Illegal Migration Bill

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th June 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Hamwee]

132: After Clause 60, insert the following new Clause—
“Operational efficiency(1) Within six months of the date on which this Act is passed the Secretary of State must publish a management review undertaken by management experts outside the Home Office, of—(a) the efficiency of the processing by UK Visas and Immigration of applications, and(b) the efficiency of the removal by Immigration Control of persons whose leave to remain has expired.(2) For the purposes of this section—(a) “efficiency” includes fairness, and(b) the review must include information regarding the numbers of appeals and their success rate.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to commission an independent management review of the efficiency of UK Visas and Immigration in processing applications and the efficiency of the removal process for those whose leave to remain has expired.

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[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, this is the first of a number of proposed new clauses relating to the efficiency of the Home Office and the elusive—maybe even illusory—impact assessment statement. We know we will be told that the impact assessment will be published “in due course”. The timetabling may be clear to the Home Office but it is not to any other noble Lord who has spoken. It occurred to me that the Home Office could really teach even Avanti West Coast or TransPennine Express something about timetabling.

We cannot put into the Bill that it should not go to Report without an impact assessment. Amendment 149 is therefore one of a number that I have tabled, all following the same form of drafting, so that the Bill should

“not come into force until”

and unless various things had happened, one of them being the receipt of the impact assessment. I realised, on reflection, that it was not my cleverest thought because I did not mean any old sort of impact assessment; I meant the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, was referring to the other day, when he talked about due diligence. That is a term I understand pretty well, as I think most people would. However, the amendment enables me to make the point that noble Lords have been making throughout.

On Monday, the Minister certainly referred to an economic impact assessment, as I think he mentioned before. My reading of the debates is that noble Lords want far more than just an economic assessment. I do not need to spell out that the impact of the Bill on third-sector organisations and so on, as well as individuals, will be considerable.

Amendment 132 is about the operation of the Home Office. Frankly, it is a pretty mild amendment, especially given how often it is remarked—I agree with this—that the backlog of applications is the problem, not the number of asylum seekers. The amendment simply calls for a management review by independent experts.

Many people are calling for the Home Office to clear applications from asylum seekers who come from countries whose nationals succeed in their applications in almost every case. We have heard reference to this throughout the Committee. It should be quite straightforward, but I confess that I am in two minds about it. I am anxious that asylum seekers are not all in the same position or with the same characteristics, even if they come from the same country. It would be too easy not to see each asylum seeker as an individual whose application should be treated as that particular individual’s application. However, that does not invalidate the point that what has been happening—or not happening —in the Home Office, rather than in the channel, is at the heart of the situation.

I mentioned earlier today the Justice and Home Affairs Select Committee’s report, All Families Matter: An Inquiry Into Family Migration, and the Home Office’s response to it. During the inquiry that led to that report, the committee, which I chair, heard from witnesses vivid descriptions of their attempts to find out what was happening to their applications. To give one example, people said that they had to hold the line for long periods and had to give a credit card number in their details because they had to pay for the call. They paid to sit on the phone but then found, when they got through, that they were not speaking to the right person or that the number that they had been told to call was not the right one. The frustration and distress mount and mount. We know that the Home Office’s service standards were affected by the Ukraine visa scheme and that the Home Office aims—I stress that word—to begin republishing quarterly performance data as soon as possible. Let me stress that I do not think that any of this is the fault of individual officials; there is something about leadership and management that needs to be sorted.

I will not read a lot from the Government’s response to the committee’s report but I want to pick out a couple of points. We made these recommendations:

“The Home Office should adopt a new approach to communication … The Home Office should establish standards about its communication with applicants and routinely publish statistics on whether these standards are met. Applicants should be able to contact the Home Office free of charge”.


The Government’s response states that the Home Office

“is working on a notification service”;

it is “currently in test”, it says. It goes to say:

“All applications are proactively monitored, and customers”—


I hate the word “customers” in this context—

“are notified prior to the end date of the service standard”.

