Illegal Migration Bill

Diana Johnson Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

To follow up on that point about the issue of tone, despite the strong views held about this Bill both in this House and outside by actors, football commentators and archbishops, I believe there is consensus that we all want to stop people crossing the channel in unsafe, small boats, and risking their lives in some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. The Government’s flagship immigration Bill underpins one of the Prime Minister’s five priorities to the British people. It is so important. That is why I asked the Leader of the House whether the Home Affairs Committees could carry out pre-legislative scrutiny to test the robustness and evidence supporting the Bill. Sadly, that has not been possible. It is also disappointing that we have not had an impact assessment —an equality impact assessment, or a child rights impact assessment—accompanying the publication of the Bill.

I also hope there is consensus across the House that the UK should do its bit to support those fleeing persecution and torture, sharing that responsibility with our international partners. We need to put this into context. Not every displaced person in the world wants to come to the United Kingdom and we are not facing an invasion. We know that countries such as Turkey take the lion’s share of refugees and nearly 70% of refugees end up staying in the region they come from.

So what exactly should the Government be doing about small boats? Last summer, the Home Affairs Committee published our report into channel crossings. We made the important point in the report that no one magic bullet will solve the problem. As I made clear last week, the Home Secretary is right that our asylum system is broken, but it is not the migrants crossing the channel who broke it. Poor resourcing, antiquated IT systems, high staff turnover, or too few staff have resulted in this backlog of 160,000 cases. Tackling the backlog has to be the most important priority for the Home Office.

Another key message from our report was the need for detailed, evidence-driven, fully costed and fully tested policy to tackle this problem, rather than simple headline-grabbing announcements on Rwanda, for which there is still no body of evidence regarding the potential deterrent effect. Other recommendations included the importance of establishing a returns agreement with the European Union, extending family reunion, and creating safe and legal routes. We all know that people may travel without papers using irregular methods, but have a solid case for seeking asylum that needs to be considered under our international obligations. The Bill currently would deny that opportunity.

Positively, at the end of last week, we saw further agreement with the French on tackling small boats, albeit we still need that returns agreement with the EU. Although it is encouraging that the Government are improving their relationship with the EU, we now find them stress testing our international obligations and potentially breaking international law.

On the Bill’s specifics, its proposals present a huge logistical challenge for a Department that is not known for good project management or for being on the front foot. It has three essential pillars: detention, deportation and deterrence. Each raises serious and fundamental practical issues to which we need clear answers in order to understand how the Bill will work.

The Institute for Government has helpfully summarised the key questions. First, does the Bill adhere to the UK’s international obligations? Secondly, how does it change existing policy on inadmissible claims? Thirdly, where can the Government send asylum seekers who are deemed inadmissible? Fourthly, what does the Home Secretary consider to be a “reasonable prospect of removal”? Fifthly, what will happen to people who the Government cannot remove to another country? Sixthly, how will the Government accommodate people they have detained and how will they pay to do so? Seventhly, will the Bill deter people from crossing the channel in small boats?

I have many concerns, particularly on the provisions relating to unaccompanied children, children and families being detained, and victims of trafficking and modern slavery. The Salvation Army stated in its briefing on the Bill that modern slavery is not an immigration issue; it is a safeguarding issue. The men, women and children trafficked against their will to the UK and enslaved should not be punished for being victims, but that is what the Bill will do.

On deterrence, during the Select Committee’s visit to France earlier this year, we heard evidence that people who have arrived in northern France, having travelled thousands of miles in some cases, will not be put off when they can see the British coastline from the French beach, and have little or no knowledge of Home Office policy or British laws. Therefore, we need fully to understand how the plan for detention, deportation and deterrence will work in practical terms. I am concerned that the Bill potentially leaves the Home Office in a legal quagmire, with up to tens of thousands of people detained for a period and then bailed into a permanent state of limbo, unable to be removed, unable to have their asylum claims processed and unable to reunite with families. There is nothing specifically in the Bill about tackling criminal gangs, people smugglers and traffickers. To conclude, we all want action on small boats, but we want effective action that will deal with the problem.

Illegal Migration Bill

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I certainly believe that, vitally, we will only have democratic consent for legal migration if it is clear that that happens at the behest of and with the consent of this House and, critically, that we do not have an illegal immigration situation that is beyond this House’s control.

The reality is that if we are to effectively deter the evil trade of people smuggling, we need to tackle the incentives. That means making it crystal clear that coming here illegally will lead to swift detention and removal. It is neither compassionate nor sustainable to allow what is an abuse of our immigration system to continue. I can testify that, having sat in meeting after meeting with the Home Office as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the cost to the Exchequer of millions of pounds each day for hotels to house asylum seekers is not something that we should take lightly. That is, in part, why I tabled my amendments.

