Illegal Migration Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 5th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness; I should have mentioned the point myself. I am concerned that the Government keep saying that the UNHCR runs safe and legal routes and that it is perfectly possible for someone in Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan to register with UNHCR, which will see them right. It is simply not true. UNHCR has again said so, formally and on the record. It does not run a clearing house. It does not run a general scheme open to all. It is able to cope with approximately, it says, 1% of the demand.

It is the case that if you are a persecuted young woman in Iran, there is no safe and legal route by which you can come to this country. If you are fleeing in Sudan from the war that the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, referred to, there is no safe and legal route to the United Kingdom. UNHCR does not stand up the Government’s story that it is the fallback, the clearing house, that we can always turn to. It says it cannot do that. Obviously, it cannot do that; it is not resourced to do that. I agree that the impact assessment, in considering the deterrent effect on what the Government call illegal immigration, must address the question of how people from war-torn, famine-struck, civil war countries can achieve a legal route.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, it is an absolute privilege to follow such a distinguished former Permanent Secretary to the Foreign department. To return to my noble friend’s amendment, it may seem a little counterintuitive or surprising for me to welcome a probing amendment about removal and about a duty to negotiate removal agreements, but I do. The reason is that there is actually a greater and stronger link between the principles that we have been discussing and the practice that my noble friend is considering here, because in this neck of the woods, in particular, the two go together.

I say, with respect to the Committee, that it would have been wise for the Government to have thought about a duty to negotiate removal agreements before they proposed to legislate for a duty to remove. The sin is to have duties to remove with nowhere to remove people to, and duties to detain with no ability to remove, because that leads to indefinite detention.

There were all the arguments that we had on the last illegal Bill, and the arguments that we will have again about whether refugees and asylum seekers should be allowed to work after a period of time. People argued about pull factors, and some of us said that there were push factors, not pull factors. But if people’s claims were being considered quickly, including of those who did not qualify for asylum—who were genuinely illegal migrants and never qualified for asylum—some of us would have no problem with the principle or practice of having a short period of arrest and detention for the purposes of facilitating a lawful removal.

My noble friend Lord Coaker has really hit the nail on the head. What is the practice here? If there is no practical agreement to remove people to whichever country they are from, and people are in practice irremovable, that is where the cruelty comes in. That is a cruelty towards people who are detained for lengthy periods, quite possibly at great public expense, in inappropriate accommodation; this could include accompanied or unaccompanied children not being housed or detained appropriately, not being educated, and so on. That is the sin—the terrible maladministration and lack of good practice, which is then translated into this culture war via more draconian legislation for a general election that will no doubt be sloganed, “Stop the boats”. We do not stop the boats, but we do not welcome the vulnerable people either, so we perpetrate this great swindle on the British people. We toxify a debate that needs to be handled much more temperately, and we do not achieve anything very much at all.

The final link between principle and practice in this area is that, in this amendment, we are talking about a duty on the Secretary of State to negotiate these practical removal agreements for those people who do not meet the tests and do not qualify in the end as refugees. In this probing amendment we are talking about that duty and asking whether it does not need to be a duty because the Secretary of State genuinely wants to negotiate. To go back to what the noble Lord, Lord Patten, said before the break, whether that is the case or not, who will negotiate with us? We have heard some flummery from the Benches opposite about how international law is not real law—“We have a dualist system and let me not give you a law lecture, but it’s not real law, it’s only international law”. If our word is not our bond, who will negotiate with us?

There is currently a contradiction at the heart of government between those who want to be leaders on the world stage, with all the challenges that have to be met internationally at the moment, and those who want a culture war. My understanding is that the Prime Minister is now saying not only that we are going to be part of the Council of Europe and honour our international commitments but that we are going to be the architects of new ones. London is apparently going to be at the heart of regulating artificial intelligence—this is where it is all going to happen. But why should anyone allow us that moral leadership on the world stage, if we will not honour international law?

