Citizens’ Rights (European Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a non-executive director of the Channel Tunnel operator, Eurotunnel. I am honoured to take up the baton of chairmanship of your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee from the noble Earl. I pay tribute, like others, to his wise and calm leadership of the committee through four turbulent years. The House will have the opportunity to debate his swansong report—if I may put it like that—the landmark report on EU-UK relations, on 20 September. I apologise in advance that I shall not be in the House, as I am unavoidably involved in a state visit to France.

Today’s thoughtful and detailed debate is possible only because of the interest that the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the committee have taken over several years in citizens’ rights. I wanted to start, like others, by repeating that, although these issues are complex, they are not abstract: they have a direct impact on the life chances of people across the UK and in the EU.

I pay tribute to the Home Office for the success of the process that has led to 7 million applications for settled status being received and 6.2 million accepted. I want to underline the five important questions that I think have come out of this debate, and I look forward to the Minister’s response. After that, the committee will reflect on what further work we need to do.

First, how and when will the Home Office give effect to the High Court ruling in the IMA case on the automatic conversion of pre-settled to settled status? Secondly, on the issue of new restrictions on applications to the scheme, as other noble Lords have said, on 17 July the Government announced that having reasonable grounds for a delayed application will now become a requirement for it to be a valid application, even before eligibility is considered. That is no technical change. If, in the view of the Home Office, there are no reasonable grounds for delay, the application is automatically rejected as invalid, regardless of its merits. In that case, there is no administrative review or appeal: the only recourse for an individual is to judicial review, with all the costs and complexity of that.

The Government have also announced the closure of two routes for family reunification and the removal of the right for administrative review of a refusal of eligibility for all future EUSS applications. These changes taken together mean, in effect, that there is now a policy of progressive curtailment of access to the scheme.

Thirdly, on the backlog, which has been mentioned by several noble Lords, the analysis given by the3million, as others have said, suggested that it would take three years to clear the current backlog and that the numbers waiting over two years is growing and could now be up to 20,000. Given the real disadvantages for people of being in this limbo, would the Minister accept that efforts to clear the backlog need to be redoubled?

Fourthly, there is the issue of digital status. If the Government are not prepared to think again about the option of a physical document, surely there is an even greater obligation on them to ensure that the online “view and prove” system is accurate, user friendly and robust. We continue to hear of glitches and outages that undermine confidence as well as causing practical problems. When it comes to travel, as the noble Lord, Lord Wood, said, the fact that the system does not link up multiple applications made by the same person can lead to delay, and all the stress that that causes, at the border. This problem will become only more acute with the introduction of the electronic travel authorisation. When will the promised comprehensive solution to the issue of linking multiple applications be in effect?

Fifthly, there is the error on the database—or exercise, as the Home Secretary’s letter put it. Given that, whatever the reasons, a misleading digital status was displayed for almost a year for all refusals in that time, will the Minister review with his colleagues the case for Ministers to use to the full their powers of discretion in not recovering the benefits from that period?

Lastly, I will say a quick word for UK citizens in the EU, echoing the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. Although almost all the residence deadlines have now passed, British people will still need assistance in exercising their rights. I know of cases in France, for example, of children of permanent residents who reach the age of 18 finding it difficult to establish their status. Can the Minister confirm that, in addition to working with the Commission in the specialised committee, our excellent embassy network, including the specialised justice and home affairs attachés, will have the resources they need to continue to help British citizens to exercise rights when they are needed?

Asylum Applications Backlog

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I am afraid the Government do not accept any lessons in handling the asylum backlog from the Labour Party, which resolved the issues in relation to its own asylum backlog by granting an asylum amnesty. That is not something we propose to do. The Government have addressed the problem by taking concrete steps, including the streamlined asylum processing model. This concentrates facilities on applicants from high-grant countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Libya, Syria, Yemen and, latterly, Sudan. That is on the basis of the high grant rate. Various other steps have been taken to make the system more efficient. That is why we have had a drop in the number of applicants.

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that up to a third of the funds intended for overseas development assistance are being spent on the accommodation of asylum seekers, who are unable to work? Does he agree that reducing the backlog of asylum seekers would free up money to spend on overseas development, which is such an important part of Britain’s overseas reputation?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I rather agree with the noble Lord. The Government’s policy is to reduce expenditure on hotels, which will free up more government money to be spent on overseas aid. I can reassure the noble Lord, the House having passed the Illegal Migration Act, that one of its consequences is that those in the cohort covered by Section 2 will not be able to make asylum claims. As a result, they will not be in the asylum backlog.

