Illegal Migration Bill

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris]

I spent considerable time in the last debate addressing the European convention on human rights, and the House will be relieved to hear that I am not going to do the same thing again today, but I will just say one thing. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) is correct to say that we have no say on who sits in the European Court of Human Rights, but no MP has any say on who sits in the Supreme Court in this country either, and the reason that nobody can give me an example of the European Court interfering with a material change to our domestic immigration laws is because there isn’t one.

I want to congratulate the Government on reaching an agreement with my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on new clause 8, which I think gives the Bill moral clarity. The aim of this Bill is to extinguish a route, not a right. The Bill says that if someone enters the United Kingdom by small boat or any other illegal route, they cannot claim asylum now or ever, but we are maintaining compliance with our legal obligations under the refugee convention only when we can say in parallel that there are safe and legal routes that they could and should have taken as an alternative. It is already clear that this was envisaged by the Bill because it is dealt with in the provisions in clause 53 in the context of annual quotas agreed in conjunction with local authorities. It is plain that this is the direction that not only the United Kingdom but all our European neighbours are moving in, faced with the mass migration flows of the modern day that simply could not have been envisaged when the refugee convention was drafted.

I also want to talk about new clauses 22, 19 and 23 to 25. My first observation is how closely they resemble laws that were tried but ultimately failed under the last Labour Government. That is not me scoring a political point; this is difficult stuff. A lot of this is in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 and the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 but it never really worked, and here is why I say that this is important today. I want to talk about identification documents, mobile phones and age verification, all of which I have experience of in immigration tribunals. All these things boil down to one critical principle: that he who asserts must prove.

I refer the House to the evidence of Dan O’Mahoney, the clandestine channel threat commander, to the Home Affairs Committee in September 2020. Asked about the number of small boat arrivals who have identification documents, he said:

“I can’t give you an exact figure, but I can tell you that it is almost none—very, very close to none. Generally speaking, encouraged by the facilitators, they will get rid of any sort of documentation …phones, SIM cards, anything…before they are intercepted by Border Force… They literally arrive in the clothes that they are wearing.”

I invite the House to contrast that with Operation Pitting. Every single person who left Kabul in haste in the summer of 2021 arrived in the United Kingdom with an identification document.

The lack of identification documents is a major problem, because it means the Home Office is entirely reliant on language tests and interviews to ascertain background facts. The best it can do is guess whether a claimant is genuine, which leads to a lot of economic migrants being given asylum when they probably would not have proved their case if they had documents. That has contributed to a huge degree of abuse in the system.

The same principle applies to mobile phones. In an era of mass technology, in which smartphones are as commonplace in sub-Saharan Africa as they are in London and in which 5 billion people use social media, it must be right that a negative assumption is reached about any individual who does not provide access to their phone as a way of establishing their identity.

I repeatedly dealt with age verification at the tribunal, the appeal tribunal and the High Court. It is not good enough to rely purely on a Merton-compliant test. Until very recently, we had no scientific method by which to establish a person’s age. Of course small children do not go through age verification, but the vast majority of children who arrive claim to be around the age of 17. We now have the technology to allow age verification, so it cannot be left as a matter of discretion or as an option for the applicant. If they say they are under 18, they must be obliged, as these new clauses require, to undergo proper age verification.

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

Before I begin, I direct the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which outlines the support I received from the RAMP project.

I support the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) and for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson). These amendments attempt to mitigate the damage the Bill will do to some of the most vulnerable people, by requiring reports on how it will affect the pregnant, victims of modern slavery and the health and human rights of refugees.

New clauses 2 and 3 would safeguard pregnant women and girls from removal. I have spoken to people working on the frontline in detention centres who feel deeply uncomfortable and ill-equipped to deal with pregnant women in such settings, so these amendments are vital. In fact, every woman who arrives in a detention centre is given a pregnancy test because staff recognise that where they work is not appropriate for pregnant women.

New clause 4 would support young people under the age of 18 in their interaction with the asylum system. This stands in stark contrast to the Government’s obsession with trying to discredit and dehumanise children, either by proposing bogus scientific assessments to determine their age—I say that as a biomedical scientist—or by bizarrely claiming that granting safety to children is some sort of pull factor. Lobotomies were once widespread across the globe too, but that does not mean they were scientifically valid, accurate or moral. Just because someone else is doing it does not mean we have to do it here, especially when the evidence for the accuracy of these tests is so poor.

It is a damning indictment of this Bill that my hon. and right hon. Friends have needed to table this extensive list of new clauses. The protections they are attempting to introduce are outstripped only by the litany of rights that this Government are attempting to remove from some of the world’s most vulnerable people.

The Government’s contemptible proposals have been tabled for entirely cynical reasons. We all want to stop the boats. But when the Government say, “Stop the boats”, it is not because they want to end the crisis in the channel, because they want to have safe borders where people do not die on them or because they want to end the suffering of people who are trying to come here to claim asylum. It is not even because they want to end the horror of people drowning as they attempt to reach refuge in the UK. It is because they are intent on vilifying people who have survived some of the most harrowing and worst things human beings can go through. I know that because I have spoken to many, many refugees and asylum seekers who have come here on boats. The Government are taking this approach because on these big issues they have no answers, so they are resorting to scapegoats.

It is clear that that has been an agenda long before this Bill was presented and that the Government are being pushed around by a very small and extreme group within the Conservative party, as we see when we look at Government new clause 22. It shamefully bars UK courts from interim measures to stop someone from being deported if they bring a legal challenge. The Government claim that they are considering fairness and the rule of law, and that that is a key British principle and value, but this measure sheds that. The Government are only too keen to undermine these principles if it helps them in the scapegoating of the most vulnerable. They want to bypass the European Court of Human Rights and harm Britain’s standing in the world, eroding the foundations of the international refugee systems and the refugee convention, all to appease their Back Benchers and throw red meat to a small portion of their base.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point. Does she agree that part of this dog-whistle politics is about what the Conservative party deputy chairman said, which is that the next election is going to be fought on woke, culture and trans issues. Of course, stigmatising refugees is part of that.

[Olivia Blake]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in this week alone the horrifying news about Sudan has reached us and we have seen the horrific circumstances being faced by not only British and dual nationals, but everyone there. While Britain is working hard to evacuate our citizens, we are not talking about safe routes for Sudanese refugees or a homes for Sudan scheme, and there are no dedicated resettlement routes and no numbers confirmed in respect of what countries the UNHCR should be prioritising in trying to help with what the Minister was outlining earlier. Even with Government new clause 8, the best this Bill could offer is a commitment to a report on safe routes, but with no actual, tangible commitments to open new ones. What are people fleeing war and persecution in Sudan, or anywhere else, supposed to do with that? By the time anything comes from this report, it will be too late for them, they will be on their way.

The amendments I cited earlier have been tabled because no serious attempt has been made in this Bill to ensure that vulnerable people are protected. That has been outlined well in the discussion we have had on modern slavery, so I will not add to that. The purpose of the Bill is the complete opposite of providing safe and legal routes for people to claim asylum. At their core, these proposals are not about helping anyone or making anyone safer, and they are not about making our borders safer; they are simply about attacking the rights of refugees, for the sake of electoral expedience and managing unruly Government Back Benchers. At the centre of this is a paradox: how can someone claim asylum if they are not on UK soil and they have to be on UK soil to claim asylum? How can they take a safe and legal route if there is no safe and legal route that works for them or is available to them? How can they claim safety in the first country they get to if that country persecutes them because they are LGBT, or they have a disability or religion—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. I am afraid that the hon. Lady is out of time. I call Sir William Cash.