32
Examination of witness
Rt Hon Shabana Mahmood MP.
Q1 The Chair: Home Secretary, welcome. Apologies for the stifling heat in this room. I hope you can cope with that heat, plus the heat that may be generated by the questions from members of the committee. We are absolutely delighted to see you. Thank you very much for coming. Without further ado, we will kick off with a nice opening question from Lord Tope.
Lord Tope: Thank you, Home Secretary. A good general question to start with: what do you see as the current challenges in your department and what effect has the defence investment plan had on your budget and your challenges?
Shabana Mahmood: Thank you very much for that. Let me deal with it in two parts. Broadly, on the general challenges, it is the Home Office; by definition, it is a challenging department. There is always a lot going on in our bit of the forest. We have big reform programmes under way across most of our areas of business, in migration and policing, and in the broader homeland security space, given that we have the Southport inquiry phase 1 report, with some legislation happening already on state threats and more to follow. There is just a lot on. Making sure that we keep on track, monitor our performance and delivery and hold ourselves to account is a big job of work in and of itself.
I have said before that I do not think that the Home Office is fit for purpose yet, but I think that we are on a trajectory with the changes that are being made by the previous Permanent Secretary, who is now the Cabinet Secretary, and Gareth Davies, who has joined us as the current Perm Sec. There is a programme of transformation for the Home Office itself and how it functions, who does what and what the oversight looks like. We are making changes, which I am happy to talk to the committee about in more detail. Policy and transformation in the Home Office are very big pieces of work, which are inherently of a challenging nature, but I feel confident that we can deliver. The combination of the changes that are being made in personnel and political direction stand us in good stead.
On money and the defence investment plan, like all departments, we have been asked to take a 1% cut in our capital budget. For 2026-27, that equates to £17 million, which sounds like a much smaller amount of money compared to other government departments that have much bigger capital budgets. Our budget for this year is £1.7 billion. It will grow over the spending review period and the period that the defence investment plan covers. It is much smaller in comparison to other government departments.
Many of you will be more familiar with some of those areas of spend because they have been the subject of scrutiny in both Houses of Parliament before. The Airwave programme, the emergency services mobile communications programme, is a very mature programme and it accounts for the biggest proportion of our capital spend. Most of the rest of our capital spend is on clear departmental priorities: migration, borders, border security, asylum accommodation and so on. I have not yet made final decisions on where our contribution will come from. I expect to be able to make up most of that from our work on estates and internal Home Office IT planning, but those are live conversations that are occurring as we speak.
Lord Tope: I am sure that we will pursue more of that in various aspects as we go on. In short, you are not expecting any serious budgetary problems as a result of the defence change?
Shabana Mahmood: No, I hope not. I hope it is possible to manage the pressure in a way that does not impact on the key departmental priorities. It would be a non-starter to take money out of very mature programmes; you would end up spending more money to get out of them than you would making any saving at all. I feel confident that there will be a path to find the sums that we are expected to find. That will probably mean a deprioritisation of some of our estates work and IT work. Those sorts of changes are never ideal but, of course, it is part of a broader need to fill a budget requirement in another very important department.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We will spend quite a bit of time looking at some of the issues that are priority areas for you. We will begin with policing.
Q2 Lord Bach: Home Secretary, I want to ask about your response to the police leadership commission report, which was published yesterday. How do you feel the Home Office will incorporate the recommendations from this important report with the establishment of a new national police service, as well as fewer individual police forces? The final part of the question is: how do you see trust in policing being restored? Does it need to be restored? I speak as a former elected police and crime commissioner who was lucky enough to have an outstanding chief constable, who even today is much missed.
Shabana Mahmood: On the police leadership commission’s work, I am very grateful to Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert and their commission panel members for the very in-depth and detailed piece of work they have done. We had an Oral Statement in the Commons yesterday, to which the Policing Minister responded for me and the wider Government. We very much welcome all their work. We will set out a more detailed response on all the recommendations a little later in the year. We need some time to digest some of them. I have had a good conversation with Lord Blunkett and Lord Herbert about their recommendations, as well as with other policing system leaders.
My broader reflections are that it is a very necessary piece of work and it is very timely, given the reform programme that we have set out for the broader policing system. This very much fits with the direction of travel that we have set on a national police service, providing national leadership on these sorts of issues. There is a very neat joining-up; it was not necessarily planned that way, because the review was commissioned before I was in post and before the policing reform programme was settled policy, with a Bill to follow later this year. I see those things as very complementary. In the policing reform White Paper, we set out our expectations of where we want to go with public policy on the professionalisation of the workforce. There is a happy joining-up of these two pieces of work and we will certainly look to build that into the wider police reform programme. I think that it sits well.
This report has focused on broader trust in policing, but that has also been in public debate over the last few months, with some incidents causing a lot of legitimate and understandable public debate. The average, everyday police officers do their job: they run towards danger and keep us safe as a country. I do not want a discussion about things that are not good enough in policing or where improvements are definitely needed, including on leadership and the work of this report, to take away from what we experience with the vast majority of not just rank and file police officers but police system leaders, chief constables and others.
Clearly, though, when incidents occur that cost public confidence, that suggest that mistakes are being made in practice in a way that rules are applied to people—whether that is videos on social media that suggest that a particular approach is being taken to tweets and other material, or whether it is much more systemic, based on how officers have responded to an incident, as we have seen in the Nowak murder—then those instances legitimately raise issues of public confidence. The reason is that you have to be able to trust your police: that no matter where you are in this country, when you call 999 or report something to the police your standard of service will not be worse than somebody else’s.
There are some questions and I have had things to say since I have been in post on non-crime hate incidents, the need for us to have a much more consistent approach to public order and, particularly, the way that we apply our public order legislation. That is why Lord Ken Macdonald has been doing a review for the Government. In areas of practice where there is enough inconsistency to be concerned or there is confusion, I have already tried to set public policy in a much stronger and clear direction, including by commissioning reviews, which I hope, once they have reported and we have responded, will provide consistency and clarity in our frameworks.
I do not think we have a mass system problem, but we definitely have problems in the system and they definitely need fixing.
Q3 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: I have a supplementary on that, if I may. You are investing quite a lot of money on live facial recognition units for the police. I know how useful they can be. You have also committed to introducing clearer rules and independent oversight in the police reform Bill. Can you tell us any more about that regime? In particular, is it only the police who will be regulated in their use of live facial recognition or will there be constraints on private sector users of that technology?
Shabana Mahmood: The legal framework that has developed through case law and the testing that we have seen in reports already, based on the police’s common law powers and wider responsibilities on data protection and so on, will be codified in the police reform Bill. That is a necessary step to give confidence to the wider policing system, but you can also then make sure that you have consistent application of the same rules. Consistency and confidence in using the framework is necessary, although, as I say, the recent legal judgments have validated the case for its use at the moment.
We are still nailing down the policy details, so forgive me if I do not give a precis of what will be in the Bill, but it will build on a consultation that took place and closed not long ago, where we received a lot of responses that focused on the need to have a framework that is capable of keeping up with changes in this area. The technology is moving very quickly, and a lot of the consultation responses focused on making sure that we have robust rules that can hold and stand the test of time. There definitely will be a need for a body to provide independent oversight. We think that a single expert body in this area will be necessary, with broader transparency safeguards on top of that. While I cannot give you the exact policy design today, those are the areas that you would expect us to look at, which we are.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich: If you are a shop or a business and you are using this technology, will you be subject to regulation?
Shabana Mahmood: Again, that is not yet the subject of a decision. There is already a framework that applies here on data protection and so on. Even if you are not a police force, it is not an unregulated or unlawful space. I would like to consider that in more detail before we step into a wider application, but all I will say for now is that the policy there is not yet settled.
The Chair: Can you explain why it is all taking so long? The consultation on this closed five months ago, yet you are still unable to tell us what is actually going to happen. As an addition to that, given that you believe it is so important to have this new legislative underpinning of the use of LFR, why have you allowed so many different forms of extension—for example, for mobile LFR equipment to fixed LFR equipment—without having a proper legal underpinning?
Shabana Mahmood: There is a legal underpinning and the courts have found that the use of LFR, as it has been used by police forces, is legal.
The Chair: I am sorry, Home Secretary, you have said that there needs to be a proper legal underpinning.
Shabana Mahmood: For reasons of clarity and consistency of practice across 43 forces. I think only some 18 forces in total have made use of live facial recognition in some form or another. Of course, what the current judgments have told us about the current use of LFR does not extend to potential future changes in this area of technology. That is why a robust legal framework could have broader application in this area of tech. There would be a need for it. Even if I said that I did not want to put anything related to this particular type of LFR on the statute book, I have a responsibility to try to pre-empt where some of this technology is heading, put those broader powers into one place and make sure that there is an oversight mechanism. At the moment there is not one single expert body overseeing this system. That is an important thing to maintain public confidence, especially as more of it is used.
