Draft Asylum Seekers (Reception Conditions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 Draft Immigration and Asylum (Provision of Accommodation to Failed Asylum-Seekers) (Amendment) Regulations 2026

Katie Lam Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd April 2026 General Committees

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

It is, as ever, a pleasure to have you in the Chair, Sir Jeremy. The power given to the Home Secretary by these regulations to suspend or discontinue asylum support in cases where asylum seekers are working illegally is welcome. It is also right to remove the existing duty on the Home Secretary to offer asylum support in all cases. Those are both improvements on the existing system. Clearly, if people come to this country to seek asylum, they should at the very least be expected to abide by the rules that govern that process.

Although the changes are welcome in principle, criticisms raised by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee highlight a broader problem. The changes that the Government are proposing today will not, without changes to the wider legal regime, change the incentives for people who come to this country illegally or under false pretences to seek asylum. The Committee noted that illegal working cases—the ones we know about, that is—accounted for just 0.3%, or one in every 333, of asylum seekers receiving support. The number of asylum seekers working illegally is likely to be far higher in reality, and it is absolutely right that we deal with those cases, but these regulations alone will not create a meaningful deterrent for people who plan to come here illegally to seek asylum.

Government Ministers say that they are developing a policy to address the problem, yet the indications so far suggest that we can expect to see tweaks at the edges of the system; what we need, and what the British people deserve, is a total overhaul. That would include preventing illegal migrants from ever seeking asylum in this country—a position legislated for by the previous Government but repealed by the current one. It would include being willing to remove people who come here illegally and return them to their home country or a safe third country—a position impossible under the current system, which the Government have committed to maintaining.

We cannot seriously hope to remove people who come here illegally while remaining a signatory of the European convention on human rights and while the broken immigration tribunal system still has the final say on who can stay in our country. Yet the Government have committed to maintaining both.

The changes I have mentioned would create a real deterrent for people who might otherwise be tempted to break into our country and abuse our good will. The measures before us today are positive, but they will not address the broader problem. The Government should focus first and foremost on the greater steps that we can take to secure our borders and end this problem for good.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Gentleman has occupied his second position in about three minutes, so perhaps he needs a little more time. But I cannot get with the argument that because the numbers may be small—of course that is a good thing—the situation is in some way tolerable. The numbers who commit crime across the population are, mercifully, small, but we still seek to prosecute; we still seek punishment. I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman thinks that unimportant. If something happened in his constituency—despite that very small number of people, a significant crime could take place or illegal working could have an impact on the local economy—the people of Dundee might feel strongly about that. I think that they would.

The Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent, talked about this measure not being enough to provide discouragement. She also talked about scale and suggested that what we know is only a small part of the issue. Through the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, the extra powers, particularly on the gig economy, to ensure that those substituting their labour are doing so to people who have a genuine right to work, are a step change in the regulatory regime in this country. They will help us to close the gap and make it very hard indeed to work illegally here.

The hon. Member also said that meaningful change is impossible without leaving the ECHR. I always caution colleagues about being quick to discount things that provide a really important underpinning of rights, because they are our rights too. “Restoring Order and Control”, our document published in November, is the biggest reform of our asylum system certainly in my adult lifetime—probably in my whole lifetime, to be fair. That is all doable within our international obligations. The reality is that the alternative to doing those serious things is just ripping up our international obligations and then spending years trying to work out how to get back return agreements with other countries, never mind our own freedoms.

[Katie Lam]

Could the Minister give us a quantitative way in which we can judge whether that has been a success, so that we can decide whether further steps need to be taken? How many people coming here illegally would he be able to tolerate—would enable him to decide that actually that is okay?

[Alex Norris]

I gently say that I do not think it is my test. The public are very clear about what they think about the system: the system lacks order and control. The test by which we judge our efforts is whether we bring order and control to the system, and that is what we are doing.

That allows me to segue nicely to what the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Woking, said about a credible plan; that is the plan, as he well knows, given that he was part of those deliberations and has been on many occasions. He talked about the appeals backlog—a very important point. I gently say that that is a sign of a system that we are getting to grips with. He will know—indeed, I think I have heard him talk about this before—that the original sin, particularly in relation to hotel capacity, comes from the backlog in initial decision making from when the previous Government just stopped making decisions. As a result, a huge backlog built up. I am very pleased that, as a Government, we have been able to get through that backlog.