Bitter experience teaches us that Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act will otherwise act to frustrate the will of Parliament. The Government have therefore rightly drafted the Bill to disapply section 3 of the Act. However, I believe that other sections of the Act will be engaged too, and they should also be disapplied for the express purpose of this legislation. I say that not on my own authority but on that of Professor Richard Ekins of Oxford University and Sir Stephen Laws KC, the former First Parliamentary Counsel. As they argue in their February Policy Exchange paper:

“New legislation should expressly disapply the operative provisions of the 1998 Act, specifying...section 3 (interpretation of legislation), section 4 (declaration of incompatibility), section 6 (acts of public authorities) and section 10 (power to take remedial action)”.

They go on to say:

“Without legislative provision to this effect, it is inevitable that claimants will challenge the Home Secretary’s understanding of the legislation, inviting the courts either to interpret the legislation to read down her duty to remove persons from the UK (or reading in new procedural requirements) or to declare the legislation incompatible with Convention rights and thus authorising ministers to change it by executive order and ensuring that political pressure would be brought to bear to that end.”

Having disapplied section 3 on the basis that it leaves open the possibility of systemic legal challenge, I can see no legal, philosophical or practical argument against doing the same where a similar risk exists.

Ultimately, we know that our best—and probably only—chance to avoid this legislation being entangled in human rights law is for this place to be absolutely clear and unambiguous about our intentions. My amendment flows in that spirit. We should show the determination now—not after the fact, if and when the fears of many of us in this House have been realised—to make our intentions clear in the Bill.

I wish to speak briefly in favour of amendment 131, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger), which has a comparable aim to my amendment in respect of the ECHR. I do so for the reasons set out by the Lord Chancellor at the time that the United Kingdom entered into the convention. He said:

“The real vice of the document, therefore consists in its lack of precision. I should be unable to advise with any certainty as to what result would be arrived at in any given case, even if the judges were applying the principles of English law. It completely passes the wit of man to guess what results would be arrived at by a tribunal composed of elected persons who need not even be lawyers, drawn from various European states possessing completely different systems of law, and whose deliberations take place behind closed doors.”

In a nutshell, that is the risk to which we expose the legislation if we proceed without that protection.

I very much hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will take these amendments seriously and work with us, over the course of the crucial weeks ahead, to ensure the legislation respects the will of the House and, I believe, the will of the British people.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

First, I add my voice to the concerns already raised by a number of Members about the lack of an impact assessment, an equality impact assessment and a children’s rights impact assessment, as we commence the Bill’s important Committee stage. In the Home Affairs Committee report on small boats and migration, we made it clear that:

“There is no magical single solution to dealing with irregular migration. Detailed, evidence-driven, fully costed and fully tested policy initiatives are by far most likely to achieve sustainable incremental change that deters journeys such as dangerous Channel crossings.”

So it is regrettable that we do not have all the information, including the costing and the impact assessments, when debating these clauses today, particularly when the Bill is being rushed through the Commons.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

The right hon. Lady has rightly called for a number of assessments, but is the real test of the Bill not the impact assessment of newspaper headlines? That is all it is about.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Unfortunately, there seems to be a great deal of confusion in the House about the small boats issue. It is worth reflecting on the fact that currently the largest number of people coming across in small boats come from Afghanistan and that the backlog in the Home Office system—now over 166,000—has been growing for some time, creating a knock-on effect on how quickly the system can deal with people arriving in this country, process them and remove those who should not be here.

It is also worth reflecting on the Home Affairs Committee report on the small boats crisis, published last summer, which said that the Government needed to address four things: clearing the backlog and speeding up the processing of people arriving in small boats; the issue of safe and legal routes, which I will say a little more about in a moment; the need for international co-operation; and the need to deal with the criminal gangs and to have return agreements with other countries in place. I remain worried about the argument that the Bill will deter people from getting into small boats, which goes back to my concern about the lack of evidence.

The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) referred to the Home Affairs Committee trip to northern France in January. One key thing I remember from that trip is that if someone is standing on the beach in Calais or northern France, with the British coastline visible just 30 miles away, it is too late; they are going to take their chance and get into a boat.

I worry about the Home Office’s capacity to deal with the momentous change that the Bill will bring. It has not been very good at dealing with the asylum applications that have been building for many years, and I worry about its capacity to deal with the large-scale detention of people, families and children that the Bill will introduce.

