Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Stephen Kinnock

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the hon. Lady for her courtesy.

[Stephen Kinnock]

The amendment in the name of the noble Lord Hope simply requires the Home Secretary to lay a statement before Parliament confirming that the Rwanda treaty has been implemented and that the country is safe. Prior to issuing his statement, the Home Secretary would presumably take account of advice provided by the Government’s hand-picked monitoring committee, as specified in the treaty.

Lord Hope’s amendment also allows the Home Secretary to lay a statement making clear that Rwanda is no longer safe, should the situation on the ground in Rwanda change. This “trust but verify” approach is embedded in countless pieces of legislation that have made their way on to the statute book over the centuries. It is a perfectly fair, measured, reasonable and non-controversial proposal, and it is simply bizarre and incomprehensible that the Government are refusing to accept it.

Let me turn now to the noble Lord Browne’s amendment. Frankly, I just do not know where to start with this one, Madam Deputy Speaker. It beggars belief that the Government are still insisting on being able to deport to Rwanda Afghans who have bravely fought alongside British forces against the Taliban. It really is shameful that we are still debating what should be a given. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Afghans who stood shoulder to shoulder with our troops, yet this Government are seeking to trash our reputation as a country that honours its debts. What a disgrace. Ministers should hang their heads in shame.

Over the course of the past few weeks, Ministers have deployed a variety of spurious and mealy-mouthed arguments to defend their position, but the one that they have most frequently used is that there are already safe and legal routes in place in the shape of the ARAP and the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, but that is simply not the case. Operation Warm Welcome became operation cold shoulder when the Prime Minister torpedoed both schemes and left these Afghans stranded—shocking but true.

Court documents show that, in November 2022, the Prime Minister issued instructions to halt flights from neighbouring Pakistan for an entire year for Afghans who had already been granted resettlement rights in the UK, and only restarted them when the Pakistani Government threatened to send these heroic individuals back across the border to meet their fate at the hands of the Taliban. Let the content of those court documents sink in: the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom explicitly instructed the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office to stop assisting Afghans who had put their lives on the line for our country. What a disgrace. What a betrayal of British values. What a hammer blow to our moral standing in the world, but the noble Lord Browne’s amendment is driven not only by a basic moral imperative, but by our national interest and military logic for the simple and obvious reason that the ability of our armed forces to recruit local allies to support us in the future will be severely constrained if this Bill passes unamended. It should therefore not come as a surprise to anyone that our armed forces are outraged and repelled by the Government’s refusal to accept Lord Browne’s amendment.

Indeed, just last weekend, 13 senior military figures signed a letter to the Sunday Telegraph stating robustly that

“any brave men and women who have fought alongside our armed forces or served the UK Government overseas”

must be exempt from removal to Rwanda. I urge Members across the House to join me in supporting the two amendments that are in front of us today. This whole process has been a farce, but if we just pass these amendments we can at least send the message that we are not a country that chooses to deport its military allies to a country on the other side of the world and that we are a country that cares about whether we are sending some of the most vulnerable people on the planet to a place that is safe for them. At the very least, we owe that basic level of respect and decency to ourselves as a nation and to the people whom this policy will affect. Unfortunately, respect and decency for anyone, whether in relation to our nation, to asylum seekers or to the British taxpayer, is not something that this Prime Minister and his Government hold in any regard whatever. That is why their time is up. They are not fit to govern. I fear that tonight, yet again, they will demonstrate that point in spades.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

As I have just intimated, there will be an immediate time limit on Back-Bench speeches of three minutes.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Stephen Kinnock

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 15th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

It is just over two years to the day since the Rwanda scheme was first announced from the Government Dispatch Box, so it would be remiss of us not to take stock of progress to date. Well, hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been sent to the Rwandan Government; civil servants, courts, parliamentarians and journalists have spent countless hours, days and weeks discussing and writing about the scheme; and not one, not two, but three Home Secretaries have flown down to Kigali. But apart from that, there is not a great deal to report. The boats have kept coming, the backlog has kept growing, and the people smugglers are still laughing all the way to the bank. We have had two years of headline-chasing gimmicks; two years of pursuing a policy that is fundamentally unworkable, unaffordable and unlawful; two years of flogging this dead horse.

I am an inveterate optimist, so I truly believe that one day Government Members will come to understand that hard graft and common sense are always more effective than the sugar rush of a tabloid front page, and they will come to accept that they should have adopted Labour’s comprehensive plan to restore order to our border by redirecting the vast amounts of money set aside for the Rwandan Government into a new cross-border police unit, and a new security partnership with Europol to smash the criminal gangs upstream.

