Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. Listening to the different views makes me think of saying, “Here we go again”. I asked the Library how many Bills there have been since I came into the other place in 1989 that contain the words “immigration”, “asylum” or “migration”. I remember a number of those debates. I was astonished to find that there have been 14 Bills since 1989 called things such as the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill and the Immigration Asylum and Nationality Bill.

Each Government, including the Coalition Government, brought in different Bills. They all had the same words. I looked at some of the Home Secretaries’ Second Reading introductions to the Bills, and they all talked about how this was going to transform things, improve things, strengthen the borders and so on. Really, of course, if we are honest, none of them achieved what was promised.

The Minister, who knows I have huge respect for him, made a much franker opening by saying that, hopefully, some of the things in the Bill can make a difference. I welcome some of the measures, but we must face up to the fact that the world is changing. People keep telling me that it is, so why do we not genuinely look at changing the refugee convention and work out the bits of it we can work with and the bits we cannot?

We should also genuinely look at the European Court of Human Rights. Time has moved on, and things have changed. The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, has already mentioned this, but I was very disappointed when our Attorney-General, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, accused anyone who said that we should talk about the European Court of Human Rights of working under some kind of Nazi ideology. I know he has apologised, but it was a very grave mistake.

We have to face up to the reality that nothing will change fundamentally until we have a look at those two ideas. We have seen over the years that United Kingdom judges—I know there are a lot of lawyers in this place, and they get upset when you criticise anyone in the legal profession—have adopted ever more expansive definitions of ECHR articles in immigration tribunals, including allowing dangerous criminals to stay here, giving all sorts of reasons why they should stay and ridiculous reasons why people should not be deported. There are thousands of examples of the definitions of the articles—not just Article 8 but Article 3—being stretched and stretched over the years beyond any definition of common sense, and certainly beyond anything intended by the people who originally framed them.

Back in November 2021, shortly after I came into this place, I was lucky enough to have a debate on migration. It was, sadly, two days after 27 people were lost crossing the Channel—one of the biggest number of deaths that had happened. As I mentioned then, one noble Lord said to me before that debate, “I really don’t think we should be having this debate, because it’s going to be divisive”.

That is our problem. We have not been prepared to be honest, to face up to and talk about what people out there are talking about when they see pictures, as they saw over the weekend, of that very large number of predominantly young men. I went down to Dover during the previous Government with a group to see what was happening there. When you see all those young men coming off the boat, obviously relieved and pleased to be there and to be safe, and you realise that they are all 18 to 24 year-olds—yes, there might be one woman on the boat, or there might be a couple of babies that the criminal smugglers are very keen to put on board—the reality is that they cannot all be asylum seekers.

I know the figures that have been given. Supposedly 76% of the people who come have been given asylum. I have a number of questions for the Minister on this. Can he tell me how many extra people have been taken on to interview asylum seekers? Can he tell me what the training is and how long it takes before they are able to start meeting asylum seekers and assessing whether they are genuine? Some members of the public might think this is happening because we want to speed up the process and get the numbers down, but is there some kind of unwritten convention that it is much easier to tick the box and let the person stay? What happens to all the people who are turned down, who have thrown away their documents so we have no idea where to deport them back to? What has happened to the thousands—I am sure it is thousands—who have come in the past few years and literally just disappeared? Where are they all? Have we got figures on them? Those are things we need to know if we are going to get to the bottom of all of this.

Also, we have a very open border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Jim Allister, the TUV Member of Parliament for North Antrim, asked a Question for Written Answer at the end of April:

“To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what procedures are in place to check the movement of people over the Northern Ireland-Republic land border to identify illegal immigrants with no right to access the Common Travel Area”.


The answer was very clear:

“no immigration checks are undertaken on the Northern Ireland-Republic land border”.

Yet at the same time the Republic of Ireland is doing checks the other way at the border, even though it is the country that said that there should be no border there.

We have to be much more realistic, and much more honest. We cannot continue like this. It is unsustainable for any country to have so many people coming in who are not necessarily anti-British—of course they want to come to this country because the pull factor is huge—but we have no idea what their ideologies are. We have no idea whether they are going to get involved and genuinely become British citizens sharing some of our values. It is a drain on our public services, and most of all, it is shattering our cultural community feeling of togetherness. We need to accept that we have to do something. We will not smash the gangs unless we stop the boats. If we stop the boats, we stop the gangs.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 3rd November 2025 Lords Chamber

We need a strong, firm response to bring this deep-rooted issue under control. The British people want the Government to act. There has been some positive progress, but they need to go further. On that basis, I commend this amendment to the House.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support very strongly Amendments 34 and 72. I imagine that if the public are watching this, this is the first amendment this afternoon for which there is wholehearted support. This is just common sense. Personally, I would like anyone who is not a British citizen—a foreign national—who has been sentenced to prison to be deported as soon as they are sentenced, but I accept that this may be going a little too far for noble Lords. At least when they have served their sentence, they should be deported.

I will raise a couple of very quick points about the concern in Northern Ireland which the Minister will know about. The other three recent Bills on this issue—the Rwanda Act, the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the soon to be defunct legacy Act—were all ruled by the courts in Northern Ireland as unworkable in Northern Ireland. I ask the Minister to be very clear that this is meant to be a Bill for the United Kingdom.

Because of Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which includes commitments that Northern Ireland will keep pace with certain EU rights, it is absolutely clear to me—and I hope to the Minister—that if the EU law says something different from our national law, EU law applies on these kinds of issues. Therefore, there could be two categories of people in Northern Ireland courts. It seems beyond doubt that convicted foreign criminals who are EU citizens will have the additional protection of the EU citizens’ rights directive. Those who are not EU citizens will still have enhanced protection from deportation under the Windsor Framework. This means that Northern Ireland could become a real magnet for foreign criminals.

The current Government have appealed a court ruling on this issue, which is very important, and we hope to get that result from the Supreme Court very soon. When this Bill goes through, we cannot end up with part of the United Kingdom not being able to deport foreign nationals in the same way.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I will raise two points. I very much support someone who has an order of deportation being removed, as I suspect the whole House does. However, Amendment 34 is not, as the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, suggested, for somebody who has a prison sentence; it applies to anyone who has been convicted of an offence. Does that mean that if somebody is convicted of careless driving, they are actually to be deported? On reading Amendment 34(2), that is exactly what it appears to mean. That seems to me a trifle extreme.

Secondly, although I recognise that deportation to a safe country that is prepared to take the person back is one thing, where, I wonder, does the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, intend that people who have come from unsafe countries should go to? What concerns me is that when someone from Afghanistan, Syria at the moment, Darfur or Iran, commits an offence, it is unlikely that they could be sent back there. Therefore, where, according to the wording of this amendment, should these people go?