Shamima and Jarrah Begum

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord raises a very important question. Of course, if British people who go to Syria return, they face the full force of the law as to why they travelled to that country when the Government had given every advice against doing so. The noble Lord will know of many cases where citizens return. However, to go into a war zone and retrieve someone is beyond what the Home Secretary is willing to do. Of course, the other point is that the Government put a huge amount of money into the region in humanitarian assistance, but the Home Secretary has rightly said that he will not risk the lives of British officials to go to retrieve foreign fighters—or, indeed, the children they have brought with them.

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, to focus on the practicalities of recovering a child from Syria is to go down the wrong road. At the core of this problem is the fact that a decision was made within days, without any due process, using television and newspaper interviews to judge a teenager and without taking into account the interests of their child, and eventually to decide that that individual, if they were so dangerous that they could not come back to this country, should be dumped on our Commonwealth partners in Bangladesh. Everything about this decision was wrong. What will the Government learn from this experience? They directly contradicted what they said last year was their policy on a returning young mother from Syria in a decision so soon after publishing that policy; surely they should learn from this experience, review the process and publish a transparent due process that will be used in every case, rather than responding to newspaper headlines.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, what the noble Lord said is interesting, because responding to newspaper headlines is quite often what happens in both Houses of Parliament. The Home Secretary makes decisions based on information that he is given—robust legal advice, including on the interests of the child. Over 150 cases of deprivation have been made since 2010, so I dispute the noble Lord’s assertion. On transparency, as I said in my Statement, we are looking to provide a transparency report shortly with the most up-to-date figures.