Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Stella Creasy and Alison Thewliss

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree. We accept that the Government have made an absolute hash of the asylum system. The asylum backlog is enormous and they should pay attention to it, but tackling the problem by denying anybody else asylum ever does not seem the legitimate way to deal with it.

Clauses 11 and 12 expand the power of detention. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on immigration detention, I find that an incredibly worrying development. It includes people who cannot be removed to their country of origin. The UK Government have previously said that their policy was to decrease the immigration detention estate, but that will now be expanded dramatically. The harm done to people in detention facilities is immeasurable. It exacerbates existing trauma, tears families apart and has crushing impacts on mental and physical health. After the Home Secretary has removed the right to apply for bail, thousands more will be trapped in the system indefinitely.

The UK’s detention system is already an international outlier, with people held indefinitely, out of line with provisions in the criminal law system. I received an email earlier from Elspeth Macdonald, who works for Medical Justice, on worrying and serious reports of a death at Colnbrook immigration removal centre. I would be grateful if the Minister stopped playing with his phone and confirmed whether the reports of the death there are true, because it is incredibly worrying. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that there will be an investigation, if the death did happen. There have been deaths in other immigration centres, and we do not want the Government repeating those dangerous errors. I would like to know what appropriate counselling and bereavement support have been made available to people in that detention centre, because that is a frightening experience for them.

It would be useful to know why the Home Office has stopped including the number of deaths in immigration detention from the official immigration statistics. They were published every year from 2017 to 2021, but in the latest statistics for 2022, deaths were not included. Immigration detention is bad for people. It is bad for their mental health. If there is to be further immigration detention—[Interruption.] The Minister shakes his head, but the evidence is incredibly clear that immigration detention is bad for people.

The Bill also expands detention criteria to include children, which rolls back on hard-won rights that the Glasgow girls and others fought for. Immigration detention is no place for anybody, and certainly not for children. Some of the detainees that the Minister wishes to hold will be pregnant. The British Medical Association has said that under the Illegal Migration Bill, the 72-hour time limit on the detention of pregnant women, introduced by the Government in 2016, will be denied to women who arrive by irregular means. Instead, pregnant women will be locked up indefinitely, while the Government attempt to remove them from the UK. They will not be allowed to apply for immigration bail for the first 28 days that they are detained or for juridical review of the lawfulness of their detention. Many pregnant women are likely to languish in detention for some time, since there are few returns agreements in place by which they could be removed from the UK.

I highlight a particular case study from Women for Refugee Women of a woman called Priya, a trafficking survivor detained in Yarl’s Wood when she was 20 weeks pregnant and held there for almost two months before being released. Priya said:

“I only had one hospital appointment while I was there, for my 20-week scan, and even then I was escorted by officers who took me 40 minutes late for my appointment. I felt frustrated that I wasn’t able to speak to the midwife after my scan because there was no time. The officers just took me straight back to Yarl’s Wood instead. It was not easy. I often felt weak and in pain; I’m anaemic and my blood pressure is very low. On one occasion I passed out in Yarl’s Wood, but they just took me back to my room and left.”

Pregnant women are being locked up in detention centres. What kind of message does that send to the rest of the world? It is inhumane.

Clause 12 amends the Immigration Act 1971, and specifies that determining what is a reasonable period to detain people is for the Secretary of State rather than the courts. Those changes would apply to existing detention powers as well as the new powers provided in clause 11. The amendment removes the considerable latitude given to the Home Secretary to decide what is reasonably necessary to enable examination or removal. Clause 13 amends the immigration bail provisions in schedule 10 to the Immigration Act and restricts the jurisdiction of the courts to review the lawfulness of a decision to detain or to refuse bail.

Clauses 15 to 20 deal with the provision of asylum accommodation for children by the Home Office rather than local authorities, which is entirely unacceptable. The Children’s Commissioner for Scotland has condemned that move in the strongest terms, saying:

“The Home Office’s history of neglect renders it an unfit parent for vulnerable children.”

The Children’s Commissioner for England says:

“The Bill as it stands leaves profound areas of uncertainty–for example, as to what form the accommodation provided to children by the Home Office will take–making proper scrutiny deeply challenging.”

