Illegal Migration Bill

Baroness Winterton of Doncaster Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

It will come as no great surprise to the hon. Lady that I do. That brings me to thinking about what we do here. There is a danger that those of us who follow the evidence and actually care about what will happen if this dreadful piece of legislation is ever implemented disappear down the rabbit hole of trying to improve, amend and mitigate it. We have all tabled dozens—hundreds, some of us—of amendments, but this piece of the Bill has simply to be excised. I will be seeking to divide the House on clause 11 stand apart, because, frankly, there is no mitigation and no polishing of this—I avoid the vulgarity, but everyone knows what I am talking about. There is no way we can polish and improve on something that is so fundamentally removed from the way we would tolerate our own children being treated.

Earlier, we were talking about returning people. I was privileged yesterday to meet a group of Hongkongers, who are among that privileged group of people who came here by a safe and legal route. They still have their problems, of course: their journey did not end when they arrived at Heathrow, and they still have to deal with the trauma of leaving friends, family and others behind in circumstances where they would ordinarily have chosen not to do so. However, I heard a quite remarkable story from one person who did not come through the safe and legal route because her arrival predated that visa scheme being opened up. She told me that her twin sister had been here, but had left the country, and now she was being told that she would need to leave because the Home Office had confused her biometrics with those of her twin sister. That is the sort of ruthless efficiency of which the Home Office is capable. Are we seriously hearing now that we are going to start sending people back to Hong Kong because they happen to have come here before the start of the British national overseas visa scheme?

Dame Rosie, I feel that I have detained the House for long enough—that is probably a matter of consensus among Members—but when it comes to Divisions, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches will do everything that we can to improve the Bill. However, ultimately, there are pieces of it that simply cannot be left to stand.

[The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for coming to a conclusion. I am going to try to call people who did not get called yesterday, as well as those who have tabled amendments, but that will require a certain amount of brevity.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It seems a long-standing conundrum of the immigration debate that most of our constituents express concern about the issue of immigration and its impact on our country, but at the same time tend to be very positive about their own personal experiences of people who have come to this country as migrants. I know that this is the case in the very diverse constituency in north-west London that I represent, but it is true in other parts of the country as well, where people’s experience is that those people who come as immigrants are those who drive the buses, work in the local shops and their children’s schools, and maintain the NHS. We are having this debate at a time when we must acknowledge that one of our biggest demographic challenges remains the fact that we have a declining working-age population, and data from the Office for National Statistics clearly shows that we, alongside much of the rest of the developed world, have a significant challenge in maintaining a workforce sufficient to support our population.

So far, this has been a very constructive debate. In particular, I highlight the comments of the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) about the need for a returns agreement. Professor Thom Brooks of Durham University recently did a very detailed study that highlighted that one of the biggest pull factors for those waiting to cross to the United Kingdom was the absence of a returns agreements with France or with the European Union. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for the work he has already done with Government in respect of safe and legal routes. As we heard from the evidence we took at the Joint Committee on Human Rights during the passage of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, the existence of a safe and legal alternative for those who wish to claim asylum in the UK is one of the defences open to the Government in seeking to treat those who, for example, arrive here in a small boat with a less advantageous process.

However, I will focus my contribution on what I fear are some of the unintended consequences of a Bill whose objective we all support: to end the situation where people put their lives at risk as a consequence of seeking to come to the United Kingdom, facing death or serious injury in the English channel in order to lodge an asylum claim in our country. In particular, I will focus on the way in which the Bill interacts with some of the positive obligations on our public authorities that are created by other legislation: for example, the Children Act 1989 and all its allied legislation, such as the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000, and—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) has outlined—the provisions contained in the Modern Slavery Act 2015.

My experience of this issue in local government is highlighted in particular by the Hillingdon judgment of 2003, which concerned the Children Act responsibilities of local authorities in respect of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. That judgment clarified that the immigration status of a child is irrelevant to the local authority’s obligations to provide support to that child, both under the Children Act when they are under 18, and as they enter adulthood through the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 and other legislation that we have passed in this House. When we considered the status of children in care, we were clear that we wanted them to enjoy support until they were at least 25 to ensure that they started out their lives in the most positive way.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Once again, I urge a certain amount of brevity, as we are not doing brilliantly at the minute and we have to get everybody in.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I will be as brief as I can, Dame Rosie. There is much that I loathe in this Bill, but I will concentrate on children’s detention. I speak in support the amendments tabled in my name, as well as new clause 18. I wish to speak on this issue because I am not sure how many Members have experience of having children locked up in their constituency in the way that the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) has, and it was the same in my constituency. For some years I was the house father of a small-unit children’s home near Heathrow, and it is important that Members fully understand and appreciate the consequences of their actions in supporting the Bill.

I have two detention centres in my constituency—Harmondsworth and Colnbrook. Prior to 2012, children and their families were detained in Harmondsworth in particular. They were locked in; they were imprisoned. The last report from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons described the setting in Harmondsworth as “bleak” and “prisonlike”, and it is. The experience of the regime is harsh. We have had suicides, and we had another death in Colnbrook last Sunday—that has been referred to. At Harmondsworth the place has been burned down during riots, twice.

I visited when the children were there, like the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland. I will tell the story of one of my visits to Harmondsworth, where the children were detained. We had a small classroom to deal with children. They were of primary and secondary age, and it was heart-rending. On one occasion when I visited they had a poetry lesson, and they chose to write a poem on a subject of their choice. One of the young girls wrote on the subject of freedom. She wrote:

“Freedom is the sound outside the gate.”

It broke my heart seeing those children locked up in that way, and all the experts I have spoken to—teachers, child psychologists, doctors—reported the impact that that was having in traumatising those children, often scarring them for life. We also demonstrated time and time again, from the various research reports on the children’s experiences, that they suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Their experiences in detention exacerbated and piled on top of what many had already experienced in their country of origin which had forced them and their families to flee, and their experiences on the journey here. In one Children’s Society report at the time, the expression “state-sponsored cruelty” was used.

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[Simon Hoare]

Yesterday, my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) set out a compelling argument about the sovereignty of this place, but I share the hon. and learned Lady’s concern that I think that speaks to an earlier time of how laws were made, when it was done in a far a more leisurely way, and when this place made far fewer laws and took its time. There were no programme motions, and people could take as long as they wished to. I take her point entirely, and does that not speak to the importance of scrutiny in the other place, but also of some oversight of the courts, so that if there is error in our lawmaking, the courts can point it out and we can rectify it, as and where necessary? I fundamentally agree with the point that she makes about the importance of court oversight.

[The Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Before the hon. and learned Lady responds, I would just say that I gave some guidance. As she knows, it is not possible to impose a time limit, but guidance was to try to get in as many people as possible.

[Joanna Cherry]

I am very grateful to you for making that clear, Dame Rosie.

Just to answer the hon. Gentleman’s points, yes, I do think that in our civilised, balanced, modern democracy, in which we have proper separation of powers, the role of the courts is very important, but the role of this Chamber is also very important. I am not too bothered about the other place. It is not elected; it does not represent people. I got elected—I went to the trouble of getting elected three times—to represent my constituents, and what I have to say about this Bill is an awful lot more important than what some unelected peer has to say. I say that with all due respect to many of the peers who I think do a fantastic job in trying to fill in the holes of the absolutely appalling way in which the Government seek to pilot legislation through this Parliament.