The security minister, Tom Tugendhat, has defended the government’s illegal migration bill, swerving repeated questions on whether there were any safe and legal routes for refugees from countries such as Iran to come to the UK.
The bill, which will mean asylum seekers who come to the UK via “illegal” routes being deported, has come in for harsh criticism from the former prime minister Theresa May and others, but Tugendhat said the government was determined to end the suffering caused by traffickers.
“This isn’t just about the crossing of the English Channel. This is about the thousands of people who are dying in the Sahara, who are dying in the Mediterranean, who are being trafficked by some of the most appalling people in the world, who have been exploited and turned into, frankly, cargo and commodity when they are just vulnerable people,” he said.
“And we need to focus on the fact that this trade is utterly horrific, and must end and this government is absolutely committed to doing what it can to end it.”
Tugendhat, the former chair of the foreign affairs select committee, avoided questions on what safe and legal routes were available to people wishing to seek asylum in the UK from countries such as Iran.
He said there were UN bodies operating in countries such as Turkey and Lebanon, which had “often supported that safe and legal route in different ways” but denied that the only route for a women’s rights activist from Tehran was via a boat across the Channel.
“Some are coming to rejoin their families on family visas and then claim asylum when they’re here. So it’s not simply by boats,” he said.
In a damning intervention during a parliamentary debate on Monday, May criticised the home secretary, Suella Braverman’s plan, warning that “anybody who thinks that this bill will deal with the issue of illegal migration once and for all is wrong”.
The bill says refugees who arrive in the UK without prior permission will be detained for 28 days and that asylum claims will be deemed “inadmissible” whatever the individual’s circumstances.
They will be removed either to their own country or a “safe third country”, such as Rwanda, if that is not possible.
May, who introduced the Modern Slavery Act in 2015 when home secretary, said the Home Office “knows genuine victims of modern slavery would be denied support” under the bill. “As it currently stands, we are shutting the door to victims who are being trafficked into slavery [in] the UK,” she said.
May said the bill would not stop illegal migration. “Whenever you close a route for migrants … the migrants and the people smugglers find another way.
“Anybody who thinks that this bill will deal with the issue of illegal migration once and for all is wrong,” she said.
A number of Tory MPs abstained on the bill and others suggested they would have reservations in future – particular over a possible breach of international law and new provisions for the detention of children.
The former justice secretary Robert Buckland said he had been prepared to vote for the bill at second reading but that he had reservations about letting it progress further. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I said that the issue relating to particularly women and children needs to be directly addressed.
“I do not support the detention of unaccompanied children or indeed the splitting up of families; that was a government policy that has been followed since 2010.
“And I think that those parts of the bill should be removed. Voting to allow the principle of a bill to go forwards is different from the detail of the bill and I would expect it to be scrutinised carefully.”
He added: “I’ve made it very clear that I do not support the detention of children or indeed women in those circumstances and that I think that the government risks looking as if it is guilty of ineffective authoritarianism, that’s something I do not support, and I made it very clear in the house last night.”
