Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Debate between Chris Murray and Katie Lam

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Katie Lam]

On 23 January 2023, Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai was sentenced to life imprisonment at Salisbury Crown court. Nearly a year earlier, Abdulrahimzai had murdered 21-year-old Thomas Roberts in Bournemouth town centre by stabbing him to death in the street following a dispute over an e-scooter.

Abdulrahimzai was an Afghan asylum seeker who came to this country in December 2019. He entered the UK illegally, claiming to be an unaccompanied 14-year-old. He was placed in school and in foster care, but he was in fact already an adult when he came here. Not only was he an adult, but he was also a murderer, having killed two men in Serbia before coming to the UK. He should never have been allowed to come to this country and he should certainly not have been allowed to masquerade as a child.

Assessing a person’s age is surprisingly difficult, but we have a range of tools to do so—the Home Office is just not using them. If we had acted sooner, using the full suite of tools at our disposal to assess Abdulrahimzai’s age, Thomas Roberts might still be alive today. The case of Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai is particularly shocking, but it is unfortunately far from unique.

[Chris Murray]

I wonder whether there have been any new scientific discoveries in the last seven months for identifying someone’s age that the Home Office would not have been aware of over the last 14 years. Is it not the case that the methodologies used are very imprecise and do not often actually lead us, in the liminal cases, to draw the distinction that the hon. Lady is advocating for?

[Katie Lam]

I will come on to precision and the ways of determining age slightly later in my remarks.

Ahmed Hassan, an Iraqi asylum seeker, claimed to be a 16-year-old when he arrived in the UK. In 2017, he set off a bomb at Parsons Green tube station, injuring 23 people. His real age is still not a matter of public record. In 2018, a Home Office probe found that Siavash Shah, an Iranian asylum seeker, spent six weeks as a year 11 pupil in Ipswich despite being 25—the list goes on. In fact, between 2020 and 2023, the Home Office identified almost 4,000 cases of adult migrants claiming to be children—45% of those who originally claimed to be children when they arrived here—and every other person of that cohort was in fact an adult. Some were at least 30 years old. That puts British children at risk, puts genuine child asylum seekers at risk and takes valuable school and care places away from the young people who genuinely need them.

I feel this particularly keenly as a Member of Parliament for Kent, the county into which all small boats arrive. Our laws mandate that the people who come to this country illegally and claim to be under 18 must be prioritised for care equally with Kentish children. That puts enormous pressure on the system and makes it harder for our children to be cared for. That is madness when we know that half of those arrivals are in fact adults, and we must put a stop to it.

It is completely rational, albeit morally wrong, for adult migrants to claim to be children. Under-18s who come here have a greater entitlement to care and support, do not have to live in accommodation with adults, and are not subject to the same rules as adults—or the rules are applied less strictly. Of course, there are people who cross the channel without their parents who are under 18; most, though not all, are male 17 and 16-year-olds, and some are younger children. No one disputes that, and children should be treated as children, but we must be realistic about the scandalous degree to which our system is exploited by the cynical and the sinister.

We have to protect actual children, and we should use every tool in the box to do so, including scientific testing. Where people refuse such tests, the Government should be able to override that refusal. We are acting in the interests of public safety and to protect the security of our children. Labour Members have asked for exact details of the scientific methods. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton West set out, there are many methods and several different ways of doing it. The ones that can be implemented in short order are the dental and skeletal tests.

Other methods are currently at an earlier stage of development, such as facial age estimation and DNA methylation, which is a process by which people much cleverer than me can assess how a person’s genes are read by their body, which changes with age. In 2022, the interim Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee stated that the

“teeth, clavicle, and hand/wrist or knee… have been shown to have a significant research and publication credibility and provide a consistent age range over which changes occur.”

Later, the same report states:

“The committee has relied on areas and methods that have been repeatedly tried and tested and shown to have consistency.”

As the report makes clear, and as Government Members have said, scientific age assessment is not perfectly precise and is not magic, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton West also correctly says, our proposal is that scientific age assessments should be used not to replace other methods and judgments, but to supplement them.

The situations that my hon. Friend and I have set out are horrifying. We can see no reason why the Government would not want to have the widest possible set of tools available to them to stop such things happening, including the option in future to bring in scientific methods that are currently at a nascent stage.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Debate between Chris Murray and Katie Lam

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[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.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Chris Murray and Katie Lam

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

These are difficult problems and challenging questions. Practically every country in the western world is struggling with this and, with the notable exception of Australia, effectively none has solved it. The basic logic of the situation is that, if someone comes here illegally from a place to which it would be dangerous to return them, there are only four options.