I look forward to the answers to my noble friend’s questions about the moment when principle really does need to meet practice.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps the Minister can help us here. Is not it the case that, without removal agreements, the Bill is likely to make the current situation worse in terms of costs to the Exchequer? As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has said, if people are not able to work, and they are not allowed the right to remain but cannot be removed, they will have to be looked after by the state. The difficulty that the Minister has is that, without an impact assessment, there are all sorts of organisations that are filling that vacuum. The vacuum was filled at the weekend—and the estimated additional costs of this Bill were £3 billion to £6 billion in additional accommodation needed to detain those people who could not be removed.

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[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I am afraid that I must disagree with the noble Lord. The point about the Bill is that we know that deterrence has effect, and we have seen that, as the Prime Minister announced this morning, in relation to the effect of our returns agreement with Albania.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for his patience. Could I try this another way in relation to the debate on the impact assessment? If I am wrong about this, I want to be set right. This is not a rhetorical question; this is a genuine question about the process and purpose behind these impact assessments. I had been thinking that the purpose of these various assessments by the department was that they become part of the case for the legislation in Parliament. The department does the drafting and the policy and that is the Bill, that will be law; and to back it up, it has its case based on the evidence that it has marshalled.

If I am right about that, that gives rise to the concerns about why we are going further and further down the legislative process before the court of Parliament—if you like—without the evidence base. Of course, that is particularly important in the case of so-called illegal migration, because public expense is such a concern in the public debate about immigration: cost-benefit economic analysis is always a keen part of the debate in the Committee, in Parliament and in the public square.

Finally, on this same point about process and the impact assessment, the Minister said earlier that it was not for him to dictate what would be in the impact assessment, and I do understand that, because no Minister would want to dictate that. However, if I am right, and the purpose of these assessments is that they are part of the Government’s case for the legislation, surely it is for the Minister and his colleagues at ministerial level to sign off on the quality of this work and the soundness of the proposition in it. Perhaps the Minister could clarify that. It is not a judicial process; it is an executive process of marshalling the economic case for this legislation.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

There is no statutory requirement to have a public impact assessment in relation to items of public legislation. Indeed, as I understand it, many pieces of legislation do not have one at all; so it is not a statutory requirement, as perhaps the noble Baroness seemed to suggest. Clearly, there is work done in the department behind the development of policy, and an economic impact assessment is certainly not an essential part of that process; nor is it a fundamental part. It is a part and, as I say, it will be published in due course.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I hope the Minister will forgive me, but a narrow but important point of principle was raised by both the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed; they spoke on different matters but on the same issue of principle. One case was about what would happen to a child who came to this country as an infant and was adopted; another, put by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, concerned a child who would not be returned to adequate reception arrangements. I believe that the Minister said to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, that we can deal with that in regulations—so nothing to worry about there—and the answer to the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, was that the Government have no intention of removing children to a country which, even if it meets the other criteria in the clause, does not have adequate reception arrangements for an unaccompanied child.

The whole structure of this so-called robust legislation is about creating tightly crafted duties to tie the hands of the Secretary of State. We know what that game is: it is about ensuring that we have, in effect, ousted the court’s supervisory jurisdiction. Powers become “duties to remove” and then, because there is a little ounce of compassion in relation to children, they say they will flip the duty and so there will not be a duty but, in certain circumstances, a power to remove even unaccompanied children. Given that this is the approach of the scheme, why on earth cannot comfort be given in the Bill to both the noble and learned Baroness and the noble Lord on those two limited circumstances? Why can the Bill not say that a child who came as an infant and who has now been adopted by a British national cannot be removed? For a child who would otherwise be removable because they have an identity document—there is a thought—or sent to a country where they are a national but there are no reception arrangements, why can it not be a criteria that there should be adequate reception arrangements? Why cannot that be in a Bill that is so tightly and robustly drawn by the Home Office?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

The noble Baroness is always a powerful advocate but, in this instance, these provisions are already clear. As I have said, and for the reasons that I have explained, there is no need, in those limited circumstances, for further exploration in the Bill. As I have said, these are things that we can explore, and doubtless will return to in other parts of the Bill, but for the moment I am afraid there is no need for further additions in relation to those areas.