1: Clause 1, page 1, line 6, leave out “designate a civil servant as the” and insert “appoint a”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would remove the requirement for the Border Security Commander to be a civil servant.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to open our first few hours of debate on Report. Noble Lords who have taken an interest in the Bill throughout our deliberations so far may recognise Amendments 1 and 2. At both Second Reading and in Committee, I said that this new commander was little more than a gimmick. I had hoped that, come Report, I would have heard more persuasive reasons to change my opinion of the Government’s policy. Unfortunately, I have not.
Since we finished Committee on the Bill, 589 people have entered the United Kingdom illegally via small boats. Since the start of this year, 36,954 migrants have crossed the channel. It does not take a genius to figure out that this Government’s policies are not working. The Government entered office with a promise to “smash the gangs”, end the use of hotel accommodation and prevent illegal crossings. They have done none of those things. In fact, the problems have exacerbated.
My Amendments 1 and 2 seek to make minor changes to the method of appointment of the commander. In my opinion, this is an important and strategic role. I will not pretend they are seismic alterations that will shift the dial demonstrably. They are, nevertheless, intended to make an important point that I genuinely hope the Government will take on board.
The point is that the whole of Chapter 1 of the Bill is essentially pointless. The commander is already in post and the Bill provides no substantive new powers. In Committee, when asked by my noble friend Lord Goschen what the commander will be able to do under the provisions of the Bill provisions that his office cannot do already, the Minister said:
“The clauses in Chapter 1—for example, ‘Duty to prepare annual reports’, ‘Duties of cooperation etc’ and ‘The Board’ overseeing all that—underpinned by statutory function give this House the confidence that there is a legislative background to those requirements”.—[Official Report, 26/6/25; col. 395.]
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Davies in his amendments. They seem to me to be eminently sensible. I wholly concur with him, as do most people increasingly in the country, that there is no sense of urgency, no sense of grip and a total lack of confidence when it comes to the Government’s handling of the immigration crisis.
The appointment of a Border Security Commander, and limiting that appointment to a civil servant, is a mistake, particularly when we look at other civil servants. When I was a Minister, I had excellent civil servants, and I have nothing to say against them. The great majority of them do an extremely good job. But when we have Joanna Rowland, the Home Office’s director-general for customer services, in charge of accommodating asylum seekers, standing down because of the failure of that, why should we have faith that someone just selected from the Civil Service should be appropriate to fulfil this role?
We are missing a huge mistake in this whole immigration debate. There is a huge backlog in the processing of asylum cases. Why have the Government not come forward with an idea of having an equivalent to Nightingale hospitals, which is what we had during the Covid pandemic, to process this? In my opinion, there is a whole raft of professionals in this country who are retired far too early. We in this House are the last vestiges of people who never retire, but there are an awful lot of people in this House who have retired, or been forced to retire, from their professions—be they judges, solicitors, army officers from the military or magistrates—who would willingly serve, if encouraged to do so, on a series of tribunals up and down the country, so as to better process the backlog in immigration cases.
If you look at the appointment of this incredibly important role, the Border Security Commander is in charge of liaising with Border Force, the National Crime Agency, the Immigration Service and Immigration Enforcement, and the goal is to deliver a safe and effective border. That has not happened to date. I just do not understand the rationale behind why this legislation is limiting the appointment of such a person, with the very narrow criteria that it has, to a civil servant. There must be plenty of other people out there who would be qualified to do this job who are not necessarily from the Civil Service.
My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 26 in this group, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord German, on co-operation with Europol. I think the reason it has been grouped here is that it would help boost the effectiveness of the Border Security Commander.
The Government recently published the implementation report on the trade and co-operation agreement with the EU. It was implemented in 2023-24, so this was a bit out of date by the time it was published just last month. Under the section on
“Law enforcement and judicial cooperation in criminal matters”,
there is a paragraph that says that:
“Under the TCA, the UK continues to co-operate with Europol and it continues to have a strong multi-agency liaison bureau at The Hague delivering operational activity against the most significant crime groups”.
There is one interesting reference in the trade and co-operation agreement—for the nerds out there, it is at Article 568, paragraph 7. It says that:
“Liaison officers from the United Kingdom and representatives of the competent authorities of the United Kingdom may be invited to operational meetings”.
That sums up the challenge that we have outside the European Union. We only “may” be invited. We have no rights. It is all grace and favour.
I watched the recent session of the Home Affairs Committee in the other place with the Border Security Commander, Martin Hewitt, and the National Crime Agency’s director general for operations, Rob Jones. Asked about European co-operation, Mr Hewitt said,
“we retained really good … law enforcement co-operation”.
