Dame Angela Eagle
MP for Wallasey · Labour · United Kingdom
“The Kremlin increasingly relies on proxy organisations to pursue its objectives, seeking to undermine our security while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. The so-called GRU Volunteer Corps is a clear example of that approach. It is not an independent force or a loose collection of volunteers.”
“This Government have introduced support for the Jewish communities who have been threatened and directly targeted by IRGC proxies. Just a couple of days ago, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced an extra £250 million for policing to ensure that we can support and protect our Jewish communities.”
“I will move on to the Islamic Movement of Companions of the Right. The IMCR has publicly claimed seven attacks at UK locations linked to Jewish and Israeli communities and to Persian-language media, including the antisemitic arson attack on four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green on 23 March.”
“We expect platforms to act responsibly and not to provide space for state threat-linked activity, propaganda or recruitment. We will be keeping a close eye on that, as well as liaising with social media companies to tell them about how this law impacts them.”
“The IRGC Quds Force and the IRGC Intelligence Organisation, together with the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, form the Iranian intelligence apparatus. As a key component of the Iranian state’s security apparatus, the IRGC is answerable directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader.”
“It provides a targeted and proportionate means of disrupting those involved in foreign power threat activity based on the recommendations of Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of state threat legislation. To answer the hon.”
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Every one of 5,924 lines we hold for Dame Angela Eagle, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 13 of 119.
“The right hon. Gentleman says that Wethersfield is now getting more people, but it is still not holding the numbers that his Government planned for it to hold when it was opened, so that is rather an odd argument for him to make. If he was serious about reducing the problems at our borders, I would have thought that he would want to support the counter-terrorism-style powers in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, but it seems that he is not.”
“Yes. Of course, we have to crack down on abuse of our asylum system, but also on the exploitation of vulnerable and desperate people by vicious criminal gangs.”
“If my hon. and learned Friend wants to talk to me about any of the details, I would be happy to listen, but of course we want to operate that site properly and appropriately until we hand it back to the Ministry of Defence in September.”
“Mr Deputy Speaker—sorry, Mr Speaker. I do not know why I am calling you Mr Deputy Speaker today; I have gone back a very long time to when you were, but that was so long ago that I can scarcely remember it. My apologies, Mr Speaker. The right hon. Lady should remember that the Rwanda scheme was about deporting people for good, not dealing with their asylum claims. That is not in any way what this Government would ever consider doing, which is why that scheme was cancelled.”
“We have put more resource into Europol to co-operate with European partners across borders. Operationally, we are working across Europe; we have a new agreement with the German Government and an agreement on sanctions and illicit finance with the Italian Government, and the Calais Group has met in London. We are doing a lot of work with source areas and countries such as Vietnam, not only on returns but on countering some of the adverts that tell lies about the kind of lives that await those who get on perilous small boats. We are working with our international colleagues across the piece, both diplomatically and operationally, to try to put pressure on the international criminal gangs and begin to close down this evil trade.”
“It is clearly important that overseas development moneys are used to try to prevent the flows of people that have been the result of collapses in various countries. We in the Home Office will do all we can to minimise the spend that we currently take from the overseas development aid budget.”
“I believe that people need to think about the language they use and the impressions of human beings they give when they talk about this very emotive issue. It raises huge concern, I know. As a Government, we have certainly got to do all we can to try to reassure people that we can get this system back under control, after finding a chaotic mess when we came into Government.”
“Asylum seekers who wait longer than a year are allowed to work, so long as that wait has not been caused by them—that is, a wait through no fault of their own. We have that system now, and I am not considering shortening the length of time that must elapse before work is allowed.”
“I do not apologise for deporting people who have no right to be here or who have been through the system and are discovered neither to be asylum seekers nor to have any right to stay in the country. I accept the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the desperate situation that people are in. They could claim asylum in the country they are in, and we need to work with our counterparts in the European Union and along all the routes to see what we can do to divert those people who are seeking a better life in our country and see if we can look after them closer to home.”
“Yes. Illegal working arrests and visits have increased by 38%. More people have been arrested. More people have been fined. We are seeking to ban those who abuse illegal workers—often underpaying them and treating them like modern slaves—from running companies. The fines are now £60,000 per illegal worker. There is no reason why legitimate small businesses should be undermined by illegal working and illegal practices.”
