Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Coffey Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 26th June 2025 Lords Chamber

We have been lucky in the last few years, but the next big issue is waiting around the corner for us. We do not know what it is, but it is there and it will happen, even with the best will and security in the world. It is money well spent trying to avoid it. We know that illegally imported goods coming to this country is unacceptable, whether meat or not. The biosecurity effects could be catastrophic. The work of those in the industry is pretty important. It is not a waste of time to have biosecurity, whether on farms, in factories or, particularly, at the border ports where food is imported. It is the same at Heathrow, but we do not get so much meat coming there; it is mainly green fruit and veg. Ports such as Dover have to take it really seriously. We need to ensure they have the resources, willingness and powers to deal with it. I beg to move.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I added my name to this amendment because I completely agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has said.

In my time at Defra, there was a weekly biosecurity meeting covering a variety of things, such as invasive species. In particular, the risks of African swine fever and Xylella fastidiosa were probably our biggest concerns. Those concerns continue to rise, which is why the extra investment has gone in to support Border Force. There is a bit of a debate about Dover and Sevington—or, more accurately, Bastion Point—but nevertheless, officials recommended that Sevington be the principal gateway and that it be reinforced by the Border Force at Dover.

As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, set out quite extensively, this matters because it was often a challenge in government to try to get other departments to realise the impact of having something like African swine fever in this country. It would entirely wipe out our pig industry. Xylella fastidiosa would wipe out species after species of flora. This is why it matters for our national biosecurity. It was great to see particular reference to investment going into Weybridge in the security strategy.

Your Lordships should not underestimate what can be done by malicious actors trying to bring in this sort of element to disrupt our country. Although I know there is collaboration between the Border Force and port health in Dover and around the country, having this issue in the priorities of this new commander would give it the prominence it desperately needs—not just among officials but across Cabinet and Ministers.

As a slight aside, I welcome the investment in Weybridge, and I pay tribute to Dame Tamara Finkelstein. She is stepping down as Permanent Secretary at Defra and is leaving the Civil Service. Candidly, I think this will be the main legacy of her time at Defra. It has taken quite a few years and money has gone along the way, but having world-class facilities is vital to recognise the importance of this to our nation.

On how this could work as a priority, a lot of effort is going into the transition from the European Union and more on the border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Of course, there is no border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. I fear a lot of effort is going into that at times, and I genuinely believe it has been completely and utterly unnecessary. We need to keep our focus right around the country.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is particularly focused on Dover, and I understand why. Candidly, a lot of stuff coming in through the classic white van is going to different parts of the country. I also pay tribute to trading standards around the country, which has been tackling this issue. It is a limited resource in local government and is trying to do many other things as well, such as tackling illegal vaping and similar things. By bringing this into the Home Office as an issue of importance, that should then extend to it becoming a priority for our local police forces around the country too.

A lot of this is seen as quite low-level organised crime, but the impact could become truly devastating. I am very conscious that the Government want to make this Border Security Commander principally about the boats, people and illegal immigration, but we have the opportunity to consider a more strategic approach. Even if this is lower down in the priorities—not that I think it should be—at least it would be a shared agenda for one of the most important posts, which this Government are creating through the Bill.

I hope the Government will consider this. Defra works exceptionally hard on this and tries to work with other parts of government. This is an opportunity to stress how big this risk is and how malicious actors can do little things to massively disrupt this country. Just think back to 20 or 25 years ago and what happened with foot and mouth: it brought the country to a standstill, so much so that a general election was delayed. That is the sort of thing we need to think about. I hope this amendment will go through.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee that I am a small organic farmer and therefore have an interest in this. I also was the Secretary of State and Minister of Agriculture in the key area when we were trying to deal with BSE.

Looking back, it is amazing how we got through that period. Part of the reason was that we had a real reputation for protecting biosecurity here, so it was possible to get other countries to believe us when we said what we were doing and how we were doing it. As the person absolutely in the spotlight on this, I owed my predecessors enormously, because they created the circumstances in which it was possible to fight that battle.

It is very important, and I hope the Minister will accept this, because I honour him considerably and I think the Committee recognises what a considerable role he is playing. He can usually convince us that what he needs us to do is the right thing. I say to him personally: there is a problem if you have a Cabinet in which none of the people is a countryman or has a country constituency.

