Unaccompanied Children (Greece and Italy)

Debate between Alison McGovern and Karen Buck

Thursday 23rd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

My hon. Friend asks a crucial question. If, by the end of the debate, the Minister has not answered that question, I think many of us will be up on our feet demanding answers.

We made great progress, working with the French authorities, on resettling children under Dubs and, as alluded to by my hon. Friend, under the Dublin III regulation where children have family members living in this country. I welcome the progress made on that front, but we are still asking Greece and Italy, two countries that are not equipped to deal with the refugee flows by themselves, to accommodate the vast majority of them. According to UNICEF, more than 30,000 unaccompanied children arrived in those two countries last year alone. That is difficult, to say the least, for those countries, problematic for Europe and, most of all, bad for the children themselves.

We know that, despite our best efforts, children are still making the journey alone. We know they are arriving in Greece and Italy, which are not able to deal with them all. We know that many have family here and that it is in their best interests to be transferred to the UK under the Dublin agreement. So why are we not doing more to help? Some 30,000 children arrived in Greece and Italy last year, but just eight of them transferred to the UK. One member of Home Office staff in Greece and one in Italy are charged with assessing and processing children whose best interests lie in a transfer to the UK.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on making a very powerful speech. Many Members, particularly those of us with city constituencies, will have had extensive experience of working with former unaccompanied children who are resident in this country. We know that the length of insecurity and uncertainty that prevails before they can make a successful application often leaves permanent scars and damage, particularly to their mental health. Is it not absolutely essential that we cut through that and provide certainty for as many children as we can as quickly as possible?

[Alison McGovern]

My hon. Friend speaks from great experience and I hope the Minister listened to what she said. If the Minister is really prepared to consider this matter, he should watch the documentary made by Liverpool footballer Dejan Lovren about his experience as a refugee and the uncertainty that he lived through. He has been brave in speaking openly about his life. I encourage the Minister to take heed of his words. It is no wonder that it has taken the best part of a year for many children’s applications to be processed, leaving them in the kind of limbo my hon. Friend mentions.

Let me be clear with the Minister. There are agencies working in Greece and Italy with the capacity to make referrals, but they will not raise the hopes of children when the process itself is so dire. The Government must commit today to streamlining the system, so that agencies and children have confidence in it and can start to make referrals quickly. We know that this can be done because it was done in France when hundreds of applications were processed in a matter of weeks. This situation is just not acceptable and we must do more.

I want to address an argument we hear constantly from the Government when we talk about resettling refugees—a line we have heard repeatedly from the Home Secretary, especially when talking about the Dubs amendment. She says it encourages people traffickers and that it acts as an incentive for perilous journeys. We have heard again today that it is a draw for migrants. The Government must drop this feeble line of argument once and for all.

People are not getting on those boats because of pull factors; they are doing so because they are fleeing war, poverty, famine and exploitation in their own countries. Even refugee camps in Greece or Italy, dangerous though they are, are safer than the hell they are running away from. We know this and the Government know this. If they do not, they should try to understand the reality. They should look at a picture of the ruins of Homs or Aleppo and tell me again about pull factors. They should see the desperation on the faces of starving people in Yemen or Somalia and explain to me again how Dubs was an incentive. They should speak to a child escaping forced servitude as a soldier in Eritrea, and repeat again to me that our immigration system is a draw. It is not; it was not; and we should not pretend otherwise. Have the Government any hard evidence to support that claim, and, if so, will the Minister produce it?

If the Government really believe the pull factors nonsense, there is just one obvious change that they could make. Under the current system, children in camps in the region can only apply to be transferred under Dublin III if they have a parent living in the United Kingdom with whom they can be reunited, but for children already in Europe, the rule can apply to extended families, grandparents, siblings or aunts and uncles. However, many of these children are orphans.