“I understand that, ahead of the reductions that were announced, 20% is currently spent on housing asylum seekers in this country. Clearly, if we can get the system running faster from start to finish and we can get people through it faster, we can reduce those costs.”
“As a result of a major international operation involving the NCA targeting a Syrian organised crime group considered to be one of Europe’s most significant people-smuggling gangs, at least 20 people were arrested in a series of raids across the continent, including one in the United Kingdom. That is just what has been happening recently. A great deal more work is going on involving many, many investigations, the fruit of which will be borne—and we will talk about it—when it is delivered.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his belief in my ability to get on top of my brief. The National Crime Agency recently arrested three men in the UK who were wanted in Belgium after being convicted of being members of an Afghan organised crime group. It has arrested a Turkish national suspected of being one of the most significant suppliers of boats and engines to gangs, who was detained in Amsterdam following a joint operation involving the NCA and Belgian and Dutch police. There have been convictions of two men based in south Wales who ran a people-smuggling ring that involved moving thousands of migrants through Iran, Iraq and Syria and across Europe.”
“We are doing that work day in, day out. If the Conservatives had not allowed smuggling gangs to take hold across the channel for six years, we would not be experiencing the difficulties that we are experiencing now in dealing with them. [Interruption.] This takes time, there is no simple, easy solution, and chuntering about it from the Opposition Front Bench—which, let us face it, is where the Conservatives belong—will not make any difference.”
“It is important, in order to deal with the chaos that we inherited, to create a system that is faster, fairer and much easier to get through than the one we inherited. Unless the hon. Lady wants people to be destitute on the streets, we have to look after them while we are processing their asylum claims. Speed is important, as well as ensuring that we do that processing fairly.”
“The Prime Minister has made it clear that the answer will not be to ignore international law, so we have to ensure that we create a system that is fast and fair and does the job much more effectively than the one we inherited. We are looking into how we can make changes to ensure that that happens.”
“I do not think that safe routes would stop people trying to get into this country clandestinely. It is important that we can assert control at the border so that we decide who comes into our country, not the people-smuggling gangs.”
“We have restarted asylum processing, and we are looking into what we can do to speed up the appeals backlog that we inherited. We will create a system that is faster, firmer and fairer so that we can get people out of asylum hotels, which are not a sustainable model for the future.”
“My right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister made some announcements recently about the capacity to increase house building in this country in order to deal with some of the pressure on demand. It is important from an asylum seeker point of view that we make the system work end to end much faster so that we can get people through it, deport those who have no right to be here, and integrate those who have been accepted as asylum seekers.”
“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Murrison—I suspect that you will be bookending our proceedings, if we make reasonable progress today. Does the shadow Minister acknowledge that increases in appeal backlogs are a result of the legacy process that his Government undertook, because people whose claims were not granted in that process have appealed and added to the backlog?”
“If they want to bring these issues out into the open at the first-tier tribunal, perhaps they should send some reporters to listen to the case or apply on an individual basis for the judgment to be published. Perhaps that might assuage their ongoing interest in these issues.”
“It is expected that judges will have a wide discretion in dealing with these sensitive issues. On making rulings of the first-tier tribunal available to the public, currently judgments of the immigration and asylum chamber of the first-tier tribunal are not routinely published. The decision about whether to publish a judgment is a judicial one. However, members of the public and the media can apply to the tribunal for a copy of the judgment in a specific case. I know that the Lord Chancellor will continue discussions with the judiciary about how we can bolster accountability and transparency to build public confidence, but I cannot help feeling that perhaps certain people who might work for a certain newspaper are getting to the end of their search engines for absurd cases that they can publish, and want a whole new database to search.”
“However, there are sometimes appropriate reasons for a hearing not to be public. For example, hearings may be held in private to preserve confidentiality in respect of sensitive medical details or to protect the privacy of a victim of a serious crime—for example, of a sexual nature. It may also be done to protect a party or witness from duress. That is precisely why the Tribunal Procedure Committee has broad discretion to determine what practice and procedure in the first-tier tribunal will best support the overall interests of justice, and why the judiciary has a range of case management powers under the tribunal procedure rules to decide how individual cases should proceed. Those tribunal powers were published and written when the party of the hon. Member for Stockton West was in government, in 2014.”
