Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I offer qualified support for the Bill. I do so in the firm belief that, unless we seize this moment to regain credible control over all forms of migration, we shall betray both the national interest and the public trust. Regrettably, my own party failed to properly deal with the issue in government and to honour the pledges made in general elections between 2010 and 2019 to lower immigration—a policy currently supported by over 80% of the public in polls. Hence net migration increased massively in the last three Parliaments. We also did nothing to address the pernicious misuse of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights.

In fairness, the Bill does give Parliament a coherent framework: new powers for intelligence-led interceptions, faster inadmissibility decisions and tougher criminal offences for those who facilitate irregular entry. Yet legislation alone is not enough unless we confront the scale of the problem with unflinching candour. The net migration figure in 2022 was 764,000—that was the peak—but even last year the figure was 431,000. That number of people is equivalent to a city the size of Bristol, yet we built only 218,000 homes in England last year.

Some 81% of those migrants were from outside Europe, presenting major problems for integration and challenges related to shared identity, values, culture, history and way of life. Only 14% came to work, while 149,000 were family dependants. Figures released over the weekend show that over £900 million is claimed by foreign national households—one in six households—each month in universal credit, which is barely two months’ worth of the winter fuel allowance.

Mass uncontrolled migration is bad for the economy. It is astonishing that per capita GDP, at $49,464 in 2023, is less than it was in 2008—17 years ago. No civilised country can absorb such numbers year after year without acute pressure on housing, health care and social cohesion, particularly in the very towns and cities that feel least heard by liberal, metropolitan opinion-formers—who are of course well represented in your Lordships’ House.

At the illegal end of the spectrum, the channel crisis persists. More than 36,000 people arrived by small boat in 2024—up a quarter on 2023—and the death toll tragically reached 77, the worst year on record. On Saturday, as we heard, over 1,200 people crossed the channel—so much for smashing the gangs. Behind every dinghy is an organised-crime business model that mocks our sovereignty and imperils vulnerable lives.

The key question is: will the Bill be a real, effective and significant deterrent for people traffickers? The Government’s pointless and performative repeal of the safety of Rwanda Act—while begging last month for the support of the Albanian Prime Minister, in vain, for a resettlement hub—was entirely unnecessary and predictable, and destroyed such a deterrence. Meanwhile, the fiscal costs mount inexorably. Hotel accommodation for failed asylum seekers and those in the ever-lengthening backlog now drains £8 million every single day—money that could have trained 260 nurses or built three primary schools each week. Labour promised to reduce the number of asylum seeker hotels, but they have increased in number since July 2024.

That said, the Government deserve some credit for establishing the Border Security Command and their efforts to develop renewed bilateral returns agreements. But the command must be given teeth: it needs real-time data-sharing across MI5, the National Crime Agency and Border Force, and an unflinching mandate to disrupt the smugglers’ logistics upstream, not merely a mop up on our southern beaches.

Crucially, the Bill must address legal migration. Skilled worker and student routes, laudable in their intent, have become porous. Employers in the care sector are now permitted to import labour at a minimum salary that undercuts our own workforce, while overseas students—commended for their tuition fees—import 150,000 dependants a year. This is not an immigration system; it is an open invitation. Even the Defence Secretary said this week that the Government have lost control of our borders.

We need to insert a statutory annual cap on gross immigration, set by an affirmative resolution of both Houses, for work and study visas allocated by auction, to ensure that they are allocated to the areas that need them most. We need a new system of sureties for visa holders that ensures a financial penalty if they do not leave the country when their visas expire. We should require the Migration Advisory Committee to publish full displacement and wage-suppression effects, not just labour-market shortages. We need to disapply Section 3 of the Human Rights Act and Article 8 of the ECHR where they would thwart the deportation of serious criminals or those who have entered clandestinely.

The Times editorial was quite right on Saturday to excoriate the Attorney-General’s ill-judged and intemperate comments on those questioning the workings of the ECHR and to point out that many European countries are seeking sincerely to reform the convention to eject illegal immigrants and strengthen the asylum rules. I wonder why, if the Minister will answer the question, the UK has declined to support such an effort—for what reason? These measures are not draconian. They are proportionate, democratic and entirely consistent with our obligations under the 1951 refugee convention, properly interpreted, notwithstanding the fetishisation of international law by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and other noble Lords.

This is a necessary start, but without the amendments I have referenced it will be neither sufficient nor credible. We have a brief window—perhaps the last in a generation—to restore a balanced immigration policy that is fair, lawful and, above all, trusted by the British people. In conclusion, I commend in principle the Bill, but give notice that I and other noble Lords will table amendments to deliver the effective border control and the sustainable legal migration regime that this country both expects and deserves.

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[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his very comprehensive and helpful summing-up of the debate. He will understand that the current discussions around reforming the ECHR are germane to this Bill and wider immigration issues. There are nine countries doing that. This Government have not availed themselves of the opportunity to take part. If he cannot answer now, will he undertake to write to me, and put a copy of the letter in the Library, explaining why that is the case?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

We are aware that a letter has been circulated by countries, which is perfectly legitimate. They are countries within the European Union; we are outside the European Union now. We will look at the provisions of Article 8 and how we can interpret them but maintaining—very importantly for those Members who have raised these issues—our integral role as a member and supporter of the ECHR. That is a critical part of our international obligations, but it does not mean that we cannot look at interpretations and examine how we implement those regulations in a UK context. We will do that. I will certainly give the noble Lord a fuller reply in a letter, but I hope that reassures him that we will look at those issues.

I will look at Hansard in detail. I have sat through every minute of the debate today and heard every contribution in full. I look forward to the debates we will have on specific amendments and specific clauses. However, I look to this House to give support to the Government’s proposals to tackle criminal gangs who are exploiting people and bringing people to this country in an illegal way, even if those people have legitimate asylum claims. This is being done by criminal gangs for illegal profit. We need international co-operation to tackle the downstream issues and to tackle the gangs at source.

I commend this Bill to the House today in order to continue that progress and to ensure that we have a full debate in Committee on its contents and the suggestions that will undoubtedly come forward from all sides of the House.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 26th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, the amendments in this group are designed to extract some more information from the Government about who is going to be entrusted with the position of Border Security Commander. The Bill sets out that the Secretary of State can determine the terms and conditions of a designation as the commander. Our Amendment 3 seeks to tie the Government to publish these terms and conditions once they have been defined.

Crucially, our amendment also clarifies that the Government must define the KPIs that will be used to measure the performance of a commander in their role. This will allow not only the Government but these Houses and the wider public to review how effectively the commander is undertaking these duties.

The Border Security Commander is a big part of the Government’s offering on this question. We need to make sure that the person appointed is delivering a solution to the problem we are discussing, and how the Government are working to define parameters and conditions which will ensure that this is the case. If the Government are convinced that their policy will indeed tackle this issue effectively, I am sure that they will have no hesitation in welcoming the principle of these amendments as an opportunity for them to show the public how well their new policy is working, and to show their ambition in setting high standards for their new commander.

Furthermore, our Amendment 5 to Clause 2 seeks to incorporate greater oversight into the termination process for the Border Security Commander. The Government are creating a role which will be politically sensitive and upon which there will be a great deal of pressure, without necessarily the powers or duties to fulfil these demands. It is a post that demands public trust—and where public trust is concerned, silence is not an option.

To remove someone from that role without any explanation, transparency, accountability or scrutiny risks breeding, confusion, suspicion and the perception that something has gone wrong behind closed doors. That is precisely what undermines confidence in public institutions.

There is also precedent, as we know. When high-profile public officials are dismissed or step down, it is customary—indeed, expected—that a Ministerial Statement is made, and we have seen that with senior civil servants and the heads of public bodies. Unfortunately, the Government have been far too unwilling to come to Parliament to outline the reasons why they have chosen to terminate senior officials. We saw that only recently when the Government ousted the head of the Competition and Markets Authority, Marcus Bokkerink. The Secretary of State for Business and Trade issued a Written Ministerial Statement, but it took an Urgent Question from my honourable friend Andrew Griffiths for a Government Minister to come to the Dispatch Box in the other place to update Parliament. That should not be the case.

On a matter as important as this, we cannot afford to construct roles that can be managed and changed in the dark. We need to appreciate and understand the fact that the public have lost trust in the Government on this, and we need to make sure that the next steps we take command trust and regain the confidence that the public must have in us. I beg to move.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. It is a pleasure to participate in your Lordships’ Committee on this very important Bill.

Noble Lords will be aware that voter salience on the issue of immigration and border control is extremely high, and it is probably the second most important issue, behind the cost of living. That said, the Bill, as currently drafted, does a reasonable job, and we broadly welcome many of its measures, as the Minister will know. He started off as a bruiser, but he is now much more emollient in his reaction and in his Dispatch Box performance, and we agree on many things.

The Bill is very good on the accountability from civil servants, the Home Office and other key stakeholders to Ministers but less strong on that between Ministers and the outside world. When one looks at the level of scrutiny and oversight in, for instance, the Bundestag, the United States Senate or other legislative bodies that are performing a very vital scrutiny and oversight role of the border issue—which is, naturally, a very live issue now in the United States—one will see that there is nothing to lose by us having the opportunity to be open and transparent in seeing what the commander is actually doing.

It is vital that we put in primary legislation the ability of a parliamentary committee to bring the border commander to Parliament to answer questions at least once a year, to measure the efficacy of their policies and whether success is happening in line with what the elected politicians and your Lordships’ House require and to keep that bond of trust with the voters. There is a very low level of trust among the voters of all parties to deal, in the long term, with the issue of border control and the safety and security of the people of this country. It would be a very good idea for the Minister to at least consider that in relation to Amendment 3.

We also need clarity and openness about what the commander is doing. The worst thing about a closed system, where you have accountability only between one part of government and another, is that conspiracy theories and cynicism grow, and people cannot see that the Government are achieving their objectives. It would therefore be very useful to have the explicit terms and conditions to be laid down before Parliament included in Bill. I agree very much with my noble friend on that.

Finally, this is not an issue about the Labour Government; all Governments fall out with senior officials. It happened under the Blair Government, certainly under the Brown Government, and under the coalition Government. It is not ignoble to think that the person you have appointed no longer has the same priorities and imperatives that they should have in carrying out their role. Therefore, you have to do what they say in HR now and “dis-board” them—the opposite of onboarding and the equivalent of getting rid of them. We could say “giving them a new career trajectory”—let us be charitable. That should be the disinfectant of transparency. Bagehot once said, I think, that openness is needed to see what Governments are actually doing. The Government should therefore explain to the voters why that person did not fit in and was not able to fulfil their duties and responsibilities. That is the essence of Amendment 5.

On that basis, I ask the Minister to think about these things. As I often say, it would not invalidate the central premise of the Bill—it is very good in many respects, especially the first chapter—but it would be certainly improved by accepting the amendments. It would be a very powerful message from this Government and future Governments that they are serious about this topic, they are accountable and they are getting things done on behalf of the people who elected them.

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[Lord Paddick (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, while agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, on the detail that he has given, I rise to support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Hamwee—in particular, Amendments 29, 34, 36 and 37 to Clause 13, although similar arguments apply to her other amendments to Clauses 14 and 16. I apologise for not being available to speak at Second Reading because of other commitments, but that is no excuse to deliver my Second Reading speech now; I will simply address the amendments. I declare my interest, if it is relevant, as a non-executive director of the Metropolitan Police Service.

Generally, in criminal law, as my noble friend Lady Hamwee said, people are considered to be innocent until they are found guilty in a criminal court. Until fairly recently, instances of reverse burden of proof have been exceptionally rare and, in most cases, the reasons have been self-evident. For example, if someone is in possession of an offensive weapon made or adapted to cause injury, such as a knuckle-duster—something with no other obvious use—the ball is clearly in the accused’s court in terms of their having to prove that they have a reasonable excuse for possession of such an article.

Here we are talking about items that could as easily have a lawful and legitimate use as they might have an unlawful use as the Bill suggests; that is, for use in immigration crime. I am thinking of things such as life jackets and inflatable boats. With the police power to arrest set at a very low standard of “reasonable cause to suspect that someone may be” about to commit a criminal offence, the prospect of innocent people being arrested under this provision is clear. Someone taking an inflatable boat down to the sea containing life jackets could reasonably be suspected to be committing an offence under this provision and therefore may be liable to arrest, even if they were a leisure user of such equipment. They could not argue that they had a reasonable excuse for possession of the boat and the life jackets, because that defence, according to the Bill, is not available to them until after they have been arrested, detained and charged and appeared in court.

That is clearly unreasonable. It should be open to anyone in such circumstances to be able to deploy the “reasonable excuse” explanation for their actions at the time of the incident, as my noble friend Lady Hamwee’s amendments suggest, and I therefore wholeheartedly support her amendments. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, has said, the safeguards are low, and the sentences—up to 14 years’ imprisonment—are high

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to this group of amendments and, with the exception of the amendments in the name of my noble friends on the Front Bench, to oppose them. It is always a pleasure, of course, to follow the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, who brings great expertise to our proceedings.

I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for whom I have great respect, but I have to say that I slightly disagree with him. I have read the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and I feel that the committee’s report in respect of precursor offences is less than compelling, if I am quite honest. I know that the Government will be, to a certain extent, circumscribed because they are not required to respond to the report until August; I am sure we would have benefited in this debate had we had the Government’s response. Nevertheless, the Government have made their position clear—and I support them in this respect—that Clauses 13 to 16 will strengthen the ability of law enforcement agencies to tackle the supply chains for the people-smuggling networks, which I think is what we are all interested in doing.

Although the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, come from the right place and are well-meaning, the real-world impact of them is that they weaken the ability of the Government and the appropriate authorities to tackle people smuggling, because they significantly change the burden of proof in respect of evidence for criminal liability and culpability. That de facto reversal of proof is not in the public interest. So in some respects the result of these amendments being agreed would be pernicious and not in the public interest, and would militate against the strategic priorities of the Government that we support: smashing the gangs and reducing illegal migration.

I do not want to detain the House at this hour with a long discussion on what mens rea means, but it does mean “guilty mind”. There are different aspects—

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

We will come to those arguments on mens rea. They are in later amendments. Perhaps the noble Lord would not want to jump ahead, because the groups of amendments dealing with that come in the next day in Committee on this Bill.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

The noble Lord admonishes me for perhaps jumping slightly ahead, so I will revert to Clause 13 and put a question to the Minister. The honourable Member for the Weald of Kent in the other place, when considering the Bill in Committee, mentioned a potential loophole arising from the draft wording in Clause 13. I accept that, in terms of reasonable excuse, the Bill is caveated in that it is not a definitive position that you have no excuse whatever. It is right that, when you are dealing with individuals, even when they are involved in something as appalling as people trafficking and illegal migration, there should always be some discretion for the criminal justice system to exercise in adjudicating on their alleged offences.

However, there is a question to be asked about Clause 13(3) and the “reasonable excuse” caveat in terms of a loophole. Do the Government see that as problematic in terms of future litigation? I would not use the term “two-tier justice”, but certainly there is an element that speaks to the fact that, if you do not charge for services and you are seeking to rescue a person, that absolves you of criminal responsibility. There is an argument that that sends out a message.

