[4] Dubs was one of 669 Czech-resident, mainly Jewish, children saved by British stockbroker Nicholas Winton, and others, from the Nazis on the Kindertransport between March and September 1939.

Hubert had fled to England the day the Nazis arrived in Czechoslovakia and met young Alf at Liverpool Street station.

Alf later said that he clearly remembered leaving Prague station at age six and not touching the food pack given to him by his mother for the next two days.

On 27 September 1994, he was appointed as a Labour life peer with the title of Baron Dubs, of Battersea in the London Borough of Wandsworth.

In his book, Things Can Only Get Better, O'Farrell described the events leading up to Dubs's shock defeat by the Conservative John Bowis at the 1987 general election.

Dubs lists his main home as a cottage in the Lake District in Cumbria, which enabled him to claim over £26,000 of overnight subsistence expenses in 2007–08,[15][16] although he has lived in Notting Hill, London, since 1964.

[22] During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Dubs was among a number of Humanists UK patrons to contribute morale-boosting messages of resilience, hope, and inspiration on National Prison Radio.

[23] In 2016, Lord Dubs tabled what became section 67 of the Immigration Act 2016 by which UK local authorities admitted unaccompanied minors housed in EU refugee camps who are mainly asylum seekers.

[26] In February 2017, the Home Office removed this as a type of permission to enter, in the light of other new provisions targeted at family reunion, after accepting 350 of the c. 3,000 whom analysts expected it would apply to.

[27][28] It would expand the laissez-passer system of Restoring Family Links for settled refugees, in line with latest European Union practice.