Diana Johnson
Main Page: Diana Johnson (Labour - Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham)Department Debates - View all Diana Johnson's debates with the Home Office
(1 year ago)
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Robert Jenrick
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his support over the last year, in particular with our landmark Illegal Migration Act 2023. He is right to say—this is a point I made in a speech at Policy Exchange earlier this year and the Home Secretary made in a speech in Washington more recently—that the international framework, whether it be the European convention on human rights or the refugee convention, although undoubtedly well intentioned at the time, is now in need of serious reform. Today we find ourselves in a world in which hundreds of millions of people are on the move and eligible for refugee status. The situation is incomparable to the one we experienced in the immediate aftermath of the second world war.
The signatories and authors of those documents would be appalled to see some of the abuses we see in our present system, which frustrates our ability to support those who are truly in need and fleeing war and persecution. Across Government, the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and I are raising this with all our partners and allies at every opportunity.
Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
At the Public Accounts Committee in July, Home Office officials told me that the Government were paying for 5,000 empty hotel beds as a buffer in case of an upsurge in people travelling across the channel. Could the Minister update the House on how many empty hotel beds the Government are currently paying for?
Robert Jenrick
I would hope the right hon. Lady welcomes today’s news that, as a result of the good progress we have made on reducing small boat crossings, we are now in a position to begin closing those hotels. It is true that the Home Office kept a proportion of hotels precisely to ensure that we did not find ourselves in the position we saw last autumn, when I took on this position and we had problems at the Manston facility in Kent. As a result of the significantly fewer numbers crossing the channel this year, those beds have not been necessary, which is one of the many contributory factors behind our ability to start closing the hotels.