Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Seventh sitting)

Tom Hayes Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)]

Clause 37 repeals the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. In doing so, the Government are removing the only deterrent, and indeed the only place where we can send people who have arrived from a safe third country. It is well established that it is extremely difficult to return people to some countries. In addition, the lack of documentation can frustrate the process of removal to someone’s home country. That is why a third country deterrent is needed: if people cannot be removed to their home country, they can and will be removed to a third country.

The logical consequence of repealing the Safety of Rwanda Act is that a greater number of migrants will arrive from countries that are harder to return them to. Without some form of agreement to send the migrants to a safe country, they will continue to come and to stay. Section 80AA of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 contains a list of safe countries, but the list is limited to countries that contribute very few illegal migrants, save for Albania. The last Conservative Government cut the number of Albanian illegal migrants coming to the UK by small boat crossings by over 90%, showing that our returns agreement with Albania worked. As the former director general of Border Force said:

“If we cannot send them back, we could send them to another safe country—ergo, Rwanda—where they could be resettled safely without adding to the continuing flow of arrivals by small boat from France.”––[Official Report, Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2025; c. 41, Q43.]

Channel boat crossings are up 28% since the election, with more than 1,300 people crossing in the week commencing 1 March 2025. This Labour Government have smashed farmers, small business owners and pensioners, but it seems that the people-smuggling gangs are the only ones who are safe. The only thing that will stop the gangs is a strong deterrent that means that people do not board small boats because they know that they will be deported if they reach the UK, and they will not be allowed to stay.

The additional offences and powers in this Bill are welcome as far as they go, but, with the scrapping of the Conservatives’ deterrent—that if someone has no right to be in this country, they will not be able to stay—this Bill is just window dressing. It will not, and cannot, stop people crossing the channel in small boats. The Government know that, because their own impact assessment shows that only a handful of people each year would be imprisoned because of the new offences created by this Bill.

Since the announcement that our deterrent would be scrapped, there are almost 8,500 more people in asylum hotels. That is the Government’s failure.

[Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)]

I was trying to count the number of times the hon. Member used the word “deterrent”, and I ran out of fingers. Could he please define what a deterrent is?

[Matt Vickers]

Does the hon. Gentleman want me to use my fingers to help him to count? The deterrent is preventing people from getting in those boats. If people know that they will be detained and removed when they arrive in this country, they will stop coming.

[Matt Vickers]

Does the hon. Gentleman know what has happened with global migration? If we compare the movements that have been made in the last week, those into Europe and those into this country seem to be slightly misaligned. The number of people arriving in this country is up 28%. The number of people put into hotels in communities across this country is up 29%; that is 8,500 more people. The number of people who have arrived in this country illegally and been removed is down significantly since this Government came to office.

It is clear that a new approach is needed. The National Crime Agency said that stopping channel migrants is not possible without a Rwanda-style scheme. It was a terrible mistake for Labour to cancel our deterrent before it had even started. The Labour Government like to point out the cost of the Rwanda plan, but a deterrent that stops illegal migrants from making the crossing and settling in the country will save the state billions in lifetime costs.

As Karl Williams from the Centre for Policy Studies pointed out,

“the Office for Budget Responsibility’s analysis last summer…estimates that a low-skilled migrant, or low-wage migrant as the OBR puts it, will represent a lifetime net fiscal cost to the taxpayer of around £600,000.”

Williams then pointed to

“analysis from Denmark, the Netherlands and other European countries that asylum seekers’ lifetime fiscal costs tend to be steeper than that” ––[Official Report, Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2025; c. 43, Q49.]

The evidence therefore suggests that if 35,000 people cross the channel a year—that is roughly where we were last year—at that sort of cost range, the lifetime costs will probably be £50 billion or £60 billion.

