Brexit: Refugee Protection and Asylum Policy (EUC Report)

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I am privileged to serve on the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee with the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. I can say that, in our time together, we have never had a single word of disagreement: we are united as one in condemning Bills which are mere skeletons or stuffed full of Henry VIII clauses or where the negative procedure is used instead of the affirmative. Now, I am not going to talk about unaccompanied children today, but I am certain that the noble Baroness will not agree with what else I have to say; I hope only that she will still speak to me when we meet tomorrow morning.

This is yet another authoritative report from one of our EU committees, but of course it is now two years old. Thus, in my contribution I want to ask my noble friend the Minister for an update on where we are with creating our own bilateral arrangements to replace the Dublin III regulation, which are described in the Government’s response to the report as “a comprehensive readmissions agreement”. Under that agreement, we would seek

“the return of EU, UK and third-country nationals who have entered the UK directly from an EU country, and vice versa.”

The response said that such an agreement would preferably be

“underpinned by continued access to Eurodac, or a similar biometric system”,

but this would be subject to negotiation with the EU. I would be grateful to hear from my noble friend the Minister how we are getting on with that.

The committee raised concerns that, if we leave the EU without the continuation of a Dublin-type agreement, it would be more difficult to control the numbers of illegals crossing to the UK. But, in my opinion, Dublin III is a joke; it is ignored by the EU in any case. There can be no legal or moral justification for illegal asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or anywhere else in Africa or the Middle East arriving in this country. Genuine asylum seekers are supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country outside their own.

Let me make it clear: genuine asylum seekers are not a threat to anyone in this country and they should be welcomed. I deplore those who criticise genuine asylum seekers. But the problem is not helped when we have so many illegals crossing through Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Romania, Germany, Italy, Spain and eventually France for onward transmission to the UK. These people give a bad name to all the genuine migrants.

These people are not genuine asylum seekers; they are economic migrants who want a better life in this country. There is no harm in that, and anyone who wants to emigrate here for a better life should be able to do so. But we have the fundamental right who to take and who to reject, and I submit that we are not rejecting enough illegal seekers—or, rather, we are rejecting plenty, but we see masses of activist lawyers using every excuse and trick in the book to let them stay, even when all legal avenues have been exhausted so far. At the weekend, I read that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary is aiming to increase the number of illegals deported. Of course, the problem is that, as soon as the flight is about to leave, another bunch of lawyers pop up to stop it, no matter how many times the case has failed in the past.

Then we come to problem, which is never talked about, of French co-operation—or possible complicity. I am not sure how many millions we have given to the French authorities to strengthen defences against illegal crossings, but something is clearly not working. Note that the vast majority of crossings are made in good-quality RIBs. These rigid inflatable boats may be heavily overcrowded and dangerous, but they are all in pretty good condition with good outboard engines. Where do thousands of illegal asylum seekers get their hands on those? If I turned up in the north of France tomorrow, I would not be able to find a boat like that; I would not know where to go for one. They get them from the despicable racketeers who take money from these people for crossing over, stuff the boats full of far too many people who then drown or suffer. These racketeers must be getting the boats from legitimate suppliers.

I suggest that we work with the French to take action against all those businesses in the north of France selling rigid inflatable boats to asylum racketeers. Does anyone seriously suggest that the local French authorities do not know who is organising this locally or where these thousands of nice new RIBs come from? Are we asked to believe that these asylum seekers turn up not knowing a thing about northern France but miraculously discover all these boats that are ready for them?

Satellite images can show these boats being prepared and readied to be loaded. While I personally would have the SBS working the shores and taking out these boats before they set off, thereby saving the lives of those who would climb on board and possibly drown, I accept that that is too radical for Her Majesty’s Government. Therefore, we should pay the French to do it for us—and we will need to pay more than the racketeers are paying some of them to turn a blind eye.

Another bit of French possible complicity—which my noble friend dare not comment on either—is the authenticated reports that French government patrol boats were gently shoving boatloads of illegals into UK territorial waters, where the rescue service would take them to England and the life that they wanted. These actions are not by local officials in the Calais region, but by boats operated by the French Government. We may be outraged, but possibly we should not be surprised. The French Government have a problem with illegal asylum seekers in the camp at Calais and elsewhere on the French coast. Every time that they try to disperse them, they come back. So it is understandable that the French have concluded that the only way to deal with their Calais problem is to shove them on their way to England. Since many of these illegals have destroyed their passports or identity documents, it is exceptionally difficult to send them back. I urge the Government to seek a way forward on that.

I repeat that this country has always welcomed genuine asylum seekers and we want genuine immigration from skilled migrants. That is our fundamental duty and it is our history. But we need to redouble our efforts to stop all illegal and unjustified migration. As I said, economic migrants who have travelled through a dozen safe countries are not deserving and should not be classed as genuine asylum seekers, because they are destroying it for all the real, genuine ones.