My amendment 137 is on the issue of establishing a cap on the number of migrants using safe and legal routes. It will be difficult for the House to identify and make provision for crises that will unfold in the year ahead. In 2010, we could not have known the true extent of refugees from the first Libyan civil war or from South Sudan, or the number coming from Syria in 2011 or from Ukraine just one year ago. We cannot know what global challenges we will face in the next year, so an arbitrary target could be seen as a restraint on Governments being able to respond dynamically and appropriately.

Who will be included in the cap, and will it include children? Every child has the right to protection from persecution, discrimination and violence. That is a cornerstone of international and domestic law. Turning away a child fleeing a war zone or a genocide because of a cap decided months earlier in this House, could undermine the key principles of the international child protection frameworks that we have signed up to, including our own Children’s Act 1989, which gives clear focus to our international obligations in domestic legislation. The Government say that clause 51 will allow them to exceed the number set out in the cap each year if needs be. In that case, it is not really a cap, is it? It might be a target, but one that would have difficulty dealing with what is happening internationally.

We should reflect on and acknowledge the willingness of the British people to step up to the plate when crises appear, as thousands did last year when they took in displaced Ukrainians, and the wholesale support for unaccompanied children being given shelter when we debated the Dubs amendment a few years ago. If the Government are determined to introduce the cap, children should not be included and “people”, as set out in the clause, should be defined as those over 18 years of age. Setting a cap on the number of children who can claim asylum could result in one child being turned away while another is chosen—it is a “Sophie’s Choice” regulation. I ask the Minister to think again, and recognise the special position of children and our obligation to them.

The most obvious and appropriate way to support refugee children is to ensure they have access to safe and legal routes, which are clearly set out and defined. That is why I have added my name to new clause 13 and amendments 72 to 75, tabled by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham. I also support new clause 17 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy).

Our Home Affairs Committee report made it explicitly clear that ensuring that there are accessible, safe and legal routes to the UK is a key plank of an asylum system that is both fair and effective, and also provides a clear disincentive and deterrent for illegal routes. I agree with the comments made by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham about the need for additionality. We cannot just say that the current schemes are sufficient, welcome as they are. There must be a package of measures to deal with the current situation, along with clearing the backlog. It cannot be right that that is left until some future date when we will know what the safe and legal routes are. That needs to be up front as part of the Bill, so that we have both the deterrent and the options around safe and legal routes.

New clauses 8 and 10 are about safe passage visa schemes. The Home Affairs Committee report mentioned using reception centres in France to allow people to make asylum claims from France—the Government rejected that idea, but some imaginative thinking about how we can assist people to make claims would be helpful. That is why it is worth the Government considering what new clauses 8 and 10 would mean. We have juxtaposed checks on passports and customs with the French, but there may be more room for negotiations with the French about making claims in France directly. New clause 8 is a little more prescriptive than new clause 10; that might be helpful as well.

I have added my name to amendment 122, which was tabled by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). The amendment would clarify our legal responsibilities and fulfil the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Last year’s Home Affairs Committee report underlined the importance of strong international co-operation and relationships in dealing with migration issues. I believe that those would be weakened by walking away from our international legal obligations.

In conclusion, the Government must ensure that the Bill does not undermine our legal or moral obligations. They should clearly establish safe and legal routes in the Bill. If they are determined to tighten our refugee provisions, we must not turn our back on child refugees by arbitrarily placing a cap on, or excluding, those vulnerable children who turn to us for support.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I rise to speak to amendment 131, which stands in my name and in the name of colleagues. I am grateful to the Minister and his colleagues for their very constructive engagement in recent days; on the basis of the commitment that I hope we will hear from him this afternoon, I do not propose to press my amendment to a vote this evening. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash); I am very glad that he has just returned from his cup of tea, because I am about to make a great speech in defence of parliamentary sovereignty in his honour.

The fact is that we need a new asylum system in our country. Indeed, the world needs a new framework for protecting the rights of refugees in an age of mass migration, with the huge people movements that we are seeing. Part of that is safe and legal routes, which are the natural corollary of the Bill; I support the principle described by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and set out in his amendments to that end. I particularly endorse the work that has gone on in the Home Office—I want to see more of it—around community sponsorship. It is one of the existing global routes that we have, and we want to see it widened significantly. Even more fundamentally, the new framework that we need must honour the founding principle of both the European convention on human rights and the refugees convention: that the primary responsibility for managing asylum rests with the nation state. That is the purpose of the Bill and of my amendment.

It is worth stating why, as part of the new framework that we need, we need a law requiring the removal of people who arrive here illegally. The fact is that even if we had the best safe and legal route in the world, we would still have thousands of people—tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands a year—seeking to come here by unsafe, illegal routes. We simply cannot accommodate all those people. That is why it is absolutely right that this Bill creates a limit, with a cap on the total number of refugees we will receive. What that cap should be is up for debate, but the need for one is clear.