My problem with this group of amendments is that they reduce the push factor and increase the pull factor. Those will be the real-world consequences of making it easier for people to argue that they have a reasonable excuse and did not possess an intent to commit these new offences. So, on this occasion, I will probably agree with the Minister that the House should resist the amendments.

I also pray in aid the example that the Immigration Minister, Angela Eagle, used in the other place. She prayed in aid the case in November 2024 of Amanj Hasan Zada, who organised cross-channel boat crossings from his home in Lancashire. He was jailed for 17 years after being found guilty on people-smuggling charges. It was very much the view of the National Crime Agency and others that, had the proposals contained in the Bill been in place, he would have been brought to justice much earlier, and that it was only because the authorities, particularly the NCA, did not have the ability to use the full force of law in respect of the legislation obtaining at the time that he was not stopped from his abhorrent activities at an earlier juncture.

I finish by saying that we all wish to see fair play and due process. We all want a legal system that does not discriminate on the basis of race, background, ethnicity, religion, and so on, but, equally, we have to be realistic, practical and pragmatic. In the real world, we need to reduce the pull factor and increase the push factor. I think these amendments would do exactly the opposite and, for those reasons, I hope the Committee is not minded to support them.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

In reply to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, he seemed to suggest that the amendments from my noble friend Lady Hamwee would somehow be unusual in criminal law. She is obviously saying that, rather than to require the person to prove a reasonable excuse as their defence, the prosecution would have to prove “without reasonable excuse” as a component part of the offence.

I was looking at driving offences. I admit that this appears to be an AI overview, subject to correction by my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but, apparently, careless driving is

“driving without due care and attention”

or

“driving without reasonable consideration for other road users”.

Presumably the prosecution has to prove that you were driving without due care and attention or without reasonable consideration for other road users. It is not, at least in the first instance, for the driver to have to prove that they were taking due care and attention or that they were showing reasonable consideration for other road users. I forget any criminal law that I learned many moons ago, but I know that there are circumstances in which the burden can shift. But, overall, the prosecution has to prove the component parts of the offence.

What my noble friend is trying to achieve is the normal rule in criminal offences, where the burden lies principally on the prosecution. I query the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, that my noble friend somehow wants to be out of line with the normality of the criminal law in what she suggests in her amendment. I think that it is the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, who, not for the first time, wants to be out of line.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I take that in good heart, as the noble Baroness and I are members of a committee of the House in which we share rumbustious debate. I am sorry that noble Lords have stumbled into “immigration law for dummies”, because neither of us is an expert on it. However, I think she is comparing apples and pears, because the example that she uses of dangerous driving is actually a strict liability offence, where mens rea is not an issue; in other words, it is not presumed that you would wilfully desire to get into a car and drive drunk in committing the offence. It is not necessary to prove it.

I am not saying that the noble Baroness is doing or saying anything out of line; I am merely demonstrating that one has to address wider issues in this policy area. For those reasons, the amendment is unhelpful in meeting the Government’s strategic objective to reduce illegal immigration.

[Viscount Goschen (Con)]

My Lords, I have not heard too many debates in which your Lordships have moaned about the lack of lawyers participating, but we have listened to two people who claim not to be experts.

I will touch on Clause 13 in the context of Amendment 36 from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. This is really a question for the Minister: I do not understand Clause 13(3)(b), which is the “reasonable excuse” related to whether the individual concerned was

“acting on behalf of an organisation which … aims to assist asylum-seekers, and … does not charge for its services”.

That is an extraordinarily widely drawn and unqualified reasonable excuse ground.

It would certainly help me and may even be of assistance to the broader Committee if the Minister could give a couple of examples of the types of scenario envisaged and could provide some reassurance that this is not too broadly drawn as an area to provide a reasonable excuse. I genuinely do not know and do not have a particular view about that, but, on the face of it, without further qualification, it seems to be very broadly drawn. I look forward to the Minister’s explanation.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 8th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, I can be very concise, mainly because I agree almost entirely with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Harper, said. We should not lose sight of the fact that this whole issue is a real concern to the public. They think we are being made fools of and they are largely right. It is time that the law was tightened up and the authorities got a grip on the situation. I support the Government’s drafting and I hope it will be widely supported.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose these amendments. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, was gracious in absolving me of my stupidity in jumping ahead. I misread the amendments last week, but we are now in group 2, so we can discuss mens rea.

It is quite in order for noble Lords in this House to test the efficacy and appropriateness of new offences; there is nothing wrong with that. I have read in detail the report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which is ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, and I have even read the ILPA briefing on the Bill—which takes some doing if you come from my perspective. I concur with the pithy remarks of my noble friend Lord Harper—who has great experience as a former Immigration Minister—that one does not always take Liberty’s briefings as the true gospel.

However, the reason I oppose these amendments is that I am not convinced by the argument prayed in aid by noble Lords, even in the JCHR report. I thought the comparison on page 10 was a specious comparison of precursor offences when they were compared with terrorism offences. I did not think that was an appropriate offence to compare it with, frankly. It is quite right to test the limits of the mens rea doctrine in respect of intention, recklessness and the reverse evidential burden of proof contained within the reasonable excuse provisions. But one has to look at the real-world consequences of what would happen if we accepted these sweeping amendments in terms of the interpretation by the judiciary and others of an amended Bill with this wording in it. I used the words “well-meaning” and it is absolutely not ignoble to put forward these amendments. However, there is a degree of otherworldly naivety about the damaging implications of the Bill being amended in this way.

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[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, what we have just heard is not unexpected. I understand that the Conservative Benches really want to stop everyone from coming across and making those dangerous crossings, which everyone would want to do, but it is quite surprising that we are debating how these matters will work between ourselves and France when the man holding the reins of the other half of this continent is in the next room to us, telling Members what he thinks on these matters. So I ask the Minister what he has heard so far about the issue of the exchange mechanism that has been trailed in our newspapers so strongly.

Secondly, I thank my noble friend Lady Hamwee for acting as what the Minister called the “super-prop” or the “super-sub” last week when some of us were away working in the Council of Europe.

On these very particular amendments, it is my reading of the report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights that these two amendments were agreed unanimously by all committee members, including the Conservatives. If that is the case, it is not just simply a matter of people saying, “We want to try and stop this happening in broader terms”, but there are Conservative members who have looked very closely at this particular part of the legislation, are trying to work out what is most appropriate and have committed themselves to it, both in this House and in the other House as well.

First of all, the noble Lord, Lord Harper, raised the issue that having to prove yourself not guilty is not something we do in this country. You have to be charged, but you do not have to go into the case from the other end of it. The issue here before us is what it will capture in that state between people who might or might not be guilty of what they are being charged with.

For example, two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to go to the northern coast of France and meet all the French authorities, from the préfecture downwards right through to on the beaches. One of the things pointed out to me was a Catholic centre where people were being helped because of normal life. They were being helped with food and trying to get appropriate clothing, and they were also being given SIM cards. If the Catholic priest who was giving out the SIM cards is going to be caught by this legislation, we ought to be very careful about the words that we use.

The change is in the words “intends that” from “knows or suspects that”. Though the cases we are going to discuss later are very proper and important offences, they are really focused on the smugglers and not the smuggled, and the smugglers getting 15 years in prison, which is the maximum sentence before us, yet the only test of getting into that process is whether somebody knows or suspects that a relevant article will be used by a person in connection to an offence.

So it is not that simple to simply say there is no link between the nature of the offence and the target for it. I am rather hoping that the Minister will tell us that this is a very tricky issue, it is something in respect of human rights that has been reflected throughout our law—international law as well as the law of our own country, both put together—and in the international conventions: not just those we were a signatory to but those we signed up to and those we created, and not just the ECHR but others as well.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Will the noble Lord give way? I am listening with great care. If I can direct him back to the issue of reverse burden of proof, he will know that this is not unusual—it is not common, but it is not unprecedented. Section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 states that, if someone is found with a blade in a public place and the prosecution proves possession, the defendant must prove they had a good reason for possessing it. The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 places a reverse burden on the defendant to prove that they took all reasonable steps to avoid the offence. These things are not unusual. For such an important public safety issue, surely the noble Lord will concede that it is not unusual or unprecedented for the Government to seek to take these matters in the legislation in the way they will.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

I do not think that either of the noble Lords were in the House when we put forward the same arguments about the burden of proof regarding blades and, I think I am right in saying, chemicals which could burn and disfigure, which can also be domestic—

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Acid.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord— I knew there was a word for it. We do not deny that there are examples on the statute book, but we objected to them at the time.

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I happen to think—and I think there is a common theme on many sides of this Chamber—that the courts are well equipped to assess whether someone had a legitimate reason for their actions. In practice, the burden on the defendant is only to raise an evidential basis for the excuse; it is then for the prosecution to disprove it. That is what prosecutions are about: they face defences, they have to prove that those defences are wrong, and they have to prove their case.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I will take the Minister back to the reasonable excuse in Clause 13(3). I am sure he has a view on why the wording is quite open ended. It says:

“The cases in which a person has a reasonable excuse for the purposes of subsection (2) include”—


these are the key words—

“(but are not limited to) those in which”,

et cetera, including that the organisation

“does not charge for its services”.

Without being too irreverent about this, Albanian people traffickers do not give you a standing order or a direct debit. There might be another way that a payment can be made, but that whole subsection is pretty open ended. Does he have any views on whether it might potentially be misused and abused if it remains as it is?

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being here for the first day in Committee. I was with colleagues as part of the UK delegation to the Council of Europe. Of course, I spoke at Second Reading.

Sadly, after the debate on the previous group, it seems that I have to declare an interest as the former director of Liberty. It is not something that I do very often but, given some of the disparaging remarks about my former employer, I thought I had better declare that as some kind of interest. Apparently, to have worked for a cross-party or non-party human rights NGO is now an issue. I should add that in my many years working at the National Council for Civil Liberties, I worked across this House and the other place, including with some very senior Conservatives, who believed very much in fundamental rights and freedoms. I guess that was then and this, unfortunately, is now.

As a preliminary point, on the previous group I was slightly flummoxed by contributions from across the Committee on the Clause 13 offence and defences. Forgive me, I have been a lawyer for only 30 years, but it is easier to prove that I was reckless in my behaviour than to prove that I had actual knowledge or suspicion. If I am right about that, I am flummoxed by every contribution from around the Committee on whether it should be knowledge and suspicion or intention and recklessness—but that was the previous group.

In relation to this group, I have to commend the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and his committee and, indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for amendments that square very well with—I will not call it a platitude—the caveat that the noble Lord, Lord Harper, gave to his other comments: that he does care about genuine refugees. If I am to take that as a real commitment to genuine refugees who are not abusing or playing any system but are in peril in their home country and fleeing persecution, if that is the commitment—I know it is the commitment from my noble friend the Minister—then I suggest that none of the amendments in this group contradicts the intention that we are going for the smugglers, going for the traffickers, going for the people who are making money out of people’s desperation, but not going for innocents.

Of course, the nature of protecting genuine refugees is that you do not know who will turn out to be a convention refugee until you process them. That means that we have to be a little bit careful about how we go after the people who are coming before we have actually considered their case. To go back to various comments that have been made about the historic origins of the refugee convention, I just remind the Committee that this was the world’s apology for the Holocaust, and that people who fled the Nazis in the 1930s often had to do so by irregular and clandestine means. For those who need a reminder, I recommend “Julia”, the 1977 Fred Zinnemann film starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. It would not be a bad thing for every participant in this Committee to revisit that Oscar-winning film, perhaps over the recess, before coming back for many more hours of deliberation on this Bill.

The reason that these amendments are good ones that do not undermine the intention of the Bill but actually speak, to some extent, to the slightly confusing debate on the previous group is, first, that they make it clear that we are going after the people who are monetising this desperation, perpetrating the evil trade and putting people’s lives at risk in the English Channel. The amendments put that squarely into the Bill. Secondly, they refer to the refugee convention, which I know will raise some hackles on the Benches opposite. I believe it is the Government’s intention to comply with the refugee convention as well as the European Convention on Human Rights. The European Convention on Human Rights has to be dealt with on the front cover of the Bill, as per the Human Rights Act. The Human Rights Act will also be the interpretive method for looking at the Bill, but there is not anything like that for the refugee convention. What there is instead is a tradition that was begun by a previous Conservative Government in the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993. Check the date: it was a Conservative Government, if I have my history right, who introduced the principle, initially into the Immigration Rules, that the refugee convention has primacy in the context of treating refugees, because the intention of that Government, and previous Conservative Governments, was to comply not just with the European Convention on Human Rights but with the refugee convention as well.

Because we have moved towards criminalisation—not just considering claims, appeals and removals—it becomes important that the refugee convention provides a defence for various immigration offences that are subsequently created. That is why the Joint Committee on Human Rights—a wonderful institution of this Parliament—has stepped in to make sure that no prosecution or conviction under any of these offences will offend the refugee convention. I can put it no better than the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who said that we do not want to use these offences. It cannot be the Government’s intention that these offences and prosecutions are for the victims rather than the smugglers. That is the best comment I can make in support of this group.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, a long-term advocate of the most vulnerable and refugees in particular, has an obvious point about feminine hygiene products. It would be strangely gendered for the Government not to consider adding that to food, et cetera, when we are talking about human dignity. I commend all these amendments to the Committee.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I was not intending to speak, because my noble friend Lord Harper made an excellent contribution, but I cannot let the peroration of the noble Baroness go without some response. Her arguments would carry somewhat more weight had she not resisted every attempt at a pragmatic, practical approach to the protection of our borders and the safety and security of our country—the first duty of a Government—through many pieces of legislation, not least the Rwanda Act, which many of us were involved in over the past couple of years. She and other noble Lords like her have never conceded that this is an issue. They want to go forward with this canard that the Conservative Party has in government and in opposition swung to the right—

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. First, I pointed out the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, which is Conservative legislation. I could have gone on. I know that the noble Lord thinks my peroration has been too long already, but we can compare the minutes afterwards in Hansard of how long people are banging on. I was trying to point to a long and noble tradition in his party of caring about the refugee convention and trying to do what the noble Lord, Lord Harper, suggested we must do: differentiate the genuine refugees, who need to get here and be processed and considered before you can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Secondly, the noble Lord should not let the fact that the messenger is unattractive to him be to the disadvantage of the amendments—try to ignore me and just consider the amendments in detail. I suggest that they do not offend his ambition of controlling borders or the ambition of the noble Lord, Lord Harper, of differentiating between perpetrators and gamers of the system and people who may well turn out to be genuine refugees. The noble Lord, Lord Harper, has made points about the public on many occasions and their warmth towards desperate Ukrainians, Hong Kongers and so on. Those people were rightly given safe and legal routes to the United Kingdom, in a way that Afghans, Sudanese people and others in equally dire straits were not. The drafters of the refugee convention always understood that that might happen and that some desperate people might have to flee by irregular routes. You do not know who is a refugee and who is not until you have considered their claim.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I do not deprecate the remarks of the noble Baroness. I find her always passionate and compelling, and she added greatly to the strength, colour and nuance of the debates we had over the last two years on the Rwanda Bill and other legislation, so I am not shooting the messenger.

