National Security Bill

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Holly Lynch

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

We on the Labour Benches are in no doubt about the importance of the Bill. Transnational repression and interference from hostile state actors and their proxies are testing the UK’s defences as never before. As the global landscape continues to change at a staggering pace, interference from countries that do not share our values is nothing new. However, the breadth and enduring nature of the threats we are now facing is a contemporary challenge, combined with the technology and methods used by those seeking to undermine us, which are new and enhanced.

Today is World Press Freedom Day, giving us a chance to recommit ourselves to defending press freedom, but also to acknowledge that many of the threats to which our security services and counter-terrorism police are responding here in the UK relate to the protection of journalists, from the—thankfully disrupted—assassination and kidnap plots against UK residents who are perceived as enemies of Iran owing to their coverage of the protests and the regime’s brutal crackdown, to the unacceptable harassment reported by Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC and her colleagues acting on behalf of the British national Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy newspaper owner currently detained in Hong Kong. We must challenge that overseas and refuse to tolerate it here.

We have always understood that we need the new provisions in the Bill, but the Minister will understand where I am coming from when I say that this has been far from a shining example of best practice in passing legislation. The churn in the Government since the Bill was tabled in May last year, coupled with the late and lengthy additions to it, has meant that scrutiny has been truncated on occasion, but it is all the more crucial as a result. It is unusual for a Bill to come back from the other place with—if I am not mistaken—no fewer than 117 Government amendments, but that is why I, like the Minister, am particularly grateful to our colleagues at the other end of the building, where operational expertise in particular has had a positive impact in shaping and sharpening these measures to ensure that they deliver the protections we need and the safeguards we can all trust.

Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Holly Lynch

2nd reading
Friday 2nd December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Can I just ensure that colleagues know it is important to address the Bill and not go too much wider?

[Holly Lynch]

I will get back to the detail of the Bill, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I quickly make the point that the Government cut 21,000 police officers. I will not be giving them a pat on the back for replacing 20,000, having recognised the detrimental impact that has had on the safety of our communities. Those pressures hit rural communities particularly hard. Interestingly, just last month, BBC analysis found that suspects are almost 25% more likely to be charged for crimes in urban areas than in the countryside. In 2021, there was a charge rate of 6.89% in rural areas compared with 8.55% in urban areas. I am sure that the policing Minister will want to have a close look at that stark difference.

I return to the detail of the Bill. I particularly welcome its provision to allow, through secondary legislation, the Secretary of State the power to expand the remit of the Bill’s requirements to other types of equipment and machinery commonly used in the agricultural and construction sectors. We hope that, if enacted, secondary legislation will expand the Bill to cover a multitude of other agricultural and construction equipment. I know that chainsaws and nail guns are the types of tools and kit that are too regularly stolen from properties, or the backs of vans and other vehicles, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.

Given the expertise of the hon. Member for Buckingham in this area and his contributions on the topic in the Chamber today and previously, I know that he is all too aware of the problem of theft from vans. According to research carried out by Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, in 2021, 27% of van drivers had fallen victim to tool theft in the previous 12 months. The total cost of all lost tools and equipment is estimated to be about £15 million a year. Volkswagen estimates that the associated downtime for drivers who must replace those tools costs £550 a day per van. The Bill presents an opportunity to sharpen the tools available in the fight against this type of crime. When resources are down and geographically stretched in some rural areas, the more we can use technology to design out crime, the better.

We are satisfied that the Bill will make some progress towards that, helping to suppress theft and the antisocial use of quad bikes that is often a consequence. I again commend the hon. Member for Buckingham. We hope that the Government will allow the Bill to progress to Committee stage where Members can consider the detail, in the hope that it makes a difference when tackling this type of criminality, which blights far too many communities.

HM Passport Office Backlog

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Holly Lynch

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, speaking to the variety of reasons why people have to unlock this backlog, whether for work or personal reasons. There are economic reasons why we must get productivity up and have people able to travel again, alongside the family connections that we need to see re-established and people’s ability to undertake holidays once again.

As the Minister for migration is back in his place, I must say that I am grateful for the occasions when I have been able to reach out to him and he has intervened on cases where I have made an appeal directly to him. However, I am privileged in that I have his mobile number; what we are trying to get to is a position where—[Interruption.] For purely professional reasons, for anyone who made an odd noise there. We are trying to get to a process whereby a constituent out there would not need to have access to the Minister’s mobile number in order to have their case resolved by this Home Office.

