Illegal Migration Bill

Laura Farris Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

Finally, I support Lords amendments 102 on safe and legal routes. It is clear that giving a two-month period for the Government to come back with a plan of implementation for safe and legal routes is a very sensible measure. The Home Affairs Committee made it clear in our report that safe and legal routes was one of the clear recommendations the Government should adopt if they seriously want to tackle the small boats problem. I also support Lords amendment 103 on the National Crime Agency and organised immigration crime enforcement, which I think is a very useful and helpful amendment, and Lords amendments 104 and 107 from the Archbishop of Canterbury on the 10-year strategy on refugees and human trafficking, which I again think would help the Government in dealing with the small boats problem.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

I will begin with Lords amendment 2, which would remove the retroactivity provisions that state that the Bill would apply to anyone who arrived on or after 7 March 2023, which is the date that the Bill was introduced in the House. There is a good reason generally why we do not allow legislation to apply retrospectively: so that there is legal certainty and people are bound only by the obligations that apply at the time. I accept without reservation that the law would be in disarray, for example, if new criminal offences had retrospective effect and people found themselves criminalised for things that they could not possibly have known to be unlawful at the time.

I respectfully submit, however, that this is not that kind of point. There is no principled argument to be made. First, the Government made it clear that the date the Bill was introduced was the same date on which it would become effective. Secondly, a person cannot argue in any compelling way that they decided to make an illegal crossing to the United Kingdom in March because they believed that they might end up in a hotel in Southampton, but now that they know they might have ended up going to Rwanda, they would not have made the illegal crossing. I am afraid that that argument does not work at all. I accept the Government’s position that the only way in which the policy will have the desired deterrent effect is if it has retrospective effect, so that we do not create perverse incentives for people smugglers to surge the crossings immediately before the Bill receives Royal Assent.

The second tranche of Lords amendments includes those that the Immigration Minister identified as wrecking amendments—amendments 1, 7, 90 and 93—and I will deal with them collectively. Lords amendment 7 seeks to strike out clause 4(1)(d), which states that removal should take effect irrespective of whether there is a judicial review application. Lords amendment 90 seeks to strike out clause 52, which states that interim orders may not halt deportation. Lords amendment 93 seeks to strike out removal pending an age verification appeal.

There is a wider point about those amendments. Collectively, they seek to dilute the deterrent effect of all removal provisions. Whatever we disagree on in this Chamber concerning current migration, we can probably achieve a consensus on one point: this situation will not get any easier to resolve. Whether the UNHCR is correct in saying that there are 100 million displaced people, or whether there are tens of millions, the reality is that famine, climate change, flooding and conflict will result in more and more people leaving their countries of origin to try to come elsewhere.

Any nation that tries to resolve the situation in its domestic arrangements will have to follow a strategy similar to the one that the Government are pursuing. The first element of that strategy is to decide on a cap for admissions and then—likely with UNHCR support in the future—to give proper consideration in advance to who should come under the quota scheme. The current schemes that are working very well in relation to Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong provide a good starting point. The second element is to deter all illegal migration by ensuring, with only the narrowest of exceptions, that an individual gains absolutely nothing from doing this.

The objective of the Illegal Migration Bill and, by extension, the Rwanda scheme is to remove illegal immigrants quickly without prejudice to their wider right to challenge the deportation order later, because the rationale is that speedy deportation deters others from coming to the country. Many eminent people agree with that proposition. As the former Supreme Court Justice, Lord Sumption, said in his foreword to Professor Ekins’ recent paper for Policy Exchange:

“This objective is frustrated if deportees are able to hold up their removal for years while their challenge goes through potentially three tiers of appeal followed by a petition to Strasbourg. The process commonly takes years.”

He continued by stating that “whatever one thinks” of the Rwanda scheme, if

“interim measures are available in cases like this, it is probable that no legislative scheme for the prompt removal of illegal immigrants”—

could ever “succeed.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris]

I will come back on two points. First, under the Bill, annual quotas will be decided upon with the consent of various local authorities that will be responsible for accommodating those people, and that is the right approach. On illegal migration, people arriving through irregular routes should not take precedence over those arriving lawfully through safe and legal routes. We could not allow a system where one displaces the right of the other, and that is a feature of this Bill.

