Illegal Migration Bill

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris]

I will come back on two points. First, under the Bill, annual quotas will be decided upon with the consent of various local authorities that will be responsible for accommodating those people, and that is the right approach. On illegal migration, people arriving through irregular routes should not take precedence over those arriving lawfully through safe and legal routes. We could not allow a system where one displaces the right of the other, and that is a feature of this Bill.

The second thing I want to talk about is the effect of judicial reviews. Lords amendment 7 would permit judicial reviews. I cannot improve on the language used by David Blunkett when he was Home Secretary, introducing Labour’s flagship immigration Bill, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which was supported at the time by the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). I wanted to refresh my memory of what he said on Second Reading, because it was a powerful part of his speech. He said:

“At the moment the system is virtually unworkable. People can bring a judicial review during the process of the initial appeal, and when they reach the right to appeal to the tribunal they can judicially review the tribunal for not allowing the appeal to the tribunal. They can then judicially review the tribunal’s decision and they can judicially review whether they are entitled to go to the court of appeal following failure at the tribunal. The whole system is riddled with delay, prevarication, and, in some cases, deliberate disruption of the appeals process. Then they can judicially review the decision on removal even when the appeals have been gone through.”—[Official Report, 24 April 2002; Vol. 384, c. 355.]

We have simplified the system a bit since then, but effectively he is right. He was right then to seek to effect removal after one right of appeal had been exhausted, and the Government are right now to aim for swift removal without judicial review holding everything up.

My final point, briefly, is about the speech that the former Supreme Court Justice Lord Brown made on Second Reading of this Bill in the Lords. He sat as a Cross-Bench peer, and he died on Friday. He said:

“No doubt the Bill can be improved in various ways, but we must recognise that almost every amendment we make to soften it can tend only to weaken its essential objectives: stopping the boats… We really must…give the Government the opportunity by this Bill finally to confront this most intractable of problems.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 May 2023; Vol. 829, c. 1806.]

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I start by referring Members to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests for the support I receive from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy project.

Despite their lordships’ best efforts, this remains in my 18-plus years in this place comfortably the worst piece of legislation I have seen come to this House. That is not because I disagree with it—I have probably disagreed with most stuff in my 18 and a bit years here—but because it is based on several bogus understandings of the truth. Within it, there is a deplorable bias towards the inhumane.

To start with Lords amendment 1, we have an attempt to get the Government to do something massively radical: to comply with international obligations. The notion that we should not do that, or that we do not need to do that, is based upon the desire to depict the current situation—the boats situation and the asylum situation in the UK—as an emergency. I will come to that in a moment.

The two likely consequences of the UK habitually choosing to not comply with its international obligations are: first, that we become a pariah, and are seen internationally as not a team player, and thereby we are less effective in all parts of our policy around the world, whether economic, defensive or otherwise; and, secondly, that others will copy us and, as a consequence, the whole system breaks down. I often hear Members on the Government Benches say, “France is a safe country, why don’t people stay there?”. The simple answer to that is, “Yeah, it is. So is Spain and so is Italy.” If we end up in a situation where other people copy us, the whole network breaks down and we end up in a desperate situation. If we care about our position internationally, we need to care about that.

Let us turn straight to the Government’s justification for not complying with their international obligations, including issues to do with modern slavery and child detention, on which the Lords has made helpful amendments. Their explanation is that the situation constitutes an emergency. Does it? In the Home Secretary’s words, we are currently being swamped by refugees. Let us look at some facts to see whether either of those things bears any scrutiny. As we speak, Germany takes four times more asylum seekers than the United Kingdom, and France takes 2.5 times more asylum seekers than the United Kingdom. If we were to add the United Kingdom back into the European Union for statistical purposes, just 7% of asylum seekers would come to the UK and, per capita, the UK would be 22nd out of 28. Demonstrably, the United Kingdom has not faced an especial problem. We are not being swamped, and such language is demeaning of this country and of the office of Home Secretary.

The Government say, “Ah, but it’s different here, because we’ve taken in 250,000 Ukrainian refugees as well as those coming in through other routes.” I am utterly proud that the United Kingdom has been among those countries who have taken in the most Ukrainian refugees, but we have not taken the most. Germany has taken 1 million Ukrainian refugees and, as I said, it still takes four times more asylum seekers than us, and Poland has taken 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees. It appears that talking about our support for Ukraine and Ukrainian refugees is an excuse for the Government in seeking to avoid their international obligations.

Britain’s problem needs to be put into overall context. The reality is that 70% of the millions of displaced people and refugees on planet Earth flee either to a different region of their country or to a neighbouring country. A steadily decreasing trickle of people end up at the end of the line—and, my goodness, the United Kingdom, over the channel, is the end of the line. Again, for us to state that we face an especial emergency in terms of the numbers of people coming here is totally bogus. It is important to state that and put it on the record.

