Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery

Giles Watling Excerpts

Wednesday 29th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) on bringing forward this important debate and speaking so powerfully. Since Kindertransport and before, right through to those coming from Afghanistan and Ukraine today, we are proud in this country to give people safe haven, and we must continue to do so.

I will focus on the boats. As a yachtsman, I am well aware of the dangers of crossing open waters. On 23 September last year, I was crossing the channel—quite legally—and I saw the French warship Athos behaving in the most extraordinary fashion. I looked on the navigation device and saw that it was circling, and it kept circling as it left the French coast towards the UK coast. It was circling around a very small boat crowded with people. When we got closer, we could see those people; they were in a desperate condition. What horrified me about that particular incident was that the French warship was just circling them. I am a yachtsman; I am a seaman. That is what I do. What we do is take desperate people off those boats and make sure they are safe. I have the evidence on my phone right here.

We must stop that sort of thing happening. Stopping illegal boats is a matter of common humanity. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) said, 39 people lost their lives in the back of a trailer, so it is not just the boats in south Essex. That is because of our weak borders. The cost to the taxpayer is enormous because of this Home Office malfunction, as I see it. It is not acceptable. I believe something like £7 million per day is spent on hotel fees, which is outrageous, but we are looking to address this. We have to show humanity about it.

Locally, at a party conference last year I was contacted by the chief executive of my local council. He told me that he had been given 24 hours’ notice, at a weekend, that we were going to have a migrant hotel suddenly opened upon us. The council did not have time to get services in line. Those people would need help. It was a question of putting desperate people in a deprived place. This was not nimbyism; the local council had identified other, more suitable sites, but the company that the Home Office had employed had decided to open that site within 24 hours.

Fortunately, by working with officials and asking an urgent question in the Chamber, I was able to get that particular incident stopped. We are dealing with this with a scattergun approach. We are being reactive as the incidents happen. We cannot go on like this. We cannot keep fighting a rearguard action. For the sake of humanity, and for the sake of the taxpayers of Clacton and elsewhere, we must stop the boats. That means backing the new Government measures, which have been laid out here today, and making the Home Office more logistically competent. In my view, and I have said this several times before, that means liaising with our French counterparts and getting British boots on the ground in France. We can do this. I am sure our French counterparts would like to see it. That would stop the boats leaving those beaches, and prevent the horror that so many people go through. We saw a child on a beach in Kent, and we never want to see that again.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I thank all hon. Members for keeping to time. We will move on to the wind-ups now. Each Front-Bench speaker has 10 minutes, or effectively 11, given that we have a bit of extra time.

Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum

Giles Watling Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Angela Crawley]

I absolutely agree. I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, as always. He is correct. We have a duty not only as a country and a nation, but as humans, to acknowledge that these children are not the criminal gangs or the ones facilitating the process of getting to the UK. They are simply the innocent bystanders of a process that they themselves may not have chosen.

Far too often, children have been incorrectly declared as adults. An immigration officer will make an age judgment based on demeanour or appearance. If they are judged to be an adult, they are not sent for an age assessment. Rather, they are given a date of birth and sent to live in shared rooms with adults. In 2021, a specialist programme run by the Refugee Council worked with 233 young people over 12 months. The Home Office had initially determined them to be “certainly” adults, when in fact, only 14 of them were adults. That means that 219 of those children were denied the rights and protections of a child, and were exposed to further exploitation, trafficking and violence as a result of that determination. Those 219 children were counting on us to take care of them.

The Home Office refuses to document how often that happens, how many children are judged incorrectly to be adults or what happens to them. There is no process to track such a decision. If there is any dubiety in that decision, there is no pathway to ensure that those individuals are protected and safeguarded until a definitive determination can be made. It is fair to say that even the determinations that are made are questionable at times. I therefore ask the Minister to be more transparent about frontline decision making. Will he commit to publishing statistics on age-disputed children who are initially treated as adults? Will he outline a pathway for those individuals to ensure that they are protected and safeguarded within the system, as they should be?

The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 gives the Home Office powers to conduct medical age assessments. However, the British Association of Social Workers has stated that there is no known scientific method that can precisely determine age. Pushing scientific methods upon age-disputed young people is incredibly insensitive. It ignores the trauma they have been through and the atrocities they have seen.