Unless we want open borders—Opposition Members deny that they want them—we have to do something about the many, many people who will still try to come once the cap has been reached. The only logical answer is to deny leave to stay to people who enter illegally, to detain them and to remove them somewhere safe and free: either back to their own country or to a third country that is willing to have them. That process must be swift and unquestioned. Nothing but the certainty of detention and speedy removal will deter illegal migrants and break the business model of the smugglers.

That power of removal was established in the Nationality and Borders Act, but as we know, a judge in Strasbourg was then woken in the middle of the night by a lawyer acting for an assortment of campaign groups. The judge—sitting in his pyjamas, for all we know—issued an interim order that caused the Home Office to stop the policy before the first plane took off.

Illegal Migration Bill

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Joanna Cherry]

I know the hon. Gentleman was trying to assist me, and I agree with him that court scrutiny is important—of course I do; I am a lawyer—but I am not going to let the Government off the hook on the absolutely woeful scrutiny that goes on, week in and week out, in this place. I am totally in favour of the bicameral system. When Scotland eventually becomes independent, which I hope will be during my lifetime, I would like to see a bicameral system in Scotland, because I like to see checks and balances, and I do not like Governments who throw their weight about and do not allow proper legislative scrutiny. That is my point and why I am spending some time on it now, because the way this has been conducted is, frankly, a disgrace. It really is a disgrace.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I am very grateful that the hon. and learned Lady is raising these points because, as the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, I know that we were very keen to carry out some prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill to assist the House when it came before us, but that was not possible because it had to be rushed through, it seems, so we have had no opportunity to have evidence sessions or to do any of the work that would really help the Government. Why are the Government so frightened of proper scrutiny of this Bill, which we all recognise is so important?

[Joanna Cherry]

I agree with the right hon. Lady, and I can tell her why the Government are afraid of proper scrutiny. It is because proper line-by-line scrutiny of this Bill would illustrate that it breaches our international obligations under the ECHR, breaches our obligations under the refugee convention and breaches our obligations under the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking. That is to mention just three, but there is also the international convention on the rights of the child, and I could go on and on. That is why they do not want the scrutiny. What really infuriated me yesterday was that, when some of us were actually trying to make arguments based on evidence and the law, the Minister was far more interested in parroting the populist slogans coming from his Back Benchers, which really had no basis in law and no basis in evidence, than in addressing the amendments we are trying to make.

I will spend a bit of time talking about the amendments I have tabled, because I think they are important. It is not just that I think they are important, but they reflect issues that have been widely raised in briefings from home-based organisations, such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Scottish Human Rights Commission, the Law Society of England and Wales, and the Law Society of Scotland. I assure Conservative Members that the Law Society of Scotland is not a bastion of lefty lawyers—I wish it was, but it is not.

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I am afraid that I have no faith in this Government to deliver an efficient asylum system that will help those people. Let us focus on what they can get right, let us stop the political posturing and let us stop forgetting that these are real human beings. I genuinely think that on child detention, we are on the wrong side of history. It is a stain that it ever happened; it is a stain that it happens now. The fact that one third are children should be enough for the Minister to turn around and say that we will have a “do no harm” principle and assume that everyone is a child until proven otherwise. I do not want a single child to be held in detention, and I am rather shocked that the Government do not feel the same.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I apologise for not being here earlier this afternoon. I had to go to the Liaison Committee’s meeting with the Prime Minister.

I want to start by following up on a point made by the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). In yesterday’s sitting, the issue of children and child refugees was raised more than 40 times by hon. Members across this Committee of the whole House. Many described their deep concern about how child refugees will be treated under the Bill. I have a great deal of respect for the Minister, but unfortunately he did not mention children once in his very short closing speech yesterday. It lasted just 13 minutes, which with 70 amendments before the Committee yesterday translates to about 10 seconds per amendment.

I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West that the lack of scrutiny of the Bill is a huge concern, especially considering the importance of the issues, the fact that the Government did not take up the Home Affairs Committee’s offer of pre-legislative scrutiny, the lack of evidence sessions, the large sweep of amendments tabled, the rushed process of introduction and the lack of any impact assessment. I hope that we will get a much more detailed and productive response from the Minister this evening.

I have tabled 10 amendments in this group, which essentially fall under one umbrella: protection for refugee children. All my amendments have the full support of the Children’s Commissioner and some arise from recommendations in the Home Affairs Committee’s small boats report, which we published last year.

