Lord Harper (Con)

My Lords, I listened very carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and have a great deal of respect for the side of the argument he is coming from. But the piece missing from his argument, and from that of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, is the concept of deterrence. What the Government are trying to do, as far as I understand it—the Minister will correct me if I have got this wrong—is to put in place a framework that actually stops the organised criminal groups, as well as those who pay them and those who help facilitate that immigration crime. The intention is to stop them doing these things in the first place, and there is a balance to strike between the criminal law regime you put in place and the penalties. It needs to be sufficiently tough that you actually deter people in the first place. The Joint Committee’s report says that the “scope is broad, the thresholds are low, and the penalties are high”. That is correct, but that is because the Government are trying, I think—and if so, I support them—to set those penalties so that people are deterred from trying to cross the channel. Let us remind ourselves that they are doing so from a safe country. They are not fleeing persecution in France; they are already in a safe European country. They may have been fleeing persecution in the country from which they originally came, but they are now in a safe European country. Of course, we also know that a lot of the people undertaking these journeys are not fleeing persecution at all; they are travelling, perfectly understandably, for economic reasons, but those are not reasons we should allow.