Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting)

Zubir Ahmed Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 15th September 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

Q My question is for you, Alp, picking up on some of the earlier commentary. You made reference to Australia, Denmark, the USA and Greece, which have reduced numbers applying for asylum through measures that bear no resemblance to the Bill. What should we put in the Bill to replicate the success of those countries?

Alp Mehmet: We could start by declaring our intention to come out of the ECHR. Human rights can be dealt with perfectly well by a country like ours without our having to be signed up to the ECHR. We could also pull out of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings. We should announce that the Human Rights Act 1998 will be repealed. All of that would allow us to deal with the sort of people who are, understandably, looking for a better life. I have no problem with that, but are we really saying that anyone and everyone of 118 million will be able to come here?

This may sound relatively minor, but the other thing I would do is put the onus on arrivals—we used to call them passengers in the old days. We should put the onus on the migrants arriving to satisfy the immigration official dealing with them of their bona fides. That is what used to happen. Our courts have pushed us in the opposite direction: we now have to disprove. If we do not have any evidence to back that up, we are effectively saying, “Okay, we can’t prove it otherwise. We don’t know who you are. You haven’t got a passport, but we’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt, because the Home Office can’t provide the evidence to do otherwise.” That is absurd. It is also dangerous.

Those are the things that I would include in the Bill. Perhaps you would expect me to say a lot of that. Look at what the Americans have done. Whatever anyone feels about some politicians in the United States, they have nevertheless been successful in closing the southern border to illegal immigration. We should put in place effective measures to stop those coming across the channel not just in boats, but in other ways. If the French were sensible and serious enough to stop the whole thing, they should volunteer to take the migrants who make their way to us from there, as should the EU. That is not going to happen anytime soon, I suspect. All in all, I am a little disheartened by the Bill, the measures in it and what is likely to happen.

[Dr Zubir Ahmed (Glasgow South West) (Lab)]

Q Mr Mehmet, you made some initial commentary about welcoming the Bill but suggested that it is not sufficient to reduce the small boat crossings. Why, then, are small boat crossings already down 41% even before the Bill has been enacted? Where does this legislation intersect with the need for further law enforcement across borders? Does it intersect with the fact that small boat crossings rose after we left the European Union and we have had less of an armoury and less flexibility to deal with them? You highlighted the American experience of reducing immigration and returns, but presumably you are not advocating a model with the level of aggressive behaviour of ICE agents. American citizens are being shot dead in the streets.

Alp Mehmet: I am not quite sure how you link what is going on at the border and Americans being shot in the street.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q You are suggesting that the Americans have been very successful, and I am politely retorting that the overall model being used there does not seem very British.

Alp Mehmet: Well, I think securing your borders is totally British, frankly. We have been doing it for millennia. We seem to have forgotten that we are a sovereign state and can decide who can enter our country and who cannot. That aside, the Americans have certainly locked the border. Anyone who makes their way into the United States via the southern border is returned. I am not suggesting that we put a massive wall on the south coast and just let them get on with it. However, I believe that detaining people on arrival, dealing with them quickly and returning them to France or wherever they have come from is doing something similar—in other words, stopping people from entering the country illegally.

The Danes have also introduced measures that I do not think we ever will. For example, if people arrive with money or luxury goods, those are confiscated. The Greeks are not admitting to it, but we know from reports that they are pushing boats back to Turkey. If we were to do all those things, I have no doubt that we would stop the boats coming over. The only reason the people arriving on them increased from 299 in 2018 to 41,000 last year and 18,000 so far this year—which is still massive, frankly—with over 210,000 arriving since 2018, is that they can and that, having arrived here, they get to stay. That is what we have to address, and that is what the Bill does not address.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q Something else has changed since 2018, which was part of my first question. How do you reconcile our reduced flexibility to deal with European nations outside the European Union in relation to this issue?

Alp Mehmet: I am sorry, Dr Ahmed, but that is just not so. I dealt with the European Union and worked in it many years ago before I retired, and I also monitored the exchanges on the Dublin agreement and the various incarnations of it: it did not work. Very few people went in either direction, and it took aeons—months and months—to arrange everything. It was no deterrent.

[The Chair]

Order. I am sorry, but that brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask this panel questions. On behalf of the Committee, I thank the witnesses for their evidence.

Examination of Witness

Tony Smith CBE gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Siân Berry]

Q Jacqui, you also raised something that I like, because it is Green party policy—though I should not be bringing that up here—which is breaking up the Home Office. In the discussions and the evidence we have heard, other people have said that it is a huge amount of work to set up the new tribunal service. Would it be easier to just start again with the Home Office and create a new branch of it that does immigration versus and police and enforcement, or is that for the future?

