My Lords, Amendment 139 in this group is in my name. This group is all about efficiency and administration. Amendment 139 is purely a probing amendment—there is no way that anyone would seek to engineer changes to the machinery of government via an opposition amendment to yet another immigration Bill—but I put it down to probe the tensions that have been emerging and increasing in recent years, even months and weeks, between the respective competencies and missions of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on the one hand and the Home Office on the other. I also tabled it to stress the vital importance of international co-operation in dealing with the worst refugee crisis since just after the Second World War. It is, I am afraid, a crisis that is only going to deepen with the threats posed not just by the various conflicts all over the globe but by the climate crisis, as others have said.
Amendment 139 probes and sets out the kind of functions that sit with the Secretary of State. Noble Lords will remember that the Secretary of State is indivisible, so when Governments of various stripes move the deckchairs around and pass functions from one department to another or even rename or reconstruct departments, the Secretary of State is the Secretary of State. The kind of functions that I set out in my suggestion for an office for refugees and asylum seekers are those in general that are much more suited to the
expertise and mission of the Foreign Office. That is why consideration of the various international obligations is set out, such as the function of considering safe passage and humanitarian protection and advising the Secretary of State in relation to aid and other action in conflict. It is the relationship between over there and over here.
4.15 pm
I suggest to the Committee that the poor old Home Department invariably—not just in the context of refugees and asylum seekers but in the context of all sorts of social problems, internationally and domestically—is the department of last resort. It often picks up problems that have been created elsewhere when more progressive, creative, benign measures have not been aspired to or achieved. That is what I am trying to suggest here.
We have seen the tensions, sometimes played out late at night, even in relation to the tone and response of different Ministers representing different departments replying to groups of amendments. I do not think that the tensions have been lost on Members of the Committee. It is not just in Committee; sometimes at Question Time we will have the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, representing the Foreign Office, coming to the Chamber, speaking eloquently at the Dispatch Box about the importance of promoting human rights, internationalism and our status in the world et cetera. It is not the fault of House of Lords Ministers, but then we get the House of Lords’ gentlemanly version of the “Stop the boats” rhetoric that comes from the Home Secretary and the Home Department these days. These tensions at times are almost impossible and unbearable for a single Government, let alone their officials and the people who look to the Government for leadership in difficult times.
Traditionally and today, the Foreign Office contains the experts on country information around the world. In Committee, we have heard noble Lords read out what the Foreign Office says about various countries, advising British travellers to be cautious or not even to go to these places, but then we are told in this draft legislation that those countries are safe. That is a tension that has been exposed.
I say this as a mere Home Office lawyer in the past, not a Foreign Office one, but the Foreign Office lawyers have always been within government the traditional experts on international law, including humanitarian law, and of course the diplomatic corps is there. We are privileged in this Committee and in your Lordships’ House to have some very distinguished former diplomats and in the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, a very distinguished former Permanent Secretary. Diplomacy, treaty negotiation, treaty interpretation and responsibility for Britain’s place and moral standing on the world stage are Foreign Office matters. At times this is undermined by aspects of Home Office policy, practice and rhetoric. The way in which departmental responsibilities have evolved in the past couple of decades means that the Home Department is now pretty much a department of the interior/homeland security. It is not even the hybrid home and justice department that it once was.
We know about the terrible backlog, the refusal culture, the initial decisions that are reversed on appeal and the large number of people who currently succeed in getting their refugee status on appeal but will now
be called “illegal”, incarcerated and maybe one day removed. That is a problem, but the biggest problem of all is probably the very mixed signals that we are currently hearing—and not just between the Foreign Office and the Home Office.
The Prime Minister goes to Reykjavík and elsewhere and talks about what global Britain should be and the role that Britain could play once more on the international stage, as it once did in the post-war era, in convening and promoting the kind of co-operation that the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, talked about earlier today. That is the kind of leadership on the world stage that is required, that Britain was once responsible for and for which Mr Sunak suggests he wants Britain to be responsible again. But then we hear the contrasting language of successive Home Secretaries in recent times: the very divisive, dehumanising, populist language that we have heard before. It never ends well.
That is the tension in tone and competence in these various departments that I wanted to highlight in Amendment 139. I look forward to the Minister’s response.