Communication does not seem to be the Home Office’s strongest point or its natural behaviour; it is not one of its characteristics. So much of this goes back to efficiency and sympathy for customers, which matters an awful lot. These people feel that, too often, too many of them are treated as statistics and numbers. The service is a poor one. That is one of the reasons why I have tabled Amendment 132, which I beg to move.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 139 in this group is in my name. This group is all about efficiency and administration. Amendment 139 is purely a probing amendment—there is no way that anyone would seek to engineer changes to the machinery of government via an opposition amendment to yet another immigration Bill—but I put it down to probe the tensions that have been emerging and increasing in recent years, even months and weeks, between the respective competencies and missions of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on the one hand and the Home Office on the other. I also tabled it to stress the vital importance of international co-operation in dealing with the worst refugee crisis since just after the Second World War. It is, I am afraid, a crisis that is only going to deepen with the threats posed not just by the various conflicts all over the globe but by the climate crisis, as others have said.

Amendment 139 probes and sets out the kind of functions that sit with the Secretary of State. Noble Lords will remember that the Secretary of State is indivisible, so when Governments of various stripes move the deckchairs around and pass functions from one department to another or even rename or reconstruct departments, the Secretary of State is the Secretary of State. The kind of functions that I set out in my suggestion for an office for refugees and asylum seekers are those in general that are much more suited to the expertise and mission of the Foreign Office. That is why consideration of the various international obligations is set out, such as the function of considering safe passage and humanitarian protection and advising the Secretary of State in relation to aid and other action in conflict. It is the relationship between over there and over here.

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[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I will certainly ensure that the noble Baroness’s points are noted in the department.

Finally, Amendment 139FD would place a duty on the Home Secretary to publish quarterly statistics on the Bill’s operation after it is enacted. Again, I have no issue with the basic premise underpinning the amendment. We already publish a raft of immigration statistics on a quarterly basis and I have no doubt that these regular publications will be augmented to report on what is happening under this Bill once it is commenced. We will consider carefully what data it is appropriate to record and publish as part of our implementation planning. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and his Front-Bench colleagues in the other place will not be slow to press the Government for the kind of data referenced in the amendment.

I and my ministerial colleagues, in particularly my indefatigable noble friend Lord Murray, have heard loud and clear the calls from around the Committee that the economic impact assessment for the Bill should be available to your Lordships before the start of Report. My noble friend has committed to updating the House before the first day of Report and I have already read out the Home Secretary’s comments from this morning. However, having had this opportunity to debate the issue again, together with the other issues addressed in these amendments, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, on the question of a secret plan or no plan, the announcement that came out the other day—it was almost not an announcement —that the provision about two classes of asylum seekers in last year’s Bill had been ditched suggests that there is no plan. On the question of external management consultants, I am not a particular fan of management cons; there has not been a success story so far, has there? My noble friend Lord Scriven’s reference to the ICIBI report was absolutely on point: reports from the ICIBI, the National Audit Office and so on do not seem to lead to any change, so one has to try something.

I am left with a very big query: why can the impact assessment not cover variables? It should address the “what ifs”. As I am reminded, it is required to provide options, and over the years I have seen so many impact assessments that do provide options: “if such and such, then so and so”. The Home Office is well on the way to out-Rumsfelding Rumsfeld. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 132 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for raising this interesting point and for her proposed Amendment 133. The purpose of the Bill is to prevent and deter illegal migration, and it provides for swift removal, with very few exceptions. Therefore, I am not quite sure why a new clause after Clause 60 is necessary, particularly because, in respect of applications for work from asylum seekers who are already having their asylum claims processed, as far as I know—I am subject to correction here—those are covered under the 2016 Immigration Rules. Part 11B sets out the policy criteria, which can be found in paragraphs 360A, B and C.

I will also comment on various noble Lords’ claims about the potential contribution that asylum seekers can make to the economy. Yes, there may indeed be contributions which can be made, but perhaps we should also consider the costs, the compliance costs and the fact that the UK is trying to move to a high-skills economy, where people with higher skills or where there is a need already can apply to work here under the normal rules. I cannot see why we need this amendment to the Bill.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

I had not intended to say anything about this amendment, but I will say a couple of things. First, those of us who have met a number of asylum seekers have been very impressed by the high level of skills and enthusiasm for work that they exhibit. Secondly, in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, I understand the point that she is making about the objective of the Bill, but it has a very long Long Title and I doubt my noble friend would have been able to table her amendment had the clerks not agreed that it was in order.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

I am not in any way trying—

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[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I am sorry if the noble Baroness misunderstood my first comment. It was in response to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I hope that the noble Baroness will not mind my using her as an excuse but, on reflection, I think that I was unkind to the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, and I wish to apologise to the House.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, shall I move on to Amendment 150? In fact, it takes us back to the previous group; I have no idea why it comes into this group. It would provide that the Act should not come into force until at least 28 days—I propose—after the Secretary of State has published a statement confirming the number of persons who, for a period of six months or more, have been awaiting final determination of their claim for asylum; and that, for not less than six months, that number has been not more than 20,000.