Analysis conducted by the National Audit Office has revealed that if the Government manage to send 300 asylum seekers to Rwanda, which is just 0.5% of the 60,000 people earmarked for the scheme, it will cost the British taxpayer a truly staggering £2m per person. It is crystal clear that the scheme is doomed to fail on its own terms because people who are prepared to risk life and limb crossing continents will not be deterred by a 0.5% chance of being sent to Rwanda.

The mind-boggling costs of the scheme are quite difficult to grasp, so I have done a bit of homework—a bit of research into what else we could get for £2 million. My hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), who is not in his place, got the ball rolling during our last debate on the Bill by pointing out that £2 million will get someone five trips to outer space on the Virgin Galactic spacecraft—Madam Deputy Speaker, you look impressed, and suitably so. I have calculated that someone could live for three decades on one of the world’s most expensive cruise liners. They could charter, for a year, the Lady M yacht, which is, of course, the yacht that belongs to the “noble” Baroness Mone—it is her vessel of choice, as some Government Members may be aware—or they could even fly the Prime Minister’s favoured helicopter to Australia and back.

Speaking of the Prime Minister, I noticed that during the Easter recess, he found time to offer his services as a financial adviser to small businesses via Zoom. I do not know about you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I have concerns about a guy who is happy to pump billions of pounds into a failing fiasco like this Rwanda scheme offering his services as a financial adviser to unsuspecting members of the public. Let us hope that the Financial Conduct Authority will intervene as a matter of urgency.

[Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is proving most entertaining, but as this is consideration of Lords amendments, will he get on to dealing with the amendments? I want him to be in order!

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. If the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) was not in order, I would not have allowed him to speak. He has been drawing some very interesting facts to the attention of the House. I, for one, am likely to explore some of them—but not the yacht.

[Stephen Kinnock]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I always enjoy taking interventions from a fellow Welshman, but I feel that the right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) was well and truly put in his place by your riposte.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Stephen Kinnock

Monday 27th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

Since the previous Home Secretary was removed from her post, I think it is fair to say that the Immigration Minister has become a law unto himself. First, he briefed the media that he has been instructing the Prime Minister to tear up all our legal obligations to fix the unfixable Rwanda policy. Then he set himself on a collision course with his new Home Secretary by appearing to bet the house on the Rwanda flights taking off. To add insult to injury, he went behind his new boss’s back to present his laundry list to the Prime Minister, including a cap on social care visas and abolishing the shortage occupation list. Does the Immigration Minister have any respect whatsoever for the authority of the new Home Secretary? Given that he is said to be on resignation watch, will he confirm that he will resign if his proposals are rejected?

Points of Order

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Stephen Kinnock

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wish to raise a point of order on the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) in the statement. The immigration guidelines were changed in August 2023 to enable eviction within seven days as opposed to 28 days, and my hon. Friend has the letter from Clearsprings to the person she is representing that confirms a seven-day deadline. I wonder whether the Minister might wish to correct the record based on the exchange he had with my hon. Friend earlier.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. As a rule, it is not correct to continue a statement with additional questions, but he appears to raise a genuinely new question arising from the statement. If the Minister would care to answer it, I will allow him to do so. If he prefers to write to the hon. Gentleman, that is also acceptable.

Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Stephen Kinnock

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

I will make a little bit of progress, and then I will allow the hon. Gentleman to intervene.

I will turn first to Lords amendment 1B, intended to ensure that the Bill is consistent with international law, which Labour fully supports. Last week, the Minister deemed the same amendment unnecessary, because:

“It goes without saying that the Government obey our international obligations, as we do with all pieces of legislation.”—[Official Report, 11 July 2023; Vol. 736, c. 198.]

That comment was typical of the Minister’s approach. He is constantly trying to calm his colleagues’ nerves by fobbing them off with that sort of soothing statement, but we all know that he does not really believe a word of it. He knows that the very first page of the Bill states that the Government are unable to confirm that it complies with our legal obligations. He also knows that the Government are more than happy to break international law—just look at how they played fast and loose with the Northern Ireland protocol. If the Minister really thinks that we will simply take his deeply misleading words at face value and trust him and his colleagues to uphold our legal obligations, he has another think coming.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I think that the hon. Gentleman did not mean to use the phrase “deeply misleading”. Knowing that he is an honourable gentleman, I suggest that he might want to use a slightly different phrase—“inadvertently misleading”, perhaps?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Would “misleadingly soothing” work?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

It will do for the time being.

