Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 10th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury. He is a fellow Lancastrian and we always talk common sense, so I think what he said is entirely sensible.

The issue of illegal immigration by small boats, which is central to our discussion today, is not just a UK problem; it is a problem in western Europe. Greece, Italy and Spain, among others, are struggling with it, and no one is finding it an easy problem to resolve.

However, one country has actually cracked it. I refer to Australia. What happened at the beginning of this century was that people came from Papua New Guinea in small boats—quite large boats in some cases—to the northern shores of Queensland. The then Liberal Government decided that the way to tackle that was to pass an amendment to existing migration legislation, not dissimilar from the measures that my noble friend is introducing today, and at the same time establish, radically and newly, an overseas processing centre on the island of Nauru near the Solomon Islands. The boats stopped coming, and that was the end of the matter.

Subsequently a Labor Government came in who, interestingly enough, opposed all this. They dismantled it, and a second wave of boats came through. The Labor Government then changed tack and began to implement the Liberal policies that they had previously opposed, but it was too late: there was a general election, the Liberal Government were returned on a policy of national sovereignty and they produced a more thoroughgoing version of the original policy. As a result, the Labor Government changed their tune, and that policy, which stopped the boats completely, has cross-party support.

On the basis of that, Australia has produced a methodical and rational system of immigration, with total cross-party support, looking at the number of people each year that it wants to allow into the country, including those who want to come in as students, those who want to come for family reasons and those who want to come in to work. It is debated annually—a whole day’s debate in Parliament, rather like the debate we are having at the moment—and then decisions are made and the policies implemented. The numbers can go up and down. The latest interest is that the new Labor Government have decided to increase the level of migration, but within a framework that has solid cross-party support.

I will not pretend that there are not big legal and geographical differences between Australia and this country—obviously that is so—but none the less it is important to look not just parochially at what we do but across the world at what is being done. It seems to me that they have done something very wise that we could well implement. I have talked to them at some length over the past year about how they did it. They stress to me that it was essential, first, that they denied to illegal migrants the possibility of being an asylum seeker and, secondly, that they could then transfer them to the overseas processing centre near the Solomon Islands at great speed. That, in essence, is what we are trying to do here: to turn the situation around very rapidly within the framework of British laws, which are different from Australian laws.

Those who oppose the Government’s policy tend to argue that we need new pathways for legal immigration, and I entirely agree. What we have at the moment is rather unsatisfactory; it is too specific to particular countries and too narrow, and we need to expand it and have a more rational approach. However, the truth is that we need to do that while having policies to deter. We need both. We need—to use a Lancastrian term—a belt-and-braces approach to this issue, otherwise we will not succeed.

I made this point, incidentally, when we had the debate on 9 December initiated by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury—good for him, because we need debates on this topic of immigration. He argued that it was right to have more legal pathways, because if we had a new, low-cost way of getting here, it would demolish the model of the traffickers, who would no longer be in business. Sadly that is not the case, as my noble friend Lord Howard pointed out earlier. If we have a new way of coming here, the people who do not get on to that route will find a private method, either because they cannot or do not want to get on to the new route or because they find it more congenial to come via private methods. Whatever the reason, we will not kill off the traffickers’ trade if we simply offer more legal routes. We have to have a deterrent as well.

There is also a bigger picture that we ought to mention, which sometimes the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, rightly mentions: this is a small number; the big number is the 700,000 or so people who are coming across legally, and we have to have a look at them. I am sure my noble friend Lord Hodgson will elucidate on this in his remarks. We need to look at that bigger picture.

This is a small beginning but, if we can get it right and get public trust back, then we can also tackle the bigger problem.