Asylum and Migration

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I beg to move amendment (a),

“That resources for use for current purposes be reduced by £740,850,000 relating to asylum and migration.”

The amendment stands in my name and that of my honourable colleagues. As the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), has so clearly laid out, there has been frustration among members of the Committee about the opacity of Home Office spending. There has been obfuscation, delay, denial and downright sleekitness over many months, and from reading the supplementary estimates in front of us, it is still very difficult to get to the bottom of what money has been spent when those estimates come forward for retrospective approval today.

Members on the Government Benches, including current and former Home Office Ministers, are prepared to weigh in publicly and call outrage on the spending of the Home Office, but trying to get any clarity on how the Department utilises its budget has been like trying to nail jelly to a wall. I agree that spending appears to be out of control, but the utter incompetence and abject cruelty at the heart of the Home Office makes things so much worse. If the Home Office was overspending, but at least having a decent set of outcomes and treating people humanely, I would perhaps be a wee bit more forgiving. Instead, it is presiding over a chaotic, mean and dangerous system, where those who are unlucky enough to come within its orbit are drawn into a dystopian nightmare.

It is a pity that due to the timing of this debate, we were not able to have sight of the National Audit Office’s report on asylum accommodation, which is due to be published on Wednesday. I hope the Minister will come to the House next week to speak to that report. We do, however, have information on what kind of service is being provided. Just this week, the food charity Sustain, working with Jesuit Refugee Service UK and Life Seekers Aid, published research that found that,

“People seeking asylum do not have access to sufficient money, kitchen facilities or food to meet their needs, are provided with food that does not meet food hygiene or nutritional standards, in some cases resulting in hospitalisation. Experiences of food were broadly experienced as degrading and dehumanising, especially for mothers unable to feed their children adequately.”

That desperately poor and deeply harmful experience is being provided by Home Office contractors, who have seen their profits soar. Clearsprings and Stay Belvedere Hotels Ltd, for example, have made a combined profit of over £113 million, and Serco and Mears are also profiting handsomely from those lucrative contracts. The UK Government often claim that they want to support displaced people closer to the place from which they have fled, yet the supplementary estimates reveal that they are now quite brazenly pochling the official development assistance budget to the tune of £3.2 million, a staggering 389.6% increase just from the sum in the main estimates. That money is supposed to help the world’s most vulnerable—to support countries and help them flourish. Instead, it is simply boosting the profits of companies that are demonstrably not even providing the very basics of humanity.

Facilities such as the Bibby Stockholm, Napier barracks, Wethersfield and Scampton are being presented as some kind of alternative to hotels, but in many cases they cost just as much if not more, and are no better run. Hotels cost so much because of the delays that the Home Office is presiding over: people left waiting, not just for months but for years at a time, without a decision. The former Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), had the cheek to say on Sky News that this was quite deliberate; the Government do not want to speed the process up, because that would make the UK too attractive. They are presiding over their own failure quite deliberately and purposefully, so if the Minister says today that it is terrible that we are spending so much money on hotels, I would ask him to speed up those applications and let people get on with their lives.

The Bibby Stockholm barge is estimated to cost taxpayers £41,000 a day or £15 million a year. With around 300 asylum seekers being housed on that barge, that equates to a cost of about £205 per day per person, the same as an overnight stay in a four-star hotel. Thrown into an indefinite stay in a shared room on an industrial barge moored in an operational port, however, you get the bonus of legionella bacteria in the water supply, as well as anxiety, depression, respiratory illness, infectious diseases and, unfortunately, seeing some of your fellow inmates committing suicide.

I have not had much of an opportunity to speak about the Home Affairs Committee’s visit to the Bibby Stockholm, but I will take this opportunity to put on record the sadness, confusion and frustration of those on board. Those men felt that they were being punished for some unknown misdemeanour—unable to get any peace and quiet, living in impossibly close proximity to people for months at a time, with no certainty as to when that will end, and their health needs not being properly assessed. The vessel was not intended to be lived on 24/7, and despite the tabloid rhetoric, none of those I met on that boat had come on small boats. Some had been international students, forced to claim asylum when the political situation in their home countries deteriorated. One told me:

“The longer you are in here, you turn into a person you don’t know”.