[Stephen Kinnock]

As always, Madam Deputy Speaker, you are very gracious.

The late, great Denis Healey famously advised that when you are in a hole, you should stop digging. [Hon. Members: “Quite right!”] Hang on. He would certainly have approved of Lords amendment 9B, which goes right to the heart of the fundamental unworkability of this bigger backlog Bill and seeks to prevent it from becoming the indefinite limbo Bill.

Let us be clear: the current state of affairs represents both a mental health crisis for asylum seekers and a financial crisis for British taxpayers, who are already shouldering an asylum bill that is seven times higher than it was in 2010, at £3.6 billion a year. Indeed, the mid-range estimate for the hotels bill alone is greater than the latest round of levelling-up funding, and three times higher than the entire budget for tackling homelessness in this country. The only people who benefit from the inadmissibility provisions in the Bill are the people smugglers and human traffickers, who are laughing all the way to the bank. As such, it is essential that this House votes in favour of Lord German’s amendment, which seeks to ensure that inadmissibility can be applied to an asylum seeker only for a period of six months if they have not been removed to another country.

A major concern throughout the passage of the Bill has been its utter disregard for the mental wellbeing of unaccompanied children. Many of those children will have had to see their loved ones suffer unspeakable acts of violence, yet despite the Government’s concession, the Bill will mean that when they arrive in the UK, they will be detained like criminals for up to eight days before they can apply for bail. We are clear that that is unacceptable, and are in no doubt that the Government’s amendment is yet another example of their liking for performative cruelty. We urge the Minister to accept the compromise of 72 hours contained in Lords amendments 36C and 36D.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Stephen Kinnock

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

Last week, the Home Secretary told the House that our asylum system is “broken”. Yesterday, her Minister, who is sitting before us today, again stated clearly that our asylum system is “broken”. We on the Labour Benches completely agree, but what Conservative Members seem to continually miss is the fact that the Conservative party has been in power for 12 years. The problem is that they never stand up and take responsibility; they always try to blame others—the civil service, the courts and even the media. It was revealed this week that the Home Secretary banned the Financial Times, The Guardian and the Mirror from the press delegation accompanying her to Rwanda. That was a truly Orwellian move—cancel culture at its worst.

The truth is that, with every decision this Government make and every ill-conceived scheme they put in place, they make fixing our broken asylum system ever harder. The first of these failures is on the asylum waiting lists. Under this Home Secretary, the Home Office is processing 50% fewer cases than five years ago—the result: 37,000 asylum seekers languishing in expensive hotels, costing the taxpayer an eye-watering £4.7 million per day. Labour would invest to save by increasing the number of caseworkers and decision makers so that processing times and hotel bills are radically reduced. [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Come on, let us have a bit of reasonable behaviour. I appreciate that it is late, but it is simply rude to shout to such an extent that we cannot hear the hon. Gentleman. It is not reasonable. There is nothing wrong with a bit of banter, but it should not be at such a level that I cannot hear him.

[Stephen Kinnock]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

It is in this context that we are supporting Lords amendment 7F today, which would give the 60,000 asylum seekers on waiting lists the right to work, to be reviewed after two years, thereby reducing the burden on the British taxpayer and boosting the Exchequer.

Secondly, during his negotiations with the EU, the Prime Minister completely failed to replace the Dublin III regulation, which means that we can no longer return refugees to the country in the EU where they would have first sought asylum. Numbers have increased because this Conservative Government lost control of our borders by losing our long-held power to send people back.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Kinnock]

We have made it absolutely clear that the plan is going to fail, as the Home Office’s top civil servant said, so the question will not arise. We will not need to deal with it; the wheels will fall off the bus. We certainly would not be spending £120 million on a press release.

The Rwanda offloading plan is not only a grotesquely expensive gimmick that is unlikely to deter people smugglers in the long-term, but deeply un-British. Dumping this challenge on a developing country 4,000 miles away, with a questionable record on human rights, raises serious concerns about whether this legislation complies with the UN refugee convention. That is why we will back Lords amendment 5D.

