Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Second sitting)

Katie Lam Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th February 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Jo White (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

Q From the moment the Rwanda deal was signed until the moment it was scrapped, 84,000 people arrived here on boats. How can you define that as a deterrent?

Alp Mehmet: Tony, you start, and then I will catch up with the question, because I did not quite hear.

Tony Smith: We may well say the same thing. The question was about the fact that the Rwanda plan did not deter anybody because we still had 84,000 people arrive. I think the reason for that was that it was never, in fact, implemented. The intelligence coming across from Calais was that the smugglers and migrants never believed that it was going to happen. Once it became clearer that the Safety of Rwanda Act had passed, and that it might well become a reality, there was intelligence to suggest that some people were thinking twice about getting into dinghies, and there was some displacement into Ireland as a result. Of course, we will never know now, because we never actually implemented it.

We had a change of Government, and the new Government made it very clear that they were going to abolish the Rwanda plan, so we are where we are, but I would have liked an opportunity to see what would happen if we had started at least some removals. We had flights ready to go. I would have liked to see the impact that starting some removals would have had on the incoming population. We will never know now, I am afraid. Clearly, we hardly removed anybody to Rwanda in the end—I accept that—but I would have liked us to at least try, to see if it had an impact.

Alp Mehmet: It was never going to be the solution. It was not going to be the way to stop those people jumping into boats and coming across, but it was going to help. There needed to be other changes. I appreciate that we are not going to resile from the European convention on human rights any time soon, but while it is there, it is very difficult to be certain that people will be dissuaded. Some will be, some would have been, and we know that some were already being deterred. It was a pity, I am afraid, that the Rwanda deal went.

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

Q We have heard today about clauses 13(3) and 14(4) exempting NGOs from criminal charges for helping asylum seekers to cross the channel. What do you think of those?

Karl Williams: If we are talking about what deterrence we might need or what pull factors there are, having charities that in some circumstances are facilitating people crossing the channel is clearly an extra pull factor—probably a small one in the grand scheme of things, but it is there. I am thinking about organisations such as Care4Calais, which provide, for example, phone-charging services to migrants who are waiting in the sand dunes and the camps around the beaches where the crossings are made. They can recharge their phones; they are therefore in contact with the smuggling gangs. I think that there is a hole in the system that needs to be closed, and I do not think that this Bill does it.

Tony Smith: There are charities and charities. Some charities are not in any way involved in facilitation; it is a pure “care in the community” exercise or function in Calais. But I think other charities are a little bit more mischievous: they might be helping people with what to say when you are near the border, how to present your asylum claim, and how to get to a beach that might not be patrolled. I would like to see more work done on that.

[Becky Gittins (Clwyd East) (Lab)]

Q Thank you to the panel for your spirited contributions so far. We know that the processing of asylum claims ground to a halt under the previous Government, which was due in part to the Rwanda scheme and to the Illegal Migration Act 2023—that being the route through which, other than the four who went to Rwanda, people were either granted asylum or returned to the country from which they came. We also know about the impact on our communities of the asylum system grinding to a halt; about the massive influx of people being placed, for indefinite periods, in asylum hotels; and about the impact that that had on our local authorities and their ability to provide services to the rest of our communities.

Given that the Bill clearly provides a deterrent to smugglers, to the people-smuggling business and to the criminal gangs in the channel by disrupting their activity, and by making it a greater expense, why do you still think it is a mistake—I think two or three of you said it outright, but you all seem broadly supportive of the Rwanda scheme—to be repealing those Acts with the Bill?

Tony Smith: There is the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, and there is the Illegal Migration Act 2023. I said earlier that I was not a great fan of the IMA, for the very reasons that you have stated: it brought in the ban too early, and people were being banned from re-entering this country before we had even removed them. That was impacting on port cases. It was a hugely difficult time, because that law put all of the eggs in the Rwanda basket. As you say, that left increasing numbers of boat people being served with a notice that they were going to Rwanda, when they were never going to go to Rwanda; they were going into the system that you described. I do not think that that was a very good idea. If we had put the IMA to one side, with the duty to remove, we could have stuck with NABA.

Then we had SORA, the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act, which would have turbocharged NABA. It would have given you a triage option: either to accept people into the asylum system quickly and process them, as you are doing now, or—for others, where you wanted to make a point that it is not okay to come across in a small boat and get to stay in the UK—to send some of them to Rwanda. That is what we could have done under NABA and SORA, and my view is that the IMA disrupted that.

Karl Williams: I suppose the asylum backlog of inadmissible people is a function of the disjunction whereby different parts of the legislation are being implemented at different speeds. Obviously the intention at the beginning was that we would have the flights going off in January or February 2023. When the ECHR injunction stopped the first flight, that derailed it. You could conceivably have had a situation in which a combination of some offshoring and the deterrent effect of that meant that the backlog of inadmissible cases did not grow. The fact that Rwanda was stalled in the courts for a couple of years, and then just did not happen at all, meant that that amount was inevitably going to increase. That was then locked in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jo White]

Q Just over a week ago, the Government announced that there will be no automatic right to British citizenship for a person who comes here illegally by boat or lorry. Do you think that will act as a deterrent to people coming here?

Professor Brian Bell: It is probably not a very strong deterrent. To repeat myself, all the evidence is that when asylum claimants think of where to claim asylum they do not have detailed knowledge of the ins and outs of the procedures of different countries. They almost certainly do not know what might happen in five to 10 years, which is the length of residence that they would need to apply for citizenship, so I am not sure it will be a significant deterrent. However, it is important to recognise that citizenship is not a right; it should be viewed as a privilege that people earn. It is reasonable for the Government to take the view that citizenship should not be given to certain people. I do not think there is anything wrong with that—it seems a legitimate observation.

[Katie Lam]

Q Perhaps on a related note, you have talked about incentives and mentioned a couple of reasons why people do not come over from France. What is your sense of why people do? Can those incentives be disrupted?

Professor Brian Bell: You would not want to disrupt some of the incentives. For example, the unemployment rate is 7.8% in France and 4.4% in the UK. The gap is slightly larger for young people than for the population as a whole. I am sure the Government would not want to change that incentive, although the French probably would. If you have a buoyant economy relative to your neighbour, at least in the labour market, that is an incentive. There is an incentive in terms of things that you would not necessarily want to change. The English language is really important as a pull factor, and the fact that there are diasporas already in the country.

There tends to be some evidence that the UK has been somewhat more successful than France at integrating immigrants into society, particularly second-generation immigrants: there is some evidence that whereas employment rates are always very poor for first-generation immigrants relative to natives, that gap narrows quite a bit in the UK when you look at second-generation immigrants. That is less true in France, so people may think the opportunities are better here.

The area where the Government could take action—and they are with the Employment Rights Bill—is that we have lots of employment rights in this country, but do not bother enforcing any of them, because we do not spend money on HMRC minimum wage enforcement teams and the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority does not have enough money to employ people to do all the work it needs to do. If the Fair Work Agency can take over and actually be beefed up, then we can enforce labour standards a bit more and that may discourage people, because one of the attractions of coming to the UK is that our looser enforcement of rules in labour market makes it easier to employ people who are here irregularly.

[Katie Lam]

Q So make it harder to work illegally or outside the rules?

Professor Brian Bell: Yes.