Those who are wrongly declared as adults will not be able to avoid deportation to Rwanda under this Government’s cruel plans. That is a terrifying prospect for children and young people. I am disappointed in the UK Government. A place that was supposed to be their second chance and a place of safety is only adding to their stress and anxiety. I therefore ask the Minister: when will the report from the Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee on specific scientific methods for age assessment be made available? Will learning from the national age assessment board pilots be shared, given their frontline role in rectifying the Home Office’s mistakes? We need to ensure that these processes are transparent and that we can scrutinise them appropriately.

Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are being abandoned by the Home Office and placed in hotels that are desperately unfit for anyone to live in, but particularly children, who are forced to live alongside adults, further exposing them to potential harms. The Home Office has set out its intentions to speed up the process by which unaccompanied children are transferred from temporary hotels to long-term care, but it is simply not enough. Again, that process is not transparent. It only normalises the use of hotels that are unfit accommodation for anyone, but particularly for children who should be nowhere near them.

Every Child Protected Against Trafficking says that housing children in hotels is unlawful, dangerous and contrary to the UK’s child welfare legislation. In October last year, more than 220 unaccompanied children went missing from hotels. Had those children been in the care of authorities, they would have been protected. I ask the Minister again, what is the pathway and how do we ensure that no child who is placed in any form of accommodation can go missing without someone being directly accountable and responsible?

Unaccompanied children are alone, scared and vulnerable. Many have left behind their families not knowing how they are; they deserve to have their families join them in safety. The Home Office’s position on altering family reunification rights for children is nothing short of ridiculous. This Government believe that allowing children and young people to sponsor their families would incentivise parents to send their children on dangerous journeys to the UK. Whether that is the case or not, I do not believe it is a decision any parent would make outside of the most desperate of circumstances.

Turning briefly to the point on family reunification, the Home Office’s minimum income requirement means that UK citizens and settled persons currently have to earn £18,600 before they can sponsor a spouse or partner to join them—more, if children are involved. That means that a substantial percentage of the population who do not earn that sum cannot live with their family and have to leave the country. Many thousands of families have been split apart since its introduction almost a decade ago, and many more have been affected by the rules that will also apply to European economic area family members.

Rather than reduce the level of income, or abandon the policy altogether as I have argued for repeatedly, reports have emerged over Christmas that the Home Office is thinking of increasing it further, splitting more families apart. The fact is that many families in the UK right now may struggle to meet those requirements in the current circumstances. To place that requirement arbitrarily on families only serves to ensure that further families will not receive reunification. It is not a reason to keep families apart. That they make those perilous journeys only highlights the grave circumstances that children flee from.

The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 brought in a ham-fisted policy with deferential treatment for refugees seeking family reunion based on the way they entered the UK. Those who arrived outside of one of the ever-dwindling safe and legal routes need to meet higher tests and additional requirements before being able to reunite with their family members. Organisations such as Families Together are calling for this discriminatory policy to be scrapped.

I close my contribution by apologising to the unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, who come to this country seeking safe harbour—because it is simply not the case. I apologise to the thousands of children who have come here and potentially been lost in a system with no traceability, because this Government refuse to acknowledge that they are in fact children. I am sorry that I could not cover more in this debate, but their voices and stories should not be ignored just because of where they came from. The fact is that they are children, and they should be treated as such. The harm and neglect that they are facing after seeking refuge in the UK can only be blamed on this Government, and the heartless Home Office polices that they exhibit.

I do not wish to hammer home the point any more than I already have, but it is simply unimaginable to me that we have, just recently, 219 children who we cannot account for, and many more who we have incorrectly administered as adults. What will the Minister do to correct that? It simply cannot continue.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

rose—

[Sir Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

This is a half-hour debate; do you have the permission of the mover of the motion to speak?

--- Later in debate ---

[Giles Watling]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Streeter. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) for securing this very important debate. I represent the coastal community of Clacton in Essex; we have the second-longest coastline in England. It is a very beautiful coastline with many sandy beaches. Essex has many points of entry. It has two freeports. It was in Essex where we had the horrific loss of life, when 39 people being trafficked were accidentally asphyxiated in the back of a container—Members might remember that horror. I am a yachtsman, and I know how treacherous our waters can be.

Children from the likes of Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan must have a quick, legal and safe route of asylum to our country. Quite frankly, some of the stories I read about children chill my blood. As we on the coast in Essex know, illegal crossings are inviting disaster, though for victims of modern-day slavery, the crossing might well be the best part of it. But we cannot be emotional here; we have to be calm, and to think this through, as the evil traffickers do. They know that if they tell people to claim to be under 18, those people will mostly be subject to our care system, as opposed to the justice system. They know that councils struggle to deal with complex cases, so people absconding from care to get to their sinister destination is certainly not unheard of.

