Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Second sitting)

Jade Botterill Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th February 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Forster]

Q Thank you for the answer, Karl. Are you suggesting that, to combat the small boats issue, we should have more schemes like the Ukrainian one?

Karl Williams: I do not think it combats it, and I do not think it is a disincentive. The ideal solution is that, once we have control over the small boats, and therefore who is coming to this country, we can have a serious conversation about, if we want, expanding safe and legal routes, what that might look like and what other parts of the world we might want to help. But so much resource is now sucked up by dealing with the downstream consequences of the channel crossings, such as the hotel bills and so on—this is a sequence of things. I do not think having a safe and legal route is in itself a disincentive to small boat crossings.

[Jade Botterill (Ossett and Denby Dale) (Lab)]

Q All three of you have expressed disappointment at our scrapping the Rwanda scheme as part of the Bill. What part of the £700 million spent by the previous Government do you think was good value for money for the taxpayer?

Tony Smith: I do not think any of it was good value for money for the taxpayer, was it? The history and record speak for themselves. But we need to think about why it did not work and look at the reasoning behind why it took three years to try to get the process going. An awful lot of work was done in Rwanda and the Home Office to try to make it happen, but it was subject to continual legal challenge. Legal challenges were made in Europe, in the domestic courts and by judicial review. On a number of occasions, flights were lined up that did not happen, and a lot of money was therefore wasted in the process.

I am not a big fan of the Illegal Migration Act. Some of it was cumbersome, because it put all the eggs in the Rwanda basket. Rwanda was a limited programme—obviously, we could not send everybody to Rwanda—but under NABA, you had the option to triage and put some people into the Rwanda basket: those hard country removals, where you could not remove them anywhere else. You had that option, but you could still do what you are doing now and process people from places like Turkey and Albania, put them through the asylum system and return them to source.

Losing that triage option is going to be a big drawback, and it is going to cost a lot more money in the long run. The intake will continue to come, and you will then have to rack up the associated asylum, accommodation and settlement costs that run along with that.

Karl Williams: I would ask: “Value compared with what?” There is one argument around the counterfactual of if you had a deterrent, but I would also refer to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s analysis last summer on the fiscal impact of migration. It estimates that a low-skilled migrant, or low-wage migrant as the OBR puts it, will represent a lifetime net fiscal cost to the taxpayer of around £600,000. We know from analysis from Denmark, the Netherlands and other European countries that asylum seekers’ lifetime fiscal costs tend to be steeper than that, but even on the basis of the OBR analysis, even if everyone ends up in work, if 35,000 people cross a year, which is roughly where we were last year, at that sort of cost range, it will probably be £50 billion or £60 billion of lifetime costs. Compare that with £700 million—it depends on what timescale you are looking at.

[Pete Wishart]

Q Does the panel agree that there will be increasing demand to come to the UK from right across the world? We are not going to deal with war-torn situations, oppression and absolute poverty, so people are going to continue to move in. The movement of peoples has never been so profound as in the last decade. I do not know exactly how you plan to stop that.

If I am unfairly characterising your view, you can correct me, but your view is that they should not get into the UK, that they should be stopped either in the sea or the minute they arrive in the UK, and that at that point they should be booted out somewhere—if not Rwanda, some other country—or just put back to country of source. Is that roughly your view? You can just shake your head or nod.

Tony Smith indicated assent.