Part of Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill - Committee (5th Day) – in the House of Lords at 5:30 pm on 8 September 2025.
Lord Hanson of Flint
The Minister of State, Home Department
5:30,
8 September 2025
The noble Lord raises perfectly valid questions. I was clear to the House and have been today to the Committee that the Government will examine the European Court of Human Rights Article 8 requirements. We will be issuing guidance on that and have some further discussion on what that means in practice. We are still considering those matters, but we not minded at the moment to bring forward legislation—and I am certainly not minded to support, for the reasons that I have said, the amendments from the Opposition front bench and from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson. I hope that I have been clear on that.
We are committed to reforms across the immigration system. It is right that we take action against foreign national offenders in the UK before they get the opportunity to put routes down in the UK. We will do what we can to protect local communities and prevent crime. We will simplify the rules and processes for removing foreign national offenders and take further targeted action against recent arrivals who commit crime in the UK before their offending can escalate.
Later this year, as the noble Lord is intimating, we will set out more detailed reforms and stronger measures to ensure that our Laws are upheld, including streamlining and speeding up the removals process. We will table legislation to strengthen the public interest test, to make it clear that Parliament needs to be able to control our country’s borders and take back control over who comes to and stays in the UK. We need to strike that balance between family rights and the wider public interest. That is why we will clarify Article 8 rules and set out how they should apply in different immigration routes so that fewer cases are treated as exceptional. We will also set out when and how a person can genuinely make a claim on the basis of exceptional circumstances.
Amendment 139, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, seeks to amend the penalty for immigration offences in Section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971, replacing this with a sentence of deportation and removing the lack of knowledge as a defence against these offences. We have been clear in our response to the sentencing review that we will reduce the use of short sentences and increase the use of suspended sentences, so there will be a significant reduction in the number of such offenders being sent to prison. Foreign nationals convicted of immigration offences can be considered for deportation at present, and we will act to ensure that such action is taken in future.
Removing lack of knowledge as a defence will likely result in consequential deportation decisions being subject to more ECHR challenges, resulting in delay, the consequence being fewer successful removals.
As a bill passes through Parliament, MPs and peers may suggest amendments - or changes - which they believe will improve the quality of the legislation.
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Also referred to as the ECHR, the European Court of Human Rights was instituted as a place to hear Human Rights complaints from Council of Europe Member States; it consists of a number of judges equal to the number of Council of Europe seats (which currently stands at 45 at the time of writing), divided into four geographic- and gender-balanced "Sections" eac of which selects a Chamber (consisting of a President and six rotating justices), and a 17-member Grand Chamber consisting of a President, Vice-Presidents, and all Section Presidents, as well as a rotating selection of other justices from one of two balanced groups.
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Laws are the rules by which a country is governed. Britain has a long history of law making and the laws of this country can be divided into three types:- 1) Statute Laws are the laws that have been made by Parliament. 2) Case Law is law that has been established from cases tried in the courts - the laws arise from test cases. The result of the test case creates a precedent on which future cases are judged. 3) Common Law is a part of English Law, which has not come from Parliament. It consists of rules of law which have developed from customs or judgements made in courts over hundreds of years. For example until 1861 Parliament had never passed a law saying that murder was an offence. From the earliest times courts had judged that murder was a crime so there was no need to make a law.
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