David Gauke is a former Justice Secretary, and was an independent candidate in South-West Hertfordshire at the 2019 general election.
The Government will do, we are told, “whatever it takes” to stop the small boats. Ministers might not want to give specific answers to hypothetical questions about defying the European Court of Human Rights, for example, but they do want to convey a sense of determination and prioritisation. Stopping small boats really matters to them, and they are prepared to pursue policies that might once have been considered unacceptable. Old assumptions have to be questioned, they argue, given the nature of the crisis.
Whether the arrival of asylum seekers in small boats on the Kent coast is quite the scale of crisis that some believe is debatable. As far as the public is concerned, living standards and the state of the NHS rank well ahead of it as an issue. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of migrants coming here in a manner that is not within our control and puts their lives at risk is a significant problem and has to be addressed. This may well require some fresh thinking and a willingness to challenge pre-existing positions.
This was the context in which the Rwanda plan was developed. The argument was straightforward. Whether asylum seekers are bogus or not (most are not), we have to deter the crossings. Send them to a far-away country and, if even if they are a legitimate asylum seeker, they stay there with no right to come to the UK. There are some practical issues and some issues of principle but it will have a deterrent effect and, after all, we must do “whatever it takes”.
In that spirit, and partly as a thought experiment, it is worth considering another idea that might previously have been rejected but could make a contribution to reducing the number arriving in small boats. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that what drives many migrants to risk their lives to leave France and come to the UK is that the UK offers greater job opportunities for the undocumented. Asylum seekers – often left to wait for years for their application to be assessed – disappear into our hidden economy and earn a living. If we could make our efforts to prevent that much more effective, we may reduce the attractiveness of the UK as a destination. One way in which we could do this is introduce digital ID cards.
There are many arguments for doing this. The principal case put forward by such proponents as Tony Blair and William Hague relates to improving the delivery of public services in a cost effective-way. But there is also the argument that digital ID cards which incorporate biometric data allow both the public and private sector authorities to establish accurately individuals’ identities and make it harder for undocumented immigrants to rent and work illegally. It would also be easier to have a joined up approach across government to enforce immigration controls.
There are two sets of arguments against the proposal. The first set relate to practical concerns. Some will argue implementing such a scheme effectively will be beyond the Government, will be too expensive, and take too long.
We should not dismiss the implementation challenges although proponents of the idea argue that we already have the technology. Citizens would need to be able maintain control of their data, and any system would need to be decentralised and have the highest privacy standards. Estonia already has much of this in place.
On the cost, the business case would be based on potentially huge benefits in terms of delivering public services. They could potentially transform the quality and use of health data, for example, which could deliver substantially improved health outcomes. The opportunities to use anonymised data to hold the providers of public services to account are sizeable. And the enhanced level of data held by the Government might mean that, for example, support in response to high energy bills can be better targeted than in the past, helping to deliver savings. The overall point is that, yes, there would be costs but because the benefits are wide and not restricted to reducing illegal immigration, these are costs which should be affordable. Identity cards are clearly not, however, an overnight solution. The full benefits would be some years away.
So on the practical points, there are challenges but none of them make it a non-starter. If we compare digital ID to the Rwanda policy, some of the same questions apply. The Rwanda scheme is costly, it is still not clear that it can be implemented anytime soon (more for legal than practical reasons) and, as it will only apply to a few hundred migrants, it will not eliminate the issue of small boats entirely. If the bar of acceptability is set at the level that a policy is cheap, quick and guaranteed to work, neither Rwanda or digital ID cards will meet it.
Then we come to the issues of principle. For some, digital ID cards are unacceptable on civil libertarian grounds. They dislike the idea that there may be moments when one might be asked to produce one’s papers or, to put it more precisely, access one’s app.
Personally, a digital ID card – if it works – sounds like an added convenience and not an imposition. It would merely be one more data-collecting app on my smartphone. Some, however, will worry that this enables an over-mighty government. But if that is one’s starting point, the approach taken in the Safety of Rwanda Bill ought to be setting off much louder alarm bells. Here is a Government seeking to oust the Courts from having jurisdiction over matters relevant to the rights of the individual; a willingness to skirt close (at best) to breaking international law; and a threat to depart from the European Convention on Human Rights. If your objection to digital ID cards is based on civil liberties, it would be somewhat odd to be content to join Russia and Belarus as the only European countries to repudiate the Convention and its institutions.
This takes us to a wider point about how we approach policy-making. We could take a pragmatic view of a policy proposal. We could ask to what extent the policy meets our objective, what the wider costs and benefits might, make a decision based on that assessment and continue to review any conclusions we have reached in light of emerging evidence.
On that basis, it would certainly seem to me to be worth exploring further the digital ID idea acknowledging that there is a risk that the practical challenges may be beyond us. The original case for the Rwanda scheme (at least as applying to Rwanda specifically as opposed to a more obviously safe jurisdiction) was always less persuasive. The subsequent finding by the Supreme Court that Rwanda is essentially unsafe should have been enough to justify dropping the policy.
That, however, is not the approach of the Government. Instead, we must do “whatever it takes” to stop the boats. We are proceeding with a policy that could cause a constitutional crisis and leave us further isolated diplomatically.
The justification is that we are in “whatever it takes” mode when it comes to tackling illegal immigration. Any price is worth paying. But, in comparison to the Rwanda scheme, the arguments for digital ID cards are stronger and the arguments against it are weaker. If the Government takes the stopping small boats as seriously as it claims, digital ID cards and cracking down on the hidden economy should be part of the plan.