Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Carla Denyer Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

The Government deserve credit for swiftly scrapping the disgusting, immoral and illegal Rwanda plan, but we need to scrap the attitudes that underpinned it too. The demonising of vulnerable people and of anyone who is different—pandering to the nasty, dog-whistling of Reform and the Tories—is divisive and dangerous. It is shocking, then, to witness the Government trying to mimic the Tories and Reform with migrant raid videos and adverts boasting about deportations. Do they not understand that that just serves to reinforce Reform’s scapegoating rhetoric? Let us not forget that last summer we saw mobs, driven by hate, trying to burn refugees alive in hotels. The Government should be challenging those narratives head-on and helping communities to heal from divisions, not publishing videos that risk encouraging further animosity towards migrants and anyone perceived as being one.

Let me turn to the Bill. I share the Refugee Council’s concerns about the potential for clauses 13 to 16 and 18 to lead to the unintentional criminalisation of refugees who are forced to make decisions under coercion when their survival is at stake—by being forced to steer a small boat under threat of death, for example. Although I am pleased to see the repeal of child detention powers, 1,300 children were wrongly assessed to be adults over an 18-month period, so how do the Government plan to address that? I welcome the repeal of much of the Illegal Migration Act 2024, but I am concerned that some aspects that should have been scrapped will remain, including, for example, the automatic inadmissibility of asylum and human rights claims from certain countries, which is particularly dangerous for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers.

Let me come to my central point. Focusing solely on enforcement simply is not saving lives. The number of deaths in the channel remains horrifying. Enforcement against criminal gangs is of course needed, but that is not going to work on its own when refugees have no other choice. Instead, if people have a choice not to go with gangs, not to put their children in a deathly dinghy and not to risk their lives, the gangs lose their power.

I hope that Ministers have seen the report on safe routes published by the APPG on refugees, of which I am a member. It contains three recommendations, all of which are already tried and tested in other countries and should, in my view, be totally uncontroversial. First, we must urgently fix family reunion. Refugee children are being intentionally kept apart from their parents by the UK’s asylum laws. That is unconscionably cruel. We must move in line with the majority of European nations by bringing parents and children together, which would likely reduce the number of parents making dangerous journeys across the channel to be reunited with their children.

Secondly, Ministers must improve the UK resettlement scheme, which has a lot of potential but has consistently failed to help enough people—only 435 people were resettled last year. My inbox—like those of many Members, I am sure—is full of heartbreaking pleas from people caught up in delays and huge backlogs, and that step could help to fix the system. Thirdly, I would like the Government to pilot a humanitarian visa, to provide a safe option for refugees with strong asylum claims to travel here and make their claim. It is based on successful schemes in the US and Switzerland that have helped to reduce people smuggling.

In conclusion, bits of the Bill are important and hugely welcome, but let us be clear: scrapping something illegal, immoral and unworkable is the bare minimum, and now we need Ministers to build something better that helps this country to rise above the far-right narrative that demonises all migrants. Before I end my remarks, I invite everyone in the Chamber to join me in a very short thought experiment. “The political environment in your home country has become extremely dangerous for anyone with your political views. People in your movement have been murdered. Last month, your children got followed home by an unmarked car, and you have received threatening calls. You have a family member in the UK who successfully claimed asylum a few years ago and is very worried about you. He implores you to join him. Your options are to stay in your home country, risk being murdered and leaving your children orphaned, or to flee to the UK.” Who among us could say with 100% certainty that we would stay?

I will abstain on Second Reading, because although I support the scrapping of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act and the Illegal Migration Act, if the Government truly want to modernise the asylum system, they must be honest about the need for safe routes and respect for human rights.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Carla Denyer Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 12th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)]

It is an honour to follow that eloquent and impassioned maiden speech by our new colleague, the hon. Member for Runcorn and Helsby (Sarah Pochin). I can tell that we will be hearing a lot more from her in this House, and while I am sure that her colleagues are pleased to have their number back up to five, I think we can all understand that her lucky number is six.