At a time when the cost of living crisis is hitting the country hard and after two years of family holidays having to be postponed and rearranged, Home Office incompetence is landing British families with yet more unnecessary costs as they pick up the tab for the failures and pay for fast-track passport services, or face losing hundreds of pounds in cancelled holidays. The number of monthly fast-track applications has more than doubled since December 2021, as other colleagues have said. In April this year alone, British families spent at least £5.4 million on fast-track services.

The Passport Office’s own forecasts show that it expects to receive more than 240,000 fast-track applications between May and October this year, at a cost of an incredible £34 million. The cost of passport failure is being passed on to families stuck between a rock and a hard place, at the worst possible time. Even the fast-track service, as we have just heard, is not always a guarantee, with the website often saying that there is no availability of appointments due to high demand. My constituents report that they are calling day after day with no success. One constituent emailed:

“Another stressful day has passed of getting no answers from the passport office. It’s nothing but incorrect information and false hope. I’ve arranged 3 call backs, one of them being from the upgrade team and not one of them have got back to me. I’m due to travel next Friday, and I have no hope whatsoever.”

The trade union PCS says that the Home Office originally estimated that 1,700 new staff members would be needed to deal with the backlog, but as far as we are aware—and we have had confirmation of this—only about 500 have actually been recruited. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed the timeline for when those additional staff members will be joining their colleagues on the frontline.

In April, the Prime Minister reportedly said that he wanted to privatise the Passport Office, using more unparliamentary language than I have at the Dispatch Box. However, the Minister has confirmed to the House that most of the services within the process have already been privatised, with in-house staff dealing only with decisions on applications themselves. I suspect that it will come as a surprise to precisely no one to hear that the Prime Minister is not across the detail on this, but what does he think is left to privatise, and how exactly, based on the performance of the existing contractors, does he think it will improve the service? Looking at the three private service providers involved in passports, freedom of information requests published by the Mirror last month revealed that TNT, as the courier service for the Passport Office, has lost hundreds of passports and documents in the past two years despite applications being lower due to the pandemic, with 519 lost items in 2020 and a staggering 1,196 in the first seven months of 2021. This £77 million three-year contract was awarded in July 2019 and is due to be reconsidered this summer, so how do the Government propose to transform the courier service?

Sopra Steria, which provides frontline and support services including scanning, uploading and storage of documents, has its own backlogs, with PCS estimating that by April 500,000 applications completed by customers were awaiting opening and scanning on to Sopra Steria’s system. As we have heard, the performance of Teleperformance, which operates the helpline, has already been deemed unacceptable by Ministers. So how exactly does the Prime Minister think that to simply repeat the words “privatise it” is fixing a broken system that is already largely privatised?

Another constituent who got in touch shared their utter frustration:

“We got married on the 7th May after postponing 3 times. I applied for an urgent upgrade a week ago as I travel a week today and I’ve still not had a phone call back to make the payment and begin fast track. I have less than a week to get my passport to go on my honeymoon. I applied with plenty of time and also applied for the urgent upgrade.”

Another said:

“This issue has caused me and my family a great deal of distress, expense and now we are potentially looking at having to cancel our holiday, losing a significant amount of money.”

This Government are presiding over backlog Britain. If it is not passports, it is drivers’ licences, NHS waiting times, court dates, charging decisions, asylum decisions, housing waiting lists and Ukraine visas—and the list goes on. People cannot be expected to find the additional cash needed to bypass Home Office failure. They deserve better. This Government must apologise and find a way of delivering better.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I need to emphasise once again how important it is for colleagues to come back for the wind-ups in order to be able to hear the responses from both the shadow Minister and the Minister to what they have said in their speeches.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Holly Lynch

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Before I call the shadow Minister, I should say that I will need to impose a time limit, which will probably start off at five minutes. Apart from Members who have an amendment down, I will be prioritising those who did not speak in the previous debate.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to be responding for Labour to this second group of Lords amendment to the Bill, and I want to start by joining others in paying tribute to those who lost their lives or were injured in, and all those who responded to, the attack on Westminster five years ago today. I pay particular tribute to PC Keith Palmer and thank all those who work so hard to keep us safe every day.