The second thing I want to talk about is the effect of judicial reviews. Lords amendment 7 would permit judicial reviews. I cannot improve on the language used by David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary, introducing Labour’s flagship immigration Bill, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which was supported at the time by the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). I wanted to refresh my memory of what he said on Second Reading, because it was a powerful part of his speech. He said:

“At the moment the system is virtually unworkable. People can bring a judicial review during the process of the initial appeal, and when they reach the right to appeal to the tribunal they can judicially review the tribunal for not allowing the appeal to the tribunal. They can then judicially review the tribunal’s decision and they can judicially review whether they are entitled to go to the court of appeal following failure at the tribunal. The whole system is riddled with delay, prevarication, and, in some cases, deliberate disruption of the appeals process. Then they can judicially review the decision on removal even when the appeals have been gone through.”—[Official Report, 24 April 2002; Vol. 384, c. 355.]

We have simplified the system a bit since then, but effectively he is right. He was right then to seek to effect removal after one right of appeal had been exhausted, and the Government are right now to aim for swift removal without judicial review holding everything up.

My final point, briefly, is about the speech that the former Supreme Court Justice Lord Brown made on Second Reading of this Bill in the Lords. He sat as a Cross-Bench peer, and he died on Friday. He said:

“No doubt the Bill can be improved in various ways, but we must recognise that almost every amendment we make to soften it can tend only to weaken its essential objectives: stopping the boats… We really must…give the Government the opportunity by this Bill finally to confront this most intractable of problems.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 May 2023; Vol. 829, c. 1806.]

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I start by referring Members to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests for the support I receive from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy project.

Despite their lordships’ best efforts, this remains in my 18-plus years in this place comfortably the worst piece of legislation I have seen come to this House. That is not because I disagree with it—I have probably disagreed with most stuff in my 18 and a bit years here—but because it is based on several bogus understandings of the truth. Within it, there is a deplorable bias towards the inhumane.

To start with Lords amendment 1, we have an attempt to get the Government to do something massively radical: to comply with international obligations. The notion that we should not do that, or that we do not need to do that, is based upon the desire to depict the current situation—the boats situation and the asylum situation in the UK—as an emergency. I will come to that in a moment.

The two likely consequences of the UK habitually choosing to not comply with its international obligations are: first, that we become a pariah, and are seen internationally as not a team player, and thereby we are less effective in all parts of our policy around the world, whether economic, defensive or otherwise; and, secondly, that others will copy us and, as a consequence, the whole system breaks down. I often hear Members on the Government Benches say, “France is a safe country, why don’t people stay there?”. The simple answer to that is, “Yeah, it is. So is Spain and so is Italy.” If we end up in a situation where other people copy us, the whole network breaks down and we end up in a desperate situation. If we care about our position internationally, we need to care about that.

Let us turn straight to the Government’s justification for not complying with their international obligations, including issues to do with modern slavery and child detention, on which the Lords has made helpful amendments. Their explanation is that the situation constitutes an emergency. Does it? In the Home Secretary’s words, we are currently being swamped by refugees. Let us look at some facts to see whether either of those things bears any scrutiny. As we speak, Germany takes four times more asylum seekers than the United Kingdom, and France takes 2.5 times more asylum seekers than the United Kingdom. If we were to add the United Kingdom back into the European Union for statistical purposes, just 7% of asylum seekers would come to the UK and, per capita, the UK would be 22nd out of 28. Demonstrably, the United Kingdom has not faced an especial problem. We are not being swamped, and such language is demeaning of this country and of the office of Home Secretary.

The Government say, “Ah, but it’s different here, because we’ve taken in 250,000 Ukrainian refugees as well as those coming in through other routes.” I am utterly proud that the United Kingdom has been among those countries who have taken in the most Ukrainian refugees, but we have not taken the most. Germany has taken 1 million Ukrainian refugees and, as I said, it still takes four times more asylum seekers than us, and Poland has taken 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees. It appears that talking about our support for Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees is an excuse for the Government in seeking to avoid their international obligations.

Britain’s problem needs to be put into overall context. The reality is that 70% of the millions of displaced people and refugees on planet Earth flee either to a different region of their country or to a neighbouring country. A steadily decreasing trickle of people end up at the end of the line—and, my goodness, the United Kingdom, over the channel, is the end of the line. Again, for us to state that we face an especial emergency in terms of the numbers of people coming here is totally bogus. It is important to state that and put it on the record.