UK Borders Bill

My Lords, it is a real privilege to follow the noble Lord’s speech, with its marvellous controlled passion making for comprehensive grasp of detail. I am most grateful to him. I guess that many of us seeking to speak in this debate come with a range of first-hand or close second-hand experience of the issues at stake. Mine seems to me to amount to the need to declare an interest. I have a good deal of first-hand information and experience of asylum seekers and would-be immigrants in Southampton, in particular, where a range of churches and the Southampton and Winchester Visitors Group are active and in close contact with me. Also, because of my commitment to the Great Lakes region of Africa and especially to the Democratic Republic of Congo, people from around the country—lawyers, in particular—write to me about Congolese and Rwandan asylum seekers. In that capacity, I have read more adjudications on these matters than I should like to have done. People from other parts of the world come to the attention of me and my colleagues—particularly Iranians and those for whom a change of religious faith is among the things that those adjudicating on asylum applications have to cope with. As the noble Baroness knows, I have also been engaged in deportation issues, and she and I have disagreed about whether deportations are still taking place to manifestly unsafe and dangerous parts of the world. Therefore, I should declare an interest in that respect, as it may be taken to colour what I go on to say. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, catalogued the legislation that we have dealt with in recent years, and I come to this latest Bill agreeing with the Government that there really is a crying need for rebuilding confidence in our immigration system—words which form part of the title of the 2006 document. I note that the other words are fair, effective, transparent and trusted. Those, too, are admirable aims, and of course we must have efficient, effective and safe operations on our borders—safe for all concerned. However, in my limited experience and in that of the many people working in this field with very much more experience and daily contact than me, the system comes over as something quite different. Words such as unjust, inhumane, ignorant and thoughtless are constantly in my and others’ minds as we find ourselves working with people at the sharp end of these systems, whether they are asylum seekers or those who, in a range of ways, have been tasked or have volunteered to work with asylum seekers. I find that the system—or systems; as we have heard, there is an interlocking range—constantly (I am tempted to say ““institutionally””) puts at risk the well-being and lives of vulnerable people and those who should be treated better. My colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, will speak in this debate on the very serious questions surrounding destitution and starvation and on the issues raised by the noble Baroness concerning children, young people and families with children. However, I should say to the noble Baroness and to the House that I do not think that either he or I have in our pockets a logo which will help her on her way with all this. I shall simply point to a number of other areas where it seems that the Bill requires extremely careful scrutiny in your Lordships’ House. I take fully on board the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, that working in Grand Committee on a Bill of this level of controversy is unsatisfactory. Without substantial and severe amendment, the Bill will clearly fail to achieve the Government’s aims and it certainly will not reassure those who know most about this subject that we can be proud to be British in the range of matters with which the Bill attempts to deal. The detailed material that most, if not all, of us have received expresses these observations and difficulties very well. I simply point the noble Baroness to what she will be as aware of as I am, if not more so: the submissions of the Refugee Council, the Immigration Advisory Service and Still Human Still Here. So I shall speak summarily. She referred to another part of the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which has keen strictures to offer on Clauses 1 to 4, referring to the powers of immigration officers and the circumstances of detention. Paragraphs 1.6 to 1.19 of the report are very telling, and I hope that the Minister will tell us that the Government intend to take serious notice of them. Others have noted the serious circumscribing in the Bill—I would say the further limiting—of the remaining rights of appeal at a number of stages of the process. As many of your Lordships know, an appeal for many of those involved is a tortuous business, which is often made worse by the difficulty of gaining access to lawyers and translators with appropriate skills, leaving aside the hurdles that people face—I recognise that the noble Baroness and I have disagreed this year on this issue—when they reach adjudicators who frankly do not know one end of a central African country from the other or the kind of things that may happen there. Other speakers have already noted the range of dangers that exist in the strengthened provisions for mandatory deportation at a number of points in the Bill. There are also some serious omissions. The Bill makes it no easier for people fleeing from persecution, terror or ill treatment to seek asylum legally in this country rather than reaching here by illegal means, which when they are discovered to have done so understandably in one sense proves to their disadvantage. That is an enormous problem for this country’s reputation as a place that is prepared to accept people who really need to be here because of the conditions in their own countries. As noble Lords—the Minister included—know well, there are only too many countries where that is the case. There is no proposal in the Bill to improve the quality of initial decision making. The more decisions that can be got right first time—very many are overturned on appeal—the less time the process will take, and the better off those who really need to be well served by our immigration legislation will be in terms of being given residency in this country; and the less certain sections of the press get excited, the more humane, dignified and right the whole process will be. There is one last omission. I am concerned that the Bill does not promise to contribute to an informed, reasoned and humane debate about the matters at issue—a major responsibility of the Home Office that it seems rarely to achieve. Of course, the matters at issue are important and delicate; of course, our borders have to be well policed. Of course, as the noble Baroness correctly notes, there are sharks, villains, traffickers and imposters, and I welcome the clauses that deal with them. Unfortunately, our structures are also extraordinarily and, it seems to me, unwisely hostile to many of the economic migrants who we should be welcoming to a much greater extent than is currently possible. Most serious of all, the structure—I do not believe that the Bill bids much to improve it; rather it makes it worse—is extraordinarily and grievously painfully hostile to the many vulnerable, frightened and hurt people whom the prejudices of sections of the press seem constantly to be encouraging the Government, notwithstanding their basic moral position, to ill treat through the current system. I should have liked the Bill to consider all those things and to be much better.