By the way, Lord Foster, given my experience in government over the last two years, I do not think five months on from the closure of a consultation that had many responses is bad going. I have already received advice and started to consider where my decisions will fall on the policy design, but there will be a policing reform Bill later this year and it will contain measures that relate to this. From consultation to potential legislative change, that is a pretty good record.
The Chair: People may question that.
Shabana Mahmood: You may disagree.
The Chair: Let us move on to another aspect of policing.
Q4 Baroness Buscombe: Home Secretary, I have not heard the word “powers” used by you yet on police and police leadership. My question relates to our rural towns and villages right across the UK where, quite frankly, a lot of us feel it is now completely lawless. We have community support officers, but they have no powers of arrest or of stop and search. They cannot look into organised crime, which is rife across the United Kingdom. We have established networks of county lines drugs. We try to make contact with our local police and we get nothing back. We are just told we are there to give them intelligence, but nothing happens when we give them intelligence. I know we had Operation Machinize, but has it actually targeted any rural areas? Everything I have seen has been around the inner cities.
Shabana Mahmood: Thank you for your question. I can deal with the specific issues on organised crime in rural areas if you would like or go broader but, as a general principle, one of the aspects of the policing reform programme is a new three-tiered model for policing, looking forward into the future. The national police service and where we might land with regional strategic forces is the bit that has lots of interest. Lord Hogan-Howe of your parish is doing an independent review into the right number of forces for the middle tier for me.
The thing that has less interest but, to me, is the absolute building block of policing going forward is local policing areas. Without pre-empting where I think Bernard will get to in his review, I do not think it will be a million miles away from saying that local policing areas should be aligned to local authority boundaries. I see that as the way of being able to make sure that your standard of service is not different in an urban area or a rural area, because it is based on your local policing area, which will be the absolute bedrock of policing in this country.
I am sure there will still be a need, at strategic and national police service level, to make sure that we think about the particular issues that you get in rural areas, where you have smaller populations but spread over a bigger land footprint. Also, you get very specific types of crime that target rural areas, for which it is necessary to make sure we have a tailored response. We already have our rural crime unit and a specific unit on wildlife crime that is run nationally. There will still be a need for national consideration of how we think about issues that are very different in a rural area compared to the rest of the country, but the new building blocks will be local policing areas, which will get rid of the sense of disparity between different types of communities. That will pick up issues on coastal communities and others.
On organised crime specifically, you mentioned Operation Machinize, which was an excellent National Crime Agency programme. I hope you have seen that the Government have decided to build on that with a national crackdown, with £30 million of new money allocated to a national strategy to deal with exactly the kind of crime that you describe: illegality on the high street, whether that is mini-marts, vape shops, other outfits—the kind where anyone who lives in these communities thinks there is probably something not great going on here. It often has links not just to organised crime, usually not at the drugs level, but to organised immigration crime.
Baroness Buscombe: It is drugs as well. I have been watching it.
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, there is a bit of everything. You will pick up on any one of those raids—I did one with police officers recently—everything from illegal tobacco, illegal vapes, immigration infringements.
Baroness Buscombe: Turkish barbers.
Shabana Mahmood: Lots of these businesses are popping up in communities all over the country. That is what the national crackdown is about. We have allocated a specific sum of money to three forces in particular where we know, based on intelligence, that there is a stronger footprint for some of this criminality, but there is a national pot for all areas to bid into. The National Crime Agency will still be doing its national crackdown work with every force in the country, so I hope that the issues that you see in your community will be picked up that way as well.
Baroness Buscombe: Yes, but I am really worried because if it is about local authorities, that sort of model does not work. We know that organised crime is all about networks. It is not just the odd shop, this or that; it is networks that are embedded across different local authorities, so there has to be some sort of overarching approach. I was pleased that the Government have accepted, in effect, an amendment which I won to the Crime and Policing Bill, to have much better closure orders to give the police the chance to do the work that they need to do, but they have to be able to cross boundaries.
Shabana Mahmood: It was a National Crime Agency programme, so it was national in nature and it will continue to be; it is a national crackdown. What I was saying on local authority areas was to make the case on the wider reform programme. I hear a lot of worry from colleagues, legitimately, about the position in relation to rural areas, given the specific challenges of policing rural areas compared with urban city centres, such as my constituency. There is always a concern about whether you can have a police service that is able to deal with the very local and different sorts of communities we have, and do a good job nationally.
At the moment, we have a police service that is neither local enough to deal with those local issues nor national enough to be able to give a strategic overview of the system. That is the gap that the reforms are designed to fill. The national police service does the national work. The local police service will be the bedrock of policing in the future; that will deal with local issues. In the middle, we will have much more strategic larger forces that are able to do the specialist investigations that we need.
Can I say one thing on the crackdown on high street illegality? One of the important parts of the programme that we have launched is the police working alongside local authority enforcement officers, but also tax—HMRC is involved—and immigration enforcement. It is a recognition that this is not one type of criminality. Entrepreneurial criminals are well designed to be able to slip through lots of different nets at the same time. We are deliberately choosing to fund work for immigration enforcement and HMRC because we know that it is a multifaceted problem.
Baroness Buscombe: Could we make sure that the local community police officers understand what is going on around them? My local police lady, who has just retired after 20 years of being in the village, did not have a clue of what was going on, but it is before our eyes every night and every day.
Shabana Mahmood: Please write to me with specific details so I can follow up.
Baroness Buscombe: It is not my village, but it is an example.
Shabana Mahmood: We have already rolled out the Government’s reforms on neighbourhood policing and the neighbourhood policing pledge: having a named, contactable officer in every neighbourhood in the country. I am always keen to hear experiences from the coalface where that is not working as it should. I also have my officials and others in the policing system to test that these pledges, once made and told that they are delivered, are in fact being delivered, not just once but consistently. Please let me know if you think that is not the experience.
Thank you for your work on the amendment. You will know that our intention is to go from six months to 12 months. We have done the quick consultation that was required of us in the recent Act and we will move very quickly here. I think that will make a difference.
That is why bringing different agencies together is really important. If you are a neighbourhood officer, it is not immediately obvious. You are not there to do immigration enforcement, so you might pass something on and it feels like nothing has happened. You might have some concerns about dodgy tax dealings but, again, it is not in your remit so you move on to something else. That is why the national crackdown, with all of the different agencies involved, is an important step forward. I hope we will see change in communities all over the country.
Baroness Buscombe: Yes, I feel encouraged.
The Chair: I am sure Baroness Buscombe will be beating a path to your door to take this further.
Baroness Buscombe: No, I am very encouraged by what the Home Secretary has said.
The Chair: Good. There you are; you have cheered up one of the members of the committee.
Shabana Mahmood: It is an important area. It affects public confidence in local communities.
Q5 The Chair: Exactly, and underpinning the question was that people who live in rural areas—I declare an interest as one—believe that policing tends to be centralised, focused on and with real attention given to the urban areas. Is it not true that, currently, if you look at police funding, there is less funding per head in rural areas, which have far more expenses because of longer distances to travel and so on, compared to funding per head in urban areas? If you are going to focus the third tier of your policing structure on local authority areas, will you ensure that there is a fair funding settlement so that policing in rural areas is funded at least as well as in urban areas?
Shabana Mahmood: We have committed to making sure that, as the reforms are rolled out, there will be a review of the funding formula, because the structure of policing will be very different. That is a necessity that will have to be considered properly. On the building blocks, I do not think it is helpful to say that crime is lower in some rural areas, or that the experience or perception of crime is up or down, because these numbers change. I do not want people to think that I am not taking seriously the sense of not being treated fairly. I very much am. Structurally, a new organising principle for policing that is based on local police areas helps to eliminate the sense of unfairness and means that, at the very local level, you are able to take account properly of the type of community that you are policing. That would be on very large areas that have to be covered and require more travel.
The Chair: That confidence will come only if people in rural areas see that they are getting adequate levels of policing and are not seeing that that happens in urban areas but does not happen in rural areas.
Shabana Mahmood: It will be important, therefore, to make sure, as the reforms are rolled out, that the LPAs are functioning well and that people understand who their local force is. This is to be settled once Lord Hogan-Howe does his report. We will make policy decisions in this area, but the intention with a smaller number of larger regional and strategic forces is there are some activities of policing where your outcomes for public protection are better at scale. This is why I talk about specialist investigations in the middle tier, or the ability to do surge policing when you have public order incidents. It is very hard to do at small force level without having to rely on mutual aid. It is much easier to do when you have a bigger force.
