Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare the support I receive from RAMP and start by warmly welcoming the repeal of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act and partial repeal of the Illegal Migration Act.

However, I share the disappointment expressed by many organisations—I am grateful for their briefings—that the Bill does not go further in repealing the whole of the latter and parts of the Nationality and Borders Act. The Law Society, for instance, describes the latter as

“a detrimental piece of legislation”

that will become

“the default directive in many places”.

Could my noble friend the Minister explain why the Bill leaves in place a number of provisions in both those Acts that we roundly condemned at the time?

In particular, why are we retaining Section 12 of the IMA? To quote the UN High Commissioner for Refugees it

“leaves in place a risk of arbitrary detention of asylum-seekers, refugees and stateless persons”.

Why are we retaining Section 59 which, in denying claims from countries deemed safe, ignores—again to quote the UNHCR—

“the requirement for an individualised assessment of an asylum claim”

thereby giving

“rise to a risk of refoulement”?

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium warns that

“children and young people are particularly at risk”

because Section 59 denies them

“proper consideration of their vulnerabilities”.

The RMCC, with support from the British Association of Social Workers, is also critical of the retention of the age assessment provisions of the NBA and calls for their repeal. The RMCC points out that neither the National Age Assessment Board nor the development of so-called scientific age assessment methods—which, as already noted, have been widely criticised—has tackled the key problem of children being wrongly treated as adults on arrival.

I was therefore alarmed to read in the parallel immigration White Paper of plans to explore

“scientific and technological methods to ensure adults are not wrongly identified as children”.

It is worthy of Alice in “Through the Looking-Glass”. I am nevertheless grateful to my noble friend for the constructive meeting we had with members of the RMCC recently to discuss age assessment. He will not be surprised to hear that I plan to table amendments on this issue.

Some of those children wrongly identified as adults could be prosecuted under the new criminal offences contained in the Bill and end up spending months in adult prisons. Concerns have been raised more widely by a number of organisations, including the Law Society and the UNHCR, about these provisions, which in their breadth and vagueness, risk criminalising both vulnerable adults and children who are risking their lives in search of safety. This exposes the gaping hole in the Bill which, as already noted, is the absence of any provision to expand safe routes. The safe routes coalition, while recognising the need to tackle the exploitation of unsafe routes by smuggling gangs, which is the Bill’s main focus, argues that it is missing a golden opportunity to address why people are taking these dangerous journeys.

I cannot understand why the Government appear to be so deaf to the widespread calls to improve safe routes for children and others, including from the APPG for refugees, of which I am a member. Instead, the immigration White Paper includes plans that will weaken the family reunion route. The White Paper also includes proposals to double the length of time most people will need to wait before they can apply for settlement. This is not the place to argue against this damaging proposal, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it, given the large number of emails I am receiving from those already on the five-year route to remain.

In the absence of any clarification about whether the new rule will apply to those already here, the emails express acute distress, a sense of betrayal and a loss of trust in the UK’s integrity and consistency. As already asked for, can my noble friend at the very least clarify whether those people will indeed now have to work here for 10 years before being able to apply for settlement, having come here in good faith on the assumption of five years?

The welcome repeal in the Bill of Sections 31 to 35 of the IMA, which rendered refugees who enter the country by irregular means ineligible for British citizenship, has now been undermined by the administrative sleight of hand that achieves the same outcome through changes to the Nationality: Good Character Requirement guidance. Having welcomed the repeal as

“a positive step that recognises the importance of naturalisation, both for the individuals concerned and for social cohesion”,

the UNHCR expresses concern that the new guidance

“may result in breaches of Article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention”,

which, it argues, is central to the convention’s “object and purpose”. It recommends that the guidance be revisited

“to ensure that it is applied in a manner consistent with the UK’s international obligations”.

The Law Society echoed the Article 31 point and noted that

“this is a significant change in policy which has been made with no consultation and therefore no scrutiny”.