First, they could be sent back to the country they came from. That is not legal in our current framework—even before getting to the morality of doing such a thing. Secondly, they could be put in immigration detention indefinitely. That is also not legal; a person can be held in immigration detention only if there is a realistic prospect of removal, which there would not be in this case. Thirdly, they could stay here indefinitely. That is not fair, and it is not what the public want. Finally, they could go somewhere else—a safe third country. Such an agreement was very difficult to broker; indeed, until the Rwandans agreed, many considered it to be impossible.

Clearly, the Government have little time for the Rwanda scheme and destroying it was one of the first things they did in office, but the basic logic problem remains. The last Conservative Government did not get everything right—that is for sure—but the Rwanda scheme was a genuine attempt to solve this truly hard problem, and it remains the only solution that we can see.

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

Does the hon. Lady accept that there is a fifth option? Just because someone does not have the right to be in the UK, it does not mean that they do not have the right to go to any other country in the world. The programme of voluntary returns, which massively went down under the Conservatives but has gone up massively under this Government, is part of the solution to that.

[Katie Lam]

As we have heard, people who have come here illegally are not voluntarily leaving the country. Most of the voluntary returns are overstayers or people who have not come here on small boats.

[Chris Murray]

But they could.

[Katie Lam]

But they do not. There will always be people who come to this country illegally from dangerous places. They are human beings responding to obvious incentives. Could the Minister please tell us which of the four options she thinks is the right one? Is it sending someone back to a dangerous country, which will entail a change in the law and probably leaving the European convention on human rights? Is it holding someone in immigration detention indefinitely, which has the same conditions? Is it allowing people to stay here, or is it sending them to a third country?

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Chris Murray and Katie Lam

Committee stage
Tuesday 4th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

As hon. Members will have read, clause 13 creates a new offence of

“Supplying articles for use in immigration crime”.

The offence has two limbs. First, that the person supplies or offers to supply those articles to another person, and secondly that, when they do so, they know or suspect that the item will be used in connection with any offence under sections 24 or 25 of the Immigration Act 1971—illegal entry and assisting unlawful immigration, respectively. I have a question for the Minister on the reasonable excuse elements of the clause. It is a defence for a person charged with this offence to show that they had a reasonable excuse. Subsection (3) defines a reasonable excuse as explicitly including that,

“(a) their action was for the purposes of carrying out a rescue of a person from danger or serious harm”,

which seems reasonable, or,

“(b) they were acting on behalf of an organisation which—

(i) aims to assist asylum-seekers, and

(ii) does not charge for its services.”

That second defence seems to the Opposition to create a large loophole in the law. Does the Minister accept that these defences will have the effect of exempting non-governmental organisations from criminal charges for helping asylum seekers to cross the channel? Why would the Government seek to do that?

The defence categorises organisations that aim to assist asylum seekers into those that do not charge for their services and those that do. Surely this criminal offence is a criminal offence regardless of who is responsible; why would it be any less criminal if someone does it voluntarily? Why is making money from something the determinant of whether it is a crime? As we heard in evidence, charities can be “mischievous”—I think that was the word used—in their activities and in how close they come to facilitating illegal crossings to the UK. Does the Minister accept that the activities of some charities can veer close to the line of facilitating illegal entry? If so, what do the Government intend to do about it?

The threshold for the defence is low. The accused simply needs to provide sufficient evidence to raise an issue, and the contrary must not be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Might that be why the Home Office impact assessment considers that between four and six prison places—I believe the central estimate is five—will be required per year once this steady state is reached? The Home Office has lauded the new powers and offences in the Bill as being key to smashing the criminal smuggling gangs, but it does not appear to consider that many people will be convicted under the new offences. How can both those things be the case?

Clause 14 creates the new criminal offence of handling articles for use in immigration crime. The person has to receive or arrange to receive a relevant article, remove or dispose of an article for the benefit of another person, or assist another person to remove or dispose of a relevant article. Again, the clause provides the same defence to the offence as clause 13 does—namely, that the action of the accused was

“for the purposes of carrying out a rescue of a person from danger or serious harm”,

or that they were acting

“on behalf of an organisation which—

(i) aims to assist asylum-seekers, and

(ii) does not charge for its services.”

I therefore have the same questions for the Minister about this defence as I did for the defence in clause 13.

