Customs and Borders

Debate between Geraint Davies and Yvette Cooper

Thursday 26th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

That is right. If a manufacturer’s components come in from China but then, as part of the manufacturing process, the product moves to France for further manufacturing, and the components come back again and are then sent somewhere else, at every stage those calculations would have to be done. At the moment, because we all have the common external tariff, when the components come in from China or elsewhere in the world, those rules of origin checks do not need to be done after the manufacturing process and before it is sold on. It does not matter where the widgets come from or where the gadgets go; we have the common external tariff, which makes that process much, much smoother than it would otherwise be.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend will be aware that third countries represent some 12% of our exports via the EU. Already, South Korea, Australia and Chile have said that they want to renegotiate the trade agreements, including tariffs, if we are not in the customs union, and many more may. Is she fearful that we will end up with higher tariffs, worse terms of trade and fewer jobs?

[Yvette Cooper]

That is right. I think there is common agreement that we want no tariffs with the EU as part of this—I think that is shared across the House—but we also want to ensure that we do not end up with worse terms of trade with the rest of the world, rather than having the promises we have had that somehow things will magically be better.

Refugee Crisis in Europe

Debate between Geraint Davies and Yvette Cooper

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

We agree that we want to do everything we can to help prevent traffickers from being able to prey on the situation and to prevent some of the problems we have seen, but I disagree with the hon. Gentleman if he sees that as an argument for not helping those in Europe itself. I will come to that and will give him a chance to ask a further question later.

This is where we start to disagree. We need to urge the Government to do more. The Prime Minister said yesterday that he would help up to 20,000 refugees over the five-year Parliament, but the crisis is now. Helping 4,000 refugees this year is not enough. Compare that figure of 4,000 with the 24,000 in France and the hundreds of thousands in Germany; compare it with our population of 60 million; with the 10,000 we helped in just nine months under the Kindertransport; with the 19,000 Vietnamese boat people who fled to Britain from the Vietcong; and with the 24,000 Kosovans who came to Britain in the late ’90s. We can do more than this.

The Prime Minister said yesterday that he wants to get on with it. That is good and it might mean more than 4,000 in the first year. The trouble is that when we first urged the Home Secretary to take in Syrian refugees, she said they would do it as fast as possible, but in the end the scheme proved slow—only just over 200 have been helped. If they can help a full 10,000 in the first year, why not say so and why set a cap for the whole Parliament when we have no idea what the circumstances will be in a few years’ time? In fact, why set a cap for the Parliament at all?

I am afraid that the figure of 20,000 over a Parliament has the feel of coming up with a plan to maximise the headline number but to minimise the impact year on year. That is the wrong approach. We need to know how many the Government will help this year. How many can we help before Christmas, when the crisis is now? What can Britain do to help?

I made the suggestion of 10,000 straightaway simply by asking every county and city to take 10 families. I said we should ask councils how many people they would be able to help. Has the Home Secretary asked councils whether they can help?

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Swansea, of course, is a city of sanctuary and the leader of the council, Rob Stewart, has said that Swansea will help in any way it can. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the issue is to establish the capacity available for people who will willingly take people, rather than just plucking numbers out of the air, and that there is a welcome home for many people in distress across the country, including in Swansea?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. Swansea and other cities, including Birmingham and Sheffield, have already said that they are cities of sanctuary and will do their bit to help. I asked councils across the country whether they would help and within 24 hours, 40 councils confirmed that they would help and a further 20 have also done so. The Welsh Assembly Government have shown great leadership, saying that they will help, and the Scottish Government have also said they will help. They need support from the Government to do so, but they really want us to do our bit. Wales, Scotland and councils across the country are all saying that they will help, but only if we can work together.

