser focus on initial decision making and on what else can be done to reduce the appeals backlog.

One of our concerns around the IIAA is that the appeals backlog is an urgent problem that needs to be dealt with now, but the best case scenario is probably that the IIAA starts to hear some cases at the back end of next year. It may well be the next election before the IIAA is really up and running. We think that more urgent things could be done without having to rip up the entire tribunal system as it currently is.