National Security Bill

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I rise from what has clearly become the securocrats Bench. I am able to speak pretty briefly, because I agree very much with what my two colleagues have said. Some very powerful speeches have been made already about the need to update our national security legislation in a changing world, and I am personally very encouraged by the breadth of agreement across the House on that.

I speak as someone who has worked with the intelligence community for more than 40 years, as a consumer, a colleague, and indeed twice as a co-ordinator —when I was chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee and then as National Security Adviser. I am not from the community, but I know the men and women who work there well. I entirely agree with all noble Lords who have paid tribute to these public servants of the highest integrity and real commitment. I want to focus just on Clause 28; I agree very much with what has been said on other aspects of the Bill.

My first point is that, in my experience, the men and women of the intelligence community were profoundly shocked by the revelations of what had happened in those fraught months and years after 9/11. The noble Lord, Lord Tyrie, has just referred to cases of rendition, all of which was laid out in as much detail as possible in the 2018 ISC report—a searing document to read. I believe that the agencies learned the lessons of that period and have changed deeply as a result. Even a decade ago, for example, I know that proposals to Ministers on the sharing of intelligence with allies would often be accompanied by pages of legal analysis. I sometimes wondered whether the extent of the precautions could affect the agility of the agencies in responding to fast-moving crisis situations. In short, this is not a group of people who have the remotest interest in doing anything to short-cut legal process or evade scrutiny.

Secondly, I am convinced from my discussions with officials that the motivation for Clause 28 comes from the public servants in the intelligence agencies. There is genuine concern among practitioners that circumstances could arise, when, for example, exchanging information and analysis with partners to identify a complex terrorist threat, where even if they had followed all the procedures in place, including the Fulford principles, they could still be legally liable under the SCA. That is something that the House needs to take seriously.

I was fascinated to listen to the noble Lord, Lord West, reporting the conclusions of the Intelligence and Security Committee. I need to read that more closely. If I understood him right, the ISC has had the opportunity of highly classified briefing on the sort of circumstances where that risk might become possible—the operational realities of real-life co-operation with our closest allies. As I understand it, the ISC felt that there were grounds for believing there is a serious problem here. That is important. There is clearly an issue that we need to get right if we are going to give the men and women of the agencies the tools they need to do their job of keeping us safe.

I am persuaded by the powerful points made today that the current Clause 28 goes too far by proposing this carve-out or exemption from the criminal law. There is therefore an obligation on this House and the Government to work towards an alternative. I hope it will be possible to do that and that it will address the concerns we have heard today, including the important issue of ministerial accountability and authorisation and oversight by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner and indeed the ISC.

I doubt that the Government will be attracted by the idea of reopening the 1994 ISA—that could well turn out to be a Pandora’s box—but I am sure there are ways of solving the need for a balance between clear oversight and accountability and effective security operations in a fast-changing environment. It is also clearly much better to build a broad coalition of support across this House and more widely. I very much hope that the Government will come forward with proposals in that spirit at Committee stage.

Beyond Brexit: Policing, Law Enforcement and Security (EUC Report)

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Friday 11th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Ricketts]

That this House takes note of the Report from the European Union Committee Beyond Brexit: policing, law enforcement and security (25th Report, Session 2019–21, HL Paper 250).

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, we are debating today one aspect of the security of the United Kingdom: the state of law enforcement and judicial co-operation with the EU. But we are doing so against the backdrop of Russia mounting the most serious aggression that we have seen in Europe since the Second World War. Every day, we see new horrors on our television screens. I regret personally that we have had so little time to debate these momentous events in this House, with just one debate in the last two weeks, but they put everything else into perspective and I believe that they are relevant to the debate that we are having today.

More than ever, we need both close co-operation with our neighbours to keep our own citizens safe and effective arrangements to enable desperate refugees to be able to come safely to this country. These objectives are intrinsically linked, as has been shown by the tensions with the French authorities over recent days over what I regard as the wholly inadequate arrangements that have been made in and around Calais for the reception of desperate Ukrainian families. Given the number of traumatised Ukrainian citizens now leaving the country, this flow of refugees is bound to continue for months, or conceivably years. We need to be working well with our EU partners if we are to avoid damaging the climate of confidence that is so important for good law enforcement and judicial co-operation.