The only solution is to negotiate with our French neighbours. We have British boots in control rooms in France, which is a welcome development, but we can negotiate further and get British boots on the ground in France. We can finance that. With every boat that lands here, we are telling those overseas that their dangerous business model can work, and telling those waiting here for their product that their evil business model is still viable. However, the point of my speech is to highlight that, for areas such as Essex, stopping small boats is not enough. Human misery can be and is traded in large vessels, heavy goods vehicles and so on, as I mentioned earlier. I urge the Minister to apply the same focus that we have on small boats to other modes of travel, which can be equally lethal, and to get boots on the ground in France for the sake of these children.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

I will come on in a moment to answer the hon. Lady’s questions about age verification, but I disagree that sending individuals to Rwanda, which has now been declared a safe country by the courts, is a policy that is uncompassionate or cruel. Quite the opposite is true.

We live in an age of mass migration. Millions of people wish to come to the United Kingdom. If we do nothing to deter people from coming to the UK, which I think is the position that the hon. Lady and her party suggest taking, we will find not 45,000 people crossing the channel, but hundreds of thousands of people doing so in the years and decades ahead. We have to respond to this issue as a country, as many other countries around the world are doing.

From the conversations that the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister and I have had with our European and international partners, it is clear that every developed country in the world is thinking carefully about how they can put in place procedures and policies that will prevent mass migration and deter individuals from making dangerous crossings or damaging their national sovereignty. Other European countries are looking to the work we are doing on Rwanda. We may see other European countries copy that policy and make agreements with third parties in the years ahead.

[Giles Watling]

The Minister almost answered my point in his last sentence. In 2020, I believe there were some 90 million displaced people across the globe on the move. That figure will have increased. Other countries will be facing the same problems that we face, and they will all have different models. Are we looking at different models?

[Robert Jenrick]

We are looking at all models; I hope that hon. Members can see from the plans set out by the Prime Minister that this will be a campaign on several fronts. We are looking at every viable route in order to deter people from coming to the UK, to process applications as swiftly as possible, and to find better forms of accommodation when they are here. I know that my hon. Friend’s constituency has been on the sharp end of the situation regarding accommodation. Of course, we are talking to our international partners around the world, who are all grappling with the same challenge.

We are not an international outlier. The policies that we are enacting are those that are being enacted or considered by most other developed countries. The Prime Minister, through his recent conversations with President Macron, and the Home Secretary, through the Calais Group of northern European states, are working intensively and constructively with our partners to find common ways forward. The treaties that we are bound by, such as the refugee convention, were created for a different era, in the immediate aftermath of the second world war, prior to this period in which tens if not hundreds of millions of individuals are looking to travel around the world. It is in that context that we need to sharpen the deterrent we have as a country to make sure that we are not providing an easier route than our European neighbours, and are not a more compelling destination than our nearest neighbours, for those shopping for asylum or, particularly, for economic migrants.

I will answer the questions the hon. Lady has brought to my attention. The first point is about how we house individuals. It is important to say—I mean no disrespect to the hon. Lady, but this point needs to be made—that Scotland is bearing a lighter burden than other parts of the United Kingdom when it comes to refugees generally, and to those who are crossing the channel in small boats in particular. The same appears to be true with respect to children.

Hotel Asylum Accommodation: Local Authority Consultation

Giles Watling Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if she will make a statement on consultation with local authorities as to the selection of hotels for contingency asylum accommodation.

[The Minister for Immigration (Robert Jenrick)]

On my appointment by the Prime Minister three weeks ago, I was appraised of the critical situation at the Manston processing centre. Within days, the situation escalated further with a terrorist attack at Western Jet Foil that forced the transfer of hundreds of additional migrants to Manston. I urgently visited Western Jet Foil and Manston within days of my appointment to assess the situation for myself and to speak with frontline staff, during which time it became clear to me that very urgent action was required.

Since then, the numbers at Manston have fallen from more than 4,000 to zero today. That would not have been possible without the work of dedicated officials across the Home Office—from the officials in cutters saving lives at sea, to the medical staff at Manston—and I put on record my sincere gratitude to them for the intense effort required to achieve that result.

