Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Leicester, and I agree with very much of what he had to say. I note that I am to be followed by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. The noble Baroness and I have made common cause on a number of issues, but tonight she will probably disagree with almost every word I am going to say, because I think the direction of travel of this Bill is a good one. There are issues we shall need to think about, debate and possibly amend in Committee, but today, at Second Reading, we are discussing the strategic objectives of the Bill, and I think these are right, worthy and in tune with the wishes of the British people. I do so on three grounds: fairness, impact and morality.

First, on fairness, it cannot be right at any level to allow people, however desperate, to be able to game the system which governs legal entry to this country. To allow this to happen is to create the major pull factor that my noble friend Lord Wolfson raised in his opening remarks. It is not fair to those people, possibly equally desperate, who have followed the legal procedures, and it is not fair to the British people. As a nation, we place great weight on fairness, and nothing is more likely to undermine public consent for our immigration policies than a view that the regulations are being evaded and abused.

Secondly, by impact, I mean the effects, in the widest sense, of rapidly increasing population in what is already a relatively crowded island. It is not just about immigration, because some of our population increase comes about from the natural increase of the excess of births over deaths. Since the Blair Government opened our borders to mass immigration, we are likely to have seen an increase in our population of 13 million —8 million so far, and another 5 million projected by the ONS. That is 25% of our population in 1997.

When you give those figures, people look at you as though you are a little Englander—not so. I fully accept the new arrivals bringing an economic and cultural dynamic from which our society has benefited, but this is about scale and thinking about the widest impacts of population growth and responding to the concerns of the people of this country in a way that builds trust in government. What are those concerns? They include the impact on our economy, our national food and water security, our environment, our ecology, our society and, last but not least, our ability to meet our climate change treaty obligations. For all these reasons, it is very important that we keep tight control of the numbers arriving. In particular, we need to discourage—as the Bill seeks to do—forum shopping, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Green, pointed out, is an issue to which this country is particularly vulnerable.

Finally, I turn to the difficult issue of morality. Here I emphasise, or follow, the remarks of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. I think we can all agree that what we really value is compassion linked to a sense of community and of civic responsibility. When we see our fellow human beings in desperate straits, we want to help, particularly if they are children.

Professor Diana Coole of London University has written extensively on the dangers of trying to create a general policy based and founded on the tragedy of an individual or a series of individuals. Yes, we want to give a hand to the Afghans whom we saw in terrible circumstances last autumn. Yes, we want to give a hand to the Hong Kong Chinese who are now under threat from the Beijing Government. Yes, of course, we want to give a hand to the desperate people we saw in the channel last autumn. But as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, will point out in his debate tomorrow, there are 82.4 million displaced people worldwide and many of them are in very serious situations.

To those who suggest that the way to deal with this is to open more legal channels, process applications faster and process those applications at source to cut out the people smugglers, I can see the force of those arguments but we are in danger of creating an immigration superhighway. Those who argue for this need to say what number they think we can accept under the system. What number in a year or over an average of five years? That is an inconvenient truth that has to be faced but face it we must, and because this Bill is trying to face a number of inconvenient truths it has my support.