We are trying to strike the right balance between a local police service that can give confidence to communities that shoplifters or prolific offenders who have a drug habit, for example, are not allowed to run amok with no one paying a huge amount of attention to them, and, at a national police service level, being able to give confidence to the system that there is some grip on the strategy for dealing with very serious organised crime, counterterror challenges and the broader national picture. In the middle, you have the specialist investigations, public order and other work as well, such as regional organised crime.
It is about making sure that the structure can deliver a system that gives us a police service that is fit for the modern world, that can keep pace with all the challenges and the new ways in which criminals behave, but can give confidence at the local level that you know who your local cops are and what they are supposed to do for you. It helps the Home Secretary know that, at national level, there is strategic leadership of the system that is very much needed.
As a country, we have done a really good job of taking an irrational model of 43 differently sized forces doing things 43 different ways, and have layered on to it national capabilities, mutual aid arrangements and ad hoc fixes to problems to get through. That is not the vision I have for how we do public protection in this country and I think we deserve better.
The Chair: Let us hope that one of our committee members who is not with us today, Lord Hogan-Howe, is in complete agreement with you as he comes up with his plan. This may sound incredibly trivial but I am going to say it: this committee produced a report on what you have described as shoplifting. We were very clear that “shoplifting” diminishes how serious it is. We are delighted that the Prime Minister now always calls it shop theft, and it would be helpful if you, as Home Secretary, could do the same.
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, forgive me. That was an inadvertent slip of the tongue. As somebody who grew up in a corner shop, whose first job was serving customers in my parents’ corner shop, and having watched people steal stuff from our corner shop, I have very strong views about all things related to shop theft and the seriousness with which it should be treated.
The Chair: Very good. Thank you.
Q6 Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Home Secretary, hello. I want to ask you about violence against women and girls and the Government’s approach to that. My colleague Baroness Bertin will follow with a supplementary about a particular aspect of that. In the last year or so, we have had the safer streets mission and yet another strategy on violence against women and girls. Those are apparently key priorities for the Government. What progress has been made in achieving reductions in incidences of violence against women and girls?
Shabana Mahmood: Thank you very much. It is a little early on the measure that has been adopted. The Government have a landmark pledge of halving levels of violence against women and girls over the course of a decade. The way that is being measured, in how to think about progress, is on the—
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Is this the ONS measure?
Shabana Mahmood: No, it is on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, and it is the proportion of people over 16 who have experienced domestic abuse, sexual assault or, I think, stalking over the previous 12 months. That is the measure that we have adopted to give us a sense of whether we are making progress against that pledge. It is a little early to draw any conclusions. The first set of data suggested a very small decrease, but not to be statistically significant in any way; it is nought point something per cent down. We expect to make progress on that measure over the rest of this Parliament and then, all being well, into the next or for a future Government to think about.
We have made more progress on delivery of our manifesto commitments to tackle violence against women and girls. This has been a cross-government effort. It is a Home Office lead, but a huge amount of work has been done in the Ministry of Justice and with colleagues in education and health. There is good delivery of the very specific manifesto commitments that were made, whether on stalking protection orders, domestic abuse protection orders as well as notices, and other specific legislative measures that we committed to.
On the approach taken by us at the Home Office, if you are placing a few big bets, which I guess is a way to think about it, then where do you think you can make the biggest difference very quickly for women and girls? We focus quite a bit of our effort on the protection space, so on current victims of violence. That is where the new protective orders regime comes in. Some 1,000 women are being protected much more strongly with the new DAPO regime, for example. We focus quite a bit of effort on perpetrators and the Drive programme specifically, to encourage these individuals to change their behaviour, turn their lives around to prevent more victims being created.
Given how concerned I and others have been around the ever-younger age group that we are seeing for nude images in child sexual abuse, where the age of perpetrators is dropping in a horrifying way, we have decided to go big on efforts with technology companies and on device-level controls. We see the announcement we recently made on device-level controls as a way of having one big change that we think can decrease the number of victims and, effectively, of child perpetrators.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: Thank you. I think the combined measure you referred to of domestic abuse, sexual abuse and stalking was developed by the ONS. It used the crime survey data, as you say, to develop that measure. It does not include any online abuse; we will take that up with you. How effective do you feel the Home Office is at progressing this strategy? The ability of the Home Office to get buy-in from other departments has been criticised by the Public Accounts Committee. There is a lot we can see with implementation but, in actual progress, this is the fourth strategy since 2010. We have had a plethora of strategies but not very much impact on the incidence of violence that women and girls are experiencing. Do you have any concerns at all about the ability of the Home Office to be strong in this territory and to push the progress that is needed?
Shabana Mahmood: The difference between previous approaches and this Government’s approach is that it is not just a cross-government effort. The Home Office has come up with this itself and has gone off to work out whether we can get any of the other government departments to take an interest. All the work on the Government’s commitment and the strategy that underpins it has been led by the Prime Minister. It is the Prime Minister who has convened government departments and the Prime Minister and his own office who have been in discussion with government departments about the things that they will do in their areas to have a meaningful impact, exactly as you say, on the scourge of violence against women and girls. I cannot speak for previous strategies or previous government approaches, but what this Government are doing has come not just from me as Home Secretary or my predecessor in this job but from the Prime Minister himself. I do not think that will change.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford: But just months ago Jess Phillips resigned, citing the lack of progress in reducing violence against women and girls and in implementing the strategy. As you know, she expressed her frustration at the lack of action and progress across government. The Public Accounts Committee has, as I say, questioned the ability of the Home Office, notwithstanding who is leading it, to get buy-in from other departments. There have been other commentators who take a different view of whether this really is a cross-government strategy in terms of implementation.
Shabana Mahmood: Jess Phillips was a Minister in my team. She is also a personal friend and a constituency neighbour. I have nothing but the highest regard for her work, her specialism and her expertise in this area, and the very unique way in which Jess was able to push to get this to be the kind of priority it needs to be. She did a great job and that work needs to be built on by all of us.
I am not going to get into the wider context of what has happened with the Labour Party and the Prime Minister’s own position, but I can assure the committee that we have a very clear sense, as the Home Office, of what our contribution is to delivering this strategy and to making sure that women and girls in our country are safer. Of the things that I know Jess was very concerned about not having made enough progress on, we were able to make the announcement on device-level controls not too long ago, although sadly after her resignation. That would not have happened without her personally putting in the effort that she did.
Trying to make one thing a priority for every government department is always difficult. I used to be on the Public Accounts Committee, so I understand the unique perspective that committee brings to things; I am sure it will have seen a lot of this before. We have a landmark commitment out there; we expect to be held to account on it and I welcome that scrutiny in making sure that not only the Home Office but other government departments are making progress on it.
Q7 Baroness Bertin: Let us carry on with discussing online VAWG. It is obvious, if you are a Government who are really serious about trying to reduce violence against women and girls, that the online space is where it is at. We have certainly made some progress in that area. I am not going to shy away from that and I congratulate the Government on it. For example, the specifics on upgrading laws on pornography are great and we are all delighted with that, but will it be enforced? It seems outrageous that there is blatantly illegal behaviour, such as chat forums, chat discussions and semi-regulated chatrooms where there are discussions and toolkits on how to drug and rape your wife. If that was a conversation about how to make a bomb it would be closed down immediately; there would be a global effort, by the way, to close down those kinds of things.
It feels to me that we still look away from the recurrent, terrible online content that actively encourages violence against women and we do not do enough. A specific point on that is around tech. I have spoken to lots of private firms and lots of people who understand what they are talking about on this. If the Government are really serious about spearheading technology to properly get a lot of this stuff down, we could do it and we could be global leaders. I wanted to kick off with that and have one supplementary as well, if I may.
Shabana Mahmood: I agree that the online space is where it is at, with the enablement of much more mass offending and offending that takes place across national boundaries. That is definitely a new feature—well, it is not new any more—of the tech environment that we have been living in for the last decade or so. That has to sit alongside a broader government approach on what the future of online safety looks like. Violence against women and girls is absolutely one part of that picture, but there are broader concerns in the online space that, I agree, demand a new kind of policy response.
On what I am directly responsible for, I hope that my and the Home Office’s willingness to look at device-level control is a statement of intent. It is primarily about nudity and children’s ability to see or create nude images on their phones. We already know that the tech companies can age verify and do so in other ways. It is not a stretch for them. It is a perfectly fair bit of regulation to require of them. If they do not act, we will legislate to make that the new norm. That is a statement of intent for how seriously we take the tech environment and of our willingness to intervene to make it a safer space.
