Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 8th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Neuberger]

162: After Clause 48, insert the following new Clause—
“Age and safeguarding assessments at the port of entry(1) A person who claims to be a child must not be subject to a visual age assessment by Border Force officials solely for immigration control purposes.(2) Any such assessment must be conducted as part of a safeguarding determination to identify potential risks and support needs. (3) A visual age assessment at the port of entry must not result in the assignment of a specific chronological age to the individual.(4) Border Force officials may only determine whether, in their view, the person is a child or an adult.(5) Where there is doubt as to whether an individual is a child, the presumption must be that the individual is treated as a child unless and until a comprehensive age assessment is conducted by local authority social workers in accordance with Merton compliant age assessment procedures.(6) The Secretary of State must publish guidance on the implementation of this section, including—(a) the training and qualifications required for officials carrying out safeguarding assessments;(b) mechanisms for independent oversight and review of age determination decisions;(c) safeguards to ensure that no child is placed at risk as a result of incorrect age assessments at the port of entry.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that visual age assessments focus on safeguarding rather than immigration enforcement, removes the Home Office’s power to assign a specific age at the border, and to strengthen independent oversight and child protection safeguards.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I will channel my inner version of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, since she is not in her place, as I introduce Amendments 162 and 163. I thank all colleagues who have signed them. I also make clear my support for Amendments 180 and 194.

Amendments 162 and 163 aim to address serious and well-documented flaws in the current approach to age assessment for unaccompanied children and young people seeking asylum. They are grounded in safeguarding principles and reflect the urgent need to prevent children being wrongly treated as adults, a practice that has led to significant harm, including wrongful detention, denial of education and even criminal prosecution. I feel like something of a broken record on this subject, having spoken on it so many times over the past few years.

The Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, which is a coalition of more than 100 organisations—I am very grateful to it for its help—has repeatedly raised concerns about the Home Office’s approach to age assessment, particularly the use of visual assessments at the border and the previous push for unproven scientific methods. For too long, it and we were not listened to, so we very much appreciated the willingness of the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, to meet members of the consortium and a number of noble Lords and his patent and keen engagement with what was said. These amendments respond directly to the consortium’s concerns and propose a child-centred, rights-based framework for age determination. I will speak to each in turn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

As the substitute for the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, I would like to make a point about AI. It is important that the Home Office and others use AI only where it is appropriate and safe. Quite a lot of work has been done across the piece in Parliament about the reliability or otherwise of facial recognition—because that is what this is— including by a Select Committee which I chaired. I have not been satisfied by any comments from the Government Benches since, including on the need for regulation and oversight. That must apply here. I would be deeply worried if we were to go ahead with using AI as a substitute for the human brain without the proper regulation in effect.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I echo totally what the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has just said. In my speech, I asked the Minister whether Parliament would have the chance to look at whether AI is used. Will he reply to that?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The Government are examining all of this, and there will need to be some further consideration. I will ensure that there is further discussion in Parliament, prior to that being undertaken.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his reply. That is what we wanted to hear, and I very much hope we might have informal discussions before that comes to Parliament. Like some of the stuff more generally about age assessment, the meeting with the Minister was hugely helpful.

I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, will not be entirely surprised to hear I do not wholly agree with him. The point I was trying to make is that it is worse for a child to be in adult accommodation than for an adult to be in child accommodation. That is the point we ought to take most seriously.

At this late hour, let us leave it at that. With the Committee’s leave, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 162 withdrawn.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 13th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, although these amendments are grouped, they are quite disparate in many respects because we take Amendment 177 as almost the antithesis of Amendments 165 and 166. I say to the Minister, who holds probably one of the toughest jobs in the Government at present, that we are here to make life even more difficult for him. I think we are doing a good job of that.

We have listened to words such as “humanity” and “compassion”, which we are always proud of as a country, but, like everything else in the modern world, compassion and humanity have to be rationed. That is an inescapable fact, because government cannot function or do things without resources, whether money or other resources. As a country, we cannot simply be the recipient of every conflict around the globe. We cannot endlessly assume that we have to take on responsibility for individuals when we can hardly take on responsibility for those we already have. We are talking about compassion and, not 200 or 300 yards from where we are sitting, we step over people sleeping in cardboard boxes. What compassion do we have for them?

Relating that to this piece of legislation, I find Amendments 165 and 166, however well intentioned, dangerous because they will provide an incentive for people, whether gangs or whatever. They would see that the simple thing to do is to send a child over, and that then, under these proposals, they would have the potential to get other people to come in. Taking the zones of conflict, how on earth will we know who is related to whom? We have had a proposal for DNA tests. We could be talking about family groups of 40 or 50, and in some cultures people have multiple wives who have multiple children.

We have to be sensible here because we are proving ourselves literally to be the Westminster bubble because we have lost touch with reality—not only public opinion, which has been expressed. Public opinion comes and goes. It ebbs and flows, and it depends on what the flavour of the month happens to be. So legislators have to take a more coherent, sensible and long-term view, with the experience we have in this House. We cannot be blown around just by public opinion. Think of the practicalities.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, mentioned that asylum seekers were getting blamed for everything, and so on. Of course, that is not the case; we all know that. But numbers matter. In 2023, we increased the population of this country by 23,000 people a week. The following year it was down to about 17,500 people a week, and this year we are probably running somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people a week. Those people do not exist in a vacuum. They consume resources: water, transport, sewage and housing. They need access to health and, of course, many will rely on the public to support them, in both the short and long term.

