Russia

Lord Swire Excerpts

Tuesday 14th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Swire (Con)]

Will my noble friend the Minister clarify whether the UK is able to act unilaterally on sequestered Russian assets and does not have to operate within the G7 framework, or whether we have to act collectively? Secondly, with that in mind and given the involvement of the UK, can the Minister update the House on the progress of the sale of Chelsea and the £2.5 billion, which is much needed? We should not fool ourselves: the situation in Ukraine is extremely serious now. It needs all the help we can give, both materiel and, obviously, financial assistance. We need to move a little quicker than perhaps we have in the past.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

On the first part of my noble friend’s question, I do not know the precise answer to whether or not we can act unilaterally. I imagine that that is the case, but I would question whether it would have much utility. By definition, the threat is a global one and the co-ordinated response will be much more significant if we take it with our allies and friends than if we go it alone.

As for Chelsea, I cannot comment. I know that discussions are ongoing, but I do not know where they are.

Creative and Cultural Industries: Impact of Visa and Immigration Policies

Lord Swire Excerpts

Tuesday 25th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I reassure the noble Lord that the visa system is operating within the service standard in every sector, so there is no delay in creative visas being awarded to those who apply. The system works well. I simply do not recognise the account that he gives; if he has any particular cases, I would be grateful if he would write to me, and I can look into them.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

I think the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, has hit on something, because we all know, if only anecdotally, that the system is not working as well as it should. Will my noble friend the Minister commit to going back to his department and having a discussion with DCMS as to how this regime can be better applied? There is no threat of people overstaying, particularly in the performing arts—it is unlikely, other than the national state orchestra of North Korea, who would probably want to stay here, but otherwise they just want to come here and perform and then go away. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by making it rather difficult for some of these performing artists to go about their business.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I am afraid, timid as I am to disagree with my noble friend, that is just wrong. There are no issues here. In 2022, we issued 6,498 creative worker visas, of which 180 were issued to EEA nationals. Over the last decade, the number of creative visas issued has remained consistently high compared to other temporary work routes, such as the charity and religious worker visa routes. While the volumes fell during the pandemic, as one might expect, they have returned to high volumes. I suggest that the high volumes and low barriers to entry are a symbol of the excellence of our own success in the areas of work to which these visas relate.

Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Swire Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 168 would introduce a new clause, giving:

“the National Crime Agency a legal responsibility for tackling organised immigration crime across the Channel, and to maintain a specific unit to undertake work related to that responsibility”.

I thank the National Crime Agency for its briefing this morning, which was very helpful, and Home Office Ministers for helping to facilitate it.

Not for one moment am I suggesting in this amendment that any Minister, the Government or any Member of this House does not want to see the criminal gangs which exploit vulnerable people tackled and these criminals prosecuted. I also say at the outset that there will be many officials, officers and various agents working hard to do just that, and we should commend them for their work.

Apart from brief debates, the focus has been on deterring migrants, detention and deportation. All of that has been the subject of lively debate, disagreement and discussion. Clearly, that is a huge area of work which, so far, I suggest—hence my amendment—has not received the scrutiny it merits. This point was forcefully and powerfully made by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, in Committee.

There are many questions, some of which were raised in Committee. If I highlight some, I hope noble Lords will see the importance of this amendment and this short debate. One of the plan’s objectives is to concentrate on disrupting the provision of dinghies and equipment. How successful has that been in disrupting the flow of migrants? Tackling the criminal gangs requires international co-operation with countries across Europe and beyond. How is this co-ordinated? Are there any problems with such co-operation and agreement? How is the sharing of intelligence working? How is the sharing of data and joint policing working? Is that working effectively and do the Government need to do more to ensure that we achieve our common goal of disrupting these criminal gangs and deterring the flow of boats and migrants across the channel?

Can the Minister give us a figure for prosecutions? I have not seen the most recent and up-to-date figures; it would be useful for your Lordships’ House to hear them. Are those arrested from the boats and prosecuted the small fry, so to speak, or the big figures who run these horrific operations? We read in our newspapers that much of it is done and organised online—it is almost advertised. How effective have the social media companies been in taking such sites down? Do the law enforcement and intelligence agencies require government help to inject some urgency into what the social media companies do with these sites?

All of this requires the NCA to be supported by the Government here and across the continent more widely. My amendment, on which I will seek to test the opinion of the House at the appropriate time, asks whether one amendment within the whole range of amendments we have debated around this Bill can demonstrate the concern we all have regarding how we tackle these criminal gangs. It would allow the NCA and others to highlight what they are doing; it would allow us to shine a light on what is happening, and to assess it and inject a focus that will let us all achieve what we want.