The Home Office has already lost children from the accommodation it has used, so we cannot trust it to look after things at present. Why would we give it more powers in this area? On Second Reading I spoke about treating people as we would like to be treated. We would not treat our own children in that way, so why do the Home Secretary, the Minister and this Government think that we should?

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady is giving incredibly powerful testimony. Will she consider supporting new clause 18, which would require that we treat every child on UK soil with the same care and that we safeguard every child equally, whether they are refugees or not?

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely support the hon. Lady’s amendment and her work in this area. This Government forget, in their talking about people as though they were an amorphous blob, that we are talking about children, and they have rights under the UNCRC. Scotland has done a lot of work on looked-after children with “the promise” and we should not treat those children any less well than we treat our own.

We would amend the Bill so that clause 23 shall not come into effect without the consent of the Scottish Parliament. Parliamentarians in both Scotland and the UK are human rights guarantors, and an important part of our role is to ensure that legislation is compliant with international human rights obligations. The incompatibility of the Bill with the European convention on human rights, the refugee convention, the convention on action against trafficking, and the convention on the rights of the child means that we as lawmakers are obliged to vote against it. The undermining of rights conveyed upon individuals by those agreements must be resisted by all spheres of government. If they are coming after this group now, it will be another group soon enough.

The Bill will negatively impact those seeking international protection in Scotland, as well as on the powers and duties of the Scottish Government, local authorities, and other public bodies under the devolution settlement. I strongly urge—I expect it, to be honest—the Scottish Parliament to withhold legislative consent for the Bill. I expect the UK Government to override that consent.

The SNP amendments to clause 25 would remove provisions that allow the Secretary of State to make regulations that would alter the operation of the two-year sunset clause in relation to clauses 21 to 24.

Clause 27 amends the Modern Slavery Act 2018 and removes provisions for leave to remain for victims of slavery or human trafficking. As protections will no longer be in place, it will be difficult for third-party agencies to encourage victims of trafficking to come forward, or to work with them should they do so. The Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance in Glasgow has told me that it is increasingly difficult to reassure service users, who are victims of sex trafficking, that they will not be returned or sent to Rwanda for speaking up, and the Bill will mean that TARA cannot reassure them at all.

People who are trafficked were often in very vulnerable situations in their home countries, and those circumstances are exploited by traffickers—that is why they are here. The risk of being returned to those situations means that people will either stay in a dangerous situation or escape and go underground to other dangerous situations. If they are apprehended and returned, the risk of re-trafficking is high if the reasons for their vulnerability are not addressed. Third-party agencies have been clear that the Bill will fetter their ability to reach out to vulnerable groups, to support women, children and victims of torture, trafficking and all kinds of human rights abuses, and that there will be a sharp drop-off in the number of people seeking help, because they will fear doing so.

This Bill will not stop the boats. It will not fix the asylum backlog. It will do nothing other than put lives at risk. It is an anti-refugee Bill. It is a traffickers’ charter. It rips up human rights. Scotland wants no part of it. We want an independent country in which we can stand up for human rights, not diminish them, as this UK Government seek to do.

Financial Services Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Debate between Stella Creasy and Alison Thewliss

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 12th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 3rd December 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

The hon. Lady is making a very good point. Is she aware that the Young Women’s Trust has suggested that 1.5 million young women have lost income during the pandemic?

[Stella Creasy]

Absolutely. We know who such companies are targeting, and they are doing so deliberately. I hate to say this, as I do want to win over the Committee, but we might not be their target audience at this point in our lives, because we might not be actively reading the social influencer media posts. I might be completely wrong—I am sure some Government Members are regularly on their Instagram accounts looking at posts by ASOS.

Some 20% of those young people say they have missed a payment in the last year—the figure has doubled in the last year—because they thought that a purchase would cost a certain amount and that they had an income, but that income has gone. The companies will say that they are very good to their customers because they do not lend more than people need and they do not charge interest—the companies’ interest is in people paying back the money—but those companies go silent on what they do when people do not pay back. What happens to people’s credit references? How do they chase money? Do they use debt collection agencies?