It is a reasonable place to start with children, just because of the number of perpetrators who are now children. Children become almost accidental sex offenders before they even know what sex is. That is a big societal problem, so I think that is the right place to start, but I agree that cannot be the end of our progress. We have to think much more carefully about policy design. To go to the previous question from Baroness Hughes, that is the cross-government bit of work that probably needs much more creativity. That is where the emerging practice is moving very quickly and we feel it is a struggle for Governments around the world to keep up.
Baroness Bertin: I also think it is creativity but, to your point earlier, there are some things that you can do quite quickly that can make a big difference. For example, my team quite recently googled “rape porn” and found a website dedicated to rape porn that is not behind an age-verified system. That is illegal. Depictions of rape have been illegal for a long time, so that site, as far as I am concerned, is an illegal site. How can it be right that a search company like Google is allowing that to come up on the front page? The law is already there, so I urge you to work with other departments to make these changes very quickly. Perhaps we are getting to a place where there should be some kind of duty to report on tech companies vis-à-vis violence against women and girls, because suddenly the executives sitting around the board table would think, “Crikey, I have to worry about this a lot more than, frankly, I am at the moment”.
Shabana Mahmood: This is not the first time that the duty to report has been raised with me. We will need a new suite of policy responses in this area; I believe that personally. The more in-depth work, now and into the future, will be in this space. Let me write to you on enforcement. We have already started to do some work on that but, obviously, it is not going anywhere near fast enough. That is always my concern: the legislation is the easy bit of the spectrum and it is about how you get the actual enforcement, because that is the only way that you change behaviours. I will happily write to you on that.
Baroness Bertin: I would appreciate that dialogue, because I have a few views that I will not bore everyone with here.
Shabana Mahmood: I also offer that broader dialogue, because we value the work that you have done here. We have some commitments that we have to fulfil where there is engagement between our officials and your team on your porn review and getting to parity, which is obviously important. I am happy to fold in a conversation about enforcement as well.
Baroness Berridge: Thank you, Home Secretary. Talking about enforcement, there is the introduction of controlling and coercive behaviour for when we need to prosecute in the domestic situation. I had cause to come across your statutory guidance of 91 pages on coercion and control in the context of the assisted dying law, where that was a big part of the issue in introducing an offence of pressure. In the context of doing research on that, it was reported to me that there are potentially problems for lawyers and part-time judges in getting the prosecution—it is a policing and justice issue—because the controlling and coercive behaviour guidance is so detailed and not properly understood. Have you come across that? We need to make sure we can prosecute, and they are struggling with the complexity of being able to investigate, advise and prosecute.
Shabana Mahmood: I am afraid that has never been raised with me; in fact, quite the opposite. When I was in my previous role at the Ministry of Justice and here, my impression, from what I heard, is that it is new but working well. If that is not the case then I very much welcome hearing from you. If you write to me, I can go off and test your findings against what my team has sent to me.
Baroness Berridge: Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you for raising it.
Q8 Lord Moraes: Good afternoon, Home Secretary, and thanks for taking our questions while I drink my Diet Coke; it is a hot one today. I want to ask you about the fairer pathway to settlement proposals. The committee looked at that in detail and there are different views on it, but what there is not a difference in views on is that these are really significant changes. We have big, unprecedented delays to settlement, retrospectivity, knock-on effects on issues like child citizenship, and so on. They are quite substantial.
I want to ask you a very basic question about the justification for the proposals. To be helpful, you told the Commons Home Affairs Committee in February—you have said it very clearly, to be fair—that the reforms to ILR are precipitated by the scale of recent migration to the UK. I get it; I am not being naive. I understand that and you have been clear and unambiguous, but I want to ask you why you introduced the idea in March that without the changes—this is another justification for dealing with ILR people—there would be a £10 billion drain on our public finances. You talked about the use of public services, which, ironically, many of these people provide in adult social care and in the NHS. They are friends and neighbours. They do not quite benefit in the same way as other cohorts in the UK.
Is that a good way of talking about these people, when the figures you rely on, the MAC figures, indicate a net positive economic contribution for at least the next 20 years? The kinds of figures you are talking about, again to be slightly helpful, for pensions and so on will not be affected by these delays. These are working age benefits, working people who are not claiming benefits on the whole. Going forward to the consultation, will you remove that idea and stick to the numbers? They are anxious. What is your response to that?
Shabana Mahmood: Indefinite leave to remain is a lifelong benefit. It is not a short-term benefit or a status that you receive for five, 10 or 20 years, or until you become a pensioner. It is a lifelong benefit in the sense that once you receive indefinite leave to remain you may permanently remain in the country for the rest of your life. Whether you choose then to become a citizen is a personal matter and people make their own choices on that. I do not think it is unreasonable to look at a lifetime cost of a status that is conferred for a lifetime. I challenge the underlying assumption there. This debate is contested and there will always be strong views, but I tend to think on these things that it is better to stick to the numbers and the facts. As I say, this is a lifelong status, not a temporary one. Therefore, looking at lifetime cost is perfectly reasonable.
Given what we have seen over the last few years, this is a pattern of migration into the country that we have never seen before in our history. No other comparable number or type of migration has occurred here. When people like my granddad came to the country, net migration was bumbling along at 50,000 or 60,000 a year. In the last few years, the numbers have approached almost a million. This is a scale of change that we have never seen before.
The other thing that is unique to this cohort that demands public policy consideration is that we have also never dropped our skills requirements in quite this way with this sort of number ever before. It had been the case, before the so-called Boris wave, that the skills requirements were RQF grade 6 and above, which is a proxy for skilled workers. That was dropped to below RQF level 6 and now accounts for a very large number of not just visa holders who have arrived from different parts of the world but the very large number of dependants who have arrived.
When you are in a position where you know that the policy environment, the skills requirements of people and those numbers are unlike anything we have seen before, and when you know that one in 30 people present in the UK today arrived in the last four years, that demands some public policy consideration at the very least. If you care as much about integration as I do then there is a question about numbers and the ability to integrate such very large numbers. Those are important questions to interrogate. It is perfectly fair for people who have a different view to say that they do not think we should change anything here. That position is fair and legitimate. This is a contested debate and people are entitled to take their positions on it, but we also have to accept, as a matter of public policy, that there will be costs and consequences to the “do nothing” environment as much as there would be to the environment in which we say we will have to take some action.
I do not think it is possible to just pretend that this massive change has not happened. I also do not think it is possible to say, “It happened under the previous Government. Let’s just write it off. It’s history, let’s move on”, because the consequences of that will be felt for many years to come. In every bit of public polling and every discussion I have ever done on this, it is a change that people have noticed. People in different types of communities all over the country have noticed this change. If you are going to say that we do not want to do anything here or to deal with any of the public policy questions that arise from this cohort of migrants then you have to answer a set of questions on how you will deal with those pressures. It is fair, in looking at a status that is conferred for a lifetime, to consider the lifetime cost. That is not an indictment of anybody; it is just a recognition of what that status is.
By the way, it is the position of this Government that we respect indefinite leave to remain. Unlike other political parties, we would never propose ripping up indefinite leave to remain of people who have made their homes here and who have settled status in this country. There are clear parameters for what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Lord Moraes: I did not want to conflate the two things. I was very careful to say that we saw a spike in numbers under the last Government. You have been very clear about that. Numbers are now coming down—prior to your response to this on ILR, by the way. Numbers are plummeting but—
Shabana Mahmood: They are changing as a result of the policy environment changing, primarily the closure of the route for care workers.
Lord Moraes: Allow me to give you credit.
Shabana Mahmood: There is no more overseas recruitment and family reunification has paused, so there are changes already.
Lord Moraes: Not this policy, so numbers are already going down. I was very careful to say that you had a numbers issue. I do not want to conflate the two things, because you did not say that the £10 billion was a lifetime benefit. It is a conflation of different fiscal strands to make this £10 billion. What I am trying to get at, given that you do not save any money through this delay with benefits, but that is what was said, is that I am afraid there is a lot of anxiety. ILR people are our friends and neighbours. They make money for this country. They work in adult social care and the NHS. They provide the public services; they do not drain them. The point about that is that if you compare them to other bits of the British population, they are so economically active that it is a surprise to them that they might be in the firing line.
You said that the Government respect them, so I will just put this to you. If you respect them, first you have to tell the economic truth about what they do. Secondly, just be aware—and you are, because that is why this policy exists—that at least one political party has the stated aim of removing many or all people from this country who are on ILR. That is their policy. If you say to that potential future Government, hypothetically, “By the way, they drain public benefits; they are of no benefit to this country”, which is what was said, then surely that is a problem, and it is a long-term problem. By the way, they will not be a negative until after 40 years. This is all in the public domain, so we have to be very clear about it.
