Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Stephen Timms

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

I hope that the Minister gets a hold of Hansard tomorrow, reads what he has just said and, as my mother used to say to me, takes a long, hard look at himself, because the idea that that is a justification for locking up children is absolutely disgraceful. For him to try to draw and to invent a causal link where none exists is a consistent line of the way this Government act. It is the same way that they tried to draw a causal link between the Modern Slavery Act and those coming in small boats—it just does not exist.

[Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I agree with what the right hon. Gentleman is saying. The current proposal in the Bill is that unaccompanied minors coming here to claim asylum will spend the balance of their childhood here knowing that the day they become 18, the Home Secretary will have an obligation to remove them from the country. Is that not an unconscionable way for any Government to treat children?

[Mr Carmichael]

“Unconscionable” is one of the more polite and measured terms that we could use about it. I reflect on the fact that when I visited Dungavel in 2007 or 2008, my own children were about six and 10 years old. The staff in Dungavel did a phenomenal job to mitigate the horrors of what they were dealing with, but at the end of the day, we were keeping children behind a razor wire, lockdown institution, and that was downright inappropriate and unacceptable. Nobody will ever persuade me that we should treat any child differently from the way in which we would want to treat our own.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Stephen Timms

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Monday 19th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). Like others, I would like to thank all those in the other place for their time and their attention to the Bill. The amendments that they have sent to us are undoubtedly significant improvements and, like the right hon. Lady, I regret that all we have had from the Government is a de plano refusal of them. There are not even any amendments in lieu, which would have shown a level of engagement.

This is particularly true in relation to Lords amendment 1, an eminently modest proposal that has elicited the quite remarkable assertion that, somehow or another, the purpose of immigration is to keep wages and salaries low in the British care sector. I have to say that I struggle with that somewhat. I just do not buy the idea that, if we were to increase the level of pay in the care sector, we would see a flood of local labour going back into it. Notwithstanding that, it is quite remarkable to think that the Government would not want to have an impact assessment for an area of public policy with whose financing we have struggled for almost as long as I have been in this House. Indeed, I cannot remember a time, in any part of the United Kingdom, when we did not struggle with its finances.

I want to touch briefly on Lords amendment 5, which was promoted in the other place by my noble Friend Lord Oates. Various points on this were made exceptionally well by the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms). The promise made by the Government at the election last year was that there would be some sort of evidence-based settlement scheme, but now we are told that it will be enough just to rely on a digital provision. I strongly suspect that, inside the National Audit Office, there are alarm bells and lights that flash every time a Minister stands at the Dispatch Box and says that there will be a digital solution to a problem. In my experience, any digital solution generally creates a new problem, especially for those who are older and those who are digitally excluded, for whom this is going to create a further and unnecessary level of exclusion.

I want to focus the bulk of my remarks this evening on Lords amendments 6 to 8 and 10, which were promoted in the other place by my noble Friend Baroness Hamwee. Subject to your agreement, Madam Deputy Speaker, I hope that we might test the opinion of the House in relation to these amendments later this evening. It is worthy of note that the United Kingdom is the only country in Europe that locks people up indefinitely for immigration purposes. Detaining people for months on end without giving them any idea of how long they will be there is clearly inhumane, but it is also expensive and unnecessary.

I have long since given up trying to plead with Home Office Ministers on the basis of humanity and compassion, but I would have hoped that a case based on economy and efficiency would find some favour. However, even that seems not to be the case. When I made an intervention on the Minister, he deftly ignored my point that £7 million was paid out last year and that there were 272 cases of wrongful detention. That is the scale of the crisis in this area. It really worries me that there is so little concern about the fact that no fewer than 272 people were detained wrongfully. That is wrong, it is inefficient and it is expensive. Surely for those reasons at least, the Government should be looking to find a better and more humane basis for doing this.

[Stephen Timms]

I very much agree with the right hon. Gentleman. He says that he has given up asking the Home Office for compassion, but I wonder whether he has seen, in the comprehensive improvement plan, that theme 2 involves a more compassionate approach.