UK-France Migration: Co-operation
Debate between Lord Empey and Lord Hanson of Flint(2 days, 12 hours ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord. Let me put him at ease. I am not having a bit of fun with the previous Government; I am imploring the House to understand what the pressures were under the previous Government, the lack of action—that is a political opinion and my view—and how, as well as the borders and security Bill, the measures that we have taken with Belgium, Holland, Germany and, in this last week, France, in the agreement between President Macron and the Prime Minister, are designed to do what the whole House has a shared objective on, which is to reduce the crossings, hold those criminals to account and break their business model. That is what we are trying to do.
The noble Lord asks when the scheme will come into play. We plan to do the scheme by the summer, which is a definitive date. I suspect that the proposal is for the next five to six weeks, but the summer is our aim. We have not yet set a date to monitor and evaluate the pilots, but, self-evidently, it is in the interests of France, the UK and the people who are being trafficked to smash the gangs as soon as possible and ensure that we provide an upscaling of the scheme as soon as possible. I hope the noble Lord will give a fair wind to what I think will still be a deterrent. We will return to that after the Recess, to be questioned and subject to scrutiny in September, which I regard as the early autumn and late summer.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, the Minister referred to a number of his international engagements, but one thing the Government are stubbornly refusing to look at is discussing with our allies a revision of the 1951 European refugee convention. I have asked Parliamentary Questions twice and both have come back with a negative response. It seems to me that talking to allies about something that was done after World War II which is relevant to all this is worth doing, and I hope the Government will do that.
While in broad terms I do not resile from the fact that the Minister is having a go at all this, and I am quite supportive of that, I am far from convinced that the European Union will be happy with it, for a variety of reasons. I hope it works, but it will have no impact whatever on the total increase in our population, which is the thing that we are studiously ignoring in this Parliament and have been for 20 years. Even in a good week, we are still increasing our population by 10,000 people per week. In 2023, we were increasing our population by 23,000 people a week, but no one in the Government or Parliament seems to join the dots between that and the housing shortage, health waiting lists and a stagnant economy.
I will support the Minister in all the measures he has taken with our European allies because I think they can be small contributing parts, and of course the Rwanda scheme never got off the ground and so we will never know whether it would have worked. The fact is that the gangs are not smashed; they are still trading well and they have weeks of good weather ahead of them. I hope that, when we come back after the Summer Recess, we are not sitting here talking about numbers still being 56% up. This scheme must be designed as a deterrent but there are many other pull factors, including our legal approach to all this and how we are dealing with it, subsidising legal actions against our own Government. That in and of itself creates a pull factor.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The noble Lord raises a number of key points. As a Government, we are committed to our international obligations. The noble Lord mentioned the 1951 convention. As he knows, a letter has been circulated by some European Union member states calling for that to be examined. We want to maintain our international obligations, and it is important that we do so. In doing that, we still have to undertake the actions mentioned—I am thankful for the noble Lord’s support on those today—as well as other actions.
The noble Lord mentioned the EU’s interests. On 30 March and 1 April this year, we had a border security summit on organised crime that brought together 50 countries that are impacted by this, including key members of the European Union such as Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, and other countries such as Turkey, Tunisia, Bulgaria, Albania, Nigeria and Pakistan. It is very important that those longer-term issues are addressed.
The people who arrive in northern France have usually entered the European Union via southern Italy or Greece, and sometimes via the borders of Poland and eastern Europe. It is in the EU’s interests to examine the French-British scheme and to ensure, if there are positive lessons to be learned, that it is expanded. It is in nobody’s interest to have criminal gangs operating throughout the EU and in the United Kingdom and the channel. As well as the challenges of that movement, the profits those criminal gangs make are going into drugs, guns and other activity that fuels further crime. I hope that the noble Lord’s fears will not be realised and that we can take action.
The noble Lord said that a large number of people are arriving here. I point him to the figure of 10,191 asylum-related returns that took place last year because of the speeding-up of the asylum-claim process. We are speeding up the asylum-claim process and weeding out those people who have paid for a small boat trip and arrived in the UK but have no legitimate asylum claim whatever, having arrived as economic migrants who did not go through a legal route. Those people are being removed.
