Nationality and Borders Bill

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove]

I am afraid that I do not have those figures to hand, but we hope to be able to say more on that very soon. It is the early days of that scheme but we have seen an overwhelmingly generous response from people offering sanctuary in their homes, and we want to take up those offers. I look forward to being able to say more about the figures on early implementation as soon as we can.

I understand the concerns raised by right hon. and hon. Members, but I hope that those schemes speak of our willingness to respond to international crises with compassion and to support higher numbers of refugees and people in need of protection when necessary. That is our approach, so we do not think that it is necessary to put a number in statute.

I understand the rationale behind Lords amendment 12, which relates to grants of asylum connected with cases of genocide. We, of course, stand by victims of genocide. Whether or not a determination of genocide is made, the UK is committed to seeking an end to serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. We are also committed to preventing the escalation of any such violations and alleviating the suffering of those affected, but it is not practical for us to be bound to consider asylum claims in British missions from the very large number of individuals overseas who might like to come here. Even with a cap on the number of individuals, we can expect many thousands of applications, which UK caseworkers would need to assess individually to determine whether each individual belongs to the specific group found to be at risk. We do not think that is practical.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

To clarify the Minister’s point, is he saying that the opposition to Lords amendment 12 is on an administrative rather than a humanitarian basis? He seems to suggest that there may be too many people coming for the British embassies to handle. Surely that is no basis to turn our backs on people who are victims of genocide.

[Tom Pursglove]

I do not accept the hon. Member’s characterisation of those remarks for a minute. My primary concern is twofold: to ensure that staff, for example, in British missions are safe and not put at risk; and to ensure that individuals turning up at British missions are also not put at undue risk, considering the sorts of circumstances that we are talking about in such debates and the lengths to which some countries will go to persecute individuals when genocide is relevant. Our approach is better: to develop bespoke schemes as circumstances arise with similar accessibility to the schemes that I described. We would argue that that is the right approach.

I do not understand the rationale behind Lords amendments 13 to 19. They would delete the new offence of knowingly arriving in the UK without a valid entry clearance, and that could make it impossible to take enforcement action against someone who has arrived in, but not technically “entered”, the UK without clearance. That would compromise our plans to enhance the security of our borders, so we cannot accept those amendments.

Similarly, I cannot say that I understand the rationale behind Lords amendment 20, which would compromise our plans to enhance our ability to prosecute people smugglers. It would do that by preserving the status quo in legislation, which means that prosecutors have to prove that people smugglers are acting for gain. Time and again, however, that requirement has been found to have significant operational limitations. We need to remove it to ensure that the lives of vulnerable people are not put at risk by the actions of people smugglers and that traffickers are brought to justice for the misery that they inflict.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Hoare]

To begin my remarks on a personal note, I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for having taken the time to talk to me about a number of amendments and for having approached the Bill with his customary calmness and friendliness and with respect for the House. It is always a pleasure to call my hon. Friend a friend, and he has handled this Bill incredibly well.

I served on the Committee stage of the Immigration Act 2016, and we should remind ourselves that Ministers told us then that that was the Bill to end all Bills and solve all problems, yet another one came along a minute or two later, so I have little or no doubt that we will return to many of these issues over the coming months and years.

This is also an opportunity to pause: all new laws and Bills set rules, guidelines, prohibitions and so forth, but that provides the House with an opportunity to briefly reflect on the enormous contribution of so many people not born in this country who have seen in this country a beacon of light and hope and decency, and who have made their way by all sorts of routes to put down roots and become part of our society. It is an opportunity to remind ourselves of the benefits of immigration and not to see it always through the prisms of prohibition and just say “It’s bad and must be controlled and stopped.”

I strongly support many of the Lords amendments on the right to work. My hon. Friend the Minister said he could not support that because it would be a disincentive to those seeking to abide by the rules to allow people to work, yet as others have mentioned, we are rightly allowing those from Ukraine to do so without anyone making that point. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland), my right hon. Friends the Members for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) and indeed the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) all expressed very cogently and calmly the clear economic and socioeconomic benefits of allowing people to work, and I urge the Minister, even at this late stage of ping-pong, to rethink on that issue.

On offshoring, I first want to say that that is the most dehumanising word. It turns our fellow human beings into commodities to have this idea that we can move them from pillar to post. I do not find it at all palatable. The Minister is also asking us to sign a blank cheque. We have his word—and his word carries weight—that any countries involved with this would share our values, but that is not on the face of the Bill and there is no guarantee. We do not know where this offshoring would be located or how it would work, and we certainly do not know how much it would cost. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield said we might as well send them to Eton and that really would be a punishment, but there is no costing to this and we should not be offshoring; if people want and are trying to come here, we should have the decency, scope and capacity to deal with it here, in country. I do not see the link between putting people off coming here illegally and offshoring; we saw that in the Australian experiment, which clearly did not work.