[Tom Hayes]

I ask the hon. Member to desist from referring to that report. In oral evidence, I asked two experts whether they thought it was possible to make such assessments on the basis of the available evidence, and they declined. In fact, the author of that report said that the available evidence was fairly lacking in robustness and integrity. When I asked him whether he had considered certain key counterfactuals, he admitted that he had not. Later, in response to my question about whether it was appropriate for MPs to brandish such research, Professor Brian Bell said that it would be “foolhardy” to do so because the report itself made “very brave” assumptions.

Will the hon. Member now desist from using that report, given that we are in a democracy, we are striving for accountability and truth, and we should not be using fake information?

[The Chair]

Order. Interventions must be short.

[Tom Hayes]

I apologise, Mr Stuart.

[Matt Vickers]

I will not desist from using those figures, but I would be happy to hear the hon. Member’s alternative figures when the time comes. I am sure this is not cost-neutral; I am sure it is very expensive.

As I was saying, that is why an effective removals and deterrent agreement is needed. I ask the Minister whether the Government are looking at a removals and deterrent agreement. If not, why are they repealing the UK’s only deterrent? How does she think we can control our borders without one, when it is clear that this Bill will not be effective in doing so? Does she agree with the National Crime Agency that a removals agreement is the only way to stop channel migrants, as happened with Operation Sovereign Borders in Australia?

The Government say that they are clearing the backlog and returning people who arrived on small boats. That is just not the case. The most recent immigration figures show that the asylum backlog is higher than when Labour came into office, and returns of small boat arrivals were down again in the most recent quarter, with only 4% of arrivals being removed. In fact, of the total returns between October and December 2024, only 16% were enforced; in the three months before, only 13% were. Does the Minister think that allowing 96% of illegal immigrants who arrive by small boat to stay in the UK is a deterrent?

[Tom Hayes]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart, and I promise that I will be briefer. Does the hon. Member agree that the overwhelming trend under the last Conservative Government in the balance between enforced and voluntary returns was in favour of voluntary returns? In fact, in 2023, only 24% of returns were enforced, in 2022, 25% were and in 2021, 27% were. Does he not agree that the trend over the last years has been one of voluntary returns?

[Matt Vickers]

I would say that the big issue around deterrence is how many of those who arrive in small boats are removed. Despite the fact that the number of those arriving illegally is up 28%, the number who are being returned is down significantly. That is the big question at play here.

[Tom Hayes]

I thank the hon. Member for his patience. Does he agree that he is moving the goalposts slightly to manufacture a political argument that, as he knows, would not be supported by the evidence available? Furthermore, will he look back into history at the record of the last Labour Government? I invite him to comment on their success—I know that he will want to jump at that. In 2004, 85% of people reaching our country were removed through enforced returns; in 2005, 73% were. Where there was a trend of enforced returns, it was actually under the last Labour Government.

[Matt Vickers]

In terms of the political arguments, what people out there want to see is the number of people arriving illegally in this country going down. They are not seeing that; it is up 28%. They want to see the number of hotels in communities across the country going down. It is not, although it was. The number of people arriving was also going down, but it is now up 28%, and there are 8,500 more people in hotels. That is the reality of the situation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margaret Mullane (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

Good morning, Mr Stuart. It was interesting to hear from the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire that he considered the Rwanda scheme a crackpot scheme. Another opinion is that it was “un-Conservative and un-British”—the opinion of John Major, the former Conservative Prime Minister. We have to acknowledge that the basic principle of this Bill is to address the failures of past legislation. Indeed, the Minister explained during an earlier debate that it is not possible to make the suite of legislation involved in the Safety of Rwanda Act and the Illegal Migration Act work together coherently. Not to repeal the Safety of Rwanda Act would undermine confidence in the credibility of the Bill. We are moving away from reliance on expensive gimmicks, hotel use, the flaw that is the Rwanda Act, with its price tag of £700 million of taxpayers’ money, and failure to effectively process the people arriving on our shores. Do we really believe that clinging to a piece of dead legislation is the way to protect our borders and put the safety of our country in focus and at the front?