I say to the promoters of those amendments that, however well intentioned, they are not a good idea. They would potentially put more people at risk rather than fewer. The concept of compassion that we have is because of the treaties we have signed. Both the ECHR and the refugee convention have been mentioned in this debate. Incidentally, I have asked two Questions in the last year about whether we were going to discuss looking at the refugee convention with allies, and I got negative answers. The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, talked about costs. When I asked the Minister about the cost of non-hotel accommodation I got the same answer. But I have not finished with him: I have a letter coming to him shortly and I am looking at how we can get questions answered.

We will get that answer eventually, but the fact that we have to go through all of this illustrates the problem, and not simply with the Bill on its own, to which there are some positive dimensions. We do not have a comprehensive view of how we will deal with immigration to this country of all forms. It is haphazard. We have created a labyrinth of different categories for people. We are not dealing with it coherently as a nation. We cannot go on with the haphazard immigration we have on the scale that it is at. Numbers matter, and we need to have that background for everything we look at legislatively, but we do not have a comprehensive national understanding of where we are going.

Everybody has a say in this and is entitled to do so. I am just saying to the Minister that although I understand that we have to deal with the specific amendments to the Bill before us, he and his colleagues have a duty as a Government to acknowledge that our system is broken. It is haphazard and has been subject to changes in the international community over which we have no control. Wars and zones of conflict ebb and flow, and they will in the future. Our system is not fit for purpose. One of the Minister’s colleagues, who normally sits in front of me and is a former Home Secretary—he knows who I am referring to—said that his department was not fit for purpose, but the policy we have is not fit for purpose, because there really is not one. That is a huge danger. I will certainly look very closely at Amendment 177 when we come to Report, but it is on a totally different plinth from Amendments 165 and 166, which are very unfortunate.

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, I have not spoken in this particular bit of the debate. Indeed, most of what I would have said has already been said, but there are three things I wish to say.

First, I support Amendments 165, 166 and 203K, and I would have added my name to them had I been able to. Secondly, I may be one of the very few people in the House who actually has some experience of child family reunion. My mother came to this country as an adult refugee in 1937. Her brother was 10 years younger and was stuck in Germany, being treated abominably at school after Kristallnacht in 1938. My mother got permission to bring her 13 year-old brother under family reunion rules, such as existed back then. That meant that he could not be a charge on the state, but he was allowed to use such health services as there were—this was before the NHS. The people around—his neighbours, her neighbours, the wider society who came into contact with him—were unflinchingly supportive.

I believe that we live in the kind of society in which people believe that children who are stuck and in danger and have family here who will support and look after them should be supported now just as much as then. For that reason, I support these amendments. However, is the Minister prepared to tell us where we are really going on family reunion more generally, because, to put it mildly, I think we are all a little confused?

I admire hugely the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and his Amendment 177 is a beautifully crafted piece of legislation. I cannot see how anybody could possibly object.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate around a cluster of amendments that are, I remind the Committee, largely about children and women. If we look at the background of the present system, we find that 91% of all visas granted since 2010 were for women and children, with children being the majority: 56% were for children against 35% for women. We should remember that we are looking at something important towards the sort of society that we want and that we want people to integrate within.

If we believe that we need a controlled, humane, ordered and planned migration system, and if we are serious about solving the challenges at our borders, we have to acknowledge that enforcement alone is not enough. We have to pair control with compassion. That is what is proposed in the amendments that have been put forward by my noble friend Lady Hamwee persistently over a number of years. These amendments are comprehensive in trying to establish compassion as part of a full migration system. One thing I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Empey, on is that we must have a comprehensive system, and a comprehensive system must be those four things: controlled, humane, ordered and planned—all four are important. To concentrate as this Bill does, potentially, on one aspect is fine, but we need to bring together the parts into a whole system.

That is why safe routes are so important. Family reunion is about safe routes. When separation occurs due to conflict, it is essential that we uphold the principle that families belong together. The best interests of a child are a primary consideration in all decisions concerning family reunion. We have to address the barriers that push vulnerable people towards smugglers. When accessible legal routes are lacking, families who are unable to reunite will often feel forced to find alternative, dangerous ways to reach their loved ones. Restricting family reunion will not stop dangerous journeys; it will only push more desperate people into the arms of smugglers. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, indicated that, in Calais, there are children seeking family reunion. We must be prepared to say that they are on a dangerous route because they are attempting an irregular route. We need this as part of a comprehensive system, so that people—young people in particular—do not feel pushed into the arms of smugglers.

At this point, three things are necessary in the legislation to try to simplify the whole process. One is removing restrictive requirements for people who are unable to return to their country of origin, meaning that family reunion is the only way they can exercise their right to family life. New financial and English-language proposals are being put forward by the Government, and I will come back to specific questions on the fundamental point that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, put to the Minister earlier.