Jacqui McKenzie: Maybe for the future, because I totally accept Professor Singer’s point: one of the issues about the new authority—I keep getting its name wrong, because it has changed its name three times—is that it is going to be expensive and unwieldy. For much less money, we could probably make the current system work. I know that these are difficult times for the country with budgets and so forth, so I do not necessarily want to propose something that is going to be very expensive. However, in the long term, the bit of the Home Office that makes these sorts of decisions probably needs to be a separate entity.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q Good afternoon. I just wanted to pick up on the point about those invocating article 8 of the European convention on human rights. You said that the number was small, but I understand that around 77,000 people end up caught in those crosshairs. From your experience and perspective, what guidance do judges need, if you do not believe that a change in the law on article 8 is necessary? More widely, where do you believe the country is? The prerequisite of a functional asylum system is that it needs to command the confidence of the vast majority of the public, but in relation to article 8, do you think that criterion is met currently?

Jacqui McKenzie: Sorry, can you just repeat the first part of the question?

[Dr Ahmed]

I think it was either yourself or Professor Singer—

Jacqui McKenzie: Oh, the numbers—sorry. The number that I referred to as being small is the number of cases that the Home Office say will be refused under this new system, which I think is 11,700.

Professor Singer: It is 11,700, and the Home Office impact assessment estimates that 55% of those will, in any case, remain in the UK, because it is not possible to remove them back to their home country due to legal or logistical challenges. It is anticipated to have quite minimal impact in practice, so it is quite a significant legislative change to make for quite a limited impact overall.

Most of the public attention is focused on the issue of foreign criminals, for example, but the House of Commons Library briefing for the Bill indicates that, at present, only 3% of foreign criminal appeals are allowed on a human rights basis, whether under article 8 or otherwise. Again, the impact is quite minimal. The most significant impact that the changes to article 8 will have is on children and families. We will see more children without their parents and more separated families, and I think in quite unconscionable ways that will actually be quite upsetting for the public.

For me, setting out an interpretation of article 8 in domestic legislation does not change the meaning of article 8 as a matter of international law, and it does not change what the UK’s obligations are. Decisions are either in line with the UK’s obligations, in which case the legislation is not necessary, because the courts are already doing article 8 determinations themselves and doing their own balancing exercise on the basis of the existing legislation that we have, or they are more restrictive than the UK’s current legislation, which puts the UK at risk of not complying with its obligations under the European convention on human rights and the convention on the rights of the child.

Jacqui McKenzie: I agree with that. I think you are aware that the figure I referred to as being small was not the overall 77,000. What we think of the 77,000 is another matter; some of us might say even that is not a huge number of people, especially when we look at how long some of those families have been settled in the UK, and the reasons why some of them are still in the immigration system, when their parents and grandparents may well have been settled. It is this point about redefining what a family is and breaking families up that concerns me more than anything.

[Ben Goldsborough (South Norfolk) (Lab)]

Q One of the issues on which I think everyone will agree is the fact that we need to have a confidence-based immigration and asylum system. We need to have the public’s full support to ensure that it can continue. At the same time, we need a fair system—a system that supports those going through the actual application system or appellate system so that they feel like they are getting their fair day in court at the same time.

However, one of the issues that both of you have raised is backlogs, which we have seen increase under the Rwanda scheme and others. One of the concerns that many people have, especially my South Norfolk constituents, will be that the courts simply do not have the ability to keep up with the amount of casework coming to them. That is because we have a system that does not have enough clarity, especially on article 8. The Bill obviously has a goal and ambition to give clarity to the courts on that issue. Is that something to be welcomed?

Jacqui McKenzie: Possibly, but you are conflating some issues. The numbers for Rwanda are tiny, as most of the people who were carded for Rwanda have been granted asylum, so are not in the backlog at all. Article 8 will not really affect those sorts of people; it will affect families, and children, many of them born in the UK—as you know, under the British Nationality Act 1981, since 1 January 1983, you do not automatically become British by being born here.

There are people here in this country without any status whose families go back decades, for example families from the Commonwealth territories. That has happened for all sorts of odd reasons, usually because parents left children behind and brought them to the UK when they were over 18, so they had no status, and they then had children who have no status. In my practice, and those of many of the people in my jurisdiction who I have networked with, those are the sorts of cases we use article 8 for, and for which we see article 8 being successful. I do not think that anybody would want to see those families being removed from the UK.

