‘The following provisions of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 are repealed—

(a) sections 12 to 65; and

(b) sections 68 and 69.’—

This new clause would repeal specified provisions of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022.

Brought up, and read the First time.

I beg to move, that the clause be read a Second time.

It is a pleasure to work under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. The new clause would enable replacements of large portions of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 —in particular, sections on asylum, immigration control, age assessments and modern slavery—to ensure the upholding of the refugee convention, to provide for safe and legal routes to sanctuary for refugees and to help prevent dangerous channel crossings.

Liberal Democrat new clause 27 seeks to repeal provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 passed by the previous Conservative Government. By attempting to repeal section 29 of the Act, the Liberal Democrats are seeking to prevent the Government from removing people, including criminals, to a safe third country.

Rewind back to 2022 when 45,000 people crammed into small boats, flimsy rafts teetering on the channel’s unforgiving waves—a swarm, spurred by the hope of slipping through our borders, hammering coastal towns and stretching security to its limits.

Did the hon. Gentleman really mean “swarm” in that context? That is quite emotive language.

Well, hot air is required in this room this afternoon, and I intend to provide it.

We fought back with the Nationality and Borders Act third-country removals, which helped the Government to deter crossings by 36% in 2023 from 45,000 to under 29,000—not by chance, but by design, sending a message to traffickers and migrants alike that Britain is no soft touch or guaranteed prize. Now, the Liberal Democrats barge in with new clause 27, desperate to repeal section 29 to shred that deterrent and plunge us back into chaos, flinging the channel wide open not just to the weary but to every chancer or criminal. That is not tweaking policy; it is torching a firewall, inviting all those to Dover’s cliffs and Deal’s shores and erasing every inch of progress that we have clawed from the crisis. The Lib Dems owe us hard answers. How many boats—50,000 or 60,000?

The Albania deal delivered a masterstroke of border control. That pragmatic triumph has turned a torrent of illegal crossings into a trickle through sheer diplomatic grit. Back in 2022, Albanians dominated the small boats surge. A 12,000-strong, relentless wave of young men were lured by traffickers with promises of easy UK entry for £3,000, clogging Dover’s processing centres and fuelling tabloid headlines of chaos. Then came our 2023 pact with Tirana—a no-nonsense agreement that flipped the script with fast-track returns, joint police operations and a clear signal: Albania is safe and you are going back.

By 2024, the results were staggering. Weekly flights were whisking deportees home, with each jet a nail in the coffin of the smuggling networks that once thrived on our porous borders. That was not luck or loud threats but cold, hard execution, bolstered by UK-funded cameras on the Albania-Kosovo frontier and Albanian officers embedded in Dover.

I think that the hon. Gentleman is somewhat overstating the impact of the Albania policy. After the initial agreement was signed, we saw a massive spike in numbers coming from Albania, and the numbers had already started to fall before the communiqué was signed. The correlation and causation arguments that he is making on the Albania scheme do not add up at all.

What is effective? The deal reduced the number of people coming from Albania by more than 90%. If we could get a few more agreements like that, we would be on the way—that would be huge progress. The Albania deal represented huge progress; to suggest otherwise is wrong. It choked off routes before boats had even launched and had a real impact.

Would the hon. Gentleman at least accept that the Albania returns were largely due to large numbers of foreign national offenders, who are a completely different category of people from those we are talking about in either this clause or this Bill?

We would want to return foreign national offenders; that is really positive. But the number of people choosing to cross because of that deterrent effect went down by not 10% or 20%, but by more than 90%. More than 90% fewer people arrived from Albania in small boats. That is huge progress. If we can replicate that elsewhere, I will be a very happy boy because we would see a huge impact on those crossings across the piece.

New clause 27 is hellbent on repealing that backbone, oblivious to how crossings from Albanians were successfully slashed, while the Rwanda threat kept smugglers guessing. If the Liberal Democrats prevail, every bilateral deal will be on the chopping block. Imagine Albanian numbers roaring back to 12,000, with other current surges unchecked. That is not progress; it is sabotage—a reckless bid to unravel a system that is finally biting back at the chaos. Do the Liberal Democrats not want to be able to remove people from this country who have entered illegally? Do they believe that any national of a safe country should be able to seek asylum in the UK? Can Liberal Democrat Members explain why that would not create a massive pull factor and encourage people to cross the channel in small boats?

The Liberal Democrats are also seeking to repeal sections 15 to 17 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which specify that the Secretary of State must declare an asylum claim made by a person who is a national of an EU member state inadmissible. Why would the Liberal Democrats believe that anyone from the EU needs to claim asylum here? Picture this scene, which is so utterly ridiculous that it strains the bounds of credulity: an EU citizen, perhaps some laid-back Amsterdamer, pedalling along the city’s picturesque canals one sunny afternoon, tulips nodding in the breeze, then suddenly deciding to chuck it all, hop on a ferry and pitch up on Dover’s pebbled shores, requesting asylum, as if the Netherlands’ orderly bike lanes and windmill-dotted horizons had morphed into a scene from—

We are witnessing some particularly theatrical prose, perhaps for the first time. Has Boris Johnson got a new job as the hon. Gentleman’s speechwriter?

His writing seems to be going quite well at the moment. I do not know that I have the cash for him.

What I have described is not asylum. We cannot pretend that the EU’s 27 nations and its vast tapestry of safe, stable and prosperous lands—we can take our pick of France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and so on, each a bastion of peace and plenty—somehow warrant the same desperate lifeline that we reserve for those fleeing real and genuine chaos. This is the same organisation that the Liberal Democrats supposedly want to build closer ties with. They also want the UK to grant asylum to people who come to this country having already been in a country where they have claimed and been granted asylum. Why are the Liberal Democrats encouraging people to cross the channel when they already have asylum or can claim asylum in a safe third country?

