Baroness Hamwee (LD)

My Lords, I support almost all the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Alton. I said to him yesterday that I thought that the committee’s work had been—I thought carefully about this word—painstaking. My name and that of my noble friend Lord German are not to a couple of the amendments because he and I had already tabled amendments on the same point when the noble Lord’s were tabled. My noble friend will pursue the point of a defence of not doing action if one was not doing so for financial gain—the same point, in effect, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has made. As my noble friend has said, and we are going to go on saying, the clauses in the Bill should not sweep up asylum seekers, whom one could also describe as victims of smugglers. I have Amendment 51A, which I picked up from the JCHR report, to add to the list of excepted articles in Clause 15. One of the things that people in this situation, and I am thinking of the asylum seekers now, must feel that they are losing is their dignity. The JCHR suggested adding—“At a minimum”, to use its words—hygiene products. If one is without hygiene products, that adds to one’s sense of a loss of dignity, a loss of looking after oneself as a real person with a proper place in the world, and so on. It is a matter of proportionality.