Those companies are growing rapidly, just as the payday lending industry did. We watched that happen and, in that Cassandra-like way, all tried to warn of it, but it took too long for us to act. In 2019 Klarna was boasting that it had signed a partnership with a new merchant every eight minutes in this country. By the end of 2019, 6 million people had used its product, and it said that 55,000 were using it weekly. Imagine what it is like now, with people having been stuck at home and stuck on their phones.

The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute found that more than 3 million people with mental health problems have found it harder during the pandemic to control their online spending, and two in five said the BNPL industry has been “harder to resist”. Because it is not regulated, it does not have to follow any of the rules we might want to point to that protect consumers. That is why we see all those adverts saying, “No interest, no fees—don’t worry about it.” The industry does not have to provide the normal financial information we see in other forms of credit because it is not regulated in that way.

Just as with the payday loan industry, as soon as we started talking about these companies, along came the offers of dinners and discussions and talks, where the industry says it is in fact a misunderstood new technology. Those of us who are not regularly on the internet have obviously missed them.

Financial Services Bill (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Stella Creasy and Alison Thewliss

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 10th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 1st December 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Stella Creasy]

It is, as ever, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and a pleasure to have this debate. I see the Minister is already smiling. I know he has been looking forward to this debate, because he and I have talked for some time now about how best to help our constituents with debt.

As a nation, we find it easier to talk about anything other than money; even our intimate relations tend to get more coverage in our national press now than the state of our bank balances. Each of us, as representatives in this place, will know from our surgeries how critical this issue is for our country and how important it is to get right the measures to help people with their financial position, because the honest truth is that this is a country not waving but drowning. We all see it in our constituencies.

Mindful of what you said about scope, Mr Davies, in speaking to the amendments I will first set out why I agree with the Government absolutely that we need a breathing space scheme. The amendments come from a desire to work with the Minister to get that scheme right. I know he shares my concern to get these policies right, because we see in our communities the damage—the financial damage, the social damage and the mental health damage—caused by problem debt.

I do not think we can start to have the conversation about whether the Bill needs amending until we define what we mean by problem debt, which is a term that we use interchangeably in debates and discussions. We know that when people do not talk about their debts, they can get into all sorts of debt without thinking that it is a problem until it is too late. All of us, whether we have been an MP for a year, 10 years or 20 years, will have encountered the person who comes to a surgery and says, “I’m going to be evicted next week. Can you help me save my house?” We know it is too late, because they have got into a level of debt they cannot get out of, but they did not see it as a problem.

One of the things that we must do in this place is to make it as popular to talk about our debts and the problems that debt can create, how people can be good with money and how we can help people be good with money—and, when it comes to the Financial Conduct Authority, how we make sure it is a fair fight—as it is to talk about people’s intimate relations. Indeed, the sidebar of shame in the Daily Mail should be more about companies seeking to exploit our constituents by offering them poor levels of debt that we want the FCA to regulate than the size of Kim Kardashian’s derrière. I put that out there as something we should be more concerned about.

Problem debt has been an issue for generations, and over the past decade it has got a lot worse. It is important that the Government are proposing a breathing space, because we can layer on top of that debt the Monty Python foot that is covid and the disruption to people’s lives and livelihoods. I know that some Members would rather be in that debate today than in this one, but I hope I can convince them that this debate in Committee and getting these measures right is the most important place we can be.

As a country we do not talk about problem debt. We do not even see it as a problem, but the problems that will face our constituents and communities in the coming months will be horrific. Let us consider how almost half the UK adult population went into 2020 with debt already hanging over their head, with almost 5 million of our fellow citizens owing more than £10,000 in credit and loans alone. That is unsecured personal debt. This is not about mortgages and housing debt; it is about people having too much month at the end of their money, and people finding ways to deal with that that do not seem to them to be a problem because, if they can keep cycling things through the cards and keep borrowing and making repayments, they can probably keep going.

