Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 7th June 2023 Lords Chamber

Debate on whether Clause 5 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I propose that Clause 5, Schedule 1 and Clause 6 should not stand part of the Bill. I appreciate the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, on this. Clause 5 relates to the removal of a person, as the Minister said on Monday, “swiftly” after they arrive in the UK or, as he put it, “shortly” after their 18th birthday. But Clause 5 actually says

“as soon as is reasonably practicable”.

Without the regulatory impact assessment, we in Parliament cannot judge what is a “reasonably practicable” period. What we do know—the Ministers know this all too well because they are lawyers—is that case law determines that

“as soon as is reasonably practicable”

cannot be considered as “as soon as possible” or “as soon as feasible”, although the Minister wanted us to think that it does. I guess the Bill would be a deterrent if one assumed that no lawyers for anyone would read it. Of course, there is no baseline estimate of the amount of accommodation and staffing or other logistical requirements that will be needed. We need central government estimates on costs, as we debated on Monday.

As we start today it is worth reflecting on the Minister’s comments in Committee on Monday as to who is included as a person—or “P”. As we found, “P” includes a young woman trafficked to the UK—potentially via multiple trafficking handlers, blackmailed and threatened, most commonly with threats of rape or family retribution—for criminal sexual or labour exploitation.

Home Office data shows the number of irregular arrivals of women since 2018 who received a positive referral to the national referral mechanism was 520. Those 520 women had been criminally exploited, and now they would be imprisoned and deported to a strange third country and, as the Minister confirmed to me on Monday, with no statutory duty for resettlement, readmission or support. Of those women, 73 were 17 and under. Last year, 13 girls came from countries to which we cannot return them. So those sexually exploited girls are now due to be detained and possibly sent to Rwanda. Last year, 13 girls were trafficked for exploitation in the UK, and the Government would now no longer allow their referral for protection. Well, not in my name—and nor should be in the name of any Member of this Parliament.

The Minister told us on Monday that they were part of the gaming of the system. He repeated to me on Monday the false assertion that

“the numbers of people claiming to have been modern slaves in this scenario indicates that there is extensive abuse”.

He also said that

“the simple reality, I am afraid, is that our modern slavery protections are being abused”.

These are misleading talking points from the Minister, and from Suella Braverman, which led, in December, to a formal complaint from Ed Humpherson, the director-general for regulation in the Office for Statistics Regulation, the formal watchdog. In response to those assertions, he investigated the data and wrote to the Home Office on 8 December. In his letter, he said:

“However, policy officials in the department could not point to any specific evidence for this when we enquired. What is more, the proportion of referrals deemed by the Home Office to be genuine cases of modern slavery in its ‘conclusive grounds decisions’ has risen year by year from 58 per cent in 2016 to 91 per cent in 2021, which does not suggest in itself that gaming is a growing problem”.


He continued:

“I would be grateful if you could raise this matter with communications and policy colleagues, encouraging them to ensure that claims in public statements are clear on whether they are sourced from published statistics or from other reliable evidence. This will avoid the risk of misleading people to believe that the statistics say something that they do not”.


So the Minister came to us in Committee in the British Parliament and misled us to believe that the statistics say something that they do not.

What makes that worse is that, in January, Home Office officials accepted the rebuke. Professor Jennifer Rubin, the Home Office Chief Scientific Adviser, replied to the regulator:

“I am glad that you highlighted this issue … The Deputy Director responsible for the publication of the NRM statistics has recently written to the policy and communications Deputy Directors to encourage them to ensure claims made in public statements are sourced from published statistics or other reliable evidence”.


So I hope that, on subsequent days in Committee and when we get to Report, the politicians in the Home Office will also do what the officials have been told to do: not seek to mislead us but use information based on the data.

The data the Minister cited on Monday was also partial. He told me:

“In 2022, there were around 17,000 referrals to the NRM—the highest annual number to date and a 33% increase on 2021”.—[Official Report, 5/6/23; cols. 1199-1203.]


That is correct, but what did he not say? He did not say that, according to the latest Home Office data that he cited, 49% of all referrals—half—are for exploitation in the UK. That has nothing to do with overseas or from small boats; 41% are for exploitation overseas. The biggest increase that contributed to his statistics was child exploitation, growing from 498 to 4,410 in the UK. I ask the Minister: are these abused children in the UK gaming the system?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness says, there might indeed be issues. Their legislation is a matter for them. The fact that they are members of the Commonwealth which upholds, or seeks to uphold, barest basic standards is a relevant background consideration, as the noble Lord pointed out.

For the reasons I have given, as best I can, the protections in the Bill are adequate to deal with the problems that have been raised. I respectfully say that Clauses 5 and 6 and Schedule 1 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

I am grateful to the Minister for his thorough response, and to those who have spoken.

I looked at the reference to the Commonwealth when the Bill and the schedule were published. It is worth noting that 76% of Commonwealth countries are not considered by this Government to be safe, because 76% of the Commonwealth is not in the schedule. That is not us questioning it; that is the Government making their own decision.

The Minister, in his typically emollient way, suggested that we do not really understand these clauses and that if we did we should not be concerned because, as he put it, the legislation will have no practical operability. We are in a situation where the Home Office is doing the reverse of virtue signalling, which is to try to create, as my noble friend Lord Paddick indicated, the most punitive and threatening environment, of which the justice department will have to pick up the pieces. The Minister has been at pains to point out that there are many elements which would mean that there is no practical operability, but we are being asked to legislate for this, and on the basis of a lack of agreements.

On Monday, the Minister said to me:

“I suppose that the direct answer is that one would have to negotiate an appropriate agreement with the country concerned”.—[Official Report, 5/7/23; col. 1229.]


As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and others indicated, the Government have not done so, but they are still asking us to legislate. The Minister said that, when we are negotiating some of these agreements in the future, there would be a “force of public opinion” on the agreements and debate. But on the only one that we have, with Rwanda, there was no debate or consultation. We were surprised by it. It was not a treaty that was ratified by Parliament; it was an MoU. The International Agreements Committee forced a debate on the MoU in this House, in which noble Lords took part, and the committee raised the concern expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, about refoulement. Unfortunately, this is the pattern of the Government.

On Monday, the Minister was not even able to confirm to me—he said he would write to me and I am grateful for that—that there are child facilities in the Rwanda agreement, because it was not designed for that in the first place. That addresses the point that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, indicated with regards to those who are children. I referenced 73 children, up to 2022, who would be in the situation of being referred to protection and then on their 18th birthday would receive, under the Bill, a third-country notice, and they would have no idea what that country would be.