Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Sixth sitting)

Jo White Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 6th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Pete Wishart (Perth and Kinross-shire) (SNP)]

These clauses create invasive new search, seizure and retention powers, along with the powers to access, copy and use information contained within an electronic device. The new powers can be applied to any person who arrives irregularly and has not yet been granted permission to enter or remain in the UK. They allow an immigration or police officer to fully search a person, including a search of that person’s mouth. I expect that the Minister will tell us exactly whether that particular qualification is required for these new powers.

This is not the plot and setting of some future dystopian film: it will be the UK sea border in the course of the next few months. These things will not be done to hardened criminals wandering the streets of the United Kingdom or those associated with violent crime. They are to be done to some of the most abandoned and traumatised people in the world. With these clauses we are starting, measuredly, to go into police state territory. They are essentially a hybrid form of stop-and-search powers, without the due qualifications and reassurances. I do not know if profiling will be a part of this—I will be interested in the Minister’s response—but it seems like only one profile will be included in all that, which is that of every asylum seeker. They may all be subject to these new powers.

For these powers to be exercised, there need only be reasonable grounds and suspicion that a relevant article appears to store some electronic information that relates or may relate to the future or past commission of a facilitation offence. That seems excessively broad. Practically any person who arrives irregularly to the UK may be subject to these powers. Any information received from these searches would be used for preventing, detecting, investigating or prosecuting facilitation offences. The property can be retained for as long as considered necessary to assess, examine or copy information for use in proceedings for an offence, before being returned or disposed of.

I trying to think why the Government want these clauses. I know they are going to tell us it is all about helping to disrupt organised crime and making sure they can find particular and specific information on electronic devices, but I think a lot of it has to do with the 2022 High Court ruling decreeing that the Home Office’s secret policy of blanket searching, seizing and returning mobile phones from individuals arriving by small boats was unlawful.

Just like the Tories before them, if any particular law that defends and protects people is seen or deemed to be a little bit unnecessary, the Government will just bring in a new one to override it completely, forgetting anything to do with the consequences and implications for people. These new offences clearly compromise a person’s right to a private and family life. Given the confidential, legally privileged, sensitive, private and personal nature of the messages, photographs, information, correspondence and data that may be on such mobile devices, we hold that that could only ever be the case. To be fair, the Government respect that and acknowledge it as fact, and the European convention on human rights memorandum suggests that the new powers could be distinguished and that phones will not be seized on a blanket basis when these powers come into force—well, thank goodness for that.

The memorandum says:

“The Home Office will issue non-statutory guidance about the use of the powers and training which will be required for authorised officers exercising those powers.”

We will have to see that happen pretty quickly, because we have no idea how any of these powers will be exercised. Again, I am entirely happy to take the Minister at her word on how the new law will be exercised as we go forward. However, there is no such guidance for parliamentary scrutiny during the passage of the Bill, so it remains entirely unclear how the Home Office proposes to use these wide and invasive new powers.

I am distinctly uncomfortable with the new powers, and I am disconcerted about how they may be applied and used. A number of agencies have serious misgivings about the type of individuals who will be subject to these new powers. The Minister has to explain just a little more how these powers will be used and what protections will be put in place, particularly for some of the most traumatised people whom we will be ever deal with in this country.

[Jo White (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I very much welcome this element of the Bill on electronic devices. While clause 22 will give officers powers to seize digital devices that are believed to be used for the purpose of people smuggling, clause 23 gives suitably trained and accredited criminal investigators the powers to access the information on mobile devices, phones and laptops that will build the evidence base, history, connections and understanding of the routes of the criminal gangs.

Seizing and extracting data from mobile devices is a powerful tool already used by our security services. There are already established Home Office guidelines on this, and these clauses extend those powers and will help enable intelligence-led profiling of irregular arrivals. That key change will lead to greater opportunities to disrupt the trade of these awful gangs.

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

I want to make just a couple of points on the seizure of phones. We have to be incredibly realistic about the threat that the country faces and how these things are organised. We have seen people-smuggling networks and trafficking networks developing in complexity and scale. It does not start in France; it goes all the way through European countries—our allies—and then through countries that are very difficult for us to engage with, including some countries that are at war and some that are hostile states.

The evidence from the National Crime Agency is very clear that the networks are organised by phone, and that that is the primary means by which these criminals orchestrate them. We know that they are evolving, so it is really important that we give officials the power to seize those phones not only to understand where these smuggling networks are coming from, which is the only way to intercede and save people in unsafe vessels, but to disrupt those networks later.

We heard a whole set of arguments earlier about the insufficiency of deterrents in stopping sea crossings. Professor Walsh from the Migration Observatory was really clear that the demand is inelastic. No matter how many deterrents we introduce, there will still be some demand rising to meet them. That is why disruption is so important, which we can only happen if we have the ability to seize those phones. There is a really important distinction between targeting the demand and targeting the supply of the ability to cross the channel.

On the point about whether the powers are applied on a blanket basis, they are not. The Home Office is clear that there will be statutory guidance. The people who seize these phones will be subject to the same rules that are already in place on the handling of material seized from any individual, and they need those powers. The point about family life and private life is absolutely fair, and it applies whenever someone’s phone is stolen, which is a wider debate that we have in society. The truth is, there is no capacity to only seize part of someone’s phone. We cannot seize only some data and not detect, for example, private text messages or family photographs. It is proper that the Home Office officials who seize such data are subject to the rules that we have in this country about protecting the data and returning it when it is decided that it is not required, but we cannot separate out different types of data, and we would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we did not allow the powers to seize it.