I spent considerable time in the last debate addressing the European convention on human rights, and the House will be relieved to hear that I am not going to do the same thing again today, but I will just say one thing. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) is correct to say that we have no say on who sits in the European Court of Human Rights, but no MP has any say on who sits in the Supreme Court in this country either, and the reason that nobody can give me an example of the European Court interfering with a material change to our domestic immigration laws is because there isn’t one.
I want to congratulate the Government on reaching an agreement with my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on new clause 8, which I think gives the Bill moral clarity. The aim of this Bill is to extinguish a route, not a right. The Bill says that if someone enters the United Kingdom by small boat or any other illegal route, they cannot claim asylum now or ever, but we are maintaining compliance with our legal obligations under the refugee convention only when we can say in parallel that there are safe and legal routes that they could and should have taken as an alternative. It is already clear that this was envisaged by the Bill because it is dealt with in the provisions in clause 53 in the context of annual quotas agreed in conjunction with local authorities. It is plain that this is the direction that not only the United Kingdom but all our European neighbours are moving in, faced with the mass migration flows of the modern day that simply could not have been envisaged when the refugee convention was drafted.
I also want to talk about new clauses 22, 19 and 23 to 25. My first observation is how closely they resemble laws that were tried but ultimately failed under the last Labour Government. That is not me scoring a political point; this is difficult stuff. A lot of this is in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 and the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 but it never really worked, and here is why I say that this is important today. I want to talk about identification documents, mobile phones and age verification, all of which I have experience of in immigration tribunals. All these things boil down to one critical principle: that he who asserts must prove.
I refer the House to the evidence of Dan O’Mahoney, the clandestine channel threat commander, to the Home Affairs Committee in September 2020. Asked about the number of small boat arrivals who have identification documents, he said:
“I can’t give you an exact figure, but I can tell you that it is almost none—very, very close to none. Generally speaking, encouraged by the facilitators, they will get rid of any sort of documentation …phones, SIM cards, anything…before they are intercepted by Border Force… They literally arrive in the clothes that they are wearing.”
I invite the House to contrast that with Operation Pitting. Every single person who left Kabul in haste in the summer of 2021 arrived in the United Kingdom with an identification document.
The lack of identification documents is a major problem, because it means the Home Office is entirely reliant on language tests and interviews to ascertain background facts. The best it can do is guess whether a claimant is genuine, which leads to a lot of economic migrants being given asylum when they probably would not have proved their case if they had documents. That has contributed to a huge degree of abuse in the system.
The same principle applies to mobile phones. In an era of mass technology, in which smartphones are as commonplace in sub-Saharan Africa as they are in London and in which 5 billion people use social media, it must be right that a negative assumption is reached about any individual who does not provide access to their phone as a way of establishing their identity.
I repeatedly dealt with age verification at the tribunal, the appeal tribunal and the High Court. It is not good enough to rely purely on a Merton-compliant test. Until very recently, we had no scientific method by which to establish a person’s age. Of course small children do not go through age verification, but the vast majority of children who arrive claim to be around the age of 17. We now have the technology to allow age verification, so it cannot be left as a matter of discretion or as an option for the applicant. If they say they are under 18, they must be obliged, as these new clauses require, to undergo proper age verification.