My Lords, it has been an interesting and wide-ranging debate, bearing in mind the subject of the regret Motion, but we support the regret Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and we are very grateful to him for bringing these changes to the attention of the House.
The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, regrets the implementation of plans, set out in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, to treat refugees differently depending on how they entered the United Kingdom. The issue is yet to be tested in the courts, as it inevitably will be. We maintained at the time, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has said, that it was a breach of the UK’s international obligations under the UN refugee convention—a view supported by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has an interesting perspective on the backlogs in asylum applications. Some 10 or more years ago, we had double the number of asylum applications and a fraction of the backlog. We were deporting far more overstayers and illegal immigrants than we do now. All this points to a catastrophic failure by the Home Office—nothing more, nothing less.
As far as Ukraine is concerned, the Government have been very generous on the basis that they expect and hope that the vast majority of those people will return to Ukraine, once peace has hopefully been restored. It is a very different situation.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that rather than taking back control of our borders, we have thrown them open. As the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, said, there is nothing now to stop people coming here with visa-free entry, which is not only still open to residents of all EU countries, but the Government have added 10 more countries to that list. These are people who can put their passports in the e-passport gates at the airport, disappear into the country and nobody knows who they are, where they have gone or whether they ever leave.
I am a little confused about the arguments on identity cards. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who apparently supports the idea, told us how difficult it is to open a bank account. Tell me about it—I have been trying to open a bank account for the last two weeks. I have shown my passport and I have gone to the bank; it wants to know where my income comes from—most of it is a Metropolitan Police pension. Yet, apparently, we need identity cards as well, to try and control things. I think things are difficult enough as it is.
But we digress, widely. The Minister may argue that our objections were debated during the primary legislation that these rule changes are based on, and the majority of this House rejected those arguments. The specifics—for example, that group 2 refugees will get permission to remain for only what I thought was 30 months but the
noble Lord, Lord Hylton, thinks is shorter—were not on the face of the Bill, and this is the first time that Parliament has had the chance to debate the specifics in legislation.
We should not expect details of safe and legal routes to be included in the Immigration Rules, but when refugees are to be treated differently depending on whether they have arrived by a safe and legal route—that is, group 1 refugees—or otherwise as group 2 refugees, Parliament has the right to expect the Government to set out what safe and legal routes are available currently and those that are planned, including any limits on those numbers. Without knowing how many or what proportion of asylum seekers will fall into each group, how can Parliament make a judgment as to whether to agree these changes to the Immigration Rules?
As the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, said, group 2 refugees will be disqualified from family reunion, so we are going to have far more unaccompanied child refugees coming to this country who will not be able to be joined by their families.
This week, the BBC reported that 181 of these unaccompanied asylum-seeking children aged 18 or under have disappeared since they have come to this country. They are put into hotels with no supervision, and they disappear. How many more unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are going to be lost and potentially abused, whether through modern slavery or through child abuse, if they are not allowed to bring their families to join them and look after them? Why is there not a risk assessment around how many more unaccompanied child refugees are going to be placed at risk as a result of these changes?
There is no risk assessment on this at all, but there is precedent in the past for impact assessments to be published alongside changes to the Immigration Rules. In September 2020, the Government published an impact assessment for changes to the Immigration Rules for students. In November 2020, they published an impact assessment for changes to the Immigration Rules for skilled workers. The changes we are debating today are arguably the most fundamental changes to the Immigration Rules ever enacted—so where is the impact assessment?
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There are other significant changes in these Immigration Rules that we also regret, in particular the fact that the rules have had to be changed so that eligibility for humanitarian protection will no longer be considered in relation to the country the UK is seeking to return the asylum seeker to, but only in relation to their country of origin, in order to prevent claims against being sent to Rwanda. The noble Lord, Lord Horam, says that he does not feel that there is any alternative to the Rwanda scheme—well, maybe if it is legal. But again, that matter is currently before the courts.
As to the deterrent effect, I appreciate that the Rwanda scheme has not actually been put into practice, but the Government have certainly signalled that they are going to pursue it relentlessly, yet we have record numbers of people coming across the channel. So I question the deterrent effect in the first place. As I say, how can it be the only alternative if it is not a legal
alternative? I can suggest an alternative—for example, humanitarian visas, where people in their country of origin are able to make an initial application for asylum in the UK and be told in-country whether that application is likely to be successful when they get to the UK. Alternatively, they might be told, “Please don’t bother paying people to get you to the UK, please don’t bother coming to the UK, because on the basis of the assessment we’ve done here, in-country, you have no chance”. That is an effective deterrent, rather than the Rwanda policy.