Brexit: Refugee Protection and Asylum Policy (EUC Report)

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Ricketts (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I have the privilege of chairing the Security and Justice Sub-Committee of the EU Committee, which has inherited responsibility for this and other subjects from my noble friend Lord Jay’s committee. Not for the first time in my career, I am following in my noble friend’s wake.

Frankly, I have been surprised and disappointed by how difficult it is to get useful information from the Government on the situation in the negotiations with the EU across a whole range of justice and security issues, and on plans if agreements are not possible. These questions get less attention in the media than trade and fisheries, but they are vital, because, as other noble Lords have said, they concern people’s lives and their safety and security, here and across the EU.

In my view, it has taken too long for this report, which we produced in October last year, to come to the House for debate. From rereading it, I am struck by how prescient it is and how close we are to some of the really unsatisfactory outcomes identified in it actually happening. However, my noble friend Lord Jay’s report and the debate today have finally extracted a letter from the Home Office, as the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, said, in response to one that my noble friend Lord Jay wrote in February. I also wrote a second letter in May. I have not had time to study it; we received it this morning. I hope it contains some useful information.

However, at the same time, we are told that the Home Office Minister, Mr Philp, who had been scheduled to give evidence to our committee next week on 29 September, has postponed that session. That is the second time he has declined to appear before our committee. We were told that he was very busy dealing with aspects of the Covid pandemic, which I understand, that negotiations with the EU were continuing and that he was not in a position to give us a meaningful update next week. I am new as a committee chairman, but I had not understood that it was for Ministers, when invited to appear, to decide whether they were in a position to give a committee a meaningful update. These negotiations with the EU, however they turn out, are now in their final weeks. Crucial issues are at stake in areas of refugee protection, asylum and many others. Ministers have a duty to come before Select Committees. It really is unacceptable to have repeated cancellations such as this. I hope the Minister will do all in her power to ensure that a Home Office Minister can appear before our committee next week on these important issues.

My noble friend Lord Jay and others referred to a report in the Guardian on 3 September that EU negotiators had rejected the UK’s proposal for an agreement on unaccompanied child asylum seekers because they had no mandate to agree one. That will be no surprise to anyone who listened to the evidence session we had with legal experts in July. Professor Elspeth Guild of Queen Mary University of London told us that the EU had no mandate because no one had thought to put into the November 2019 political declaration anything on this issue about unaccompanied child migrants. The UK had proposed a draft agreement, presumably knowing full well that there was no mandate on the EU side to negotiate it. However, the position is even worse than that, because since this is an area of exercised EU competence, individual member states are not competent to agree individual agreements with us either. We will clearly land up with no agreement on unaccompanied child migrants, and since it has been made clear that we are pulling out of the Dublin system altogether, we will arrive exactly where the report predicted last October, in a situation with no agreement.

I know that the Minister explained, in Committee on the immigration Bill, that the UK draft agreement lies on the table, but I fear that means tabled in the sense in the US Senate, where something that is tabled is consigned to oblivion. We need to understand from the Government what the arrangements will be to deal with unaccompanied child asylum seekers when we have completely left what one witness called the “tapestry of law” in the EU represented by the Dublin arrangements. Clearly, in that situation, the rights of unaccompanied child asylum seekers will be reduced. We have heard that the UK is the only country in Europe that does not provide for refugee children to sponsor close relatives. Dublin also gives unaccompanied children legal rights, for example, to appeal judgments and to have timelines for the resolution of their cases. All that will go.

One of the reasons given by Mr Philp for not coming before our committee next week was that he was busy dealing with the issue of small boat crossings of the channel. It seems to me that those two issues are linked. I do not accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that there is complicity among French officials and the French system with traffickers in this dreadful trade of sending people at high risk across the channel. However, I note that it is the Dublin regulation that gives the UK a legal base to return failed asylum seekers to countries such as France. Without that, we will not have the legal base. If we reduce the legal routes available for asylum seekers to this country, including children, surely more will try illegal routes to get here.

We need a comprehensive approach to refugee and asylum protection. We are still waiting to see the details of the proposed global resettlement scheme. Perhaps when she winds up the debate, the Minister can tell us when that will be published, because it is a crucial document.