Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Nick Timothy Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

As the hon. Lady will know, this challenge has been escalating for six years. We have seen a huge increase in the number of boat crossings, and underpinning that increase is the development of a criminal industry. In 2018 there were barely a handful of boat crossings, and now an entire criminal industry has developed based on false advertising and marketing, and on being able to promise people that they will be able to work illegally. That is why the previous Government’s complete failure to take enforcement action on illegal working or to make sure that there was a proper system in place for returns has been deeply damaging.

The Bill provides statutory underpinning for the new Border Security Command. For too long, different agencies with responsibility for border security have been operating in silos, without clear strategy or direction. Criminals can exploit that fragmentation, and the new Border Security Command that we established last summer is drawing together the work of different agencies including Border Force, the National Crime Agency, local police forces, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, immigration enforcement, the intelligence and security agencies and, because strengthening our borders means working internationally, the work of the Foreign Office on border security. Led by former police chief Martin Hewitt, Border Security Command is already having an impact, driving law enforcement co-operation across Europe and beyond. By placing it on a statutory footing and securing its authority and direction, for the first time border security is being treated as the national security issue that it needs to be, engaging with the multiple challenges and threats that we face around our borders.

The Bill strengthens the powers that law enforcement can use against ruthless and devious criminals. For too long, the ringleaders and facilitators of this wretched trade have been able to evade justice by ensuring that they are not present when the money changes hands or the boats set off. That has to change. Learning from early intervention counter-terrorism powers, the Bill will make possible much stronger early action against smuggler and trafficking gangs. New powers will better target supply chains, making it an offence to organise the buying, selling and transporting of small boat parts, motors and engines to be used for illegal entry—not waiting until we can prove that the boats in question were used to arrive at Western Jet Foil.

We are making it an offence to organise the logistics or gather information for the purposes of organised immigration crime, making clear that that is targeting criminal gangs who are profiting from trading in people, not those who help rescue others from serious danger or harm. We are giving law enforcement powers to seize and search the mobile phones of those arriving on small boats, to trace the gangs who organised their journey. As Rob Jones from the National Crime Agency said,

“if you get effective legislation, and you get concerted effort across the system internationally, you can make a real difference.”

That is why a Bill such as this is so important.

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

I have asked the Home Secretary this before and she has not given an answer yet: which metric should we use, and by which date, if we are to ascertain whether she has succeeded in smashing the gangs?

[Yvette Cooper]

We have been clear as part of the plan for change that the purpose is to reduce illegal migration and the number of boats crossing the channel, because no one should be making those dangerous journeys. We must take these powers to be able to go after the gangs —powers that, astonishingly, the hon. Gentleman and his party seem to want to vote against tonight. They will be voting against the action that we need, and voting in favour of the criminal gangs, letting them off the hook once again.

I am also deeply concerned about the growing violence and risk to life. In the past 12 months we have seen a disturbing number of cases where the French authorities have tried to rescue people, including children, from dangerously overcrowded boats on which they were being crushed to death. One such case was last April when a seven-year-old girl died. Even though people had died and many were complicit in the crushing and putting lives at risk, some refused rescue and remained on the boat to travel to the UK. We must be able to take stronger action here in the UK. We must be able to extradite people to France to face trial, but we need powers in the UK too. A new offence of endangering life at sea is being introduced to send a clear message that we will take action against those who are complicit in loss of life or risk to life at sea. Those involved in behaviour that puts others at risk of serious injury or death, such as physical aggression, intimidation or rejecting rescue attempts, will face prosecution.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

The Home Secretary asked earlier why we oppose this Bill. The answer is that it weakens the law and it allows illegal immigrants to claim asylum, live off benefits and become British citizens. It hinders enforcement by stopping scientific age checks for illegal immigrants and it allows the courts to further restrict immigration detention. No wonder the Home Secretary was yet again unable to say which metric we should use, and when, to judge whether she has succeeded in “smashing the gangs”. Once more she revealed her party’s true self by arguing that the problem with the crossings is not the crime of illegal immigration, but the risk to the illegal immigrants.

Much of this Bill is fanciful. New offences for facilitating the channel crossings apply in other jurisdictions. The idea that the state, even working with other countries, might identify, arrest and extradite the criminals involved, when it fails to prosecute elementary immigration crimes committed on British soil, seems far-fetched.

Some measures are pathetically weak. For example, the Bill requires the Border Security Commander to produce a “strategic priority document”, to which partners agencies must have “regard”. Even measures that supposedly toughen policy have glaring loopholes. The new offence of

“endangering another during sea crossing”

excludes the parents of children on the boats from prosecution, obviously encouraging migrants to put more children on to the boats. But it is all a sham, because we know that the Government’s real policy is to rush asylum claims through, accepting the vast majority before hiding immigrants in the welfare and local authority housing budgets. A Government impact assessment last July admitted that in black and white, stating that 44,000 illegal immigrants who Ministers were choosing not to deport would be granted asylum instead. That cohort alone will cost the taxpayer up to £18 billion over their lifetimes. So opaque was the Home Office about the true costs of its policy choices that the UK Statistics Authority rebuked it, in a letter to me, for being insufficiently transparent.

That should prompt an urgent question about what we are going to do with the huge numbers of low-skilled and high-cost immigrants who have come to Britain in recent years. According to the Centre for Policy Studies, more than 2 million visas have recently been issued to immigrants who could soon get indefinite leave to remain. That gives them the right to live in Britain indefinitely, and grants them access to the NHS, social housing and benefits. Even cautious estimates suggest that the net lifetime fiscal cost to the taxpayer could reach £234 billion.

That brings me to my final point: those immigrants who entered the country illegally should never be allowed to stay here, and those who came here legally on time-limited visas and have not contributed enough should be expected to leave. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition is right to say that ILR should be conditional on someone’s respect for the law and their contribution to our economy. That would go some way to making up for the failures of immigration policy in the recent past, and it would mean a different system, in which we think of immigration as a temporary stay, not a permanent right. It would increase the outflow of migrants as we also control the inflow, and ensure that both the law and the state are in a condition to deliver that policy.

Civilisations that are unable to control their borders die, and ours is no exception. The future of immigration policy must be not just about who comes here, but about who we decide must leave.