I turn first to amendment 295. The Government have excluded unaccompanied children from the removal provisions in the Bill. We know that children will often have made very difficult and perilous journeys, probably at the hands of traffickers or smugglers. However, the Bill will oblige the Home Secretary to remove those unaccompanied children from the United Kingdom when they turn 18.

In the year ending September 2022, the UK received 5,152 applications for asylum from unaccompanied children. Many of them came from Sudan, a country facing political instability following years of civil war, where child marriage is rife for girls as young as 10. Under the Bill, a 13-year-old Sudanese girl, for example, could claim asylum in the UK, be placed in the care of a local authority and be fostered, spend five years at school, make friends, learn English, get an education, build a life and become a member of society, only to face removal on her 18th birthday. If that were allowed to happen, the Home Office would be removing a young woman who had built her life here and might only know this country as home. The Bill also dramatically increases the risk of children fleeing the system and disappearing before their 18th birthday, in the knowledge that they face certain removal. My amendment would not grant an automatic right for these children to remain in the United Kingdom; it would simply prevent their mandatory removal when they become adults, so that each case can be decided on an individual basis.

Turning to amendments 299 and 301, the Children’s Commissioner has raised concerns that under clause 3, the Home Secretary will still have the power to remove unaccompanied children. The explanatory notes state that this power will be used only in exceptional circumstances, but there is no further detail in the Bill about what that means. I tabled amendment 299 to establish the right of an unaccompanied child who makes a protection claim—including a claim to be a victim of slavery and human trafficking, as set out in section 69 of the Nationality and Borders Act—to have that claim considered before potential removal. I have also added my name to amendment 121, tabled by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West, which would strengthen the position further.

Although clause 5(4)(a) goes some way towards protecting such people by stopping their removal if they make a protection claim or a human rights claim, it is dependent on subsection (4)(b), which relies on the Secretary of State’s considering this to be an exceptional circumstance. I understand that such a power is likely to be used in respect of unaccompanied children from a country listed in new section 80AA(1) of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, under clause 50.

Without my amendment, the Home Secretary would, for example, decide the right of a 14-year-old unaccompanied asylum-seeking child from Albania to remain in the UK. Over recent months, there has been a growing view that Albanian boys are not in need of protection on their arrival in the UK. In fact, they are exceptionally vulnerable, having often been trafficked here without proper protection and pushed into forced labour or criminality. Again, hanging the threat of removal over these children’s heads is a guaranteed way of ensuring that those who arrive here unaccompanied will try to go it alone—run away from care, and slip out of the system and into the arms of traffickers and abusers. Therefore, amendment 301 goes further by removing the power of the Secretary of State to make arrangements for the removal of an unaccompanied child.

The Home Affairs Committee’s report on channel crossings, produced last year, raised grave concerns about the Home Office’s record of safeguarding children, from failures to identify vulnerable children through screening and assessments to failures of communication when transferring safeguarding responsibilities from one agency to another. There is also the disastrous and unforgivable failure of children going missing on the Home Office’s watch.

I greatly fear that the Home Office is simply not up to the job of keeping children safe and secure. That is why I ask the Minister to reconsider clauses 15 and 16, which set out how the Home Office would accommodate a child and would be given safeguarding responsibilities that currently sit with a local authority. These clauses are incredibly thin when it comes to such an essential issue as safeguarding children, and they make no provision for the state of the accommodation to be provided. Will the accommodation be regulated, which body will inspect it, how will decisions be made, and what support will be available for these children?

The Children’s Commissioner has made it clear that she does not believe that the Home Office is the right body to oversee the safeguarding of children, and I completely agree. That is why I have supported amendments 143, 144 and 145, tabled by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), to ensure that our current statutory time and location restrictions on the detention of unaccompanied children and children with families are not disregarded.

Illegal Migration Bill

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I am not sure I follow the logic of it. He said that there was a deterrent effect, but it has not started yet, which suggests to me that there has not been a deterrent effect. If we look at the numbers, channel crossings continue to skyrocket, so I think what matters to this House is results and outcomes. As things stand, there is no evidence whatsoever that the Rwanda scheme has acted as a deterrent.

