Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Katie Lam Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Mike Tapp]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. The hon. Member for Stockton West has made a creative argument, and I will try to bring some sense to it. First, we have to look at what the new clause would actually do for the country and our judicial system. Public hearings could expose vulnerable individuals, including victims of persecution or trafficking, to undue public scrutiny, which could deter genuine applicants from seeking justice. There are also security risks. Sensitive information about applicants’ backgrounds, including details that could endanger their families in their home countries, could be exposed.

There is also the risk of the legal system being overloaded further, given what we have inherited. Increased public interest in the hearings could lead to more appeals and challenges, which would cause more delays and inefficiencies in the system. Finally, the new clause is simply unnecessary as courts already have the discretion to allow public access when appropriate. It would remove vital judicial flexibility.

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

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dr Murrison. After years of broken promises, it should come as no surprise that the public do not trust politicians in Westminster on immigration. The distrust is compounded by regular reports of individual cases in the immigration system, the most shocking and nonsensical of which are often those of foreign criminals allowed to remain in this country due to human rights laws.

The system is broken. It has been broken for many decades, and that is now plain to see. Our basic decency—our desire to do the right thing—is exploited by paedophiles, rapists, terrorists and hardened criminals, who threaten not just individual members of the public, which is terrifying enough, but the broader social fabric of our country. The news reports that we read are possible only because upper tribunal judgments on asylum and immigration are published at regular intervals. The publication of those judgments allows everyone in the country to see what tribunal judges have decided in asylum, immigration and deportation cases. Crucially, it allows us to scrutinise both their decisions and their reasoning. We can see why the judgments were made and what that says about our laws, and decide for ourselves whether we think that is right. Judges are not accountable to the public, but transparency allows everyone to see our laws in action and to form a view about whether they are the right ones.

However, upper tribunal judgments do not tell the full story. All immigration and asylum cases are first heard by a lower-tier tribunal, the judgments of which are not made available to the public. Unless the initial decision of the lower-tier tribunal is appealed, the public do not ever get access to the details of any given case. Given the absurdity of the cases that we do hear about, many members of the public will rightly be wondering what is happening in the cases that we do not see.

If we want to restore public trust in the immigration system, we must restore transparency. Publishing the decisions of lower-tier tribunals is not the biggest or most consequential change in the grand scheme of our broken immigration system, but it is a meaningful one. The public have a right to know about the way our tribunal system works, to know about the rules judges use to make fundamental decisions about immigration and asylum—about who can be in this country and why—and to see how those rules are applied in practice so they can decide for themselves whether that is right or wrong and whether it serves Britain’s interests. That is why we tabled this new clause, and we sincerely hope that the Government will consider making it part of the Bill.

[Margaret Mullane (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve on your Committee, Dr Murrison. I do not see how turning border security into public discourse on a case-by-case basis is beneficial to the process, either for those administering or presiding over the hearings, or for those subject to the tribunal process. I accept that there is an argument for greater transparency, but given the circumstances of people’s arrival at our borders—they are fleeing trauma, in a vulnerable state—I feel it is inappropriate to parade the lives of asylum seekers in the public domain.

I have every faith that the Bill will create a robust system that is effective and accountable. The new clause would add nothing to its overall strength. The hon. Member for Stockton West says that trust has been lost in the asylum system. I think it will take this Bill and this Government to bring that trust back.

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Then the small boats crisis began, with the Conservative Government failing to do anything to stop its source, its methods or the routes. Under Rishi Sunak, they came up with a wizard idea that sending a group of arrivals to Rwanda would stop the boats. Well, we all know the outcome of that failure: 80,000 people arrived on small boats during that period. By June 2024, net migration stood at 728,000. Now we have the leader of the Opposition wanting to act tough on migration, but with her party’s recent history, how can anyone believe a word she says? All the Conservatives’ credibility is gone. This Government are focused on sorting out their mess. In my view, new clause 25 is yet another wheeze—speak big, but do little.