The noble Baroness pre-empts my comments. I was going to say that my party has had an outward-looking, internationalist, liberal approach to bringing into this country the brightest and the best. Going way back, from the Ugandan refugees who were expelled by Idi Amin, and the Asian folk from India and the Indian subcontinent, to, as the noble Baroness says, Syrians, Ukrainians and Hong Kongers, we have a very proud record of welcoming people from different cultures. However, it is important to make the point that it is not strange that nine countries in the European Union are demanding that the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights are revisited because they are simply not working and are not equal to the geopolitical challenges alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, around the mass movement of people.

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[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord again. I want to move away from me and go back to the amendment. I suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, that the amendments make that distinction, because the refugee convention will be of no avail as a defence to anyone who does not turn out to be a refugee. The convention’s principles are non-penalisation, non-discrimination and non-refoulement. Whatever the other defects, the Committee ought to be able to unite around those principles.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Before I look at the specific critique of the amendments put forward, I take the comments by the noble Baroness on face value. However, I know that, when my party were in government, those on the other side, the Liberal Democrats and many Cross-Benchers took issue with age-verification tests and other attempts by the state to determine the bona fides of people with respect to their age and background, and whether they were truly subject to oppression, mistreatment, or the misuse of the criminal system in their countries. At every step, those were opposed. It has proven difficult for us to focus on those who are genuinely in need of our support, as my noble friend Lord Harper said.

By the way, I support the very sensible amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, about dignity products. Any sensible, sentient, caring, compassionate person would do so.

I end my slightly odd preface to these comments by saying that we have a responsibility. We are not elected, but we should nevertheless reflect the very serious and significant concern among the public about these issues. Many people would be horrified by this otherworldly obsession with the minutiae of amendments when we have a national crisis affecting our borders and the safety and security of our country. We have a responsibility to address that.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am sorry, but this is Committee, where we look at the minutiae of amendments. I plead with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, to look at the amendments in this group and at my suggestion that they do not offend his ambition to control the borders and to differentiate between those gaming the system or monetising an evil trade and those victims of trafficking and potentially genuine refugees. It is not about what I have said in the past, who I am or the NGOs that the noble Lord does not like; it is about the specific amendments, because this is Committee in the House of Lords.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I am aware of that. I am merely drawing to your Lordships’ attention the fact that there will be real-world consequences from the interpretation of the legislation when it finally gets Royal Assent and becomes an Act.

As has been said by my noble friend Lord Harper, there are other individual groups who have a vested interest—perhaps for the right reasons—to not consider the security and safety of our border. They are perfectly entitled to believe in there being no borders and in a very loose and liberal interpretation of immigration policy. However, we must be careful when we legislate that we do not allow those people—who are massively out of step with the views of most of the public—to put in the Bill, through advocacy, something that will not be in the long-term best interest.

I cannot add anything more to the excellent points on Amendment 33 made by my noble friend. I oppose Amendments 35 and 44. Although it looks on the face of it beguilingly attractive that we should not be in breach of international treaty obligations which we have signed, my concern is that this is a moveable feast. To put in the Bill quite a prescriptive, tight and draconian interpretation of an international regime which may well change over the next few years is not appropriate. I have no doubt that the 1951 refugee convention will evolve—for the better, I hope—and that certainly the ECHR will be reviewed, as it is not only people in the UK who are concerned about it. The amendments are well meant and make a strong argument, but they would tie the hands of our own judiciary and Ministers.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

I do not wish to detain the Committee now, but will the noble Lord, at some point between now and Report, at least have a conversation with me about what he thinks is draconian in these international conventions to which we are already a signatory, and which these amendments will simply ensure that we act upon in the way that is suggested in things that we are already signed up to?

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I am always more than happy to have a conversation with my friend the noble Lord. However, as the Minister himself said not that long ago, the Bill in its entirety is compliant with the current legislation in respect of the Human Rights Act and the European Court of Human Rights. It would be otiose, and at the same time restrictive, to put this stand-alone amendment in the Bill. It would encourage what I have previously described as judicial activism, which we have seen in the immigration tribunal and has been featured in the Daily Telegraph quite regularly. I do not think that is helpful; it would undermine the faith and trust that people have in the criminal justice system. For that reason, I do not think the Bill should be amended in the way that the noble Lord proposes, but I am always happy to be persuaded by him.

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

Noble Lords will be aware that I have been concerned with immigration matters for about 25 years. I have not paid much attention to asylum because the numbers were much smaller, but they are now significantly greater. I repeat my warning that we really need to have our feet on the ground if we are going to deal with the scale of what is now in front of us. The public need to know that their concerns are understood and are being acted on. That is not yet the case and it needs to be done.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am always pleased to know what my comrades in arms in both Houses have done, and it is important that the Government reflect on all points of view. I simply make the point that there will be a response to the committee’s report prior to Report, and those nuances will be examined as part of the discussion.

The third point that the Government want to put on record—I have said this in earlier discussions—is that the United Kingdom is unequivocally committed to the European Convention on Human Rights, and the measures in the Bill support that aim and are compatible with UK human rights obligations. That leads directly to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lords, Lord Harper and Lord German. Those are the three important principles: gangs are the target; we will respond to the report; and we believe we are compliant.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I am grateful for the forbearance of the Minister. While he is in a pensive mood, will he confirm that there is a possibility, at least, that the Government’s current review of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which was announced on 30 March, may well be concluded by the time that we get to Report or Royal Assent to this Bill, and would potentially feed into any further amendments that the Government brought forward?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

As the noble Lord knows, the Government are reviewing the issue of Article 8, but intend to do so in a way that examines judicial discretion on Article 8 and potentially looks at how we can improve performance on that issue. It does not mean that we will be withdrawing from Article 8, or indeed from any aspect of the convention. I think it is important that consideration is given to those issues.

If I may, I turn directly to the amendments before the Committee today. I start with Amendments 33 and 38, which seek to add the requirement that one can be prosecuted under these offences only if an individual derives financial or material benefit from engaging in the offence. These offences, as I said, target criminal gangs at the early planning stages, when financial or material gain is often not yet evident. For the very reasons that a number of noble Lords have mentioned, introducing the requirement in the clauses for gain would significantly constrain law enforcement’s ability to intervene early and disrupt organised crime groups before a crossing occurs or money changes hands. Given the complexity of cash flows in these criminal cases, it is impractical to exempt those without apparent financial or material gain, and doing so would shift the burden of enforcement to prove gain, undermining effective prosecution.

Additional amendments to this clause do not take into account the wide range of complex agreements that might be considered when engaging in these events—for example, substantial benefits in kind for engaging in the activity—and with such amendments, people would never be guilty of an offence. Again, these are complex issues, and for the very reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and the noble Lord, Lord Green, mentioned, there will be continued pressure, and it will be continually ramped up. Even now, I can update the noble Lord, Lord German, that the President of France has made reference to the fact that we need to have international co-operation in his address to both Houses a few minutes ago, and that there will again be consideration of joint action on the criminal gangs, for the very reasons that the noble Lords, Lord Deben and Lord Green of Deddington, mentioned, because it is a nationally important issue that needs to be resolved and there will be increasing pressures.

I just say to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, who moved the amendment, that I do not think it would be appropriate or proportionate, particularly given the life-threatening risks posed by people smuggling, for his amendments to be accepted. They would undermine the opportunity for early intervention that the offences are designed to examine and stop. Where there is evidence of involvement of organised criminal activity, where lives are endangered and where our borders are undermined, those individuals would rightly be liable for prosecution, regardless of whether financial or material gain can be demonstrated.

There are going to be pressures: the noble Lord, Lord Deben, mentioned them clearly. It is an important issue—I cede that to the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington. In order to deal with these issues, we need to have some potential powers of criminal action, and I am grateful for the support from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, from the Opposition Front Bench.

Turning to Amendments 203, 35, 44 and 57, Amendment 203 would add the offences in Clauses 13, 14 and 16, as well as the offence of illegal entry under Section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971, to Section 31 of the Asylum and Immigration Act 1999. This section currently protects refugees from being punished for certain actions that they may have to take to reach the UK. Amendments 35, 44 and 57 would similarly make it difficult to prosecute an individual were they to engage in this crime and seek to claim refugee status. Those are the issues that the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, referred to, which are keen issues that the Committee needs to consider.

I just emphasise again that these offences are targeted not at refugees but at the vile people smugglers. The amendments would provide a potential defence to individuals, even if the commission of the offence had nothing to do with conduct that was necessary to arrive in the UK. As such, an individual could be absolved from all sorts of behaviour, including engaging in offences before arriving in the UK, creating a loophole for anybody who wished to commit those offences. I reassure the Committee that care has been taken by officials in the Home Office, with ministerial support, to ensure that these offences have the flexibility to target the smuggling gangs but do not unjustly impact or endanger those who are exploited by these criminal smuggling gangs.

Each clause has a non-exhaustive list of reasonable excuses, including one for those acting on behalf of an organisation that aims to assist asylum seekers and does not charge for its services, and those intending to act in the rescue of a person in danger. Indeed, Clause 15 contains a carve-out of humanitarian items that cannot be considered under Clauses 13 and 14, plus carve-outs under Clause 16 for academics, journalists, rescuers and those seeking to provide those humanitarian services that are necessary. These safeguards, when combined with investigatory discretion in prosecutions and the public interest test for charging decisions, ensure that enforcement is targeted and proportionate.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the concerns of my noble friend Lord Harper.

I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. I have the pleasure of serving with her on the European Affairs Committee, she has great expertise and knowledge of these issues from her experience in the European Parliament, and she is our resident expert on these issues when we debate it in the committee. But she will know that we have had two separate inquiries which have covered these issues over the last year or so. One was on our and the EU’s policy on data adequacy, which is germane to the area of crime and policing; in particular, serious organised crime and the work of the NCA. More recently, of course, since the reset on 19 May we have been looking in forensic detail at the Government’s policy, as far as it is possible so to do.

Very briefly, the reason I have some concerns about these amendments—I reiterate the point made by my noble friend—is because I take the view, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The evidence the committee heard from the National Crime Agency was that we were making organic, incremental changes and things were improving since our exit from the European Union in 2021. A good example of that is that, as the noble Baroness well knows, British police forces are able to take the operational lead in some of these big cases, particularly involving the National Crime Agency, cybercrime, people trafficking and modern slavery. Therefore, this amendment would, in effect, tie the hands of Ministers quite closely in terms of the strategic objectives that they are aiming to deliver in this area.

We all want to work closely with our partners and friends in the European Union—the Liberal Democrat Chief Whip laughs, but he might try to listen to my remarks before being so presumptuous. We want to work closely with them, and we have worked closely over the last few years. There is more work to do on data adequacy, on sharing data. There are enduring problems about the view of the Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union in terms of the legal purview they have and the oversight that they wish to have with regard to joint operations. But these amendments are rather heavy-handed and circumscribe the flexibility of Ministers.

Finally, there is an opportunity for proper scrutiny and oversight of the work of the NCA and others, by the Home Affairs Select Committee in the other place, our European Affairs Committee, and directly on the Floor of this House and of the other place. So, for those reasons, I echo my noble friend. On this occasion, although the noble Baroness does an excellent job in helping us understand these issues from her unique experience, I hope she will see that her amendments are unnecessary.

[Lord German (LD)]

Interestingly, the challenge in the Bill before us is to smash the gangs. That was the statement from the Minister, and the issue of boats crossing the English Channel dominates the Bill and is the one that has been given the most effect. It was, of course, the previous Government who made this such a totem issue that they put it front and above all else, even putting it on the sides of lecterns inside 10 Downing Street. If the Government want to treat this matter—which is so important to the Benches on my right—with the Bill, as has been explained to us, we want to see how we best use our resources to tackle these problems in common.

As I explained earlier, I have visited the Pas-de-Calais to examine all these issues. I was with the French police just after they had arrested the driver of a German motor car that had a blanket over the back seat with teddy bears on top. Underneath was a dinghy of exactly the sort that I had seen on the beach, and which had been demonstrated to us as one of the types that are used. Those dinghies had come from Germany in a German car, the number plate of which I have a photograph of, whose driver was arrested at the French border. I was told quite clearly by the officials there that these things come from across Europe, and that all the machines and bits and pieces are collected and used by different countries. Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece and Turkey, as well as France and the UK, are all involved in this. Quite clearly, it would be right for the Bill to examine the level of cross co-operation between the forces which are to deal with this.

Europol is, of course, the agency on the continent, and is the one that particularly reflects the chain I have just described. The scope of the relationship between us and Europol is defined by the TCA. I have seen no amendments relating to that agreement, but I am hopeful, as I know many Members of this House are, that we will see big changes to the TCA, which has not been used to give us the best result. It is quite clear that our relationship with Europol is defined by it.

The scope of the co-operation is laid out clearly in Article 567. I will not read everything out, but it includes

“the exchange of information … reports … analysis … information on … participation in training … and … the provision of advice and support”.

Nowhere does it mention joint co-operation in activities to deal with the issues before us. I know that there has been some action, because we have seen it reported. The important aspect is the depth of that action with the body that has responsibility for policing these serious crimes across the parts of the European Union where this matter is arising.

I have some questions on the specifics. First, what is the level of operational development between the British forces and Europol? Have we designated a national contact point, as the agreement outlines, and how many liaison officers do we have? The TCA, to which the previous Government agreed, says:

“The United Kingdom shall ensure that its liaison officers have speedy and, where technically possible, direct access to the relevant domestic databases of the United Kingdom that are necessary for them to fulfil their tasks … The number of liaison officers, the details of their tasks, their rights and obligations and the costs involved shall be governed by working arrangements”.


We need to know what the “working arrangements” are, and whether we have those liaison officers in place. My second question is therefore on the structural relationship. Do we have these liaison officers in place, and are there officers from Europol inside the UK and vice versa? That is what the TCA, which was agreed to by the previous Government, says should happen.

The third element is whether the scope of co-operation in this document is sufficient to tackle the problems that we are now facing with this chain of operations across Europe, and which end up with us. This is an important issue, because we are talking about a serious crime that is being reflected across parts of Europe as well as in the United Kingdom. The relationship is important to us, because it includes the people with the operational ability, but we of course need to know whether there is co-operation in that operational ability. Without understanding that, we cannot be reassured that this matter—which, according to the Conservative Party, is at the top of the issues that the country is facing—will be tackled properly.

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[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

I thank the Minister for that response. The tone and approach go very much in the direction and spirit of the amendments, even if their drafting is not entirely fit, in the Minister’s mind. He is right that they were designed to illustrate the very welcome change of approach of the current Government, who regard co-operation with Europol—and, indeed, with the EU generally—as important.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, said that we must be driven by operational need, not ideological nostalgia. I do not think you could find anything in the drafting of the amendments which is not operational. To be honest, I take slight exception to any suggestion that they are driven by ideological nostalgia. If there is any ideology, it is coming from those on the Opposition Benches, who are still displaying an allergy to the European Union.