In conclusion, although I repeat my welcome for the repeal of many of the damaging provisions made by the previous Government, I wish I could welcome this Bill unequivocally. As the daughter of a refugee immigrant, I welcome the fact that I live on an island not of strangers but of diverse groups who have enriched our lives. We have a responsibility to them, and to those who seek to come to our country in future, to ensure that we build a fair and inclusive immigration and asylum/refugee system.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I support these two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for the very reasons she gives. Clause 34 is very welcome and I am very glad that the Government have put it in, but it is very narrow. There is a considerable overlap between family reunion cases and evacuees, and this is about evacuees. I would like to bring the two together, as the noble Baroness said. The top five countries from which family reunion cases come are Syria, Sudan, Iran, Eritrea and Afghanistan, so we are in exactly the same territory of facilitating evacuation. It does not work very well at the moment, for the reasons that the noble Baroness spelled out.

The double journeys point is really worrying. To collect the visa, you have to go to a visa centre. In the top five countries I have listed, there are no visa centres, for obvious reasons—in most of them, there is no embassy—so you have to cross a frontier. When we are talking family reunions, more than 50% of those involved are children. Are we asking them to cross a frontier and go somewhere that could be a very long way away to get their visa? No, we are not; it is worse than that. We are asking them to go twice: once to give their biometric details and, secondly, to collect the visa—they cannot get it the first time. Could they not have the biometric details taken when they pick up the visa, when the family reunion case has been established and they are going to be let in? They would then need to make only one journey. It seems to me that this simple improvement to the process would save a lot of heartache and probably a lot of lives, in cases where it has been decided by the system that family reunion is appropriate and should be facilitated.

I support the two amendments ably moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, but I hope that the Government will go a little further and think hard about changing the procedure for the collection of the visa so that the biometric details could be given at the time the visa is picked up and thus the double journeys could be avoided.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support. I, too, am supported by RAMP, and that is in the register—that is done for Committee now. I warmly welcome Clause 34 as well, but the amendment being proposed is a very modest one, which would not be difficult for the Government to accept. The case has already been well made and I will not reiterate it, but I will give an example from the British Red Cross, which I think has made a very persuasive case to Members of the Committee. It gives the current example of Iran:

“The visa centre in Tehran has been temporarily closed since 15 July 2025. This visa centre was the base for many Afghans and Iranians to submit their family reunion applications. Now families are unable to access the centre and will need to take a dangerous journey to a neighbouring country just to submit their biometrics and have their application processed … This amendment would allow biometrics to be taken at different locations within Iran where people could travel to safely rather than crossing borders”.


Safety must be one of the criteria that we use in thinking about displaced people. It is a very modest amendment and I hope that my noble friend will be able to look kindly on it.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I will say a couple of words in support of these amendments from my noble friend. As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, just remarked, it is not as if these changes would be difficult to make: the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, referred to them as simple improvements to the process. My noble friend referred to the current summit: to be honest, I have not seen the results, as I was in meetings all morning. Are there any yet? It has obviously been widely trailed that President Macron will talk about improving the reception by this country of applicants for family reunion. It would be perhaps a little ironic—well, there would be a nice coincidence of efforts—if, from this side, we are proposing simple improvements in process and we also have an ally in President Macron, who is saying, “Please simplify and streamline your family reunion efforts”. That would be a nice entente amicale.

I will make a point that I am not sure any of the other speakers have, which is made in our briefings. Families often become separated, so not only does a family together have to make possible multiple journeys but dispersed members of a family, including children, might have to make multiple trips from different locations. So you are multiplying the risks and the possibility of violence and distress. I think my noble friend referred to one in five families saying they had to resort to using smugglers to reach the visa centre. Well, surely one of the major purposes of the Bill, which we all support, is to try to put the smugglers and people traffickers out of business. Here is a government policy that is helping to give people smugglers more business—we regret it, but it is the reality—which you could avoid by the simple shortcut of making biometrics collectable other than at visa centres and not requiring at least two journeys. The thought of a lone woman or a family with children having to expose themselves to all the threats to safety that we can imagine and are told about is really unconscionable, when it really would not take a great deal of effort by the Home Office to keep people safer, streamline the process and satisfy President Macron, as well as us, all at the same time.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Lister of Burtersett Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