Asylum Seekers: Hotels
Debate between Lord Empey and Lord Hanson of Flint(5 months, 4 weeks ago)
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The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for giving us an opportunity to debate this issue. We have had a number of Questions on it, but it is worthy of a debate in this short time we have. I will try to answer the points that noble Lords mentioned in their contributions.
If the noble Lord will forgive me, I will start with the noble Lord, Lord Patten, who asked whether we have a plan to look at blue Monday five years hence. I hope it will help him and the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, if I mention some points very briefly, which I hope will satisfy the noble Lord, at least in part.
First, we have to speed up asylum claims, because they are taking too long to be determined. As my noble friend Lady Lister mentioned, we have a proud record of accepting asylum claims, but we have to adjudicate them. The longer we take to adjudicate them, the longer people need to be in hotels and dispersed accommodation. So the first task the Government have to undertake is to ensure that we complete and assess asylum claims as quickly as possible. To do that, we have put in an extra 1,000 staff, deployed from different parts of the department, in part from the savings from the Rwanda scheme which was scrapped.
Secondly, we need to speedily remove those who do not have a claim for asylum. Since 4 July, the Government have taken 16,000-plus people who have failed the asylum system from hotels and returned them to a place of safety—a country that they have been deemed able to return to.
Thirdly, and this is the nub of the discussions we have had so far, we need to look at how we close hotels, because they are a costly way of operating asylum accommodation. We have already closed the “Bibby Stockholm” and scrapped the use of Scampton in Lincolnshire, and we have plans to reduce the number of hotels over the course of this Parliament. It will take time, but by March this year we will have nine fewer hotels than we inherited in July last year. The noble Lord will expect me to say this, but I find it strange that under his jurisdiction and his Government, the number of hotels went from zero in 2015 to a peak of 400 in 2023 and is now just settling at the 260-270 mark. There is a record that we have to pick up on and work with, which I am trying to do in a constructive and positive way.
To answer some of the points mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Empey and Lord Green, we have put in place the new Border Security Command—which will require legal back-up in a Bill later this year—with Martin Hewitt as its head. That is designed to try to take some of the pressure not off asylum accommodation, which is legitimate, but the illegal entry to the UK by criminal gangs organising for people to make dangerous crossings to potentially seek asylum, who in some cases have no basis for asylum but still come across in illegal gangs. The Border Security Command will be part of the plan to try to overturn that.
The noble Lord, Lord Davies, asked about what we are doing with our international partners, and we have some international policy objectives. We do not have a phobia about talking to Germans, Italians or the French. We have a Calais Group in place to look at the issues there. Our Border Force control is looking at what is happening in Germany, working with Germany upstream to reduce the pressures there and to ensure that people claim asylum legitimately in their first port of call, rather than coming to the United Kingdom.
We have scrapped the Rwanda scheme, which was a disincentive and a waste of money. We have put that money into the areas I mentioned to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, such as speeding up asylum claims, finding places to reduce the use of hotels and commissioning good, dispersed accommodation. I take the point mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord German, that we want to get people through the system as quickly as possible, so they are determined to be legitimately here and able to work, or not legitimately here, and a way is found to deport them. That process needs to have integrity and speed.
There are issues arising from and discussions about the levels of migration, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Green. The Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill, which is a Liberal Democrat-inspired Bill, not a Government Bill, has legitimate objectives at its core, which I accept and understand. A big migration White Paper is due shortly; it will look at the very pressures that have been talked about in this House by my noble friend Lady Lister and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield, and at how we deal with integration and the potential shortfall in skills. It will consider how we deal with asylum issues generally, all the questions that are dealt with in the family reunion Bill, and how we create a wider 5-year plan—going back to the noble Lord, Lord Patten—to ensure that we can deal with those issues over that period. Those are all key issues.
To the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield and others who have mentioned it, I say that the hotel costs which are the focus of this debate are simply eyewatering and not a good use of taxpayers’ money. As the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, mentioned, they are not even a good way of ensuring the safety and security of the people in those hotels, particularly women fleeing persecution. The costs were £8 million per day under the previous Government. They have dropped to £6 million per day following the work we have done to reduce them. It will take time but, I say again to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, it is part of the plan to get that figure right down and, over a period, end the use of hotels, but we have to deal with the demand issues first. These include legitimate asylum claims, which my noble friend Lady Lister mentioned; we should be place of sanctuary, somewhere that accepts people who are fleeing persecution, and do so in a proper and effective way without hotels.