I intend to keep my remarks tightly to the amendments before us, particularly Lords amendments 24 to 27, but I want to start by again expressing regret that modern slavery provisions have been included in a Bill on immigration. Members might remember that on Report I was intervened on only by Conservative MPs seeking to agree with me—which is certainly unusual—that the provisions in the Bill on modern slavery will only take us backwards. If this Bill passes unamended we will identify and protect fewer victims of modern slavery and identify and prosecute fewer perpetrators. That is not only our view: the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner has been fierce in her opposition to a number of the changes, and Caroline Haughey QC, one of the leading legal experts in this area, has said this Bill will

“catastrophically undo all that has been achieved in the 10 years since the first modern slavery prosecution.”

Lords amendment 27 seeks to exempt child victims from the most damaging of the Bill’s provisions and ensure that all decisions are made in their best interests. Throughout the passage of the Bill we have voiced our concerns that the Government fail to recognise that identifying victims of modern slavery or human trafficking is a safeguarding, not an immigration, matter. Last year, 43% of victims referred to the national referral mechanism were children, with 31% of them being British, and the rise in county lines gangs is believed to be one of the biggest drivers of the rise in child referrals.

This amendment must also be considered in light of what is currently happening in Ukraine and the reports by charity and aid agencies on the ground of the heightened risks of children being exploited and trafficked along the Ukrainian border and in neighbouring countries, such is the flow of people away from the Russian bombardment. If the Minister is not minded to strike part 5 from the Bill and work with the sector and us on genuine alternatives, he must protect children from the worst of the changes, which only put barriers between victims and the support and justice they need and deserve.

If the Government are to deliver on their own promise of smashing county lines, they must accept Lords amendment 27. The Government’s own existing statutory guidance states:

“Whatever form it takes, modern slavery and child trafficking is child abuse and relevant child protection procedures…must be followed if modern slavery or trafficking is suspected.”

Under the changes introduced in the Bill a child can access protection only if they disclose details of their trauma against a Home Office-mandated timeline, and can access NRM support only if they have no public order offences in their background. The Government’s own guidance rightly says that a child who has been trafficked must be protected, no ifs, no buts—which means no clause 63, no clause 66 and no clause 67 as a condition of support on recognition as being a victim. As a minimum, in order for the Government just to adhere to their own guidance and protect child victims of trafficking, they must adopt Lords amendment 27 to prevent changes that would leave children more vulnerable to criminals and traffickers.

In Committee, at the 12th sitting, the Minister stressed that the Government’s view was that it would somehow be unfair to establish a system that distinguishes between a child and an adult, and he has repeated that sentiment today. He said in Committee:

“To create a carve-out for one group of individuals would create a two-tiered system based on the age at which exploitation may have taken place”,

and went on to say that it

“would not be appropriate or fair to all victims.”––[Official Report, Nationality and Borders Public Bill Committee, 28 October 2021; c. 484.]

I am afraid that is just absurd: we differentiate between children and adults throughout domestic legislation, recognising the age-related vulnerability of children, and it is the very basis of the Government’s own age assessment proposals in the Bill. Child victims have rights to protection under the United Nations convention on the rights of the child and the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings, and it is there in the Government’s own guidance. If the Minister is really trying to tell us that the Government do not like creating two-tier systems given what else the Bill does, we are simply not having it. I urge the Government to follow their own guidance, recognise that child victims of trafficking are victims of abuse and adopt Lords amendment 27.

Courts and Tribunals: Recovery

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Holly Lynch

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Just a gentle reminder that we have two further debates this afternoon that colleagues will have spent a lot of time preparing for, and we are anxious that they should have enough time to air their views during those debates, so concise questions and brisk answers would be welcome all round.

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) has already spelt out, Halifax county and family court and Calderdale magistrates court were two of the 86 courts that were closed under this Government in 2016 alone. We were promised video links and a technological revolution in access to justice, but four years later, we have had absolutely none of that. The pressures were just transferred to other regional courts, which now face intolerable backlogs because of the virus. Those court buildings are still standing empty, so why not reopen some of them to get the justice system moving again?