This bigger backlog Bill is rotten to its very core, because it prevents the Home Secretary from considering those who arrive here on small boats as asylum seekers, and instead obliges her to detain and remove them. However, there is nowhere to detain them, and there is nowhere to remove them to either. We already have 50,000 asylum seekers in around 400 hotels, costing the taxpayer an eye-watering £6 million every single day, and on average, each asylum seeker is waiting a staggering 450 days for a decision. The backlog now stands at 166,000, more than eight times larger than when Labour left office in 2010, when it stood at just under 19,000. Incidentally, I am still waiting for the Prime Minister and the Minister for Immigration to apologise to the House and correct the record on that point.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentioned detention, and a number of amendments have been tabled today on that topic. I listened carefully to what the Minister said about detaining unaccompanied children, but I also wanted to ask my hon. Friend for his views on detaining children, families with children and pregnant women. This House has made very clear in the past its view about safeguards being required for the detention of the vulnerable groups I have just described. Does he think that we now need to think again about the detention of pregnant women and families with children?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that excellent intervention. She is absolutely right to highlight this issue, and she has tabled a compelling amendment to deal with it. Members on both sides of the House fought very hard for these legal limits, as she rightly pointed out, and when we are talking about the detention of pregnant women, removing those limits and paving the way for vulnerable individuals to be detained individually is morally wrong, wrong-headed and deeply counterproductive. I have not heard any argument from Ministers to justify it.

New figures reveal that this bigger backlog Bill could end up putting an extra 50,000 people into permanent taxpayer-funded accommodation this year, with hotel costs rising to more than £13 million a day, which is more than £4 billion a year during a cost of living crisis. That is because, according to the Government’s own forecasts, 53,000 who cross on small boats will be classed as inadmissible, without any prospect of being removed. What is particularly astonishing is that the Government made this same mistake last year by including similar inadmissibility provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. The result is a cost of £400 million to the taxpayer in just six months, with only 21 people returned to their country of origin.

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[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. I will now announce the result of the ballot held today for the election of the Chair of the new Energy Security and Net Zero Committee. A total of 384 votes were cast, none of which was invalid. There were two rounds of counting. There were 362 active votes in the final round, excluding those ballot papers whose preferences had been exhausted. The quota to be reached was therefore 182 votes. Angus Brendan MacNeil was elected Chair with 188 votes. He will take up his post immediately. I congratulate him on his election. The results of the count under the alternative vote system will be made available as soon as possible in the Vote Office and published on the internet.

I now call Dame Diana Johnson, after whom I shall have to impose a five-minute limit on speeches.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). I thank her for highlighting the evidence that we heard this morning at the Home Affairs Committee on the issue of trafficking and modern slavery, and I again pay tribute to the work that she did on that pioneering piece of legislation in 2015.

I think the right hon. Lady is right that the Government do not fully understand the law in this area of modern slavery and trafficking. I support what she said about amendments 95 and 4. I noted that, at the start of proceedings, the Minister said that it is important that we get the Bill right, and it is absolutely important that we do so. As we enter this final stretch for the House to have the opportunity to debate and amend the Bill,

I wish again to express my concerns about the lack of an impact assessment for the Bill. The impact assessment is now seven weeks late, and it is wholly unacceptable that the House is being forced to pass this very significant legislation with no firm analysis on whether it will work or what the cost will be. According to the Refugee Council, the Bill could cost as much as £9 billion over the next three years.

I again refer to the Home Affairs Committee report on small boat crossings, in which we were very clear about the need for evidence-based policy making. It is regrettable that this Bill is being forced through at breakneck speed with no time for pre-legislative scrutiny. I know the Minister has had to table a lot of Government amendments to deal with issues that perhaps should have been thought through before, and we have heard that he will reconsider issues around modern slavery and trafficking as well.

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[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the amendments she has tabled and the work she does with the Select Committee. Does she agree with my constituents who have written to me, precisely on this issue, to say that the Bill risks our reputation internationally for providing a safe haven for those who are fleeing persecution, and that we must do all we can to ensure that that reputation is maintained?

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Reputation is important in this area, and the approach taken on this particular point will hurt our country more than it helps us. For example, it will not help us to get a returns agreement with EU countries, which I think we all agree is necessary if we are to start to tackle irregular migration.

I welcome the fact that the Government are introducing provisions for legal aid in the Bill, which I think is a positive step forward, but I am concerned that they do not acknowledge that there are currently legal aid deserts across the country that leave genuine asylum seekers, refugees and victims of trafficking without access to legal advice. The sector is on the point of collapse and access to advice regulated by the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner is really hard to come by for the many people who desperately need it. I hope the Minister will set out how people will be able to access that legal advice and assistance.

On new clause 8 and amendment 11, I welcome the Government moving on the safe and legal routes. Again, that is in line with recommendations that the Home Affairs Committee made in its report.

At Committee stage, I raised several concerns with the Minister about the lack of consideration for vulnerable children within the Bill. The Bill creates broad powers to detain unaccompanied children, removing essential safeguards and time limits that had previously been enacted by this House.