“I have to compliment the hon. Member for Stockton West on his tie, since he raised it, and the hon. Member for Weald of Kent seems to have good taste in the colour of her jackets. I promise that that is the last fashion statement that I will make in our proceedings today. On new clause 24, we agree that accountability and transparency are absolutely vital for building trust and credibility in the immigration system. Under rule 27 of the Tribunal Procedure (First-tier Tribunal) (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) Rules 2014—note the date—the presumption already is that hearings at the first-tier tribunal must be public unless the first-tier tribunal gives a direction that it or part of it is to be held in private. Indeed, the majority of hearings at the first-tier tribunal are public.”
“I will deal with some of the broader points in my response, but we do age assessments. We do not simply accept—just as his Government did not—asylum seekers’ claims about their age as if they were the truth. I would not like the shadow Minister to give the Committee the impression that that is happening—that we are accepting claimed ages without any kind of check. I will go into much more detail in my response to the debate about precisely what we do, but he must not give the impression that we are not checking; we are.”
“At the moment, we do not have enough certainty about the gap that exists in the current assessments, which are still being assessed. The hon. Member for Stockton West and the Conservative party put these things on to the statute book but then did not operationalise them. At the moment, we are doing as much work as we can to see how reliable they are, with a view to operationalising them. But as I wrote in a response to shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Croydon South, when he wrote to me about this issue, we are in the middle of that process. I hope that we will soon be in a situation to make announcements one way or the other, and those announcements will be made in the usual way.”
“We have retained those bits of legislation; neither the 2024 regulations nor section 52 of the Nationality and Borders Act have been repealed by the Bill, so the capacity to use scientific age assessments remains on the statute book. The hon. Member for Stockton West did not seem to know which age assessment methods we were talking about. The 2024 regulations specify the power to use X-rays and MRIs, and that it is possible to take a negative view of the credibility of a person who refuses to consent, where there are no reasonable grounds for refusing that consent. With those measures on the statute book, the Government continue to explore methods to improve the robustness of age assessment processes by increasing the reliability of the scientific methods being used.”
“We can make judgments about people who are much older, but we are dealing with that uncertain four to five-year range on either side, which is the difference between 18 and 24 or 17 and 23; you will know about that, Dr Murrison, from your work as a medical doctor. On new clause 26, I want to reassure Opposition Members that there is already provision in law for the use of age assessment, and our repealing of section 58 of the Illegal Migration Act does not remove that provision. That is because the Immigration (Age Assessments) Regulations 2024, which followed scientific advice from the Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee in the Home Office, specify for the purposes of section 52 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 the scientific methods currently recommended for age assessment.”
“However, she also knows about the Government support that her local authority has been given to disperse unaccompanied asylum-seeking children around the rest of the country so that some of the burden can be shared. We are dealing with people who arrive without papers. Some of them wish to lie about their age, and some have been told to lie because the people-smuggling gangs perceive it as a way for people to access more resources than they could if they were seen as adults. As the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire pointed out, the system can get it wrong on both sides. People who are children have been judged to be adults and put in inappropriate places, and people who are adults have been judged to be children and put in appropriate places. There is no guaranteed scientific way of making a judgment.”
“The fact is that there are people who are genuine asylum seekers who are children, people who are not genuine asylum seekers who are adults who claim to be children, and children who sometimes claim that they are adults. When that happens, one has to look at modern slavery issues and coercive control. There are safeguarding issues on both sides of the age assessment argument. Children pretend to be adults for reasons that we can imagine, but we will not go into those, because they are not very pleasant. There are also incentives created by the way in which the Children Act 1989 deals with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. As a Kent MP, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent knows exactly what happens with the Kent intake unit and the pressure that her own local authority has been put under.”
“As I understand it, the issue with that legislation was that the then Government’s intention was not to remove children to Rwanda, so it became more important to have a way of assessing whether somebody was a child. The Safety of Rwanda Act and the IMA—the previous Government’s approach to this issue—would have created even bigger incentives for people to claim that that they were children, because they would have avoided being sent to Rwanda, not that anyone ever actually ended up there. The previous Government’s approach of deportation permanently to Rwanda actually created even more incentives for people to lie about their age.”
“That has again demonstrated the wide range of opinion that there is at both ends of the argument whenever we consider such issues. I will deal with both arguments in my response, and I hope to find a middle way. First, repealing section 58 of the Illegal Migration Act, which the Bill seeks to do, does not stop our capacity to do age assessments. Listening to some of the contributions from members of the official Opposition, one would have thought that repealing section 58 will take off the table—completely and utterly—all age assessment. That is simply not true. The age assessments in section 58 were about the duty to remove somebody to Rwanda; they were not connected to anything else.”
