Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Seventh sitting)

Becky Gittins Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th March 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Katie Lam]

But they do not. There will always be people who come to this country illegally from dangerous places. They are human beings responding to obvious incentives. Could the Minister please tell us which of the four options she thinks is the right one? Is it sending someone back to a dangerous country, which will entail a change in the law and probably leaving the European convention on human rights? Is it holding someone in immigration detention indefinitely, which has the same conditions? Is it allowing people to stay here, or is it sending them to a third country?

[Becky Gittins (Clwyd East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, once again, to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Stuart. I was disappointed but not surprised to hear that the official Opposition want to keep the Safety of Rwanda Act on the statue books. I was disappointed for a number of reasons, which I will set out shortly, but I was not surprised. I have seen the way in which the Tories continue to position and conduct themselves on immigration policy. It is clear to me that they simply refuse to learn the lessons of the last 12 months. The public saw right through their Rwanda plan. They could see it for exactly what it was: a gimmick that was both unworkable and unaffordable.

Before today, I thought I would familiarise myself with the Report stage and the Third Reading of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. At the time, a good number of Committee members, including me, had yet to be elected, but reading the debates really brings home the sense of chaos that had engulfed the Conservative party at the time. The then shadow Home Secretary, now Home Secretary, summed it up:

“What a farce…We have a Prime Minister with no grip, while the British taxpayer is continually forced to pay the price. Former Tory Cabinet Ministers and deputy chairs from all sides have been queueing up to tell us it is a bad Bill. They say it will not work, it will not protect our borders, it will not comply with international law and it is fatally flawed.”—[Official Report, 17 January 2024; Vol. 743, c. 966.]

A previous Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright), stated that

“to arrogate to oneself the right to declare one’s own compliance with international law runs the risk of, first, other states finding comfort in our example and, secondly, undermining our own messages in other situations. That makes this not just bad law, but bad foreign policy.”—[Official Report, 17 January 2024; Vol. 743, c. 855.]

This is an example of utter chaos. The Law Society, in welcoming the repeal of the Rwanda Act, said in its evidence to this Committee that the Act

“set a dangerous legal and constitutional precedent by legislating to overturn an evidence-based finding of fact by UK courts that Rwanda is an unsafe country to send asylum seekers to.”

However, the measure made it on to the statute book. The Rwanda plan ran for two years and, as we know and have heard several times this morning, a grand total of four volunteers were sent to Rwanda at the not insubstantial cost of £700 million to the UK taxpayer—quite a remarkable feat.

While hundreds of millions of taxpayer pounds were sent to Rwanda, the legislation’s effect was felt in the UK. As a result of the fantastical Rwanda plan, huge backlogs of asylum claims were building, with tens of thousands of people in hotels unable to leave because of the design of the Illegal Migration Act. We know that the use of hotels does not represent value for money and we are moving away from it. When it comes to the idea of the Rwanda policy being a deterrent, from its inception to the announcement it was to be scrapped, 84,000 people crossed the channel in small boats. It is always difficult to measure a deterrent’s effectiveness, but that is a pretty clear indicator that a deterrent it was not.