IF ALL other countries adopted the approach the Government’s approach to asylum-seekers, the Archbishop of Canterbury told the Lords on Wednesday night, “the whole international refugee system would collapse”.
He was speaking at the end of the Committee Stage of the Illegal Migration Bill, during which bishops were once again critics of the Government’s proposed plan to remove the right to seek asylum from anyone arriving in the UK by illegal routes (News, 26 May; 7 June; 12 June).
Another prominent speaker in the debate was the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Revd Paul Butler, who told the Lords that, if the Prime Minister’s promise of more safe and legal routes for asylum-seekers could not be taken at face value, then the intention behind the Bill “would appear needlessly pernicious and unjustly punitive”.
A number of amendments were proposed, debated, and withdrawn, having failed to attract Government support. Bishop Butler’s comments were made in relation to an amendment to Clause 58, which seeks to put a cap on the number of entrants using safe and legal routes. The amendment sought to exclude the current named schemes in operation for those displaced from Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong.
Bishop Butler told the House: “Since the pandemic, and following the end of the vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, I have despaired as I have witnessed the breakdown of our contribution to global efforts to support refugees to find sanctuary.
“I believe that the strength of shared opinion across different sides of this Chamber on the need for safe and legal routes, is, in part, due to the global reputation we once held on resettlement. Central Government led with great conviction and leadership in supporting communities up and down the breadth of this country to welcome over 20,000 Syrians who could then start to rebuild their lives.
“However, we now find ourselves in the absurd position that, in order to deter asylum-seekers from travelling to the UK regularly, we are being asked to sanction the possibility that the Government will deliberately break international law to ban the right of men and women and children to claim asylum on arrival.”
The Bill provided an opportunity to “demonstrate real leadership and make a different choice”, he said. The amendment would give the Government an opportunity to turn around the 39-per-cent decline shown in last year’s resettlement figures, and the 23-per-cent decline in family reunions. The latest figures in “the unprecedented magnitude of forced displacement across the globe” stood at 110 million.
“Any long-term strategy for safe and legal routes must be formulated collaboratively with our international partners and wider refugee organisations rather than simply in a Home Office vacuum. Protection routes must be informed by the refugee experience and explore innovative and sustainable solutions with human dignity at their hearts,” he said.
The work on safe and legal routes “would stop before it even got started” if the numbers in the current schemes were included in the cap. “These schemes do not grant refugee status; so can the minister confirm that they will be excluded?” he asked.
He continued: “Most of us here will never know the pain of having to take the unfathomable decision to risk everything to reach safety, and the courage it must take to leave home in hope of sanctuary.
“The Government had the opportunity to offer accessible and safe routes that will provide hope for some of the world’s most vulnerable and, ultimately, save lives, and to do so alongside international partners offering similar routes in their nations. It is a privilege and a responsibility that we should never choose to abdicate.”
The amendment was not accepted, however, and the Bishop withdrew it.
He also spoke to later amendments that were also withdrawn, one requiring the Secretary of State to commission an independent management review of the efficiency of UK Visas and Immigration in processing applications, and the efficiency of the removal process for those whose leave to remain has expired.
Baroness Chakrabarti described the Home Office as “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.” She also referred to “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.”
Bishop Butler said: “Most of the arguments have been around the Government’s conviction that this is the right way to stop the boats. Many of us in this Committee believe that it will not stop the boats; that we will end up with large numbers of people being detained for indefinite periods; and that it will cost a huge amount of money.”
The Bishop strongly supported amendment 133, which would require the Secretary of State to make regulations enabling asylum-seekers to work once they had been waiting for a decision on their claim for three months or more. The Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, had also added her name, he told the Lords.
“There is little prospect of potential removals being able to keep pace with a large population of asylum-seekers who will be deemed inadmissible in the future, and currently we have a huge backlog. We risk the creation of a permanent underclass,” he said, “apart from the deleterious effects that drive some of these people into the grey and black economies because they are not allowed to work openly.”