How incredibly sad it is that the UK Government see fit to treat people in that way.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I completely agree with what the hon. Lady has said about our visit to the Bibby Stockholm. Does she agree with me that what Wendy Williams said in her review on the Windrush scandal about the Home Office remembering the “face behind the case” seems to have been lost in the way we are now treating some asylum seekers?

[Alison Thewliss]

The right hon. Member is absolutely correct to point that out. From reading some of the reports of the independent chief inspector, it is very clear that that policy has all but been abandoned. People have lost the sense that they are dealing with actual human beings —with stories, with dignity, with a past and a future—and that these things have been completely lost all together. People are treated as so much less than as if they were actual human beings, and that is quite appalling from any Government. It is appalling to listen to those stories, and to hear what people had been through and what they continue to suffer in those circumstances.

Home Office officials have reportedly raised significant concerns about the cost and feasibility of housing asylum seekers at MDP Wethersfield in Essex and RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. In addition to the near £15 million to another private contractor to set it up, it is estimated that it will cost about £72 million per year to accommodate people at Wethersfield—a site about which the now former chief inspector of borders and immigration raised concerns about safety. He said that

“there was an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness caused by boredom which invariably, in my experience, leads to violence.”

That was before the site was even at full capacity. It would be useful to know from the Minister what he is doing to address the concerns about violence at the site, because the chief inspector was very clear to the Committee how worried he was about that.

A report published in December by the Helen Bamber Foundation and the Humans for Rights Network found that the asylum accommodation site at Wethersfield is causing “significant” and “irreparable” harm to residents, and recommended that it be shut down as a matter of urgency. Not only will the public cover the cost of the woeful conditions at Wethersfield, but they are also het for the Government’s court fees in any upcoming legal battles. Scampton, similarly, comes in at an estimated £109 million this year.

The detention estate has been growing arms and legs over the past few years, and the estimates provided by the Home Office suggest that the trend is only set to continue. The cost of detaining someone for one day is estimated at about £113 per person. Expanding the detention estate at Campsfield House and Haslar immigration removal centres is expected to come in at about £260 million. Ludicrously, the Home Office has made quite a deliberate choice to pursue these more expensive and more punitive options, despite having clear evidence from the pilots of alternatives to detention, which it itself commissioned, that were found to be significantly cheaper, more effective and with much better health outcomes for those in that system.

It is no secret that the SNP thinks the Rwanda scheme is irredeemably awful. It is unworkable, conspicuous punishment. The Supreme Court has found the scheme to be unlawful. On top of all that, it is of course eye- wateringly expensive. I would like to thank the National Audit Office for its report setting out the known sums so clearly. I find it quite wild that the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), came here today to criticise the ball that she herself started rolling. I guess it has not worked out the way she expected, but I could not really see what she thought would be so great about the scheme in the first place.

The UK’s Rwanda scheme has cost about £220 million so far under the UK-Rwanda partnership, not including the UK Government’s legal costs for defending the plan in the courts. The Home Affairs Committee finally received evidence in November last year that, in addition to the money already sent, additional payments will be made to the Government of Rwanda each year. Quite unbelievably, some of this was only uncovered because somebody in Rwanda let it slip to the International Monetary Fund; it was not through due diligence to our own Parliament or the parliamentary Committees that are supposed to scrutinise these things, but because of a slip in some other documentation.

There is a direct cost of £20 million to the Home Office, which the National Audit Office says is expected to rise to £28 million by the end of 2023-24. There will be £1 million a year in staff costs, £11,000 in flight costs per individual and the as yet unknown costs of escorting individuals to Rwanda. There is also the bounty to Rwanda for the delivery of the first 300 asylum seekers, which is a further one-off £120 million. Whether or not Members believe 300 will actually be sent, the fact is that this is within the documentation.

