Small boats crisis latest: Labour MPs will be instructed to vote against Illegal Migration Bill

We're waiting for the Home Secretary to make her announcement on the new legislation any minute now...

Suella Braverman has appeared before the House to announce the new bill.

“A few months ago, the Prime Minister made a promise to the British people. He said that anyone entering this country illegally will be detained and swiftly removed,” she said.

Braverman said the Illegal Migration Bill would fulfil that promise. “It will allow us to stop the boats that are bringing tens of thousands to our shores, in flagrant breach of both our laws and the will of the British people.”

The UK must support the world’s most vulnerable, she said - met by loud jeers from others in the House - and since 2015, had given sanctuary to nearly half a million people.

Vulnerable asylum seekers given refuge in the UK included more than 150,000 people from Hong Kong, 160,000 from Ukraine, and 25,000 Afghans fleeing the Taliban, Braverman said.

“Indeed my own parents, decades ago, found security and opportunity in this country - something for which my family is eternally grateful.”

This Bill was widely supported by the British public, Braverman said, “not by the people smugglers and other criminals breaking into Britain on a daily basis”.

“For a Government to not respond to waves of illegal migrants breaching our borders, would be to betray the will of the people we were elected to serve.”

The small boats problem was part of a larger, global migration crisis, Braverman said, with developed countries set to deal with unprecedented numbers of people leaving the developing world for places like the UK.

“Unless we act today, the problem will be worse tomorrow.” People were already dying in the Channel, she said, and the volume of people arriving had overwhelmed the asylum system - with a backlog of over 160,000 people. The system now cost British taxpayers £3 billion each year, she said. 

Since 2018, 85,000 people had illegally entered the UK by small boat, she said, 45,000 of them in 2022 alone. All had travelled through other countries where they could, “and should”, have claimed asylum, she said.

Braverman denied many of those arriving in the UK via small boats were truly the most in need of asylum. Some had come from safe countries like Albania, and nearly all had passed through France, she said.

“The vast majority, 74% in 2021, were adult males under the age of 40, rich enough to pay criminal gangs thousands of pounds for passage,” she said.

The need for reform was “obvious and urgent”, Braverman said, and in the face of today’s crisis, “yesterday’s laws are simply not fit for purpose”.

“They will not stop coming here, until the world knows that if you enter Britain illegally, you will be detained and swiftly removed… back to your country if it’s safe, or to a safe third country, like Rwanda,” she said.

“Enough is enough. We must stop the boats.”

The new bill would allow immediate detention of illegal arrivals without bail or judicial review for 28 days, until they could be removed.

It will put a duty on the Home Secretary to removal illegal entrants, and will radically lower the number of challenges and appeals that can suspend removal. 

Only those under 18, medically unfit to fly, or at serious risk of harm - with a higher bar - would be able to delay their removal. Any other appeals would be heard remotely, once the person had been sent back.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper criticised the Government’s track record on dealing with people smugglers, and said Home Office decisions on asylum cases had “collapsed”.

“This is deeply damaging chaos and there’s no point in ministers trying to blame anyone else for it. They have been in power for 13 years. The asylum system is broken and they broke it.”

Ms Cooper said “serious” action is needed to stop small boat crossings, with a new agreement needed with France and other countries.

She added: “Instead, today’s statement is Groundhog Day.”

“They still don’t have any return agreements in place, the Home Secretary herself has admitted Rwanda is failing, and even if it gets going it’ll only take a few hundred people, so what will happen to the other 99% of people under this Bill?”

Cooper also questioned the bill’s hardline approach, and asked what would happen to people detained after those 28 days were up. If their cases were not resolved, would they be put out on the street, separated from family, she asked.

“What does it mean for the promises that we made to the Afghan interpreters who served our country, but were too late to make the last flight out of Kabul as the tyranny was closing in on them? The Government told them to flee, and find another way here.”

If they were to arrive under the new legislation, “they would only ever be illegal in the eyes of the Government who relied on the sacrifices they made for us", she said.

Conservative former minister Tim Loughton criticised the “fabricated rage” from Labour, and said the Home Affairs Select Committee had been informed the Rwanda policy had initially had a deterrent effect on migrants getting into boats, when it was announced during a recent visit to France.

Suella Braverman replied: “Deterrence is the key theme running through these measures. We want to send the message loudly and clearly to those people smugglers, to those people thinking about crossing the channel: Do not do it.

“Do not hand over your life savings, do not get into that flimsy dinghy, do not risk your life, because you will not be entitled to a life in the UK.”

