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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Seema Malhotra)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Mundell. I thank the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) and congratulate him on securing this important debate. I also thank my colleagues from across the House who have contributed.
There has been an important focus today on statistics, which I welcome because this Government believe in making good use of facts and evidence when delivering policy. Various points have been raised, and I want to come back to all of them, but, if I do miss any, I hope that Members will allow me to respond to some of their points in writing. I also recognise that the Minister for Border Security and Asylum, my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle), is unable to be here today.
Before I address Members’ points, I want to make a few remarks reflecting on the immigration system that the Government inherited. The hon. Member for West Suffolk alluded to the situation that we found, and it is worth reflecting on what the latest official figures show because they shocked us all. Under the previous Government, net migration grew almost five times higher in four years—and is still four times higher—-than it was before the pandemic, driven heavily by an increase in overseas recruitment. The Home Secretary and the Prime Minister have both been extremely clear that net migration needs to come down. We are, therefore, continuing with visa controls, which we supported when they were introduced by the previous Government. However, we are also clear that much more needs to be done to restore order and credibility to the system. That is why—
Seema Malhotra
I will make some remarks; I know the hon. Lady has already contributed.
That is why we are pursuing a new approach to end the overreliance on international recruitment by ensuring that the immigration, skills and training systems are properly aligned in a way they have not previously been. Further details of our plans to reduce net migration will be set out in the forthcoming White Paper. I am sure the hon. Member for West Suffolk will want to contribute and bring his own experience in government, which I do respect. I am sure he will also want to engage on how we build the solutions and the architecture that we need for a new part of how Government works, working across the Home Office, skills and our future needs, as well as on how we ensure that we are supporting migrants into work, which is also part of the role of the DWP.
Let me turn to some of the issues raised in the debate. It is worth saying that the issue of dangerous small boat crossings has been a phenomenon of the last five or six years. There has been an increase from 300 people coming in 2018 to an average of over 36,000 a year in the last three years—a 120-fold increase. We cannot deny that, in a few short years, an entire criminal smuggler industry has been built around boat crossings, and that has also been allowed to take hold across the UK border. The cost of the asylum system also increased by more than five times to £5.4 billion between 2019-20 and last year. Returns of those with no right to be here are 30% lower than they were in 2010, and asylum-related returns were down by 20% compared with 14 years ago. That was the legacy we inherited from the previous Government, and former Ministers themselves have admitted it was shameful.
On the calls for more data, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics publish a very wide range of statistical information on a regular basis. Our country’s statisticians, and those working in my Department and other Departments, are in fact world leaders in the production of statistics and analysis on the topic of migration. I am sure that the hon. Member for West Suffolk will know that the UK publishes, I believe, more statistics on migration than any other country. The content and presentation of official statistics is kept under review and that regular oversight allows us to balance the production of regular statistics with the need to develop new statistics and statistical products for future release. We remain committed to the issues of transparency and ensuring that public and parliamentary debates are informed by robust and accurate statistics, and to keeping statistics under review.
The hon. Member for West Suffolk raised a few comments on some of his correspondence and it would be helpful to refer to some of that. I assure him that the Home Office has received his letter of 1 September and is due to respond in due course. The breakdown of £700 million in costs, which the hon. Member inquired about, has been published on gov.uk and sets out the cost of the Rwanda partnership and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which were inseparable. The purpose of the IMA was to prevent individuals arriving in the UK from remaining here, and Rwanda was intended to be a vehicle for enabling that. To try and separate them is deliberately misrepresenting the true cost of what was clearly a failed policy.
Seema Malhotra
The hon. Gentleman can come back in a moment.
The proposal to send asylum applicants to Rwanda was impractical, costly and would not have worked to reduce irregular migration. We believe in dealing with these issues with common sense in the work we have been undertaking: making sure we have a new Border Security Command and Border Security Commander, working upstream, building new partnerships with other countries and doing that in order to also disrupt the supply chains of criminal gangs, who the hon. Member for West Suffolk knows are undermining our border security and putting lives at risk. We will continue to spend taxpayer money on real solutions such as breaking the business models of those criminal gangs. In fact, when we made it clear that the Rwanda partnership would come to an end, we saw, for example, the repurposing of two flights provisionally booked for Rwanda, which were used to return a number of individuals to their home countries instead.
Nick Timothy
I thank the Minister for giving way and I appreciate that she has been given a hospital pass by the immigration Minister, who really ought to be the person here, but last time she was, she did not give a very good account of herself, and has been avoiding writing letters or giving any of the numbers that the Opposition have been asking for.
The statement—which was obviously pre-prepared, and I understand how these things work—does not address any of the questions that I raised in my speech. It is not true that we are world leaders in the collection of statistics that relate to immigration. Anyway, the questions related not to overall levels of net migration from particular countries and so on, but to things such as the nationality and immigration status of criminals and imprisoned criminals, or people living in social housing or in receipt of benefits. We do not have any information on that, and if we are compared to some European countries such as Denmark or the Netherlands, a study from which shows that the average asylum migrant costs something like £400,000 net over their lifetimes, we are nowhere. Can the Minister give us a quick answer on that?
Seema Malhotra
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. As I said, we do keep our statistics under review. He will also know that a lot of research on the cost and benefit of migration has been done by the Migration Advisory Committee, and its annual report, published this week, is another example of the work it is doing, with its capacity expanding to help us address some of the challenges of bringing net migration down alongside having a more coherent policy for how we do that across Government. Indeed, the recent estimate of the average contribution of skilled workers is also demonstrated in the report.
I will make this point before I finish: the hon. Member for West Suffolk will know that the Ministry of Justice does publish data on foreign national offenders in the UK in its official statistics. He will also know that we have seen a 21% increase in foreign criminals being removed from the UK, compared to the same period last year. That sends a clear message to foreign criminals that if they break the law, they will not be allowed to stay in the UK.
I recognise the importance of the debate and the issues that have been raised today. I thank the hon. Member for raising them and we will respond to him in due course.
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).