Lord Dubs (Lab)

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to several of these amendments, tabled by my noble friend Lord Browne of Ladyton, who regrets he is unable to be here today and has asked me to speak to the amendments on his behalf. I agree very much with what the noble Lord, Lord German, just said in relation to the earlier amendment. I am also grateful to the Law Society of Scotland for some of the briefing it has provided, although I should emphasise that the amendment is not confined to Scotland: it is, of course, a UK-wide amendment. I will take the argument in summary. Speaking to an earlier amendment a few minutes ago, my noble friend said: “The gangs are the target, not the refugees”. The point, particularly of Amendment 50 is, in fact, to give effect to saying the gangs are the target and not the refugees. Amendment 50 seeks to make the legislation consistent with the spirit of the refugee convention, ensuring that vulnerable people are not debarred from refugee protection on the basis of criminal acts they have committed in order to claim asylum in the UK. Clearly, none of us accepts that traffickers have any legitimate basis at all—they are vile people. But some of the people who cross the channel as a result of their efforts—I hope we can stop these traffickers—are, in fact, refugees. If their only offence is to cross the channel by boat, we are making the vulnerable the victims, and that seems not a sensible thing to do. Elsewhere in the Bill, the Government’s approach is to concede the point, and I do not see why it should not apply in this section. If we do not amend the Bill, we will create a Kafkaesque situation in which we would remove protections on the basis of steps taken by refugees in order to seek these protections in the first place. That seems a fairly clear point, and I would have thought the Government would be willing to tidy up the Bill to achieve this particular end. I will make it clear that the refugee convention has a provision in it about particularly serious crimes, but it is designed to exclude individuals whose record of criminality rendered forfeit their claim to asylum. But that should never apply to those asylum seekers who are forced because there are no safe and legal routes to enter the country by these other means, which we have labelled in previous legislation as illegal. If we had safe and legal routes—and I do not want to get into a Second Reading debate on this—the whole system would work in a much better way. Furthermore, Amendment 56 is a limited and, I hope, constructive amendment that seeks to remove an inconsistency within Clause 16. This clause creates a defence of collecting information for use in immigration crime, but subsection (6) has a defence for anyone who does it for the purpose of a journey made only by them. The point of Amendment 56 is that if people are traveling in a family group, they will also be able to have that defence. This is a very simple point indeed, and it goes fully in the spirit of what the Minister said earlier. I repeat: gangs are the target, not the refugees.