[Katie Lam]

How can I begin my remarks without repaying the Minister’s kind words about my clothing? This is one of my favourite jackets and I am delighted to see that it might also be one of hers.

It is no secret, as the hon. Member for Bassetlaw has just set out, that previous Governments of different parties have failed the British public on immigration. The level of immigration to this country has been too high for decades and remains so. Every election-winning manifesto since 1974 has promised to reduce migration. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch) has said, the last Government, like the Governments before them, promised to do exactly that, but again like the Governments before them, they did not deliver. Because of that failure to deliver, the British public may face a bill of more than £200 billion in the years ahead, unless we change the rules on settlement.

Under current rules, after just five years in the UK, migrants on work or family visas will become eligible for indefinite leave to remain. If they are successful, and 95% of ILR applicants are, they are entitled to welfare, social housing, surcharge-free access to the NHS and more. According to the Centre for Policy Studies, some 800,000 migrants could claim ILR over the course of this Parliament. Given the profile of those who are likely to qualify, that could come at a lifetime cost of £234 billion.

[Tom Hayes]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Katie Lam]

I will gladly.

[Tom Hayes]

Sorry, I coughed and laughed at the same time, partly because I think the hon. Member anticipated the point I was about to make. I will put this on the record again, as I have consistently. She may have more information to come back to me with and I will come back to her. The Centre for Policy Studies report is flawed. It has skewed information; it uses assumptions that are unreasonable and the financial modelling that ensues is therefore unreasonable. As a consequence, it feels like the Centre for Policy Studies and the hon. Member are reaching for a very large number to create the impression that there will be a very significant financial burden.

I make two additional points. First, even if that report relied on reasonable assumptions and therefore the modelling was correct, the Boris wave was caused by her party’s Government. She is nodding her head; she affirms that. I welcome that, in her speech, she has so far acknowledged the failings of that Government. Secondly, the report makes some very big assumptions about the future behaviour of the people currently in the migration system in our country. That is not a wise move, particularly when she is extrapolating £235 billion to £240 billion across a very long timeline. In fact, if we were to break it down on an annualised basis, even using the report’s flawed assumptions and flawed modelling, the figure would be far smaller. We need to have some integrity in the data that we use. Does she agree?

[Katie Lam]

As Professor Brian Bell said in evidence to this Committee—in a session to which the hon. Member for Bournemouth East has referred a couple of times—

“It is actually extremely difficult to work out the fiscal impact of migration.”––[Official Report, Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2025; c. 59, Q92.]

That is clearly true: forecasting the lives of millions of people over decades will obviously have a substantial margin for error.

The only way to avoid that error would be not to try to forecast in the first place. I have repeatedly asked the Home Office, over several months, whether anyone in that Department or any other—indeed, anyone in Government—is attempting to forecast the cost to the public purse of the ILR grants that will come in this Parliament. I am yet to receive an answer. To me, that clearly says that nobody in Government is thinking about the impact the issue will have and how much it will cost. When they do, I will happily use those numbers. Until and unless that happens, the modelling from the CPS is the best we have—in fact, it is all that we have.

[Tom Hayes]

This is my last intervention on this matter. I take the hon. Lady’s point entirely, but will she not acknowledge that the modelling has deep, fundamental flaws? Although it may be the only modelling and therefore the best, on the strength of what is in that report it is still not worth considering or using in parliamentary debate.

[Katie Lam]

I have already acknowledged that the margin for error is massive—that is clearly true. If everything that the hon. Member is saying is correct, I would like to see Government figures to replace the CPS figures. I think that is a reasonable request.