--- Later in debate ---

[Blake Stephenson]

Can or does? Is it an objective or a political assessment?

Neal Barcoe: If done well, it can absolutely improve. If we can ensure that the quality is there, that it is staffed up properly and that we have the right levels of independence, as set out in the Bill, I think it would be an improvement on the current system. I recognise what underlies your question—we have had a lot of immigration and asylum bills, and that change of perspective is difficult for people in the system, which it undoubtedly is—but I think there are very sensible things in the Bill that seek to improve the current situation. One of the things—the Public Accounts Committee has spoken on this, and the NAO—is about how Departments come together and co-operate more effectively in this space, looking at the whole system. I think that that is what the Bill is about; it is about trying to look at the whole system as one. As I say, at an official level, we are doing that much more than we were before.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q I must declare that I was once involved in a first-tier tribunal. Obviously, as parliamentarians, we are sometimes heavily involved in such matters on behalf of constituents. In the case I was involved in, it could be seen from space that there was going to be only one decision, yet it took a long time to get there. The persons present in that case seemed to be, let us say, overqualified. From your perspective, how will the IIAA affect the workload of the first-tier tribunal?

Daniel Flury: Clearly, as the IIAA grows, the expectation is that the work of the first-tier tribunal will decline. I am the senior responsible officer for a programme that is essentially managing that decommissioning process—that decline. As Neal says, there is still a pretty significant backlog of just under 152,000 appeals sitting in the system. There is still quite a bit of work to be done. The current approach in HMCTS and the judiciary is simply business as usual until further notice. We are striving to sit more and be more productive. We are striving for output, and I feel that we are partially succeeding this year. Over time, in the years ahead, that work will decline and we will eventually wind up the operations.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q By what order of magnitude do you think that could happen, and in what timeframe?

Daniel Flury: In terms of how quickly it could happen, I think the expectation is that this should all happen as quickly as possible. We are working with the Home Office on a number of assumptions around its expansion and our contraction. It is quite difficult to put a timescale on it just yet, but I think the expectation, certainly from the Home Office, is that it should happen pretty quickly. Our overall planning assumption is that we expect it to be somewhere between one and three years.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q On the spectrum of complexity in these cases, clearly, many of them are straightforward—like the one I was involved in—but there are others that have elements of complexity that are sometimes apparent, sometimes not. For the benefit of the Committee, could you lay out some of the safeguards that are in place to manage that complexity?

Daniel Flury: It is principally the judge’s role to manage the complexity of a case, obviously supported by legal representatives. In terms of the support that HMCTS can offer, we have a programme, which applies to all courts and tribunals, of reasonable adjustments that we offer appellants, claimants, defendants and so on. The rest is primarily provided through legal aid, legal representation and the judge safeguarding them in that case.

[Ben Goldsborough]

Q Many people have heard the old adage that justice delayed is justice denied. That is very obviously a situation that we are currently in within the asylum process, with the backlog having grown to the size that it has. In your view, do you believe that the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority will help us with that backlog and move that concentration away from, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West said, some very qualified people—overqualified for what is needed—and into the hands of those who can efficiently deal with cases as and when they come up?

Daniel Flury: Well, it is certainly the intention that the new body will speed up appeals through the system, but I could not say. As Neal said, you would need to ask a Minister, or maybe the Home Office would like to offer a view.

Neal Barcoe: My short answer is yes—that is absolutely the intention and the systems are being designed to deliver it in that way. I do not know whether my Home Office colleague wants to add anything more.

Alison Hewett: Clearly, my responsibility here is to support the delivery, as laid out in the Bill. The IIAA will have ownership of its own procedural frameworks. Those will be set in train. We have quite a large transformation programme, and we are working very closely together, as my colleagues have indicated, because this is a whole-of-system effort. We will put mechanisms in place and, because it is an independent authority, the transformation programme will transfer its responsibility over to the chair at a certain point, once it is set up. From then on, the authority will establish its own detailed practices and processes.

I can say a little more about the statutory roles that will support that. There is a lot on the face of the Bill that is hardwired to protect the integrity of the overall system, provide justice and address, at pace, some of the issues that colleagues have already referred to.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Vickers]

Q How many people are currently in the UK who have exhausted their appeal rights and have no lawful right to remain, and what is the single biggest barrier preventing immigration enforcement from removing more of them?