However, Mr Jones amplified that by saying,
“we have mitigated the impact”
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We lost access to the key database, SIS II. Although we have re-established some access to the so-called Prüm system of fingerprint and DNA data, access to its successor, Prüm II, is, as I understand it, not yet pinned down. Brexit cost us access to ECRIS, which carries criminal records in the EU of, among others, third-country nationals.
When Rob Jones gave evidence to the European Affairs Committee, he told us that it would also be useful to be able to exchange larger data sets with the EU more easily, in order to be better able to tackle criminal networks rather than merely individuals. That key point is relevant to this Bill because it would of course include organised immigration crime.
When the European Affairs Committee heard evidence from a range of witnesses from the criminal law enforcement sector, including Rob Jones, witnesses explained how new working arrangements in the post-Brexit environment were being developed. However, they told us that they were slower, more cumbersome and more in need of human input—in other words, more clunky—than those that applied when the UK was an EU member state.
At the moment, UK-EU co-operation on law enforcement depends on the pragmatism and good will of individual law enforcement professionals, which is not the best or most solid basis. Instead, we need formal UK-EU agreements on co-operation, in order to ensure legal certainty and consistency in the UK’s law enforcement relations with the EU. Since the reset has not so far produced much in the law enforcement field, the purpose of Amendment 26, which would require the production of an annual report on co-operation with Europol, is to encourage the Government to pursue a more formal relationship with Europol and to focus mind and effort in the years to come.
I shall highlight one point about Amendment 26. It asks not only for reporting on what co-operation with Europol has happened in the previous year but for
“planned activities for improving future cooperation with Europol”.
That is a key point. We want to know not only what has happened in the past year but what lessons have been learned and how to improve activities in the future. We cannot wave a magic wand and get back the days when, for 10 years, we had a British director of Europol—those were the good days—but we can at least do better than make the best of a bad job and try to make this a priority. By imposing a requirement on the Government to report, I hope that would provide an incentive to pursue a more structured and formalised relationship with Europe in order to catch more organised criminals.
My Lords, I will start my remarks on this group where the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, finished, since that seems the most convenient way to do it. I will not rehearse my arguments on Amendment 26 at length because I spoke to it in Committee.
On co-operation with Europol, which is very important, I shall make two points. First, the Government’s motivation to co-operate with Europol is because they want to deal with the problem, and I do not believe that the necessity to produce a report will change that dynamic. If the Government did not want to co-operate with Europol because they did not think it was important, I do not believe that having to prepare a report would change their mind either. I do not think it will achieve very much.
Secondly, as I said in Committee, the danger is that this then skews attention towards Europol. We know that border security is not just a European problem. Obviously, the small boats issue—the visible bit of it—is a European problem, because that is where the boats are coming from, but the people in them are not all starting off from France. This is a global problem, and these organised crime groups are global in nature. If we start putting legislation in place that forces the department to start overly focusing on one area to do bureaucratic tasks, we will skew its resources. I want the Home Office and the Government to choose which agencies they partner with, and the work they do, based not on the need to produce bureaucratic documents but on the security threat to our border. That is best left to the judgment of Ministers and those in post, so I respectfully suggest that this is not a wise amendment.
I turn to Amendments 1 and 2 tabled my noble friend Lord Davies. Unfortunately, I was not in the Committee stage debate when the Minister put this forward, so I had a look at the arguments. I confess that I am not entirely clear how designating a civil servant—or, indeed, anyone with this title—makes a meaningful difference, other than perhaps presentationally, to our ability to secure the border.
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I pick up the point that my noble friend made about the pace at which the Government are giving this individual powers. Having looked at the Bill again, it is noticeable that this person does not have the ability to co-ordinate. The ability to co-ordinate or direct members of the Armed Forces is excluded—that power effectively remains with Ministers. In addition, the intelligence agencies of our country are not counted as partner authorities for the purposes of the Border Security Commander either, so those responsibilities effectively remain with the Home Secretary and other Ministers.
In terms of the role, and this is why who gets the role matters, effectively strategic priorities for government departments are set not by officials—well, they should not be set by officials—but by Ministers. I understand in one way why the Government are making sure that this person is a civil servant, because they are therefore clearly being directed by Ministers, which is right. However, if they are a civil servant being directed by Ministers, giving them a fancy title is basically just window dressing; it does not have any meaningful effect. My noble friend is therefore right to argue that this does not really have a meaningful role.