We have to be cognisant of the fact that we still have to deal with the continued demand, as has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Empey. We need to focus on reducing the pressure on the system from those who are seeking to come here illegally.
We have increased dispersed accommodation by 8% in the past few months of this Government’s tenure—the first time that we have been in office to do so. Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money had already been spent on large sites at Scampton and Bexhill, and the “Bibby Stockholm”, by the previous Government, and we have tried to row back on that. We have reviewed asylum spend, and it is important that we look at the bigger picture. In 2023-24, when the noble Lord’s party was in office, the Home Office spent £4.7 billion on asylum support, the vast majority on hotels. We are continuing to explore how we can save taxpayers’ money, and we are on track to save £4 billion over the next two years. I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Patten, that it is part of the plan to reduce the amount of money spent on asylum accommodation by speeding up the claims, scrapping accommodation such as the “Bibby Stockholm” and ensuring that the Rwanda policy is changed, so that we can use that resource to clear the backlog of asylum decisions.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for securing this debate. This Government inherited an asylum system under exceptional strain. When we came into office, there were tens of thousands of cases at a complete standstill, and a growing a backlog. In reference to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord German, asylum seekers were therefore living in limbo, accommodated in hotels which not only cost exorbitant sums but are profoundly detrimental to the wellbeing of vulnerable individuals, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, mentioned. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield highlighted that there is real pressure on hotels from collections of individuals, which has led to forces that are not conducive to integration, security and acceptance. The focus has been on hotels rather than on dispersed accommodation, where people go about their daily lives in a dispersed way.
For all those reasons, the Government are actively working towards a more sustainable and cost-effective solution to accommodate asylum seekers away from hotels. I have to be honest with the House: it will take time. It is a challenge, and it cannot be done straightaway, but the Government’s objective is very clear. In the manifesto, we said that we would end the use of hotels for asylum accommodation and, at a date to be determined, that we will do. I will be accountable to this House, as my right honourable friend the Home Secretary will be to the House of Commons, in ensuring that we do that in future. The resource that is being eaten up by asylum hotels is the very same that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, mentioned, can be used elsewhere for more positive activity. I will look at the detail of what she mentioned and drop her a note.
I will check on my noble friend Lady Lister’s lost letter. I thought I had sent it, but maybe it got lost in the system over Christmas and the new year. We will find out where it has gone, and if it does not have a stamp on it yet, it will have one shortly. She may even find that I use the new method of email, as a matter of some speed, to get the correspondence to her in short order. I will look at that as a matter of urgency and get back to her.
I hope that today’s debate has been useful. There are challenges. On all sides of the House, we accept that we have the challenges of wider migration, hotel accommodation and its cost, making a plan and illegal migration into this country. In the short time that I have had, I hope I have set out the Government’s prospectus. With that, I hope that the House can hold me to account in due course on the delivery of that proposal.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
We have time. As I have known the noble Lord, Lord Empey, for such a long time and worked with him in such a constructive way, and even though the clock is flashing, I will take his intervention.
Lord Empey (UUP)
Before the Minister sits down—again—could he respond to my point about the 1951 refugee convention. He talked about demand. This is part of the legal framework and our international obligations, which I think need revision, with our partners across the rest of the world who were party to it in the first place. If he cannot give me a response now, he can write to me—or email me.
Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (Search, Seizure and Detention of Property: Code of Practice) (Northern Ireland) Order 2024
Debate between Lord Empey and Lord Hanson of Flint(7 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
As the Minister responsible for this order, I have not had any discussion with Naomi Long or the Department of Justice on these matters, but I hope it will give some confidence to my noble friend to know that it is my intention to meet our counterparts in Northern Ireland. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary has, I believe, already met the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, and I intend to do the same. I have a potential visit to Northern Ireland planned for the new year to discuss areas of mutual co-operation. I will make sure that this issue is raised as one of many items on the agenda of any future meeting in January. With that, I commend this order to the Committee.
Lord Empey (UUP)
Will the Minister reflect again on the resources issue? If he does not have any material to hand, he could write to us, which I imagine would be easily achieved.