The £234 billion cost is equivalent to £8,200 per household, or around six times our annual defence budget, and this about not just money but capacity. Our public services are clearly already overstretched and this could push them to breaking point. If we accept, as we should, that previous Governments have failed on migration, then we should do everything in our power to limit the long-term impacts of that failure. That is why the Conservatives propose to extend the qualifying period for ILR and reform settlement rules to ensure that only those genuinely likely to contribute will be eligible for long-term settlement. That would give us an opportunity to review visas issued over the last few years. Those who have come to this country legally on time-limited visas and have subsequently not contributed enough, or have damaged our society by committing crime, should be expected to leave.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly said that the levels of immigration under the last Government were wrong and that it was a mistake to allow so many people to come to the UK. This amendment would allow the Government to limit the long-term consequences of that mistake, so why would they oppose it? It is not too late to change our rules around settlement. By refusing to extend the eligibility period for indefinite leave to remain, the Government are actively choosing to saddle the British taxpayer with a likely bill of hundreds of billions of pounds. We must make difficult decisions on this reform and the many others required in our migration system. Those decisions may be painful, especially in the short term, for individual people, families or businesses but they are the only way for any Government’s actions to match their words. The public have had enough and rightly so.

The hon. Member for Bournemouth East talked about LLR, which must be applied for every two and a half years on the existing 10-year route. That is the case only because, as it stands, the 10-year route, by design, is for those not on eligible visas. The five-year route that we here propose to change is exclusively for those on eligible visas. I therefore cannot see why, within the existing rules, there would be any requirement for LLR applications. I hope that reassures the hon. Member.

[Margaret Mullane]

The new clause is not in keeping with the provisions outlined in the Bill, which primarily focus on border security through new and strengthened law enforcement powers, providing intelligence to address organised immigration crime.

I fundamentally disagree with the context of the new clause. Subsection (2) relates to existing legislation whereby the qualification of indefinite leave to remain applies to people on skilled work visas, scale-up worker visas, entrepreneurial or investor visas, innovation founder visas, or UK ancestry visas, and people with a partner who holds citizenship. Those people are, for the most part, contributing to our society through work. If somebody has been living and working here in a skilled role, or innovating in our country—and possibly even supporting job creation—for five years, that is long enough for them to identify Britain as their home. They will have friends and community networks. In most instances, they are boosting our economic productivity. The increased qualification period set out in the proposed new clause would move the goalposts for skilled workers after years of contribution.

I will bring the conversation back to the purpose of the Bill: the Committee’s focus should be on those entering the UK illegally and those engaged in organised immigration crime, not the construction workers, nurses, doctors, investors and business owners in Britain on work visas.

[Tom Hayes]

I will speak briefly. I welcome the hon. Member for Weald of Kent’s clarification of the Conservative party’s position on the amendment, but that clarification also raises further questions; I wonder whether the hon. Lady could respond on the spot. If there is no requirement every 30 months in the 10-year period for an individual to pay fees of £2,608—or, for a child, £2,223—to the Home Office, how will the Home Office fund much of its work? The fees paid by adults and children contribute significantly to the Home Office’s budget. The point is particularly important because the Home Office has had to borrow from the official development assistance budget in order to fund asylum hotels. I worry that there is going to be a significant financial gap here, and I wonder if the hon. Lady could clarify what her costings are?

[Katie Lam]

I think the hon. Gentleman is eliding two different routes. At the moment there is a five-year route, which is for people on eligible visas, and a 10-year route. The 10-year route has LLR requirements that have to be applied for every two and a half years, and is the route that generates the fees that he is talking about. Under the amendment, that would not change; we are proposing changes only to the five-year route. The five-year route at the moment does not have LLR requirements because it is for people on eligible visas. The income for the Home Office from the same people should be no different under the amendment that we are proposing. I hope that that is clear.

[Tom Hayes]

I am happy to accept that clarification. If that is correct, I look forward to seeing more information about the particular policy, what financial costs would be involved and what the financial benefits would be.

Finally, I echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh about the importance of settling. We talk here about the financial costs: it is going to be more costly to our country and public services if somebody is having to go through many years of unsettled status. It is going to be harder for them to have all the infrastructure and anchors that they need within society. As a consequence, I would love to know whether the Conservatives have done any modelling of the impact of increasing the period of limbo, including—as mentioned in the IPPR report that I referenced earlier—the cost to public services when people find themselves homeless, with difficult mental health conditions or unable to take their child to the school that they want and have to travel significant mileage.