[Tom Hayes]

May I start by saying that it is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Stuart? I am particularly enjoying the opportunity to have these debates in a free-flowing way—while sticking to parliamentary etiquette, obviously.

I commend the hon. Member for Stockton West, with whom I have some sympathy. He has been sent here to defend the impossible. I half wondered, when he came in wearing that fetching yellow tie, which I slightly covet, whether he had come to hold his hands in the air, make an apology and perhaps stand on the side of classical liberalism, but no: he stood true to the 2024 manifesto on which he was elected. I hope that in addressing how he would define a deterrent, I will add something new. When I asked him for a definition, he said that a deterrent would prevent people from coming and that it would do so by detaining and removing them. I shall make a case that challenges his assumptions on that basis.

A deterrent is a strategy aimed at preventing external actors, targets and adversaries in the military sense from taking unwanted actions. For the Rwanda asylum policy to be a deterrent, the Conservative Government would have needed to achieve certain things: to maintain the capabilities required to deter and be highly resolved to deploy them—as the hon. Member said, to be able to detain and remove—and to effectively communicate their resolve to act. In any communication, one needs to be understood to be highly resolved and capable of following through.

For the Rwanda asylum policy to be a deterrent, the Government would have needed to persuade potential migrants of their capabilities and resolve to send them to Rwanda to process their claims after they had illegally entered the country, and to have stopped migrants from paying significant sums of money to smuggler gangs facilitating illegal migration. In short, from what the hon. Member said, it feels as though the principal target of deterrents was migrants. The Rwanda asylum policy was always doomed to fail on those key conditions, because it was not able to achieve detention or removal.

On detention, Professor Brian Bell, the chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, told us that the numbers given by the Government

“are certainly not consistent with a story of a very significant deterrent effect from the Rwanda Act.”––[Official Report, Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2025; c. 56, Q84.]

Dr Peter Walsh of the Migration Observatory cited concerns about

“where people would be detained”,––[Official Report, Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2025; c. 14, Q13.]

as the UK immigration detention system had capacity for only 2,200 people, with roughly 400 spaces free. Moreover, he said that Rwanda would struggle to process more than “a few hundred” asylum claims a year.

That takes me to the question of removal.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Does my hon. Friend realise that the detention estate was used by the Conservative party to empty some prison places and try to relieve pressure there? I think it highly unlikely that there would be even 400 spaces.

[Tom Hayes]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important reminder that when the Labour Government took office after our historic win, we inherited an awful mess in our prison system, which was described by independent experts and organisations as near to collapse—so near that there were just a few hundred spaces left at a time when the country was rioting.

[Chris Murray]

Is my hon. Friend also aware that under the previous Government, the Home Office tried to secure additional detention estate for asylum seekers but catastrophically failed to do so? For example, at Northeye, they spent hundreds of millions of pounds to secure the site—far more than the previous owners had paid—yet found that it had contaminated ground and could not be used, and the Bibby Stockholm in Dover closed very swiftly after opening.

[Tom Hayes]

I thank my hon. Friend for those important points. In fact, the Bibby Stockholm was moored just off a place near my constituency in Dorset. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Lloyd Hatton) for campaigning so quickly and efficiently to have the Bibby Stockholm closed, and I thank the Government for responding so constructively to that request. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh about how we have seen significant challenges to the state’s ability to detain. As a consequence, in one of the two conditions set out by the hon. Member for Stockton West for an effective deterrent, it is clear that the Conservative Government failed.

For the next component of an effective deterrent—removal—we need only look at the ultimate proof: who went to Rwanda? What deportations actually happened? I can anticipate some of the ways that the Conservatives may challenge that, so I would like to take them on. First, they may blame this Labour Government for cancelling the policy, without also saying that the Conservative party controlled the timing of a general election that they seemed certain to lose. That they believed they were certain to lose is perhaps why they called the election before they could begin deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. In fact, the first flight was set to take off on 24 July. If the Conservatives had delayed the Dissolution of Parliament by just 20 days, to 19 June rather than 30 May, the first planes could have taken off.