“I am determined to see whether we can connect up our information about people coming from Europe, following Brexit and the disintegration of our access to Eurodac and various other pieces of information collected in Europe on asylum seekers and those arriving illegally—not all of them are asylum seekers. Reconnecting, if possible, to those databases would give us more comfort than we have at the moment. However, I emphasise that when people come to this country, we do check them against all our biometric records and the terrorism lists and watch lists that we have. It may be possible for us to do more in future. We have had a debate about new clause 26 from the Opposition and new clause 43 from the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire on behalf of the Scottish National party.”
“I start by endorsing what my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East said about Dolores, Thomas Roberts’s mum, whom I met last night. She has gone through a searingly awful life experience. It is difficult even to think about that, let alone to offer any comfort. Unfortunately, I do not think that her experience would have changed much had scientific age assessment been in place, although the person in question had been assessed by his local authority as a child and was therefore in a separate environment from that which he would have been in had he not been assessed.”
“I will also address new clause 43, which says that we should not use age assessments at all, other than in exceptional circumstances. Given what the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire said when he moved it, I think it accepts that we should continue with Merton assessments, which are the other way of dealing with age assessments currently. Those usually involve two social workers and various other experts interviewing the person concerned to try to get a handle on their real age.”
“We are making a scientific assessment of how accurate and effective the methods are that could be used to make age assessments, and I hope to have some results from that work soon. What I do not want is to have a clause in primary legislation telling me that I have to do that by a set time. I am trying to reassure the hon. Gentleman that despite the repeal of section 58 of the Illegal Migration Act, which this Bill brings about, the capacity to do age assessments and apply them scientifically is still on the statute book. We are looking closely into how we can operationalise these methods if we feel they will give us a more trustworthy result, but we will not do that if we do not. We are in the middle of getting to the stage where we can make that judgment.”
“We are not in disagreement on principles, but if we are going to use scientific age assessment, we need to ensure that it is as effective and useful as possible, so that it can be taken seriously and play an effective part in the battle that all of us want to be involved in: ensuring that children do not end up in adult settings and adults do not end up in children’s settings.”
“The hon. Gentleman is being a bit mischievous. We are in the middle of an assessment of whether scientific age assessments work and at what level of capacity and detail we can trust them. I expect reports fairly soon, and once I have them I can make a decision on how we go ahead with them. I will let Parliament know in the usual way when that has happened, but it is not useful or effective to have the hon. Gentleman’s new clause setting a deadline for that in the Bill. I hope he will accept that in the helpful way in which I intend it.”
“Member for Mid Dunbartonshire objects to—from protections or support on the grounds of public order or bad faith. However, that is in line with article 13 of the convention; that part of the Nationality and Borders Act put the convention into UK law. I am surprised she is suggesting that we should remove it. The Act also sets out the circumstances in which confirmed victims of slavery and trafficking may be granted temporary permission to stay in the UK. The Government will be launching a public consultation, before summer recess, on how we can improve the process of identifying victims of modern slavery. We will provide details on that consultation in due course.”
“The national age assessment board creates a standard and a bar below which it is hard to go. It sets important standards in age assessment, improves quality and ensures that ages are recorded correctly for immigration purposes. The Nationality and Borders Act also placed protections and support under the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings on a legislative footing for the first time in the UK. That includes the right to a recovery period in the national referral mechanism, during which potential victims of modern slavery and trafficking are eligible for support and are protected from removal from the UK. The Act provides the means to disqualify individuals—I suspect that this may be the bit that the hon.”
“Member for Mid Dunbartonshire wants us to repeal very large chunks of the Act under the new clause. I will mention only a few, and I hope that she will forgive me for not talking about every section. The introduction of the national age assessment board, for example, in March 2023, relies on a piece of the Nationality and Borders Act that the hon. Lady wishes to repeal. In the interim, since that Act has come into being, we have introduced the national age assessment board and made it available across the country. It continues to offer significant improvement to our processes for assessing age, including creating greater consistency in age assessment practices, which can be very inconsistent in the practical delivery of Merton-compliant assessments in different local authorities—some are more experienced and some better at it than others.”
