Illegal Migration Bill

Edward Leigh Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should have put that question to the Home Secretary, because he appears to disagree with his own Conservative Government’s policy and to be off on another bit of freelancing for himself, further undermining any possibility of getting international agreements, whether on returns or on anything else. He is planning to make it even harder to get the kinds of returns agreements we need and to get the kind of international co-operation we need as well.

Ministers say that they plan to lock everyone up before they are returned, and the Bill says that everyone is included. Children, unaccompanied teenagers, pregnant women, torture victims, trafficking victims, and people such as the Afghan interpreters and young Hongkongers we promised to help—all locked up because they arrive without the right papers. The Home Secretary has not said where, or how long for. It might possibly be at RAF Scampton, but the Tory right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) does not want that. It might possibly be at MDP Wethersfield, but the Tory right hon. Member for Braintree (James Cleverly)—the Home Secretary’s Cabinet colleague, the Foreign Secretary —does not want that either. In other circumstances, there might be pressure on the Home Secretary to put the site in her own constituency, except for the fact that she does not actually have one right now.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

A responsible Opposition must have a plan. We all agree that we have to stop these boats, but the Opposition’s plan appears to be to process asylum applications even more quickly, so that more people will come; to process them in France, where an unlimited number will want to come; or to have this ridiculous idea of a cross-border police force. Everybody knows that on average, people get caught once on the beaches by the French police, they are not detained and they come back the very next night—they all get there. The right hon. Lady knows perfectly well that the only way that we are going to stop these boats is the Government plan: to detain them and deport them to Rwanda.

[Yvette Cooper]

The right hon. Member is just kidding himself if he thinks that any of the Government’s plan is actually going to happen, or if he thinks it is actually going to work.

Clause 9 deals with what happens to all of the people who cannot be returned—the tens of thousands of people who, according to the Government, are expected to arrive after 7 March. It says that the Home Office will provide those people with accommodation and support: in other words, they will go back into asylum accommodation and hotels, but they will never get an asylum decision. Tens of thousands of people will be added to the Home Office backlog every year, only it is going to be a permanent backlog that the Home Office is never even going to try to clear. Those who would have been returned after their asylum claim was refused now will not be, and those who would have been granted sanctuary will be stuck in limbo instead. That is tens of thousands of people just added to the asylum backlog, costing billions of pounds more—up to £25 billion over the next five years.

As for the backlog the Prime Minister promised to clear, it is going to get worse, not better. Effectively, the Government have concluded that the Tory Home Office is so rubbish at taking any asylum decisions on time that they have decided to just stop doing them altogether, and they are hoping that no one will notice. Last week, I said that the Government might have decided not to call this an asylum system any more, but everyone is still going to be in the system nevertheless. Well, I got that wrong, because I have read the Bill’s explanatory notes again, and they say that:

“Subsection (2) amends section 94 of the 1999 Act…so that the term ‘asylum-seeker’ covers those whose asylum claims are inadmissible by virtue of Clause 4 of the Bill.”

In other words, the Government are amending the law so that all the people who they are going to exclude from the asylum system are still going to be called asylum seekers after all, and are still going to be in the asylum system.

You could not make it up: more chaos, more people in the asylum system, even fewer decisions taken, more people detained with nowhere to detain them and more people stuck in limbo, with no one credibly believing that anything in the Bill is going to act as any kind of deterrent to any of the criminal gangs. The Government are chasing headlines, but it is all a huge con.

What is the price of that con? What is the price of those empty headlines—of cancelling asylum decisions, rather than getting a grip? The Government are damaging our international standing, our chance of getting new co-operation agreements to tackle the problems, and our commitments to the rule of law. They are saying that Britain, uniquely, will not take asylum decisions, yet are expecting other countries to keep doing so. They are saying that Britain, uniquely, will not follow the refugee convention, the trafficking convention or the European convention on human rights, yet are urging other countries to follow those conventions. Think, too, of the price for the people we promised to help—for the Afghan interpreters who worked for our armed forces but who missed the last flight out of Kabul, and who the Government told to find an alternative route. If those people arrive in the UK now, the Conservatives plan to lock them up, keep them in limbo, and treat them as forever illegal in the country they made huge sacrifices to help.