There are 9 million people who live in the countryside, and agriculture is one of our crucially important industries. Therefore, I hope the Minister will understand why we are very concerned that this should be in this Bill, because it covers a much wider range than doing the things that we might otherwise do in agriculture Bills and the like.

The truth is that, although the noble Lord and my noble friend have concentrated on the gangs and the people who make a lot of money out of it, one problem with biosecurity is that it is sometimes breached almost accidentally by individuals. You can bring really serious diseases in by bringing in a ham sandwich in the wrong circumstances and dropping it. I would just be frank about that end of it. We also know that there is considerable activity in bushmeats—in other words, meat which itself is illegal, as a matter of fact, but therefore has gone through no protective system at all—and the effects of that are really serious. We do not have to go into the details of some of the human diseases which have been spread by the use of bushmeats.

I recently had to spend a lot of time trying to get the Government of the time, a Conservative Government, to take seriously the problem of the growth in the number of wild boars in our forests and the fact that African pig diseases can get into that whole community and then threaten the entire British pig industry. I can tell the Committee why it was so difficult: it was because you were talking to people who did not appear to understand, first, that pigs have two litters and produce an awful lot of piglets, which can very soon get out of hand. They did not understand how close these wild boars were to the pig industry, and they had never really seen a wild boar—as somebody who had most of the lawn dug up by one, not all that time ago, I am quite strongly affected. I say merely that I found it difficult to explain to people how serious this was, why it mattered and what the effects were if we did not get it right, so I beg the Committee to support this change.

I know that the Minister wants to control the Bill, and one does not want to expand it, and I know that the Government are very concerned about that, but it is our only chance to remind everybody of the importance of biosecurity. The challenge is getting worse and worse. It is not just animals but, as my noble friend remarked, it is also about plants, invasive species and huge costs, and I end on that issue.

If we let this get out of hand, the cost to the national Exchequer will be enormous. We need only look at what we are trying to do about Japanese knotweed and all kinds of invasive species—we know what the monster wasp is likely to do, and we think of the American crayfish. I could go through a whole series of things that we would then have to deal with. Many people will know what we had to deal with with the escape of mink, for example. The control of our borders is crucial for biosecurity reasons, but it is crucial also to the Treasury—and, if I may say so, I have never found a department less understanding of how crucial it is to them. They ought to remember the cost of foot and mouth and the cost of BSE and all those diseases. Just think of what bird flu is doing to us at this moment. Therefore, I beg the Minister to take this very seriously.

Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Coffey Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 10th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

The European Court of Human Rights is not recognised as a traditional court of jurists as one would recognise, for instance, the US Supreme Court. Many of the people representing their countries are from NGOs who have vested interests in different areas. It is not comparable to our own Supreme Court, the US Supreme Court and many others. I stand to be corrected.

This is the debate we had during the discussions and deliberations on the safety of Rwanda Act. The erroneous notion that international law is sovereign over the UK Parliament, and that we cannot pass laws contrary to international treaties such as the ECHR, is pernicious and hugely undermines the faith and trust the electorate have in our governance. Such a notion was explicitly refuted in a Supreme Court ruling in 2021.

Real demonstrable damage is being done by such mischaracterisation and errors. The excellent report for the Centre for Policy Studies authored by my noble friend Lord Lilley, recently published, highlights that the proportion of asylum claims granted first time jumped from 25% in 2010 to 67% in 2023. We have to ask ourselves why that is the case. Why are we so out of step with so many other countries such as France, Italy, Spain and Germany? Some 42,000 asylum seekers are awaiting appeal outcomes, with 40% citing human rights grounds.

This Government have instead doubled down on lawfare, on the rule of lawyers and not the rule of law. Today the newspapers report that our Attorney-General has apparently appointed himself as Deputy Prime Minister with an effective veto over all government policy and a “snitch clause”, encouraging civil servants to dob in Ministers who fall foul of the Attorney-General’s zealous, unbalanced and damaging interpretation of international law. This extends to vetoing potential domestic legislation. It will not end well.

To finish, this Government had a great opportunity to consolidate and build on the work we had done in government, and we would have cheered them on and wished them well. It is a matter of great regret for the future of our country, for people who are looking to government to protect the safety and security of our borders, that they were not able to do that.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friends in opposing this clause. While I will try to avoid repeating what my noble friends have already said, to take a starting point, I did speak in the debate at the other end on this because it was important that, as has already been somewhat alluded to, this turned out to be quite a significant deterrent.

