UK Opt-in to the Proposed Council Decision on the Relocation of Migrants within the EU (EUC Report)

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has considerably widened the scope of this debate and I shall resist the temptation to answer him directly for that reason. I understand that he must come to the aid of his noble friend, but it is not enough to say that he is in a minority because he has made important points which we will reserve for another day.

This debate follows on neatly from the debate on the situation in the Mediterranean and the displacement of refugees and migrants from Asia and Africa introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on 9 July, which the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, may have attended. I am afraid that we did not get satisfactory answers on that occasion, as we should have done given the current daily anxieties in the media and among the public, so I shall ask some of those questions again today. This is a matter of great concern in this House, not least because of the work that has been put in by our Select Committees.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Prashar on her elegantly worded Motion and on taking on this urgent question on the very last day that we can have any hope of influencing Her Majesty’s Government. It is also a genuine benefit to have this particular Minister, whom I know from experience of the Modern Slavery Bill and most recently the Psychoactive Substances Bill. The Minister has to represent a department that can at times, and under any Government, resemble a brick wall—and I have had 20 years of experience of that—but he himself is a very practised listener.

The Government do need to listen on this issue because, as others have said, this is an exceptional time in terms of the numbers of migrants entering Europe. Member states therefore have to make urgent adjustments, and they are very modest adjustments being proposed today, to current EU policy—not just the Commission proposals or the recent Council conclusions, which seem to have confused everyone and have muddied the waters, to use the expression of my noble friend—but in the longer term the Dublin regulation itself, because the fact is that member states are already reinterpreting the regulation. Surely this strengthens the argument, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, pointed out, that we should be reconsidering that regulation formally.

We are therefore discussing this issue in something of a vacuum because the Commission, having revised its conclusion, has not yet come up—or the Council has not yet come up—with new proposals we can consider. We know that the Commission made a serious misjudgment—and the Minister might agree on that point—in proposing a mandatory scheme in the first place. On the other hand, it should be helpful to our Government if we raise the issue today, either to enable them to prepare a response in advance or, better still, for us as the UK to make our own proposal first.

My own view is close to that of my noble friend and of the committee. The Commission’s intention is very clear: to help Greece and Italy to relocate 40,000 migrants to other member states. The Council has agreed now to adopt a voluntary scheme, if it is agreed by consensus by all participating member states. I was surprised to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, mention our own “population explosion” and “superhighway”, which I think do not come into this area of discussion. I believe that the UK should in fairness take an active part in the resettlement scheme as proposed in the terms now set out by the Council.

The proposed scheme does little to help with the processing of asylum applications; under the Dublin rules, that falls to Greece and Italy as the countries of first asylum. They get very limited operational assistance from the EU or through FRONTEX, but that processing needs strengthening as well. As my noble friend says, these are not economic migrants from north Africa. I must repeat that. The vast majority in Greece and Italy who come under these measures are fleeing civil war in Syria, Iraq and Eritrea. I support the view that, when we see the Council’s conclusions, the UK should fully take part in negotiations on them. We are a member state, whatever our legal relations with Schengen or FRONTEX, and under a voluntary scheme especially we have a clear moral responsibility.

Can the Minister say how many Syrians are being processed already under the UNHCR’s gateway resettlement scheme? I know we are receiving up to 750 from different countries under this programme, but how do the Syrians fit into the more recent scheme by which hundreds of vulnerable Syrians are selected and given five years’ humanitarian protection status? I understand that up to March only 183 had been resettled under this scheme. When I asked the noble Earl, Lord Courtown, the number had risen by four, to 187, when he answered in the 9 July debate. Can the Minister confirm those figures, and does he have anything more recent?

I do not think we are slamming the door—an expression that is being used. I recognise that more than 4,000 Syrians have already been granted asylum in the UK during this crisis, but we still cannot match the generosity of other EU members, such as Germany and France, which have various problems, as has been said, and are jointly taking more than 20,000 refugees in the next two years.

I am reminded by the right reverend Prelate’s contribution that this contrasts not just with the case of the Ugandan Asians but with the warm reception that the earlier boat people, the Indo-Chinese, received— I think that most of us can remember that—especially through the churches and local communities. Again, these were people already under UNHCR protection and processed through that scheme.

If I may digress for a moment, some noble Lords may be familiar with the magazine Forced Migration Review, which is published by the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford. It is an excellent magazine recording the direct experience of aid workers and researchers who visit refugee camps in Turkey and the Levant. They know the problems of refugees intimately. Last September’s issue was devoted to Syrian refugees. It reminded us that during the civil war it is the women who shoulder the main burden in feeding the family and keeping homes together. It is they who ultimately make the decision to leave; they are already vulnerable at the point. But the old, the infirm, mothers of young children and many more suffering from mental health problems are the categories that we are talking about, who deserve urgent assistance and protection. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, put it, the Government must not shelter behind their JHA opt-outs. It is up to them to increase our share of this responsibility.