Think of the Ukrainian family who travelled here via Ireland, as I know some people did in the early days of the conflict, without the right papers. They could have been the family staying with me, or the family staying with the Immigration Minister. I have listened to teenagers talking about how they had 20 minutes to pack before they fled their homes, not knowing whether they would ever return or see friends and family again. Under this law, those teenagers who arrived with the wrong papers would be locked up, denied any chance to ever live or work here lawfully in the future. That is the Tories’ position: in the interests of a plan that is actually a con and will not even work. It will not work to deter the criminal gangs; it will not work to remove people, because the Government do not have the returns agreements in place, and it will make it harder to get those returns agreements. In exchange for that con that makes nothing any better, they believe that no one who arrives in Britain without the right papers in their hands should ever be able to seek protection here or live here, no matter their personal circumstances.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I have been trying for two years to get a young girl, Maira Shahbaz, into this country. Aged 14, she was raped and abducted and she is now hiding in a room after being forced into marriage. I am told that I cannot get her in because the whole system is under such pressure, so I am all in favour of safe and legal routes.

However, the fact is that such is the misery in the world that there is no limit to the number of fit, able young men who want to come over here from Iraq, Eritrea and Syria. I do not blame them; I would do the same. We speak English, President Macron has a point that we have no identity cards—maybe we should have identity cards—and they can get jobs here. We could open a safe and legal processing centre in Lille and it would be overwhelmed: 1,000 would apply today and 10,000 tomorrow. There is no limit to how many people want to come. We could process asylum applications even more quickly, and that would produce even more applications. We could have more gendarmes based on the beach in France and, as I said earlier, people will try the first night, and the second night they will make it.

We have to do something, otherwise they are coming to every hotel. Every single hotel in the country is rapidly being filled up. For two years, I and my local council of West Lindsey have been producing a fantastic plan to try to get redevelopment of former RAF Scampton. We will get £300 million-worth of investment. It is the home of the Dambusters and the Red Arrows; we will have a heritage centre. But the Home Office is so desperate, because every single hotel is filled up, that it has now marched into my constituency and said that it wants to put 1,500 asylum seekers there.

Of course we oppose that. Nobody else in this Chamber cares a damn about what happens in Gainsborough, but I am the local champion; I care about my people and I care about £300 million-worth of investment. I am asking for an assurance from the Home Office that, if the asylum seekers do come in, they will not put at risk that wonderful development. However, in an interview with BBC Radio Lincolnshire, Peter Hewitt of Scampton Holdings said that his development would be “totally scuppered”, that the move would be

“rather inconsistent with running an airfield and airside operations”,

and that, if the housing plans went ahead, 40 acres out of the 130 acres earmarked for redevelopment would be taken up.

That is just one example of what is happening in our country. The system is broken. We have to do something about it, and international experience proves, whether in Greece or Australia, that the only two policies that work are offshoring or pushback. Nothing else works. Unless we pass this Bill, unless we have the courage to try to create an asylum system that brings into this country the real asylum seekers such as Maira Shahbaz, the people who have been raped or forced into marriages, we will have a never-ending stream of young men paying criminal gangs to get into our country.

Illegal Migration Bill

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I strongly endorse my hon. Friend’s comments. This is an issue of the highest importance to the people we serve in this place. Of course there is a legitimate role for the other place in scrutinising legislation, but now is the time to move forward and pass this law to enable us to stop the boats.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I wonder whether my right hon. Friend has noted the remarks of Lord Clarke, who is not a particularly vicious right-wing creature. He said this Bill is entirely necessary and that we have to get on with it.

I also wonder whether my right hon. Friend has looked at today’s remarks by Lord Heseltine.

Lord Clarke and Lord Heseltine seem to have come up with a sensible option. We should go ahead with this Bill. We have to have much better European co-operation and, really, we have to build a wall around Europe. [Interruption.] And we have to do much more—this is what the Opposition might like—in terms of a Marshall plan to try to remove the conditions of sheer misery that cause people to want to leave these countries in the first place.

[Robert Jenrick]

I read the remarks of the noble Lord Clarke, and I entirely agree with his point, which is that, having listened to the totality of the debate in the House of Lords, he had not heard a single credible alternative to the Government’s plan. For that reason alone, it is important to support the Government.

I also agree with Lord Clarke’s broader point that this policy should not be the totality of our response to this challenge. Deterrence is an essential part of the plan, but we also need to work closely with our partners in Europe and further upstream. One initiative that the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and I have sought to pursue in recent months is to ensure that the United Kingdom is a strategic partner to each and every country that shares our determination to tackle this issue, from Turkey and Tunisia to France and Belgium.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Presumably it is the hon. Gentleman’s most devout hope if he takes power in 15 months’ time, but charming as he is, it is a mystery to me why he thinks when he asks President Macron to take these people back, he will do so. Of course he won’t! Nothing will happen. May I gently suggest that, if there is a Labour Government, they will quietly adopt this Bill once it is an Act?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I will come to that in my comments, but as the right hon. Gentleman will know, any negotiation requires give and take, quid pro quo. As I said in response to one of his hon. Friends, to get that deal with the European Union we of course have to do our bit and take our fair share, and that will be the negotiation that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) will be leading on when he becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, following the next general election.