The amendment, he said, should be considered as “nothing more than a failsafe aimed only at those who have been here far too long without the ability to support themselves easily, and who wish to work and contribute to their own welfare, that of their local community, and, sometimes, that of their family back in the land they have come from. . .
“This is entirely in line with Conservative economic arguments. It is in line with everything in the Universal Credit system about encouraging people into work and supporting themselves. Please, it is time to agree to this.”
He later sought to correct Baroness Stowell of Beeston, who said that five million people were on out-of-work benefits at a time when there were record numbers of job vacancies. The Bishop pointed out that Universal Credit applied to large numbers of people in work as well as out of work.
That amendment, too, failed to be accepted. The debate ran to almost 11 hours, and was at times very heated. The Bishop introduced Amendment 139B in his own name, which would give the Secretary of State a statutory duty to implement all recommendations of the Chief Inspector of Prisons in relation to immigration detention.
He described it as “a common-sense proposal that offers the Government a procedure to ensure that statutory oversight of detention facilities and standards is maintained. . . The Bill establishes a comprehensive detention regime that many of us expected to have been consigned to history.
“It moves the system away from an administrative process to facilitate someone’s removal to a wider system of incarceration intended to deter asylum-seekers from travelling to the UK. . .
“The Government know too well that it is not simple conjecture that detention facilities may fail to meet safeguarding rules and accommodation standards, given the events at Manston in 2022. With a maximum capacity of 1600, Manston became overcrowded, with the number of people detained there nearing 4000 towards the end of 2022.”
He emphasised: “It is most important that we understand the inspection framework for detention sites, and its legal underpinning. The extensive duties and powers provided to the Home Office by the Bill demand that they be matched by statutory and mandatory accountability.”
When the debate resumed for the third session, Lord Purvis of Tweed told the Lords: “The Archbishop of Canterbury and other noble Lords were right to place the Bill in its moral context. . .
“I think the Government know the public are not on their side. That is why they are not giving the full picture. The Bill has no moral basis. We should not be legislating for it, and we are causing more damage around the world, which will make the problem even greater.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury closed the debate. He tabled an amendment calling for a ten-year strategy on combating human trafficking with the UK’s international partners. The Secretary of State must prepare a strategy “through collaboration and with signatories to the Refugee Convention or any other international agreement on the rights of refugees”.
He pointed out that the Bill currently focused solely on the domestic situation: “It proposes action that not only is unlikely to achieve its aim domestically, but also undermines the principles of the global refugee system, which the UK was influential in setting up in the first place.”
He gave the figures on the global crisis for the end of 2022, which showed 108.4 million people displaced, 35.3 million of whom were refugees; 62.5 million internally displaced; and 5.4 million seeking asylum. “The number arriving in small boats in the UK — 45,755 in 2022 — is tiny when set in such a horrifying context,” he said.
Most critically, he said, 76 per cent of refugees were being hosted in “low- and middle-income countries infinitely poorer than our own, and 70 per cent in countries neighbouring their home countries.
“It is neither morally right nor strategically sensible to fail to engage with the global context, or to leave other countries to deal with the crisis alone. Doing so damages our reputation as a nation, but it also risks unbearable pressures being placed on other countries, and the possibility of state collapse and an ever growing avalanche of further numbers of refugees across the world, adding to the problems we face.
“If the Government, as part of their strategy, wish to work in partnership with faith groups and NGOs to identify and support refugees anywhere in the world where we have a presence, we would be delighted to work with them. . .
“We want the UK again to be a moral leader on the world stage. We are more than capable of it. A global crisis requires global solutions, and we need to develop them now. If all other countries adopted the approach the UK Government are taking with this Bill, the whole international refugee system would collapse. That is not in our interests regardless of morality, purely pragmatically, nor any other country’s, never mind those in need of protection.”
That amendment was also withdrawn. The debate was adjourned at 10.44 p.m.
The Bill is due to resume in the Lords on 28 June, for the Report Stage.