I have the pleasure of serving on the European Affairs Committee with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson. We are going to have some interesting discussions when we finalise our report on the reset. He referred to the leads from the National Crime Agency and the National Police Chiefs’ Council giving evidence to us a few months ago. I looked it up while he was speaking, and they referred to the more cumbersome, clunky and process-heavy post-Brexit arrangements. They were engaged in mitigation, so they were making the best—I am now using words they did not use—of a not great job. I am afraid that what is coming from the Benches to my right is a prejudice against working with the European Union.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I am listening very carefully to the noble Baroness. She knows that there has been cross-party support on, for instance, information-sharing in respect of the Schengen Information System’s second iteration, which we were members of in 2015, and it is incumbent upon this Government and the European Union to negotiate that information-sharing. We could ameliorate the clunkiness were the EU to be a little bit flexible, for mutual benefit, in sharing the SIS II data.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

There are all kinds of things we can aspire to. Unfortunately, the arrangements the noble Lord’s party negotiated have certain constraints in terms of the legal operation of the European Union, and he knows that.

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[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, I very much hope that my Amendments 102 and 149 are in the spirit of what we are discussing this afternoon and, indeed, in the spirit of what the Government are attempting to do. I pray in aid both our earlier debate on the UK Government’s resilience action plan—I was in the Chamber when the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, was on the Front Bench for that—and the Government’s other document, the National Security Strategy 2025, which states in paragraph 14, among many other things, that we will:

“Expand our legal and law enforcement toolkit, to ensure the UK becomes a harder target for hostile state and non-state actors including criminal gangs engaged in illegal migration … Roll out a series of new measures to strengthen our borders, defend our territory and enhance the resilience of our critical national infrastructure”.


I concede that there are other parts of this document, but they all pretty much say the same thing:

“Security at home … Defend our territory … Make the UK a harder target”.


Under “Pillar (i)—Security at Home” in paragraph 1, it says:

“The first pillar of our Strategic Framework is to protect our people, bolster the security of our homeland and strengthen our borders against all types of threats, both in the physical and online space”.


In paragraph 3, it says:

“These multiple and interconnected threats require us to make ourselves a harder target to our adversaries. As a first step, the defence of our borders and territorial waters must be strengthened”.


Hear, hear to all that.

Then we come to the clauses in question and I find the drafting rather tentative, so my amendments seek to put a bit of muscle behind the Government’s intention. In proposed new subsection (1), my Amendment 102 would change “may” to must”, which would require immigration officers to take fingerprints from all people to whom that section applies. Section 141 applies to a person who does not present a passport at a port of entry, a person who has been refused leave to enter the UK and granted immigration bail, and any person who has been given a deportation order, among others. Currently, that too says only “may”, meaning that as things stand, as the legislation is proposed, the drafting suggests there is no requirement for immigration officers to collect this biometric information. My amendment would make it a duty to do so, in order to ensure an accurate collection of data.

Secondly, the amendment would add a new person to whom Section 141 applies, “ZA”. This is any person who wishes to enter the United Kingdom—visitors, tourists, all immigrants and any arrivals whatever. Proposed new subsection (2) in this amendment would amend the Immigration (Collection, Use and Retention of Biometric Information and Related Amendments) Regulations 2021 to require immigration officers to take photographs of every arrival into the United Kingdom. This is all about ensuring that we know who is entering the country and that we have an accurate record of every person who crosses our border. If that person then commits a crime while in the United Kingdom, the police would have their fingerprints and photograph on record to enable them to investigate and prosecute. I cannot see why the Government would be opposed to this, given everything that they have said so far today.

Amendment 149, the second amendment in my name, would amend the Immigration Act 1971 to insert two new sections. Proposed new Section 28IA would create new powers to seize identity documents from foreign criminals, asylum seekers, those awaiting deportation and those granted immigration bail. Immigration officers would be able to search for, seize and retain all such ID documents, and there are penalties within the amendment for those who do not comply, seek to falsify or misrepresent themselves. Proposed new Section 28IB states that immigration officers must give all the people they have seized this documentation from a new standard biometric government-issued identity card. This would be linked to the biometric information they have supplied, as laid out in Amendment 102. There is nothing very contentious or draconian there. It is just an attempt to garner the information we need to standardise that information and to have a better idea of who is in this country at any one time. I beg to move.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the excellent amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Swire. I begin with a confession, which I think is shared by most of my colleagues on these Benches, that we were all whipped in 2006 or 2007 in the other place when in opposition to oppose identity cards. It was a period when there were serious concerns about the infringement on civil liberties of identity cards. Tony Blair, our former Prime Minister, got a lot of things wrong over the years, but he was absolutely right on identity cards. If I were to go back in time and vote again, I would support identity cards, for many reasons. We are talking almost 20 years ago and the world has changed significantly in terms of transnational travel, patterns of serious organised crime, and the challenges of large numbers of people moving across the world, a minority of whom are doing so for nefarious reasons and for criminal enterprises.

The Minister knows that I have great respect for him. I know he serves in the greatest tradition of patriots in the Labour Party who have served in government and he wants to do his best to protect our borders and the safety and security of our country. However, we can no longer have these slightly erudite debates about ID cards and civil liberties when we have so many huge challenges, particularly the threat of Islamist terrorism and other serious organised crime. If we look abroad, we see that other countries have taken this very seriously as well, including many English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and of course the United States. What bedevils us is the lack of co-ordination and collaboration in terms of sharing data.

I have been nice about the Minister and now I am going to be nasty. I have asked him four or five times the same question—I dare say it is his officials’ fault, not his—about whether we collect data on students whose visas are rescinded as a result of criminal activity. For various reasons, he has had to answer that he cannot give me that information, telling me the Home Office does not collate that data, there are too many databases, or it would be too expensive to collect that data. I am not blaming him as such, but that is symptomatic of the difficulty of being able to properly co-ordinate data in the public interest to fight crime. Therefore, we should consider anything that can assist that, whether it is facial recognition—I know there are civil liberties issues and in China we see some very major infringements of civil liberties, so I do not want to go down that road—iris scans, fingerprints, et cetera. The ability to collect that data for people coming in—

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My noble friend Lord German is going to speak on the entirety of the amendments, but I did not want to lose the theme of ID cards. I have a question, because I genuinely do not understand. We have had big, long debates about ID cards in the past and maybe we will again in the future, but how are ID cards supposed to help in the case of irregular migration? Employers who are employing people illegally are presumably meant to be checking documents at the moment to make sure that people have the right to stay and the right to work. How does an ID card actually help?

If employers have the means to check whether someone has the right to work legally—that is an alleged pull factor, although of course the Migration Advisory Committee has always advised that that is actually not true—can the noble Lord explain to me what ID cards add as a supposed deterrent to irregular migrants, when employers should already be checking documentation? How do they add value to that particular issue?

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Well, if there are appropriate safeguards—I know that is a big “if”—and if there is proper scrutiny and oversight of the issuance of those ID cards, I believe they would allow a number of key agencies, such as the NHS, local authorities, adult social care, children’s services, police forces, the National Crime Agency and others, to be in a position to track those individuals who are identified as previously predisposed to commit crime, and often serious crime.

I absolutely respect the liberal position—and also the Liberal Democrat position. They believe in an individualist freedom not to be tracked by the state. We know that there are occasions across the world where that sort of surveillance is for pernicious, irregular and completely immoral reasons. But that is not our country. We have a parliamentary democracy, with checks and balances to ensure that that would not be abused. Indeed, the Information Commissioner has wide-ranging powers. So I have crossed the Rubicon on the principle of ID cards—but this is not a balloon debate on ID cards, so I must press on.

My own party has also been complicit in some of these significant difficulties. We made a big mistake in ending exit controls—I cannot remember when it was, but I think it was in the early 1990s under the Major Government. That was a significant mistake that we made. But we can also learn from our friends in the European Union, who have the European travel information and authorisation system, which is coming on stream, and EES—the entry and exit system—because they understand the importance of collecting data in order to facilitate fighting crime.

So we need to focus on collecting data and using it effectively to join up the dots on crime fighting and to make sure that we know who is in the country—who is coming in and who will be leaving—which is what my noble friend’s amendments would do. Putting that obligation on a statutory footing, in order to track those individuals, would be a start of the imperative for departments, particularly the Home Office, to start joining the dots on the data they hold in order to work properly to protect people.

I have to mention that, only two days ago, Mr Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office Minister, was on LBC. He was completely stumped by the presenter, who asked what questions they ask people who say they are applying for asylum when they come ashore near Dover. He was not able to confirm any of the questions. The presenter asked whether they ask the individual, “Who trafficked you? What nationality were they? Where did you actually come from?” Maybe the Minister will answer this, but I am not sure that there is a particular protocol for collecting the most basic data—and that is not even when we are talking about IT databases.

So my noble friend’s amendments are excellent. They begin the process of really taking seriously the challenges that we face in protecting our border. We are following the lead of many countries across the world that similarly take these threats to national security and safety seriously. The Minister has generally been in the right place—I read the debate on the statutory instrument on biometrics with my noble friend in March—and he is saying the right things. He would give us a lot of sustenance and support in that campaign to make our country safer were he to be minded to support my noble friend’s excellent two amendments.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Swire’s two amendments, which are well-intentioned, well drafted and have the right approach. Strengthening the ability of state agencies to be able collect this information would be very helpful.

However, at this point, I part company with my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough, which I do not do very often. I will not allow him to tempt me at length on this, but I do not agree with him at all on ID cards. I hope she does not find that it damages her reputation, but I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, on this point. She asked the right question: how does having ID cards solve any of these problems?

In his excellent introduction, my noble friend Lord Swire highlighted that we already require people who come to this country as migrants to have identity documents and that their biometric information is on a database. We require those who employ them, for example, to check their employment status. There is a gap in that, which we will come to deal with in later groups on Clause 45. The Government rightly are looking to strengthen that to include not just traditional employment models but some of the new employment models that are not currently captured but which have been highlighted publicly, including by the shadow Home Secretary, when talking about the problem that the gig economy, for example, and those who deliver things are not captured by the traditional models. That is important, but we already require people to check that information. Those employers who are operating illegally and choose not to do it still will not do it even if we have ID cards.

My worry about ID cards—and then I will stop talking about them, because it is not strictly within the scope of these things—is that you put the burden on those of us who are lawfully in the country and who should not have to keep being asked for ID when we have the right to use such services. All the public services that we access, including the NHS—except, rightly, for emergency care—the DWP and so on, require you to evidence that you have a right to be in the country and to access those services. We rightly do not insist that the NHS does it for emergency care, but, if you go to a hospital for planned treatment, they will check that you are entitled to have free NHS care. They may not always do so, but they are legally supposed to—those checks already exist.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I have to ask my noble friend a fundamental question. Regarding the biometric data that we currently retain across all the agencies of government, if that system is working, why have the Government—and indeed the previous Government, who he served and I supported—no idea how many illegal immigrants there are in the country? Why do they have no idea of the veracity of the estimate that one in 10 of the 9 million people in Greater London are illegal immigrants? We simply do not know the numbers. ID cards may not be perfect, but they may go some way to enabling us to have a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the challenge facing us in the delivery of public services. At the moment, we are flying blind and cannot use the data. The Government simply do not know how many people are in the country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I shall deal with those points briefly. First, I do not accept that the UN is the arbiter of what the convention means. It is our job in this House and the House of Commons to make laws and set out our immigration policies. We should not subcontract that to outside organisations that sometimes have a very eccentric view of the world, and it is not one that is supported by the British people.

This comes down to the point about numbers. I am a strong supporter of our long tradition of taking genuine asylum seekers and refugees in the United Kingdom, but we can do that only if we retain public support for it. I say to those who oppose stronger and tougher controls on who can come here and make it clear that it is only people who follow our laws that they are in danger of forfeiting that public support and confidence. If we do not deal with this issue, at some point—and I think we are getting very close to it—the public will say, “We just don’t want anybody. We’re not interested in their circumstances. We’re not interested in what’s happened. We want to control the number of people that are coming here”. I think that would be a tragedy. I say to those who oppose tougher border controls that they are running a real risk of altering public opinion so that it does not support it.

When we get these schemes right—I referenced earlier in the week the scheme that we set up for those fleeing the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine—they have huge public support. In my part of the world, I had no complaints about the Ukraine scheme. But when people think people are taking the mickey out of us, as they do with these small boat crossings, public support is not there and is not supportive. In a democracy, we should be mindful that we have to carry the public with us.

On this issue of deterrence, I think you have to have a deterrent. My noble friend demonstrated earlier the success in Australia. It was very telling that one political party in Australia opposed the scheme, and then when it came back into government it recognised that it was necessary. Although it would be politically convenient if that happened to this Government—if, in the end, what they are proposing was a failure and they suffered some political damage from it—the bit of me that wants my country to be successful, having had some responsibility for our borders in the past, does not want that to happen. I want to get this right. If we had won the election and been able to implement the Rwanda scheme, it would have been a deterrent. It would have sent a very clear message to people that paying thousands of pounds to people smugglers to cross the channel was a fruitless endeavour. The one thing we know about the people who pay people smugglers is that they expect to get what they pay for and, if they were not able to get to the United Kingdom and stay here, they absolutely would not have carried on paying people smugglers and that business model would have collapsed.

I completely accept that it was perfectly reasonable for people to disagree with the Rwanda scheme in the way that it was set up, whether it was Rwanda or a different country, but the problem the Government have is that Clause 37 repeals our scheme and, as my noble friend said, replaces it with no alternative deterrent at all. We have just seen this afternoon what the Prime Minister has announced. Obviously, we have not seen all the detail—we have just seen the headlines—but a one-in, one-out scheme has now been announced. The problem with that is twofold.

First, as my noble friend said, I am not sure what the legal underpinning of that is. It would be helpful if the Minister could set out whether the scheme that has been announced today, in both its pilot and its full form, will require any further primary legislation to make sure it can be implemented, and if it does need primary legislation, whether it is going to be inserted into this Bill before it leaves the House. Also, I fear it will be subject to enormous legal challenge and the Government will have exactly the same problems as we had with the Rwanda scheme. It will take them ages to be able to scale it up. The final flaw is that the public want to stop the volume of people coming here and, although a one-in, one-out scheme might alter the composition of the people coming, by definition a one-in, one-out scheme will not reduce the numbers. If we can only send somebody back to France and get another person, we might change who they are, but we are not going to deal with the numbers problem at all, so for a lot of the public the scheme will be a failure by its very definition.

As I said, I strongly support what my noble friend said. I think the Government are making a terrible mistake with this clause—not from my perspective, but from their own perspective. They are going to find that, welcome though some of the measures in this Bill are that support the powers the Government have—I have already referred to some of the later clauses that strengthen the controls on those working illegally, and where the Bill has measures in it that are strengthening the system, I support them—completely removing a deterrent without putting anything in its place, not amending it but completely scrapping it, is a mistake, and I fear that the Government will come to regret it. That will not be a good thing. It might be a short-term political advantage for us, but it will not be a good thing for the country. I would rather, if they had some disagreements with the detail of the scheme, that they had reflected on that and altered it.

If there was a clause here that was making changes to the Rwanda scheme—for example, the way it was dealing with the processing, or maybe even picking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, about who did the processing—that would have at least been an argument that we could have entered into, and it would have been a better argument than scrapping it overnight without anything at all to replace it. I fear the Government will come to regret having done so. We will know from the robust remarks of my noble friend that we did our best to stop them making that terrible mistake. I only hope that we are not proved to be correct.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I remember those long evenings over the last two years when we debated the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. The words of Pyrrhus come to mind, because noble Lords on the then Opposition Benches, particularly the Cross-Benchers and the Liberal Democrats, eventually prevented the Act from happening by a circuitous route. As Pyrrhus said, “One more such victory and we are doomed”. I think that the Government will reap the whirlwind of overpromising to smash the gangs and potentially not delivering.