The nation went into coronavirus already in hock in ways that make people financially vulnerable, but without an awareness of what that might mean for their communities. When asked about their debts at the start of 2020, 40% of those polled said the debt was due to normal living expenses. One thing that we need to knock on the head is the fact in this country debt is not about people buying flash cars and tellies, much though that sidebar of shame might like to make us think it is. It is about people trying to put food on the table and keep the car going so they can get to work, and yes, there are people putting their mortgage on their credit cards.

When I talk about problem debt, I do not just mean the Wongas of this world. I mean the credit card companies that have a sort of respectability because they have helped to keep people going. I am not against borrowing or any form of credit at all, but when we know how the country and our constituents were leveraged at the start of this year, and we see what has happened this year, getting right our proposals to help them, because debt will be a problem, becomes all the more important.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Lady agree with me that there is a big problem around catalogues and debt for basics such as school clothes, trainers and jackets? People are building up debt for the essentials of life and are told they can pay it back in tiny amounts, but it is over a very long period, which means the debt is never really cleared.

[Stella Creasy]

I completely agree. Many a time have I had conversations with constituents about how they buy things, and they do not see it as a problem. They have no other option, so they use the catalogues and do not look at the interest rates. What they need is not more financial education, but more options. The brutal reality is that it is very expensive to be poor in this country. That is why it matters that the things we do to help them if they get into difficulty work.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy]

My right hon. Friend raises a real concern. If we have a large influx of people needing to speak to a debt adviser, and there are no appointments, will they get access to help? One reason why they will not be able to get an appointment is because debt advisers will have to do a midway review with people. We should simply trust debt advisers. Anybody who has worked with them, as the Minister has, will know that they are part Martin Lewis, part Alison Hammond from “This Morning”—a kind person who makes jokes so that a person feels better about themselves. They are trying to help people in distress. Through the legislation, we are asking them to do a job; we should let them do it as they see fit.

I hope that the Minister will listen to the sector when it says, “Let us hold those reviews when we need to, rather than telling us that we have to hold them, because if we are overwhelmed by people, we can’t do the job that you are asking us to do.” I do not disagree on the policy intent, but the context is different, and if we do not react to the context, all this good work, and all the legislation, will be for nothing, because there will not be appointments. There will be a negative relationship between debt advisers and the people whom they are trying to help, which will affect whether people listen to what advisers are saying; debts will continue to rise; creditors will go unpaid; and for people, the breathing space will feel like holding their breath, rather than coming up for air.

[Alison Thewliss]

We should recognise the professionalism, expertise and qualifications of those giving debt advice to our constituents, and not try to put a provision in the Bill that prejudges what they do. Speaking from experience, they have worked incredibly well, over time, with my constituents, so I question whether the midway review is necessary.

Let me give a case from my constituency. A woman came to my office very upset, very much in the way that the hon. Member for Walthamstow described, because she was being evicted the next day. We had to swing into action and try to find ways around that, and spoke to the Glasgow Housing Association. It did take time to make that happen, but the GHA sat down with her, went through all her bills and outgoings and worked with her intensively over a period, to make sure it would get the rent money and that the other debts she had, that were also causing her problems, were taken care of.

I was struck by the professionalism of the GHA advisers and by the fact that they were experienced and were tough but compassionate with the woman. They made sure she could see a way through. If people see an arbitrary cut-off point halfway through, that will give them fear, not reassurance. There is a risk that the respite will be removed from people who are supposed to be helped by the midway review, if it is put at an arbitrary halfway point. The Minister should consider whether that is really the outcome that he wants to achieve. Yes, there should be some kind of review mechanism, but my experience is that it is done all the way through the process. There is no need for the midway review, because reviewing is already happening.

[John Glen]

Amendment 35, put forward by the hon. Member for Walthamstow, would restrict the Government’s ability to require debt advisers to complete any review of debtor eligibility in any future regulations made concerning breathing space or the SDRP. As the Committee will be aware, breathing space regulations were approved by the House in October, and they state that a debt adviser must complete a midway review after day 25 and before day 35 of the moratorium.

