Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Liam Byrne Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I am glad that the debate has provided an opportunity for former immigration Ministers to come together for some therapy and to share a little experience about the principles at the heart of the Bill. I served as immigration Minister for nearly two and a half years—in fact, I think that I am the longest-serving former immigration Minister still in the House—so I know a little about what it takes to deliver an immigration system, and I have sympathy with some, albeit not many, of the comments that I have heard from the Government Benches this afternoon.

I will say three quick things about deterrence, international agreements and staying true to our values in these debates. I was the Minister who introduced the UK Border Agency. I brought UKvisas from the Foreign Office and customs from the Treasury into the Home Office to create a £2 billion agency with a simple principle at its core: that border security in the 21st century cannot simply be about defending the border at the shores of our country. In this day and age, one has to operate a triple border. We have to export the border as far away from these shores as possible; we need to have a strong border at those shores; and then we need to have strong in-country enforcement. The only way in which we can get that system to work, and to work effectively, is to fund it.

Global migration pressures are growing sharply. As the right hon. Member for Bournemouth West (Sir Conor Burns) rightly flagged, 184 million people globally now live outside the borders of their birth, and there are 37 million refugees. Those migration pressures have been growing exponentially since the fall of the Berlin wall, and will continue to grow exponentially in the years to come, not least as the ravages of extreme weather drive more and more people in fragile, conflict and violent countries into poverty. People will always go that extra mile to seek a new life abroad. If we are to have strong borders for this country, yes we must have deterrence, but the deterrence is the speed of justice. It is not the prospect of overriding domestic laws and shipping people off to some remote deportation centre. That is why Home Office officials are right to say that the Bill and its objectives provide very little deterrence, because the Bill does not accelerate the process of rendering a decision on a person’s case and, if they have no basis to be in this country, removing them very rapidly.

Under the administration that I ran, we knew that we had to transform the speed of deportation, which is why we moved heaven and earth to ensure that one person who had no right to be here was removed every eight minutes. That was the kind of pace that was needed to send the very clear message that, if a person is found to have no right to be here, they will be removed very quickly. That is the most effective form of deterrence. The House has to confront the reality. Given a choice on how to spend £400 million of taxpayers’ money, do we spend it on building a remote processing centre in a far-away place, which our own officials tell us is will have no deterrent effect whatsoever, or do we invest it in creating a system that takes decisions quickly and removes people quickly if they have no right to be here?

The first thing one learns as an immigration Minister is that we cannot remove people unless we have agreements with other countries to take them. This is not a country that just drops people out of the back of aeroplanes if they have no right to be here: we have to get them new travel documents, and to have other countries that agree to take them. Frankly, the most important countries with which we need those kinds of agreements are our closest neighbours in Europe, so if we are about to destroy—wipe out and consign to history—decades’ worth of human rights agreements with our closest neighbours, how easy do we really think it will be to get return agreements of any type with those European countries? It is going to get harder and harder, because we will be seen not as good partners, but bad partners. That will not help us to get in place the kinds of returns agreements we are going to need if we are to keep our border and immigration system working well in the 21st century.

My final point is about the Human Rights Act. It is a terrible sight to see the party of Churchill depart so quickly from one of Churchill’s proudest legacies. The European convention on human rights and the Council of Europe were not ideas that were dreamed up out of thin air. They were ideas led, promulgated and delivered by Winston Churchill. That vision—his vision—of a great charter to bring peace to a war-divided continent was based on our experience of protection against torture and against unfair imprisonment and protection of life. Those are ideas that we in this country pioneered, from Magna Carta through the Bill of Rights to the European convention on human rights. The idea that the Conservative party will now lead us in departing from that tradition is a very sorry state of affairs. We in this country are the pioneers of human rights—we celebrated that anniversary with the United Nations at the weekend. It is something we should hold dear.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. I call David Jones. [Interruption.] David Jones?