I know the Minister said in his opening remarks that he was going to support the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), and I am pleased to hear that. However, unfortunately, the Bill as currently drafted will still allow the unlimited detention of pregnant women, ending the current 72-hour time limit—a limit put in place by the Government in 2016.

The Bill also abolishes necessary safeguards for children who are accompanied, undoing the protection put in place by the Government in 2014. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Children’s Commissioner and the Refugee Council have all raised serious concerns about those proposed changes, and I agree completely with the issues that they have raised.

That is why I have tabled amendments 2 and 3 to uphold the existing detention limits for children, families with children and pregnant women. They were introduced by this House for very good reason and should be upheld. Limits on detention deliver essential safeguards for the most vulnerable people who arrive on our shores, ensuring that while we process their claims we keep them safe, we treat them with care and we do no further harm. The UK has been a stalwart of that decency, but these specific detention measures are a major step backwards for families, for children and for pregnant women.

I welcome Government amendments 134 and 136, and the support for the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, but even with those changes, the Bill does not extend the appropriate protection to children with families or to pregnant women. My amendments have cross-party support, including from the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West, and from the Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes). I hope that the Minister will, even at this late stage, consider again whether anything can be done on the amendments. If he is not minded to do that, I will, if necessary, test the opinion of the House on that important issue.

I also welcome the Government’s change of heart on the ban on future citizenship for children born in the UK to parents who meet the conditions in clause 2. That delivers on at least half of my amendment 8. However, I firmly push back to the Minister that it still cannot be right that an eight-year-old child brought here by their parents would be forever barred from citizenship as an adult. I raised that point in Committee. It seems completely illiberal to punish a child for the actions of their parents or carers. Will the Minister look again at amendment 8?

I have tabled several other practical amendments underlining the protections and considerations for children, which I believe need to be addressed. Those amendments are all supported by the Children’s Commissioner, and some have foundations in the Home Affairs Committee report on channel crossings. I hope that the Minister will consider them in that vein.

The Government’s approach to tackling migrants in the Bill remains problematic in respect of children. There are several measures and amendments before the House that could be adopted while still allowing the Government to deliver—arguably more effectively and practically—on their stated aims. There are other, less headline-catching measures that will also uphold the essential safeguarding provisions that the House has put in place over the years to protect victims of trafficking and modern slavery, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, asylum seekers and refugees.

Finally, the Home Affairs Committee has started an inquiry on slavery and trafficking. We were very fortunate to have had evidence from Baroness Butler-Sloss last week, and from the former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Dame Sarah Thornton, both of whom took the view that the Bill will not help victims of modern slavery and trafficking; it will do the exact opposite. I again ask the Minister to listen to the experts in the field. It is notable that two Conservative Members—the right hon. Members for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) and for Maidenhead—made compelling arguments on why the provisions relating to modern slavery and trafficking need to be considered once again.

The other place may take further views, but does the Minister seriously want to make it harder for victims to come forward? If—as Dame Sarah Thornton said—a woman is trafficked into this country after 7 March, taken to a brothel and repeatedly raped, but manages to escape and seek help, does the Minister want to ensure that she is told that no assistance can be given and that she will be removed to Rwanda? Is that how we want to treat people like her?

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Illegal Migration Bill

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

I suspect the Bill will end up being completely ineffective. Possibly, nobody will ever be removed to Rwanda—I hope that is the case. I would rather we stopped it here and now, and at least passed amendment 1B. That would give those whose duty it is to protect people’s rights a recognition of the conventions that we have signed up to and have spread around the world, saying how good we are at signing up to those conventions. Let us stick to our word, and stick to those conventions.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

As we did not have the opportunity for pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill and it is being pushed through Parliament very quickly, I am pleased that the Lords have sent back amendments so that we can look again and consider the unintended consequences of parts of the Bill.

I will speak to the amendments on modern slavery. Evidence presented to the Home Affairs Committee revealed the urgent need to open up more escape routes for trafficking victims, including ending the current industrial-scale sexual exploitation, with women advertised on pimping websites up and down the land, in every Member’s constituency, on websites such as Vivastreet, which allows women to be raped multiple times a day. Under this legislation, if those women come forward to the authorities, they will not be offered help and assistance but will be detained and removed. Removing those modern slavery protections will do nothing towards doing what we all want to happen: to bring the organised crime groups orchestrating that abuse to justice. So I support Lords amendment 56B to maintain the status quo.