My supplementary question to you is: when you respond to the consultation, will you exercise some care in what the justifications are? These people are afraid. They are afraid of us—this Government, sorry; not us as members of the committee—and they are afraid of what potentially might come next: removal or deportation. That is a real fear. It is a serious issue. Will you modify what you say about their contribution, which is positive for the foreseeable future?
Shabana Mahmood: I do not accept that I have said anything that requires modification or apology. On the issue of the £10 billion, which is from Migration Advisory Committee numbers, I made a speech and used that number. A Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament in the Commons chose to challenge that. The ONS found that I had used accurate numbers and in fact we had an explanatory note with my speech that was published on GOV.UK that explained the number and how it was being used. That was an example of good communication of statistics by the Government. I feel that that side of this debate has been excavated in other ways and I have used the number accurately to describe what is an accurate position on the lifetime costs of a lifetime status.
We will be able to talk more about some of these numbers once we publish the results of the consultation, the analysis and the impact assessment once policy is settled, but you are dealing with very different cohorts to the types of cohorts that we have had for work visas in the past. There will be different behavioural changes in this cohort than there have been before. Some of what you are driving at will be answered later in the year when we respond to the consultation and settle policy in this area.
Let me zone out for a moment and address the broader point on the signal sent to people who are already in this country, if I might phrase it that way. First, I do not have any truck with the argument that says because another party is about to do something extreme, that means that you should then change how you are dealing with an issue. This is a legitimate area of public concern and a plurality of people across the country would say it is a legitimate area of public concern. It is the job of the Government, therefore, to consider how we respond to it.
I believe in running a good system of economic migration. My own parents were economic migrants to this country. There is a set of rules and they played by those rules. They are citizens and they raised four British children in this country. A system of economic migration has to be well managed and you have to be able to pull levers to manage that system if things do not play out the way you think they will. In that regard, I do not think we are doing anything unique. What is unique about this cohort is the sheer number of people we are talking about.
What is not unique is that the British Government or the Home Office is seeking to think about the routes that are available into the country and change some of the rules that apply to those routes. That basically happens all the time, and it is not unique to us. It happens in every country in the world, including lots of the countries that British citizens go to work in, which regularly change their rules as well. The thing that is striking with this cohort is the sheer numbers that we are dealing with, but those are numbers that were never planned for. If you have an inbound number of people that is far outside what you planned for or expected, it demands a public policy response and you have to explain the consequences of those choices.
Lord Moraes: One last quick question.
The Chair: Very quickly.
Q9 Lord Moraes: I too am an economic migrant. My parents came in exactly the same way as yours did. The issue going forward is to understand that the sins of the past, those inflated numbers, are not the fault of people currently in the court of ILR. They are deeply anxious, and doing a blanket policy with retrospectivity in it, by the way, will not help. You are already bringing the numbers down and you should get credit for that, but to be careful of having a blanket policy in ILR that is sending a message to them is the important point.
Shabana Mahmood: I do not accept, by the way, that this is retrospectivity in the usually understood way of things. It has been settled case law for some years that the immigration rules that apply to an application are the rules in force at the point of the application, not at point of arrival in the country. It has been settled law for some time. If a Government were not allowed to pull a lever to impact on people currently in the system, that would be a very big change and would drive a coach and horses through a Government’s legitimate ability to control the border.
I have been saying to colleagues who have concerns in this area that we are, of course, consulting on transitional arrangements and we have received a lot of consultation response on what the transitional arrangements should look like. What you are not asking for is no retrospectivity. You are saying have an exemption or special treatment of particular cohorts of people who are in the system at the moment, which is fair enough because Governments also sometimes provide exemptions or bespoke new routes as well. We received consultation responses on all of those, but I do not accept the retrospectivity point because that would fly in the face of settled case law in this area that has tested what it means to have a legitimate expectation and what a Government’s powers are when it comes to changing immigration rules and how they should be considered. I believe we are compliant with all our legal obligations.
The Chair: Home Secretary, so that we can pick up on this reference you have made to retrospection, I acknowledge, before I bring in a number of colleagues who want to kick in here, that you have already made a special case for prison officers back in December. You knew that, because many of them were below RQF6, they would not be able to be on the normal route and they might well leave and there was deemed to be a potential staffing crisis. You have already made exceptions and we know that the NHS is pushing you because it is concerned about 12,000 staff and so on, but there is a principle. Lord Bach?
Q10 Lord Bach: Forgive me for coming back to this, Home Secretary, but as you said at the start, a number of people have very different views on this. I will be very quick, but I wanted to say the problem that there was—and it was a grave problem and outrageous in many way—I think has gone and it is finished. We are now in a position, as has already been said, where net migration is coming down fast and there is no reason to believe that that will not continue to be the position. Great credit is due to this Government for that and maybe some to the end of the last Government as well. In those circumstances, and as one lawyer speaking to a much better lawyer—I am not being unduly modest; it is not a field I worked in—it seems unfair and against the rule of law for people who came into this country on one basis with the view that, within five years, provided they behaved themselves, provided they got work if they could, and the rest of it, they would then be entitled to ILR. For that to change seems to me to be something only for the most extreme circumstances, and because numbers are coming down now, it does seem particularly unfair on them. It is on that simple basis that I am glad that no decision has been taken yet, and I appreciate that. I very much hope that that can be put in the balance when a decision is taken.
Shabana Mahmood: All aspects of the policy are yet to be settled, so this has not been a fake consultation exercise where the Government already know all the policy and it is just looking like we ask for views. There will be a lot of transitional arrangements that have not had a lot of airtime and debate publicly—on spouses, older household members, whether you look at household or individual income, and of course the policy on children remains to be settled. This is a proper piece of work and I think it is the largest number of responses any consultation has had or certainly has had in recent years. I cannot say any more than reiterate that point.
Leaving aside all the individual views—and I can tell there are different views around this committee on the rights or wrongs of individual proposals—as a matter of good administration and a Government being able to secure their border, I must stress the point on the settled case law about what applies and what does not. The issue on legitimate expectations has been tested in court and I know that, whatever changes we make here, we will be safe on legitimate expectations because being on a route is not the same as being on a promise to settlement. If it were the case that no Government could ever change their rules on anyone who is currently in country, that would be a coach and horses through any Government’s ability to run their border effectively and to respond to changing patterns of behaviour, changing public policy concerns and all the rest of it. It would make us an outlier compared to other countries. I did, not too long ago, a scan of changes in rules in other countries to which British citizens often go to work and in almost all those major jurisdictions the rules change and they are applied immediately regardless of when you came into the country. That is such an important principle.
I gently urge colleagues not to think about this as an unusual, unheard of retrospection. What you are highlighting strongly and passionately and what is very striking about this cohort of people is the size. We have never dealt with numbers of this order ever before. We have certainly never had this number of dependants and this level of lower skilled workers ever before either. That is why it is big in the sense that those numbers are big and historically have never happened before. Therefore, it is a complicated policy environment because of the nature of the size here, but on the legality of whether you can change the rules on people while they are in country, yes, you can. If you could not, you could say goodbye to Governments being able to run their borders properly. That would be so unheard of that I just cannot believe that that is what people think is the end game that they are arguing for.
On legitimate expectations, as I say, that has been well tested in case law over many years. I do not want to get into a lawyer-off with august lawyers on this committee, but I would be happy to write to you about the case law that I think is most striking in this area and where I believe we are compliant with what would be expected of us by the courts. I am not going to write policy here that puts me in contravention of my legal obligations, but what we are doing or what we propose to do is fully in line with what the law would require of us.
The Chair: Many on the committee will accept that case law may back you up. It does not mean that we necessarily believe that it is the right way to go.
Shabana Mahmood: No, but then you are making an argument for a legal change, Lord Foster, not the legality of the Government’s current practice.
The Chair: I am not aware and I am not going to engage in legal debate with you because I know that—come on in. You are desperate to.
Q11 Baroness Buscombe: I am a lawyer, or rather a barrister, and I just wanted to make sure that you were made aware that three members of this committee—myself, Lady Bertin and Lady Cash who is now a member of our shadow Front Bench—abstained from supporting the inquiry that we have just completed on immigration settlement and integration because we entirely support your proposals. The reason we do is nothing to do with having a moral compass or not, what is fair to a certain cohort of people versus others. We started the inquiry process looking at the lack of trust in the immigration system and we believe quite strongly that the scale, which you have referenced, is so enormous and the pressures on our welfare system and our public services in general have been so extraordinary—and that started well before this particular cohort, to be perfectly honest. Public services back in the 1980s were far superior to now. It was a civil servant who said to me, “Why would I return to the UK where you pay first-class taxes for third-class services?” I just wanted to check that you knew.
