Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Gary Sambrook Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 30th June 2020 Commons Chamber

The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has referred to the common travel area as being “written in sand”. There was no public consultation on the memorandum of understanding, so it has not been stress-tested. There may well be concerns whenever we look to the implementation of the citizenship clauses of the Good Friday agreement and how people who are solely Irish will be impacted down the line if that particular area is properly addressed in UK law. Ideally, I would like to see a UK-Ireland treaty to encapsulate the common travel area, but short of that, this new clause would go some way to giving that reassurance and ensuring that things are entirely future-proofed.

[Gary Sambrook (Birmingham, Northfield) (Con)]

I was pleased to serve on the Bill Committee, which was my first in this place. It was a whole five days of my life that I will never get back, but it was very enjoyable and informative. I particularly enjoyed the submissions from the Migration Advisory Committee, the Federation of Small Businesses and No5 Chambers, a Birmingham law firm. It was good to see a Birmingham firm down here contributing to our national debate. I cannot say that I agreed with most of what it said, but it was good that it was contributing.

A number of Government Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) and for Winchester (Steve Brine), have mentioned the real genesis of the hostile environment. They named him, but he is actually a Member of this place—the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), who was also the architect of austerity, because we all remember the little note he left behind as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He still sits on the Labour Benches. Labour MP after Labour MP stand up and complain about the hostile environment and austerity, but sat among them is the architect of austerity and the hostile environment. That is the sort of double standards that I do not want to see representing the west midlands in the mayoral election next year.

The ending of free movement of labour is a key cornerstone of the manifesto that I stood on in December and something that I am keen to get into legislation as quickly as possible. People have been calling for this for many years and many a politician have ignored their wishes. Included in this points-based system are things such as having a job offer or a sponsor before coming here, or being able to speak English sufficiently well, or meeting tougher criminality checks. Those are the sorts of things that people have been calling for and I am pleased that I am supporting those measures in this Bill tonight.

On the issue of immigration detention, I say to my colleagues that I hear their concerns, but I am convinced that immigration detention is used as a last resort. It is an absolutely necessary tool to ensure that we keep people safe on the streets of our country.

As my hon. Friends the Members for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) and for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford) mentioned, the list of people who would possibly have been released early had we put in place a 28-day limit would have made it hard for me to look any of my electors in the eye. I would not have been able to say that I had allowed those people on the streets early when I was out door-knocking. It is not as if those people are just banged up and forgotten about; they have rights. If they think their immigration detention is unfair, they can apply to a judge, and their case is often heard within a matter of days. Anyone wishing to leave immigration detention can do so at any time by simply leaving the country. I agree that, in general, the whole asylum and removal system needs to work much faster, but we also need to have a tough and robust system in place.

Many Opposition Members would have us believe that, if we did not have EU migration, the social care sector and the NHS would fall apart overnight, but as we heard in the evidence sessions from Brian Bell from the MAC, only 5% of the social care sector comes from EU migration. The hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) said that she thought the Bill had been written before the covid crisis. I can tell her that, a couple of weeks ago, during the crisis, the latest claimant count from my constituency was 10.2%. Is she and many other Labour Members—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We have to move on, sorry.