That may be a little circular and rambling but, basically, it proposes that we should get to a steady state in dealing with asylum applications. The periods may not be ones that noble Lords agree with, but I propose a figure of 20,000 people, which is not a negligible number of people. This amendment seeks to be realistic and provide a bit of—to our minds—common sense to the context of what we are debating.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, and my noble friend Lord Paddick—who probably had no option but to sign it. This is a serious amendment that follows on from the serious points made about the operations of the Home Office. It is the backlog that is the problem. So much of this debate has suggested, implicitly or explicitly, that the position that we are in is somehow the fault of those who are seeking asylum, which is not an easy thing to take on.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 150, to which I have added my name, and indeed to all the amendments in this group—I will be very brief.

Of course it is right that we should get the backlog down, and of course it is right that we should have a steady state, if you like, and be able to operate an asylum system that is humane, speedy and efficient. It is none of those things at present and we do not show any great signs of getting there any time soon. That is one reason why we suggest that the provisions of this Bill should not come into force until that has been achieved.

I am, along with my noble friend Lord Carlile, a member of the Woolf Institute’s Commission on the Integration of Refugees. I am also Rabbi Emerita of the West London Synagogue, which runs a drop-in for asylum seekers on a regular basis and has done for more than 10 years. I also chair a small family charity that provides scholarships for young asylum seekers to access education, which they otherwise could not do because they cannot get student loans. The reason I raise those things is that they mean that I talk to quite a lot of asylum seekers, for a variety of different reasons. I have never yet met an asylum seeker who has managed to get to this country who does not want to work or is not willing to work. Most of them are in fact very talented; the students we support are unbelievably talented and have been through absolute hell, but nevertheless show incredible determination and eventually get serious professional qualifications and very good degrees.

It seems to me that what we need to do in this House is look seriously at what we want to achieve by an asylum system. Surely we want to achieve the allowing in of those who are genuinely in fear of persecution, as well as all the other reasons that we allow asylum seekers in, and create a refugee system. In so doing, however, we want to treat people humanely, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said; his was a very impressive speech. We want to have coming here people who want to be here and make a contribution. We need to think quite hard about what we are trying to do. There is no pull factor, really—it just is not evidenced—but there is a very large number of desperate people seeking asylum in this country. Those who are genuine and can prove it should be treated humanely, accepted and allowed to work even if their full refugee status has not yet been achieved.

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Moved by

[Baroness Hamwee]

136: After Clause 60, insert the following new Clause—
“People smuggling(1) Not less than six months before the other provisions of this Act come into force, the Secretary of State must lay before each House of Parliament a report regarding agreements and discussions with the governments and authorities of other countries, including those bordering the English Channel and the North Sea, concerning the steps taken or agreed or proposed to prevent or deter a person from—(a) charging refugees for assistance or purported assistance in travelling to or entering the United Kingdom;(b) endangering the safety of refugees travelling to the United Kingdom.(2) The report must focus on steps other than the provisions of this Act.(3) This section comes into force on the day on which this Act is passed.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause requires the Secretary of State to publish a report on the actions that are being taken to tackle people smugglers.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 136 is one of a series of amendments we have tabled on the criteria that should be met before the Bill—an Act by then—comes into force. Amendment 136 is about people smuggling, though the term is not used; about

“(a) charging refugees for assistance or purported assistance in travelling to or entering the United Kingdom; (b) endangering the safety of refugees”.


The answer to most questions, of course, is to stop the boats. I wondered during the debate on the previous group whether “stop the boats” actually features as a phrase in the Bill. I do not think it does, but it seems to be the answer to everything.