I appreciate that the Minister may disagree with my interpretation, but he will remember that when this started happening and became law, people started moving to Ireland, to Dublin. People left this country because they were concerned about being caught up in the process of being sent to Rwanda. People could see it with their own eyes. In 2022 the number of crossings meant that 45,000 people came to our shores through small boats, then it started to fall when the Prime Minister at the time announced that. Once there was legal wrangling, all of a sudden the number of people coming across on illegal crossings started to rise again. The numbers cannot be refuted.

I appreciate that this was in the Labour Party’s Change manifesto for government, which estimated that it would save £75 million a year by scrapping this policy. It also anticipated that it would save, I think, a few hundred million pounds more by ending hotels. That has not happened either.

Nevertheless, in the first half of this year, we have seen 20,000 people coming to these shores. That is a significant uplift and, with no deterrent, there seems to be no change in the trend. I hope that what the Prime Minister has announced while we have been debating this amendment will be successful. I will not repeat the questions from my noble friend Lord Harper.

It is critical to come back to aspects of the constitutional arrangement, which is why we ended up where we were. We had had the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, then the Illegal Migration Act 2023. I am not going to debate that, because we will come on to it later in Committee. The High Court having ruled in favour of the then Government, the Court of Appeal and then five members of the Supreme Court spoke unanimously. I think it was perfectly valid for the UK Government, who were responsible for international relations, to try to correct how Rwanda had been maligned by those five judges. Yes, that was also considering representations made by lawyers and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, but nevertheless, as I think I referred to previously, Rwanda is a prominent member of the Commonwealth. It is a nation that joined the Commonwealth because of values. The Commonwealth does not let just anybody in. Also, Rwanda had just recently held the presidency of the Commonwealth. That in itself is no mean feat. So it was perfectly valid of the Government. As we know, if judges come up with a decision that Parliament does not like, the recourse is for Parliament to then put in place a new law. That is why I was more than happy to support that legislation at the time.

I respect that this is a manifesto commitment, but it feels very tokenistic. As my noble friend Lord Horam pointed out, the scheme in Australia involved a number of factors, not only the offshoring and processing but the turn away policy—how the Australian navy worked with boats—but nevertheless it was clear that the Government were not going to accept illegal criminal activity. We all know that the smugglers do not care whether people live or die as they push them out into the very dangerous channel. This is just one line in a campaign, and I think the Government will come to regret not having something effective in this regard. As I say, we will come on to the Illegal Migration Act later.

I encourage the Government to think carefully about what happened and to recognise that every time they undermine the deterrent, unfortunately, the number of people handing over thousands of pounds to smugglers will just increase. I am sure nobody in this Committee wants to see that.

[Lord German (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches support this clause in the Bill and support the Government’s action. The rest of it was very irresponsible. Getting rid of that project, which was announced in this Chamber by the Labour Party leader at that time, was the right thing to do. It also means that we can have better standing with our international colleagues, as we have had already with the UNHCR and with the French President, who was quoted as saying that this was a way of getting a better relationship with France.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

I appreciate what the Minister is saying, but, ultimately, this is a decision about whether or not Rwanda is a safe country. Do the UK Government believe that Rwanda is a safe country or do they agree with the Supreme Court that it is an unsafe country?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a very good point. Members of this House expressed strong concerns when the Bill, now an Act, was debated, particularly about the previous Government’s statements under Section 19(1)(b) of the Human Rights Act. They could not say that the Bill was compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. The Government were seeking to overrule a Supreme Court judgment that the Act did not provide safeguards when Rwanda was subsequently deemed unsafe. I confess that I was not here; I was having what we call an interregnum between the House of Commons and this House. However, having watched the debate from afar, I know that that was one of the concerns that were raised. In fact, the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ report said it was incompatible with the ECHR and, more widely, that the policy outsourced the UK’s obligations under the refugee convention and referred to the difficulties in guaranteeing compliance with the principles of that legislation.

I think that was the reason that members of the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrat Party, and from the Cross Benches, and a number of Conservative Peers, rejected the proposal on several occasions, until such time as the then House of Commons fulfilled its manifesto commitment—I accept that—to bring the scheme in. The scheme was never going to work.