The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘I’ve heard of migrants hiding in sofas and car dashboards’
Ed Cumming meets Bas Javid – brother of Sajid – who is taking on the people smuggling gangs
Bas Javid is not one for an easy life. Thirty years in one difficult public service career would be plenty for most people. Not him. After three decades in the police, during which he rose through the ranks to become one of the most senior officers in the force, he has contrived at the age of 51 to find an even more difficult job, joining the Home Office to become director general of Immigration Enforcement.
“I am focused on transforming Immigration Enforcement and we have made good progress already, but there is clearly more to do,” he says. “The Home Secretary and Prime Minister have been very clear about this, the Government’s new legislation is aimed at closing loopholes, meaning people who are here illegally, especially those convicted of crimes, will no longer be allowed to stay in the UK.”
Bas – short for Basit – is sitting in his office in the Home Office, on Marsham Street in central London. He cuts a more dashing figure than his older brother, Sir Sajid Javid, the Tory MP who served as chancellor and health secretary. He has been in the job for two months, during which time illegal immigration has never been far from the front pages.
Rishi Sunak has promised to “stop the boats”, meaning the small boats bringing migrants across the Channel, but the results have been mixed. Last year, 29,437 crossed this way. More than 1,000 migrants have made it so far this year, including 358 in eight boats on January 17. On January 14, five migrants died in French waters while attempting to cross.
“This isn’t just about individual immigration offenders, we’re targeting the organised crime groups of people smugglers, to disrupt their activity and dismantle their criminal networks,” Javid says. “I’ve been amazed by the lengths these people smugglers will go to to turn a profit – hiding migrants in sofas, car dashboards, makeshift coffin-like compartments in vans. We see people who have been smuggled here, people who believed they would have a better life, but are living in squalid conditions.”
Members of the Tory party have been at each other’s throats over the Rwanda Bill, under which illegal immigrants could be deported to the African country.
“[Immigration] is a very topical issue, isn’t it?” Javid says. “Both on a political and social level, it’s quite divisive. You can talk to 10 different people about immigration – legal, illegal – and they’ll have different views. It’s a tough subject. Immigration enforcement is about identifying people who have no legal right to be in the UK, tracking them, working on the case and ultimately removing them.”
As far as Javid is concerned, the Rwanda plan would be a useful tool for his staff. “Subject to the outcome of the bill, which is very much in the political world and not my day-to-day business, [the Rwanda Bill] offers a very clear tool to me and the people I work with to be able to do our jobs.
“Ultimately from an operational perspective I’m engaged in tackling the organised immigration crime that sits around people smuggling. Crossing the channel on a small boat is a very dangerous thing to do. People get exploited into doing it. They get charged high sums of money. It’s a vile trade.”
One change from Javid’s work as a police officer is that most of the illegal immigrants are suspected of no crime, other than being in the UK illegally.
“There are clearly people within the illegal immigration sphere who are criminals,” he says. “Then at the other extreme are people who are victims of crime, subject to modern-day slavery, poor working practices or exploitation of one kind or another. Then there are people who came through a legal route, but for one reason or another have either abused the conditions under which they were here, or overstayed, or become illegal because they’ve offended. It’s not cut and dry. It’s important to do it with compassion. But we follow the law, and the law of our country is if you have no legal right to be in the UK, you have no right to be here. I don’t make the laws. I’m here to make sure we enforce them.”
Javid is the son of immigrants himself. His father, Abdul GhaniJavid, moved to the UK from Pakistan in 1961, when he was 17, with £1 in his pocket, to look for work. He settled in Rochdale and worked in the cotton mills before becoming a bus driver. He and his wife, Zubaid, instilled a rigorous work ethic in their five sons: Sajid and Bas, as well as Tariq, Atif and Khalid. Tariq was in retail but died in 2018; Atif is a property developer in Bristol, Khalid works in financial services. How does being from an immigrant family affect how Javid approaches his new role?
“I gave that some thought before I started,” he says. “I don’t know if any previous director of Immigration Enforcement has been from a minority ethnic background or had parents who came to the UK from another country. But when I talk about compassion, that means the ability to understand people’s concerns or plight or circumstances. I think anyone can have this mindset, but coming from a migration background myself maybe it’s more automatic. I think my coming from a family of immigrants, with personal experiences of racism and bias, enables me to come from a place of compassion in this job.”
Javid was not an academic child. “Tearaway is probably a better description,” he says. “I went to 11 schools in 11 years. I moved between Rochdale, Bristol and Pakistan, so there was a lot of disruption.”
A month before his 17th birthday, he left school and enlisted in the Navy. It was a turning point. “I ended up in an organisation that taught me discipline, camaraderie, the value of hard work. You grow very quickly as a person. That became my education.” He served on HMS Brilliant, which was stationed in the Persian Gulf after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. As a British-Asian, and a Muslim, he was an atypical figure. “For the six years I served, I never came across another British-Asian sailor. That was the 1980s and early 1990s. It was the same for policing when I joined. I went through various organisations in transition.”
He joined the police in 1993, starting in the Avon & Somerset and West Midlands police, rising through the ranks before moving to the Met. He was repeatedly hospitalised, including when he was knocked out trying to break up a fight. “My jaw still clicks,” he says, rubbing the affected area. During the pandemic, he was the second highest-ranking officer in the department that decided not to investigate Partygate, although he recused himself from the decision because of his family ties.
He was in charge of professional standards in the force after the murder of Sarah Everard. The killing led to a mass reckoning with the Met. Last March, Lady Casey’s damning report into the Met, commissioned in the wake of the murder, found the force to be guilty of institutional racism, sexism and homophobia. Casey warned that “public consent is broken” and found that discrimination was “baked into the system”. This was not the 1990s, it was last year. Did Javid recognise the description?
“I’m opposed to the label of ‘institutional’ on policing, simply because there are lots of different definitions of what it means,” he says. “I don’t think it’s right to label an organisation institutionally anything. We worked every day to fight racism, but in any organisation you will have people who will have racist tendencies, views and biases. And it’s right they are identified and rooted out.”
He says he has never harboured dreams of elected office, adding: “I’ll leave [politics] to my brother.”
“Don’t make your headline about my brother,” Javid says, in parting. “Everyone does that. It gets boring after a while.”
‘Coming from a family of immigrants enables me to come from a place of compassion in this job’