[Sir John Hayes]

I am astounded to hear the hon. Gentleman’s speech. I sometimes come into this place and think that I am in a parallel universe. I do not know whether he gets out much, but if he speaks to his constituents as often as I speak to mine, he will know that they do see this as an emergency. One hundred thousand people have crossed the channel on small boats, with every one of them knowing that they have arrived here illegally, and he will know that we are spending £6 million a day on 300 hotels to accommodate them. If that is not a crisis or an emergency, I do not know what is.

[Tim Farron]

I will come to the emergency, which the right hon. Gentleman set out towards the end of his remarks—the emergency caused by Government incompetence in not clearing the backlog. When we look at the numbers coming to our shores—I am sure he knows this as he has seen the figures—we see that statistically, compared to other countries of similar size and stature, the United Kingdom is not overwhelmed. What we are overwhelmed by is the consequences of the Government’s own incompetence.

I will wager, dare I say it—I am not a betting man—that I speak to my constituents more than the right hon. Gentleman speaks to his, and my constituents represent the values of the United Kingdom. They believe that it is right to provide sanctuary to those who present as refugees and that, in any event, even if those people are not refugees, we will only ever know that if we process them properly, which is what a competent, decent British Government would do.

[Tahir Ali (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab)]

I have received hundreds of emails from my constituents. Does the hon. Member agree that the Bill will lead to more misery for thousands of refugees, cost taxpayers millions and cause chaos to a system that is already on the brink of collapse?

[Tim Farron]

Yes, I think it will. I was visiting a hostel for people seeking asylum in this country a few months ago in Cumbria. One gentleman had been an interpreter for the British and American forces in Afghanistan, and we had left him behind. By hook or by crook he got himself here, and he had been waiting more than 12 months for his case to be heard. He got to the stage where he almost did not care if he got kicked out; he just wanted a resolution. That is miserable. Those people are getting the blame, from this Government and some of their supporters, for the consequences of the Government’s own failure and incompetence. That is shameful. I would be ashamed of that if I were sitting on the Government Benches. I know that some are, to their credit.

Talking of shameful things, let me move on to child detention and Lords amendment 8. As at least one Government Member rightly said, one of the great achievements of the coalition Government was the ending of child detention under a Conservative Prime Minister. Those on the Government Benches should be proud of that. The Refugee Council estimates that the Government’s proposals would potentially lead to 13,000 children being detained as a consequence of this legislation.

The real question for the House—for the country, actually, but for Members here in particular—is, do we see a child asylum seeker primarily as an asylum seeker to be deterred or as a child to be protected? If the answer is not the latter, I am sorry, but shame on you. An argument is made by some that if we do not detain children—by the way, teenagers are children too, as I am a parent of several—we will create a pull factor. The fact is that the Joint Committee on Human Rights has demonstrated that there is no evidence for that whatsoever. Even if there were some evidence for not detaining children being a pull factor, in what moral universe would it be okay for the Government to use children as collateral to achieve their policy aims? Again, that is outrageous.

On modern slavery and Lords amendments 6 and 56, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who is no longer in her place, made an outstanding speech. She introduced the modern slavery legislation as Prime Minister. This Government talk about enacting many of the things in this legislation as enacting the will of the people and carrying out their mandate. As a former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member had a mandate, which I am sure the whole House supported, to deliver that modern slavery legislation. I am proud of that, as should she be. How does that mandate not trump the apparent mandate to put those victims of modern slavery at such terrible risk?

The simple fact is that if someone is a victim of trafficking and modern slavery, because of the Bill and the failure to accept the amendments put forward, that person’s choices are to remain in exploitation, or go for prolonged detention or removal to Rwanda or some other country. For many victims of trafficking and exploitation, remaining in exploitation will seem the least worst option. Far from being an attempt to tackle evil gangs, the Bill plays into their hands. This is a traffickers charter.

Throughout the Bill we see the rhetoric of crisis, emergency and of our being overwhelmed. We are, indeed, overwhelmed—by the Government’s epic incompetence. Some 177,000 people are waiting for an initial decision. Those people do not want to be in hotels; they want to be processed. If the Government wanted to bring about a real deterrent, they would process people efficiently like other countries somehow manage to do, and they would return the ones who are not refugees. That would be a deterrent, but it is beyond the Government’s competence.

According to the Government’s own figures, of the top 10 nationalities of people presenting as refugees here, 80% are granted asylum. Even the Government’s own processes accept that they are genuine refugees, even though others characterise them in terrible and unflattering ways. Some 83% of them are from Sudan and 99% are from Eritrea. That is crucial, because there is no provision in the Bill whatsoever for those people to come here safely. It is so important that we tackle the issue of safe routes. A Government who were really serious in trying to stop the boats would do carrot and stick, so to speak.

The fact is this: desperate people will take dangerous routes until safe routes are available. If people have fled terror in whatever country—many are from the horn of Africa and have fled through the absolute hellhole that is Libya these days, and then crossed the Mediterranean— then I am sorry, but we are not going to deter them from taking a relatively short journey across the channel unless we provide safe routes. That is why the Government need to put safe routes on the face of the Bill. If they were trying to solve this problem holistically, they would make sure that safe routes were part of the Bill.