Illegal Migration Bill

Third Reading

That the Bill be now read a third time.

My Lords, before we commence proceedings on the Bill, I am obliged to make a short statement setting out the position on legislative consent. It is the UK Government’s view that the Bill relates to reserved or excepted matters—namely, immigration and nationality—in each of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and is therefore not within the legislative competence of any of the devolved legislatures.

The United Kingdom Government note that the Senedd has declined to agree a legislative consent Motion in relation to certain provisions in the Bill, but it is our view that the legislative consent process is not engaged in relation to Wales.

Noble Lords will recall that we added a provision on Report relating to legal aid in Northern Ireland. Such a provision may amount to an alteration of the Department of Justice’s executive functions; as such, we consider that this provision engages the legislative consent process in Northern Ireland. However, due to the continued absence of the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly, a legislative consent Motion cannot be secured.

For completeness, I add that no legislative consent Motion has been considered by the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Government sought to bring forward such a Motion in relation to the modern slavery provisions in the Bill, but the Presiding Officer concluded that it did not meet the terms of the relevant standing order of the Scottish Parliament and consequently it was not debated. Accordingly, I beg to move.

Motion

Moved by

That the Bill do now pass.

My Lords, I do not want to detain the House for too long at this stage but, in view of what transpired on Report, it is fitting that I say a few words before the Bill completes its passage through your Lordships’ House.

There is clearly some disagreement about the means, but we all agree on the necessary ends: we must stop the boats. It remains the Government’s contention that the provisions of the Bill, as introduced in your Lordships’ House, are a vital plank of the actions we are taking to stop these dangerous, illegal and unnecessary crossings of the channel. As my noble friend Lord Clarke so memorably noted, we have not heard an effective alternative. But, if we are to stop the boats, it is imperative that the scheme provided for in the Bill is robust and sends the unambiguous message that, if you enter the UK illegally, you will not be able to build a life here; instead, you will be detained and swiftly returned, either to your home country or to a safe third country.

As a result of the many non-government amendments agreed by your Lordships’ House on Report, that message is no longer unambiguous. It is, at best, half-hearted and, at worst, now wholly absent from the Bill. The Government are reflecting carefully on each and every amendment, but I have no doubt that many will not find favour with the other place and we will soon be debating them again.

Having said all that, I record my thanks for all the valued contributions made by my noble friends and noble Lords opposite during the Bill’s passage. It is particularly appropriate, following the sad news of his death late last week, that I express my sincere appreciation for the insightful contribution made by Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood at Second Reading. This was one of his last speeches in this place and I am sure that I speak for all noble Lords if I say that his passing is a great loss to this House.

My Lords, we have a short time before this Bill comes back and I would like to take this opportunity to say to my noble friend that the Bill has been significantly altered and, in the view of many of us, generously improved in your Lordships’ House.

My noble friend said some fairly strong words and, of course, he is fully entitled to do that but I urge that he discusses with his ministerial colleagues, particularly the Home Secretary, some of the speeches that have been made in this House and the underlying concern of those speeches—many of them made from this side of the House—that there is an absence of kindness, consideration and concern in the Bill that came before us at Second Reading.

The Bill has been improved. It has been made more human and more humane. If there is a particular thing that illustrates what I am trying to say—and it was raised earlier this afternoon, and I raised it myself in the gap when we debated the Windrush generation on Friday—it is that this incident of the painting out of murals designed only to amuse unaccompanied children sends out a message that, frankly, is not worthy of our country. I urge my noble friend to permeate his discussions on this Bill and his consideration with the Home Secretary as to which amendments can be amended, which can be accepted and which they feel they have to resist, with a recognition that it is the kindness and consideration of this country that have made it a great country. One has only to cite the Jews in the years before the war and the Ugandan Asians who came into this country 50 years ago, both enriching our communities.

Of course we cannot have boat people coming indiscriminately, but we must recognise that they are human beings, that they are individuals and that they are worthy of consideration as such. I implore my noble friend to enter some of that spirit into the discussions that he is shortly to have with the Home Secretary and his ministerial colleagues.

My Lords, I very much echo what the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has just said. I want to draw attention to the fact that the last-minute publication of the child rights impact assessment, which required the intervention of my noble friend Lord Kennedy of Southwark, meant that we were unable to pay due attention to it during the Bill’s passage—despite children being among the Bill’s main victims. Therefore, I will say a few words now.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child makes clear that a child rights impact assessment should be built in

“as early as possible in the development of policy”.

The fact that it arrived so late and reads more like a repetitive post hoc justification of the Bill’s measures than a serious analysis of their implications for the rights and best interests of the child suggests that it was not. Noble Lords from across this House and the Children’s Commissioner have called for the assessment since the Bill’s introduction. The commissioner has now made clear that the assessment “does not allay” her

“concerns about the impact of this Bill on children”.

With particular reference to detention and the use of force, she notes that it

“relies on overly optimistic assumptions about what might come to pass to reach conclusions about the positive effect on children, while ignoring or overlooking the clear, evidenced and tangible negative impacts it will have”.

While the Home Office’s use of the DfE template is welcome, it serves to expose the lack of evidence to support its assessment of the impact on children’s rights and its failure to consult externally. From the perspective of process and outcome this is a travesty of a child rights impact assessment. I hope that we remember that when it comes to the process of ping-pong on amendments affecting children.

From these Benches, I echo the remarks made by the Minister about our late and lamented noble and learned friend Lord Brown, who is sorely missed and who was often an inspiration to us all, even when we did not entirely agree with him, because he always inspired conceptual thinking.

