Illegal Migration Bill

Beth Winter Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I start by congratulating Humza Yousaf on becoming Scotland’s new First Minister, and wish him every success in taking Scotland forward to independence. He, of course, comes from a heritage beyond these shores, and that should be a matter of celebration and pride.

Once again, the amendments before us today show that this Bill pleases nobody. Opposition Members are trying on a cross-party basis to restore some basic elements of humanity and decency to the process and make sure that the UK actually continues to have something that resembles an asylum system, but it seems that for many Tory Back Benchers, the Bill does not go far enough: Tory extremists want to make it even more punitive. We see that, for example, in amendment 136, tabled by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who is no longer in his place. Attempting to ban the use of hotels for temporary accommodation is simply gesture politics. It is probably unworkable and is certainly impractical, and is likely to further increase, not reduce, the cost to the taxpayer. I wonder how often the hon. Member and many others who have spoken today have actually met with asylum seekers who are staying in such hotels—who, incidentally, I am happy to consider as constituents of mine who have a voice that needs to be represented in this place.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) said, too many Tory Back Benchers speak of asylum seekers as some sort of amorphous, dehumanised blob, which I think is completely inappropriate. The asylum seekers I have met, through the Maryhill Integration Network and elsewhere, do not want to live in hotels: they want to be able to work and contribute to society. The way to get asylum seekers out of hotels is to give them the right to work, the right to earn a living—which, by the way, is another fundamental human right—and to let them pay for their own accommodation and pay tax into the system. At the end of their asylum process, if their claim is rejected, there have always been processes for removal and return; however, if their claim is accepted, they will be much further down the road of community integration, and at far less cost to the taxpayer. Instead, this Bill and the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North will channel yet more money into the hands of outsourcing companies such as Mears and Serco, and many of us will continue to hear stories at our constituency surgeries of substandard and unsuitable accommodation being paid for by taxpayers.

Today’s group of new clauses and amendments really gets to the heart of what the Government say this Bill is trying to achieve. Many of us suspect that what the Government are actually trying to achieve is a fight, first with the House of Lords, then with the Supreme Court and then with the European Court of Human Rights, but much of that was covered yesterday. Clause 2 provides sweeping powers and duties that add up to what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has described as a ban on asylum.

During the passage of the Nationality and Borders Act, many of us asked how the United Kingdom, which is surrounded by water, can ever be the first safe country of arrival for an undocumented migrant, an issue that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) touched on. How can anyone traveling from Iran, Eritrea, Sudan, or practically anywhere else on the globe be expected to meet the third condition in clause 2(4) about not passing through a safe third country? Maybe there is some inventive way that the Minister can tell us about—he has paid so much attention to the debate. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) should not have been surprised that the Minister was having conversations on the Front Bench, because he has spent most of the debate looking at his phone. I do not know whether there has been an update to Angry Birds or Candy Crush, or maybe it is just a particularly difficult Wordle today.

Nevertheless, what are the inventive ways in which people can reach this country without passing through a safe third country? If someone pushes off from the coast of Eritrea, navigates the horn of Africa, sails round the Cape of Good Hope, makes it up the north and south Atlantic ocean without straying into anybody else’s territorial waters and lands on the south coast of England, will they be allowed to claim asylum under clause 2? In fact, will there even be a way of knowing? That person would not even be allowed to make a claim, so when would they get the chance to prove that that was the journey they had undertaken?

In order to mitigate these ridiculous restrictions, the SNP has tabled amendments 186 to 196. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central for humanising the people affected in the way that she did. The amendments would offer protection to people who are under the age of 18; people already determined as refugees under the terms of the refugee convention; people who face discrimination because of their sexual orientation; people who are victims of torture; people who have been trafficked or face slavery; people who have HIV or AIDS; and people who have come from Ukraine or from Afghanistan. Given the outrage we have heard today from sections of the Conservative party about the treatment of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, I hope the Government will be prepared to accept our amendment 189, or they will face the prospect of their Members joining us in the Lobby in support of it later on.

I asked the Minister yesterday, and he did not bother to respond—again, I am not sure he was listening—where the evidence is for the deterrent effect that these powers and the threat of immediate deportation are supposed to have. Why has the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 not had that impact? Should those powers not have already started to work, because the powers in clause 2(3) are backdated to 7 March, when the Bill was introduced? Surely there should already be a slowdown in the number of arrivals. If there is a reduction in arrivals from Albania, it is because of a separate arrangement that the Government have come to. The reality is that this clause and these powers will not have a deterrent effect.