People smuggling, the criminal activity which is so closely related to small boats and which the Bill purports to deal with, led to subsection (2) of the proposed new clause: the steps that are included in the Bill are not, in our view, an answer to the problem. I find it very distressing that, with such a serious situation, we have a Bill that implicitly blames victims, and we hear very little other than platitudes about tackling the criminals. We know, of course, that people fleeing by boat, endangering their lives and losing their lives, is not unique to the channel and the North Sea, which are referred to in the amendment. Geographically, we are most closely affected by those, but a lot of lives have been lost by people fleeing from countries bordering the Mediterranean and further afield.

My name is attached to Amendment 139F in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. As she is not here, I will speak to it very briefly, because I think it would be a pity if there was no response from the Government, and I have no doubt that the Minister has a response—he is nodding. The noble Baroness’s proposal, supported by the noble Lords, Lord Alton of Liverpool and Lord Carlile of Berriew, as well as by me, is that

“Where a person meets the … conditions in Section 2”—


which is the fulcrum, if you like, of the Bill; and I like the way it is phrased, rather than “meets the criteria”—

“and is suspected of involvement in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, the Secretary of State is required as soon as reasonably practicable … to refer the person to relevant authorities in the UK for investigation and possible prosecution; … to cooperate with authorities in other safe countries and international tribunals who may be investigating the person”.

I look forward to the Government’s views on that and beg to move Amendment 136.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, a more sensitive soul might be somewhat disheartened, having sat here for a large part of this debate only for the entire Chamber to empty at the very thought of me saying anything at all, but I will do my best. Perhaps I am getting an early reputation in this place already.

I will speak to the amendment in my name and those of my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier and my noble friend Lord Soames of Fletching, who unfortunately is unable to be with us but would have liked to have taken part in this debate had he been able to. There has been a lot of discussion about the Bill’s scope, and I was quite pleased to get this amendment through the Table Office, because it is slightly wide of what the Government are debating, which is stopping the boats. The Bill is about illegal immigration, and it is my view that a Government have an absolute duty to secure their own borders and to know who is coming into the country, who is in the country and who is leaving the country at any time. It seems extraordinary that there is still no passport control when people leave this country, as well as when they come into it. Only by knowing how many people there currently are in the United Kingdom can we have a proper, dispassionate and, to use that word, humane debate about what size we are prepared to let our population rise to.

The problem, of course, is with the official statistics—or rather the lack of them. The Government’s publication, Irregular migration to the UK, year ending March 2023, states:

“The statistics presented here relate to the number of people recorded being detected on, or shortly after, arrival to the UK on various routes. They do not provide an indication of the total number of people currently in the UK who have entered the UK via irregular routes or the number of irregular migrants present in the UK. It is not possible to know the exact size of the irregular population currently resident in the UK, nor the total number of people who enter the UK irregularly”.


The official population of the United Kingdom in 2023 is recorded as being just under 68 million, which represents a steady year-on-year increase. Some would have the real population of this country at least 1 million more. Then there is what I call the supermarket theory, which says that the real population of this country is many millions more. I have even read one report alleging that the real population of this country is not 68 million but nearer to 80 million. Of course, if you look on Twitter, you need not necessarily believe all those conspiracies.

My point is not to quibble about the size but to demand that the Government and their various agencies do more to find out the real population of this country. If the figure is 1 million or 2 million in excess of the published data, that, by definition, must mean that hundreds of thousands of people are living outside the system. How can they access healthcare and schools? What about national insurance contributions? What happens to them in old age? If they are outside the system, they are more vulnerable to low wages, abuse, poor housing, inadequate medicine and all the things that we take for granted. They are the losers, but so are we, as by definition they are not paying any tax, for TV licences or anything that people even on low incomes are obliged to pay. They are not participants in society; they are existing on the margins of it.

As it happens, I have no particular view on what should happen to those who have already settled here illegally. I am sympathetic to some sort of amnesty, but I am equally sympathetic to those who feel a sense of injustice that these people have in some way cheated the system—jumped the queue, if you like—and that they should retrospectively be subjected to the same rules on immigration as those who have sought to come after them. However, many of these illegal immigrants will be in low-paid and insecure jobs. Many businesses, certainly those in the hospitality sector, need these people. Indeed, because of Covid and, dare I say it, Brexit there is a critical shortage.