The last Prime Minister could have waited out those 20 days, if he did not have anything else to do. With a zombie Government that were not showing any ambition, if he had wanted to show ambition, he could have spent a nice 20 days watching all 90 hours of the TV show “Lost”. If he wanted to go at a more leisurely pace—and the Conservatives were excelling at going at a leisurely pace—rather than binge watching something, he could have watched all 30 hours of the TV show “Stranger Things”. Instead—and this is where the “ba-dum” comes in—the Government manifested signs of being lost, and the last Conservative Cabinet just comprised stranger things.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

Elegant.

[Tom Hayes]

I thought I would to and find a moment of humour in the dispiriting debate on this topic.

The Conservatives may progress to blaming successful legal and judicial challenges to the policy. The Rwanda policy was, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dover and Deal said, unlawful and deemed to be so by the courts. If they do, His Majesty’s Opposition should confirm whether they respect the independence of our judiciary in adjudicating such challenges on the one hand, and respect the international human rights laws, under which challenges were made and were successful, on the other. That is important, because one of the hallmarks of the new Government is to be lawful and to respect our judiciary. We need to embrace that change. The Opposition could also reflect on the probability of further legal challenges being undertaken because of the human rights concerns about Rwanda, which my hon. Friend highlighted so effectively.

Last, the Conservatives may want to blame political challenges for undermining the credibility of their Rwanda asylum policy. In a democracy, it is of course right that Members of Parliament raise concerns on behalf of their constituents—indeed, that is what we have been doing—but the Conservatives overcame those political constraints by passing the Safety of Rwanda Act to address judicial concerns, and they signed a legally binding agreement with Rwanda. So the idea that the deterrent was not able to function because of legal or political challenges is actually farcical, because the previous Government held the cards in their hands.

I have heard it said that the Conservatives could have followed the Australian asylum policy, which has been described as a successful model—perhaps it even inspired the Rwanda asylum policy—but there is good reason to believe that UK could not have achieved the deterrent effects of the Australian offshore asylum processing model. Indeed, Professor Brian Bill, chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, said in oral evidence that it was inappropriate to draw comparisons between the Rwanda scheme and the Australian policies.

Were we to be generous and accept the view of the hon. Member for Weald of Kent that the Australian policy stood out in the world as being successful, there would be challenges to assessing the efficacy of that policy. As the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, an expert and independent institution, has said, there is no compelling evidence to suggest that the Australian offshoring policy was the reason for a drop in numbers of people going to Australia. Put bluntly, if migrants were paying attention to the last Government’s policy, they had no reason to believe that they would be barred from staying in the UK.

That takes me to my third and final definition of what would make an effective deterrent. Yes, the state must be understood to be highly resolved to deter, detain and remove, and capable of doing so, but it takes two to tango. Britain can only be understood if asylum seekers are able to understand, which in turn depends on several key factors. It means migrants being able to do at least three things: to pay close attention to the last Government’s actions—I struggled to do that, so I cannot see how asylum seekers would—to stay fully informed about the many twists and turns in the Safety of Rwanda Act asylum policy, which again I struggled to stay abreast of, and to behave as rational actors who weigh up the costs and benefits of action.

We have heard in testimony and oral evidence that migrants are typically unaware of Government policy and actions, because they are too busy being asylum seekers and migrants. Moreover, it can be said that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the chaotic and difficult circumstances that they are forced to inhabit prevent them from being the rational actors that they would otherwise be, calmly and objectively assessing the trade-offs between the perceived costs of illegal entry, the probability of those being incurred, and whether those are outweighed by the potential benefits of migration.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)]

Clause 38 repeals sections 1 to 6 and schedule 1, sections 7 to 11, sections 13 to 15 and schedule 2, sections 16 to 28, sections 30 to 5, sections 53 to 58, section 61 and section 66 of the Illegal Migration Act.