We need to deal with the challenge that we face, but we need to ensure, as much as we can, working with our own agencies and our international partners, that the full weight of our state and others will be brought to bear on those who run these criminal gangs. They prey on the vulnerabilities of often desperate people, including children, and exploit others’ misfortune. There should be no hiding place for these modern-day smugglers.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 168AZA stands in my name. When I first tabled this in Committee, it was supported by my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier—who is his place and will, I hope, be saying something about it shortly—and my noble friend Lord Soames of Fletching. However, due to my complete incompetence, they seem to have fallen off this time, although I know that they are here—one physically and the other in spirit.

Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Swire Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 136 is one of a series of amendments we have tabled on the criteria that should be met before the Bill—an Act by then—comes into force. Amendment 136 is about people smuggling, though the term is not used; about

“(a) charging refugees for assistance or purported assistance in travelling to or entering the United Kingdom; (b) endangering the safety of refugees”.


The answer to most questions, of course, is to stop the boats. I wondered during the debate on the previous group whether “stop the boats” actually features as a phrase in the Bill. I do not think it does, but it seems to be the answer to everything.

People smuggling, the criminal activity which is so closely related to small boats and which the Bill purports to deal with, led to subsection (2) of the proposed new clause: the steps that are included in the Bill are not, in our view, an answer to the problem. I find it very distressing that, with such a serious situation, we have a Bill that implicitly blames victims, and we hear very little other than platitudes about tackling the criminals. We know, of course, that people fleeing by boat, endangering their lives and losing their lives, is not unique to the channel and the North Sea, which are referred to in the amendment. Geographically, we are most closely affected by those, but a lot of lives have been lost by people fleeing from countries bordering the Mediterranean and further afield.

My name is attached to Amendment 139F in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. As she is not here, I will speak to it very briefly, because I think it would be a pity if there was no response from the Government, and I have no doubt that the Minister has a response—he is nodding. The noble Baroness’s proposal, supported by the noble Lords, Lord Alton of Liverpool and Lord Carlile of Berriew, as well as by me, is that

“Where a person meets the … conditions in Section 2”—


which is the fulcrum, if you like, of the Bill; and I like the way it is phrased, rather than “meets the criteria”—

“and is suspected of involvement in genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, the Secretary of State is required as soon as reasonably practicable … to refer the person to relevant authorities in the UK for investigation and possible prosecution; … to cooperate with authorities in other safe countries and international tribunals who may be investigating the person”.

I look forward to the Government’s views on that and beg to move Amendment 136.

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, a more sensitive soul might be somewhat disheartened, having sat here for a large part of this debate only for the entire Chamber to empty at the very thought of me saying anything at all, but I will do my best. Perhaps I am getting an early reputation in this place already.

I will speak to the amendment in my name and those of my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier and my noble friend Lord Soames of Fletching, who unfortunately is unable to be with us but would have liked to have taken part in this debate had he been able to. There has been a lot of discussion about the Bill’s scope, and I was quite pleased to get this amendment through the Table Office, because it is slightly wide of what the Government are debating, which is stopping the boats. The Bill is about illegal immigration, and it is my view that a Government have an absolute duty to secure their own borders and to know who is coming into the country, who is in the country and who is leaving the country at any time. It seems extraordinary that there is still no passport control when people leave this country, as well as when they come into it. Only by knowing how many people there currently are in the United Kingdom can we have a proper, dispassionate and, to use that word, humane debate about what size we are prepared to let our population rise to.

The problem, of course, is with the official statistics—or rather the lack of them. The Government’s publication, Irregular migration to the UK, year ending March 2023, states:

“The statistics presented here relate to the number of people recorded being detected on, or shortly after, arrival to the UK on various routes. They do not provide an indication of the total number of people currently in the UK who have entered the UK via irregular routes or the number of irregular migrants present in the UK. It is not possible to know the exact size of the irregular population currently resident in the UK, nor the total number of people who enter the UK irregularly”.


The official population of the United Kingdom in 2023 is recorded as being just under 68 million, which represents a steady year-on-year increase. Some would have the real population of this country at least 1 million more. Then there is what I call the supermarket theory, which says that the real population of this country is many millions more. I have even read one report alleging that the real population of this country is not 68 million but nearer to 80 million. Of course, if you look on Twitter, you need not necessarily believe all those conspiracies.

My point is not to quibble about the size but to demand that the Government and their various agencies do more to find out the real population of this country. If the figure is 1 million or 2 million in excess of the published data, that, by definition, must mean that hundreds of thousands of people are living outside the system. How can they access healthcare and schools? What about national insurance contributions? What happens to them in old age? If they are outside the system, they are more vulnerable to low wages, abuse, poor housing, inadequate medicine and all the things that we take for granted. They are the losers, but so are we, as by definition they are not paying any tax, for TV licences or anything that people even on low incomes are obliged to pay. They are not participants in society; they are existing on the margins of it.