Shabana Mahmood: I did look at your report, and I guess here and elsewhere these issues are contested and there are differences of opinion. As I say, the consultation process is a genuine exercise in thinking through carefully what the right transitional arrangements are, balancing all the different things that you would expect a Government to consider when they are working out what is in the public interest and then coming to a settled view later this year. We hope to publish and have settled policy later in the autumn.
The Chair: Just so I can assure Baroness Buscombe and put it firmly on the record, I personally made sure that the Secretary of State was already aware of what you have just told her. We will move to Baroness Berridge.
Q12 Baroness Berridge: The report that we have just referenced that we published begins with some very helpful definitions for those who joined the committee since but then goes very quickly into the questions about data and highlights major concerns on that. I think the general public basically want to know if you know who is coming in and do you know who is going out. Do you?
Shabana Mahmood: Many years ago when I was an Opposition MP, I made the same challenge of the Tory party when they were in government and their answer then was “Not completely”, and I think that would probably be the same position as it is today. That is because of the way the data is collected. We do not have a biometric system, but of course the EU is now doing biometrics at exit as well as entry into the EU territory. There are some tech issues, but you can see where they are trying to get to. We do not have that. We have a biographic system, which is passport number and your passport details. There are inherent vulnerabilities with a system like that, so you will not capture everything 100% of the time. The other thing that you cannot measure easily is, of course, the scale of irregular or illegal arrivals into the country. The small boats are a very visual thing that can be counted, but of course there are other ways of arriving in the country clandestinely that cannot easily be measured.
Baroness Berridge: I know there will always be the common travel area.
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, and dual nationals being the other—
Baroness Berridge: Using their passports either way. But, for the exit process, the report specifically asks—I think post the pandemic we paused exit checks—to reintroduce exit checks. Are you going to reintroduce that?
Shabana Mahmood: I hope to be in a position again after summer, so early autumn, that there will be some progress here and we can start to publish that data again. I do not know why it has taken six years—just fronting that to the committee—in the sense that I know the reason corporately is because there were two different systems and migrating data from the old system has taken everybody far longer than they ever thought it would. I can tell you that, since we have been in government, my predecessor and myself have been chasing this one down to get the numbers back out there, but I anticipate us publishing in autumn of this year.
Baroness Berridge: My final follow-up on one of the other proposals was the connection of data to administrative data. Specifically, there is a recommendation about having a unique reference number, and one of the agencies the committee suggested that linked to was the criminal justice system. Will that be possible? That, in my view, would help enormously to prevent having a period of time where there is stuff in the media about who the person is and what their status is and rumour develops; we would just know, by connection of a unique reference number to the criminal justice system, who we are dealing with and what their status is, so that you have accurate information, subject obviously to criminal proceedings, in the public domain.
Shabana Mahmood: On CJS data, this is one of the problems that, in the future, the national police service and the Home Secretary, through the new powers in the Bill, will be able to direct the system in much more carefully because data across the CJS does not talk to each other and there is a very mixed picture of what different individual police forces collect as well. That is a much bigger piece of work. Where I want to be is that police forces, in this part of our forest, are all able to collect the same kind of data to the same high standard very consistently across the piece. That is not where we are today. Part of the reforms will enable us to be in that position in the future.
On immigration data or status in respect of criminality on particular pieces, the Home Office provides that information as quickly as we can in a way that we obviously do not want to compromise any proceedings either. Usually, our new practice, which was developed after the violent disorder in the summer of 2024, is to provide it as quickly as possible specifically at moment of charge but with some discretion to go earlier if there is misinformation in the public domain that is also very damaging for public confidence. I think on all the cases that have happened since we have been in government, certainly since that summer and learning the lessons of the speed at which information should be shared now, we move much more quickly and that is the Home Office checking through its own immigration records as fast as it can. That is the most resilient way of being able to provide that information in the public domain.
I agree with you that what is needed across the CJS, so not just for policing but at CPS level and also through the courts and into probation, is a much more unified dataset that can, even if it is used for different reasons, speak to different systems. Your committee will know the challenge of getting different systems to talk to one another and the amount of change that requires. It is a very big piece of work. To reassure you on the policing side, getting our house in order is one of my priorities.
Q13 Lord Empey: Secretary of State, I am, like Baroness Berridge, a new member on this committee. The absence of accurate figures of course is a huge issue because it is harder and harder to judge, but as regards saying that immigration has plummeted or the problem is solved, it is not, because all we are talking about is net figures. The gross figures, if we take to March 2026, were 813,000 people coming into this country. That included boat people and so on. That is a colossal number of people. What we do not know is what their economic status and demand for public services is versus the 643,000 people who left, so the net figure is totally misleading. It does not tell us anything about the demands on public services or the economic status of the people who have arrived. In terms of saying that it is sorted, they used to say that the first thing a politician should learn is how to count, and we do not know how to count in this country and have not done for 40 years. Can you give us a timetable as to when you think we will have information of sufficient quality to be able to judge what the implications are of these colossal numbers, which is even at this stage 16,000 people per week?
Shabana Mahmood: There are different figures in there obviously, but let me say, just on the specific question that I know has been of interest to the committee before on exit checks and the numbers, the best proxy that has been used is numbers in and then what you know from the exit checks to work out what your potential population of overstayers is likely to be. The reason those are proxies is, again, due to issues that I think the committee knows well. With the way that the common travel area works and with dual nationals, there are reasons why you cannot have a definitive figure. We are a relatively open society. We do not have a system of compulsory ID that is used to check status regularly, and the Government’s work on digital ID is about ease of use of public services, not gateways to check people’s status. For the sort of country we are and how we run ourselves, the ability to give you a definitive, “This is exactly the number today” is not possible.
You can get a good proxy that tells you what your population of interest is and then also tells us what we can do in immigration enforcement, so we do know when we think someone has overstayed and then we are able to tailor immigration enforcement in that direction. Overstaying in and of itself has not been a big priority within immigration enforcement work before. That has changed under this Government. We have increased resources for immigration enforcement. I think the footprint for immigration enforcement now will be the biggest it has ever been, and that creates more capacity to make very good progress on removals of foreign offenders and keep going in the right direction—our numbers there are higher than those that we inherited—and to be able to do more on removals of people who are failed asylum seekers and also be able to go after a bigger cohort of overstayers.
Q14 The Chair: Thank you very much. Can I just say to the Secretary of State and to all colleagues that time is against us, so we need short questions and short answers for now, so we can get through everything.
Since I want to ask the next one, which is about the Life in the UK Test, I am not going to ask the Secretary of State a whole series of difficult questions such as how old Big Ben is—questions that seem to us totally irrelevant to life in this country. Secretary of State, first, we have called for major reforms. You have said you will do something about it. Can you tell us what progress there is? Secondly, we also suggested you should look very seriously at a different way of doing it, which is the sort of support mechanisms that they have for people who have done bad things and have been sent off to a driving offence course and there should be similar things like that. Could you very quickly tell us what progress is being made and what you think of our course proposal?
Shabana Mahmood: I hope to update Parliament, the House, more on proposals in this area later this year. The contract for the current test I think runs out in autumn of next year so there is a good moment coming up where, if we want to do things very differently, we can. I agree with you. I brought my copy, by the way, just in case I needed a quick cribbing and having looked at it—
The Chair: Knowing you had is why I did not ask you the questions.
Shabana Mahmood: You thought you had better not test me. I would have offered to test each of you in turn as well. I take on board the point.
I will just observe that any system of testing that you have across who we are as a country and where this is the choice they are making as they become a citizen of our country is likely to feel a little crude. It is not a thing that is easy to test. If you are coming to this country, you are joining a very particular kind of society with very particular norms about how we do things and it is very hard to just get on one piece of paper the inheritance you have. I agree with that, but we will find a better way than the way that we have at the moment.
The Chair: I am just going to stop you, Secretary of State. Can I just be absolutely clear? First, you have said that the contract does not run out for a bit. It is perfectly possible, is it not, to make changes to the current questions and the current system straightaway? It cannot be right to have at least two questions in the system where the correct answers are wrong. For example, King Cnut was not the first Danish king; it was Sweyn Forkbeard. And it is not true to say that the highest value of the UK note is £50 when, if you go to Scotland, you can get a £100 note. Just assure us that changes are being made now.
