Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th February 2024 Lords Chamber

It appears that our much-admired Modern Slavery Act and the process for identification of victims are no longer available for anyone who comes to this country other than through the very limited safe routes. The possibility of prosecuting traffickers will also be dramatically reduced. These amendments are intended to give some support to those who are or are about to be victims of a hugely profitable and odious trade in men, women and children. I ask the Government to listen and exempt them from removal from this country.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord German, could not move the amendment in his name. I can tell that House that he is a marvellous chairman of the Parliament Choir and has an unrivalled ability to speak the poetry of Dylan Thomas with all the Welsh fervour that it demands.

I understand the good intentions of those who are putting forward the amendments in this group, but I fear they suffer from a real difficulty. In particular, in Amendment 23 the new subsection (1A)(c) would exempt a person who is

“a victim of human trafficking”.

The problem with that is that it drives a coach and horses through the Government’s intentions, which are, of course, to draw the category for exceptions extremely narrowly, so that most people do go to Rwanda, and therefore it is a definite deterrent to people leaving France and trying to get to this country as illegal immigrants. That is the whole point of the legislation, and it needs that sharpness and narrowness of exclusivity to achieve that aim. I fear that, in the hands of any sensible immigration lawyer, simply saying that the person might be a victim of human trafficking opens the whole thing to abuse.

I make that point because I have just been reading in the newspaper this morning that the Home Office is about to buy, or has bought, 16,000 homes in this country to house those illegal asylum seekers who are at the moment in hotels. It wishes to transfer those people, because of the public cost, to residential houses or flats, and that is what it is proposing to do. This housing they are taking is social housing and private rental housing, particularly in areas such as Bradford, Hull and Teesside, which are low-rent areas and obviously comparatively deprived areas. I think this shows the domestic consequences of allowing in the present number of illegal migrants and why the Government have to bear those in mind as well as our undoubted sympathy for those who may be suffering from human trafficking, slavery and so forth. These factors clearly have to be balanced; the domestic responsibilities of the Government with the concern for illegal immigration of this kind. I hope the House will bear that in mind when it considers these amendments.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

Before the noble Lord sits down, can he answer a question? Under Home Office figures, 78% of those people who have been referred to the national referral mechanism for being trafficked or in modern slavery have been successful and, by definition, a woman who is trafficked here—not smuggled but trafficked—will be unaware of the final destination. It will be against her will. How will she be deterred by this Bill?

[Lord Horam (Con)]

She will be deterred because the Bill is designed to send people to Rwanda, with a very narrow area of exemptions for those who cannot be sent to Rwanda. That is the way it will operate. Obviously, it will need to be spelled out, and the Government will have to put behind it all the explanations they can through modern social media et cetera to get across the message to the people who are at present in France that there is a real possibility that they will end up not in the UK but in Rwanda. That is how it works. That is how it is supposed to work, and I submit that widening it to all these other possibilities will detract from that deterrent element and therefore destroy the purpose of the Bill, with the domestic consequences that we can see.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, it is extremely difficult to debate anything in the Bill if the only answer of those who are happy with it is, “It is all very difficult, and therefore we have just got to do it as we are saying, because we really cannot deal with any of the details”. I have to say to my noble friend that the fact that we are talking about people who come to this country not illegally but involuntarily means that we are not talking about people who are going to be deterred by anything. They do not want to come here, so the question is how we deal with those.

I must say I am a bit tired of having to remind this Government of what it means to be a Conservative. I had to do it earlier, on the single market, and I am now doing it on this. We have a reputation in the world because of our Modern Slavery Act. It was a brave and important thing to do. It was welcomed across the whole House. I am proud that it was a Conservative Government who did it. I am not proud that there is a Conservative Government undermining that, when we know that more than three-quarters of those who appeal in these circumstances are found to be right in their appeal.

We also know that appeal is very difficult. We know how many people who are trafficked do not get into the system because of the nature of trafficking. Those of us who sit in our comfortable places might just think, on Ash Wednesday, that this is a moment to reach out to those who are uncomfortable and not able to speak up for themselves. There are few people who are in a worse position than those, so on what possible moral basis do you threaten to send them to a country which has not signed up to the international agreement on modern slavery, has twice as many modern slaves as we do—and we admit that we have many whom we have not traced—and has a history of ignoring this problem? How on earth can we defend that on a moral basis, leave alone a practical one? What the blazes is the use of claiming that there is a deterrent effect when the person you are talking about is not in a position to be deterred because they have been taken up by someone who has made those decisions for them?

I believe we cannot allow the Bill to go through without some serious consideration of this point and make sure that we do not allow our country to be let down in this way.