The numbers speak for themselves: the removal of the deterrent has encouraged a massive increase in the number of crossings and the Government are instead proposing to legislate themselves out of the situation, while welcoming greater and greater numbers of migrants at the taxpayer’s expense. On this side of the Committee, we oppose the question that this clause should stand part of the Bill.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome Clause 37 very warmly. For some of us it is the best bit of the Bill. I am really pleased, for once, to be able to unequivocally support my Front Bench and my noble friend the Minister.

My noble friend the Minister did not have the pleasure of sitting through the debates about the Rwanda Bill in this House; I do not really want to put him through it all again, because it is like a nightmare in my mind and it is quite difficult to recall everything that was said at the time. But I remind the Committee that, on a number of occasions, your Lordships’ House rejected key bits of the Bill, and it went through only because of the majority in the Commons. We had ping-pong, ping-pong, ping-pong, and eventually we had to give in. To now try to resurrect it through this clause stand part device seems a bit perverse.

I will just remind noble Lords why we were so opposed to the Rwanda Bill. First of all—I have to see whether I can read my notes here—there was the failure to meet the concerns of the Supreme Court. Saying Rwanda is safe then and for always does not make it safe. I can remember noble and learned Lords and others on the Cross Benches—one of whom may well want to speak today—saying, “We’re being asked to say that night is day and put that into legal form”. It was ridiculous. So, for the lawyers among us, it was really quite distressing that we were having to put our name to that.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees had concerns, at the heart of which was the belief that the Act was not compatible with international refugee law—the refugee convention. There was the disapplication of the Human Rights Act, highlighted by the Joint Committee on Human Rights—the current chair is no longer in his place, but I am sure he would agree with what the previous committee said. That committee emphasised the universality of human rights, which this piece of legislation rode a cart and of horses through.

There were particular concerns around the treatment of LGBTI+ people, who would potentially not be treated well, as well as concerns about children, which was one of the main issues that I took up during the passage of the Bill. On the treatment of age-disputed children, there were fears that they would be removed to Rwanda because they had wrongly been assessed as adults, and then there was a difficult provision, if they could prove that they were children, for them to be sent back to the UK, in effect as parcels. Many of us thought that was dehumanising of children and went against children’s rights.

I am sure my noble friend the Minister will be terribly pleased to hear that we will be debating age assessment later in Committee. But it is worth pointing out at this point that just yesterday, the i newspaper published the latest analysis by the Helen Bamber Foundation of FoI data. That found that in 2024, at least 678 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were initially classed as adults but then found to be children by local authorities, and that was over half of those who were so referred. Had the Rwanda Act been in operation now, how many of those children might have been sent to Rwanda and got stuck there? That is the question that I would put. In addition, there was never a proper child rights impact assessment or anything like that.

Finally, the noble Lord talked about a deterrent. I seem to remember that, in all the paperwork we were given—it was probably an impact assessment or something—that there was a very clear reference to academic work which suggested that there was no evidence of a deterrent effect in this kind of legislation. The noble Lord also talked about us being a soft touch for illegal migrants. Please can we remember that most of those who come across on the boats, putting their lives at risk, are seeking asylum? They have an international right to do so. Please do not let us write them off as “illegal migrants”.

That is all I wanted to say. I warmly welcome that the Government have taken this step, because it is a very positive step in the name of human rights and international refugee law.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, I think the noble Baroness was a little unkind to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, who made an admirable speech: gallantry in a hopeless cause is always extremely impressive. I thought Owain Glyndŵr was speaking to us. I was reminded of the gallant knight in “Monty Python”, who has all his limbs struck off, but bravely says, “No, no, it’s only a flesh wound”, and fights on. It was tremendous.