As it happens, I have no particular view on what should happen to those who have already settled here illegally. I am sympathetic to some sort of amnesty, but I am equally sympathetic to those who feel a sense of injustice that these people have in some way cheated the system—jumped the queue, if you like—and that they should retrospectively be subjected to the same rules on immigration as those who have sought to come after them. However, many of these illegal immigrants will be in low-paid and insecure jobs. Many businesses, certainly those in the hospitality sector, need these people. Indeed, because of Covid and, dare I say it, Brexit there is a critical shortage.

Equally, we must concede that many of those jobs could be filled by British people. I use that term to describe people who are here legally, regardless of whether they were born here or not. We need to be honest with one another. Of course, the argument goes that we need more immigrants to help grow the economy, but, equally, we should recognise and admit that the more people we have, the more schools we will need to open, the more hospitals we will need to build, the more investment in infrastructure we will need, and, critically and perhaps most contentiously of all, the more housing we will need to build. When we have done all that, and the economy has expanded, we will presumably need more immigrants to staff the increased size of our public services. That may well be acceptable, even desirable, but I believe that the British people should have the right to have a say on this. It is not just up to the politicians—or, indeed, if I might say so, the Church—to decide on the size of the population of this country.

I return to my original point. We cannot have an informed debate about this until the Government come to the table and lay before Parliament an annual estimate of the number of illegal immigrants already in this country. My noble friend the Minister will no doubt argue that this information is published, yet it is not published in a clear, unambiguous document—but it must be. Ministers and many others will ask, “If these people have been illegally operating in this country in the black or grey economy, how can we possibly find out who or where they are?” Perhaps identity cards are the answer. I am not convinced by that, but in this information-gathering world, where our data is increasingly harvested, there must be ways. Just look at the NHS app, which most of us signed up to during Covid.

Another approach—I am grateful to Migration Watch for suggesting this—would be that of residual methodology, which allows us to estimate the size of the illegal immigrant population by comparing a demographic estimate of the number of immigrants residing legally in the country with the total number of immigrants as measured by a survey. The difference is assumed to be the number of illegal immigrants in the survey, a number that later is adjusted for omissions from the survey.

I now turn to the second part of the amendment, which covers the issue of foreign national offenders held in our prisons. I am very aware of this because, when I was a Minister in the David Cameron Administration, we were all given countries to be responsible for. We were summoned regularly to No. 10, as he was trying to drive down the number of foreign national offenders and get them back to their countries of origin. It was an astonishingly difficult thing to do, not least because of the interventions of the legal teams who were trying to stop them having to go back. Further difficulties were from some countries which destroyed all the information about them, so it was very difficult to ascertain as to where they had come from and who they were. It is a difficult task, but it is an achievable one.

In March of this year, I asked a number of questions of the Home Office, which I shall not repeat now, on the number of foreign national offenders and how many we had repatriated. From that, it would seem that some 12% of the current total prison population of England and Wales—10,148 people—fall into that category. The cost alone of that is huge. The average cost of a prison place in England and Wales was £46,696 in 2021-22, so we are spending about half a billion pounds a year, by my very ropey maths, on housing these foreign national offenders. The Home Office must get a grip; we want more action and enforcement and fewer excuses as to why it is impossible to send those foreign national offenders home.

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who is not now in his place, rather unfairly described the desire from the Government to do something about immigration as an attempt to address the demands of the red wall—non-traditional Tory areas of the country which voted overwhelmingly for this Conservative Government in the last election. That is not a fair accusation; I think that the majority of people in this country want a humane and fair system, and one that actually works and is seen to work. Between 70% and 80% of the British public support measures aimed at deterring illegal immigrants from remaining in the United Kingdom. The truth of the matter is that none of us knows the scale of illegal migration because no official estimate has been published since 2005.

I very much hope that the Government will support this amendment, as I hope that His Majesty’s loyal Opposition will. If they do not, they will need to explain why not. At its simplest, the amendment is to encourage the Government to find out, before we agree on the future immigration policy, how many illegal immigrants and foreign national offenders are in this country, and to publish that data clearly and unambiguously on an annual basis.

Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme

Lord Swire Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Swire (Con)]

My Lords, some people put the amount of Afghan refugees in Pakistan at up to half a million, some of whom are extremely vulnerable, particularly young women, former judges and former politicians. They live under a constant threat of being returned to Afghanistan, where they would certainly meet with jail or possibly worse. What conversations have the Government had with the Government of Pakistan to lift this threat of being returned to Afghanistan?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I am afraid that I cannot answer my noble friend’s question. That is probably a matter for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office but I can no doubt ask the relevant Minister to write to him.