Nationality and Borders Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Siobhain McDonagh and Tom Pursglove

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Tom Pursglove]

Q Mindful of the breadth of your professional experience in previous roles, how crucial do you think the streamlining of the processing of applications is to tackling some of these challenges?

Tony Smith: We lived through this before. We had something called the new asylum model when I was in the UK Border Agency, before taking the top job in the Border Force. Previously, I was regional director for UKBA London and the south-east, which meant that my teams were the ones who were processing asylum arrivals coming into the country. I was actually responsible for removals.

Yes, we did have targets in the Home Office in those days for enforcement. It was part of my mission to ensure that those who did not qualify to stay, either because they had arrived under safe third country rules, or they were coming on a manifestly unfounded route, were sent back. The trouble is we have seen a good deal of judicial overreach by the European Court of Justice, and significant interpretations and European directives, which kind of hindered those arrangements on returns. We have now got to a point where we are not really returning anybody who is coming across on these boats, and people notice that. If we do not start returning people, the numbers will continue to rise. We need to find a way of segmenting those applicants who we know have a genuine claim for asylum in this country from those who have probably been in Europe for a long time and may have had applications for asylum rejected—they have had a notice de quitter from Schengen, sometimes two or three notices—who are not genuine asylum seekers but who would just like to come to live here. That is not effective border control.

It is going to be really, really difficult, but I applaud the authors of the Bill, because it finally gets to grips with the difficulty of the way we have interpreted the 1951 refugee convention and put up what I think is the right interpretation of it in not conflating two different arguments, which is human smuggling across the English channel by criminal gangs, putting lives at risk, and the genuine need to resettle refugees from different parts of the world.

[Chair]

We only have a few minutes, so I call Jonathan Gullis.