Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Chris Murray Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Vickers]

Well, hot air is required in this room this afternoon, and I intend to provide it.

We fought back with the Nationality and Borders Act third-country removals, which helped the Government to deter crossings by 36% in 2023 from 45,000 to under 29,000—not by chance, but by design, sending a message to traffickers and migrants alike that Britain is no soft touch or guaranteed prize. Now, the Liberal Democrats barge in with new clause 27, desperate to repeal section 29 to shred that deterrent and plunge us back into chaos, flinging the channel wide open not just to the weary but to every chancer or criminal. That is not tweaking policy; it is torching a firewall, inviting all those to Dover’s cliffs and Deal’s shores and erasing every inch of progress that we have clawed from the crisis. The Lib Dems owe us hard answers. How many boats—50,000 or 60,000?

The Albania deal delivered a masterstroke of border control. That pragmatic triumph has turned a torrent of illegal crossings into a trickle through sheer diplomatic grit. Back in 2022, Albanians dominated the small boats surge. A 12,000-strong, relentless wave of young men were lured by traffickers with promises of easy UK entry for £3,000, clogging Dover’s processing centres and fuelling tabloid headlines of chaos. Then came our 2023 pact with Tirana—a no-nonsense agreement that flipped the script with fast-track returns, joint police operations and a clear signal: Albania is safe and you are going back.

By 2024, the results were staggering. Weekly flights were whisking deportees home, with each jet a nail in the coffin of the smuggling networks that once thrived on our porous borders. That was not luck or loud threats but cold, hard execution, bolstered by UK-funded cameras on the Albania-Kosovo frontier and Albanian officers embedded in Dover.

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

I think that the hon. Gentleman is somewhat overstating the impact of the Albania policy. After the initial agreement was signed, we saw a massive spike in numbers coming from Albania, and the numbers had already started to fall before the communiqué was signed. The correlation and causation arguments that he is making on the Albania scheme do not add up at all.

[Matt Vickers]

What is effective? The deal reduced the number of people coming from Albania by more than 90%. If we could get a few more agreements like that, we would be on the way—that would be huge progress. The Albania deal represented huge progress; to suggest otherwise is wrong. It choked off routes before boats had even launched and had a real impact.

[Chris Murray]

Would the hon. Gentleman at least accept that the Albania returns were largely due to large numbers of foreign national offenders, who are a completely different category of people from those we are talking about in either this clause or this Bill?

[Matt Vickers]

We would want to return foreign national offenders; that is really positive. But the number of people choosing to cross because of that deterrent effect went down by not 10% or 20%, but by more than 90%. More than 90% fewer people arrived from Albania in small boats. That is huge progress. If we can replicate that elsewhere, I will be a very happy boy because we would see a huge impact on those crossings across the piece.

New clause 27 is hellbent on repealing that backbone, oblivious to how crossings from Albanians were successfully slashed, while the Rwanda threat kept smugglers guessing. If the Liberal Democrats prevail, every bilateral deal will be on the chopping block. Imagine Albanian numbers roaring back to 12,000, with other current surges unchecked. That is not progress; it is sabotage—a reckless bid to unravel a system that is finally biting back at the chaos. Do the Liberal Democrats not want to be able to remove people from this country who have entered illegally? Do they believe that any national of a safe country should be able to seek asylum in the UK? Can Liberal Democrat Members explain why that would not create a massive pull factor and encourage people to cross the channel in small boats?

The Liberal Democrats are also seeking to repeal sections 15 to 17 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which specify that the Secretary of State must declare an asylum claim made by a person who is a national of an EU member state inadmissible. Why would the Liberal Democrats believe that anyone from the EU needs to claim asylum here? Picture this scene, which is so utterly ridiculous that it strains the bounds of credulity: an EU citizen, perhaps some laid-back Amsterdamer, pedalling along the city’s picturesque canals one sunny afternoon, tulips nodding in the breeze, then suddenly deciding to chuck it all, hop on a ferry and pitch up on Dover’s pebbled shores, requesting asylum, as if the Netherlands’ orderly bike lanes and windmill-dotted horizons had morphed into a scene from—

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[Matt Vickers]

I would suggest that that is quite a creative interpretation of last week’s events. This debate is about what people contribute when they are legally able to, rather than creating anything that would draw more people to make that crossing and to turn up in this country.