“That is a financial necessity to deal with the backlogs that we have inherited—the permit backlog in particular, but also others, especially in the appeals space—so that the costs do not continue to mount up at the expense of the taxpayer. Getting the system moving again is an important part of what we have been doing. Following the election, the Home Secretary acted rapidly to change the law to remove the retrospective application of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which allowed decision makers to decide asylum claims from individuals who arrived in the UK from 7 March 2023. Previously, there was a ban on that, because of the duty to remove, which was never going to be sensibly put into effect. I am not going to speak to every section of the Nationality and Borders Act, but the hon.”
“I do not know what the hon. Gentleman had for lunch, but perhaps we should find out and get some of it ourselves. We can then all compete with the poet laureate and the virtuoso performance that we have just heard. I am going to talk about the new clause, however, which is in respect of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. The hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire is proposing that numerous sections of the 2022 Act be repealed under the Bill. I should start by making it clear that we are determined to restore order to the asylum system, so that it operates swiftly, firmly and fairly, and ensures that the rules are properly enforced.”
“We have talked a lot about chicken nuggets, and I would just put on the record that that case is being appealed, and judicial activities on that case have not yet finished. With that commitment to human rights and European convention rights, I hope that Opposition Members will think about some of the potential consequences of what they are suggesting in chopping up human rights and wanting to put us in the same company as Belarus and Russia; about the way convention rights were developed; and about the benefits that adhering to human rights frameworks has given us as a democracy over the years.”
“I do not think that this Government would want to see that reversed. The paradox of new clause 33 is that all those who potentially had a human rights claim, whatever their circumstances, could go straight to the Strasbourg court, which would clog up that court. As the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire pointed out, that is not taking back control, it is abrogating it, and would flood the Strasbourg court with decisions that could have sensibly been taken here. That is not to say that any one of us would not be frustrated by particular individual decisions, but I caution against using decisions that have been only partially covered or talked about on the front pages of The Daily Telegraph , which often takes decisions in cases out of context.”
“To start taking those away on a bit-by-bit basis, particularly beginning with people who are very unpopular and have done difficult or bad things, could be the start of a very slippery slope if we are not careful. That is why I am proud that our Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill has printed on its front cover that it is compatible with convention rights. This Government will always do things that are compatible with convention rights. The paradox of some of what has been said in the debate we have just had is that it politicises decisions. That is a very different approach to judicial issues from the one we have seen for very many years, where, in effect, a lot of the powers on particular issues that used to sit with the Home Secretary have been taken by judges who are publicly accountable for their decisions.”
“I am not sure how much of the debate we could have heard, Dr Murrison, had you made that observation at the beginning of it. I do not think this Government wish to join Belarus and Russia among those who are not signed up to the European Court of Human Rights. The Government are fully committed to the protection of human rights. When we talk about human rights, that means all people who are human: everybody, applied universally. As the Prime Minister has made clear, the United Kingdom is unequivocally committed to the European convention on human rights. The Human Rights Act is an important part of our constitutional arrangements and fundamental to human rights protections in the UK.”
“That is where we and other Opposition parties differ from him and his party. That is why I do not accept new clause 33 and I hope that the Committee will vote against it if it is pressed to a vote.”
“I would respectfully say that the hon. Gentleman’s party had many, many years to think of a solution, and most of the cases that Opposition Members have raised today had their genesis in the years that they were in power. Close to the very end, as they became more and more frustrated, they started coming up with more and more outlandish approaches. Obviously, one wants the entire judicial process to be used, as speedily as possible, and if the Home Office wishes to appeal a particular case, it will do so. We keep a constant eye on the issues and we think about reforms that we could make. Obviously the hon. Gentleman will be the first to hear if we decide to make changes, but we do not wish to abrogate from the Human Rights Act, the ECHR and the human rights framework.”
“We already have the power to deport any foreign national on the grounds that doing so would be conducive to the public good, regardless of whether they have had to serve the 12-month prison sentence that the UK Borders Act 2007 requires. If they are subject to a 12-month prison sentence, it is a duty to deport them. The hon. Member for Weald of Kent was a special adviser in the Home Office, so she knows about these things, and the hon. Member for Stockton West is a spokesperson in the shadow Home Office team. The Conservatives talk a lot about deportation, but they did not do a lot about it when they had the power to do so.”