Lord Mann (Lab)

My Lords, I congratulate the Home Office on its direction of travel, but I have a few points I think it needs to consider to get this right. It would be helpful if the Home Office were to publish more regularly the gender breakdown of asylum seekers so that we can be clear that it is a representative proportion of those to whom we may have an obligation. It would also be rather helpful for the Home Office to do more in the international context. I recall going with the former Bishop of Durham to Burundi, where a third of the entire population had sought asylum in a neighbouring Commonwealth country, Tanzania. It is part of the Commonwealth and was previously part of the Empire. It seems to me that part of our obligation to those seeking asylum is to ensure that those large numbers who temporarily felt obliged to move to a safe haven in Tanzania were able to return—as they did, but with some difficulty—to one of the most impoverished countries in the world, Burundi. Similarly, I visited the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, where more than 1 million have fled from Myanmar—again, a country with which we have a very long-standing relationship. These are all asylum seekers, but it would be rather absurd for us to have a policy that suggests that the way to address those problems would be to facilitate those people coming here via organised crime gangs. It is interesting to observe how low, or non-existent, the number of rough sleepers is in certain parts of the country. That is not correlated to wealth and income in those areas; it is correlated to the amount of casual work available—work on farms, for example, or in vape shops. There is a new mania in this country for everyone not to wash their own car but to pay someone else to do it. The evidence I have seen would suggest that many of these businesses are impossible to trace, and yet the Home Office is meant to have a system to ensure that illegal working is clamped down on. What further will be done about the registration of businesses to ensure that a business on a set and identifiable premises, which someone could go in and ask for work from, is in fact a legitimate business operating within the law, rather than a cash business facilitating the work of organised crime gangs in trafficking people to this country? In the same way that we have an electoral roll that we are required to be on, would it not be worth considering requiring a local authority to hold a business roll of who is operating a business, so that we can start to cut through? We have done this with some of the manipulation of Companies House from abroad in illegal working in this country. It would give both the country and those seeking refuge a better deal, and the criminal gangs a worse deal and less profit motivation.