Equally, we must concede that many of those jobs could be filled by British people. I use that term to describe people who are here legally, regardless of whether they were born here or not. We need to be honest with one another. Of course, the argument goes that we need more immigrants to help grow the economy, but, equally, we should recognise and admit that the more people we have, the more schools we will need to open, the more hospitals we will need to build, the more investment in infrastructure we will need, and, critically and perhaps most contentiously of all, the more housing we will need to build. When we have done all that, and the economy has expanded, we will presumably need more immigrants to staff the increased size of our public services. That may well be acceptable, even desirable, but I believe that the British people should have the right to have a say on this. It is not just up to the politicians—or, indeed, if I might say so, the Church—to decide on the size of the population of this country.

I return to my original point. We cannot have an informed debate about this until the Government come to the table and lay before Parliament an annual estimate of the number of illegal immigrants already in this country. My noble friend the Minister will no doubt argue that this information is published, yet it is not published in a clear, unambiguous document—but it must be. Ministers and many others will ask, “If these people have been illegally operating in this country in the black or grey economy, how can we possibly find out who or where they are?” Perhaps identity cards are the answer. I am not convinced by that, but in this information-gathering world, where our data is increasingly harvested, there must be ways. Just look at the NHS app, which most of us signed up to during Covid.

Another approach—I am grateful to Migration Watch for suggesting this—would be that of residual methodology, which allows us to estimate the size of the illegal immigrant population by comparing a demographic estimate of the number of immigrants residing legally in the country with the total number of immigrants as measured by a survey. The difference is assumed to be the number of illegal immigrants in the survey, a number that later is adjusted for omissions from the survey.

I now turn to the second part of the amendment, which covers the issue of foreign national offenders held in our prisons. I am very aware of this because, when I was a Minister in the David Cameron Administration, we were all given countries to be responsible for. We were summoned regularly to No. 10, as he was trying to drive down the number of foreign national offenders and get them back to their countries of origin. It was an astonishingly difficult thing to do, not least because of the interventions of the legal teams who were trying to stop them having to go back. Further difficulties were from some countries which destroyed all the information about them, so it was very difficult to ascertain as to where they had come from and who they were. It is a difficult task, but it is an achievable one.

In March of this year, I asked a number of questions of the Home Office, which I shall not repeat now, on the number of foreign national offenders and how many we had repatriated. From that, it would seem that some 12% of the current total prison population of England and Wales—10,148 people—fall into that category. The cost alone of that is huge. The average cost of a prison place in England and Wales was £46,696 in 2021-22, so we are spending about half a billion pounds a year, by my very ropey maths, on housing these foreign national offenders. The Home Office must get a grip; we want more action and enforcement and fewer excuses as to why it is impossible to send those foreign national offenders home.

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who is not now in his place, rather unfairly described the desire from the Government to do something about immigration as an attempt to address the demands of the red wall—non-traditional Tory areas of the country which voted overwhelmingly for this Conservative Government in the last election. That is not a fair accusation; I think that the majority of people in this country want a humane and fair system, and one that actually works and is seen to work. Between 70% and 80% of the British public support measures aimed at deterring illegal immigrants from remaining in the United Kingdom. The truth of the matter is that none of us knows the scale of illegal migration because no official estimate has been published since 2005.

I very much hope that the Government will support this amendment, as I hope that His Majesty’s loyal Opposition will. If they do not, they will need to explain why not. At its simplest, the amendment is to encourage the Government to find out, before we agree on the future immigration policy, how many illegal immigrants and foreign national offenders are in this country, and to publish that data clearly and unambiguously on an annual basis.

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[Lord Stewart of Dirleton (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, from the Cross Benches, submitted my use of the verb “require” to a degree of philological scrutiny, which I had not taken into account when preparing my answer. I take the noble Lord’s point in relation to empowerment as opposed to obligation.

I regret to say that, in relation to the complex interrelating commitments to which the noble Baroness sought my views from the Dispatch Box, I will have to undertake to correspond with the noble Baroness and the noble Lord.

