Nationality and Borders Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 26th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly—although I did think my noble friend Lord Horam, having been an MP, had a common-sense perspective.

I do not agree with Motion D1. The proposed right to work after six months here would be a significant pull factor, in addition to those already outlined by my noble friend Lady Stroud. It could even undermine the points-based system that is already leading to the UK welcoming many more people and more students now that Covid is largely behind us.

As noble Lords will recall, my main concern during the passage of the Bill has been the constantly expanding numbers of people arriving across the channel in small boats, sometimes with tragic consequences. The Rwanda proposal is a brave attempt to discourage the large number of young men, resident in France—which is a free country—who wish to come to the UK, mainly for economic reasons. Sadly, the vociferous critics of this proposal, some of whom we have heard from today, have no alternatives to propose. So I shall be supporting the Government today. I thank the Minister for all she has done to engage and for doing her best to progress this obviously difficult Bill.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise with some hesitancy because I feel I am likely to be chastised for rambling, saying the wrong thing and going on too long. But let me see if I can entertain you.

I think that this is a very important and serious moment in a discussion on a very important and serious matter. I do not feel that this Bill will resolve it. I have been critical throughout on a range of issues and I feel that the Government have wasted opportunities —but I am not going to remind noble Lords of that.

At this point in the passage of the Bill, having listened to the considerations in the other place, we should recognise with a certain humility that the failure of the Government or Parliament to deal with the arrival by irregular routes of so many people is seen by so many citizens of this country as making a mockery of border control. This has led people to welcome the Rwanda solution as “At least somebody is trying to do something”. People will ask, “What would you do about the boats crossing the channel?” It is fair enough for people to say that, if something appears to be a deterrent, maybe we should try it.

As it happens, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Horam, that there are not enough legal routes. I would like to open up a debate about more economic migration for unskilled workers. This might not go down well with my fellow citizens, but I should like to try to win that argument. I am fed up with having to describe people who want to come into this country as asylum seekers, when I know that many of them want a better standard of living—and why should they not have it? I defend them.

But we are not even having this debate. In this House, all the emphasis is on international obligations and the rule of law. There is little discussion about our obligations to the sovereignty of this country or the rights of British citizens of all ethnicities who worry about the fact that borders are not controlled. Perhaps I may remind noble Lords who are sighing that in a different context people are perfectly happy to grandstand about nation states, national sovereignty and the importance of border control—but that is only when you are talking about Ukraine. This is a different question.

On the Rwanda scheme, while I do not think that subcontracting our responsibilities to refugees to another country is against the nature of God, I actually do not like it. It is largely a cowardly decision. Despite what I have said, I would not choose this method. Over many years I have argued against such an approach, because I have always thought that any organisation that outsources or subcontracts its obligations on migration—particularly to heavily beleaguered countries—to police its borders on their behalf is washing their hands of a problem that they should tackle.

When I was criticising other places for doing this, I was criticising the EU—fortress Europe—which, for decades, has had a history of dumping asylum seekers on its non-EU neighbours. In 2016, the EU signed a deal with Turkey in exchange for £6 billion. President Erdoğan—that democrat—promised to stop Syrian refugees crossing the Turkish border into Greece and Bulgaria, and anyone found to have entered Greece was illegally deported to Turkey. The EU’s outsourcing of its migrant policy to, first, Colonel Gaddafi and, when he died, to warlords and militias or EU-funded Libyan detention centres has been a humanitarian disaster with torture and slavery at its heart. As it happens, Rwanda is not in that category, but I am always nervous about outsourcing to poor African countries that need the money; it seems unsavoury and cowardly. The reason these policies, which I feel avoid difficult problems, are greeted as they are by people is that they want something to be done. It equally avoids the problem and washes our hands of it to describe everyone in small boats as genuine refugees, and anyone who does not say that is seen as unkind. It also avoids the problem when you do not have an honest conversation about economic migration. It is equally cowardly and indulging in moral grandstanding to imply that “evil Tories” have turned into Nazis because they are actually putting forward a policy when no one knows what other policy to put forward. This does not help improve the level of debate about a very difficult situation.

Finally, and briefly, I support Motion D1, on the right to work, because it is ridiculous that we do not encourage people to have the right to work. In this instance, when the Government say that all claims should be settled within six months, I say to them: if they could get all the claims of the tens of thousands of people settled in a matter of months, we might not have a crisis where people say, “Bring in the Rwanda situation”. The claims go on and on for years and no one really trusts the processes to be done efficiently by Home Office civil servants in the background—no disrespect intended—so people sit around unproductively for years. For those who think that this would mean that they might undermine the wages and salaries of British citizens and workers, which is always a concern, let me tell noble Lords that, when they are sitting around for months and years, most are working but they are just working on the black market. That is perfectly legitimate because we will not let them work responsibly. Alternatively, if they are not working, they are sitting around doing nothing for years and years. That is not a very positive contribution to the UK, even if you are going to ask them to leave after their asylum status has been assessed eventually. I urge the Government, in this instance, to reconsider.