We are determined that the National Crime Agency will be strengthened so that it can tackle the criminal gangs upstream. Too much focus by this Government has been on slashing tents and puncturing dinghies along the French coastline, whereas Labour has set out its plan for an elite unit in the NCA to work directly with Europol and Interpol. The latest amendment from Lord Coaker, Lords amendment 103B, attempts to strengthen the NCA’s authority, and we support it without reservation. We are also clear that there is a direct link between gaining the returns agreement that we desperately need with the EU, and creating controlled and managed pathways to asylum, which would allow genuine refugees to reach the UK safely, particularly if they have family here. Conservative Members refuse to make that connection, but we know it is in the interests of the EU and France to strike a returns deal with the UK, and dissuade the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who are flowing through Europe and ending up on the beaches of Calais. The EU and its member states will never do a deal with the UK unless it is based on a give-and-take arrangement, whereby every country involved does its bit and shares responsibility.

--- Later in debate ---

The question of safe and legal routes is again a classic example of the Government saying to us that we can have jam tomorrow but not today. How is it that the high politics have to be in the Bill but the actual practical workable solutions, which will, to borrow the Minister’s three-word slogan, actually “stop the boats”, are somehow too difficult? They always have to be left—not because they are practically or administratively too difficult but because they do not fit the unpleasant political rhetoric and narrative on which the Government rely to speak to a base that, frankly, should be confronted and not appeased. That is why my party will vote against the Government motions to disagree and we urge their lordships to stick to their guns.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The Minister can relax; I am not going to bang on about RAF Scampton—not least because I have put in for the Adjournment debate on Thursday when I can deal with it in more detail. I just ask the House to accept that my constituents are, more than any others in the country, victims of this farce—this debacle—of trying to house 2,000 people in one place. That is not good for the people and it will overwhelm our social services.

There is now an argument to be had about the future of the House of Lords. There is no point in our having these endless debates about whether it should be elected or not. It should be a proper revising Chamber. When it is given a Bill such as this, its attitude should be, “How can we improve it? How can we make it work better? How can we remove these legal glitches, which will have unintended consequences?” It seems to me that so much of the debate in the House of Lords and so many of the amendments have just been designed to drive a coach and horses through the Bill and to give human rights lawyers even greater chances to develop ever more legal arguments to stop anybody from being deported.

I have some sympathy with what the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) said. What is a bit of a mystery to me is that we went through this whole process last year. We had the ping-pong on the Nationality and Borders Bill. We got it through Parliament and were told that it would solve the problem—but we still have the same problem. I prophesise that, actually, this Bill will become law. The Labour party does not want to set a precedent for the unelected House of Lords to block legislation, so it will give in and the House of Lords will deliver the Bill. It will become an Act of Parliament, and I have a horrible feeling that, this time next year, we will be in exactly the same position. Can we rely on the Supreme Court to agree that people should be deported to Rwanda?

What are we going to do? Is it crueller to detain people as soon as they arrive or to do nothing and have a tragedy in the channel? Is it cruel to continue letting people smugglers get away with what they want? Of course, I have enormous sympathy with what my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) says about children, but the trouble is that so many of these people who claim to be children are not children—they have to be assessed. One of the problems we face at Scampton is that there are so many of these people, 20% of the population coming into the camp, which means there will have to be an army of social workers to determine whether they are children.

I have enormous sympathy for persecuted LGBT people, but the truth is that the moment we create an exception saying that we cannot deport a person to an African country with a dodgy record on LGBT, everyone will claim to be LGBT—of course they will. I would do the same. If I were coming from Iraq, I would say I am a Christian. If I were coming from Syria, I would say I am gay. This is the problem we face. Every time we try to do anything, human rights lawyers drive a coach and horses through all our efforts.

So what are we going to do? I have said for two or three years now that the only solution—I suspect the Government will be dragged into this within a year—is to have a derogation, if necessary a temporary derogation during a national crisis, from the refugee convention, which prevents us from detaining people who claim to be asylum seekers. We will also have to have a derogation from the European convention on human rights.