New clause 32 would revoke indefinite leave to remain in certain circumstances: that a person

“is defined as a ‘foreign criminal’ under section 32 of the UK Borders Act 2007”;

that the person

“was granted indefinite leave to remain after the coming into force of this Act,”

but has not spent 10 years resident in the UK;

that the person or their dependants

“have been in receipt of any form of ‘social protection’…from HM Government or a local authority”;

or that the person’s

“annual income has fallen below £38,700 for six months or more in aggregate during the relevant qualification period, or subsequent to receiving indefinite leave to remain.”

Let us be absolutely clear about one thing, because it is a cornerstone of this proposal and speaks volumes about who we are as a nation and what we stand for when the chips are down: anyone who has entered this country under the carefully crafted, well-designed and wholly principled safe and legal routes—those lifelines that we have extended through the Ukraine scheme, the British nationals overseas scheme or the Afghan schemes—would find themselves entirely exempt from the rigours of new clause 32, and rightly so. Those schemes are not just policies, but promises; they are solemn commitments that speak to our national character, and we stand by those we have pledged to protect.

Let us think of the more than 200,000 Ukrainians welcomed since 2022, fleeing Putin’s bombs—families clutching what they had, offered sanctuary through the Ukraine family scheme and Homes for Ukraine.

[Chris Murray]

Looking at the proposals set out in this new clause, how exactly is the hon. Gentleman proposing to calculate the £38,700? Is software available in the Home Office or in His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs? What if someone was found to have overpaid taxes after they were found not to meet the amount? Would the Home Office go and find them overseas and bring them back? This proposal sounds absurdly unworkable.

[Matt Vickers]

Lots of processes are in place, but we are putting down a principle. It is the same as the skilled worker visa threshold of £38,700. We have to set a line that requires people to be self-sufficient and not a drain on resources. This is the line that we are setting.

There are also Hongkongers. By 2025, nearly 180,000 British national overseas visa holders had escaped Beijing’s iron grip—huge British talent. More than 20,000 Afghans have been resettled since the Kabul airlift. Those were the right things to do, and we would exempt them from this proposal. These are not random arrivals; they are people we invited, whose stories of sacrifice and loyalty resonate with the values that we hold dear, from duty to decency. We would not renege on those commitments and tarnish the trust that we have built.

Let us cast our eyes across the globe, because other nations are not just theorising about this; they are proving that it works, day in, day out, with systems that do not just talk a good game but deliver tangible, measurable results that we would be foolish to overlook. Take Australia, a land of vast horizons and sharper borders, whose points-based residency system does not mess around. If someone is pulling in less than 53,900 Australian dollars—£28,000—and they are dipping into welfare, Australia will show them the door, an approach that is saving taxpayers billions.

These are not quirky outliers or flukes; they are lessons carved in policy stone and shining examples that tying status to contribution is not some pie-in-the-sky dream but a practical, proven playbook that delivers real savings and sharper borders, and stands up to scrutiny. New clause 32 lifts straight from that script, making £38,700 the line in the sand, with no benefits to lean on and no criminal record to tarnish the deal. It is not radical; it is road-tested, and echoes what works elsewhere on the globe.

Critics might cry, “Unworkable!” but the conditions in new clause 32 are trackable. HMRC already logs income for tax. The Home Office flags criminals under the UK Borders Act 2007, and the Department for Work and Pensions tracks benefits down to the penny. We are not reinventing the wheel—just syncing data to enforce the rules, with £38,700 as a clear line, 10 years as a fair test, and exemptions for the Ukraine, Afghan and British national overseas schemes, showing that we can tailor it.

This is a framework that says, “If you’re here for the long haul, you’ve got to bring something to the table, not just pull up a seat.” Australia and Canada have shown us the path with lower costs and tighter controls; we would be stupid not to take it. I would like to know why the Government would disagree with the principles behind the new clause. Why do the Government want foreign criminals to remain in the UK with indefinite leave to remain? If the Government believe in the £38,700 amount for skilled workers to obtain a visa, why would that not apply to people remaining in the UK indefinitely?