It is important to make the point again that there is no plan B. We have spent £209 million this year giving money to the French, and yet we are told that we might send back 50 illegal migrants a week. That is one in 17 migrants. At the time when the Rwanda policy was developed, the number of illegal entrants crossing the channel was 45,700 in 2022. We are now in a position where we have had a 55% increase in those channel crossings in the last year, so it is not working.

Of course, my noble friend Lord Horam is right to make the point that it is impossible to judge the efficacy of the policy because it was never rolled out properly. It is no good the Minister complaining about that because his Government, for purely cynical political reasons, decided to draw a line in the sand and curtail and end the scheme. The scheme was popular with the public. Even after the Supreme Court hearing and judgment in November 2023, a Savanta poll found that 47% of people supported it and only 26% were against it.

For too long, our asylum system had been overwhelmed by those who sought to abuse our generosity and bypass legal immigration routes. The current system was not only unsustainable—it still is—but fundamentally unfair to those who follow proper procedures and wait patiently for their applications to be processed through legitimate channels. The Rwanda scheme was always about breaking the business model of people smuggling. The Rwanda partnership addressed the root cause of this crisis by fundamentally disrupting the business model of the criminal gangs that profited from human misery—I think we agree that that is the number one priority.

When people understood that making dangerous channel crossings would not lead to permanent settlement in the UK, the economic incentive for these perilous journeys disappeared. This was not merely theoretical: as my noble friend said, there have been examples of countries working together—Australia, for instance, but also Denmark and Israel—to return irregular or illegal migrants. Far from abandoning our humanitarian obligations, the legislation strengthened our ability to help those most in need. By creating an orderly, managed system, we could better focus our resources on genuine refugees who required our protection. Rwanda, as a safe third country with a growing economy and commitment to refugee protection, offered a new life with dignity and opportunity.

The Act reasserted parliamentary sovereignty in matters of immigration policy. The British people voted repeatedly for Governments committed to controlling immigration. This legislation ensured that elected representatives, rather than foreign courts—I know some noble Lords do not like that term—determine how we implement our policies.

There were economic benefits. We always hear from Ministers how expensive the Rwanda scheme was, but, actually, by the time of the general election, the National Audit Office found that we had spent something like £318 million. That is not an insignificant amount of public money, of course, but the Minister quotes a £700 million figure—I would like him perhaps to write to me to outline how he gets that breakdown, because I am not sure that the NAO would necessarily agree with him. But we are now spending £4.7 billion every year on the asylum system and hotels. So, on a cost-benefit analysis, a scheme that potentially reduced the pull factor was probably better value for money.

The legislation demonstrated Britain’s commitment to international co-operation in addressing global migration challenges. Of course, the Government approved of this in principle. In May, we saw the slightly unedifying sight of the Prime Minister travelling to Albania to go cap in hand to the slightly dubious Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama, seeking offshore processing facilities in Albania. Unfortunately, he was several months too late. The Italian Government had gone in before and the charms of Madame Meloni surpassed those of Mr Starmer—I cannot think why. The Government obviously believe in the principle of offshoring the processing of asylum seekers, and it is disingenuous to say that that is not the case. We wish them well if they wish to pursue other opportunities to explore working and collaborating with other countries.

The safety of Rwanda Act 2024 represented compassionate but firm governance—compassionate towards genuine refugees who deserved our protection and firm in our determination to prevent abuses of our asylum system. The legislation delivered on our manifesto commitment of 2019.

But as I said, Labour Peers, Cross-Benchers, Liberal Democrats and Bishops—all unelected and unaccountable —conspired to thwart this legislation; to undermine, traduce and attack the Bill at every turn; not to improve it or to scrutinise it but to wreck it. We should not be surprised at the specious claims by lawyers in this House that the legislation was “unlawful”, which demonstrated their own anti-democratic inclinations and propagated the fiction that unelected courts have sovereignty over our own elected Parliament and a Government with a strong electoral mandate. That is completely wrong. Parliament is supreme, as a casual reference to Sections 7 and 23 of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 makes clear.

[Lord German (LD)]

I just want to correct the noble Lord. I cast a vote two weeks ago, along with other Members of this House and of the House of Commons, for the senior judge from the United Kingdom to the European Court of Human Rights. He is the only elected British judge who exists.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

The European Court of Human Rights is not recognised as a traditional court of jurists as one would recognise, for instance, the US Supreme Court. Many of the people representing their countries are from NGOs who have vested interests in different areas. It is not comparable to our own Supreme Court, the US Supreme Court and many others. I stand to be corrected.

This is the debate we had during the discussions and deliberations on the safety of Rwanda Act. The erroneous notion that international law is sovereign over the UK Parliament, and that we cannot pass laws contrary to international treaties such as the ECHR, is pernicious and hugely undermines the faith and trust the electorate have in our governance. Such a notion was explicitly refuted in a Supreme Court ruling in 2021.

Real demonstrable damage is being done by such mischaracterisation and errors. The excellent report for the Centre for Policy Studies authored by my noble friend Lord Lilley, recently published, highlights that the proportion of asylum claims granted first time jumped from 25% in 2010 to 67% in 2023. We have to ask ourselves why that is the case. Why are we so out of step with so many other countries such as France, Italy, Spain and Germany? Some 42,000 asylum seekers are awaiting appeal outcomes, with 40% citing human rights grounds.

This Government have instead doubled down on lawfare, on the rule of lawyers and not the rule of law. Today the newspapers report that our Attorney-General has apparently appointed himself as Deputy Prime Minister with an effective veto over all government policy and a “snitch clause”, encouraging civil servants to dob in Ministers who fall foul of the Attorney-General’s zealous, unbalanced and damaging interpretation of international law. This extends to vetoing potential domestic legislation. It will not end well.

To finish, this Government had a great opportunity to consolidate and build on the work we had done in government, and we would have cheered them on and wished them well. It is a matter of great regret for the future of our country, for people who are looking to government to protect the safety and security of our borders, that they were not able to do that.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friends in opposing this clause. While I will try to avoid repeating what my noble friends have already said, to take a starting point, I did speak in the debate at the other end on this because it was important that, as has already been somewhat alluded to, this turned out to be quite a significant deterrent.

I appreciate that the Minister may disagree with my interpretation, but he will remember that when this started happening and became law, people started moving to Ireland, to Dublin. People left this country because they were concerned about being caught up in the process of being sent to Rwanda. People could see it with their own eyes. In 2022 the number of crossings meant that 45,000 people came to our shores through small boats, then it started to fall when the Prime Minister at the time announced that. Once there was legal wrangling, all of a sudden the number of people coming across on illegal crossings started to rise again. The numbers cannot be refuted.

I appreciate that this was in the Labour Party’s Change manifesto for government, which estimated that it would save £75 million a year by scrapping this policy. It also anticipated that it would save, I think, a few hundred million pounds more by ending hotels. That has not happened either.

Nevertheless, in the first half of this year, we have seen 20,000 people coming to these shores. That is a significant uplift and, with no deterrent, there seems to be no change in the trend. I hope that what the Prime Minister has announced while we have been debating this amendment will be successful. I will not repeat the questions from my noble friend Lord Harper.

It is critical to come back to aspects of the constitutional arrangement, which is why we ended up where we were. We had had the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, then the Illegal Migration Act 2023. I am not going to debate that, because we will come on to it later in Committee. The High Court having ruled in favour of the then Government, the Court of Appeal and then five members of the Supreme Court spoke unanimously. I think it was perfectly valid for the UK Government, who were responsible for international relations, to try to correct how Rwanda had been maligned by those five judges. Yes, that was also considering representations made by lawyers and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, but nevertheless, as I think I referred to previously, Rwanda is a prominent member of the Commonwealth. It is a nation that joined the Commonwealth because of values. The Commonwealth does not let just anybody in. Also, Rwanda had just recently held the presidency of the Commonwealth. That in itself is no mean feat. So it was perfectly valid of the Government. As we know, if judges come up with a decision that Parliament does not like, the recourse is for Parliament to then put in place a new law. That is why I was more than happy to support that legislation at the time.

I respect that this is a manifesto commitment, but it feels very tokenistic. As my noble friend Lord Horam pointed out, the scheme in Australia involved a number of factors, not only the offshoring and processing but the turn away policy—how the Australian navy worked with boats—but nevertheless it was clear that the Government were not going to accept illegal criminal activity. We all know that the smugglers do not care whether people live or die as they push them out into the very dangerous channel. This is just one line in a campaign, and I think the Government will come to regret not having something effective in this regard. As I say, we will come on to the Illegal Migration Act later.

I encourage the Government to think carefully about what happened and to recognise that every time they undermine the deterrent, unfortunately, the number of people handing over thousands of pounds to smugglers will just increase. I am sure nobody in this Committee wants to see that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point. Members of this House expressed strong concerns when the Bill, now an Act, was debated, particularly about the previous Government’s statements under Section 19(1)(b) of the Human Rights Act. They could not say that the Bill was compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The Government were seeking to overrule a Supreme Court judgment that the Act did not provide safeguards when Rwanda was subsequently deemed unsafe. I confess that I was not here; I was having what we call an interregnum between the House of Commons and this House. However, having watched the debate from afar, I know that that was one of the concerns that were raised. In fact, the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ report said it was incompatible with the ECHR and, more widely, that the policy outsourced the UK’s obligations under the refugee convention and referred to the difficulties in guaranteeing compliance with the principles of that legislation.

I think that was the reason that members of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrat Party, and from the Cross Benches, and a number of Conservative Peers, rejected the proposal on several occasions, until such time as the then House of Commons fulfilled its manifesto commitment—I accept that—to bring the scheme in. The scheme was never going to work.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Before I let the noble Lord, Lord Jackson in, let me answer the noble Lord, Lord Horam, who asked how I know. I know because four people volunteered to go on the scheme. The scheme did not work and would not work. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, confirmed his view that it did not work. This is an honest disagreement between us, and that is where we are.

I will take the noble Lord’s intervention before I carry on.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I am delighted that the Minister prays in aid my estimable noble friend Lord Deben. Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and the fact that he will disagree with his Front Bench.

That aside, on safety, for the avoidance of doubt, the Supreme Court did not express a conclusive view about the risk of Article 3 ill-treatment of relocated individuals in Rwanda. That issue was not the subject of detailed argument at the hearing of the appeal. On the refoulement issue, the Supreme Court concluded that it was unnecessary for it to determine it. As such, the High Court’s determination that Rwanda was in general safe for individuals removed under the MEDP was not disturbed. That is the fact of the matter.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Politics is about the exchange of views and ideas and the delivery of policies. I think we have reached an impasse. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, and Opposition Back-Benchers think that the scheme would have worked, and the Government think that the scheme was expensive and would not have worked. That is the clear blue—or red—water between us on this. I am grateful for my noble friend Lady Lister’s support for the Government in taking the steps that we have taken.

The UK will also exit the UK-Rwanda treaty as part of ending this partnership and it is therefore appropriate for the Government to repeal the safety of Rwanda Act. Clause 37 will achieve this. In doing so, it is also important that we address the issue that has been endemic in the discussion we have had today, that somehow this was a deterrent and the removal of this clause and the removal of the scheme will therefore end that deterrent. I just refer noble Lords to Clauses 1 to 12 of this Bill, which establish a new Border Security Command and put in place resources of £150 million and £280 million over the next few years to establish very strong action on the meaningful issues that are important to us all.

We have created co-operation with the French, Dutch, Germans and Belgians through the new Border Security Commander on tackling the small boats at source. There is the work that the border commander has been doing with the French Government as part of the preparations for today’s conference between the President of the Republic of France, the Prime Minister and other representatives. There is also the work that the Government will do under Clauses 13 to 17 of this Bill to create new offences to bring people to justice if they provide activity on the issue of supplying articles, handling articles, collecting information and offences committed outside the United Kingdom. There is also Clause 18 on endangering another during the sea crossing to the United Kingdom, as well as powers to search on electronic devices to bring people to justice in that way. This Bill is full of deterrent activity that, if and when implemented by the Government after being passed by both Houses, will make a real difference.

I am pleased to say to the House that, hot off the press today, the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic of France have now finished their deliberations and, speaking with the President at a news conference just a few moments ago, the Prime Minister has confirmed a new UK-France returns pilot scheme. The Prime Minister has said that the scheme will come into force in a matter of weeks. Migrants arriving via small boats will be detained and returned to France in short order. In exchange for every return, a different individual will be allowed to come here via safe and legal routes, which individuals in this House have been pressing this Government to have. There will be strict security checks, open only to those who have not tried to enter the UK illegally. The suggestion is that, under the pilot, 50 people per week will be sent back to France across the channel—as I recall, even in this very week alone, that will be 46 more than left under the Rwanda scheme.

For the first time since we left the European Union, the UK has secured a bilateral agreement with France to pilot the return of illegal migrants across the channel. This tightly controlled pilot will be, I hope, the premise for further action downstream. The UK-France summit today has seen both nations strengthen co-operation on border security. We know that there is no silver bullet on this issue. We know that the returns pilot is part of a border crackdown, but it is the culmination—and this goes again to the value of the Border Security Command in this Bill—of six months’ work by the Border Security Commander with the Home Secretary, my right honourable friend the Member for Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley, the French Interior Minister and the French-established new Compagnie de Marche. That is real progress in developing real, positive action. I can even go back to our discussions about Europol earlier today, on ensuring that we tackle smuggling gangs and disrupt their business model, that we have stronger law enforcement and that we dismantle this multi-million pound black market. This is not just about gangs; it is about lives.

The Rwanda scheme was ineffective, costly and did not deliver. The Government’s proposals in this Bill, and the statements by the Prime Minister and the President of France today, will add greatly to the potential to impact this heinous crime and business.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, on the overall issue, I strongly support the various provisions in legislation to make sure that victims of modern slavery and trafficking are properly protected. There is, however, a balance to strike, because the people we want to protect are actual victims of modern slavery and trafficking. We have to be very careful because, if you have a blanket exemption for anyone who claims to be a victim of modern slavery and trafficking, you just create a massive gap in our laws where anybody who is then intercepted ends up claiming to be a victim of modern slavery and trafficking to avoid being removed from the country. That has two incredibly damaging consequences. One is that they are able to undercut our immigration control, but they also damage public support for and acceptance of genuine victims of modern slavery and trafficking. We have to have a system which recognises that there are many bad actors out there who will take advantage of every weakness in our legislation.

I do not support the first amendment in this group, which seeks to get rid of the Home Secretary’s ability to remove people who have sought to use modern slavery protections in bad faith: the sorts of people I have talked about who try to use these provisions, where they do not apply, to try to avoid our immigration controls. I think it is reasonable that the Home Secretary is able to do that. I know from my experience, and I have no reason to suspect it is now any different, that the officials in the Home Office who look after this area of policy are expert, competent people who do their very best to try to make these decisions.