To turn to the specific issues that we are debating today, our report formed part of a suite of reports by the European Union Committee. As a first-time chairman of a committee, I am most grateful for the wise counsel and friendly support that I received at all times from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. The Security and Justice Sub-Committee must be one of the few in your Lordships’ House that never met in person. We came into being in April 2020 and had an entirely virtual existence until we were disbanded in March 2021, having published this report. I am grateful to all members of the committee, who adapted with great good humour to the oddities of the Teams environment. I am also grateful to our clerk team, about whom I will have a little more to say in winding up.

Our committee report was based on an intensive three-month scrutiny that we did at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. We heard from a range of expert witnesses and from the Home Office Minister Kevin Foster, which was very helpful. We drew on a wealth of evidence that we had amassed during the year in which we watched the negotiation of the trade and co-operation agreement with the EU. We had a most helpful session with the then Home Office Minister of State James Brokenshire. I wish to put on record our thanks for his unfailing courtesy and support of our work in the committee, together with that of Home Office officials.

To turn to the substance of the report, my first point is that we welcomed the fact that an agreement had been reached which avoided an abrupt end to the years of effective co-operation that British policing had enjoyed with EU counterparts. We were very conscious when we produced the report that we were just at the start of implementing a series of complex and often novel measures and that it would be vital to scrutinise how they worked out in practice. I noted from the Government’s response to our report of 15 June 2021, for which we were grateful, that

“the indications so far are that, in general, the new arrangements are working well in practice.”

A similar comment came in the agreed statement from the first meeting of the Specialised Committee on Law Enforcement and Judicial Cooperation of 19 October 2021, which said that

“overall, implementation … had gone well and that the agreement was operating effectively.”

Those are somewhat lapidary comments and I see the main purpose of today’s debate as giving the House more detail on how these various measures are working out in practice. I know that other noble Lords more qualified than me will delve into individual issues such as the successor arrangements to the European arrest warrant and the important area of EU-UK family law, which is vital to the lives of so many of our citizens, so I will concentrate on three other themes.

The first is the UK’s access to the EU databases and alerting systems, which British police relied on so heavily prior to our withdrawal. That is dealt with in detail in chapter 2 of our report. We welcomed the agreement that allowed the EU to continue access to the Prüm database of fingerprints and DNA. We noted, however, that this was subject to an

“evaluation visit and pilot run”

conducted by the EU into the UK’s handling of Prüm data. The deadline for this was 1 September last year; it was then extended to June 2022. Perhaps the Minister could assure us that the UK will meet all the requirements for continued access to Prüm, which remains vital, as I understand it, for crime scene investigations in this country.

One other important aspect is whether and how the UK will mirror changes made by the EU to the Prüm system. I quote paragraph 82 of our report:

“The Government told us that it will be a matter of ‘choice’ whether or not it remains aligned to EU legislation as it evolves.”


This is not a theoretical point. The Commission has already brought forward a regulation that would substantially reform the way the Prüm system works, including expanding it to cover facial recognition. Depending on how the Commission’s draft fares, the Government could soon be faced with that choice on whether to align. A process for doing that is set out in the trade and co-operation agreement, but will the Minister commit that the Government will keep the European Affairs Committee and the Justice and Home Affairs Committee closely in touch with their thinking, given the consequences of a decision not to align as the Prüm system evolves?

Our report welcomed the provisions in the trade and co-operation agreement for continued access to crime scene data through ECRIS and to passenger name record data on people arriving on flights from the EU, although I think that we are still operating under a derogation on passenger name recognition, which cannot go on indefinitely. However, we had more serious concerns about the alternative arrangements in place for the UK replacing those that were available under the SIS II—Schengen Information System II— information-sharing system. That was the system that UK police consulted over 600 million times in 2019. We concluded that the loss of SIS II by UK law enforcement

“leaves the most significant gap in terms of lost capability.”

The Government told us that they would be relying instead on the Interpol I-24/7 database. That requires EU member states to enter their alerts into both SIS II and the Interpol system, the so-called double-keying arrangement. Much therefore depends on the continued willingness of individual police officers to undertake that extra work. A recent report by the Centre for Britain and Europe at the University of Surrey, titled Border Trouble?, based on a lot of interviews with current law enforcement officers, contained some worrying evidence. One officer was quoted as saying that there were

“big question marks about whether Interpol would, over time, continue to give us the amount of detail as we had under SIS”.

Another commented that

“there is a huge absence of information that we previously relied upon”.

Could the Minister tell us whether the UK is indeed continuing to get the same volume of alerts and information from EU partners through the I-24/7 system? Could she also update the House on progress in ensuring very rapid transfer of information from I-24/7 to the police national computer? We were told that this would happen

“via policing systems within minutes … and … at the border within 24 hours”,

but for Border Force officials 24 hours feels like quite a long time in terms of delay in access to data. That covers the points that I wanted to make on access to systems.