I sum up what has been a short debate by thanking noble Lords for their informed scrutiny of what has been said, not only by me but by others participating in earlier parts of the debate. From the perspective of this Committee, at this stage, the issues have been given a good airing. Noble Lords have referred to the inevitability that we will consider the matter at a later stage but, at present, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, the debate was not that short, but perhaps it was shorter than those on some of the other groups.

I will just comment on the Minister’s response regarding people smuggling. I find it quite depressing that reliance is placed on deterring demand rather than on deterring criminals. I wonder whether the strategy might include, if it does not now, a communications component. We are told of successful prosecutions, but I am not sure that I ever really read about those in the press; perhaps I read the wrong media—I do not know.

Though I have heard what the Minister had to say, to me it is the criminality—the smuggling—that is at the heart of the problem. I am sure that we will come back to it as an issue in some form at the next stage. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 136 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Hamwee]

139A: After Clause 60, insert the following new Clause—
“Secure reporting for victims of crime(1) The Secretary of State must, by regulations, make provision for the prohibition of automatic sharing of personal data of a victim or witness of crime for the purposes of section 2(1).(2) In section 20 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 (power to supply information etc to Secretary of State), after subsection (2B) insert—“(2C) For the purposes of section 2(1) of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, this section does not apply to information held about a person as a result of the person reporting criminal behaviour which they are a victim of or a witness to.”” Member's explanatory statement
This new Clause would prevent immigration data being shared for the purposes of section 2(1) about a victim or witness of crime who reports an offence. This is to ensure victims are able to approach the authorities for assistance without fear of removal under section 2(1) as a result of that contact or resultant data sharing with immigration enforcement.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

Amendment 139A is in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew—who has managed to escape for the moment—has added his name to it, as has the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London.

This amendment seeks to prevent immigration data being shared for the purposes of Clause 2(1), under which the Secretary of State must make arrangements for the removal of people who meet the four conditions. I am very happy to have my name to this—I would not have signed it if I were not happy—because the issue of exemption from the Data Protection Act is one which my noble friend Lord Paddick and I have raised many times since we debated the then Data Protection Bill. The exemption from restrictions on sharing data for the purposes of immigration enforcement or immigration control—I do not recall which but it amounts to the same thing—is a very wide exemption.

The concern here is to ensure that victims can approach the authorities for assistance without the fear of removal as a result of that contact, or of data being shared with immigration enforcement. Noble Lords have frequently made the point about people without secure status having more confidence in smugglers and traffickers than they do in the authorities. The traffickers’ threats are not ones that they will take lightly; they control their victims, notwithstanding that the victims have “escaped”.

We have a number of other clause stand part notices, all amounting to the fact that we oppose the whole of the Bill. The clauses which are listed in this group are not substantive clauses; in other words, they are not about policy. I will mention just one, which is about financial provision. I am alarmed—we all are—at how much will be spent on what we consider to be the likely costs of the policy. I will not go over them again. We are firmly opposed; I do not think I need to spend time re-emphasising that point. I beg to move Amendment 139A.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I have two sets of amendments in this group. First, Amendments 142, 143, 144 and 147 seek to examine how the Brook House inquiry findings can influence the way in which the Bill will be enacted. Secondly, Amendment 139FE seeks to examine the devolution issues, which I will be looking at specifically through the legislation governing Wales and, very specifically, the Act of Parliament which I want to test the Government on.

First, my intention is to find out how the Government intend to deal with the recommendations of the Brook House inquiry when it reports and apply them to the changes that it will necessitate in the implementation of the Bill. Under the Inquiries Act 2005, the Brook House inquiry into mistreatment and abuse in breach of Article 3 of the ECHR at Brook House immigration removal centre was instituted in November 2019, following a judicial review proceeding. The inquiry has heard extensive evidence, and it is the first public inquiry into the mistreatment of those detained under immigration powers. The conditions of that detention provided a unique opportunity for public scrutiny of and accountability for detention practices and culture.

The inquiry, which we understand will be published in late summer, has heard evidence from detained persons, detention officers, healthcare providers, G4S—which was the contractor responsible for Brook House at the time—employees, Home Office officials, members of the independent monitoring board and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons. The inquiry also appointed and heard from three experts to address the key issues of the use of force, the institutional culture, and clinical care provision and safeguards. It also examined a vast amount of documentary material and video footage.