I am a member of the Council of Europe, and I value the work of the Council of Europe, but the European Court of Human Rights is not a supreme court like our Supreme Court. It is not a supreme court like the American Supreme Court. It is a fundamentally political body, appointed on political grounds.

Until we have freedom of manoeuvre to have a real deterrent that tells the world, “If you land illegally on our shores, you will be detained and, ultimately, you will either have to go back where you came from or be deported,” we will never stop this problem. It is all right for the Labour party to talk about safe and legal routes, and about what it will try to do, but we all know that that did not work for the Dublin convention and it will not work if Labour takes power. President Macron will not suddenly change his mind. He will not take anyone back. We will be in this exact position in 15 months’ time if there is a Labour Government, and I predict that, if there is a Labour Government, they will simply leave this Act on the statute book pretty well unamended.

My constituency is a victim of all this, so what is the House going to do? This is utterly debilitating. We cannot go on like this. Please, can we have a plan?

[Caroline Lucas]

It is sadly not a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). Talking about leaving or having derogations from human rights law is exactly what is wrong with the Government’s approach to this issue and what is wrong with this vile Bill.

With overwhelming support from across the political spectrum, and backed by Conservative peers and by religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the other place is absolutely right to have inflicted a string of defeats on this vile, illegal Bill.

Lords amendment 1B, in the name of Baroness Chakrabarti, should be easy for any decent Government to accept, because it simply asks for compliance with the rule of law, which is the bedrock of our democracy. But the Government are attacking that foundation, forced to admit on the face of this immoral Bill that they are unable to say it is compatible with the 1950 European convention on human rights. By moving a motion to disagree to Lords amendment 1B, the Government are seeking to deny UK judges the right to interpret this law and to check it against compliance with the UK’s obligations under no fewer than five international conventions that we should be defending, not undermining.

The Minister in the other place tried to argue that a previous version of this amendment was trying to incorporate international law into domestic law and that, in doing so, it was an unacceptable change to our legal framework. I do not think that that is what the previous version did, but, for the avoidance of doubt, in this version Lords amendment 1B is explicit in calling for the interpretation of international law to ensure compliance with our international obligations. Indeed, Ministers will be aware of the contribution from Lord Hope, who served as deputy president of the Supreme Court and last week said that this amendment is a

“pure interpretation provision…entirely consistent with the way the courts approach these various conventions….it is entirely orthodox and consistent with principle.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 July 2023; Vol. 831, c. 1817.]

Adhering to the refugee convention, the European convention on human rights, and other international laws we have signed up to should be non-negotiable. What a terrible state of affairs it is that the Government want to vote down an amendment seeking compliance with the rule of law.

The Government’s argument is that stripping vulnerable people of asylum and other human rights will stop other vulnerable people falling into the hands of the people traffickers. That is both morally bankrupt and utterly bogus. It is morally bankrupt because human rights are not earned or contingent on a person’s conduct or character, or on whether upholding those rights might affect someone else’s actions. Human rights are attached to a person by virtue of their humanity. Vulnerable people, including children, are being punished because of presumed future actions of adults. Furthermore, by disagreeing with Lords amendment 1B, Ministers face the charge of hypocrisy, as they disrespect international law and undermine migrants’ rights at a time of unprecedented international turmoil. Just last week, the Prime Minister was at a NATO summit absolutely saying that we need to uphold international law against the grotesque breaches by Putin in Ukraine. Yes, we do need to do that, but let us have a little moral consistency.

As well as being immoral, the Government’s argument about a deterrent effect is bogus and unevidenced. The Home Office’s own impact assessment, published just last month, is peppered with caveats about how undeliverable this policy is. It includes an admission that:

“The delivery plan is still being developed.”

The lack of evidence on deterrence in that document is glaring. It says that the Bill is “novel and untested”, so we do not know what impact it will have on deterrence. As I said earlier, a raft of children’s charities have pointed out that once routine child detention was ended in 2011, there was no proportional increase in children claiming asylum. Beyond that, there is a strong evidence to show that it is the precisely the hostility towards refuges exemplified by this Bill and the Government’s rejection of Lords amendments to it that fuels the grim and terrible trade in small boats that they claim they are against.

So any Member who votes to block the Lords amendments should admit that in doing so, they degrade the rule of law, dehumanise vulnerable refugees, attack our modern slavery laws, put LGBT refugees at grave risk, and that their approach will lead to the unconscionable mass detention and treatment of children, with no stated time limit to that detention—it is sickening. I will be voting to uphold the Lords amendments, because this Bill shames and degrades our country, our democracy and this House.