Secondly, on data handling, the Home Office’s track record on handling personal data is frankly not flawless. Yet the importance of maintaining the highest possible standards is apparent from the fact that the whole of our justice and law enforcement co-operation with the EU could be put at risk if there was a “serious and systemic deficiency” in the protection of personal data by either party. Now that the UK is no longer a member of the EU, we are held to an even higher standard of personal data protection than when we were a member, because we do not have the so-called national security carve-out available to EU member states. The actions of the ECJ in twice knocking down EU/US data protection agreements shows the risks. Could the Minister assure us that the UK continues to be fully in line with the EU’s requirements for data handling for law enforcement?

Thirdly and finally, I turn to the state of the UK’s relations with Europol and Eurojust. We noted that the agreement enabled us to continue a close working co-operation, as the US and Canada have. I see that we now have in place a working arrangement for UK liaison officers. What we have lost inevitably is any role in the strategic management and administration of the two organisations. Could the Minister update us on how effective the co-operation with Europol and Eurojust is turning out to be? It might also be interesting for the House to hear what the impact on Interpol co-operation is in relation to the current sanctions on Russia, given that Russia is of course a member of the Interpol system.

That brings me back to the most important issue for our debate today: the continued scrutiny that will be necessary on practice as it evolves as these measures are used. I hope that the Government will provide the necessary information for that to both the European Affairs Committee and the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, so ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. The trade and co-operation agreement offers a set of arrangements that should in principle give us a good level of co-operation, but so much depends on not words on pages but operational contacts between individual law enforcement colleagues and the continuation of the habits of close working formed while we were a member. The climate of confidence in handling related issues such as refugees is also relevant. The challenge will be to maintain that level of practical problem-solving and good will in the years ahead. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all the participants in our debate this morning, which has been substantive and wide-ranging. The details are certainly technical, but the subject is vital for the security of citizens in this country and in the EU. I start by thanking the Minister. We are all aware of the huge load that she is carrying with three major pieces of legislation on her plate and a series of late nights this week; yet, I hope she will not mind me saying, she was her usual cogent, comprehensive and collegial self at the Dispatch Box this morning, and we have covered a great deal of ground.

Secondly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has also done, I want to thank the staff of our committee: our clerk, Simon Pook, our legal adviser ,Tim Mitchell, our policy assistant, Genevieve Richardson, and our committee assistant, Amanda McGrath. They took on a large extra burden due to the fact that we only ever met virtually; I think that is true for staff throughout the House. They were themselves working from home, often not in ideal conditions. Many of them had to re-role as IT technicians as well as using their other skills. The House owes our staff a real debt for the load that they have carried during this extraordinary period.

I will not prolong the debate but pick out just three or four very brief themes: first, the importance of sustaining practical co-operation at the operational level and the risk that we may pull apart over the years because we are not part of the management and administration of these EU measures and instruments. Secondly, a number of noble Lords made the point that the TCA is a foundation on which we can build closer co-operation in areas where there are gaps at the moment. Thirdly, it is a fragile foundation in the sense that, as the noble Lords, Lord Anderson, Lord Paddick and others have said, it does depend on continued EU confidence in the UK’s high standards, both in human rights legislation and in data protection; I hope that is something that the Government will continue to bear very much in mind.

There are a number of continuing areas of concern such as family law, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, explained to us so clearly, and the operation of the surrender agreement, all of which underlines the need for this House and its committees to continue to scrutinise this important area of co-operation and all the different arrangements that we have discussed today.

Motion agreed.

School Trips: Passport and Visa Requirements

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I do not disagree with the noble Lord about the value of foreign travel for students at any age. It absolutely enriches their experience. However, we expect tourists who visit the UK from outside the EU to hold a passport and we will now be expecting those from EU and EEA countries and Switzerland to do the same.

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, is the issue here not really about maintaining the deep web of human relationships between our country and our near neighbours into the period when we are no longer in the EU? I have had many conversations with French people who have said that coming here was their first contact with abroad, it made a deep and lasting impression and it led to a lifetime’s friendship with the UK. Surely for these children, who are a low security risk, it should be possible to find a pragmatic arrangement to allow them to come on a collective document.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I certainly agree with the noble Lord about a deep web of relationships. In fact, my first school trip was to France; I recall that it took probably five days on a coach and we only had two days there, but nevertheless it was a very enjoyable experience. However, we are now treating the whole of the world in the same way and we do not make any apologies for that.

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.