Freedom from Torture identifies four principal reasons for its clients undertaking perilous journeys to reach these shores. One is

“to join family or community that could offer security and support”,

and another is

“because of familiarity with the UK’s language, culture and institutions”.

The UK Government spend thousands, probably millions of pounds promoting those things abroad, saying, “Britain is great. Come and get a Chevening scholarship. Come to the United Kingdom”, except when someone actually tries to apply, they cannot, unless they have an awful lot of money. Another of the reasons is

“the hope of reaching a place where human rights are respected”,

which is certainly ironic given the Bill in front of us and the clauses we are debating today. The final reason is

“a lack of safety in the countries they were passing through.”

There is very little that the Government can do to address any of those pull factors through legislation. Several stakeholders make the point that many arriving here have little or no familiarity with the asylum rules, so the punitive measures in the Bill, particularly the powers in clause 2, will do nothing to change that.

Amendments 174 and 175, which I have tabled, relate more specifically to the debate we heard yesterday about the clauses on safe and legal routes. The amendments would ensure that this House has a meaningful say on what the cap or target for entrants under safe and legal routes should be. The current proposal for a statutory instrument drafted by Ministers with no room for amendment would mean really no say at all. Brexit was supposed to be about parliamentary sovereignty and this place taking back control of decision making, so why Conservative Back Benchers are so keen to hand over powers to the Executive is not clear at all.

I also welcome new clause 29 tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts). The commitment of Welsh Ministers and Senedd Cymru to making their country a place of sanctuary is hugely encouraging, and she is right to seek to make sure that the clauses in the Bill recognise and do not interfere with that commitment. Perhaps nation of sanctuary status is something that our new First Minister and his team will consider for Scotland, because we already aspire to those ideals, even if we do not use that formal term.

In conclusion, it is worth reflecting that Greek philosophers figured out in about 500 BC that the world was round. That does not seem to have sunk in on the far reaches of the Tory Back Benches. We cannot just keep pushing people away in the expectation that they might fall off a cliff at the edge of a flat earth. If we keep pushing people around the globe, eventually they will come back to us. Migration is a global reality. It is part of human nature. Over the centuries, people had to flee these islands because their crops were devastated by blight or because they were forced from the land to make way for sheep. It is just as well that America, Canada and Australia were not implementing hostile environment immigration policies back then, and it is just as well that we have global treaties and conventions to protect human rights and regulate how refugees and asylum seekers are treated by countries of arrival. That is not for this Government, however.

The exceptionalist attitude displayed by some Tories, which first led to Brexit, and which we see in amendments that have been tabled to the Bill, now stretches beyond the European Union and the Council of Europe to key United Nations frameworks that have sought to keep everyone on this planet safe since the end of the second world war. Withdrawing from those frameworks might be their ambition, but it is not the ambition of people in Glasgow North or people across Scotland. If the Government continue down the road they are going, the international agreement we will be withdrawing from is the Treaty of Union 1707.

[Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Having studied and listened to the entire debate today has only strengthened my resolve that we must oppose this rotten Bill in its entirety. It is inhumane. It is immoral, and it demonises and scapegoats the most vulnerable, desperate people who are fleeing violence, terror and poverty. We should be welcoming them with open arms.

As others have said, I have to express my concern at some of the inflammatory and inaccurate comments by some Conservative Members this afternoon. I also want to reiterate the concerns expressed about the lack of scrutiny: 10 or 12 hours to be considering in excess of 130 amendments is totally unacceptable. Notwithstanding my belief that the Bill should be thrown out in its entirety, I want to set out my concerns about some of the clauses and to speak in support of a number of amendments before the Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Beth Winter]

I fully agree—[Interruption.]

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Lady. [Interruption.] Thank you. I would like the Committee to behave like that all the time. It is most discourteous for conversations to be taking place on the Back Benches, particularly among people who have not been in the Chamber for much of the debate. Some of us want to hear what Members have to say.

[Beth Winter]

Thank you, Chair. I appreciate your intervention.

In conclusion, there is an alternative, as is evident from the number of extremely progressive and positive amendments. We must clear the backlog, expand safe routes, and the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), in co-operation with Care4Calais and the Public and Commercial Services Union on safe routes, was excellent. We must be welcoming vulnerable people to what I would describe as a nation of sanctuary.

