Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Debate between Margaret Mullane and Tom Hayes

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Margaret Mullane]

The new clause is not in keeping with the provisions outlined in the Bill, which primarily focus on border security through new and strengthened law enforcement powers, providing intelligence to address organised immigration crime.

I fundamentally disagree with the context of the new clause. Subsection (2) relates to existing legislation whereby the qualification of indefinite leave to remain applies to people on skilled work visas, scale-up worker visas, entrepreneurial or investor visas, innovation founder visas, or UK ancestry visas, and people with a partner who holds citizenship. Those people are, for the most part, contributing to our society through work. If somebody has been living and working here in a skilled role, or innovating in our country—and possibly even supporting job creation—for five years, that is long enough for them to identify Britain as their home. They will have friends and community networks. In most instances, they are boosting our economic productivity. The increased qualification period set out in the proposed new clause would move the goalposts for skilled workers after years of contribution.

I will bring the conversation back to the purpose of the Bill: the Committee’s focus should be on those entering the UK illegally and those engaged in organised immigration crime, not the construction workers, nurses, doctors, investors and business owners in Britain on work visas.

[Tom Hayes]

I will speak briefly. I welcome the hon. Member for Weald of Kent’s clarification of the Conservative party’s position on the amendment, but that clarification also raises further questions; I wonder whether the hon. Lady could respond on the spot. If there is no requirement every 30 months in the 10-year period for an individual to pay fees of £2,608—or, for a child, £2,223—to the Home Office, how will the Home Office fund much of its work? The fees paid by adults and children contribute significantly to the Home Office’s budget. The point is particularly important because the Home Office has had to borrow from the official development assistance budget in order to fund asylum hotels. I worry that there is going to be a significant financial gap here, and I wonder if the hon. Lady could clarify what her costings are?

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Margaret Mullane and Tom Hayes

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Margaret Mullane (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

Good morning, Mr Stuart. It was interesting to hear from the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire that he considered the Rwanda scheme a crackpot scheme. Another opinion is that it was “un-Conservative and un-British”—the opinion of John Major, the former Conservative Prime Minister. We have to acknowledge that the basic principle of this Bill is to address the failures of past legislation. Indeed, the Minister explained during an earlier debate that it is not possible to make the suite of legislation involved in the Safety of Rwanda Act and the Illegal Migration Act work together coherently. Not to repeal the Safety of Rwanda Act would undermine confidence in the credibility of the Bill. We are moving away from reliance on expensive gimmicks, hotel use, the flaw that is the Rwanda Act, with its price tag of £700 million of taxpayers’ money, and failure to effectively process the people arriving on our shores. Do we really believe that clinging to a piece of dead legislation is the way to protect our borders and put the safety of our country in focus and at the front?

[Tom Hayes]

May I start by saying that it is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Stuart? I am particularly enjoying the opportunity to have these debates in a free-flowing way—while sticking to parliamentary etiquette, obviously.

I commend the hon. Member for Stockton West, with whom I have some sympathy. He has been sent here to defend the impossible. I half wondered, when he came in wearing that fetching yellow tie, which I slightly covet, whether he had come to hold his hands in the air, make an apology and perhaps stand on the side of classical liberalism, but no: he stood true to the 2024 manifesto on which he was elected. I hope that in addressing how he would define a deterrent, I will add something new. When I asked him for a definition, he said that a deterrent would prevent people from coming and that it would do so by detaining and removing them. I shall make a case that challenges his assumptions on that basis.

A deterrent is a strategy aimed at preventing external actors, targets and adversaries in the military sense from taking unwanted actions. For the Rwanda asylum policy to be a deterrent, the Conservative Government would have needed to achieve certain things: to maintain the capabilities required to deter and be highly resolved to deploy them—as the hon. Member said, to be able to detain and remove—and to effectively communicate their resolve to act. In any communication, one needs to be understood to be highly resolved and capable of following through.

For the Rwanda asylum policy to be a deterrent, the Government would have needed to persuade potential migrants of their capabilities and resolve to send them to Rwanda to process their claims after they had illegally entered the country, and to have stopped migrants from paying significant sums of money to smuggler gangs facilitating illegal migration. In short, from what the hon. Member said, it feels as though the principal target of deterrents was migrants. The Rwanda asylum policy was always doomed to fail on those key conditions, because it was not able to achieve detention or removal.

On detention, Professor Brian Bell, the chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, told us that the numbers given by the Government

“are certainly not consistent with a story of a very significant deterrent effect from the Rwanda Act.”––[Official Report, Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2025; c. 56, Q84.]

Dr Peter Walsh of the Migration Observatory cited concerns about

“where people would be detained”,––[Official Report, Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2025; c. 14, Q13.]

as the UK immigration detention system had capacity for only 2,200 people, with roughly 400 spaces free. Moreover, he said that Rwanda would struggle to process more than “a few hundred” asylum claims a year.

That takes me to the question of removal.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Margaret Mullane and Tom Hayes

Committee stage
Thursday 6th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Margaret Mullane (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve on your Committee, Mr Stuart. I thank the hon. Members for Perth and Kinross-shire and for Stockton West for their contributions. There are a few points I want to make. Clause 18 already outlines provision within the lines that amendment 17 seeks to remove. Naming the act of supplying an unseaworthy vessel, while removing the broader terminology of an act from the Bill, sets a precedent where we would have to outline all possible acts within the Bill. That is wholly unnecessary and not in keeping with the structure of the Bill. Although providing an unseaworthy vessel is the initial act that causes risk to life, amendment 17 would serve to de-prioritise further acts of criminality that could endanger life in a sea crossing. The wording already in the Bill provides sufficient scope to address what the amendment seeks.

Following on from this, I think everybody in this room agrees with the sentiment of amendment 5—that genuine asylum seekers are vulnerable—but it is also important to recognise that someone with the right to asylum could be involved in criminality. The Bill already establishes, through clauses 16 to 18, the provision of a reasonable excuse as a defence, creating a clearer distinction between humanitarian activity and genuine asylum seekers, journalistic or academic works, and those involved in immigration crime as well. I believe that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire has already conceded that point, having withdrawn amendments of a similar nature.

[Tom Hayes]

It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham, who made a very persuasive case. She has stolen much of what I was going to say, which is actually quite helpful. I want to start by reflecting on the international situation, following up on the equally persuasive points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover and Deal about the relationship between the UK and France. It is worth reflecting on where we are. The current Home Secretary was the first to visit northern France in almost five years. Using a parallel Conservative political time continuum, that was six Home Secretaries ago.

In December, we had the meeting of the Calais Group in London, which was able to agree a plan to tackle people smuggling gangs. We have seen the Home Secretary and Interior Ministers from G7 countries, Germany included, meeting in Italy to agree a new joint action plan. We have seen the French Government appoint a new special representative on migration, Patrick Stefanini. He will work closely with our new role of Border Security Commander so that we have the closest, strongest, deepest engagement and interaction.

It is worth reflecting on that, because we are not going to solve the problem of small boat crossings on our own. We have to repair the damage done by the previous Conservative Government to our relationships with our major EU allies and partners. One of the consequences of the botched Conservative Brexit deal is that the UK no longer participates in the EU’s Dublin system, which determines which countries should take responsibility for processing an asylum claim where a person has links with more than one country, and provides a mechanism to return the person to the responsible country. That is underpinned by a shared database of asylum seekers’ fingerprints. It is chaotic that we had a deal that robbed us of the opportunity to take part in that system.