Section 2 of the Illegal Migration Act placed a duty on the Home Secretary to make arrangements to remove persons to their home country or a safe third country who have entered or arrived in the UK illegally. Let me point out to those people who are concerned about genuine asylum seekers that section 2(4) of the IMA makes it clear that the provision does not apply if someone comes directly from a place of danger, which is consistent with article 33 of the 1951 refugee convention. However, people who come here directly from France, a safe country where no one is being persecuted and which has a perfectly well-functioning asylum system, should not illegally enter the United Kingdom.

I ask the Minister why the Government are repealing this duty. Is it because they do not think they are able to remove those who have arrived illegally? Is it because the Government think people who arrive in this country illegally should be allowed to remain?

Section 5 of the Illegal Migration Act provides that asylum claims are automatically deemed inadmissible for those who have arrived illegally. One of Labour’s first actions in government was to allow illegal migrants to claim asylum. Can the Minister explain how allowing illegal migrants to claim asylum is providing any deterrent? Surely it will help the smuggling gangs, by providing a stronger incentive for people to make those dangerous crossings of the Channel in small boats.

[Tom Hayes]

The Illegal Migration Act, which we are discussing under this clause, was put on the statute book by the previous Government, but they did not commence much of it at all. Can the hon. Member explain why that was?

[Matt Vickers]

There is a lot to do in the way of commencement; the Bill is there and could be commenced at any time, if the Government felt it was of help. In fact, in a few years’ time, when they come back to the drawing board to try to find a deterrent, they might well want to do that.

Sections 31 and 32 of the Illegal Migration Act prevented people who have entered the country illegally from obtaining British citizenship. The Labour Government are repealing this provision. Their position is hardly surprising when the Prime Minister does not think that British citizenship is a pull factor, but that does not mean it is the right thing to do. Why are the Government repealing this clause, allowing illegal migrants to get British citizenship?

Do the Government not believe that British citizenship is a privilege rather than a right, especially for those who have entered the country illegally? If so, why have the Government not included measures to stop illegal migrants obtaining British citizenship, and instead only issued guidance stating that

“applications made after 10 February 2025 that include illegal entry will ‘normally’ be refused citizenship, regardless of when the illegal entry occurred.”?

Section 58 of the Illegal Migration Act states:

“The Secretary of State may make regulations about the effect of a decision by a relevant person (“P”) not to consent to the use of a specified scientific method for the purposes of an age assessment…where there are no reasonable grounds for P’s decision.”

This means that, if a migrant refused to undergo an age assessment, they would be considered an adult. Labour have removed age assessments for illegal migrants who claim to be under 18, resulting in the risk that grown men may end up in schools with teenage girls. In fact, the most recent data on age disputes shows that more than 50% of migrants claiming to be under 18 were actually adults. How do the Government therefore intend to ensure that migrants claiming to be under 18 actually undergo age assessments, and why is that not included in the Bill?

The SNP’s new clause 2 would repeal the Illegal Migration Act entirely, so the SNP must be agreeing with the Labour Government that illegal migrants should be able to get British citizenship and should not have to undergo age assessments. Therefore, I ask the same questions: does the SNP not believe that British citizenship is a privilege rather than a right, especially for those who have entered the country illegally? How would the SNP ensure that migrants claiming to be under 18 actually undergo age assessments, and why is that not included in new clause 2?

By repealing the Illegal Migration Act in its entirety, the SNP want to stop the seizure of mobile phones from illegal migrants, something that helps to establish identities and obtain evidence of immigration offences. As Tony Smith said:

“Passport data, identity data, age data and travel history data are often held on those phones—all data that would be useful when considering an asylum application.”––[Official Report, Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Public Bill Committee, 27 February 2025; c. 40, Q43.]