I have met victims of modern slavery. I met the people who implemented this legislation when my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead was Home Secretary and I was in the Home Office, and I have a lot of confidence that they get the decisions right—not in 100% of cases, because people are not perfect, but I think we have a good system—but we have to have the power to deal with people who act in bad faith.

Amendment 117 repeals a whole bunch of sections of the Nationality and Borders Act that actually provide the protections for victims of modern slavery, such as their ability to get leave to stay in the United Kingdom for a period of up to 60 months and to have a recovery period. Those are all very valuable protections that ought to remain, so I do not support that amendment.

Very briefly, given that my noble friend Lady May is not able to be here, I briefly support the thrust of her amendment, Amendment 183. That looks at making sure that people who are victims of modern slavery and perhaps have committed criminal offences but under duress are not then punished for a second time as a result of only having committed those offences under duress.

I think that amendment has a lot of merit. If my noble friend Lady May were to bring it back on Report, I would consider supporting it. If there are any flaws or weaknesses in the way it is drafted, it would be good if the Minister were able to set them out today or would engage with my noble friend and the people who have supported the amendment to deal with them so that we could have an agreed position on Report.

With those relatively brief comments and mindful of time, I will sit down.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 172. I would genuinely press the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, to elucidate the meaning behind it, because I find it quite confusing. The amendment seeks to prevent the proper authorities gaining any information about a person. I read the wording very carefully. It refers to

“suspected victims of slavery or human trafficking”.

It could be that that status changes, and that a person was originally suspected of being a victim but when further inquiry took place it proved not to be the case. Therefore, I find it odd that under this restrictive amendment—I am happy to be disabused if I have got it wrong—a public authority would be speaking to, for instance, adult social care or adult social services, children’s services and others but would be prevented on a statutory basis from talking to anyone else on the chance that, somewhat down the line, that person may have criminal charges laid against them. At that stage, they may be found not to have been truly a victim of slavery or human trafficking.

To specifically rule out

“a customs official ... a law enforcement officer … a UK authorised person”—

I am not entirely certain what that is—or

“the government of a country or territory outside the United Kingdom”

seems pretty draconian and restrictive. Perhaps the noble Baroness might wish to enlighten us about the meaning behind this amendment. However, for the reasons I set out, I do not think it would be appropriate to incorporate it into the Bill, and on that basis, I oppose it.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I have my doubts about Amendment 182, which would insert a new clause after Clause 48 for victims of human trafficking, granting them leave to remain for at least 60 months, access to support services and employment, and eligibility for settlement after five years. Returning to the point made on these Benches by my noble friend Lord Harper and picked up on a different amendment by my noble friend Lord Jackson, I fear that there is always a doubt about real victims of human trafficking and slavery, who everyone feels the deepest of sympathy for and wants to support. However, by creating a system that gives undue advantage to such people, as Amendment 182 would do, one would, I fear, increase the perverse incentive for anyone to claim that they were a victim of human trafficking and slavery. That would create endless additional bureaucratic and other expenses for our legal system and our Home Office arrangements in trying to check the mushrooming of claims. I am not in favour of this more generous treatment under Amendment 182.

I also have certain doubts about Amendment 205, which would require the Secretary of State to introduce legislation to adopt into UK law the 2005 Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, partly because we have made progress on many of these matters in UK law. At this stage, it is not very sensible to start adopting additional international frameworks, some of which are recent, while others relate to distant periods that we already cover. This would over-bureaucratise the system and add an additional expense. Where there are genuine claims, we must make our own laws work.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I emphatically support the excellent Amendment 203J, to insert a new clause after Clause 48, moved so ably by my noble friend Lord Murray of Blidworth.

It is important at this juncture to put this into some context, because there is a fast-moving debate on our involvement with the 1951 refugee convention and our obligations therein, and the European Convention on Human Rights. The Minister knows that these issues have been debated recently by his noble friends, including the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, Jack Straw, the former Home Secretary, and even other esteemed Members of this House, such as the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven. However, we are not here necessarily to talk about the disapplication of or derogation from the ECHR, although I may press the Minister to update your Lordships’ House on progress made on the review of Article 8 of the convention, which has been a government undertaking for several months.

The fact of the matter is that we have a small boat crossings crisis, which is the kernel of the rationale of this amendment. Small boat crossings are costing us £5.6 million a day in hotel accommodation for asylum seekers—the equivalent of 73,000 visits to accident and emergency by British citizens and others every day. The National Audit Office tells us that by the end of this Parliament, this is likely to cost the country £15 billion. We have had 180,000 individual crossings since 2018, and this year alone, as of yesterday, 28,000 individual arrivals.

The point is that this is an existential emergency for the protection of our borders, so we need to look at different ways of approaching the situation. On that basis, the Minister should look very carefully at this amendment. It is not about withdrawing from the convention, but a very robust interpretation of our legal obligations under Section 31 of the convention. I will not try the patience of the House by repeating the specific wording of that convention, which is often being misinterpreted by some members of the judiciary and others, including, of course, some charity groups with a vested interest in this area.

My noble friend is right to talk about accretion and the reach of the concept that has developed since the 1970s: the living instrument doctrine, which has informed decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in this area. I accept that the Government are in a difficult position at the moment. We were, of course, party to the Dublin III convention— Regulation 604/2013—and we are now waiting for the European Union’s decision on how to implement the asylum and migration management regulation 2024, which will come into full effect in June 2026.

This is a question of fairness. If you go the right route and seek asylum, naturalisation as a British citizen or indefinite leave to remain, you are, as we know from the Home Secretary’s remarks earlier this week, subject to some pretty significant restrictions on who you can bring in, what your salary or pay should be and your access to public funds. That is perhaps as it should be, but if you arrive by small boat, you have no such restrictions. You are put up in a hotel, subject to limited security checks and are perhaps eventually to be reunited with family members, who will access NHS services, school services and local authority and housing association housing. There is an issue of disproportionality and unfairness between those two groups, and the important thing we need to remember is that my noble friend Lord Murray’s proposal addresses this issue in a way that will not cause—how can I put it?—legal chaos. Most importantly, it will act as a clear and demonstrable deterrent to the people traffickers and to those seeking to arrive by illegal and irregular means, by small boat across the channel. The Government have a good opportunity, as my noble friend says, to seize this issue with both hands.

I finish on the second issue: the UK/European Applicant Transfer Scheme, which was sealed by means of a treaty between the United Kingdom and France in May. Interestingly, the Home Secretary wrote to my committee, the European Affairs Committee, on 6 August to indicate that Section 20 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 was being disapplied, and that the Government had invoked Section 22(1) of CRaG to prevent proper scrutiny and oversight of the treaty, as per the legislation—in other words, 21 days of proper scrutiny. That may be an operational issue which was necessary at the time, but it goes to the inability of the other place and this House to properly scrutinise that one-in, one-out treaty and its efficacy. I would value the Minister’s comments on that. When will we have a chance to look properly at how that treaty and its effects are working, both in the interests of the UK and of our partners in France?

With that point in mind, the Minister has an opportunity to properly consider the amendment. The Government are in a pickle; they are flailing around for some gimmicks to convince the public that they have got a grip on small boat crossings, which they do not. This is a real opportunity for them to seize this issue and to reduce the pull factor of small boat crossings. On that basis, I strongly support the amendment, and hope the Minister at least responds in kind in an attempt to ameliorate what is a national emergency.

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 104 and 203J, and to join the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, in inviting the Minister to consider carefully the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Murray. I was a member of the court in the decision to which the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, referred. It provides a good example of the problem we face in looking at these amendments.

The problem with the courts is that individual cases come to us and you have to consider them one by one. But as legislators, we can take a broader view, cover the whole ground and intercept problems that, if not intercepted, would come back to the courts one by one to be dealt with. The Georgian case is a good example: if it came before the Supreme Court now, the protection the court offered in the case to which the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, referred, would be made available as well. To allow that person to be extradited to Georgia, in the light of such conduct, would be quite contrary to their human rights. For these reasons, there is a lot of force in those two amendments, on the ground that they intercept a problem that will recur and is best dealt with by legislation now.

The noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, referred to a case in the Supreme Court. I have no recollection of that case, and he will correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe that I was party to the decision and therefore was not in the majority. However, if the minority had included Lord Rodger, that would carry great weight for me.

I confess that, for quite some time, I have felt that the point that the noble Lord, Lord Murray, is making had a lot of force behind it. I would need to look again more carefully at the wording of the convention to determine what my final decision would be, but he said enough to justify the invitation from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, to the Government to look at it very carefully, because the advantages of giving effect to that reading are obvious. I do not think that it would damage our reputation, because it would depend on an interpretation of the wording of the convention—not defying or withdrawing from the convention but giving effect to it. That, I think, is the point that the noble Lord, Lord Murray, is making, and there is a lot of force behind it.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Lords Chamber

These amendments are about maintaining the tools the Government need to act decisively on the basis of authoritative information and without being hamstrung by vexatious delays. We cannot afford to slip into a system in which removals are paralysed by endless backlogs, where spurious challenges proliferate and where factual determinations are relitigated to no end. We struck the right balance when these provisions were first drafted: fair but firm; open to genuine challenge but closed to tactical obstruction. If the Government truly believe that removing these powers will have no adverse effect, they must explain why to the Committee. Otherwise, they should reintroduce them, so that those who they themselves have determined have no right to remain can be removed swiftly and the integrity of our immigration system can be preserved. I beg to move.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments on age assessments moved by my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower.

When we ventilated these issues in 2023, when we were looking at the then Illegal Migration Bill, we had a very good debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, was very voluble and passionate about this issue, as one would expect of her, and as we have come to know and love during the course of these debates. However, I think the public have moved on. When we debated the earlier clauses of the Bill, we talked about the crisis of confidence and the lack of public support for any actions taken by parties in government, whether Labour or Conservative. That crisis of confidence is worse than ever now. I do not think that it is improved by anecdotal and media portrayals of people who are quite obviously young men and not children, but who are purporting to be children and using various methods to thwart the reasonable expectation of most people that they should be removed because they should not be allowed to settle in the United Kingdom on a permanent basis as asylum seekers.

Therefore, we have to use our common sense here. I regret the fact that the Government seem to be throwing the baby out with the bath water. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, said earlier that it was a moveable feast, but in fact, she is now a compatriot of the Government on many of the proposals. I know she has always been a compatriot of the Minister, as they both hail from north Wales. However, we have moved on significantly since we debated this issue two years ago. People expect fair and equitable treatment of minors and people purporting to be minors. Therefore, we have to use our common sense.

Often, it is young men—disproportionately so—who are arriving without any identification. They will have disposed of their passports or ID cards and will therefore be able to make the case that they are children or very young people, and there is no identification to disprove that notion. The appearance of young people over 18—facial growth, bone structure, beards and so on—decries the idea that they are allegedly children. They look over 18. Across the world, artificial intelligence and scientific methods are used to ascertain the precise age of young people.

The Government should look more favourably on these amendments, because they were put in the earlier legislation for good reason. I specifically support my noble friend Lord Murray of Blidworth’s amendment, and Amendment 200, because this is not being done surreptitiously; it is being done in the open. You will be able to test the veracity of the scientific assessment, judge it against international comparators and get scientific experts in anatomy to test whether these scientific assessments work. A blanket ban on a reasonable scientific assessment is not the right way to proceed, particularly as this will be a relatively small number of people. There will be a relatively small number of young men claiming they are children. A robust scientific regime to test that and, more importantly, parliamentary scrutiny and oversight of the regulations the Minister will lay before the House for this scientific assessment and method, is a reasonable position to adopt.

If the Government are seeking to persuade the electorate that they are serious about and committed to tackling the egregious abuses of our border, they must recognise that people pretending to be children—forcing often cash-strapped local authorities to find them a school place or provide a statement of special educational needs and other contingent liabilities and funding—is an issue of public importance, safety and security.

I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is champing at the bit to disabuse me of my notions. It is unfortunate that the Government and the Minister, for whom I have huge respect, as he knows, have seen fit to remove this provision for no particular reason. He has not made the case for why he is doing that. Therefore, he needs to think again. Hopefully, he will have better news for us on Report. In the interim, naturally, I support all four amendments.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak very briefly, before the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, because I am unhappy about these amendments. I was very relieved when the Government put forward a situation that would not support them.

I was invited by the charity Safe Passage to attend a drop-in session at its drop-in house in London, where I met two young men. Safe Passage was absolutely satisfied that both of them were 16. They were Afghans; one had a beard, and the other had a moustache. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, seems to me to be unsafe, because what we are looking at is Europeans. Europeans do not normally get beards and moustaches under the age of 18, but those who come as refugees and asylum seekers come from all over the world, where they grow up and mature much more quickly.

I was extremely relieved to see the approach of this Government and very disturbed to see these amendments, which I hope will not succeed.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Before the noble and learned Baroness sits down, if I may, for the avoidance of doubt, I was not arguing that it would be merely a subjective assessment or value judgment of appearance: it would be complementary to a robust scientific method, which would be tested both in this House and by other scientists in the course of the work. It would not just be a border officer saying, “You look like a 21 year-old”. The amendments make reference to scientific assessment, which would be an important complementary safeguard that might address the particular concerns of the noble and learned Baroness.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

I am very interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, says, because he did talk about common sense and looking at a person. That is what encouraged me to speak. When I met those two young men, I absolutely took the view that they were over 18, but I was disabused, not only by their age, which was identified, but by the fact that I had been thinking in European terms. That is the danger of what is being said by the Opposition.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am very grateful for the noble Lord’s intervention. One of the problems is that social workers are using exactly those techniques—perhaps not in full, but they are. What is more, the NNAB social workers are paid through the NNAB by the Home Office. They are not independent, which is the other key point we wanted to make. I am very grateful for what the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, said at the start. He said that the public had moved on. But, as a former trustee of UNICEF, I say that my priority has to be the protection of young people who are under 18, and an arrangement for those where it may not be possible to decide that exactly—and we have had many debates about all that.

The issue is not just one of public satisfaction. The public may be very irritated by the young men who are clearly over 18 who are doing this, and that is fine for the system. Those of us who are bringing back amendments, probably on Monday, want to make sure that it is not happening the other way round: that people under 18 are being deemed to be adult. We know that this has happened and I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that we might finally see some data on this. Every time I have asked over the last three or four years, there has been no data about those who are deemed to be 18 and over who were under, and, indeed, the other way around. That is important for the Home Office, because it needs to understand about provision for those who are in this very small group, who need to be looked after in a slightly more special way.

By the way, not every young person who is under 18 who goes to a school is going to have special needs. They may need some language support, but not necessarily special needs. They may need emotional support if they have come from a war zone such as Sudan but, if we are saying that they are awaiting assessment as asylum seekers, that is something that this country really ought to be prepared to look at. So I am much more cynical about the NNAB being as truly independent and clear as the noble Lord, Lord Murray, was making out. Those of us who have amendments will go over this in detail next week.

I want to go back to Amendments 114 and 115. Young people having no right of appeal contravenes the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child. They absolutely must have support in complex issues, particularly in a country where they may not speak the language. When the official Opposition were in power, they also refused to let young people who were having age assessments carried over have any access to legal or advisory support during that process. They said it was not necessary. But I have to say that those European countries that use age assessments all have independent support for these young people from that Government’s own process. I particularly pray in aid the Netherlands, because it was cited by the noble Lord, Lord Murray, when he was at the Dispatch Box in the past.