Clause 15 provides a definition of “relevant article” for the purposes of the new offences in clauses 13 and 14. There are exemptions for food and drink, medicines, clothing, bedding, tents or other temporary shelters, and anything to preserve the life of a person in distress at sea or to enable such a person to signal for help. Will the Minister set out the kinds of articles that she therefore expects to be captured by the offences in clauses 13 and 14? It would be useful to know what items the Home Office, Border Force and the police specifically wish to disrupt. There is also a power in clause 15 for the Secretary of State to amend the list of relevant articles. Will the Minister explain what purpose that power serves? The list of what counts as a relevant article is almost limitless, so does she envisage that the power will be used primarily to create exemptions?

The hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire has tabled amendment 3 to specify that if a person is an asylum seeker, they cannot commit the offence in clause 13: supplying articles for use in immigration crime. It would be good to understand why the Scottish National party does not think it is possible for asylum seekers to commit that offence. How are law enforcement officers supposed to know that a person is genuinely an asylum seeker—and even if they are, what happens if their application is subsequently rejected?

The hon. Gentleman also tabled an amendment to require the commander to include in their annual report information about how they have paid due regard to the Human Rights Act 1998 and the European convention on action against trafficking. My views are the same as those set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton West on amendment 1.

[Chris Murray]

I apologise for my longer interventions, Mr Stuart; I will try to bundle them all into this speech.

One of the most important things that we heard during evidence was from Dr Walsh from the Migration Observatory. He said that demand for cross-channel crossings is essentially inelastic. Even if the price of a crossing doubles, there will still be demand for it; people rise to meet that price. That tells us that deterrence and disruption of the demand alone will never be enough to tackle the horrors that we are seeing in the channel at the moment. We must also disrupt the supply of ability to cross the channel. That is an important part of the Bill, and these clauses go right to the heart of it.

On the point about criminalising all asylum seekers, ahead of oral evidence, I read carefully the submissions we have had from organisations I have worked with in the past. I found the testimony of the Crown Prosecution Service very convincing. It stated clearly that in addition to the primary legislation, the CPS will produce guidance that will set out both the public interest threshold and evidential test that it would seek in order for a case to go to prosecution. It was very clear that the kind of hypothetical examples set out by the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire would not meet that threshold.

On the point about decriminalising all asylum seekers, to clarify the point I was trying to make in my interventions, during a crossing anyone can declare themselves an asylum seeker. That then breaks down into different categories: someone who is genuinely eligible for asylum in the UK and will, when they go through the process, get refugee status; someone who is genuinely seeking asylum, but will not meet the threshold when they go through the process and will not get such status; and someone who knows that they are ineligible, or might be eligible on some counts, but is engaged in the criminal act of facilitating illegal entry into the UK and putting those other people’s lives in danger. At that moment, it is not possible to distinguish between those people; the asylum process is there to do that.

Were we to accept the premise of the hon. Gentleman’s amendment, it would be a wrecking amendment. I know it is not intended that way, but it would in reality be a wrecking amendment to any kind of intervention on a crossing at sea.

[Chris Murray]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important point, but I do not accept that the proposal is creating new criminal offences for all asylum seekers or for all people; it is creating new criminal offences for those engaged in the exploitation of people and the trafficking or smuggling of them across the channel in great danger. We cannot allow that to continue if we care about those people’s lives at all.

In the constituency of every single MP in this room, there will be a cannabis factory where a probably under-age Vietnamese child is working at cultivating cannabis. If they arrived in the past two years, they came across in one of those boats. Significant, serious organised crime networks are exploiting the vulnerability of those people in order to facilitate such crossings. This proposal is how we stop them doing it, and that affects every one of our communities.

I am aware that I am testing people’s patience, but I want to make two final points. The first is about the criminalisation of organisations that help asylum seekers. That is an important point, and the distinction has to be clear. I did have concerns about this measure being in the Bill, but the evidence sessions completely reassured me. The testimony of the CPS was that asking about the weather in Dover when in Calais, and those kinds of things, would not be facilitating immigration crime. The testimony that the National Crime Agency is using these measures to tackle serious and organised crime makes it clear what the purpose of the clauses is.

The hon. Member for Kent—

[Katie Lam]

Weald of Kent.

[Chris Murray]

Weald of Kent, sorry—that is quite far south for me. The hon. Lady made a point about the sector and charging for services. Some organisations out there are charitable and provide services for free, and some organisations charge enormous fees and are extremely exploitative. That is where that distinction comes from. That would be my interpretation of the legislation.