The Liberal Democrats’ amendment 9 would have repealed section 29 of the Illegal Migration Act, which requires the Secretary of State to remove people who have sought to use modern slavery protections in bad faith. Do the Liberal Democrats think that people using modern slavery protections fraudulently should be allowed to stay in the UK? If so, do they believe that people who make fraudulent immigration claims should be allowed to stay in the UK? We believe that the effect of repealing the majority of the IMA and the entirety of the Safety of Rwanda Act will be an increase in the number of people arriving in this country illegally and remaining.

I have therefore asked the Government whether they would be prepared to be transparent about the numbers. If they are convinced that the approach set out in the Bill will be successful, let us measure it. Will the Minister commit to publishing all the numbers, and the nationalities, of all those who might have been excluded from the UK asylum system on grounds of connection with a safe third country or a late claim, but have not been—with reasons why not—and to setting out the obstacles to returning them to their country of origin and what steps are being taken through international agreements to overcome that, as recommended by Tony Smith in evidence to this Committee? We will oppose the inclusion of this clause in the Bill by way of a Division.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Murray]

Like the Safety of Rwanda Act clause, this clause is an inevitability, because it was clear from the outset that these sections of the Illegal Migration Act were never going to work. I know that the Conservatives tend to think that everybody who works in the migration sector set out to thwart their plans at every turn, but that is not the case. I was working for the strategic migration partnership in Scotland when the Illegal Migration Bill was introduced two years ago. I remember sitting down with local authorities, the police and other key stakeholders to look at the legislation, and all of us collectively said, “How is this going to work? This is never going to be feasible in reality.”

I draw people’s attention to one component of the Act that is being repealed, which brings its failure to the fore. The IMA placed on the Home Secretary a duty to remove that applied to all asylum seekers regardless of their case. For anyone under 18, the duty to remove kicked in at the age of 18, but when we were working with local authorities, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children came across and sought asylum in this country. These children are among the most vulnerable people in the world. They have lost their loved ones, they are on their own and they are in a strange country. In the UK, we have a national transfer scheme to disperse them around different local authorities. I worked with the officers who were trying to help those children to get themselves together after a really traumatic experience.

The Illegal Migration Act meant that, at the age of 18, in theory those people would be eligible for immediate removal. What does the Committee think that did to those children in terms of their attempts to secure any services, learn English or get any education? It made it impossible for them and it had a direct impact: they did not leave the country, but they disappeared. Some of them are probably out there being exploited right now, as a direct consequence of clauses in the Illegal Migration Act. The Act did not just put those children at risk; it put incredible pressure on overstretched local services around the country. For the previous Government to set out to use immigration legislation to put further pressure on overstretched local services was only going to have negative consequences in communities, and it should never have happened.

More broadly, the duty to remove, which this clause repeals, essentially shut down the asylum system and created what IPPR has called a “perma-backlog”. We have talked about deterrents and incentives, but I do not see any greater incentive for someone seeking to exploit the asylum system in this country than shutting it down overall, which is what that duty to remove did. It created a vicious circle, which frankly was bad for asylum seekers themselves, because genuine refugees had to spend years in hotel accommodation, which is not a particularly nice thing to do, and for the taxpayer in the UK, because costs soared from £18,000 per asylum seeker per year in 2019 to £47,000 in 2024. It was also bad for communities, because people could not be moved through that process, which clearly put pressure on an already febrile immigration situation. It is good that we are repealing this duty; as I said, it was inevitable, because it was never going to work.

Finally, I understand the points that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire made about human trafficking. It is really important that we offer the victims of modern slavery proper protections, especially when they are forced to commit crimes in the course of being trafficked. This legislation does not completely take that power away, but again, I have to draw on my experience of the last couple of years. There was an increase in the number of exploiters—those who were perpetrators of trafficking—using the trafficking system to evade prosecution. I worked closely with Police Scotland and the Crown Office, including in the Perth and Kinross council area. We saw, particularly in the Vietnamese community, the growth of that development.