I will finish by reflecting on the words of the First Minister of Wales. A week or two ago he spoke about,

“the basic belief that, in our brief lives, we owe a duty of care…to our family and friends, but also to strangers”.

He said that that simple belief lies at the heart of

“our ambition to be a nation of sanctuary. To provide a warm welcome to families forced out of their homes…all of those who seek sanctuary from wherever, and however, they may come”

to our shores. Care, compassion, respect, dignity, humanity, inclusivity and kindness—those are the values that I hold dear, and those are the values and principles that we should seek to uphold. This Bill does not do that at all. We must reject it.

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter). I share her concerns about the Bill, and indeed about the process that we have undergone in scrutinising it.

I want to make three short points. The first and most important one is to try to encourage a little more interest in clauses 30 to 36 that relate to citizenship. They were touched on by the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee and the former Attorney General, but they are incredibly important and quite alarming. It might seem slightly odd for an SNP MP to be rushing to rescue the concept of British citizenship, but citizenship is vital. It is a source of stability and other rights. Deprivation of citizenship, or blocking people from citizenship, as in the Bill, is something that should be looked at closely and seriously.

Clause 30 is entitled

“Persons prevented from obtaining British citizenship etc”

and it sets all the alarm bells ringing. Subsection (4) states:

“A person (“P”) falls within this subsection if P was born in the United Kingdom on or after 7 March 2023, and either of P’s parents has ever (whether before or after P’s birth) met the four conditions in section 2.”

That unbelievably broad clause means that children, and indeed some adults, will face being blocked from accessing the right to British citizenship not because of their own actions, but because of the actions of their parents, potentially even decades ago. To me that is ludicrous overreach, even if someone is in the space of accepting the Government’s premise of deterrence. In many cases, it could be children born here. One parent could become a British citizen and still that child, born in Britain, could be deprived of their own British citizenship. Or that child could be born here and spend the first 10 years of their life here, and be deprived of their British citizenship just because of the actions of one of their parents, potentially many years previously. It could be a child brought here at a young age and whose entire life has been built here. Surely, even to the Bill’s most ardent supporters, depriving kids of British citizenship because of what one of their parents did is a step too far? That is absolutely wild, but that is precisely what clauses 30 to 36 do and that should be looked at again.

The second point I want to make is on the detention clauses. Like many Members have said today, fewer safeguards and protections with more detentions is another tragic and backward step. Other colleagues have set out most of the key concerns. I just want to repeat the point made on Second Reading and by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) today: any idea that the right of habeas corpus, or a petition to the nobile officium in Scotland, makes all of this fine is absolutely preposterous. These are much more limited procedures for challenging detention, confined to questions of authority to detain rather than errors in decision making. They are also infinitely less accessible and speedy compared with a bail application to the tribunal, especially for vulnerable people. This set of clauses is designed to stop people who should be freed from detention being able to secure their release from detention, and nothing else.

My third and final point relates to clause 4 and the permanent state of inadmissibility of claims. This is the problem at the heart of the Bill. It is a permanent ban on making certain claims, which our amendment 294 seeks to address. Permanent inadmissibility means that, over time, thousands of refugees and others who qualify for protection will be left in limbo, because the Government will not have the capacity to remove them all to Rwanda, but also, because of the Bill, quite simply will not be allowed to process and recognise their claims here. Refugees will end up spending year after year after year in hotels or in dismal former military barracks without any hope of being able to move on.

The penny that does not seem to have dropped right across the Committee is that it also means that many who are not refugees will also be left in limbo in the United Kingdom. Again, the Government will not have the capacity to remove them all to Rwanda and, because of this very Bill, the Government will not be able to remove them to their home countries. If you do not process their asylum claims, you cannot—with a few exceptions—remove the person to their home country. That is recognised in clause 5. So thousands of people will also be left in limbo forever. In fact, the Bill almost creates a perverse incentive. If you are an overstayer—one hon. Member spoke about overstayers—probably your best bet is to make an asylum claim and then be left in that permanent state of limbo. It is an absolutely mad Bill. It does not make any sense at all. That, I suspect, is why we have not seen the impact assessment—it will reveal most of that.

The Bill will not solve any backlog. The backlog is going to balloon. More people will be jammed into hotels and military barracks, not fewer. The backlog will essentially just be given a different name: inadmissibility. That is what the Bill achieves and nothing more. A different backlog and incredible cruelty—that is what the Bill is all about and that is all it is ever going to achieve if it is passed.