Windrush

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), who made her case so passionately, and I would like to associate myself with many of her comments. We have heard that there is complete understanding from Members on both sides of the Chamber today that a wrong needs to be corrected.

Before I go on to the rest of my speech, I would like to add a brief moment of levity. There was some temporary excitement among my friends yesterday when they read a headline in the paper suggesting that the son of an immigrant bus driver had been elevated to the position of Home Secretary—they thought that the honour could have been bestowed on me already. However, when I explained that someone who holds that great position of state needs to be able to command a Department of 27,000 staff and a budget of £14 billion, handling millions of decisions every year, I think they completely agreed with the Prime Minister that it was probably best left in the hands of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), for the moment.

However, as I say, I am the son of an immigrant bus driver. My Irish parents came over from Ireland in the 1940s and I grew up in an Irish community in Birmingham. To go back to the comment made by the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, I heard stories of signs on bed-and-breakfast accommodation that said, “No blacks, No Irish.” I have a complete understanding and affinity for that community, with which my parents shared so much of their early life. Indeed, my father never went outside of England and Ireland. He never travelled to another country and I cannot imagine how disturbed he would have been to be faced with the prospect of having to provide documents that would allow him a passport to travel to other places around the world to join and support family members, as the hon. Lady so rightly mentioned. I completely understand the difficulties that people will have faced and we need to put it right.

We also need to understand the context in which this debate can sometimes be framed. My hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) mentioned that we have approximately 1 million illegal immigrants in the UK. Clearly, this is a sizeable problem. Today, I read an article in the paper that said my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) had been talking about the fact that we need to reconsider our approach to our immigration policy in this country. In 1997, a poll showed that 3% of the people who were asked their view on immigration thought that it was the most important issue facing the country. Ten years later, 46% of people thought that it was the most important issue, so for today, we have a problem. However, it is best placed in the hands of a man who is a brilliant Minister, who will completely sympathise with the people affected.

What have the Government done so far? We have made 7,000 calls, identifying prospectively 3,000 people who have been affected; 600 appointments have been made and 100 people have already had their documents processed. As a party, we are taking this problem very seriously. We have deployed the resources necessary to address it, and I firmly believe that within months the Conservative party will have dealt with this issue.