We must not see the world in black and white. I am by no means saying that every victim of trafficking is somehow an imposter and we must stop them getting any protection, but it is happening, so it is proper that we keep the clauses in place so that we can tackle that. If we do not have that component, the system will break down. Just as we saw with the asylum system, if we do not have clauses to make the system functional, it will break down and everybody loses.

[Tom Hayes]

It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh, who, in an outstanding speech, set out the major challenges with the Illegal Migration Act, part of which will be repealed.

I want to knock on the head four things that were said by the hon. Member for Stockton West. The first was in reference to section 23 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023. That provision, which the Opposition have talked about, was never implemented by the last Government, so in effect he is opposing a repeal of something that his last Government never started. That feels to me like the worst kind of politics. Between the Royal Assent given to that legislation and the Dissolution of Parliament, 315 days passed, yet no effort was made to implement that provision.

Secondly, sections 9 and 10 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 were, as we have heard, unworkable. They allow people to arrive, claim asylum in the UK, get support, and be put up in a hotel, which as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh described, will often be in the some of the most dire conditions that somebody can go through after fleeing some of the worst experiences that people can have, be it trauma, famine, disease or poverty—the list goes on. Applications were not processed, so people were not able to leave their hotel. The consequence of that is not just an expensive asylum backlog, but people living with serious psychological scarring for a significant amount of time.

That brings me to my third point. I will talk more about this when we reach new clause 26, which relates to scientific age assessments, but I really do not know how the Conservative party can talk about the welfare and protection of children when we heard oral testimony from the Children’s Commissioner about children who were subject to, and vulnerable to, organ harvesting, rape, sexual assault and disappearance from hotels and into wider society, where, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh said, they are likely to continue to be abused, exploited and victimised. I will make those points when we reach that debate.

Lastly, on the point about France, I wish the Conservative party would stop throwing stones at one of nearest neighbours and most important strategic allies, particularly when we are in such a volatile international climate. It is really important that we properly scrutinise legislation, but do not indulge in the petty politics that defined the last Conservative Government, disrupted so many of our international relations, and actually made us less secure.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

This has been a small but perfectly formed debate on clause 38, which repeals all but six sections of the Illegal Migration Act. As Government Members have pointed out, despite the amount of time that has lapsed since the Act got on the statute book, the vast majority of its provisions have never been commenced. In fact, we had to commence one tiny bit of it so that we could restart asylum processing; that is probably the most it ever had any effect.

Let us be clear: the Illegal Migration Act meant that thousands of asylum claims were put on hold, because of the duty to remove, increasing the backlog, putting incredible pressure on the asylum accommodation system and creating what has been called the “perma-backlog”. We all know what that was, and how big it was when we came into Government. The Act has largely not been commenced, nor will it be under this Government. We need to sort out the chaos created by the unworkable and contradictory provisions in the Act. Despite the bravado of the hon. Member for Stockton West in his earlier contribution, I suspect that most Conservative Ministers knew that the Act was unworkable, because it was not commenced when they had the ministerial capacity and power to do so for all the time between when it was put on the statute book and when we formed a new Government a year later.

The system had been left in chaos but, were the Government to accept new clause 2 and simply repeal the entire Act, it would lead to a missed opportunity to improve our immigration system. I will go through some of that with the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire. Clause 38 will repeal section 2 of the 2023 Act, which provides for the duty to remove. The Government are committed to ending the migration and economic partnership with Rwanda, so section 2 will be repealed to deliver that by repealing the duty to remove and associated provisions.

On sections 22 to 28 of the Illegal Migration Act, we are not retaining the vast majority of modern slavery provisions in the Act because they are connected to the duty to remove irregular migrants. These sections were never commenced and provided that where a duty to remove was applied for an individual, that individual should be disqualified from the national referral mechanism unless certain limited exemptions applied. We are removing sections 30 to 37 relating to permanent bans on entry, settlement and citizenship, which, while held up as a success by others, were unenforced and unworkable. Sections 57 and 58 of the Act are also repealed. They relate to age assessments, but both sections are unworkable and irrelevant without the duty to remove.