To bring Manston to a sustainable footing and meet our legal and statutory duties to asylum seekers who would otherwise have been left destitute, we have had to procure additional contingency accommodation at extreme pace. In some instances, however, that has led to the Home Office and our providers failing to properly engage with local authorities and Members of Parliament. I have been clear that that is completely unacceptable and that it must change.

On Monday, a “Dear colleague” letter in my name was sent to outline a new set of minimum requirements for that engagement, backed by additional resources. This includes an email notification to local authorities and Members of Parliament no less than 24 hours prior to arrivals; a fulsome briefing on the relevant cohort, required support and dedicated point of contact; and an offer of a meeting with the local authority as soon as possible prior to arrival.

I have since met chief executives and leaders of local authorities across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, among many other meetings, to improve our engagement. We discussed their concerns and outlined the changes that we intend to make together. I have also met our providers to convey my concerns and those conveyed to me by hon. Members on both sides of the House in recent weeks, and to agree new standards of engagement and conduct from them.

These new standards will lead to a modest improvement, but I am clear that much more needs to be done, so this performance standard will be reviewed weekly with a view to improving service levels progressively as quickly as we can. In the medium term, we are committed to moving to a full dispersal accommodation model, which would be fairer and cheaper. We continue to pursue larger accommodation sites that are decent but not luxurious, because we want to make sure that those in our care are supported appropriately but that the UK is a less attractive destination for asylum shoppers and economic migrants. That is exactly what the Home Secretary and I intend to achieve.

[Giles Watling]

I thank the Minister for his answer. Last Sunday afternoon, the Home Office contacted my local authority by email to give it 24 hours’ notice that it had selected a hotel to act as contingency asylum accommodation. That gave the excellent people at Tendring District Council no time to respond properly to the issue of services. It is an inadequate timeframe and shows how poor the comms from the Home Office have been; I have not been contacted personally about the issue at all. I am glad that the Minister finds it unacceptable, but will he agree to meet me and the local authority to discuss the plans for Clacton?

[Robert Jenrick]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising those important issues. I will, of course, be happy to meet him, as I have met hon. Members on both sides of the House in almost every case where someone has requested to do so.

In respect of the hotel in Tendring, as I understand it, having spoken to officials this morning, a proposition was put to Tendring District Council to use a former care home in my hon. Friend’s constituency, which would have accommodated a small number of asylum seekers. Short notice was given because it was to be a backstop accommodation option in the light of the extreme situation that we were contending with at Manston. On further inquiries, and prior to his inquiry to the Department and the calling of the urgent question, the proposition was dropped by the Home Office and there is no intention of proceeding with it.

For information, had that proposition been taken forward, it would have been for a very small number of individuals. At the moment, there are 39 asylum seekers accommodated in my hon. Friend’s constituency, 14 of whom are in hotels and 25 in dispersed accommodation. That accounts for 0.02% of the population of Tendring’s local authority. I do not say that to diminish the legitimate concerns that he raises, but merely to provide context. If we are dealing with 40,000 individuals crossing the channel illegally, there will be a need for all local authorities in the country to work with the Home Office and to play their part. It is absolutely incumbent on the Home Office in return, however, to provide good standards of engagement so that we can ensure that the right accommodation is chosen in the right places. That is exactly what I intend to achieve.

Migration

Giles Watling Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

That does sound like a very concerning incident. My hon. Friend has my assurance that I will raise it with the Home Office and, indeed, the police, and will report back to him.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

On 23 September, when I was crossing the channel—quite legally—I spotted the French warship Athos behaving very strangely. I have here a screenshot of the warship, which I took on a navigational device. It was circling a small open boat full of people.

[Craig Mackinlay]

Escorting it.

[Giles Watling]

The warship made no attempt to pick those people up, as it should have. As a yachtsman, I can tell the House that they were in danger and should have been taken off the boat, but the warship was, as my hon. Friend says, escorting that boat to our shores.

I am pleased with the deal that the Home Secretary made, and it is, as my right hon. Friend said, a good first step, but in my view it does not go far enough. Should we not push to get British boots on the ground and on the beaches alongside their French counterparts, in joint operations, to keep people on the shores of France, or on the shores of the continent?

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend has made an important point. Of course we would like to have an effective returns agreement with France, and we would like to have British officers supporting their French counterparts in northern France. Those issues remain for discussion with France, but it is an important first step that we now have our officers working with their French counterparts in the control centre so that the very sophisticated intelligence that we are now gathering is being shared in real time and acted upon by the French.