The hon. Lady and I share a desire for the integrity of data and its greater availability. In proposing the amendment, does she have access to any of that information?

[Katie Lam]

I will come back briefly. If I have properly understood the hon. Member’s question, he is asking what we think the impact will be on the number of people who would still apply for ILR after 10 years.

[Tom Hayes]

indicated assent.

[Katie Lam]

He is nodding.

Part of what we are trying to say by extending the time is that we feel that a person’s commitment to the UK before they apply for settlement should be longer than five years. If application numbers go down because people feel that they do not want to commit for 10 years before getting settlement, that is something that we are happy to accept as part of the amendment.

It seems from the numbers that we have at the moment that the number of people who would apply over an extended period would go down because fewer people would qualify under the rules that we are stipulating. The reason why they would not qualify is that they would not be making a sufficiently significant contribution to the public purse over that period. Our calculations are that all of those lost applications would be net fiscally positive.

[Tom Hayes]

In which case, I will close by saying that the Home Office data shows there is not that drop-off of people—people do not leave the country because they have to wait longer for their status. In fact, those people try to get that status by serving within our country and economy. The Home Office data, which is publicly available on gov.uk, records what the stay and departure rates are each year. I am not sure that the amendment and the policy within it are going to achieve the goal that the hon. Lady is seeking.

[Katie Lam]

I totally take the hon. Gentleman’s point, but I think he is answering a slightly different point. What we are saying is that the combination of the extension of time and the change in criteria would lead to lower applications. It is not so much about a choice on the part of the individual migrant, but a structural change within the system.

[Tom Hayes]

The very last point I will make is that I understand what the hon. Lady is saying, but that is not what my point was about. This would not be a deterrent or an incentive for people to leave the country. People would still remain in the country. The health impacts and the limbo that people would experience through their inability to settle would still create a fiscal drag.

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This is not an immigration issue—it is nothing to do with immigration. It is a safeguarding issue, and it is about making sure that we have the best interests of children at heart. It is an opportunity to uphold our commitment to child welfare and to ensure that the UK meets its obligations under domestic and international child protection frameworks. I urge hon. Members to support the new clause and ensure that no child seeking refuge in this country is wrongly treated as an adult and then placed in harm’s way.

[Katie Lam]

On 23 January 2023, Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai was sentenced to life imprisonment at Salisbury Crown court. Nearly a year earlier, Abdulrahimzai had murdered 21-year-old Thomas Roberts in Bournemouth town centre by stabbing him to death in the street following a dispute over an e-scooter.

Abdulrahimzai was an Afghan asylum seeker who came to this country in December 2019. He entered the UK illegally, claiming to be an unaccompanied 14-year-old. He was placed in school and in foster care, but he was in fact already an adult when he came here. Not only was he an adult, but he was also a murderer, having killed two men in Serbia before coming to the UK. He should never have been allowed to come to this country and he should certainly not have been allowed to masquerade as a child.

Assessing a person’s age is surprisingly difficult, but we have a range of tools to do so—the Home Office is just not using them. If we had acted sooner, using the full suite of tools at our disposal to assess Abdulrahimzai’s age, Thomas Roberts might still be alive today. The case of Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai is particularly shocking, but it is unfortunately far from unique.

[Chris Murray]

I wonder whether there have been any new scientific discoveries in the last seven months for identifying someone’s age that the Home Office would not have been aware of over the last 14 years. Is it not the case that the methodologies used are very imprecise and do not often actually lead us, in the liminal cases, to draw the distinction that the hon. Lady is advocating for?

[Katie Lam]

I will come on to precision and the ways of determining age slightly later in my remarks.