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and the support provided to my office by the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy Project. I would like to make a couple of points about the amendments, drawing on the evidence we heard in Committee.

The purpose of this legislation is to stop the small boat crossings in the channel. They are too dangerous and too many vulnerable people die in the attempt. They represent a lack of grip on the immigration system, because it should be the Government who decide who comes into this country, not people smugglers. The previous approach manifestly failed. That is because the Rwanda scheme meant we could never reduce demand enough. As Dr Walsh from the Migration Observatory told us in our evidence sessions, demand for crossing the channel is essentially inelastic and we will never get it down enough. Deterrence alone therefore will not work. If we want proof, we should consider that of all the asylum seekers in the system, those who went to Rwanda represent one 4,000th of 1%. Rather than tackle demand, we should tackle supply. We need to make it harder to get in boats and to organise crossings, and we need to disrupt the supply chain that drives this multimillion-pound industry and seize the phones of those making the crossing.

On new clause 3 on safe routes, let us be clear that there is absolutely a wider case to be made for safe routes and there is a national obligation to help where we can, but let us also be clear that safe routes already exist at significant scale. Some 500,000 people sought sanctuary in the UK through them over the last few years. We must be clear, too, that given the vast numbers of people in the asylum system just now, no one can argue that Britain does not have enough refugees. Most importantly, safe routes fall into the same logical trap as the Rwanda scheme, in that they aim to reduce demand rather than to tackle supply. Rwanda said, “Don’t come because there’s a tiny chance you’ll be sent to Rwanda instead.” Safe routes say, “Don’t come because there’s a tiny chance you can come through safe routes instead.”

The purpose of the Bill is to reduce channel crossings. There are good arguments for safe routes on many levels, but having worked on migration policy for 15 years before coming here, I know we have to recognise that they will not play a role in reducing this cross-channel travel.

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

The Government’s repeal of the vile and illegal Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 and large parts of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 are welcome, but they must do more to repeal the underlying legal framework, which continues to undermine the UK’s ability to uphold the rule of law and human rights. The Illegal Migration Act simply does not belong on the statute book, and my preference would be to scrap the lot of it. My amendment 35 at least seeks to restore judicial oversight of decisions about detention. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association points out that without my amendment 35, a software engineer who overstayed her visa could be detained for longer than a suspected terrorist, and with far less judicial oversight.

Turning to my new clause 38, I am disappointed that the Government have not used the Bill to repeal the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, when Labour rightly opposed that legislation in its entirety on its Second Reading. That Act marked the UK’s move away from upholding the 1951 refugee convention and instead denies the right to territorial asylum, yet this Labour Government have chosen to leave the Act on the statute book, untouched by this Bill. My new clause 38 focuses on undoing the provisions that penalise and criminalise people who make unsafe journeys to the UK to seek sanctuary. It scraps the parts that create an unfair two-tier asylum system with differential treatment for different groups of people—a proposal so unworkable that the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) had to pause it when in government. Crucially, it scraps the law that criminalises people arriving in the UK without permission or the right paperwork with a penalty of up to four years in prison. This law is clearly contrary to article 31.1 of the 1951 refugee convention, which provides immunity from penalties in recognition of the fact that refugees are often compelled to arrive without appropriate documents in order to access their human rights under that convention. Lastly, my new clause 38 would scrap sections 30 to 38 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which sought to—I will put it charitably—poorly reinterpret the refugee convention.

I wish to highlight the fact that the Government are leaving on the statute book measures that unjustly penalise and criminalise refugees for arriving irregularly when there are no safe and managed routes to travel here to claim asylum for the vast majority of people who might need and be eligible to do so. In the words of Warsan Shire:

“no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land”.

This Government are clearly focused on appearing tough on immigration, and to do so they have brought in some of the previous Government’s cruel policies and introduced some of their own—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

Order. I call Bell Ribeiro-Addy.