The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, also slightly abbreviated the history of the Rwanda Act in this House. It began with the Rwanda treaty, which this House recommended, on the advice of its International Agreements Committee, could not and should not be ratified until the various supervisory and legal constructs needed—and set out in the treaty itself—existed. Because they did not exist; they were to be set up. Various judges were to be appointed, courts were to be formed and supervisory monitoring procedures were to be put in place—none of that existed. This House recommended that the treaty should not be ratified.

The Bill itself had three fundamental problems for this House. First, as the noble Baroness said, there was the fundamental “Alice in Wonderland” absurdity that we can, by so voting, change facts: we can make Rwanda safe by declaring Rwanda safe. The noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, spoke powerfully on that subject.

Secondly, there was the problem of our international commitments. It was impossible—in the view of this House, which voted several times on it—to reconcile the Bill and the treaty with our international commitments. We were telling people, “You may never have your claim for asylum heard in this country. You may claim asylum in Rwanda. You may claim from the Rwanda Government the right to become a citizen of Rwanda. But you may never claim the right to become a citizen of the United Kingdom. We are going to send you to Rwanda, we are never going to let you come here and we are never going to hear your case”. To make that fit with the refugee convention is impossible—that is what this House determined. Keeping the Rwanda Act on the statute book would be absurd. If we mean what we say about a rules-based, legal global order, we really need to pay attention when what we are doing ourselves is clearly in breach of a central plank of the rules-based order.

That is completely different from what this Government are, as I understand it, seeking to do with offshoring the exercise. Although I do not like that—it is a very bad idea that people’s claims should be considered abroad, because it will be harder to ensure that they get appropriate legal advice and age assessment, if their asylum case heard in a foreign country—it is completely different from what we were going to do with Rwanda. With the Rwanda Act, we were not just offshoring but offloading; we were putting on the Rwanda Government the responsibility of considering the future of these people. We were saying, “It’s absolutely nothing to do with us and we refuse to touch it”. That simply will not do.

We have to applaud the noble Lord, Lord Davies. I note that his Scottish colleague was cunning enough to disappear before we came to the question of whether Clause 37 should stand part. I am a Scotsman and know that there are some battles that it is best not to fight. It is very gallant of the noble Lord to be here to make his case, but it would be absurd if he were to succeed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. Unlike a number of noble Lords here, I was unable to take part in the earlier iterations of debate on the Bill. I was a very strong supporter of it, but, as a member of the Government, it was not within my area of responsibility, and I was, sadly, excluded. Therefore, unlike others, I relish the opportunity to volunteer my support for it this afternoon.

Fundamentally, this argument is about whether or not you believe in the deterrent effect. As was mentioned in Tuesday’s debate, and on previous occasions, the challenge we face—and I think the noble Lord, Lord Alton, highlighted this in the Joint Committee’s report when he was introducing his amendments earlier in the week—is the enormous number of displaced people around the world who, under the refugee convention, would potentially have a claim for asylum. The fact is that those volumes cannot all be accommodated here. The extra challenge we get from the issue of small boats crossing the channel goes directly to one’s interpretation of that convention; this was the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, raised when she talked about people coming across the channel from France.

It is the Joint Committee’s view, but it is not a universal view and it is not my view, that the refugee convention protects people fleeing persecution who come directly to the United Kingdom. Most of these people enter the European Union on the southern borders, so they have crossed—

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I will finish the point and then of course I will take the noble Baroness’s intervention. They cross a number of safe European countries before they get to their final safe EU country of France. I absolutely accept that a number of them—not all of them; some of them are economic migrants—are absolutely fleeing persecution, but they have not come directly to the UK, and therefore I do not feel that they benefit from the protection of the convention. On that point, I will take the noble Baroness’s intervention, and then I will make some progress.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. It is not simply what I say or the Joint Committee on Human Rights says; it is the UN High Commission on Refugees, which is given the responsibility of overseeing the refugee convention. It is very clear that the Rwanda Act went against that convention, and it does not accept this interpretation of what coming immediately from a safe country means.