Bas Javid: I do not have an exact number on the total. When we look at it in individual categories, such as people in the appeal system where the appeals right is exhausted, that is in the thousands—tens of thousands in many cases. In terms of individuals in particular cohorts or groups, we can break that down. I can get those figures for you—I do not have them to hand—but it is several thousand.

Anna Turley: I have one figure to add to the point on article 8. For those who were granted an article 8 right to remain in 2025, the cost to the taxpayer is £4.9 billion. That again shows the scale and the impact on the British taxpayer.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q I have a couple of questions. The IIAA is a big change. It is causing a lot of anxiety, understandably, because of the spectre of the complexity of cases. From your perspective, what insurance policies are there to make sure that the complexity is matched by the level of adjudication?

Bas Javid: Everything we do within my team and the wider system, we do with compassion, respect and dignity. For every person we come across, whether that is a voluntary return or an enforced return or a foreign national offender, we follow the rules of policy and law. Our strapline is stop, manage, remove and protect; safeguarding and vulnerability form a huge component part of what we do, day to day, and how we run and manage our operations.

On the benefits that the IIAA will bring in terms of speeding up and discontinuing successive claims, it will obviously allow us to manage and process people much quicker, and it will certainly separate the people who have legitimate claims from those who potentially do not.

[Dr Ahmed]

Q Minister, you heard me earlier mentioning my home city of Glasgow and my constituency of Glasgow South West, which has the highest number of asylum seekers. There is real pressure on local infrastructure and housing, compounded by some ill-advised housing policies from the Scottish Government. Can you provide some reflection on why the measures in the Bill are necessary, and what impact it will have, not only on restoring trust and public confidence in the immigration and asylum system, but on social cohesion more widely?

Anna Turley: I think you are absolutely right. This is such an important issue to all of our constituents across the country; it is one of the biggest things that comes up on the doorsteps in all the conversations we have. Everything is seen through the prism of fairness in this country, and rightly so. That is what the Bill is aiming for, through a number of measures, such as repayment of support and so on.

This is about fairness; if people come here, we want them to integrate and to settle. If they have a genuine right to be here, we will always provide that, but we also have to be conscious that, in a country where our resources are not infinite, we have to have a managed system, where we remove those who have no right to be here and ensure that we support people in a way that is compliant with our international obligations, but does not go over and above them, which perhaps in the past we have done too much.

In 2024-25, for example, the entire cost of asylum was £4 billion. At a time when our public purse is under strain, that is a challenge. We are working hard to do everything we can, all the way up to the source, to prevent the illegal movement of people across this country—the people trafficking that we have seen—and to disrupt the industrial network of gangs that exploit desperate people who wish to come to this country. We are doing that through doubling our investment in the National Crime Agency, working with the French to reduce the number of boat crossings, and processing and removing people.

The key part of the Bill is the speeding up of appeals. That is one of the most important ways that we can accelerate the process. Nobody should have to wait 72 weeks for an asylum appeal. No one should be able draw things out and exploit the system through last-minute loopholes, using provisions that are designed genuinely to protect people but that are being exploited to draw out cases.

This is a matter of fairness and due process, and of making a system that is fair and well managed so that it is fair both on the taxpayer and on those who are here genuinely fleeing persecution.

[Joe Robertson]

Q Minister, I am sure you want to tackle the immigration issues and asylum problem that we have. However, are you concerned that the provisions in the Bill, to the extent that they are beneficial at all, could be quite limited, as balanced against the potential upheaval of institutional changes in the way that asylum applications are dealt with, or that they have the potential to create all sorts of unintended consequences and issues due to the way the Bill is drafted? Given the evidence you have heard in this session, does any of that cause you concern?

Anna Turley: I think my biggest cause of concern is that things cannot go on the way that they are. We want to make sure that we introduce legislation that deals with that. Of course there will be things that we will, with the due process of Parliament, continue to work on as the Bill progresses. But the reality, particularly when it comes to the appeals process, is that the system as it stands is falling over and not serving anyone.

It is important that we build a new structure, which I believe is more flexible and swift, and which has all the right safeguards. We have not had a chance to discuss some of those safeguards. Some of the witnesses were critical of the process, but we are talking about building into the system a high degree of training and legal support, high professional standards, numerous levels of oversight, and the opportunity to go on to a tribunal appeal. We have great civil servants, who are not legally trained, but who manage the process. We want to build a body, and do it carefully and do it right, in a way that means that we no longer rely on the judicial capacity, which is falling over. We can then make those decisions swiftly, but with a properly, professionally trained body. That will enable us to make good, swift decisions on those appeals and then refer to tribunals as and when that is needed.