Published in the Daily Telegraph on 3 February 2025
The Government is putting human rights laws before the needs and safety of the British public
Across the West, governments are closing their borders, tightening immigration laws and publishing data on the true costs of immigration from particular countries. In Denmark, the state has shown immigration from outside Europe is a fiscal burden. In Sweden, the government is taking measures to increase deportations. In Germany, the likely next Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has promised to seal the border.
In Britain, the Government is doing the opposite. Having already scrapped the Rwanda scheme, Labour is now gutting the legislation the Tories introduced to ensure that instead of settling in Britain, illegal immigrants would face the choice of deportation to their own country or to another. The new immigration Bill, published last Thursday, is a charter for mass migration, a gateway for illegal immigrants to stay here for good, and a signal to millions of people around the world that the British welfare state is available to them.
The Bill revokes Tory laws that make inadmissible the asylum claims of anybody who enters the country illegally; place a legal duty on ministers to remove illegal entrants from Britain; prevent illegal immigrants from obtaining British citizenship; allow ministers to treat asylum seekers who refuse to undergo scientific age checks as adults; limit the right of courts to restrict immigration detention; and declare Rwanda a safe country to which illegal immigrants can be sent.
This adds up to a significant diminution of the state’s ability to secure the border and deport illegal immigrants. And much of the remainder of the Bill is window dressing. For example, the Border Security Command will be placed on a statutory footing. But most of the agencies connected to the Command already report to the Home Secretary, and the Command itself is a bureaucratically confused rehash of structures that existed before. The Bill requires the Commander to produce a “strategic priority document”, to which partner agencies must have “regard”.
Other measures just seem fanciful. New offences for supplying equipment facilitating the Channel crossings apply to activities in other jurisdictions. The idea that the state – even working with other countries – might identify, arrest and extradite the criminals involved, when it fails to prosecute elementary immigration crimes committed on British soil, seems far-fetched. Indeed, upon completion of any prison sentences, the criminals involved would find it easier to resist deportation thanks to other government policies.
Even the new measures introduced in the Bill – measures that supposedly toughen policy – have glaring loopholes. The new offence of “endangering another during sea crossing” to Britain is supposed to criminalise those who refuse offers of help from French patrol boats, but the parents of children on the small boats will be excluded from prosecution. This will inevitably encourage migrants and the organised-crime gangs that help them to put more children onto the boats.
As ever with Labour, the shadow of human rights laws – and lawyers – looms over the Bill. The exclusion of parents from the new offence of endangering others is a decision based on human rights laws. The repeal of the Safety of Rwanda Act is about human rights laws. The whole Bill is all about human rights laws. And those laws put the individual rights of illegal immigrants and foreign criminals – by design – over the right of the public to live safely and peacefully.
We already know the reality of Labour’s plan for the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who crossed the Channel last year – and the thousands more who will come over the course of this parliament – because they have told us in the small print of one of their earlier decisions. They will rush their asylum claims through the system, accepting the vast majority, and then hide them in the welfare and local council-housing budgets.
This is convenient for ministers as the cost of housing illegal immigrants in hotels – and, incidentally, the number of hotels paid for this purpose by the Government is going up – is published in the Home Office accounts. Tracking those granted asylum through the welfare system is impossible as it stands, and ministers have already refused to acquire and publish the relevant data.
The impact assessment for the decision last July to suspend the duty on ministers to remove asylum seekers who had entered the country illegally said as many as 44,000 additional people could be granted asylum. Were all 44,000 to remain in the UK, the cost to the British taxpayer could reach nearly £18 billion.
So opaque was the Home Office about the true costs of its policy choices that the Statistics Authority rebuked the department, in a letter to me, for being insufficiently clear and transparent, and insisting that the Government “refers precisely to published data”. Even though ministers continue to refuse to publish detailed data on the net lifetime fiscal costs and contributions of different profiles of migrant, we know enough from existing studies to understand the truth.
In Denmark, the finance ministry estimated that in 2018, immigrants and their descendants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey accounted for 55 per cent of the non-Western migrants and 77 per cent of the costs – the equivalent of about £9,500 per migrant per year. In the Netherlands, a University of Amsterdam study said the net lifetime cost of asylum migration averages around £400,000 per immigrant.
This corresponds roughly with the Office for Budget Responsibility calculation that the average “low-wage migrant worker” arriving aged 25 will cost the British taxpayer £465,000 by the time they reach 81.
My party, the Conservatives, should consider itself fortunate to have survived after letting immigration soar after Brexit. But the new Bill is a travesty that will need to be opposed with vigour. We have an opportunity to show we have the political will not only to cut the numbers in future, but to undo some of the damage done. Amendments to extend the number of years before an immigrant wins indefinite leave to remain here, restrict the application of human rights laws, and deport those who fail to contribute to our society will undoubtedly be rejected by Labour. But they would represent a good start for future Conservative policy.