The National Audit Office report sets out a further payment schedule for each person removed to Rwanda up to a total of £150,874 each. Again, it is entirely unclear how much this will all add up to in the end, because it depends on somebody staying put once they have got to Rwanda, which nobody can guarantee. The NAO says that the numbers are “inherently uncertain”; I would say that that is putting it mildly. Of course, this does not save any money. The UK Government’s own figures estimate that moving an asylum seeker to Rwanda would cost £63,000 more than keeping them in the UK to be processed, so it is no wonder the permanent secretary would not sign it off without ministerial direction.

I do not seek to malign Rwanda or its Government, but we hear a curious dichotomy from Government Members, whereby Rwanda is safe enough that the legislation can pass, but sufficiently scary to serve as a deterrent to those desperate enough to risk their lives crossing the channel in a flimsy inflatable. It cannot be both scary and safe at the same time; it cannot be a deterrent and something that is perfectly reasonable. Those two things cannot exist together.

Bizarrely, we have heard the news just today from Lizzie Dearden at The Independent that the Home Office is so desperate to fill up these flights that it is offering those who have been unsuccessful in their asylum claims £3,000 to go to Rwanda. This is wild stuff, and again it has not been brought to this House as a proposal and has not received any further scrutiny.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. Not every country in Europe behaves in the same way and tries to outsource or evade its human rights obligations by exporting refugees and asylum seekers. Does she agree that we ought to give asylum seekers the right to work much quicker so that they can join the labour force and contribute to the economy, rather than be held at great expense in totally unsatisfactory and often totally appalling conditions?

[Alison Thewliss]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct, and that entirely flips on its head the Government’s argument that asylum seekers are some kind of burden. Many have skills that they wish to bring to the workforce and many have things they wish to contribute; they want to say thank you for being given sanctuary. They have a lot to offer the UK, but the UK Government are not interested and do not see them as people with skills who can contribute in any meaningful way, which is desperately sad.

The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford has suggested that a value for money assessment should take account of asylum seekers who are neither deterred from coming nor removed to Rwanda, because they are now left in a limbo of the Home Office’s own making. They cannot have their asylum claim processed nor in most cases be removed to their home country because of the Illegal Migration Act 2023. They are inadmissible and are unable to work, to contribute and to move on with their lives. Who exactly does this situation benefit and where on earth is the Home Office going to accommodate them? It cannot say.

None of this is sustainable. The new backlog replaced the old one, and over 12,000 people are now appealing to the first-tier tribunal due to slapdash decisions made in haste to meet the Prime Minister’s target last year. Safe and legal routes have been closed down. Money has been given hand over fist to France and Belgium, while Home Office staff are left without the resources they need to do their jobs effectively. The independent chief inspector of borders and immigration noted in his report on asylum casework that staff had taken demotions rather than continue as caseworkers, and managers had tried to shield their teams from difficult messages coming from above. The Guardian has revealed this afternoon that the Atlas database flaws have left 76,000 people listed with incorrect names, photographs or immigration status and cases combined together.

What an absolute guddle this system is. The Home Office is now under investigation, I understand, by the Information Commissioner due to its utter incompetence and inability to process cases properly. The Home Office has pulled off the astonishing feat of creating an asylum system that is simultaneously slow, expensive, shoddy and in some cases unlawful besides. This wastefulness is a pattern of behaviour from a Department that appears to regard those who come to our shores as somehow less than human.

In a cost of living crisis, the Rwanda scheme is a bottomless pit for public funds. The UK Government under either the Tories or Labour cannot find the money for an essentials guarantee, to scrap the two-child limit or for cost of living support for people struggling every day, yet when it comes to dog-whistle politics there is a big blank cheque.

There are limitations on what we as MPs can do about this. The estimates and budgetary processes are entirely inadequate for the purpose, particularly in light of the fact that this is a Department prone to secrecy and misdirection. My SNP colleagues and I have tabled an amendment to reduce the resources for use for current purposes relating to immigration and asylum by £740,850,000. That pertains to our best estimate of how much the supplementary estimate would have to be reduced by to defund the Rwanda plan, the Bibby Stockholm and Wethersfield, Scampton, Campsfield and Haslar immigration removal centres. It is a small part of what the Home Office has wasted on schemes that have absolutely no merit and that cause more harm than they ever will good. I commend our amendment to the House.