While I am up, the noble Lord talked about all these people coming here, but what proportion of asylum seekers do we in this country take in, as opposed to other European countries? My understanding is that we are not a country that is taking more than our share.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I shall deal with those points briefly. First, I do not accept that the UN is the arbiter of what the convention means. It is our job in this House and the House of Commons to make laws and set out our immigration policies. We should not subcontract that to outside organisations that sometimes have a very eccentric view of the world, and it is not one that is supported by the British people.

This comes down to the point about numbers. I am a strong supporter of our long tradition of taking genuine asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom, but we can do that only if we retain public support for it. I say to those who oppose stronger and tougher controls on who can come here and make it clear that it is only people who follow our laws that they are in danger of forfeiting that public support and confidence. If we do not deal with this issue, at some point—and I think we are getting very close to it—the public will say, “We just don’t want anybody. We’re not interested in their circumstances. We’re not interested in what’s happened. We want to control the number of people that are coming here”. I think that would be a tragedy. I say to those who oppose tougher border controls that they are running a real risk of altering public opinion so that it does not support it.

When we get these schemes right—I referenced earlier in the week the scheme that we set up for those fleeing the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine—they have huge public support. In my part of the world, I had no complaints about the Ukraine scheme. But when people think people are taking the mickey out of us, as they do with these small boat crossings, public support is not there and is not supportive. In a democracy, we should be mindful that we have to carry the public with us.

On this issue of deterrence, I think you have to have a deterrent. My noble friend demonstrated earlier the success in Australia. It was very telling that one political party in Australia opposed the scheme, and then when it came back into government it recognised that it was necessary. Although it would be politically convenient if that happened to this Government—if, in the end, what they are proposing was a failure and they suffered some political damage from it—the bit of me that wants my country to be successful, having had some responsibility for our borders in the past, does not want that to happen. I want to get this right. If we had won the election and been able to implement the Rwanda scheme, it would have been a deterrent. It would have sent a very clear message to people that paying thousands of pounds to people smugglers to cross the channel was a fruitless endeavour. The one thing we know about the people who pay people smugglers is that they expect to get what they pay for and, if they were not able to get to the United Kingdom and stay here, they absolutely would not have carried on paying people smugglers and that business model would have collapsed.

I completely accept that it was perfectly reasonable for people to disagree with the Rwanda scheme in the way that it was set up, whether it was Rwanda or a different country, but the problem the Government have is that Clause 37 repeals our scheme and, as my noble friend said, replaces it with no alternative deterrent at all. We have just seen this afternoon what the Prime Minister has announced. Obviously, we have not seen all the detail—we have just seen the headlines—but a one-in, one-out scheme has now been announced. The problem with that is twofold.

First, as my noble friend said, I am not sure what the legal underpinning of that is. It would be helpful if the Minister could set out whether the scheme that has been announced today, in both its pilot and its full form, will require any further primary legislation to make sure it can be implemented, and if it does need primary legislation, whether it is going to be inserted into this Bill before it leaves the House. Also, I fear it will be subject to enormous legal challenge and the Government will have exactly the same problems as we had with the Rwanda scheme. It will take them ages to be able to scale it up. The final flaw is that the public want to stop the volume of people coming here and, although a one-in, one-out scheme might alter the composition of the people coming, by definition a one-in, one-out scheme will not reduce the numbers. If we can only send somebody back to France and get another person, we might change who they are, but we are not going to deal with the numbers problem at all, so for a lot of the public the scheme will be a failure by its very definition.

As I said, I strongly support what my noble friend said. I think the Government are making a terrible mistake with this clause—not from my perspective, but from their own perspective. They are going to find that, welcome though some of the measures in this Bill are that support the powers the Government have—I have already referred to some of the later clauses that strengthen the controls on those working illegally, and where the Bill has measures in it that are strengthening the system, I support them—completely removing a deterrent without putting anything in its place, not amending it but completely scrapping it, is a mistake, and I fear that the Government will come to regret it. That will not be a good thing. It might be a short-term political advantage for us, but it will not be a good thing for the country. I would rather, if they had some disagreements with the detail of the scheme, that they had reflected on that and altered it.