The amendment would not amend the existing breathing space regulations, which I believe was the intention. In addition, it would apply to any regulations made in the future on the SDRP and the second part of the debt respite scheme, which the clause is focused on. That would restrict the Government’s ability to require debt advisers to complete any review of debtor eligibility related to a plan. It is expected that SDRPs will be reviewed annually, or when requested by a debtor, to ensure that payments are set at the right level and the plan remains appropriate. If those reviews could not consider a debtor’s eligibility in any way, that could be a significant constraint on the design and effectiveness of the scheme in future, and would remove the safeguards put in place for creditors.

Financial Services Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Stella Creasy and Alison Thewliss

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 5th sitting & Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons & Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 24th November 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

We should put on the record that the gender pay gap has not slipped but has been abandoned as a commitment by the Government. I hope the Government will rethink that quickly, given the importance of the case that the hon. Lady makes. It has not slipped—it has gone.

[Alison Thewliss]

I meant more that the actions of businesses had slipped, but the hon. Lady is correct to point out that the Government have abandoned that commitment as well. I was going to go there with that point. If companies are not held to account, that slippage will become irreversible. Companies have worked so hard to try to bridge that gap, and going backwards really is unacceptable.

By bringing those elements together, companies across Scotland have shown that they can improve productivity and competitiveness and build sustainable growth in a way that achieves fairness, equality, opportunity and innovation. We have the UK’s highest proportion of living wage employers in Scotland because the Scottish Government made that commitment. That is what we can do with the limited powers that we have. If we were to put into legislation here far more responsibility and accountability, it would certainly move that agenda forward.

In addition, we believe that moves such as increasing worker representation on company boards, which is commonplace among our more productive, investment-rich European competitors, would promote much greater social responsibility among companies that had that representation, as would increasing the representation of women and minority communities on public and private sector boards.

Scotland is on track to ensure that all public sector boards have a 50/50 gender balance due to the statutory targets that we put in place. We would support similar UK legislation for the private sector, because if these things are not in place, it will take a very long time before we see any meaningful change. The evidence shows that it is good for companies and organisations to do that, because they do better when they better represent society.

It is important that we make sure that companies are held to account in this way. The amendments tabled by the official Opposition are good and sound. I am interested to hear why the Minister thinks that they are not good ideas worthy of pursuit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alison Thewliss]

I agree very much with what the right hon. Gentleman has said. It is important that we are kept up to date, in the absence of other scrutiny mechanisms. At the very least, within six months of Royal Assent, we should find out the impact of any revocations. The point was well made about consumers, because in many ways they are very far away from where this Bill is, and they may not see any issues that are coming up. It is important that we, as parliamentarians, are sighted on what those issues might be and have some degree of scrutiny over what happens with the regulations.

[Stella Creasy]

We are talking in quite abstract terms, but it is worth remembering that when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fell apart in America, consumers were the first to feel the repercussions that were felt around the world. This financial regulation comes in in the aftermath of that, because it is still going on. There are still people and families who are paying the price for what happened in the financial crisis. This is not about reheating and repeating the arguments about who caused the financial crisis. It is about recognising that consumers in all our constituencies paid the price, first and foremost.

As others have said, when we think about financial regulations, it can feel quite technical, distant and obscure because of the language we use, but let us remember back to those days. Many years ago, when I first came into Parliament, we were dealing in 2010 with the aftermath of the financial crisis, and it was a very painful crisis for many. Everybody asked why we did not see what was happening. Why did we not see it coming? How could we not have seen that banks were over-leveraged? How could we not have seen that mortgages were being resold in the subprime market? The truth was that it was a closed shop, so everybody was marking each other’s homework and saying, “I am sure this will be fine.” This seems to me the mildest of amendments, simply asking whether we have the information to ensure that such an occurrence could never happen again, when we are talking about something as simple as the capital requirements that banks and financial institutions should have. After all, that is exactly what happened in 2008: everybody leveraged each other, so the capital was gone, and when the roundabout stopped, it was our constituents who paid the price. I know by now, on the first day, that Ministers will think we are a broken record, but to ask the Treasury simply to provide that information and to look at it from a consumer perspective does not seem an unfair thing to do, given the history and the legacy of this that we have seen for so many in our constituencies.