Ahmed Hassan, an Iraqi asylum seeker, claimed to be a 16-year-old when he arrived in the UK. In 2017, he set off a bomb at Parsons Green tube station, injuring 23 people. His real age is still not a matter of public record. In 2018, a Home Office probe found that Siavash Shah, an Iranian asylum seeker, spent six weeks as a year 11 pupil in Ipswich despite being 25—the list goes on. In fact, between 2020 and 2023, the Home Office identified almost 4,000 cases of adult migrants claiming to be children—45% of those who originally claimed to be children when they arrived here—and every other person of that cohort was in fact an adult. Some were at least 30 years old. That puts British children at risk, puts genuine child asylum seekers at risk and takes valuable school and care places away from the young people who genuinely need them.

I feel this particularly keenly as a Member of Parliament for Kent, the county into which all small boats arrive. Our laws mandate that the people who come to this country illegally and claim to be under 18 must be prioritised for care equally with Kentish children. That puts enormous pressure on the system and makes it harder for our children to be cared for. That is madness when we know that half of those arrivals are in fact adults, and we must put a stop to it.

It is completely rational, albeit morally wrong, for adult migrants to claim to be children. Under-18s who come here have a greater entitlement to care and support, do not have to live in accommodation with adults, and are not subject to the same rules as adults—or the rules are applied less strictly. Of course, there are people who cross the channel without their parents who are under 18; most, though not all, are male 17 and 16-year-olds, and some are younger children. No one disputes that, and children should be treated as children, but we must be realistic about the scandalous degree to which our system is exploited by the cynical and the sinister.

We have to protect actual children, and we should use every tool in the box to do so, including scientific testing. Where people refuse such tests, the Government should be able to override that refusal. We are acting in the interests of public safety and to protect the security of our children. Labour Members have asked for exact details of the scientific methods. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton West set out, there are many methods and several different ways of doing it. The ones that can be implemented in short order are the dental and skeletal tests.

Other methods are currently at an earlier stage of development, such as facial age estimation and DNA methylation, which is a process by which people much cleverer than me can assess how a person’s genes are read by their body, which changes with age. In 2022, the interim Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee stated that the

“teeth, clavicle, and hand/wrist or knee… have been shown to have a significant research and publication credibility and provide a consistent age range over which changes occur.”

Later, the same report states:

“The committee has relied on areas and methods that have been repeatedly tried and tested and shown to have consistency.”

As the report makes clear, and as Government Members have said, scientific age assessment is not perfectly precise and is not magic, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton West also correctly says, our proposal is that scientific age assessments should be used not to replace other methods and judgments, but to supplement them.

The situations that my hon. Friend and I have set out are horrifying. We can see no reason why the Government would not want to have the widest possible set of tools available to them to stop such things happening, including the option in future to bring in scientific methods that are currently at a nascent stage.

[Tom Hayes]

I thank the hon. Member for Weald of Kent for raising the absolutely horrific and awful circumstances involving Thomas Roberts, who would have been my constituent and whose mother, Dolores, is my constituent. She is racked by grief and unable to sleep at night. Her health has worsened because, as she said to the Minister and me last night in the Minister’s office, with her son being murdered, she feels that half of her whole life has completely disappeared.

I do not want to name the murderer in this debate; I name Thomas Roberts, the victim. I want to talk briefly, with your permission, Dr Murrison, about Thomas Roberts, because it is important for the Committee to know who he was. It is important for Dolores, so racked with grief, to know that her MP and the Committee are focused on what happened.

Thomas was 21 years of age when he died on 12 March 2022 in Bournemouth town centre, the victim of a stabbing by an asylum seeker. His mum has told me several times, and she told me again with the Minister last night, that Thomas was known by everyone and, when his mother wanted to go into town, to Littledown or to other parts of the constituency, he would say no, because he was so well known and he did not want to be seen by his friends out with his mum.