If there was a clause here that was making changes to the Rwanda scheme—for example, the way it was dealing with the processing, or maybe even picking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, about who did the processing—that would have at least been an argument that we could have entered into, and it would have been a better argument than scrapping it overnight without anything at all to replace it. I fear the Government will come to regret having done so. We will know from the robust remarks of my noble friend that we did our best to stop them making that terrible mistake. I only hope that we are not proved to be correct.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

102A: Clause 38, page 31, line 9, leave out “11” and insert “12”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would add section 12 (period for which may be detained) to the list of sections of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 to be repealed.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, in the absence of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who is not in her place, I will move Amendment 102A and will speak to the consequential amendments, because I was planning to speak in support of this amendment.

I had assumed that the noble Baroness would be here to explain it, so I will briefly quote from briefings that some of us have received from ILPA, BID and Detention Action. The briefing says:

“Section 12 IMA, since 28 September 2023, has sought to enable the Executive to (a) decide the reasonableness of the length of all forms of immigration detention, intending to overturn an established common law principle which provides for judicial oversight over the length of detention as an important safeguard against arbitrary detention, and (b) continue to detain persons after the reason for their detention (pending examination, removal, or deportation order/decision being made within a reasonable period of time) falls away”.


I probably will not be quite as helpful to my noble friend the Minister as I was on the previous group, but I will start by welcoming the repeal of most of the Illegal Migration Act; needless to say, I do not support the other amendments in this group. However, the omission of Section 12—one of the very few sections to survive—is worrying, because I fear it may reflect an attitude towards detention that I had hoped we had seen the back of with a change in government.

We will be returning to the question of detention and the case for a time limit at a later date but, as I will probably be away then, I hope the Committee will bear with me for raising some more general points about detention. In justification, I cite the UNHCR’s observations on the Bill. It emphasises:

“Detention of asylum-seekers and refugees should be a measure of last resort and both necessary and proportionate in each individual case”.


It therefore recommends the repeal of Section 12 of the Illegal Migration Act, which it fears could mean in some cases detention for periods inconsistent with standards in international refugee and human rights law. Previously, it had pointed to the policy of indefinite detention as a key point of concern. This concern has to be the greater so long as Section 12 remains on the statute book.

It has been a full decade since the inquiry into the use of immigration detention on which I served, established by the APPGs on refugees and migration, called for a 28-day time limit on detention. It argued that detention should be an absolute last resort, with a presumption in favour of community-based solutions. It is depressing that, despite countless reports, including that of the official Brook House inquiry, making the same case in the intervening 10 years, here we are again.

One of those reports was by the Home Affairs Committee in 2019, chaired by the now Home Secretary. It pointed out that the UK is the only country in Europe without a limit on the length of time someone can be held in immigration detention. Having reviewed the evidence, it concluded:

“There is a rapidly growing consensus among medical professionals, independent inspectorate bodies, people with lived experience and other key stakeholders on the urgent need for a maximum time limit”.


The committee called on the then Government to

“bring an end to indefinite immigration detention and to implement a maximum 28-day time limit with immediate effect”.

That was in 2019. Of course, nothing happened. One has to ask: what has changed the Home Secretary’s mind?

The consensus is still very much there. Indeed, the evidence of the harmful effects on health, particularly mental health, has mounted, including last year from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Moreover, as Refugee Tales, which met with some of us the other day, found during its walking inquiry into immigration detention, the damaging impacts last long after release. It notes that:

“For those with lived experience, ‘detention never leaves you’”.


A series of reports by Women for Refugee Women over the past decade have underlined the particularly damaging impact of detention generally on women, the majority of whom are survivors of rape and other forms of gender-based violence. Their most recent report warns:

“Locking up women who have already survived serious violence and abuse retraumatises them, causing profound and longlasting damage to their mental health”.


