Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, many moons ago I was a staff writer on the Financial Times and occasionally involved in writing leaders. Those of us who wrote leaders for national newspapers were well aware that they were not exactly the first point of interest. I do not know how noble Lords read their newspapers, but I start with the back pages, which were particularly pleasant today, with the reports of the win in India in the first test match. Then I went to the news on the front pages, then to the features and then finally the leaders. However, as a leader writer, I was aware that the opinion expressed in the leaders is the collective view of at least the senior people on the newspaper in question. Therefore, I was very interested to read the views of the Times on 15 January, where it said, under the headline, “Return of Rwanda”:

“The legislation would prevent a general claim that Rwanda is an unsafe destination but not rule out a specific case of an individual being at risk for some reason. That is in principle a sensible balance, respecting the will of parliament and the rights of the individual”.


That is precisely the view taken by our colleagues in the other place, without any further amendment.

Of course, we are here because the Supreme Court concluded that the Government’s policy was unlawful. I therefore took the trouble to read the Supreme Court evidence—57 pages of it. I understand from its procedures that it has to take a view on the hard evidence; that point has been made. The hard evidence that it took was from the UNHCR before September 2022.

However, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart, pointed out in his opening remarks, the problem with this approach is that it does not look at the evidence today or as it may be in the future. It did not go to Rwanda and took no evidence of that kind. The fact is, as has been pointed out many times, that Rwanda is a rapidly developing situation. It is helping the UK with its illegal immigration and, in return, getting a significant chunk of development aid. It hopes this will be a model for other European countries—and other European countries are following this closely—which will work for the future. Therefore, Rwanda has every incentive to make this policy work.

This raises the question, incidentally, of whether this sort of decision—as to whether Rwanda can be trusted—is one that should be made by Governments or by courts. The Supreme Court raised this question, but it did not, in the end, give a view.

We are where we are. I believe the Government have made a big effort to meet the Supreme Court’s points. In particular, they have put a lot of work into capacity building, which is what the Australians did when they faced a similar problem over outsourcing to Nauru, near the Solomon Islands. The Australians provided training, support and expertise, and had a permanent presence on the ground, and the UNHCR was kept in touch. This trilateral approach has worked and now has all-party support. That is the opportunity we may face here. I think it should be put to the test.