Angela Crawley
Main Page: Angela Crawley (Scottish National Party - Lanark and Hamilton East)Department Debates - View all Angela Crawley's debates with the Home Office
(8 years ago)
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Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I thank the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) for securing this important debate. Given the dramatic rise in the number of children travelling through Europe in recent years, it is impossible to remove emotion from the debate. Too often, too many children are left unaccounted for and unrecognised in a system that focuses on bureaucracy, timing and filling in forms, and fails to remember that these are children and they are our responsibility. As a result of the ongoing crisis in Syria—sadly, in no way unique or the first of its kind—too many children are facing perilous journeys. Last month, while I was in Calais, I spoke to volunteers from Help Refugees. Both Annie and Maddie spoke of the utterly horrifying fact that too many children aged as young as nine are climbing into trucks, trying to get to the border and being sent back. One child, Hasan, had taken 15 perilous journeys. He had attempted to cross the border and been sent back. However, today he will reach the UK and he will be reunited with his family. That is a good story, but that is only one good story in the face of so many stories of children who may or may not make it.
I spoke to a mother who had put her two young children aged two and seven on the back of a truck in the hope that they would make it to the UK. I do not know whether they did. She will never know where those children are. This is the emotion of the debate and the reality. We do not know where those children are and that is the reality that we must face.
Save the Children, living up to its name, has put pressure on the Government to resettle the 3,000 unaccompanied children already in Europe. That is a responsibility that we in the UK must take seriously, and we must step up to the plate. However, as the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) said, in order to protect children we need to know where they are. That is vital. If I drive one point home in this debate, it is that there are too many children whose whereabouts we do not know; we do not know where they are going and we do not know where they will end up. That is not good enough.
The standard of care that we know they will receive when they get to the UK will be exceptional. It will be top class and delivered by some of the best local authorities across the UK in Scotland, England, Wales and elsewhere. Funding local government to deliver the services is absolutely vital. The stark reality is that three times more teenagers are deported than the Home Office previously admitted, which highlights that this bureaucratic process is still penalising people and creating an arbitrary line in the sand between what is a child and what is not a child. This is not good enough.
I will leave this point with the Government. I echo the sentiments of timeliness and the need to protect. The Government are failing children. We can always do more, so let us step up to the plate and do that.