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

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 28th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the Government have set out an economic analysis of the deal and exit from the EU, including in a no-deal scenario. I point him to that.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Does the Home Secretary recognise that ending freedom of movement is a huge loss for many people—not just for businesses and for our economy, but for families and friends here in the UK now? Will he actually own up to the fact that, as we should be reminding people, ending freedom of movement means that the freedom of movement for young people in this country to visit, stay and work in other countries will be massively reduced—we are shrinking our young peoples’ opportunities—and that if our goal is to reduce immigration, this is perverse because immigration from non-EU countries is actually going up while immigration from EU countries is going down?

[Sajid Javid]

I think the hon. Lady and I will have to agree to have different points of view. I respect her view, but I think one of the clear messages from the referendum result was that many people felt we needed an immigration system that is designed in Britain and built in Britain and which is designed specifically to meet the long-term needs of our economy and our society, and that is what we have set out in the White Paper. The independent work by the Migration Advisory Committee—the analysis it has done by looking at the immigration systems of other successful industrialised economies—shows that it is not necessary to have freedom of movement or something similar to freedom of movement in order to have a successful country and society.

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[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point. I want to take him back to the threshold figure of £18,600, because it is so unfair, so unequal and so unjust. That is not even the minimum wage, so it deliberately splits up families, depending on the wealth of one person in that family. The Supreme Court says it has a particularly harsh effect on citizens who have lived and worked abroad. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is cruelty and callousness at the heart of this Government’s policy?

[Stuart C. McDonald]

I absolutely agree. We could spend many hours debating, and highlighting the flaws of, so many of the features of the family migration rules. Another is the fact that this threshold only takes into account the earnings of the UK sponsor; it does not take into account, for example, the potential earnings of those who want to come and join their family members here. So these rules achieve absolutely nothing but keeping families apart—families split apart and destroyed.

Our asylum system also urgently needs important reform: to fix and extend the “move-on period” that forces newly recognised refugees into homelessness and poverty; to end the poverty support rates for asylum seekers and allow them the right to work; and to respect the vote in this House on the Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill to extend family reunion rights.

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[Sir John Hayes]

I do not mind being called a traditional Tory, but I am not so keen on “lazy”. If I am articulating that view and if it reflects a view that is held by many of my constituents and a large number of other people, I am doing the House a service.

[Caroline Lucas]

rose—

[Sir John Hayes]

I will give way in a second.

Trevor Phillips, the founding chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, argued that there is a liberal consensus not to speak about such things. There is what he described—I do not know whether I am being unfair, but perhaps the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) matches this description—as “touchy”, “smug”, “complacent” and “squeamish” unwillingness on the part of bourgeois liberals to address the issue. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is a bourgeois liberal, but I do know that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) is, and I will happily give way to her.

[Caroline Lucas]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way with the customary courtesy that we all appreciate so much—Hansard could perhaps put “sarcasm” in brackets there. To address his point, of course he needs to respond to his constituents, but would he accept that his constituents may have reflected such a view back to him because of things such as the poster put up by Nigel Farage during the referendum campaign that actually showed Syrian refugees while implying that that was something to do with freedom of movement being out of control? Perhaps he would be doing his constituents more of a service if he based his arguments on evidence, and the evidence, time and again, is that freedom of movement does not reduce wages. We need a Government who are willing to enforce a minimum wage. I wish this Government would do that, but that is not the fault of freedom of movement.

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[Ms Harman]

I am heartened by the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, and I hope he will join us when we take up the Home Secretary’s offer to go and talk to him about how we can make progress.

[Caroline Lucas]

The right hon. and learned Lady is making a powerful case. When I finally got into Yarl’s Wood, what came over to me from my conversations with the women I met is the mental torture, the arbitrariness, of not knowing why they had been taken. Although I respect that she is trying to get a majority for a particular timeframe, which is why she has chosen the 28 days, does she agree that, if we were not trying to make that compromise, there is an argument for ending indefinite detention altogether, without any timeframe?

[Ms Harman]

But the point is that it would not be indefinite—it would be finite. It would be for up to 28 days, and then with the possibility of a further 28 days—the cap would be there, with no more days after that. Perhaps I could talk to the hon. Lady about this further.

Here in the UK we pride ourselves on our commitment to human rights, so how is it that indefinite Home Office detention has been a feature of our system for so long? I suspect one reason is that immigration detention used to be used for a very small number of people—exceptional cases. In 1993, there were only 250 detention places, and for the most part many of them were not full. Now, 27,000 people are detained every year, with 7,000 of them for more than 28 days. I am very encouraged by the Home Secretary’s offer to meet us to discuss a way forward on this. I am grateful to the Immigration Minister for the evidence she gave to the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

Unaccountable, arbitrary, indefinite detention is a human rights abuse. It is a cruel anomaly in our system, and I hope the Government will use the opportunity of this Bill to end it. They will have then done something that the last Labour Government should have done and did not, as was rightly pointed out by my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary.