Illegal Migration Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 10th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is good that one thing seems to unite the whole House, and that is the fact that we all deplore the backlog and agree on the need for it to be addressed. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned all of the Conservative ex-Home Secretaries who were responsible, but going back much further during the 13 years of the Labour Government we had exactly the same problem—I remember as a constituency MP this was one of the issues that came up time after time.

I will be supporting this Bill in its Second Reading tonight and will be opposing the wrecking amendment. It is important that the convention to allow government Bills to have a Second Reading is adhered to, no matter how strongly we may feel about the legislation. We will all have the right to amend this Bill—as normal, we can table amendments and vote on them— and I may put down some amendments myself. For me, the principal aim of this legislation is to act to stop the small boats coming here in the first place.

Around 18 months ago, I had a three-hour debate here on migrants, sadly on the day that 27 lives were lost crossing the channel, and much was said then about how that could never be allowed to happen again. Since then, the numbers coming over on dinghies have escalated: in 2021 when I spoke, around 28,500 people had come through already; in 2022, there were 45,755; and, from 2018 until now, nearly 100,000 people have arrived at Dover. It is legitimate to say that our country has lost control of our own borders—certainly that is what the public think when they look at the pictures on television.

Some of these new arrivals—not many, but some—have been identified as a terrorist threat, and many have disappeared with us having no idea where they have gone to or what they are up to. The security of our own country must be a priority of government, and so must the social cohesion of our communities. Moving hundreds of mainly young men—I often think “Where are all the women?”—into areas where they will not be able to intermix is a recipe for problems. The public are not stupid, nor are the vast majority prejudiced against genuine asylum seekers, but they see at first hand the impact on their community and know that it is unsustainable.

I visited Dover two years ago to see for myself how the arrivals are processed. We cannot ignore the fact that the way we treat arrivals is far superior to what happens in France or elsewhere. Therefore, we cannot ignore that there is a pull factor to the United Kingdom; otherwise, I cannot see why so many want to leave the safe countries that they have come to in order to come here. Of course, there are some with family connections, but we already operate a system that would allow legal entry for them—maybe that can be looked at to make it better.

Those who manage the boats—the people smugglers —are well acquainted with what happens in our own country. They know that there are at least five different avenues to challenge a negative asylum claim result, and if all that fails, another asylum claim can simply be launched in a fresh application. Then we see that when someone who commits a hideous crime such as murder here is being deported, one of the many agencies will assemble a mass of MPs, and probably noble Lords, to stop the deportation—all of which is usually paid for by public money and legal aid. We cannot go on with people being allowed to bring multiple claims and judicial reviews. It is a lawyers’ paradise, but it is the hard-working British taxpayer bearing the cost.

Making it clear, as the Bill does, that if you come here illegally you will not be considered for asylum and that you will be deported will be a deterrent. I want to see fulfilled the commitment given by the Home Secretary that, once the small boats have been stopped, the Government will look at more safe and legal routes for genuine asylum seekers. I want that to happen, and we will keep an eye on this to make sure that it does. However, we really need to differentiate between economic migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Even if some noble Lords do not differentiate, the public do, and that is what is important. It is also important to note that people have complained about the language used by some Ministers. Sometimes the language used by people supporting the Bill—who are making some quite rational and sensible points—is then almost portrayed as racist. We have to be careful about our language just as much.

In my view, the reality is that only tough and unambiguous legislation will stand any chance of succeeding and dissuading people from risking their lives by jumping into dinghies and heading for Britain in the expectation that, once here, they will be permitted to stay. We have to send a signal that we are not an open door, and that we will not continue to allow the industry of lawyers making millions from the whole asylum system to continue. The Government are unwise, I think, to seek to give the impression that the Bill will solve all our illegal immigration problems—it will not. However, it certainly is a start, and we have to try. The Bill is now with us, and with some improvements, it should be supported.

Illegal Migration Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register. As noble Lords will know, I frequently get up to speak on the rights of trade unionists. I am also president of a trade union affiliated to the TUC.

The purpose of this discussion is to encourage the Minister to go away and, we hope, say, “Well, they made some good points there. We had better bring forward some amendments. We ought to change same of the provisions of this Bill because it really doesn’t work.” Hence, I am speaking in support of the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Davies.

In Amendment 57B, the noble Lord is seeking to delete the phrase

“the captain of the ship or aircraft, the train manager of the train or the driver of the vehicle must"—

not “can”, “should” or “might consider”, but “must”—

“if so required by an immigration officer or the Secretary of State prevent P from disembarking”.

Immigration officers are also in trade unions. They have a very difficult life. Who is going to decide what they actually order the captain of the aircraft to do? Anyway, if the aircraft is up in the sky and it is suddenly discovered that someone is on board who should not be, what is the captain supposed to do? The captain of the aircraft has two principal jobs: to bring the passengers safely to the destination, and to do the same for the plane. They are not prison warders.

In many cases, of course, if this happened mid-air, they would not have realised the situation when they took off. Those of us who have been around a long, long time and can remember the hostage crises of many years ago will know that the situation became apparent only when aircraft were actually in the air. I am not asking the Minister, “will they be prosecuted?” because the Bill says that they will. I want to know under what circumstances it is envisaged that prosecution will be brought, and by whom it will be brought. Will it be the DPP, the department or the Minister? What will be the aim of the prosecution?