Just like the Labour Government, the Liberal Democrats want to remove sections of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 that allow local and public authorities to conduct an age assessment on an age-disputed person. As we discussed before when the SNP did not wish those who claim to be a child to be treated as an adult, every European country apart from ours uses scientific age assessment techniques such as an X-ray of the wrist. As we have said, there are also other methods. More than 50% of those claiming to be children were found to be adults after an age assessment in the quarter before the election. Without a scientific age assessment method, it is very hard to determine age. Given the horror stories in this area, why do Liberal Democrats want to put the people of this country at risk, and blindly allow unverified people into the UK?

Let us now talk about a nightmare unfolding right under our noses: one that the Liberal Democrats seem hellbent on making worse. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, 560 adults—grown men with stubble, receding hairlines and years behind them—had the gall to pose as kids, slipping through the cracks until scientific age checks, such as wrist X-rays and dental scans that every sensible European nation uses, caught them red handed and stopped them cold.

The Lib Dems’ new clause 27 would axe those checks and rip out the one tool keeping us from dumping people who are 25 years old or even older into classrooms alongside children. That is not some abstract risk. It has happened and it is real; it means men in their 20s sitting at desks meant for teens, all because we have let sentiment trump science. That would not protect children, but endanger them—a reckless gamble that would turn schools into hunting grounds and parents into nervous wrecks, all so the Lib Dems can pat themselves on the back for being compassionate. If they get their way, every classroom will have a question mark. How many 25-year-olds will slip through before the damage is done?

What do the Liberal Democrats believe should happen if the authorities believe a migrant who is claiming to be under 18 is actually an adult? Do they believe that such people should be placed in schools with schoolchildren? Again, it seems as though the Liberal Democrats want to strip the Government of any power to control who comes to the country. That would see net migration drastically increase.

The issue cuts deeper than policy, however; it is about what people expect, and the Liberal Democrats’ new clause pulls hard against that grain. Voters have signalled what they want loud and clear, with 68%—nearly seven in 10—backing tougher border controls in surveys: a call echoing from Dover to Folkestone, where residents live with the reality of arrivals day by day. That is not a passing opinion; it is a steady demand—rooted in years of debate, from the 2016 Brexit vote to the 2019 landslide—for a system that prioritises their say.

I do not know what the hon. Gentleman had for lunch, but perhaps we should find out and get some of it ourselves. We can then all compete with the poet laureate and the virtuoso performance that we have just heard.

I am going to talk about the new clause, however, which is in respect of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. The hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire is proposing that numerous sections of the 2022 Act be repealed under the Bill.

I should start by making it clear that we are determined to restore order to the asylum system, so that it operates swiftly, firmly and fairly, and ensures that the rules are properly enforced. That is a financial necessity to deal with the backlogs that we have inherited—the permit backlog in particular, but also others, especially in the appeals space—so that the costs do not continue to mount up at the expense of the taxpayer. Getting the system moving again is an important part of what we have been doing.

Following the election, the Home Secretary acted rapidly to change the law to remove the retrospective application of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which allowed decision makers to decide asylum claims from individuals who arrived in the UK from 7 March 2023. Previously, there was a ban on that, because of the duty to remove, which was never going to be sensibly put into effect.

I am not going to speak to every section of the Nationality and Borders Act, but the hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire wants us to repeal very large chunks of the Act under the new clause. I will mention only a few, and I hope that she will forgive me for not talking about every section.

The introduction of the national age assessment board, for example, in March 2023, relies on a piece of the Nationality and Borders Act that the hon. Lady wishes to repeal. In the interim, since that Act has come into being, we have introduced the national age assessment board and made it available across the country. It continues to offer significant improvement to our processes for assessing age, including creating greater consistency in age assessment practices, which can be very inconsistent in the practical delivery of Merton-compliant assessments in different local authorities—some are more experienced and some better at it than others. The national age assessment board creates a standard and a bar below which it is hard to go. It sets important standards in age assessment, improves quality and ensures that ages are recorded correctly for immigration purposes.

The Nationality and Borders Act also placed protections and support under the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings on a legislative footing for the first time in the UK. That includes the right to a recovery period in the national referral mechanism, during which potential victims of modern slavery and trafficking are eligible for support and are protected from removal from the UK. The Act provides the means to disqualify individuals—I suspect that this may be the bit that the hon. Member for Mid Dunbartonshire objects to—from protections or support on the grounds of public order or bad faith. However, that is in line with article 13 of the convention; that part of the Nationality and Borders Act put the convention into UK law. I am surprised she is suggesting that we should remove it.

The Act also sets out the circumstances in which confirmed victims of slavery and trafficking may be granted temporary permission to stay in the UK. The Government will be launching a public consultation, before summer recess, on how we can improve the process of identifying victims of modern slavery. We will provide details on that consultation in due course.

The Act also introduced the establishment of a clear two-limb test for assessing whether an asylum seeker has a well-founded fear of persecution and raised the standard of proof that an asylum seeker must satisfy for certain elements of the test to the higher “balance of probabilities” standard. That is helping to ensure that only those who genuinely require protection are granted it in the UK, while those who do not qualify will be removed. The Government are committed to restoring order to the asylum system, and the Bill supports our aim in ensuring that the system operates swiftly, firmly and fairly. The examples outlined demonstrate the practical benefits of keeping the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 on the statute book. It follows that I do not agree that new clause 27 should be added to the Bill.

I thank the Minister for her clear outline. The Liberal Democrats want to enable the replacement of large portions of the Nationality and Borders Act and ensure that we uphold the refugee convention. We wish to push the new clause to a vote.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

The Committee divided: Ayes 3, Noes 13.

Question accordingly negatived.