Secondly, I am disappointed that the Lords amendments on children have not been accepted. Children constitute a small minority of those making the crossing in small boats, often arriving frightened, frequently traumatised and always vulnerable. Such were the concerns of the Home Affairs Committee about the current treatment and experience of children who claim asylum in the UK that we recommended the Government commission an independent end-to-end review of the asylum system as it applies to and is experienced by children. However, instead of that, the Government are hurrying through a Bill to reduce children’s rights. No one in this House would want such treatment for their own children, which is why I support Lords amendments 33B, 36C and 36B remaining in the Bill.

Thirdly, a year ago the Home Affairs Committee published the results of our inquiry into channel crossings and identified a slew of robust measures that the Government could deploy to stop small boat crossings and create a fair and efficient asylum system. They included the creation of safe and legal routes and international initiatives by the National Crime Agency to combat people smugglers, both of which are the subject of Lords amendments under discussion today.

Stopping the people smuggling gangs will require a raft of carefully crafted, costed and evidence-based strategies, such as the ones put forward by the Home Affairs Committee. It is for that reason that I firmly support Lords amendment 102B on safe and legal routes, Lords amendment 103B on the National Crime Agency, Lords amendments 107B and 107C on a 10-year strategy and Lords amendment 23B on removal destinations for LGBT people and other persons. These measures and the Bill as a whole must be implemented in accordance with our international obligations, as is set out in amendment 1B.

[Patrick Grady]

A constituent contacted me recently and said that I seemed to be speaking an awful lot in the Chamber about immigration and asylum issues. I suppose that that is correct, but then that is because the Government allocate so much time in the Chamber to immigration and asylum issues. This is the third major piece of primary legislation on immigration since 2015. However, the majority of constituents—hundreds of constituents—who get in touch with me on each of these pieces of legislation tell me just how disappointed, if not horrified, they are at the Tory UK Government’s attitude to people who come here seeking refuge.

In rejecting all the Lords amendments before us today, the Government are showing just how hostile an environment they want to create—not just for asylum seekers, but for almost anyone who wants to make their home here in the UK. The fact that they will not accept Lords amendment 1B, which is a considerably softer version of what we discussed last week, demonstrates that. If the Government are truly committed to the international conventions listed in the amendment—particularly the 1951 refugee convention—they really should have no problem agreeing that they will form part of the interpretation of the Act when it comes into force.

I have also heard from constituents who want to ensure that LGBTQ people who arrive here from places where they can face imprisonment for simply being who they are cannot be removed to those countries. That is what the Lords are seeking to achieve in Lords amendment 23B. Accepting that amendment would save time and public money because otherwise, by the Minister’s own admission, claimants would have to make suspensive claims against removal to their country of origin. That is what the Minister says he wants to avoid. He wants to avoid loopholes and needless court cases. In that case, he should support Lords amendment 23B.

The amendments that seek to protect children from indefinite detention and that maintain human trafficking protections speak for themselves, as does the Government’s insistence on rejecting those amendments. The Government keep asking those of us who are opposed to the Bill for alternative proposals for dealing with irregular arrivals, and these are clearly outlined in Lords amendment 102B and in the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’s amendments 107B and 107C. The Minister keeps saying that he wants to establish safe and legal routes. Well, that is what Lords amendment 102B will require him to do. I have met many asylum seekers through the Maryhill Integration Network and elsewhere who would much prefer to have come here from Eritrea, Iran or other countries that have been mentioned today through a safe and legal route, rather than the risks, costs and desperation of coming on lorries and boats.

The archbishop’s proposals for the development of a strategy on refugees and human trafficking are perhaps the most straightforward and easily implementable of all the clauses and amendments so far. The Government regularly accept amendments requiring them to publish strategies and reviews on all kinds of legislation. Perhaps they do not want to support this one because the transparency and accountability that would come with requiring the Government to undertake a long-term analysis and make a long-term plan in response to global population flows would reveal the true hollowness of the rest of their proposals—the inhumanity and the self-defeating implications of the hostile environment.

Millions of people will be on the move in the coming years and decades. They will be fleeing wars that we have financed and climate change that we have helped to cause. Experiences in southern Europe and the American midwest this week suggests that they will not just be moving from the southern hemisphere either. Nobody is saying that the United Kingdom should have completely open borders and take unlimited numbers of migrants, but we have to be prepared to take our fair share, just as other countries welcomed refugees fleeing famine and clearances on these islands not that many generations ago.

If Government Ministers and Back Benchers truly respect the role that the House of Lords is supposed to play in the UK constitution, they really ought to listen to the messages that their lordships are sending today and will send in the days to come. As it stands, people in Glasgow North and across Scotland are listening to the rhetoric of the Conservative Government and deciding that they want no more of it. They will be seeking the safe and legal route to independence as soon as possible.