I thank the Minister—and I do mean this by the way—for his patience while under fire, even though I mostly disagreed with his responses when they came. However, behind and underneath that carapace of patience has been a failure to understand that the Government set out to do something that is neither possible nor legal. We were told that the Bill would stop the boats as a deterrent. However, we know that the boats were fuller than ever in June. We were told that sending asylum seekers and refugees to Rwanda would be a deterrent. However, sending them to Rwanda is illegal—I use the word advisedly—under the laws of this country, at least until the matter has been relitigated in the Supreme Court. In the Minister’s consultations with the Home Secretary, the Government should give serious consideration to pausing this Bill until that hearing has taken place. It seems extraordinary to me, as a long-time parliamentarian in both Houses, for this Parliament to be asked to pass a Bill which requires something unlawful to be done. I have a basic opposition to that.

I will say one other thing. Some of us are already receiving messages from various well-informed members of the media about changes the Government intend to make to this Bill. It would be helpful if we were informed at approximately the same time as the media so that we can make a considered judgment as to what we do during ping-pong and so that we can carry out the role which, I believe, we have performed effectively hitherto.

My Lords, it is an absolute pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, and I agree with so much of what he said. I do not normally support the contemporary fashion for many speeches at Third Reading, but, because of the Minister’s kind words about the late noble and learned Lord, Simon Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, I want to echo the tributes to him at this opportunity. He was a titan of our chambers and of so much more. He was, above all else, an incredibly kind human being. Kindness is a quality that has been mentioned in this Chamber today a number of times.

The Minister is quite right that Lord Brown was much more sympathetic to the Minister’s position on this Bill than perhaps I have been, but I would like to leave noble Lords with some words from Lord Brown at ping-pong during the passage of last year’s Nationality and Borders Act. He was pressing me all day, by every available means of communication, to press an amendment that would have made that legislation—which is now defunct, I understand—subject to our international obligations under the refugee convention. This is what he said in the Chamber that night:

“My Lords, I rise, I hope for the last time—a hope which will be shared by every Member of this House”—

self-deprecating, as always—

“—to support this amendment. There are not many issues that it is worth going to the stake for, but surely the rule of law is one. I have spent 60 years of my life on it and do not propose to stop here. I suggest that your Lordships support this too”.—[Official Report, 27/4/22; col. 299.]

My Lords, I wish to echo some of the words of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. I, for one—like, I am sure, many noble Lords—do not have any pleasure in this Bill receiving its Third Reading because it lacks kindness, compassion and humanity. It is also not going to be effective, regardless of the rhetoric from the Dispatch Box.

For many of us who have been on this Bill, the way the Home Office has acted towards this Chamber has been with complete discourteousness. We had a late impact assessment, a late child impact assessment and they tried to keep us here for long hours to do our job, which is to scrutinise effectively.

I say very gently to the Minister, even though he has been very robust in his defence of the Bill, that it is not the job of this House to come up with a whole new Bill; it is our job to come up with amendments which make a Bill more effective. I believe the amendments we have passed make the Bill more effective, more compassionate and kinder in how we treat some of the most vulnerable people who seek asylum on these shores. I say very gently to the Minister, as he takes this back and it goes to the other place and as he speaks to the Home Secretary: think about the amendments, which are trying to make the Bill more effective; and make sure that the Home Office comes back, hopefully, with a Bill from the other place with a bit more compassion, kindness and effectiveness, and a lot less rhetoric.

My Lords, I rise to ask the Minister to make a correction. He said that there were divisions between the two sides of the House, but surely what has been true about this Bill is that large numbers of people on this side of the House have been very unhappy about it, have voted against it or have not voted with the Government. It is very important that the Minister takes back to the Home Office the fact that this Bill is not supported by the House as a whole, even by those of us who recognise the great need to have strong immigration control.

If I may say so, the Minister’s comments about the drawings on the wall made me very unhappy. If it were his child in that place, he would know that his child would have been uplifted by those paintings. What about the people who did those paintings? They did it to make life a bit better for those people who find themselves in a position that we all ought to thank God that neither we nor our children are in. Until the Government understand that feeling, and recognise the unhappiness across the House, they will have missed the whole tone of what this House is about.

My Lords, this is a bad Bill. We have done our best in your Lordships’ House to improve it. However, it is quite obvious that the Government, when we talk about kindness, compassion and humanity, seem to think that these are weaknesses. I argue that they are actually strengths. It is part of our British psyche to give that sort of kindness, so the Bill does not work for anybody in Britain. It certainly will not work for the Government to stop the boats. I just wish the Government had more common sense.

My Lords, while echoing all the sentiments that have been expressed, I will address the remarks of the Minister in introducing new material at the very beginning of his statement about the legislative consent Motion of the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd. The impression given by the Minister was that these were matters reserved to the British Government, and that therefore any legislative consent Motion from the Welsh Senedd was not appropriate and certainly not allowed. But the matter on which it passed the legislative consent Motion was a very narrow issue indeed about how children in Wales are to be looked after, and the responsibilities of local authorities towards those children, no matter where those children came from.

The piece of legislation that the Government are now putting a red line through is an Act of the Welsh Parliament that has been signed by the Head of State. It is one of which the Welsh people are truly proud, because it projects certain obligations on local authorities to commit to those children who find themselves in Wales, no matter where they come from. I wonder whether the Minister, in reminding us why the Government have overturned that piece of legislation, knows that they are actually overturning a piece of primary legislation that was passed five years ago and has universal support from all parties in Wales. It is that narrow point that the Government seek to overturn, not the Bill as a whole, even though the Welsh Parliament has of course expressed widespread concerns about the Bill as a whole. But that is what the legislative consent Motion was denied for: the overriding of a piece of primary legislation in that respect.