The hon. Member has talked about this before, and I listened carefully to what he said about Nightingale-style decision making. I gently say that we do not need to do that, because of the decisions that have been made at a quicker rate, without affecting the grant rate but with better and improving quality. That of course creates pressures on the appeal system while that cohort of people move through it. That is not a forever thing, although I recognise it. He talks about a plan; he will have seen what we have said about appeals reform. I hope that he and his colleagues will feel able to support that in due course.

The hon. Member also talked about knock-on effects on others. I am particularly mindful of local government; he knows my passion for local government. The intention of this measure is not to shift the burden from the Home Office to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government or to councils. Indeed, he will have seen our plans to reduce homelessness, in respect of which we are a significant stakeholder. Of course we are mindful of those effects. I argue that the article 3 backstop in relation to destitution should give him—I hope it does—a degree of confidence that that is not going to happen.

The point about a right to work is one of principled disagreement between us. My strong view is that, if we know that traffickers are saying, “Come to the UK—you will be housed in a hotel and allowed to work illegally”, simply changing the reality so that the people can work legally would be an intolerable pull factor. However, to help close that gap there is the right to work at 12 months, so the gap is not so big. The hon. Gentleman suggested around six months. I do not know if he would go any further, but he certainly mentioned six in his contribution.

With regards to important questions around slavery, the hon. Member mentioned that he does not quite understand the definition of “deliberate”. I do not think people will be accidentally working illegally, but I accept they could be compelled to. That is why we have modern slavery protections through the Modern Slavery Act 2015. We of course take that exceptionally seriously. That vulnerable group of people will not be affected by these provisions.

The hon. Member gave me a slightly impossible challenge by asking me what I will do to make sure that a future Government who do not currently exist do not do something that he and I would not want. I kind of get that, but, as many people have said in this room over the centuries, one Government cannot bind the hands of a future Government. There is a reality there. That is why we have elections and we seek to continue in Government. However, at least in most cases, we have a backstop—we have an article 3 backstop and a refugee convention backstop—that gives universal protections irrespective of the Government of the day. Those principles are of course contested, although not by us, but I hope the hon. Member is reassured that the backstop exists.

The SNP spokesperson, the hon. Member for Dundee Central, spoke at great length about a world that I did not quite recognise, and which I have to say is not in anything we are preparing here. I say gently to him that there is nothing progressive about defending a status quo where human traffickers have the most agency and people routinely lose their lives in the channel, and that is before any sort of transit effects—never mind the impact on the women and children in that transit. If that was a challenge about where I sit on the political spectrum, there was language in what he said I would not recognise.

This is a hopelessly broken system; there is nothing progressive about defending it, which is why we are seeking to change it. The hon. Member set out quite a dystopian vision, but I gently say that for around six years of our nation’s history, between 1999 and 2005, we relied on the power rather than the duty. I was at school at the time and remember those days only tangentially, but it was not exactly a dystopian past, so I do not recognise what he said.

The hon. Member said that the support we have today should be a floor, not a ceiling. I have not heard from Scottish nationalist colleagues—even, I suspect, as a feature of the current election in Scotland—a suggestion of what services or public investments they would cut in order to top this up, and in what way. I hope that he will be out making the case for that on the doorstep as soon as possible, and at least quantify what we should stop doing, so that we can do more on this.

The hon. Member also mentioned destitution. Again, I would rely on the article 3 backstop on that. He talked about a “straw man”, but that is not in the nature of my politics. I reassure him that this is a genuine attempt to grip a system that does not work. We have had lots of debates in the Chamber on the other things we are doing; this is a serious attempt to grasp a serious problem. It is a good thing that the level of offending is mercifully low, but we want that level to be nil, as that is a fair balance with the taxpayer. That is why we are doing what we are doing.

The hon. Member for Fylde asked what side we are on—left or right? I am on the side of the British people. That is the reason why I am here. It is why I stood for my council. It is why I stood for Parliament and why I wanted to be a Government Minister.