Thomas was an aspiring Royal Marine and, in order to become one, he was in the Sea Scouts. He was physically fit—so fit, in fact, that he would actually bench press his mum and his brother. Dolores told me that the passing of his driving test on the first go was one of her proudest moments. It is one of the things that she remembers so fondly and so closely now, as she comes to terms with her grief.

Thomas was also an aspiring drum and bass DJ, and by all accounts a very good one, who was up and coming on the south coast. If he had not made it as a Royal Marine—there was every certainty that he would—he could easily have taken up a drum and bass DJ career. He was a member of the Christchurch boxing club. He was active in his community, and deeply loving and caring about his family.

Thomas lost his life—or rather, his life was taken from him—because an asylum seeker was in our country. That begs the question: why was that person in our country? Why were they able to wield the knife that cut short Thomas Roberts’s life, and that took away all the hopes and ambitions that his mother had for him? It is because we did not have access to the necessary database to track criminality and find out more about who the asylum seeker actually was. I am deeply sad that Thomas is not with his mum, in his community, or with his friends who loved him so much, because the last Government broke our asylum and immigration system, and created the conditions for that tragic killing and other tragic killings that have happened in our country.

Scientific age assessment, as the hon. Member for Weald of Kent said, is not a magic wand; it is imprecise, as we heard from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. We know what works, and that having a functioning asylum and immigration system will make all the difference. I just wish we had had that on 12 March 2022 when Thomas was denied his life opportunities because of the breakages in that system.

I thank the Minister for meeting Dolores yesterday—I know that that provided her with much-needed comfort and clarity. I am absolutely confident that the Bill and its measures will make the difference that is so needed to protect our society. I also note the contribution of Councillor Joe Salmon of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council, who has been such a support to Dolores and her wider community, because she will be grieving for a very long time. It is incumbent on all of us in public service to speak the truth, look at the facts and bring forward the measures that will make the biggest difference.

If I may, I will return to the question of scientific age assessments. I referred to the concerns of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and of experts, but I now refer to the House of Lords debate on 27 November 2023, which is worth a read if Opposition Members have not had a chance. It goes into significant detail and depth about the concerns that I had about that as a possible policy at that stage of its development.

The Minister has been clear that scientific age assessments are not off the table; there just needs to be certainty that they are an effective tool. To avoid any further deaths and injustices, we need to have the right tools to protect the people of this country, secure and protect our borders, and make sure that we are truly able to restore confidence and trust in this system and in our ability to manage who comes into our country and who stays here.

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We should be considering what the Bill is about. I remind the Committee that the Bill is about action, and we need to ensure that what comes out of Committee is a workable and operable Bill that will do the hard work to tackle the criminal gangs that are fuelling illegal immigration, and to fix our broken asylum system.

[Katie Lam]

It was a privilege to hear about Thomas Roberts’s life. The hon. Member for Bournemouth East did himself great credit in telling us about him so movingly. Thomas’s mother, Dolores, whose pain is impossible for us to imagine, has also done his memory great credit by finding a way in her grief to talk about her son to her Member of Parliament and to the Minister.

Securing the border is a genuinely difficult job, and the Opposition are genuine in our desire to support the Government in doing that. We really believe that the new clause would help the Government to expand their ability to do that job. We deeply hope that they will consider it. I also thank the hon. Member for Clwyd East for her generous words.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I start by endorsing what my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East said about Dolores, Thomas Roberts’s mum, whom I met last night. She has gone through a searingly awful life experience. It is difficult even to think about that, let alone to offer any comfort. Unfortunately, I do not think that her experience would have changed much had scientific age assessment been in place, although the person in question had been assessed by his local authority as a child and was therefore in a separate environment from that which he would have been in had he not been assessed.

I am determined to see whether we can connect up our information about people coming from Europe, following Brexit and the disintegration of our access to Eurodac and various other pieces of information collected in Europe on asylum seekers and those arriving illegally—not all of them are asylum seekers. Reconnecting, if possible, to those databases would give us more comfort than we have at the moment. However, I emphasise that when people come to this country, we do check them against all our biometric records and the terrorism lists and watch lists that we have. It may be possible for us to do more in future.

