Illegal Migration Update

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Wednesday 29th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend, who began this good work with her new plan for immigration—an incredibly important step forward. Among other points, it recognised that it is critical that, when individuals cross the channel illegally, they are moved either to detained accommodation, which we want to bring forward as a result of our Illegal Migration Bill, or, in the absence of that, to specific sites where they can be housed appropriately, where their cases can be processed swiftly and where they have minimal impact on the broader society.

I know my right hon. Friend pursued a very similar prospect in north Yorkshire, and she will have sympathy with the work we have done in recent months to take forward these proposals. We do not have a current plan to proceed with the Linton-on-Ouse proposition, but the sites I have announced today are just the first set that we would like to take forward, because we want to remove people from hotels as quickly as possible and move to this more rudimentary form of accommodation, which will reduce pull factors to the UK and defend the interests of the taxpayer.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I think the House should be more generous to the Minister and acknowledge the true genius of this announcement. Only this Home Office team could think that the answer to the problem of growing numbers of people in small boats was to bring them all together and put them into one big boat. Armando Iannucci himself could not improve on that. But if the Minister is confident in his projections about what is going to happen to the backlog of asylum applications, why is the extra capacity going to be necessary?

[Robert Jenrick]

To answer the second point first, we want to see anyone crossing the channel moved into this rudimentary accommodation immediately. That is why it is critical that we build national capacity so that we can clear the hotels, consign that policy to the history books and put people into larger sites. That is why we need them. I have affection for the right hon. Gentleman, but he is being naive in this regard. I speak every day, as does the Home Secretary, to our northern European counterparts in Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and France, all of whom are pursuing options such as this, because there is a European migration crisis. We have to ensure that the UK is not a magnet for individuals who are either economic migrants or essentially asylum shoppers. I will not allow the UK to be a soft touch.