My Lords, I shall also speak to the other amendment in this group. The group is about probing what the Government should be doing in the asylum and immigration space instead of this appalling Bill. As I said at Second Reading, the Bill does lots of things that are unnecessary, unhelpful and unreasonable—in fact, some of it is arguably legal—while it does nothing to directly tackle the real issues, one of which is people smuggling.
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The fact is that thousands of desperate individuals grudgingly pay people smugglers because they believe there is no other choice; in the overwhelming majority of cases, they are right. If we have learned anything from the war on drugs, for example, it is that, where demand is not allowed by or provided by the state, it will be met by criminals, with all the associated dangers that come from an absence of regulation and control. In this Bill, the Government are targeting the mere 6% of those seeking to move to the UK who are asylum seekers, the most deserving of those who want to settle in the UK in that they are seeking safety from war and persecution rather than career advancement. They are criminalising the users, the asylum seekers, rather than just the suppliers, the people smugglers, and taking away the rights of the users rather than just those of the suppliers. We need to know what the Government are doing to directly target the suppliers—the people smugglers.
This Government are actually helping the suppliers, or people smugglers, rather than the users. We should be in no doubt that by failing to provide sufficient, effective and accessible safe and legal routes, and increasing security around Channel ports, making it
almost impossible for individuals to cross the Channel on their own, the Government are helping the people smugglers increase their turnover and their profit margins.
The Government make much of the rhetoric of breaking the people smugglers’ business model. I studied economics at university—back in the day when PPE stood for politics, philosophy and economics rather than personal protective equipment—and I have a master’s degree in business administration. From my knowledge and experience, it appears to me that the Government do not understand business models or how to break them. These amendments aim to probe what the Government are doing to target the real criminals in all of this, the people smugglers, rather than targeting innocent, desperate seekers of sanctuary, which is what most of the Bill is actually about. I beg to move.