Channel Crossings in Small Boats

Giles Watling Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

When it comes to helping vulnerable people, it is far more effective to help those who are in dangerous locations rather than shipping people from, say, Spain to the United Kingdom, because countries like Spain are already safe countries. As I say, we do more than our fair share when it comes to protecting vulnerable people. I have already referenced the fact that we have the highest number of UASCs of any European country, and our resettlement programme, in the five years from 2015 to 2020, took in more people directly from conflict zones than any other European country. So any suggestion that this country is not doing its fair share is completely wrong and completely misguided.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

This issue just seems to be maundering on and on; we keep coming back to it again and again. On 9 June this year, I asked Ministers about this issue, as my constituents in Clacton expect this matter to be dealt with—it is what they voted for. People’s lives are at risk. Criminal gangs are getting rich and it has to stop, so what concrete progress has been made since I last asked this question? I reiterate that we need to get the French navy to step up to the plate and take those people off the boats in international waters. How are we going to ensure that that happens, and soon?

[Chris Philp]

Since we last spoke, the French officers operating on or near French beaches have stopped hundreds of crossing attempts—they have stopped about 3,000 crossing attempts so far this year. We have also established the joint intelligence cell that I mentioned earlier, and intelligence passed from the National Crime Agency here in the UK to our French counterparts contributed, I believe, to 84 crossing attempts being prevented this morning alone, so that is good progress. However, there is undoubtedly more that needs to be done, because these crossings are continuing at frankly unacceptable levels, and negotiations and discussions are continuing as we speak with our French colleagues to step up our efforts and activities even more.

Oral Answers to Questions

Giles Watling Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) (Con)]

What steps her Department is taking to stop migrants crossing the English Channel illegally.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

What steps her Department is taking to stop migrants crossing the English Channel illegally.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Chris Philp)]

I am very glad that this question has arisen. We should be absolutely clear that these crossings of the English channel are extremely dangerous. They are crossing the busiest shipping lines in the world. They are facilitated by criminal gangs who are ruthlessly exploiting vulnerable people. The crossings are also entirely unnecessary because France is a safe country and it has a very well-established and functioning asylum system. We are therefore working with our French counterparts around the clock, sharing intelligence between our National Crime Agency and the French authorities, to stop illegally facilitated crossings and to prevent on-the-beach embarkations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp]

I entirely agree with the point my hon. Friend makes, and with the similar points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mrs Elphicke), on this topic. We have a points-based system coming into force shortly. We granted asylum or protection to 20,000 people last year, one of the highest figures in Europe, and we welcomed 3,000 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, the highest number of any country in Europe. Our legal migration methods are entirely fair. We should therefore be policing illegal migration routes with complete effectiveness, and the Home Secretary and I are determined to do that.

[Giles Watling]

I thank my hon. Friend for his earlier answer, but we know that the migrants, as they cross the channel, sometimes threaten the French navy that they will throw themselves or their children into the sea. That is an appalling act, and we need to get the French navy to step up to the plate and take those people off the boats in international waters. What are we doing now to ensure that this happens?

[Chris Philp]

Discussions are under way between the UK Government and the French Government. Indeed, I am speaking to my opposite number, the French deputy Interior Minister, Monsieur Nunez, on Thursday this week. There is more we are doing as well, including working with the French OCRIEST, the French gendarmes and the Police aux Frontières—the PAF—to ensure that as many of those embarkations are stopped before they even get on to the water. About 50% are stopped before they get on to the water, but we would like that number to be a great deal higher.

Policing (England and Wales)

Giles Watling Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I know Belgravia police station very well indeed—[Laughter.] It was not through having spent any overnight stays there. During my time in policing in London, I visited it on a couple of occasions. The Met will be in receipt of a further 1,369 police officers, who will need to be accommodated somewhere. As I have said in the media in the past, perhaps to some hilarity, their lockers will need to go somewhere, and an expansion of the size that London will see over the next few years means that a general review of the property strategy is sensible.

[Giles Watling (Clacton) (Con)]

In Clacton, we led a campaign to increase the precept for policing, it spread across Essex, and I am very glad that we have more police officers in Clacton and we have town centre teams. However, like many parts of the rest of the country, we have a lot of knife crime and it needs to be dealt with. What is my hon. Friend thinking of doing to stop young people getting drawn into that sort of crime in the first place?