The Home Secretary would not be drawn into questions from the SNP about what would happen to a migrant who could not be returned to another country.

SNP immigration spokesman Stuart C McDonald claimed the Bill “will not so much as lay a solitary finger on people smugglers or people traffickers, but it will cause serious and devastating harm for people who have already endured incredible suffering”.

Suella Braverman replied that the SNP spokesman expressed a lot of “passion” in his questions, adding: “I would only wish that the Scottish Government would bring so much passion to their approach to accommodating asylum seekers when Scotland currently takes one of the lowest numbers of asylum seekers out of our United Kingdom.”

The Home Affairs Select Committee found that small boats have not “overwhelmed” the asylum system as the Home Secretary claimed, its Labour chairwoman Dame Diana Johnson said.

In its report on Channel crossings published last summer, “we found that small boats have not overwhelmed the asylum system as the Home Secretary is claiming today”, she said. “The backlog has been allowed to grow since 2013… poor resourcing by successive governments of staff and technology in the asylum operations function of the Home Office has been a significant factor in its collapse.”

Braverman hit back, saying it was "clear for everyone to see that our asylum system has been overwhelmed by unprecedented numbers of people arriving here, and very high numbers being processed currently.”

Braverman questioned whether Labour and party leady Sir Keir Starmer had any plans for fixing the problem at all, and why even before seeing it and engaging on the substance, Labour had already said it wouldn’t support its passage through Parliament.

“Deep down, the Leader of the Opposition doesn’t want to stop the boats. He thinks it’s bigoted to say that we’ve got too much illegal migration abusing our system… Labour are against deterring people who would come here illegally. They are against detaining people who do come here illegally. And they are against deporting people who are here illegally.

“That means they are for this situation getting worse and worse. Perhaps that’s fine for the Leader of the Opposition and most of the Labour frontbench, but it’s not their schools, it’s not their GPs, it’s not their public services, housing and hotels filling up with illegal migrants.”

Conservative former levelling up secretary Simon Clarke told the Commons that immigration was a “top priority” for his constituents.“That being the case, we all hope this legislation will succeed, but will she promise that if it is frustrated by the European Convention on Human Rights that we will commit to leave it? Because leave it we must, if in the end this legislation is forestalled.”

The sentiment was echoed by former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who said: “Could my right honourable friend expand a little bit on the issue that stopped the migrants being taken to Rwanda last time, which was the intervention of the Court of Human Rights… I didn’t really hear anything in this statement to suggest that anything has changed on that matter.”

Suella Braverman said last year’s ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which grounded a flight to Rwanda was “deeply regrettable”.

“We are addressing that particular issue in this Bill to avoid that scenario playing out again. But in our view this Bill complies with our international obligations and we must take these measures now promptly.”

Amnesty International says there is nothing “fair, humane or even practical” in the Government’s planned new law to tackle Channel crossings.

Steve Valdez-Symonds, the group’s refugee and migrant rights director, said: “Attempting to disqualify people’s asylum claims en masse regardless of the strength of their case is a shocking new low for the Government… People fleeing persecution and conflict will be irreparably harmed by these proposals, while the UK is setting an utterly terrible example to other countries around the world.”

He accused the Government of “callously using vulnerable people for its own political ends”, and said Ministers needed to focus on the real issue – the urgent need to fairly and efficiently decide asylum claims while urgently introducing accessible schemes, “so people seeking asylum do not have to rely on people smugglers and dangerous journeys.”

Meanwhile the Church of Scotland urged the UK Government to drop the new bill, saying it “goes against everything that we uphold and value”. The church joined the Scottish Refugee Council in condemning the Illegal Migration Bill, who said it would leave people fleeing violent regimes with no way to claim asylum.

Rev Karen Hendry, convener of the Church of Scotland’s faith impact forum, said: “I am deeply concerned by the growing hostility towards people seeking safety both in the way they are viewed and as displayed today, in policy by the UK Government.

“This Bill will not just strip people fleeing war and persecution of their right to seek safety in the UK but punish them, based simply on how they came here, not whether they need protection from war and persecution.”

- House Secretary Suella Braverman has today formally unveiled a proposed new law in the House of Commons, aimed at curbing illegal migration

- Braverman says 85,000 people had illegally entered the UK by small boat since 2018, 45,000 of them just last year 

- The bill would remove and ban asylum seekers from re-entry if they arrive in the UK through illegal means

- Labour and SNP have questioned the Tory’s hardline approach, and what would happen to migrants who could not be returned

- Meanwhile, Conservative MPs have questioned whether the UK would need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to achieve the bill

- Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will hold a press conference on the bill later today