We have had a debate about new clause 26 from the Opposition and new clause 43 from the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire on behalf of the Scottish National party. That has again demonstrated the wide range of opinion that there is at both ends of the argument whenever we consider such issues. I will deal with both arguments in my response, and I hope to find a middle way.

First, repealing section 58 of the Illegal Migration Act, which the Bill seeks to do, does not stop our capacity to do age assessments. Listening to some of the contributions from members of the official Opposition, one would have thought that repealing section 58 will take off the table—completely and utterly—all age assessment. That is simply not true. The age assessments in section 58 were about the duty to remove somebody to Rwanda; they were not connected to anything else. As I understand it, the issue with that legislation was that the then Government’s intention was not to remove children to Rwanda, so it became more important to have a way of assessing whether somebody was a child. The Safety of Rwanda Act and the IMA—the previous Government’s approach to this issue—would have created even bigger incentives for people to claim that that they were children, because they would have avoided being sent to Rwanda, not that anyone ever actually ended up there. The previous Government’s approach of deportation permanently to Rwanda actually created even more incentives for people to lie about their age.

The fact is that there are people who are genuine asylum seekers who are children, people who are not genuine asylum seekers who are adults who claim to be children, and children who sometimes claim that they are adults. When that happens, one has to look at modern slavery issues and coercive control. There are safeguarding issues on both sides of the age assessment argument. Children pretend to be adults for reasons that we can imagine, but we will not go into those, because they are not very pleasant. There are also incentives created by the way in which the Children Act 1989 deals with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. As a Kent MP, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent knows exactly what happens with the Kent intake unit and the pressure that her own local authority has been put under. However, she also knows about the Government support that her local authority has been given to disperse unaccompanied asylum-seeking children around the rest of the country so that some of the burden can be shared.

We are dealing with people who arrive without papers. Some of them wish to lie about their age, and some have been told to lie because the people-smuggling gangs perceive it as a way for people to access more resources than they could if they were seen as adults. As the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire pointed out, the system can get it wrong on both sides. People who are children have been judged to be adults and put in inappropriate places, and people who are adults have been judged to be children and put in appropriate places. There is no guaranteed scientific way of making a judgment. We can make judgments about people who are much older, but we are dealing with that uncertain four to five-year range on either side, which is the difference between 18 and 24 or 17 and 23; you will know about that, Dr Murrison, from your work as a medical doctor.

On new clause 26, I want to reassure Opposition Members that there is already provision in law for the use of age assessment, and our repealing of section 58 of the Illegal Migration Act does not remove that provision. That is because the Immigration (Age Assessments) Regulations 2024, which followed scientific advice from the Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee in the Home Office, specify for the purposes of section 52 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 the scientific methods currently recommended for age assessment. We have retained those bits of legislation; neither the 2024 regulations nor section 52 of the Nationality and Borders Act have been repealed by the Bill, so the capacity to use scientific age assessments remains on the statute book.

The hon. Member for Stockton West did not seem to know which age assessment methods we were talking about. The 2024 regulations specify the power to use X-rays and MRIs, and that it is possible to take a negative view of the credibility of a person who refuses to consent, where there are no reasonable grounds for refusing that consent.

With those measures on the statute book, the Government continue to explore methods to improve the robustness of age assessment processes by increasing the reliability of the scientific methods being used. At the moment, we do not have enough certainty about the gap that exists in the current assessments, which are still being assessed. The hon. Member for Stockton West and the Conservative party put these things on to the statute book but then did not operationalise them. At the moment, we are doing as much work as we can to see how reliable they are, with a view to operationalising them. But as I wrote in a response to shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Croydon South, when he wrote to me about this issue, we are in the middle of that process. I hope that we will soon be in a situation to make announcements one way or the other, and those announcements will be made in the usual way.