Another deeply un-British part of the Bill was the idea that the rubber dinghies could be pushed back out to sea. Yesterday, we witnessed the Home Secretary’s latest screeching U-turn—this time reversing a particularly unhinged part of the legislation. The Home Secretary’s pushback policy was almost completely unworkable, as she was told by the Border Force, by the French, by the Ministry of Defence and even by her own lawyers. As we learned from court documents published yesterday, she had actually agreed that pushbacks could not be applied to asylum seekers in the channel, but she tried to keep that secret so that she could keep up the bravado and tough talking. We hope that she will correct the record.

I have already pointed out—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I want to let the House calm down for a moment. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman, who is an experienced and efficient Member of this House, will know that he should not be making a general speech at this stage; this is not Second Reading. This debate is very narrow: we are discussing only the amendments that have just come back from the Lords, not general issues. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will now stick to the narrow matter before us—and so will everybody else.

[Stephen Kinnock]

Thank you for your wise counsel, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I have already pointed to the work and refugee convention amendments, but we also need to address differential treatment. Lords amendments 6D, 6E and 6F provide that a person can be a tier 1 refugee if they have travelled briefly through countries on their way to the UK, as somebody from Kabul or Kyiv would have to, or if they have delayed presenting themselves to the authorities for a good reason. They would also require compliance with the refugee convention and state that family unity must be taken into account. The Government should get behind the amendments. What in them can there possibly be to disagree with?

The channel crossings have been taken out of the Home Secretary’s hands and handed to the Ministry of Defence and the Royal Navy. The Ukrainian refugee scheme has been handed over to the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. This Sunday, the former director general of borders and immigration called for a new immigration Department to remove responsibility from the Home Office. With her Department now effectively in special measures, will the Home Secretary not just for once do the right thing and accept the amendments today, so that we can begin to repair some of the damage done by this deeply counterproductive legislation?

Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Debate between Baroness Laing of Elderslie and Stephen Kinnock

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

Good jobs and decent working conditions have always been central to the Labour party’s core mission. Prosperity and patriotism are the mutually reinforcing foundations upon which our Labour movement is based, and although we in the Opposition recognise that good pay is utterly crucial we also know that work is about dignity, pride and contribution. It is about being part of something bigger.

In my Aberavon constituency, I see that desire to be part of something bigger every day—from the NHS workers who have saved so many lives to the manufacturers who have provided them with PPE, and the steelworkers who have continued to build the foundations of our modern economy. Yet over the last 11 years we have seen an exponential increase in insecurity across all sectors of our economy—from the two in five adult workers who do not yet know their shift hours for next week to the exploited gig economy workers denied holiday pay, the workers sacked by British Gas and then rehired on worse conditions, the high street workers with the threat of internet shopping looming over them, and the factory workers who could be the latest victims in the erosion of our manufacturing base that we have seen over the last 11 years.

British workers are the greatest asset that this country has, yet successive Conservative Governments have utterly failed to value their contribution. Many on the Conservative Benches celebrate flexibility and fluidity, yet flexibility without real choice means insecurity, and fluidity without proper investment in reskilling means mass unemployment. Tackling insecurity at work should therefore be a top priority for any Government, so where on earth is the long-promised employment Bill? Its omission from this Queen’s Speech is simply unforgivable.

It is important to recognise that during the pandemic 50% of the workforce did not work a single day from home. It is many of those workers, who are still going into work or who have been furloughed, who are the most likely to be at the sharp end of the job market, with their jobs often the most at risk from automation, the digital economy and the green revolution. It is these trends—and, crucially, how the Government respond to them—that will define Britain’s success in the years ahead. Of course, the trade union movement must be at the heart of this response. The modern job market will evolve, but the basic principle will always remain: the most productive and competitive companies are those that give their workforce a strong voice. Good industrial relations deliver good business results.

I therefore suggest that there should be three core principles at the heart of the Government’s response: first, dignity at work with new legislation protecting the rights of employees, not least to outlaw fire and rehire; secondly, partnering with business and trade unions for a new kind of growth to deliver the jobs of the future, recognising where Britain can be competitive but also that the less celebrated foundational industries such as steel are critical for our security; and thirdly, a properly resourced programme of training and retraining aimed at the jobs of the future. There is no point in trying to address the productivity crisis if we keep cutting the workforce out of the conversation; there is no point in investing in further education if the jobs are not there; and there is no point in decarbonising our industrial base if the local workforce is not trained up and if jobs and carbon emissions are simply offshored. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), the shadow Chancellor, has so rightly said, our communities do not need sloganeering about levelling up; they need good jobs. She said:

“We need jobs you can raise a family on”.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call Richard Holden. Is the hon. Gentleman appearing virtually? No. I call Wendy Chamberlain.