These protections are built in because we have a formal duty to look after those under 18 and, yes, it may be difficult to work out if some are, but we will know about most of them. I really think that the first two amendments need to be reviewed, and I do not think we can support them. I can remember when I read the first full report: it is not as clear as the noble Lord, Lord Murray, said. There is always talk about ranges. I do not know about noble Lords, but I have a son of six foot four and he was certainly sprouting a beard by 16 or 17 and was already over six foot. We make mistakes, and I absolutely support what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, was saying. You cannot just assume that that is right and, if we get it wrong, you have a young man—they usually are young men—who is put into an adult centre. They then are at risk, and that is on us as a country.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I absolutely applaud the laudable work of UNICEF. The point that I was attempting to make was that we must focus our efforts on weeding out those who are clearly, as she concedes, not reaching the age criteria, so that we can focus on those in most need, who have suffered terror, despotism, trauma et cetera.

Taking the noble Baroness back to the appeals, what is the alternative? If you have an open-ended, liberal, permissive appeals system, it will be gamed by many people. She might want to think about this before she tables an amendment: can you have an appeals system that pays due regard to the universal human rights of children but does not allow the system to be gamed by endless appeals that take months and years?

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

The problem is that Amendment 114 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, says there is no appeal—full stop, end. None. Therefore, that young person, who probably has English as a second language, whichever side they are and who will be arguing that they are under 18, does not even have the right that the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, was talking about, and that worries me. I have argued this for some time, as the noble Lord, Lord Murray, knows, to his cost. I agree that the public are concerned. I have no doubt about that. However, are we only concerned with what the public are concerned about? Do we not need to focus on children who are seeking asylum in this country and can get some help? If we go by, “Well, actually the public don’t want it”, it will all start going the wrong way.

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[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I have heard what the noble Baroness said. I will reflect on that point. I give way to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

The Minister anticipated my point, and the noble Baroness put it much more clearly. I was going to ask whether there would be periodic production of qualitative and quantitative data around the numbers coming in. As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, said, we are debating in the dark on numbers—we need the numbers. But the Minister answered the question, for which I thank him.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful for our agreement on the answering of the question and I retain my position. I hope noble Lords will not press their amendments.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 8th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 138 and 139 are in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Davies of Gower. Together, they go to the heart of what it means to have a fair, firm and trusted asylum and immigration system that both commands the confidence of the British people and respects their good will.

We should start from first principles. The people of this country are generous, compassionate and welcoming. That generosity has been demonstrated towards those migrating to the UK over the centuries and has especially been seen more recently in the Homes for Ukraine scheme, through which ordinary families across the UK opened their doors, and the Afghan relocations and assistance policy and the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, which have offered refuge to those who stood by our Armed Forces. This reflects a profound national instinct to offer sanctuary to those in genuine need fleeing persecution and violence, and to do so with humanity and dignity.

However, that good will is not unlimited, nor should it be exploited. When we ask the British people to assent to immigration policy, we are not legislating in the abstract. We are in effect asking our fellow citizens to share their homes and their services with those arriving on our shores. That is a profound act of trust, and it is our duty in this place to protect that trust. That is why I suggest that these amendments matter: they draw a clear and important distinction between those who come here in need of our support and behave with gratitude and decency, and those who come here and break our criminal law and expect to remain regardless.

I turn to the detail of the two amendments in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Davies. Amendment 139 would provide that any person who was not a British citizen and was convicted of a crime while in the UK would be automatically deported. Furthermore, where a non-British citizen over the age of 17 was convicted of an offence, the court would have to order deportation when sentencing. That would bring absolute clarity: if you break the law, you forfeit the right to remain. It would also ensure that those who committed immigration offences, such as entering or remaining unlawfully, were dealt with firmly and consistently.

Amendment 138 deals specifically with automatic deportation orders. These were introduced to the immigration system by the previous Labour Government in the UK Borders Act 2007. They state that the Secretary of State must make a deportation order in cases of conviction where 12 months’ imprisonment is applied and an offence is specified. My amendment seeks to prevent the possibility of constant and lengthy appeals by removing the ability of foreign offenders to frustrate an automatic deportation order through a lengthy appeal mechanism. It provides that, if a deportation order is made, it is final and can be neither appealed nor overturned by a higher court. That would not, of course, affect the right to appeal the criminal conviction, which would remain, but the automatic deportation order could not be overturned.

We cannot justify to the British people a system in which convicted criminals linger here for years during protracted appeal proceedings. These amendments are not directed against those who genuinely need our protection—those fleeing war, persecution and danger—but against those who exploit our generosity, take advantage of our systems and commit crimes against the very society that has given them shelter.

Finally, I lend a word of support to the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough. I have no wish to steal his thunder, so will be as brief as I can. I support the amendment, which would ensure that deportation orders follow swiftly within seven days of release and cannot be endlessly delayed or appealed. That clarity is essential both for the integrity of the system and for the public’s trust in it.

These amendments draw a firm line, restore public trust and reaffirm the principle that compassion must be matched by responsibility. I beg to move.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to speak to Amendment 203A in my name and to contribute to the wider deliberations of the Committee. It almost feels as if this Bill is from a different era. The speed of change of government policy on immigration following the publication of the immigration White Paper and various other political developments has left us somewhat flat-footed.

Foreign national offenders remain an endemic issue, which the previous Government, in all fairness, failed to tackle as effectively as they could have. It is apposite that just today the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (Removal of Prisoners for Deportation) Order 2025 is being considered by the Grand Committee. As noble Lords will know, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has opined on that statutory instrument in its 31st report. I will not bore the Committee with the details.

Foreign national offenders cost roughly £54,000 each. They cost £500 million a year and, as of 25 June, there were 10,772 foreign national offenders in our prison estate. They represent 12.5% of the prison population. Disproportionate groups are Albanians, Poles, Romanians, Jamaicans and Irish citizens.

I welcome the Government’s new focus on this area. It is fair to say that they have made some progress. Up to August 2025, they had removed around 5,000 of these individuals. Nevertheless, the number of foreign national offenders is still extremely high compared with just six years ago. Since 2019, there has been a 16.8% rise in foreign national offenders in the prison estate. It was not always the case that we were struggling to remove them. In 2016, the previous Government removed 6,437. In 2017 the figure was 6,292 and in 2018 it was 5,500. Believe it or not, over 12,000 were removed in 2012. The previous Government secured a prisoner transfer agreement with Albania in May 2023.

Regarding some of the legal impediments to the removal of foreign national offenders at the end of their sentences, the German Government—no doubt we will come back to this issue in future—derogated from parts of the European Convention on Human Rights specifically to prevent vexatious and spurious claims against deportation by, in particular, persistent Albanian career criminals. I wonder why the UK Government have not sought to pursue a similar policy, but I am obviously glad that they are looking at it in their review of Article 8. Every time the Minister speaks on this, he sounds a bit more robust in his interpretation, which I am hopeful about.

One-third of foreign national offenders are citizens of the European Union. They should be removed on the basis of public policy, public health and public safety and security, available under the free movement regulations and, post Brexit, Regulation 27 of the Immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2016.

I am interested to see the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, in the Chamber, as I do not know what the statutory basis for this is, but why do we not remove the many hundreds of Irish prisoners in our estate? It seems to be a “convention” that we do not. As she would no doubt agree, surely we can ask the Irish to take back their own prisoners as a quid pro quo for the defence support we consistently give to them. The previous Government paid £25 million to the Government of Jamaica to construct a prison in Kingston as part of a quid pro quo for the removal of several thousand Jamaican prisoners in our estate. It seems that we have not expedited that positive outcome. Can the Minister update us on any new prisoner transfer agreement that is likely to come to fruition on top of the one signed in October 2023 with the Philippines? I know that there is ongoing work with the Government of Italy in this respect as well. Maybe he can say how many prisoners claim asylum, or are likely to claim asylum, at the point that they are due to be released or deported.

The reason why we need this amendment and a statutory duty as an imperative in law is that Ministers are bedevilled not just by judicial activism and the misuse of Article 8 of the ECHR by some judges in the Upper Tribunal, as consistently exposed by the Daily Telegraph, but by a fundamental and chronic issue of mismanagement in the criminal justice system. It is why we have 12,000 criminals mooted for deportation at large in our communities, an increase of 192% since 2012. Yet we have the legal powers to act decisively under the Immigration Act 1971 and the UK Borders Act 2007. I applaud the Government for their early removal scheme changes and efforts to secure new prisoner transfer agreements. I think we all agree with that, but we need better and more up-to-date data and communications between the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. We need better reporting performance at the foreign national offenders returns command and a review of case working. We need to stop the use of manually accessed spreadsheets, tackle poor IT provision and improve case ownership, case management, accountability and timelines.

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[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, I will make a very brief point in addition to that one. It is interesting that we have just came out of a debate on a group of amendments that address the rule of law and legal advice. Around the Committee, there was a strong view that people should have representation, that they should be able to make their case and that their case should be heard. What we have before us now is a group of amendments in which there is absolutism without any sense of balance or proportionality. The case of coercion, which my noble friend has just discussed, makes it incredibly difficult for anyone who believes in the rule of law and in due process to support these amendments, particularly when we are told that the criticism largely comes from the Daily Telegraph.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I will respond, with all due respect, to the noble Lord’s comments about minors. We should bear in mind that this amendment would apply to people who would be subject to the provision as adults, not children, when sent into the prison estate. They would be subject, for instance, to pre-sentence reports and background information being provided if they were young people, but, in essence, they would be adults. They would be at the top level of criminality, because they would be incarcerated in respect of a custodial sentence. In other words, they would have committed pretty serious offences; they would not have been sent to prison for not paying their TV licence or for speeding. Therefore, for the noble Lord to conflate the two is wrong. This is something that the British people are looking to the Government to take action on. They look at other jurisdictions and simply cannot understand why other jurisdictions are in a position to take robust action to remove people who have committed persistent criminal offences in their country.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, the question was posed by my noble friend Lord Jackson—and touched on by, I think, my noble friend Lord Harper—as to why Irish citizens are not deported. The answer lies in the Ireland Act 1949, which was passed by this Parliament when the Irish Free State turned itself into a republic. The Ireland Act 1949 states that Irish citizens should not be treated as foreign citizens for the purposes of British law, which is why Irish citizens can vote in our elections and why Irish prisoners are not sent to the Republic of Ireland.

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Moved by

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough]

141: After Clause 41, insert the following new Clause—
“Collection of data on overseas students subject to visa conditions and immigration rules(1) The Secretary of State must collate and publish—(a) the number of overseas students who have had their student visas revoked as a result of the commission of criminal offences,(b) the number of overseas students who have been deported following the revocation of their student visas, and(c) the number of overseas students detained pending deportation following the revocation of their student visas.(2) Data published under subsection (1) must be broken down by nationality.(3) For the purposes of this section—“overseas students” means any person who is not a British citizen who has been granted leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom for the purposes of partaking in an educational course;“student visa” has the same meaning as in the Immigration Rules.”

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I will not detain your Lordships’ House too long with this amendment because it is straightforward. It relates to the piece of the jigsaw that is missing in respect of foreign national students with visas to study in the United Kingdom. The background of my amendment is the very serious occasions on which public disorder has occurred, in London and other parts of the country, arising from the Israel-Gaza conflict, which dates from October 2023.

This has obviously been a phenomenon across the world of student bodies, whether it is Harvard, Columbia in New York, in Australia or across Europe, protesting against what they perceive as wrong policy pursued by a particular country—not just the Israel-Gaza situation but other contentious political issues. Other jurisdictions have co-ordinated their response to public disorder which has occurred with student bodies in a better way. In other words, they have monitored whether those students have properly abided by the restrictions and obligations put on them when they apply for and are successfully granted a visa.

Students and those with educational visas in higher education are not in any sense sui generis. They do not have carve-outs and are not given a free pass. Indeed, for the purposes of any transgression of criminal law, public disorder and other issues, they are as much subject to statute as anyone else: the Immigration Act 1971, the UK Borders Act 2007 and the Immigration Act 2016. As I referenced in the earlier group, if they are from the European Union, they are also subject to restrictions in their conduct, essentially around visa breaches and immigration law violations, but for our purposes today, I am focusing on criminal activity. That is quite a high bar for those students, in that it is deemed to pose a threat “to the public good”, which is the wording used in primary and secondary legislation—statutory instruments.

It is unusual that I am praising the Government slightly today, but I know that they are mindful of the concerns that the general public have on this issue and that they are seeking, as did the previous Government, to address and ameliorate abuses of the student visa system. We accept in good faith that they are seeking to tackle those egregious abuses, but, to my mind, the piece of the puzzle that is missing is that there is not proper co-ordination in respect of student visas. Therefore, it is important to collect the data on those student visas which are applied for by students who are subject to criminal sanction, not just being arrested but charged and, perhaps, subject to criminal penalty, including, of course, incarceration in the prison estate.

It is for that reason that I think my amendment fits well with this Bill. I am not saying that every foreign student is a criminal—far from it. We welcome the many thousands of students who come to our country to study, some of whom stay here to further their careers and add to our economy and our civic life, et cetera. But there will be some who come here and commit criminal offences. To my mind—I echo the astute comments of my noble friend Lord Harper—you have an obligation, if you apply for a visa and come here, to behave yourself, to behave in a civilized manner, to abide by the law, to work hard and to abide by the conditions of your visa and wider obligations. If you fail to discharge that, particularly, for instance, by shouting antisemitic abuse on a hate march in London or anywhere else, that is unacceptable. If you are subject to criminal sanction and penalty, there is a strong case that your visa should be revoked and you should be removed from this country.

However, the first step should be that that information should be collected and collated in a way which is transparent and open, so that the state and the criminal justice system has an opportunity to make a value judgment on your behaviour, as someone who is not a British citizen and who has been invited here in good faith to behave as a decent, honest, law-abiding citizen. For those reasons, I commend the amendment in my name, support Amendment 141A from my noble friend Lady Lawlor, and look forward to the Minister’s answer in due course.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, this group of amendments proposes the means to make transparent one of the constituent parts of the high immigration levels that the Government aim to reduce. The amendments propose making transparent the data on the numbers granted student visas and the numbers of dependents, capping the numbers—in the case of the amendments that will follow, Amendments 198 and 199—and dealing with those who offend and the home countries of offenders.

I shall focus on my Amendment 141A, which proposes an annual statement on the number of visas given to overseas students and their dependents, because they contribute significantly to the overall immigration numbers, on which this Government and the previous one have concentrated in order to get them down. The evidence that we have is piecemeal. It covers a range of periods and categories and comes from the Home Office, the ONS and the Higher Education Statistics Authority, but all of the evidence indicates that overseas students’ visas and those issued for dependents constitute a large cohort of the immigration numbers.

In the previous academic year ending September 2024, there were 732,285 overseas students at higher education institutions in the UK. That is almost 25% of the total student population. Around one in 10 came from the EU, while 90% of them came from further across the world. Although the total was down from the very high period of 2022-23—a record high, as it happens—these figures from 2023-24 are still the second-highest ever for overseas students and their dependents.