A rethink on both those issues from the Minister would be helpful.

[Brendan O'Hara]

I rise to speak in support of Lords amendment 12, put forward by Lord Alton of Liverpool, who for decades has been the conscience of this place in dealing with matters of genocide. The amendment would enable the Bill to do three things: provide safe passage for victims of genocide; create a route to asylum that is not currently available in the UK; and help the UK Government meet their legal responsibilities under the UN genocide convention. Let me begin by declaring an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the Yazidi people and vice-chair of the APPG on international freedom of religion or belief and the APPG for the prevention of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Amendment 12 has its origins in Sinjar and the Nineveh plains in northern Iraq, where in August 2014 Daesh terrorists attacked peaceful Yazidi communities. During its reign of terror, Daesh raped, murdered or sold into sexual slavery thousands of women, and sent young boys to its terrorist training camps. Daesh sought to completely destroy the Yazidi community and erase their ethnic and religious identity, culture and way of life. I have spoken many times in this House about the fate of the Yazidis, and in 2016 the House voted unanimously that what happened to them was a genocide.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the atrocities and the fact they meet every single standard laid out in the 1948 convention on genocide, the Government still steadfastly refuse to create a safe or legal route to enable victims of genocide or those at risk of being victims of genocide passage to the United Kingdom. We have a legal and moral responsibility to say that that has to change. It cannot be right that the most abused communities in the world—whether they are the Yazidis, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya or whoever—cannot find safe passage to the United Kingdom.

Let us compare the UK’s record to that of Germany. Since Daesh launched its attack in 2014, 85,000 Yazidi people have been given sanctuary in Germany. In contrast, the UK has not taken in a single Yazidi from northern Iraq. Not one. The Government will say that they are considering eight applications from Yazidis from Iraq, but considering only eight applications from victims of one of the worst genocides in the 21st century is a shameful statistic. As we have heard so often in the debate, that is not an accident, because the system is deliberately designed not to recognise those fleeing genocide as a specific group that requires a bespoke solution. Minister, that has to change.

In conclusion, Baroness Kennedy was absolutely right to describe the Bill as

“an affront to human rights and civil liberties.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 5 January 2022; Vol. 817, c. 639.]

Regardless of the form in which the Bill passes tonight, it will continue to be an affront to human rights and civil liberties and an indelible stain on what is left of the reputation of the United Kingdom. If it has to pass, at least allow those who are suffering the most heinous of crimes at hands of some of the most brutal regimes a glimmer of hope that in their greatest hour of need they will find refuge here. I ask Government Members to consider this humanitarian amendment and make a change that will allow the most abused people to find refuge here in the United Kingdom.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I commend the Minister for the moderate and sensible way in which he introduced the Bill and I urge him, when considering how we should vote on all the amendments, to be robust and to hold the line. When the Bill becomes an Act it will be crawled over by so-called human rights lawyers, and I believe that it is the bare minimum to try to deal with the scandal of channel crossings, which are putting so many lives at risk.

Let us pause for a moment and think about what we can agree on. The push factors are enormous, such is the misery in the world in places such as Yemen, Syria, Iraq and many other countries. There is no limit to the number of people who want to come here. Let us consider the pull factors. We have the most liberal labour laws in Europe. We speak English; we can do nothing about that. We have no national identity card, which I think will become increasingly essential in the modern world. People can vanish into the community, and we already have large communities from all over the world. The pull factors are enormous—in a way, President Macron has a point.

We have to ask people who oppose the Bill and seek to amend it, what is their solution? Everybody accepts that the cross-channel trade is appalling—it criminalises desperate people and lines the pockets of gangsters—but what is the solution? Such is the pull factor and the push factor that even if we did have offshore asylum claims for 2,000, 5,000 or 10,000, it would probably make very little difference to the number of people desperate to get into this country by any means at all.

I repeat that what we have in the Bill is the bare minimum to try to break the cycle of it being just about economically attractive to make the appallingly dangerous journey. We have to have a variety of measures in our toolkit. I do not know whether we will ever resort to pushback, although the Greeks have pursued it very successfully, and I do not know whether we will ever resort to offshoring, although the Australians have used it very successfully.