If we take the Government at their word, from the way it is presented as the starting point of this Bill—in that they want this individual to have a powerful role where they can make a meaningful difference—then Amendment 2 asks some good questions about whether the type of person we want doing this role and their previous experience should be in the nature of law enforcement or military command in some way. It may be that, over time, the Government can build this role —as well as the board that the Border Security Commander would chair and the structure they will put around them—into a meaningful law enforcement and crime fighting capability.
That seems to be the Government’s ambition, in which case Amendment 2 has quite a lot of merit, but making the person a civil servant does not achieve that. Just for the avoidance of doubt, this is not in any way to denigrate civil servants; when I was in the Home Office, I was always very impressed by them. It is just making the point that in our democratic system, setting strategic priorities and co-ordinating between different agencies, some that are responsible to the Home Office and some that are not, is really a job for Ministers. In the end, the responsibility for securing the country’s border is the Home Secretary’s responsibility. You can appoint somebody with whatever title you like and whatever background you like, but, in the end, that is the fact. The strategic priorities for the department are set by the Home Secretary, and everything else flows from that.
It seems to me that the Border Security Commander as set out in the Bill is really neither one thing nor the other. Either the Border Security Commander is effectively the Home Secretary and sets clear priorities, setting a very clear direction in the department and delivering on what we are led to believe is the Government’s or the Home Secretary’s number one priority, or that is not the case, and you try to create a meaningful role that people understand has that important focus in the same way that people can see that the heads of the Armed Forces or Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police have a very important leadership role—but in which case that person probably should not be a civil servant and should come with a different type of command experience. So it seems to me that the role set out in the Bill is neither one thing or the other.
My noble friend’s amendments test that point, and I would certainly like to hear from the Minister about which direction this role is going to go in. Is it effectively just going to be working for the Home Secretary, which is perfectly fine, in which case a lot of this is just window dressing, or is it really intended to make it a meaningful, authoritative, powerful role in Whitehall, in which case the person’s qualities need to be somewhat different than is set out by making them a career civil servant?
So it appears the Government believe that designating a civil servant as a commander and granting them the ability to prepare a report and to chair a board meeting every now and then is the solution to all our border security woes.
Noble Lords will be aware of the report into the operation of the Civil Service within the Home Office. How can we have faith that another civil servant in post as the commander would make any difference? Amendments 1 and 2 are intended to press the point that the commander, if their appointment is ever to be anything more than pure performance politics, needs to be more than simply a civil servant. It is wise, is it not, to have a guarantee in the Bill that the commander will be a senior law enforcement or military officer, so as to ensure the requisite competence, leadership and experience is brought to the role.
I have one question for the Minister. Earlier this year, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration investigated the Home Office’s operation to deter and detect clandestine entrance to the UK. The first recommendation of the independent inspector was to:
“Designate a Home Office-wide ‘owner’ for clandestine entry”.
In the Government’s response, the Home Office agreed with that recommendation and said that the
“Border Security Command … will ultimately provide the structure to support this role”.
However, it said that it will not implement that recommendation until October 2026. We have a Border Security Commander who the Government tell us is critical to co-ordinating our response to threats to border security, and yet they are not willing to make him responsible for tackling all methods of clandestine entry until next year. Why is this?
Does this not demonstrate the issue with this Government’s approach to the problem? Every can must be kicked down a very long and winding road. Why not designate the commander as the Home Office-wide “owner” for clandestine entry now? Why wait until next year? It is unfortunate, and we on these Benches will be pushing the Government to go much further over the course of Report. The British public want this border crisis solved, and they are watching. I beg to move.
I urge the Government to underline the sense of crisis there is in this country. It is benefiting parties and groups in this country that we would rather it did not, because there is a feeling up and down the country that the Government simply have not got control of our borders. There are those who may argue that the appointment of this individual is totemic, that they do not have sufficient power and that the powers will not kick in until later. Those are other arguments. My argument is that, if we have a national crisis which is set to get only worse, we should look at the whole cadre of recently retired professionals who would step up to serve, right across the board, in dealing with the backlog and this immigration crisis. We should look at the best candidates available to fulfil this particular job and not limit it to somebody from the Civil Service.
of Brexit and
“we have recovered those relationships in terms of law enforcement”
and have positive joint operations. He also said:
“We have more people in Europol than we have ever had”.
I assume he was thinking that the committee would be impressed by that, but I believe he was making the best of a bad job. I imagine that we have more people at Europol than ever before because, whereas in the past British police officers could access European databases from their desks in the UK, now we need a host of liaison officers attached to Europol HQ to handle the red tape of individual information requests and to run around seeing whether we might be invited to meetings.