Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (First sitting)

Matt Vickers Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th February 2025 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Yes, that is okay.

Daniel O’Malley: I am Daniel O’Malley, policy and public affairs specialist with the Scottish Refugee Council.

[Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)]

Q First, what are your views on the functions and objectives of the Border Security Command, as set out in the Bill?

Enver Solomon: I am happy to take that one. Our view is that this legislation is rightly seeking to disrupt the criminal gangs—the smuggling gangs. The trade is heinous; it is very damaging to people and it needs to be stopped. In that context, the Border Security Command is an understandable response. I think the issue that we have with it is that it is very difficult to simply rely on enforcement to tackle what is a complex and challenging situation.

The Bill is putting multiple eggs in the basket of enforcement, not just through the Border Security Command but by introducing a number of new offences. Our view, based on our frontline practice and work over many decades with people who have come to this country from war zones, having fled persecution or having been victims of modern slavery, is that that strategy will fundamentally fall short, because it is very difficult to change behaviour by adopting a primarily enforcement approach, which is primarily driven by further prosecution and creating new laws.

Essentially, new laws, such as the offences created in the Bill, are pretty much a blunt instrument to deal with behaviour that drives people to seek protection in other countries and to come here seeking asylum. I think that the evidence, from the offences created in previous legislation, demonstrates that they have not acted as a deterrent.

To sum up, enforcement is an understandable and legitimate approach, but it is only one approach, and it needs to be combined with other approaches that focus on international diplomacy and co-operation, and, critically, on additional legal routes. If you look at the evidence, particularly from the US under the previous Administration, the combination of those three can have a demonstrable impact on reducing irregular arrivals.

Despite the intention that this Bill has set out, our concern is that it will not deliver the outcome—the understandable and credible outcome—that the Government are trying to achieve, which is to stop the people smugglers and to stop people making dangerous crossings. It is focusing too much on an enforcement-driven agenda.

[Matt Vickers]

Q What provisions would you like to see in the Bill—you talked about a broader approach—that are not in there?

Enver Solomon: We would have liked to see more provisions that look at opening up targeted, additional humanitarian pathways, additional legal routes, and additional mechanisms for people to seek humanitarian protection and make applications for asylum without necessarily having to take dangerous journeys. We have advocated for a targeted humanitarian visa to be piloted for specific nationalities where there is a high grant rate.

We would also have preferred to see the full repeal of the Illegal Migration Act 2023—not all provisions have been repealed. It is very positive that a significant number have been repealed, and that the Government have started to clear the backlog and essentially end the meltdown of the asylum system under the previous Administration, with the failed implementation of the Act. That is positive, but we think that retaining other provisions in the Act, particularly the provisions on inadmissibility, and not repealing the differential treatment provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, contribute to greater dysfunction in the system.

The Government’s laudable and correct intention to bring greater efficiency and competence to the system is absolutely right, but having multiple pieces of legislation that just create greater dysfunction will not ensure that you get an effective end-to-end system. You do that by ensuring that you have reliable, speedy decision making on asylum; that decisions are right first time; that if people are granted protection, they can move through the system effectively with appropriate support; and that if people are not granted protection, the right steps are in place to support them. The focus needs to be much more on getting the asylum system to function, with a clear vision of its purpose, than on layering more and more legislation on to an already incredibly complex legislative system, which actually just creates further dysfunction.

[The Chair]

Before I go to the Minister, can I just check with Mubeen that you can hear us okay?

Mubeen Bhutta: Sorry?

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from the Immigration Law Practitioners Association and from Migration Observatory. Again, we must stick to the timings in the programme motion that the Committee has agreed. For this session, we have until 12.40 pm. Could the witnesses please briefly introduce themselves for the record?

Zoe Bantleman: Good afternoon. I am Zoe Bantleman and I am the legal director of the Immigration Law Practitioners Association.

Dr Peter Walsh: Good afternoon. I am a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

[Matt Vickers]

Q Do you think the new endangerment offence will make any difference to channel crossings?

Dr Peter Walsh: Evidence from academic research shows that the impacts of deterrence policies are fairly small. The main reason for that is that migrants often do not have accurate or detailed knowledge of policies in destination countries. Their understanding of those policies is often lacking in detail and wrong, and it is often influenced by what they are told by their smugglers or handlers, who have a vested interest, of course, in downplaying risks.

There is also some statistical evidence that looks more broadly at what drives unauthorised migration and asylum applications around the world. That has found that domestic policy is not statistically one of the more important factors. Instead, geopolitical developments, conflict—civil, ethnic or international conflict—ecological disaster and regime change are all statistically much stronger drivers of unauthorised migration and asylum applications in particular countries.

Finally, rounding out the picture, when an asylum seeker decides which destination country to move to, that calculus is influenced not just by policy—policy is one of the things that they take least account of—but by things like the presence of family members, members of the community, friends, language and in some cases, in the context of small boat arrivals, escaping the Dublin system. Individuals may have claimed asylum in other EU countries—maybe those claims are outstanding or have been refused—and they understand that if they move to the UK they cannot be returned to the EU, because we are no longer a part of the EU and of the Dublin system that facilitated that.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Q Dr Walsh, you have just argued that deterrence does not really work, yet one of the big arguments on Second Reading was that somehow by repealing the Safety of Rwanda Act and most of the Illegal Migration Act we had thrown away the only thing that would work. Would you care to comment on that?

Dr Peter Walsh: Because under the IMA the Government proposed not to process people’s claims, they would not have known whether returning those individuals to countries of origin would be safe or not. That is where Rwanda came in.

There were always questions about the deterrent effect of the Rwanda policy. For my part, whatever deterrent effect it would have had would have depended fundamentally on how many people were actually sent to Rwanda. You can imagine that if it was a large share of people arriving by small boat, that might make people think twice, but if it were a small share—only thousands a year when we have tens of thousands of small boat arrivals—that would imply that the chance of being sent to Rwanda was fairly small. You can imagine that the people then making the trip would view that risk as just one risk among many much greater risks—risking their lives, for example—so there were always real questions about the deterrent effect of the Rwanda policy and how many people would in fact have been sent there.

The last Government said that the scheme was uncapped, and the Rwandan Government said, “We can take as many people as you can send.” But there were logistical challenges there, not least among them where people would be detained. At that time we had about 1,800 people in immigration detention in the UK, with a capacity of 2,200. You would have to detain people if you were threatening to remove them to Rwanda, so that was a very big initial stumbling block, putting aside whatever the capacity of those Rwandan facilities would have been, and more broadly the capacity of the Rwandan asylum system to process large numbers of claims. Typically it processed only a few hundred a year, not 10,000 or 20,000, so there were real questions there.

The big risk was what to do with people who are neither deterred from arriving nor able to be removed to Rwanda. That would be a sub-population in the UK without legal status who would be here indefinitely, so they would for ever have no legal right to remain in the UK, but we would be required to provide them with asylum accommodation and support at great cost. That was the risk when it came to Rwanda and the IMA.