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[Matt Vickers]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

New clause 33 aims to help the Government by providing a way to put securing our borders above spurious human rights claims to frustrate removal. It would disapply the entire Human Rights Act 1998, as well as any interim measures of the Strasbourg court that prevent the effective operation of legislation relating to immigration and deportation. The result would be that those seeking to appeal deportation or other immigration decisions would not be able to make human rights claims under the Human Rights Act in British courts.

The new clause would apply that new power to all aspects of immigration control, including enforcement, deportation, the granting or removal of immigration and asylum status, and any other immigration entitlements. We would expect Parliament to legislate and the Home Office to decide immigration cases based on their reasonable interpretation of the European convention on human rights, but UK judges would be able to use only UK law passed by Parliament to decide appeals, and no longer make expansive and common-sense-defying interpretations of what they claim the ECHR means.

The Human Rights Act would still apply to non-immigration matters, so UK judges could continue to apply the ECHR directly to them. We would still be under the ECHR, so applicants would still be able to go to the Strasbourg court, but the new clause would stop UK judges expanding the definitions. In that scenario, it would be possible to deport people pending a Strasbourg appeal, and it would repeat the measure in the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 to give Ministers the power to ignore an ECHR rule 39 interim order. We are not saying that the new clause provides the full answer to controlling our borders. Wider questions such as ECHR membership and wider immigration system reforms are to be addressed in longer-term pieces of work, but the new clause would be a step in the right direction.

The reason the new clause is necessary can be seen in recent decisions about immigration appeals. For example, an Iraqi drug dealer was saved from deportation from the UK after a judge ruled that he was too westernised to be returned to his home country. That man, who was jailed for more than five years after a conviction for dealing cocaine, had lived in Britain for 24 years and has a British-born daughter. Home Office officials attempted to have him deported, but a specialist judge in the asylum tribunal ruled that returning the man to Iraq would violate his human rights as he would be viewed with suspicion. The judge said that the man, who cannot be named, would face persecution in Iraq because he would be seen as westernised.

As we have already mentioned, an Albanian criminal was allowed to stay in Britain partly because his son would not eat foreign chicken nuggets. An immigration tribunal ruled that it would be unduly harsh for the 10-year-old boy to be forced to move to Albania with his father, owing to his sensitivity around food. The sole example provided to the court was his distaste for the type of chicken nuggets available abroad.

[Chris Murray]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman could just assume that we are familiar with those two cases by now and either not bother citing them or think of some new examples to support his arguments.

[Matt Vickers]

I think they are relevant; they are things that both the public and I are bothered about. They show the failings of the system and why people are so concerned about the way that it is going.

As a result, the judge allowed the father’s appeal against deportation as a breach of his right to family life under the European convention on human rights, citing the impact that his removal might have on his son. An attempt to deport a Sri Lankan paedophile, who was convicted of assaulting three teenage boys, was delayed over claims that deportation would breach his human rights.

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[Katie Lam]

The hon. Member asks a good question. I am not sure whether that would be explicitly decided on the face of the Bill; that could be something that the Home Office decided subsequently—whether it wished to set out future years or just the following one. In my initial response to the hon. Member, the point that I was trying to clarify was that that cap can, of course, be changed. Once it is set, it does not need to be set in stone for ever, but it is important that it exists and that the conversation about what it should be is had in front of the British public.

[Chris Murray]

It was interesting to hear the hon. Member for Weald of Kent setting out her argument articulately, and it was good to hear her say that she recognises that the last Government made a lot of mistakes on immigration, and that the evidence shows that. Sadly, although it is good to have that recognition, it does not seem as though very much has been learned from the Conservatives’ experience in office, based on each of the new clauses that they have set out.