Amendment 58A would delete, amongst other things, the phrase

“knowingly permits a person to disembark in the United Kingdom”.

What is someone in that situation supposed to do? If a train comes into a station, it is very difficult to stop people getting off it. Noble Lords who have travelled to Brussels will be well aware of the number of times it is announced over the Tannoy that “You must not disembark at this station”. If someone does disembark, however, has the driver knowingly permitted them to disembark simply because they have gone into a station? Should they have stopped in the middle of the countryside? I ask the Minister to look at whether there should be an indemnity for transport workers, so that these provisions are not used to prosecute them. If they are, why should any pilot take the risk of flying an aircraft that might have an asylum seeker on it? Rostering is voluntary: you do not queue up and say, “you go there”. That is where the weakness lies—I diverge slightly—in the minimum strikes legislation. You cannot order people to do things, not in a free society; and that is where we live.

I ask the Minister to talk to the transport unions and to his own department about what it is trying to do with this and whether it will actually work. What concerns me about this Bill, as with the minimum strikes legislation, is that we are progressing rapidly towards a fairyland where pass legislation that just will not work. It is not a good thing to do, because it does not breed respect for legislation. I, and many people in Britain, want illegal immigration to stop. There is a general feeling out there in the country, particularly among the trade union members that I deal with, that you should not be able to cheat the system. But you have to make this Bill work to achieve that, rather than just achieving headlines for the Daily Mail, and for us all to look smart. The challenge is to make this work, not to make it look good.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak on this provision, because when I read the Bill and saw it, I genuinely thought that it must have been a drafting error on the part of civil servants that Ministers had not noticed. Having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, move his amendment, and to the other noble Lords who have spoken, it seems very sensible to me that this be taken back by the Government before Report. I am amazed that there was no consultation with the trade unions on this issue, which really does affect their members’ livelihoods. If this went through, I can imagine how workers on planes, ships and other forms of transport would react, knowing that it could be used against them.

It right that this Chamber address this issue, being an advisory, revising Chamber that gets things changed that we think are obviously wrong. In addition to what has already been said about consultation, why has this not been discussed properly? As the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, has said, many trade union members believe that the way we deal with illegal immigration has to change, but this is not the way to do it. This bit of the Bill must be taken out. The Minister should accept that there will not be support for it in this House, and that the other place has not, perhaps, thought about this in a sensible way.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton for tabling these amendments, which are supported by the trade union movement and by other noble Lords.

I will put my cards on the table: my personal position is that coercive powers of detention should be in the hands of the state, for a number of reasons. I think Ministers should be directly responsible for the use of coercive power in our democratic society, and those powers should be exercised by properly trained people who enter into a profession to exercise powers such as that. However, that is not everyone’s position. I know that reasonable people, including friends of mine with whom I disagree and some on the Benches opposite, believe, for example, in private prisons. Those are circumstances where there is a contract that a private provider enters into to provide services for detention, coercion and so on. I have problems with that; I will not bore the Committee with my various concerns about it, but I believe that there is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to G4S scandals. I am thinking also of Brook House detention centre and the various people who have died in the context of forced removal from the country. I have concerns about the use of private contractors to exercise some of the most coercive powers of the democratic state.

However, the problem that has been identified by my noble friend Lord Davies and others is even more serious than that, because these are not private guards who have been employed by AN Other private security company—although I am concerned about that, and the scandals speak for themselves—but people who are transport workers. They are used to giving service to the public, which is a very different job with a very different understanding, different training and, as the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, pointed out, different preoccupations and priorities from the use of coercive force.

On mixed flights, holidaymakers sit alongside deportees. To be fair, that is already a problem; under the regime that we have now, these problems have arisen for some time, but the Bill makes the problem worse. We also have to be realistic that, in the context of the challenges we will face on this planet in the years to come, more and more desperate people will come. The idea of having mixed flights, with transport workers now being responsible for a policy of transportation in addition to normal service provision with the priorities of customer safety, is a total nonsense. If the Government want to pursue the sorts of policy that we are seeing in this legislation, with controversy, coercion and desperate people who may want to fling themselves off the train, the ship or the plane, that is really not appropriate for transport workers. We are now getting into a transportation policy of coercive control and removal, and that really ought to be done by servants of the state, agents of the state, who have been employed for that purpose.

It is not just for the sake of their consciences or for the safety and security of the desperate people themselves—or indeed the terrible people. We keep calling them “illegal migrants” but that is a bone of contention, because of course these people are being removed without consideration of their asylum claims, so we do not know whether they are illegal or not. However, whether they are illegal or are genuine refugees, some of these people will be desperate and will resort to desperate means to escape removal, and the lovely people who I travel with on the trains, when I can, should not be charged with that task; it should be people who are genuine volunteers who have been properly trained, and they should be directly responsible to Ministers when things go wrong, which I am afraid they sometimes will. So the amendments are very well put and I urge the Government to think again.

The Minister will rightly say that this is not novel. I do not want to pretend that it is totally novel to give directions to conventional transport providers and to contract out aspects of immigration control; bit by bit, that has been happening for decades, and it has simply been turbocharged by this policy. However, it is not safe or ethical, and nothing good will come of it.