[Katie Lam]

Presumably, though, it seems reasonable to think that there could be a third category, which is people who charge fees that are not exorbitant.

[Chris Murray]

That is absolutely right—but, in my experience of the channel coast and of working in the refugee sector, those do not exist. Anyone who was to do that would probably be giving immigration advice, which is a regulated component under UK legislation. That would be structured differently from someone on the coast or on a boat or vessel, in the way that this legislation sets out. I am happy to be corrected, but that would be my interpretation.

Finally, I come to the point about mobile phones and the different things listed that can be seized when a vessel is disrupted. Last week, we heard so much evidence—there is so much evidence out there—that the crossing of the channel is the final stage in a very long process involving criminal gang networks, organised crime networks and just immigration networks that stretch through Europe, including allied countries and countries very difficult for us to have relationships with. We know that those smuggling networks are all orchestrated by mobile phone, so it is important that the Bill incorporates that.

On the concerns that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire about criminalising the most wretched people in the world, the exemptions in the Bill are clearly humanitarian. They are clearly the kinds of things that people need to survive on a dangerous sea crossing or on their arrival. The only exception is their phone. It is because we know that the data taken from those phones is critical in the fight that phones are excluded. That is why it is important that that component remains in the Bill.

Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Chris Murray and Katie Lam

Tuesday 29th October 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Chris Murray]

Q You talked about the proposal for the SIA to be the regulator. Why did you choose the SIA as the regulator? How should an organisation respond when it perceives that there is a conflict between what the SIA is asking it to do and what other legal rules, such as licensing, ask it to do?

Dan Jarvis: Let me pick up on the first bit of your question, then I will hand over to Debbie for the second bit. Clearly, this is an important role for the regulator, and there has been an ongoing debate for some time about how best to provide that regulatory authority. A number of options were considered by both the previous Government and this Government, and there were other ways of providing that regulatory authority. Clearly, we were mindful of the Cabinet Office guidance about how best to proceed in terms of the creation of new regulatory authorities, which is not recommended. We looked carefully at the current role and responsibility of the SIA, and the judgment taken was that it has or will have the necessary experience and skillset to provide that regulatory function. This is an important role, and Ministers will ultimately be accountable to Parliament for the performance of the regulator.

This is an important piece of regulation that does require that regulatory function. We as Ministers clearly wanted to satisfy ourselves that that is the most appropriate solution. Clearly, we have to consider other factors as well, such as cost. Having considered all those factors and looked clearly at the capacity and capability within the SIA, the judgment was made that it is the most appropriate body to take on this regulatory function, but it is important to say that clearly there will be ministerial oversight over that process. Ministers will be accountable to Parliament for the performance of the regulator, and this is a crucial part of the legislation.

I have to say that the feedback has been largely positive about the decision. There was a period of time initially when there was not clarity about the regulatory functions and who would provide that particular arms’-length-body regulatory function. The Government took the decision that the SIA was best placed to do that, and we think that that is the right solution.

Debbie Bartlett: We are absolutely alive to the fact that the SIA will have to align and work closely with a number of regulatory bodies, including those responsible for fire safety, licensing—as we heard from the gentleman before us—and health and safety, and with our other operational partners in this space, including the police, and industry themselves. There will be a lot of work to ensure that those regimes are complementary. We heard clearly from the gentleman about the concern of duplication. I do not think that is the case; it is actually about aligning. The licence regime is limited. That is why we felt this legislation was necessary over and above what is already out there.

Many of our venues and premises are already be aligned to things like health and safety and fire safety. Where possible, we have sought in the legislation to try to align and complement as much as possible. What we are asking of people should not be a huge surprise in terms of what has already been asked under those other regimes. They absolutely will have to align and, indeed, within the legislation, we are giving the SIA the powers to share information with other bodies as necessary in the delivery of their duties and those of other public bodies.

[Katie Lam]

Q I want to follow up on thresholds. If I understand this correctly, there was previously this idea of capacity, and that has been changed to this idea of reasonable expectation. If I ran a venue that had a capacity of 220 people, could I decide to only ever sell 195 tickets and I am not caught? Is that how this will work?

Debbie Bartlett: That is correct. As long as you do not expect to have more than 190 individuals at your premises, you will not be considered in scope of the standard tier. Obviously, the regulator—the SIA—will have the powers to seek information that will justify some of that decision making. For some, and we have set this out in fact sheets, depending on how you justify that decision, it could be historical attendance data or your fire safety capacity data—it depends what you use—you will then have to present to justify that decision making.