First, on the spousal visas, quite a lot of what is in new clause 35 actually exists already. There are already salary thresholds and things like that. It is unlike me to praise the previous Conservative Government on immigration, but, actually, across previous Administrations, both Labour and Conservative, very good work has been done on issues such as sham and forced marriages. What is new in new clause 35, which is a very strange and horrible power to give Ministers, is the ability to either restrict the nationalities that British people can marry or set thresholds on them. I have huge respect for my ministerial colleagues in the Home Office, but I do not think that they should be able to choose what nationalities I am allowed to marry. We got rid of anti-miscegenation laws in the 20th century; we do not want returning through the back door, through measures such as this. Most of all, this arbitrary figure of 7% is very strange; if I were to marry, say, an Australian or an American, I would have to hope that I was not in the 8th percentile of people to do that. That would be a very strange way for us to ask British citizens to live their lives and fall in love with people.

Opposition Members also made the point about how the legislation needs to look backwards and make sure that migrants are net fiscal contributors over their lifetimes. I would say, again, that that is not a realistic thing to ask Governments to do. We will only know whether we have been net fiscal contributors when we die, so we cannot really ask people to make those projections.

Finally, there is the numerical visa cap in new clause 40. Again, that is a gimmick that is not addressing the actual structural problems in the immigration system. First, it treats all migrants the same, as one big monolithic whole, yet we know that the impact of migrants on communities is different, whether they are spouses, students, doctors, lorry drivers or refugees.

If we are going to have this kind of cap, how do we prioritise? Will it apply throughout the whole of the year? How will businesses plan if they want to recruit from overseas? As my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East said, what if emergencies mean that there are more people coming in? The last Conservative Government set a cap for tier 2 visas, then, of course, ended up hitting it and just exempting doctors and nurses from it anyway. Is it not inevitable that we will just be condemned to repeat history if we do that here? We have talked a lot about public trust in the immigration system and how that has been so deeply sapped by failures on immigration policy. The Conservatives had a net migration target of 100,000 a year, which they consistently failed to meet and had to revise. This proposal is just advocating that we repeat that exact mistake, but hoping for a different outcome, which seems bonkers to me.

[Seema Malhotra]

A number of the issues raised regarding these new clauses have already been debated in relation to other measures, so I will keep my remarks fairly brief on some of the additional issues.

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[Matt Vickers]

We have had many alternative means of accommodation, including hotels. Accommodation of asylum seekers in hotels is through the roof—it is up 29%, with 8,500 more people staying in them—but the situation I am describing applies more widely than any accommodation centre or hotel.

The £4.7 billion tab for 2023-24 covered beds, meals and NHS visits while the backlog ballooned.

[Chris Murray]

Will the hon. Gentleman accept that that number has “ballooned”—or gone up highly—not just in the aggregate but per asylum seeker? The hon. Gentleman wants to try to charge people, but his party let the system get completely out of control. Maybe it was the backlog that let it get out of control, rather than the kind of hotels that people were staying in.

[Matt Vickers]

The reality is that somebody is getting charged for it and paying for it, and at the moment that is the Great British public. There are ballooning costs. There are increasing numbers: illegal arrivals are up 28% since the election, there are 29% more people in hotels, and fewer of the people who arrive illegally are being removed. The number goes up, the cost continues to go up, and somebody has to pick up the tab. Making the person repay those costs once they are working—with, say, £10,000 over a decade—could claw back hundreds of thousands of pounds. That is not small change: it is classrooms built, potholes filled and nurses hired. Why are the Government content to let this sinkhole drain us dry when we could balance the books with a system that asks those who are successful to pay back some of these costs?

In his evidence, Tony Smith highlighted the knowledge that such support is available as a pull factor that encourages people to cross the channel. We share Tony Smith’s view that making it clear that the costs of asylum support and accommodation will be recovered once the applicant is economically active could help to disincentivise future crossings. That is why we have tabled new clause 37.

The proposed new clause would enable the Government to treat asylum support like a student loan, with asylum seekers able to pay back the cost of support when they are in paid employment. We believe that if someone’s asylum appeal is granted and they are allowed to remain in this country and they are able to work, they should be required to pay back to the state the costs of their maintenance, as and when they are able. State support is not a right.