UK Asylum and Refugee Policy

Lord Horam Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I am always amazed by the simple fact that, when I was born 83 years ago at the beginning of the Second World War, there were 2 billion people in the world and now there are 8 billion—a fourfold increase. That is an explanation of climate change, if you need any other. If you add climate change to bad government, wars and extremism, it is scarcely surprising that forced migration is on the scale that it is and, frankly, likely to get worse.

I have a family member who works for Marie Stopes International, now known as MSI Reproductive Choices. She is working on bringing family planning help to women in developing countries, including in west Africa. I always say to her that no one in the world is giving more practical help than her.

Obviously, the UK will want to make its contribution to helping with this problem. We always help with these international problems and have an outstanding record, but we are a small and heavily populated country. Since the Blair Government opened the floodgates, net migration has been at a very high level. We have been importing a city the size of Newcastle upon Tyne pretty well every year since the beginning of the century. In the last 12 months, it was two such cities, as the net migration figure was over 500,000.

This has had massive consequences for housing and public services, particularly in the poorer parts of our country, as my noble friend Lady Stowell pointed out in a very perceptive speech, which is where immigrants mainly go. The Labour and trade union activist Paul Embery described in his book Despised the catastrophic effect on his hometown of Dagenham. There have been severe environmental consequences. The Times columnist Emma Duncan pointed this out recently in an article with the headline “green space trumps migration”. Then there is the threat to social cohesion, a product in Lancashire that I know very well. All the while, public opinion, which is strongly against mass immigration, has been ignored. If you ignore people’s views in a democracy, you eventually get a raspberry. We got that raspberry in Brexit, which was partly caused by the weaponising of immigration.

How do we square this circle? How do we make a contribution to the international problem yet cope with the serious downsides? My answer is the same as that of my noble friend Lord Lilley. Let us prioritise. I would give maximum priority to those in greatest need: the genuine asylum seekers, the real refugees, properly defined. If you give priority to genuine refugees, that means there is less room for other migrants. I am particularly appalled by the recruitment teams that leave the UK to hire doctors, nurses and care workers for the National Health Service. The countries from which we hire them need them far more than we do. I remember paying a visit as part of a parliamentary delegation to Botswana when the AIDS problem was at its height. I asked how they were dealing with putting out the necessary drugs; they said they did not have enough nurses, as they had all gone to the NHS because they got more money. That is the consequence of our immoral migration policy in that area.

I am an economist. In my view, much the same arguments apply to economic migrants. I remember a Jamaican politician saying to me, “How do you expect us to build a modern society when every year half our graduates disappear to the United States or Europe?” The CBI has said that it wants more immigrants to fill vacancies. This is ridiculous. I started out running a successful medium-sized business. Manpower planning is a major part of the job. You have to think ahead and train. The CBI and the Government should stop moaning and see this as an opportunity. I would readily reduce the number of migrants of this kind, which is far larger, as you could then have an increase in the number of asylum seekers coming to this country and widen the scope for them.

Finally, there is the question of illegal immigration across the channel. The problem here is that those who criticise it never put forward any solution. Simply saying that we should have more legal routes is not a solution because it leaves the traffickers in business, and while they are in business, people will take their chances. I listened carefully to the remarks of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham on this point, and neither of them filled in this hole in their argument, I am sorry to say. We have a new team in place—including my noble friend who sits on the Front Bench, whom I welcome to his place—and in my view its watchwords should be “compassion” and “control”; if the team keeps those two words in mind, it will not go far wrong.