Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Second sitting)

Kenneth Stevenson Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th February 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Pete Wishart]

And were they gang members?

Sarah Dineley: I cannot break that down, but that would include gang members. That is the total number of prosecutions.

[Kenneth Stevenson (Airdrie and Shotts) (Lab)]

Q This might be a lag question, which is quite engineering-based, but you mentioned proactive, pre-emptive and disruptive, and those are engineering terms as well. I am really interested in how they react and would work within the Bill, how they would help the Bill and how the Bill would help them. Could you give us some idea of that?

Rob Jones: In relation to the powers in clauses 13 to 16?

[Kenneth Stevenson]

Yes. I apologise—I think I have cut across the Minister, because she asked a very similar question, but, if you could give us an idea of how those three things that you spoke about before could be helped by the Bill, that would be really helpful.

Rob Jones: When we identify somebody from the UK who is involved in organising small boats crossings, for instance, we have to get very good, sophisticated surveillance control over that individual to get enough evidence to be able to produce a full file submission to the CPS for a section 25 facilitation offence. That could mean months of surveillance, or covert activity, in terms of eavesdropping and audio recordings.

In the meantime, we are seeing that individual with a public profile on social media, researching crossings, communicating with people overtly and meeting people. When you are looking at the commissioning of the offence, and you are living with somebody who is involved in serious organised crime, you are seeing that play out in front of you.

These clauses allow us to take elements of their business model—as they are meeting people, as they are researching, and as they are taking the preparatory steps to the section 25 offence—then go to the CPS and say, “We think we’ve got enough; we think we could go now.” That gives you more momentum, more speed and more agility.

It is the same mindset as trying to prevent attacks in the CT world. You would not choose to reactively investigate a terrorist attack; we would not choose to reactively investigate highly dangerous crossings in the English channel during which people get killed. We would choose to pre-emptively stop them, and that is what the new offences would introduce.

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

Q My question is regarding the asylum decisions backlog that the country faces, which we are now starting to move through. As a consequence, of course, some people will have their grants rejected and others will have them accepted. Where the grants are accepted, what would you say to anybody who claims that that could be a pull factor for people to try to access this country?

Then, just picking up on your point, Mr Jones, about criminal gangs starting to feel the pressure because of this new suite of tools, would you say that the tools provided for in this Bill, which will have a disruptive effect, could in consequence also have a deterrent effect on the criminal smuggler gangs?

Rob Jones: I will take the second question first. Obviously time will tell but, adding to what we are doing already, these tools will rack up the pressure, and that starts to change behaviour. It increases costs and increases friction in the business model. Those things contribute to deterring people from getting involved, and we see that with other areas of criminality. I will allow others to answer the asylum question.

Sarah Dineley: I am going to dip out, rather, and say that it is not really a matter for the Crown Prosecution Service, but I can tell you that the Home Office is undertaking a piece of work looking at what the pull factors are for migrants wanting to reach the UK, and at what point they reach the firm decision that the UK is their final destination.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

Yes, but that is gone.

Dame Angela Eagle: And very expensive they turned out to be. We have inherited such a mess, with huge backlogs and very long waits for appeals, that we have to try to clear up. We have an asylum system that essentially broke down—I think one of our witnesses was talking about it being “in meltdown” earlier today.

We are going to do the day job and start to get that system working. I think that having fast, fair and effective immigration decisions is a very important part of all of this, as is removing those whose claims fail so that we can actually get to the stage where people know that, if they come to this country and they do not have a reasonable chance of being accepted as an asylum seeker, they will be returned. I think that is what the deterrent is.

Seema Malhotra: If I may add one point, it is absolutely valid and right to say that this Bill is one part of trying to tackle both the criminal gangs and the demand. Certainly, the other side of the work that the Home Secretary has been leading on—in terms of agreements with other countries for returns, as well as the reasons why people are coming and what more could be put in place as a deterrent—is work that was also talked about in evidence today; international diplomacy is also an important part of the overall framework. That is going on in parallel, and it is important to be working upstream through diplomacy and agreements with other countries too.

[Kenneth Stevenson]

Q Listening today has been very interesting; I have written down some of the points. There were the points about organised crime, and about the Border Security Commander and the border post that he—or it might be a “she”, and I am not ultra-woke—would be in charge of. There is also the point about 2 million people coming over from Gaza, and that the tagging system has not worked, although I did not hear any evidence of that—I wanted numbers; as an engineer, I wanted to hear the background to that.

I then heard that there were no magical solutions and that war was not easy to win—so we are in a “war” with migrants. We then spoke about unkindness to asylum seekers. I think that the most important words that I heard today were proactive, pre-emptive and disruptive— that is what the Government are trying to be. Do you agree that that has to start with the gangs who are starting this and are pulling—or pushing—people across?

Dame Angela Eagle: Yes. There are many genuine asylum seekers, many of whom are granted asylum when they are finally processed, who have come in that way. There are also people who are trafficked, who are in debt bondage, who go into sex work in nail bars, say from Vietnam, or who end up—as the police chief told us—growing cannabis in hidden farms in all our communities or being involved in serious crime. Some of them are victims of modern slavery, and some of them are the perpetrators of all that kind of evil.