Shabana Mahmood: Let me come back on the specifics of the wrong questions. You will be pleased to know, on the integrity of the test, that not even the Home Secretary can see the questions. I will have to defer to officials on the checking of the accuracy of the answers, and I am very happy to write to the committee on those two specifics. I suspect one or two of those might be contested, though, anyway.
The Chair: Are you seriously looking at our proposal for either an alternative or something that is an optional extra—looking at courses along the lines of the very successful things that are done with the driving offence people?
Shabana Mahmood: We are absolutely looking at proposals that have been made, previous findings from this committee and others, seriously. We are also looking to learn from other jurisdictions.
Q15 Lord Bach: Very quickly, Lord Chair, because there are a couple of people who want to ask supplementaries on this question, I want to ask about the Immigration and Asylum Bill has just been introduced. The simple question is: what is the most important impact you see this having?
Shabana Mahmood: It will be crucial to help us get some measure of control on a system that is failing very badly at the moment. Very specifically, I think it will, with the new independent immigration appeals authority, help us to get to grips with the very big problem that we see in the immigration appeal space. The sheer volume of appeals demands a new public policy response to be able to handle that volume. We have seen initial decisions made much more quickly. We have worked through that backlog more quickly but everybody is basically sitting in the appeals backlog instead.
Being able to more speedily decide cases and get people to point of removal is one of the biggest changes that will have an impact on this space. There are obviously other important changes on Article 8 reform, making sure human rights legislation and the development of human rights here does not take us beyond our international obligations, so we are within our international obligations, which we care about and want to maintain, but we do not go further than we need to in fulfilling our obligation. There is a strong suite of measures. The ones that I think will take some time but have the biggest impact are immigration appeals.
Q16 Lord Dubs: Home Secretary, it is a pleasure to put the question to you directly as opposed to via other media. You suspended family reunion last autumn and, when this Bill came along, I was hoping there was going to be something in it to say it was coming back again. I am talking about family reunion where there are children abroad who have family here. What is the chance of you bringing something like that back again?
Shabana Mahmood: We have not yet settled policy on family reunion. It remains suspended, but we have committed to settling policy on family reunion and separately on children. None of the changes we have made impacts on unaccompanied minors in the country. For the rest of the cohort, we have said that we will settle policy and we expect to do so later in the year.
Q17 Lord Anderson of Ipswich: You have alluded to the independent immigration appeals authority provided for in the Bill, which will see judges of the First-tier Tribunal replaced by adjudicators, who will not need to be lawyers, although they will of course need to be recruited and trained. I know your aim, as you said, is to increase capacity and speed up decision-making, but your published impact assessment rates the value of this change as uncertain and the Public Law Project has said you are prioritising speed over justice. I have two questions. First, how do you answer those criticisms and, specifically, can you clarify whether these lay adjudicators will have access to legal expertise rather as lay magistrates have a magistrates’ clerk in their court, or will they just be left to get on with it?
Shabana Mahmood: They will. I can deal with that quite quickly. It is intended in exactly the same way as the situation in the magistrates’ court, although of course the big difference between these adjudicators is they will be trained, so not sitting as ordinary members of the public but recruited from a broader range of people. When you have a system that is not able to deal with claims in a speedy way or where last-minute appeals are able to frustrate legitimate removal from the country, I question whether that is meaningful justice. I do not accept the criticism on speed over justice. I think that speed and the ability to have flex when it comes to the sheer scale of immigration appeals that we see is necessary to maintain justice in its broader sense, which is not just for the people who are awaiting a decision, awaiting a hearing on their appeal, but also for everybody else who has a public interest in knowing that the Government can remove those who have no right to be in the country and to do so effectively and quickly without last-minute frustrations that are designed to frustrate legitimate removal from the country.
I reject that criticism. I think we can get the balance right. It will still be an independent chamber. We will set out in legislation the independence of the individuals who will run that and have oversight. It allows for a Home Secretary to be able to ask the chamber to flex so that it can prioritise cases based on a wider public interest. That is different to the way that judges do listings in other tribunals. As a former Lord Chancellor, I never interfered with listings for the judiciary. They have a specific set of things that they do for us constitutionally. That is not for the Government. Here, when it comes to immigration appeals, we need the ability to be able to flex the system to prioritise in the public interest, to make sure you can get foreign offenders out of your jurisdiction; those public interest requirements matter more, but there will still be a legal independent underpinning and Ministers will be required to uphold the independence of this authority as well.
Q18 Baroness Berridge: There was a Private Notice Question that you may be aware of that Lord Hanson answered in the House of Lords after it was in the media, because it started its course in the House of Commons. A specific question was raised by a colleague, Lady Deech, about the situation for First-tier Tribunal judges not having to give declarations of interest and conflicts and so on. Will these independent adjudicators have to list, for instance, membership of political parties and so on? One can see information about people coming out afterwards now on social media and saying, “Well, the decision was made by this person. They have that issue and they are now bragging on social media that they did it this way”. Will we make sure that they are subject to similar requirements, as we have on the judiciary, to declare?
Shabana Mahmood: There is absolutely a requirement to make sound, legally defensible decisions, and that requires also making sure that there is not a conflict of interest that might call into question the legality or the procedural fairness of a decision. That would apply in the same way. I do not know if you can give me the detail of the rest of that Private Notice Question, but I am very happy to pick up any additional—
Baroness Berridge: I think it was news to many of us that there were not these requirements at the moment on First-tier Tribunal judges. A lot of us who were lawyers could not quite understand that, so can you check that they do act under the same requirements?
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, it would be for the new officers of the authority to set their own procedural rules, so that will not be written by the Government. It will be an independent authority, and it will have procedural rules in the same way that other chambers also have procedural rules that they must abide by, and I am sure that that will of course be picked up. Procedural fairness is a necessary aim of any system of adjudication.
The Chair: If you could write to us and particularly on the First-tier Tribunals and particularly the issue of declarations of interest, we will look forward to hearing from you. Baroness Bertin.
Q19 Baroness Bertin: Could I ask a question on asylum hotels? The Government have pledged to end the use of asylum hotels in this Parliament, but at the current rate of progress that will be in 2034. How is that pledge going?
Shabana Mahmood: I think we are on course to meet our pledge to get out of asylum hotels by the end of the Parliament. The peak of asylum hotel usage was something like 400. That has halved, based on where we are today: I believe it was 213 in July 2024 and now we are down to just under 170, so we have closed one in five. I believe we are on track to keep our pledge. It is a very important programme of work that is happening in the Home Office. You will have obviously also seen the move into large sites. We have made some new announcements on new large sites that we will be using for the purposes of asylum accommodation.
Baroness Bertin: Is that military bases?
Shabana Mahmood: Yes.
Baroness Bertin: Essentially, the rate of progress that you feel will be in the right place by the end of Parliament is because of the use of military bases?
Shabana Mahmood: Yes, a combination. We see military bases as the future for asylum accommodation. We think that can have a better impact on the ability to crowd in services on a site rather than other models of providing accommodation. We have seen the stresses and strains of hotel usage specifically, so the expansion of the use of military sites is very much a key plank of the Government’s policy in this area.
Q20 Baroness Buscombe: Very quickly, could you reassure us and those watching this broadcast that people will not be put into houses in among other people living in streets and so on? We are talking about people who have arrived here illegally. For some reason we do not lock them up. We allow them to live as we live, but will they just be confined to those barracks? Secondly, I will not give my source, but I know that certain members of the Armed Forces are deeply upset that asylum seekers are being put into far better accommodation than some of them are living in and have lived in for ever. I have been to many barracks and bases and the standard of accommodation is utterly appalling, and I am shocked to discover that we are going to repair some of this for asylum seekers. Can you reassure me that is not the case?
Shabana Mahmood: We are not taking over military sites that are in active usage. Much of what we have announced is in the training site space, so this is not accommodation for military families that has now been upgraded to a higher standard. That is not the case and that is not what has happened on the sites that we have taken over. It is quite basic accommodation, but what we can do on these sites is grow the accommodation at scale and have on-site provision of services that enables a better running of that part of our estate.
People are not detained, so that is the difference. They are not locked up. We have a detention estate that we use when we are progressing someone to removal from our country, and there are of course strict legal safeguards there to make sure we do not unlawfully detain somebody. While a claim is in process, either for an initial decision or more likely these days because it is sitting in an appeal queue, people are not in detained accommodation and are able to move about their business.
There is a mixed model of accommodation. We have increased the use of military sites and will increase that again in the future. There is also dispersed accommodation and, of course, you will know about the hotel situation. We are looking to have a model that can deal with the numbers that we have, do so in a way that fulfils our obligations, but also ultimately maintains both public confidence and value for money.
Baroness Buscombe: Can I say dispersed accommodation really worries—
The Chair: I am sorry, but we really have to move on.
