Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Karen Bradley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dame Karen Bradley (Staffordshire Moorlands) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow my fellow member of the Home Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Telford (Shaun Davies). He made exactly the right point in saying there are no easy answers to this problem.

I stand here in another immigration Bill debate—I do not know how many I have attended in the 15 years that I have been in Parliament. Madam Deputy Speaker, you held the brief of Immigration Minister for some time. We have all tried to combat this problem, and we all want to see the same solution. I sincerely wish the Home Secretary and her team of Ministers the best of luck in getting the Bill right, which may mean that there need to be some amendments to make sure that it actually delivers what she wants it to deliver, because there are no easy solutions. There is no silver bullet that will solve this problem, and any politician who dares to stand up and say, “Only one thing is going to make this better,” is misleading the public and making it harder for all of us to do the job that we were elected to do.

It is important to say that the Bill builds on previous work, including on data sharing and returns. These are all matters that Governments of every colour have worked on for many years. I congratulate the Secretary of State on focusing on those, but it is right to say that this is a process rather than an event, that these are things that all parties and all Governments have worked on, and that legislation can only go so far. This is about how enforcement happens, about training and about understanding at the frontline. I praise the NCA, which has done incredible work on this issue globally for many years and continues to do so. We need to remember when people get to the beaches in northern France that an awful lot of others do not make it there because of the work of the NCA and other parts of our law enforcement system.

Illegal migration is a global problem, and we cannot escape that. We have talked about the increase in numbers, which is down to global events. This is happening across the world; we are not the only country suffering from this problem. We might see it acutely on the boats crossing the channel, but this is happening everywhere. May I ask the Home Secretary to use her good offices, and those of the Prime Minister, to raise this issue at all multilateral levels? We need it to be on the agenda for the UN General Assembly, and we need an annual Heads of Government meeting at a UN level to look at this matter. The Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), talked about when the refugee convention was written and what it was written for. Things are different now. We are living in a different world, which means that we need to work together globally to deal with this issue.

In the short time I have, I will make just a couple of points. I welcome the measures on endangering life at sea, but the devil will be in the detail. We will need to make sure that the measures are properly understood by those enforcing the laws, and that they can actually be implemented. The Home Affairs Committee has heard that if a boat gets on to a beach near Calais, it is very difficult for anyone to intervene at that point because of the legal position in international maritime law and other matters.

I also welcome the protection measures and the biometric testing. I met representatives of the British Red Cross last week, and they have some very interesting ideas about potentially expanding where that testing could take place. I hope that the Home Secretary and the Minister can take that point forward.

My final point is about modern slavery. I welcome what the Home Secretary said about the protections for victims of modern slavery, but I want to reiterate that modern slavery is not a migration crime; it is a financial crime. It is the exploitation of one human being by another for financial profit, and we must not confuse the two. If somebody chooses to pay a people smuggler to put them in an unsafe vessel, that is a crime, but it is a consensual crime. If somebody has been forced to get into an unsafe vessel, that is a coercive crime and needs to be treated differently. In much the same way as our policy response to a person who gets ill from having their drink spiked is different from our policy response to somebody who gets ill from taking an illegal substance that they chose to buy, there has to be a different policy response to victims of modern slavery.

May I ask the Home Secretary and the Minister to make sure that, throughout the passage of this Bill and elsewhere, the victims of modern slavery are put at the forefront and can get the protections they need? They should enter the national referral mechanism so that they can be looked after. We owe it to the world to be a leader in this matter, and I fear that if we do not take those steps, we will fail to be so.