Shockingly, its latest research found that despite the Home Office banning such practices, male detention centre staff still subjected women in intimate situations to constant supervision.

For a brief period, the previous Government flirted with alternatives to detention with two pilot schemes. In an assessment of these pilots, the UNHCR wrote that:

“Alternatives to Detention provide a people centered approach to supporting asylum seekers whilst waiting for case resolution without any evidence of a reduction in compliance with UK Home Office directives”.


The evidence from the pilot shows significant improvement in the mental health and well-being of participants and that alternatives to detention are cheaper and offer better value for money compared with the cost of detaining asylum seekers. One would have thought that would appeal to Governments of any persuasion.

It was thus disappointing that, when we debated the guidance on the detention of vulnerable persons last October, my noble friend the Minister told us it was the new Government’s policy to “expand the detention estate”. Apropos of that, I understand that the review of that guidance is still ongoing. Can my noble friend the Minister give me an assurance that any changes it proposes will strengthen, and not weaken further, the safeguards for vulnerable people in detention?

Just about finally, returning to the question of indefinite detention, whenever I raised the issue with Ministers in the previous Government, I was met with the semantic response that detention is not indefinite because it comes to an end. We all know that, in this context, “indefinite” means without a specified end or time limit. I hope this semantic distinction did not lie behind Minister Eagle’s recent response to an Oral Question, when she stated:

“Immigration centres are not used for indefinite detention”,—[Official Report, Commons, 2/6/25; col. 18.]


because, if there is no reasonable prospect of removal, the person has to be released. Yet in the year ending 31 March 2025, just over a third of those leaving detention had been held for 29 days or more, and as many as 533 for six months or more.

I trust that my noble friend will accept that we do apply indefinite detention, with important, limited exceptions, in this country. I hope he will acknowledge the harm that this does to those affected. Will Members of your Lordships’ House still have to be making the case for a time limit and minimal use of detention a decade on from now?

In conclusion, repeal of Section 12 of the IMA is the absolute minimum needed to even begin to meet the UNHCR’s concerns, echoed by the JCHR, which, like the UNHCR, also called for its repeal:

“to restore certainty and ensure compliance with Article 5”

of the ECHR. This point is underlined by the Bar Council, which, along with numerous other bodies, argues for repeal with reference to the rule of law and access to justice.

I hope that my noble friend will give serious thought to this, and also to the case that will be made in later amendments for a clear time limit and the development of alternatives to detention. I beg to move.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to oppose this amendment. I am afraid—and she will not be surprised, I suspect—that I broadly disagree with everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, has just said. Let me set out the reason why.

First, she mentioned that the Home Secretary changed her mind and wondered why that might have been. I obviously cannot get inside the Home Secretary’s mind. I suspect what has changed, between chairing the Home Affairs Committee and now, is that she is now the Home Secretary and responsible for protecting the borders and the security of the United Kingdom. Whoever holds that responsibility is sometimes confronted with reality; despite things that they might have liked to have done, they are confronted with the reality of keeping the country safe. What the Home Secretary, I suspect, will have realised is that there is a cohort of people here who she thinks should be removed, as they have no legal right to be here, and she has realised that unless you detain them, you are not able to carry out your functions of keep the country safe.

Now, I do not know whether that is the reason why—the Minister may or may not confirm it—but I suspect that the realities of office have changed her mind, for this reason. We do not detain people indefinitely. The power to detain people is in order to facilitate their removal from the country and to protect the public. The Home Secretary has to have reasonable grounds to believe that, and people are able to challenge that through the judicial process.

The noble Baroness quoted some statistics; I will quote the same statistics but the other way around. Two-thirds of people are detained for 28 days or fewer. It is true that some people are detained for a long period of time. In most of those cases, the reason for the lengthy detention is the responsibility of the individual themselves: it is because they are trying to avoid being removed from the country that they have no legal right to be in, throwing up legal challenge after legal challenge. That is the reason why they are detained. If they wish to cease being detained, they could comply with the deportation order that they have been issued by the Home Secretary, get on a plane and leave the country. It is the fact that they do not wish to comply with the law that means they are held in detention.