Baroness Buscombe: What is the definition of dispersed accommodation?
The Chair: I am sorry. We have to move on. Lord Dubs.
Q21 Lord Dubs: It is a sad comment of the times that, when you move people into military accommodation, the rent-a-crowd are coming in to demonstrate, often from different parts of the country. They are not even local. What can you do to assure local opinion that this is not a threat to them? What can you do to assure local opinion that this is a reasonable process on the way to asylum seekers being judged as to whether they have a claim for refugee status so that the rent-a-crowd people do not dominate the headlines?
Shabana Mahmood: There is definitely organised protest activity that is sometimes not local to an area and represents people coming from other parts of the country. It would be a mistake to say that that accounts for all the anxiety. It is also often local in nature, and I have seen that in my own constituency. We have had three asylum hotels in my patch and the people who have expressed concern about that are my own constituents. They are not people who have been bussed in from elsewhere. You are definitely right, Lord Dubs, there is an element of some of the protest activity that is organised by groups online and troublemakers wanting to get together and wreak havoc if they think they can get away with it, but it would be a mistake to think that that accounts for most or all of what we see.
As a constituency MP, I understand the local anxiety. It is not specific only to hotels. Where we have moved into military sites, local people there have had something to say about that. With dispersed accommodation, again sometimes you see local discontent there. We work closely with local authorities and local police forces before decisions are made about where we will go. Once we have made decisions—because, in the end, we do have to go somewhere and there is only a limited amount of land—we have to make decisions that are sensible and mean that we can put people somewhere but we do so in a way that still works with all our partners. That is an ongoing process, so it happens before a decision and then after a decision has been made.
The Chair: We are now going to move into a question that really we could have spent the whole session discussing. It is very large, very complicated and so on and we are clearly not going to be able to go into it in detail. I will ask Lord Empey to introduce the question and then for a few brief remarks, Secretary of State, from you in response. I think Lord Dubs may want to also come in, but we can perhaps agree that we will write to you with a number of detailed questions, because it is a complex issue and we need to fully understand it. To give us a background and introduce it, Lord Empey.
Q22 Lord Empey: Secretary of State, you are well aware that the CTA, the common travel area, has been around for a century. You will also be aware that we have a policy flowing from the Belfast agreement that we would not have any hard border on the island, albeit that we have two jurisdictions and the police on both sides of the border intervene in certain circumstances, so it is not a complete free-for-all. We also know that you and the Irish authorities meet regularly to discuss these matters, but we have had one very disturbing case in the last few weeks—I cannot say too much because it is before the courts—and this has sparked some disgraceful demonstrations, as Lord Dubs was referring to.
The problem is that, depending on the ebb and flow, or perhaps how European countries treat their immigration situation if they decided to tighten things up, water will flow to the easiest point. There have been cases from both jurisdictions where people have abused the system to come illegally into the United Kingdom or vice versa. It is only, I think, a year or two ago that people in the Republic were complaining that people were coming from our jurisdiction into their jurisdiction and they have a huge problem with immigration right now and it is a big issue for them.
Could you update us briefly on what you are doing and, if necessary, as the Chair says, write to us with the latest? We do not want to start trying to unravel arrangements that we have had for 100 years, which have worked well. I may just point out that, at the beginning of Covid, there was an issue over the importation of vaccines or something and the Irish Republic overnight decided it was going to ban it and check things at the border and then within a few hours it withdrew that because there was such a reaction. Could you update us on where we are?
Shabana Mahmood: Yes. Thank you for that. We could indeed spend the whole session on these particular matters. To reassure the committee, I have discussed the shared problems and issues that we have on the common travel area with my Irish counterpart. We have discussed this on several occasions and we will discuss again. I will reiterate, though, that the lack of specific checks does not mean that there is no border security at all, so I just want to reassure the committee that this is not some sort of gap or loophole that no one is doing anything about at all. It is a shared problem for us and the Irish. We are absolutely committed, as are they, to maintain the uniqueness of the arrangements between the Republic, Northern Ireland and mainland Great Britain as well. That reflects the history and the heritage and the Troubles and the Good Friday agreement as well as, as you say, that this goes back longer than all of that. We want to respect our arrangements.
The problems that we see on our side and on the Irish side are shared problems, and we have very much a view that we should look for solutions together, and that is what we are doing. Most of our efforts here—and you will forgive me for not going into too much detail because there are operational consequences—are that what we look at is operational co-operation between us and our Irish counterparts and also having an intelligence-led approach. We know quite a lot about how movements take place from Ireland into the UK and vice versa and also how movements take place on the island of Ireland itself. This is something that both us and the Irish have a good sense of, and we are very much working together on it. I think that, between the intelligence-led approach and the operational co-operation, we can bear down on some of these issues.
The Chair: Thank you. We will chase that up in more detail. We will move on to one other broader issue. Lord Dubs.
Q23 Lord Dubs: As you know, Home Secretary, this committee looked at EES. We went to Dover, Folkestone and St Pancras and we warned the previous Government that there would be a bit of chaos, and we are seeing the chaos now. The system is not working. Different EU countries are operating a different system. It is not working at St Pancras really and we have had people missing their flights in Italy coming back here. What can we do to resolve this muddled situation?
Shabana Mahmood: To reassure the committee, I have discussed the new juxtaposed controls based on the EU’s new policy for its member states on exit checks. I have discussed it with my French counterpart directly. I have also discussed it directly with the Commission. You would expect the Government to have made points about the need to maintain fluidity at the border. That is exactly what we have been pushing for. For what it is worth, this is not our system; it is the EU system. The French are not the only ones that have tech issues as they migrate to the new system across the whole of the EU. There have been problems in other countries as well and some of that has affected British citizens.
To reassure the committee, we are very alive to those risks and one of the first things I did when I came into post was I had a bilateral with my French counterpart in which this was very much on the radar. The French have also prioritised fluidity at the border, for what it is worth, and we have found them very helpful on this matter, but of course they now have a set of obligations at EU level and a set of regulations that they must follow. We will obviously be arguing for a pragmatic approach while tech systems catch up with where the EU wants these new regulations to be. It is not in our direct control, but I can assure you that we are absolutely pressing that point.
Q24 The Chair: I have a final point on that very particular issue. During the implementation phase of the scheme, which as you know took very many years, it started with the ability of people on the ground to say, “There is too much of a queue here. We will just suspend the system”. Could you bring us up to speed with what agreement you now have with the European authorities about the ability of our ports and railway stations, where relevant, to be able to suspend the system if there are large queues? We cannot obviously do it for when people arrive in other countries, but we could do it here.
Shabana Mahmood: This is where it is a matter for the EU. They have a new posture on the expectations of their member states and compliance, which has created less room for manoeuvre for the French, for example, to be able to prioritise border fluidity. We obviously continue to make the case to the Commission and everybody else that, while there are tech issues, a pragmatic suspension of requirements for peak periods would be a sensible way forward for everybody.
The Chair: So that I can be clear about what you are saying, you understand that there are all the stories about what will happen, for example, at Dover during the summer holidays. At the moment, you are saying that the EU authorities are now being much tighter about the ability of people at Dover to say, “We are going to suspend the system because we want to get people through and reduce the queues”, and you are negotiating to try to get that flexibility back. Is that a quick summary of what you said?
Shabana Mahmood: Yes. The flexibility, I believe, ends in September, although you are testing the bounds of my knowledge of EU regulations. I believe the flexibility ends in September and at that point there is no flexibility to prioritise border fluidity. We are asking and suggesting that there is an extension of that because it is not obvious that the issues will be resolved.
The Chair: It is also not obvious that the suspension will be as easy as people initially thought, given all the fears about this summer, which is before the February end of the light-touch approach.
Shabana Mahmood: Yes. At the highest levels in the EU and with Ministers of the interior, including the French but others as well, we have prioritised and asked for border fluidity to be maintained. It is in everybody’s interest, not just ours but for EU member states as well, that we do not get pinch-points around holidays but also that their tech has a chance to catch up with its requirements so that it can meet this demand in the future. I think we have a shared interest. There is a view about the flexibility and how it should be maintained. We are pushing for maximum flexibility.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Secretary of State, and more generally, thank you very much. You have given very detailed, comprehensive answers to a large number of questions. We are enormously grateful to you. There are several areas where you have agreed you will write to us—not least that you are going to get rid of the Life in the UK Test and replace it with a whole series of courses that people can go through, which is great news to hear.
Shabana Mahmood: I did not quite say that but—
The Chair: Well, maybe. You got close or at least showed interest in it. We are genuinely very grateful and thank you very much indeed.