We want to find out what the top countries are. India was top of the list, sending 107,500—almost nine times the number from India in 2017-18. China, which sent the most students for 10 years, is now in second place; it sent 98,400. There have been rapid increases from Nigeria, which is in third place. The figures for Nigeria will come up in my notes in a moment, so I will come back to them, but it is in third place.

Now we have another set of figures, though, from the Home Office. I want to talk about them. They give an indication of the numbers for the year ending in June this year—the year in which the Labour Government have been in power. From them, we discovered that the number of student visas granted for the year ending June 2025 was 436,000; that was higher than the average from 2012-21, which was an average of 305,000, although it was much smaller than in the peak year of 2023, which was the year when 650,000 student visas were granted. During that time, there were 18,000 dependents—a far lower figure than the 154,000 who came in before that. That is, I think, due to the previous Government’s attempts to curb the figures.

What we see from this is that student visas for overseas students still run at a very high rate. If we take the figures for the year ending June and multiply them, say, by three, we are looking at well over a million people in the country on overseas student visas. For these reasons, it would be very helpful for Parliament, and indeed the public, to know on an annual basis the number of overseas student visas granted, and the numbers granted to dependents, and whether that is increasing or falling. That kind of information in an accessible and consistent form will help identify the nature and scale of the question, whether it is indeed a serious problem and, if so, how we can deal with it.

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[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I want to touch on three matters—two to do with these amendments and one of a more topical nature. We have at previous stages of this Bill talked about the ability of the Government to remove people from the country. Amendment 199 touches on illegal removals. The Minister has been very keen to champion the deal the Government have done with France. Given that the French Government have, just a few moments ago, been voted down by the National Assembly and therefore collapsed, I wonder if the Minister, as he has been in post—I am sure the Home Office will have given it a great deal of thought—could comment on what impact, if any, that will have on the deal that the Government have done, whether in substance or the speed with which they will be able to implement it. That would be both of interest to the Committee and relevant to this legislation.

I strongly support Amendments 141 and 141A, from my noble friends Lord Jackson and Lady Lawlor, because they are about making sure that we better understand the system. While I welcome students who come here to go on good courses, who are here to study, it is useful for us to know if those students are breaching criminal law. I will not rehearse the arguments that my noble friend Lord Jackson made so eloquently, but there is a very good reason why having this data is helpful: one of the things that the Home Office pays a great deal of attention to, when it is making judgments about granting student visas in the first place, is looking at countries where there is a high risk of abuse. It puts a great deal of weight and expectation on universities to ensure that students are genuinely here, that they are competent to study courses and that they are going to study those courses when they get here. If the data highlights countries that are a particular risk, it would enable the Home Office and universities to take that into account when they are making decisions; it would tighten our immigration system and it would make sure that people are genuinely coming here to study—which is, of course, the reason they have been given the visas. So I strongly support both those amendments.

I also support Amendment 199. There is an argument for it—the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, was not enormously persuaded, but I will just give him one argument for where it might be helpful. One of the things that the Home Office finds difficult at the moment is when it wants to deport people to countries that will not have their nationals back. This is internal government politics, but I suspect that the Home Office is very keen to implement those visa requirements. I do not know—and I would not expect the Minister to confirm this at the Dispatch Box—but I suspect that other bits of government, such as the Department for Business and Trade and perhaps the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, are not very keen on implementing those visa sanctions. They would come up with all sorts of compelling reasons—for them—for why the Government should not do so. The countries know this, and they also make those arguments about why we would not want to implement those visa sanctions—damage to our trade and all sorts of other reasons.

This provision may be helpful when Ministers are having those conversations because, by making it mandatory, if the country will not up its game and if is not willing to take back citizens who are not entitled to stay in the United Kingdom, the Government can explain to those countries that their hands and discretion have been fettered by Parliament. Therefore, the only possible sensible course for that country is to improve its compliance and, frankly, do what it is required to do by its international obligations, which is to take back the citizens who are not welcome here. So I think there is a very sensible argument. It may be that the drafting of this amendment can be improved, and the noble Lord is well qualified to help with that.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Is my noble friend as pleased as I am by the news that the new Home Secretary is a keen reader of the amendments that His Majesty’s loyal Opposition have put down on this Bill? The top story in the Times today is:

“Mahmood plans visa crackdown on countries that won’t take back migrants”.


Is she a sinner repenting, and is my noble friend full of joy about this?

[Lord Harper (Con)]

I am very pleased that my noble friend Lord Jackson raised that, because I read that piece this morning and it is part of the reason why I was keen to speak on this amendment. In the debate that was going on this morning, our friend the shadow Home Secretary was challenging the new Home Secretary on this. She hit back and made the point that this permissive power had been in place for some time and had not been used for the reasons that I set out and because of all the other arguments that will be brought forward in government about why you would not want to disturb the relationship between the United Kingdom and the other country that is refusing to take back its citizens. It was interesting to note that the Home Secretary appears a little more seized of using this power.

We are trying to be helpful here because—I do not know, but I suspect—when she has these arguments inside government and expresses her intention to use this power, she will get quite a lot of push-back from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and from the new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Secretary, who perhaps may not have remembered that, just a short while ago, she was responsible for these important matters in the Home Office; it is amazing how quickly Ministers forget when they change departments. The Business Department and the new Business Secretary will be making the point about our important commercial relationships. Actually, the new Home Secretary may well welcome the strengthening of her hand that would be put in place by the Government accepting Amendment 199.

When the Minister responds, even if he does not like the specific drafting of the amendment on the Marshalled List today, and given what my noble friend Lord Jackson said about the Home Secretary’s views, I hope that he gives it a fair wind and commits to come back with a government amendment on Report. If he does not, perhaps we will discover that the Home Secretary’s tough words are just that—words.

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[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

It is not really within my brief to comment on the financing of universities, so the noble Baroness will forgive me if I do not go too deeply into that. However, I can be clear about the grounds on which a student’s permission to stay may be cancelled, and this relates to some of the points the noble Baroness has made: where the person’s sponsorship or endorsement has been withdrawn, for example because they do not have the required knowledge level of the English language; where the person does not start their course with their sponsor—that is important because, as universities know, people sign up but do not turn up; where the person ceases to study, which can include no longer attending their course, completing it at an earlier date or the start date of their course being delayed for more than 28 days; where the sponsor loses their licence—this is important too—or transfers the business, so if they are not a serious higher education institution and are not sustainable; or where the business for which the person studies is transferred to another business or institution and that business or institution, for example, fails to apply for a sponsor’s licence.

If the noble Baroness will forgive me, I do not feel I can comment on higher education funding, but we think we have robust arrangements for removing people and cancelling student visas where there are the sort of problems I have set out, including those to which the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, referred in relation to crime and disorder.

Foreign nationals—including students, of course—who commit a crime should be in no doubt that the law will be enforced, and that, where appropriate, we will pursue their deportation. Before coming to your Lordships’ House, I was deeply involved for many years with the Prison Service, and I saw at first hand the problems of not deporting foreign national offenders and what that was doing to not just immigration policy but the prison capacity crisis. I spent several years working on that policy with the Ministry of Justice, so I understand that problem very well and take very seriously the need to get better at it.

On the specifics of the amendments about publishing data on these topics, the Home Office already publishes a vast amount of migration statistics, as your Lordships know, including information on visas, returns and detentions. If I may say so, too much of that information does not play a large enough role in an often fevered public debate which is often based on rumours rather than detailed facts. The official statistics published by the Home Office are kept under review, in line with the code of practice for statistics. This ensures that we identify changing needs for new statistics to support public understanding. The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, have made suggestions, and they may want to continue to press that case.

The Government recognise that there has been heightened interest from parliamentarians, the media and members of the public about the numbers and types of criminal offences committed by foreign nationals in the UK, what happens to foreign national offenders after they have been convicted—I have already stressed my interest in this subject—and what happens to them after they have completed their sentences. We understand the importance of this information. The department is assessing what more can be done to improve the processes for collecting and verifying relevant data on foreign national offenders and their offences and to establish a more regular means of placing that data in the public domain. By the end of 2025—so, again, not far away—if this work progresses as planned, the Home Office proposes to publish more detailed statistical reporting on foreign national offenders subject to deportation and those returned to countries outside the UK.

Before I sit down, I shall make one other comment in response to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Harper, about the agreement between the UK and France. It remains firmly in place, and we shall continue to work with the French Government in all their various forms. On the basis of the assurances that I have given, I ask the noble Lord to consider withdrawing his amendment.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, for his excellent response. It is the first time I have had the pleasure of listening to him at the Dispatch Box, and I welcome him to it. I thank other noble Lords for their contributions to this interesting debate—even the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, with whom I disagree. His characteristically eloquent but pugnacious contribution was most appreciated.

The Minister touched earlier on the reason why I tabled this amendment. I asked his colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint, a Question for Written Answer about the collection of data around student visas and criminality. He answered on 25 March that the Home Office did not collect that data. If you are going to design public policy around an efficient and effective immigration policy, wider economic issues and the efficacy and viability of the higher education sector all wrapped up in one, you cannot do it if you do not have the data. You need to collect that data. It is not just about criminality. In fact—dare I say it?—my noble friend Lady Lawlor’s amendment is actually more germane to this debate because we need to collect that data. The Government should perhaps look at that on Report.

On Amendment 199, I think that there is quite a bit of consensus across the Committee about the rather liberal, permissive powers of the Government in response to what one might call, if one used a pejorative term, visa retaliation. There is a way of doing it in a more collaborative way without going nose-to-nose with each individual country. It is good that the Government are now looking to invoke those powers because they are important. Countries should know that they have a duty and a responsibility adequately to address the issues we have in our country.

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[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to reiterate what has just been said on Amendment 153. Like the previous speaker, I too have had experience of dealing with domestic servitude. I chaired an inquiry for the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Scotland which was dealing with trafficking more generally. It came as a great surprise to me, because my own experiences as a younger barrister had been dealing with domestic workers inside embassies and diplomatic circles. People would often be brought from countries other than the Emirates or Saudi; they would be Filipino, or from parts of Pakistan or India. They were collected on entry into the country, their passports were taken from them, and they were deeply exploited. I remember being involved in a number of such cases when I was a young lawyer.

As a much more senior person chairing an inquiry, it came as a great surprise to me to find that many successful business people who were running chains of Indian restaurants and all manner of businesses brought people from villages where their ancestors were from. They would say to the workers that they would be paying their parents for their services. They would be paid at the sorts of rate that people would be getting back in those countries, whether it be Bangladesh, Pakistan, or wherever. The workers often received no money—maybe just meagre pocket money. They often slept on mats in the kitchen rather than in a proper bed. They were expected to work all hours of the day and night and were not able to complain anywhere. The idea of someone with a specific visa ending up being tied, like indentured labour, to a family, and not having it made clear to them that there were other options, was quite scandalous. It was rather shocking that we made those changes to those arrangements some years back, as has already been described. Since we have this Bill before us, now is the time to put that right; we have the opportunity to do so.

Kalayaan has been doing incredible work on this front. It has done deep research into what is a form of modern slavery—a smokescreen used to deflect the transparency and accountability there should be for what is experienced by many migrant workers. The evidence that Kalayaan has compiled reports very serious abuse. I ask the Committee to take seriously the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, which I strongly support.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendments 151 and 152 and endorse and support the amendment of my noble friend Lady Lawlor. The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, will know that there have been a number of reports in local and national media about people without settled status who are seeking determination of their asylum-seeker status who have been alleged to be working as delivery drivers for food-delivery companies. Clearly, it is a potential loophole, and it is responsible for us to respond to that sensibly by an amendment that seeks to close that loophole.

On the other two amendments, the noble Lord, Lord German, will be aware that we debated this issue in Grand Committee a year or so ago, when we had quite a good debate. I always think it is a good rule of thumb that my noble friend Lord Randall of Uxbridge speaks good sense. I do not always agree with everything he says, but I was determined to agree with something he said in his remarks. We laboured in the Whips’ Office in the other place many moons ago, and he took a pastoral interest in my short-lived career in the Whips’ Office. I agree with him more than I disagree in that this is a point of principle about whether you should give asylum seekers the right to work. I think the challenge is that, despite what the noble Lord, Lord German, says, there is a pull factor. People come to the UK, which is a unique economy, because it is in the right time zone, we speak English and we have a dynamic, service-based economy. They travel over many countries mainly, in my view, as economic migrants—clearly, there are a number of genuine asylum seekers—and it is not possible comprehensively to disprove the idea that they are coming for work.

The problem with the proposal is that the most disadvantaged group of people in this country is poor white British boys. A situation where you encourage an economic model that brings in more people to drive down wages, keep conditions not much better than was hitherto the case, cut back on training and keep this addiction to cheap foreign labour is not a model for a successful, happy and contented country. That does not, in any sense, second-guess the merits of individual people who want to come to the country to make a better life.

That brings me on to the point that the challenge we have here, and the thing that the Government can take away from this debate, is that there is much more to be done along the lines that my noble friend Lord Randall outlined in terms of civic education around British values—an educative or didactic process for these new asylum seekers to understand what Britain is about and how they can contribute as decent, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens without working. If you cross the Rubicon and say that, if you arrive and claim asylum, you can automatically work and enter the employment market, that is a step too far. However, the Government have a duty and a responsibility, for the sake of the taxpayer and for the welfare of those people and their families, to give them the opportunity to volunteer, train and assimilate but not to work. That is the challenge for the Minister.

In many respects, I support my noble friend Lord Randall—and even, maybe, to a certain extent the noble Lord, Lord German, and others—but on a point of principle I cannot support this amendment. I hope that the Minister will set his face against it, but the Government, as the previous Government did, could do a lot more in terms of the training and development of people who aspire to be British citizens.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I would like to find that there is something on which I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough. I think his point about assisting assimilation is very strong, but it is not an alternative to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord German.

The Minister knows full well that I have been boring him for years about the right to work, and he used to show some personal sympathy for the point. I am with the noble Lord, Lord German, in not believing very strongly in the pull factor. I think people come here basically to escape persecution, famine and war. I think pull factors are, to the extent they exist, much less important. I think, secondly, that the best way to deal with pull factors to the extent that they do exist is with identity cards. I am a strong believer in identity cards. We made a great mistake when we dropped the idea; we should get back to it.

I support Amendments 151 and 155A. Amendment 155A is a very modest proposal; I hope that the Minister will feel that he can consider it. I think there is much to be said for the Treasury approach to this issue. That is an unusual statement to make but, in the Treasury, the right to work would have a double benefit: it would increase the tax take, and it would reduce public expenditure. These are both quite desirable benefits; if you are in the Treasury in current circumstances, they are highly desirable. The main argument for the right to work is human dignity and assisting the assimilation process. The Exchequer arguments are subordinate arguments, but they are real. We ought to reduce the cost of the queue. Of course, the best thing—as the Government are trying to do—would be to reduce the length of the queue but, if we can reduce the cost of the queue and increase the tax take, these must be things that are worth doing.

I have long felt that this is something that we ought to be able to do something about. I hope that the Minister will be able to indicate at least an open mind on the softest of these amendments, Amendment 155A—the one that simply calls for a report.