The Home Secretary must have a reasonable belief that she can ultimately remove them—otherwise, she would not have the legal power to detain them. If we were to have what the noble Baroness suggests, which is a fixed statutory time period of 28 days, all that would do would give a bigger incentive to people with no right to be in this country to legally challenge decisions. Unless you could get all those legal challenges heard and decided within 28 days, all those people would have to be let out of detention, and we would cease to be able to remove any of them from the country. That would include some people who are not just here illegally but a present danger to people in this country. I strongly support the ability of the Home Secretary to detain people and not to have a fixed time limit, which would simply be an incentive for those people to delay.

If the noble Baroness looks into the details of who stays here in detention for a long period of time, it is people trying to avoid having to leave the country when they have no right to be here, throwing up legal challenge after legal challenge. The alternative way of dealing with it, if you really want not to detain people, is to reduce the opportunities for them to challenge the decision, and for deportation orders to be able to be carried out swiftly. Then we would not need to detain people. I am afraid that I suspect the Home Secretary has realised that detention is necessary to protect the public and to make sure that we can enforce the necessary deportation decisions.

I understand why people do not like it, but I am afraid it is a bit naive to think that everyone who comes to this country, or who overstays their welcome and is in this country without legal authority, goes when they are asked to. You sometimes have to use the power of the state and detention, and you sometimes have to enforce their removal, because otherwise they do not go. If you do not demonstrate that you have a robust system, you will have even more people coming here because they think that, once they get here, they are never going to be removed.

One of the important reasons for having a deterrent is that, if you look at the total number of people we remove, you want to get to a position where the balance between enforced removals and those who go voluntarily is much more in favour of those who go on a voluntary basis, because it is quicker and cheaper for everybody, but that happens only if people realise they are going to have to go at some point. If people think they can get away with staying when they have no right to be here, we have to use the powers that we have at our disposal. I accept that it is not ideal, but I am afraid there are limited choices for Ministers if they want to enforce a robust immigration system. Detaining and removing people where necessary ensures you command the confidence of the public that you have a robust system. If that confidence disappears, the public will not support anybody coming here, whether legally or not. As I have said in debates on earlier clauses, that would be a tragedy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lords who spoke. As I said, we will come back to the issue of detention later, and it is helpful to have heard the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Harper, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, because I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord German, in particular will take them on board when he comes to move his amendment later.

I point out to the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, that no one is talking about people just roaming around, free to go where they like. I made the point that, in the pilots, there was no evidence of a reduction in compliance with UK Home Office directives. They are not just a holiday camp or something.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

I am sorry, but what I meant was the community frameworks about which the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, spoke.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

That is what I was talking about: the pilots showed that there was a very effective way, alternative to detention, that still kept people where they were supposed to be. The noble Baroness might like to read the UNHCR report about the pilots.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord German, for his support. He probably explained what Section 12 is about rather more clearly than I did, so I thank him for that. My noble friend the Minister dealt with Amendments 112 and 113, so I will not refer to them.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, asked what would happen next if this amendment were successful and we removed Section 12. It would be the status quo ante—not some kind of strange situation that we have never seen before. I will not go on much longer, because I am conscious of time moving on.

I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister. I apologise for doubling up by asking a Written Question and then saying it, but when I wrote the Written Question this amendment had not been tabled. The Written Question was an alternative, and I am sorry that he has had to put up with it twice.

I will leave it to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, to read what my noble friend said. It is helpful to have it spelled out exactly why the Government are not repealing Section 12 of the Illegal Migration Act. I suspect I still do not agree with him, but it is helpful to have those reasons. I absolutely understand, and I will not push him to deal with the points I made about indefinite detention, alternative detention and so forth, because that debate will be had at a later date; it is just that I probably will not be able to be there for it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 102A withdrawn.