Illegal Migration Bill

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Joanna Cherry]

I know the hon. Gentleman was trying to assist me, and I agree with him that court scrutiny is important—of course I do; I am a lawyer—but I am not going to let the Government off the hook on the absolutely woeful scrutiny that goes on, week in and week out, in this place. I am totally in favour of the bicameral system. When Scotland eventually becomes independent, which I hope will be during my lifetime, I would like to see a bicameral system in Scotland, because I like to see checks and balances, and I do not like Governments who throw their weight about and do not allow proper legislative scrutiny. That is my point and why I am spending some time on it now, because the way this has been conducted is, frankly, a disgrace. It really is a disgrace.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I am very grateful that the hon. and learned Lady is raising these points because, as the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, I know that we were very keen to carry out some prelegislative scrutiny of the Bill to assist the House when it came before us, but that was not possible because it had to be rushed through, it seems, so we have had no opportunity to have evidence sessions or to do any of the work that would really help the Government. Why are the Government so frightened of proper scrutiny of this Bill, which we all recognise is so important?

[Joanna Cherry]

I agree with the right hon. Lady, and I can tell her why the Government are afraid of proper scrutiny. It is because proper line-by-line scrutiny of this Bill would illustrate that it breaches our international obligations under the ECHR, breaches our obligations under the refugee convention and breaches our obligations under the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking. That is to mention just three, but there is also the international convention on the rights of the child, and I could go on and on. That is why they do not want the scrutiny. What really infuriated me yesterday was that, when some of us were actually trying to make arguments based on evidence and the law, the Minister was far more interested in parroting the populist slogans coming from his Back Benchers, which really had no basis in law and no basis in evidence, than in addressing the amendments we are trying to make.

I will spend a bit of time talking about the amendments I have tabled, because I think they are important. It is not just that I think they are important, but they reflect issues that have been widely raised in briefings from home-based organisations, such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Scottish Human Rights Commission, the Law Society of England and Wales, and the Law Society of Scotland. I assure Conservative Members that the Law Society of Scotland is not a bastion of lefty lawyers—I wish it was, but it is not.

--- Later in debate ---

I am afraid that I have no faith in this Government to deliver an efficient asylum system that will help those people. Let us focus on what they can get right, let us stop the political posturing and let us stop forgetting that these are real human beings. I genuinely think that on child detention, we are on the wrong side of history. It is a stain that it ever happened; it is a stain that it happens now. The fact that one third are children should be enough for the Minister to turn around and say that we will have a “do no harm” principle and assume that everyone is a child until proven otherwise. I do not want a single child to be held in detention, and I am rather shocked that the Government do not feel the same.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I apologise for not being here earlier this afternoon. I had to go to the Liaison Committee’s meeting with the Prime Minister.

I want to start by following up on a point made by the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). In yesterday’s sitting, the issue of children and child refugees was raised more than 40 times by hon. Members across this Committee of the whole House. Many described their deep concern about how child refugees will be treated under the Bill. I have a great deal of respect for the Minister, but unfortunately he did not mention children once in his very short closing speech yesterday. It lasted just 13 minutes, which with 70 amendments before the Committee yesterday translates to about 10 seconds per amendment.

I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West that the lack of scrutiny of the Bill is a huge concern, especially considering the importance of the issues, the fact that the Government did not take up the Home Affairs Committee’s offer of pre-legislative scrutiny, the lack of evidence sessions, the large sweep of amendments tabled, the rushed process of introduction and the lack of any impact assessment. I hope that we will get a much more detailed and productive response from the Minister this evening.

I have tabled 10 amendments in this group, which essentially fall under one umbrella: protection for refugee children. All my amendments have the full support of the Children’s Commissioner and some arise from recommendations in the Home Affairs Committee’s small boats report, which we published last year.

I turn first to amendment 295. The Government have excluded unaccompanied children from the removal provisions in the Bill. We know that children will often have made very difficult and perilous journeys, probably at the hands of traffickers or smugglers. However, the Bill will oblige the Home Secretary to remove those unaccompanied children from the United Kingdom when they turn 18.

In the year ending September 2022, the UK received 5,152 applications for asylum from unaccompanied children. Many of them came from Sudan, a country facing political instability following years of civil war, where child marriage is rife for girls as young as 10. Under the Bill, a 13-year-old Sudanese girl, for example, could claim asylum in the UK, be placed in the care of a local authority and be fostered, spend five years at school, make friends, learn English, get an education, build a life and become a member of society, only to face removal on her 18th birthday. If that were allowed to happen, the Home Office would be removing a young woman who had built her life here and might only know this country as home. The Bill also dramatically increases the risk of children fleeing the system and disappearing before their 18th birthday, in the knowledge that they face certain removal. My amendment would not grant an automatic right for these children to remain in the United Kingdom; it would simply prevent their mandatory removal when they become adults, so that each case can be decided on an individual basis.

Turning to amendments 299 and 301, the Children’s Commissioner has raised concerns that under clause 3, the Home Secretary will still have the power to remove unaccompanied children. The explanatory notes state that this power will be used only in exceptional circumstances, but there is no further detail in the Bill about what that means. I tabled amendment 299 to establish the right of an unaccompanied child who makes a protection claim—including a claim to be a victim of slavery and human trafficking, as set out in section 69 of the Nationality and Borders Act—to have that claim considered before potential removal. I have also added my name to amendment 121, tabled by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West, which would strengthen the position further.

Although clause 5(4)(a) goes some way towards protecting such people by stopping their removal if they make a protection claim or a human rights claim, it is dependent on subsection (4)(b), which relies on the Secretary of State’s considering this to be an exceptional circumstance. I understand that such a power is likely to be used in respect of unaccompanied children from a country listed in new section 80AA(1) of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, under clause 50.

Without my amendment, the Home Secretary would, for example, decide the right of a 14-year-old unaccompanied asylum-seeking child from Albania to remain in the UK. Over recent months, there has been a growing view that Albanian boys are not in need of protection on their arrival in the UK. In fact, they are exceptionally vulnerable, having often been trafficked here without proper protection and pushed into forced labour or criminality. Again, hanging the threat of removal over these children’s heads is a guaranteed way of ensuring that those who arrive here unaccompanied will try to go it alone—run away from care, and slip out of the system and into the arms of traffickers and abusers. Therefore, amendment 301 goes further by removing the power of the Secretary of State to make arrangements for the removal of an unaccompanied child.

The Home Affairs Committee’s report on channel crossings, produced last year, raised grave concerns about the Home Office’s record of safeguarding children, from failures to identify vulnerable children through screening and assessments to failures of communication when transferring safeguarding responsibilities from one agency to another. There is also the disastrous and unforgivable failure of children going missing on the Home Office’s watch.

I greatly fear that the Home Office is simply not up to the job of keeping children safe and secure. That is why I ask the Minister to reconsider clauses 15 and 16, which set out how the Home Office would accommodate a child and would be given safeguarding responsibilities that currently sit with a local authority. These clauses are incredibly thin when it comes to such an essential issue as safeguarding children, and they make no provision for the state of the accommodation to be provided. Will the accommodation be regulated, which body will inspect it, how will decisions be made, and what support will be available for these children?

The Children’s Commissioner has made it clear that she does not believe that the Home Office is the right body to oversee the safeguarding of children, and I completely agree. That is why I have supported amendments 143, 144 and 145, tabled by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), to ensure that our current statutory time and location restrictions on the detention of unaccompanied children and children with families are not disregarded.