EU Justice and Home Affairs Measures

Debate between Geraint Davies and Yvette Cooper

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary knows that an awful lot of the measures she has removed from the 35 are in fact measures that she plans to continue to co-operate with. There is a whole series of different aspects of guidance and pledges for co-operation across the policing and Eurojust world that she plans to continue to co-operate with. However, she has told her Back Benchers that she will not co-operate with them at all so that she can promise them a grand repatriation, when in fact it is the equivalent of repatriating the “Yellow Pages”.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend knows that this is really about co-operation across Europe to bring thousands of villains to account. How can we have faith in the Government if they cannot even co-operate with their colleagues in the House of Lords so that we can have the same debate, or give us enough time to consider the right thing to do, instead of this complete farce built on a hoax?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I heard somebody on the Government Front Bench muttering that there are different procedures in the House of Lords—different procedures that mean that they are allowed to vote on 35 measures, but we are allowed to vote on only 11? I have never heard anything so ludicrous.

The Home Secretary has been ducking and diving on this issue from the start. There are important measures in the 35 that we should be supporting and debating, and too many times the Home Secretary has tried to duck having a vote on them. The Schengen Information System II is vital and necessary. The recent Public Accounts Committee report that set out that there had been a 70% increase in delays in asylum claims also pointed out that the British Government have less information about criminals crossing our borders than other countries, and that is because we are not part of SIS II. The Home Secretary has not been able to join SIS II because she has been so busy renegotiating her opt-in, opt-out hokey-cokey for the sake of pandering to her Eurosceptic Back Benchers. We should be part of SIS II and we should be voting for it today.

The Association of Chief Police Officers has described the European arrest warrant as “an essential weapon”. Distinguished legal figures, including the former president of the Supreme Court, have argued that Britain also risks becoming a safe haven for fugitives from justice, a handful of them British citizens but the vast majority foreign nationals wanted for crimes elsewhere in Europe. They are right. For example, Zakaria Chadili from France was alleged to have travelled to Syria in late 2013 and undergone a month of training with a proscribed organisation. Instead of returning to France, he came to the UK and the French police wanted to arrest him. Between his first court appearance on 9 May and the orders for extradition on 13 June were just a few days, and he was surrendered on 25 June. In a similar case from 1995, before the European arrest warrant, Rachid Ramda, an Algerian national, was arrested in the UK in connection with a terrorist attack on the Paris transport system and it took 10 years to extradite him back to France.

The statistics are clear: the European arrest warrant helps us to deport foreign criminals and terrorists. More than 1,000 people were removed because of an arrest warrant last year. Of those people, 43 were UK nationals, eight of whom were connected to child sex offences. Since 2009, 500 people have been brought back to the UK to face British justice, including suspected child sex offenders and those suspected of murder, rape and drug trafficking, and more than 4,000 people have been removed, including more than 100 for murder, more than 300 for serious violence, more than 400 for drug trafficking and more than 500 for robbery. The arrest warrant helps us to bring to justice people who have committed heinous crimes in the UK and who should be facing British justice, and people who have committed crimes abroad, whom we want to deport from this country to face justice at home.

[Geraint Davies]

My right hon. Friend is being generous in giving way. Swansea has the most overcrowded prison in Britain. Does she agree that this measure is very important because, over the past five years, it has meant that 5,000 people have been removed from Britain to face justice abroad, with only 5% of the total moving in the other direction? Unless we continue using it, we will have an even greater crisis in our prisons because they will be full of foreign criminals.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. We do not want people to be stuck in British prisons when they should be facing trial and justice abroad. It would not be fair on victims of crime if we denied them justice because we did not have the procedures in place to ensure that people faced the courts. We do not want British families to be left without justice. We do not want the UK to be a safe haven for dangerous criminals.

It was right that the arrest warrant should have been reformed. We have supported the reforms that have been passed by this Government and have backed further reforms in Europe. The European Commission has concluded that

“it is essential that all Member States apply a proportionality test, including those jurisdictions where prosecution is mandatory.”

The Polish Parliament has taken through legislation that follows those principles.

Crime does not stop at the channel. That is why it is right that we should have the chance to show our support, right across the House, for the measures today.

Criminal Law

Debate between Geraint Davies and Yvette Cooper

Monday 10th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

As I have made very clear, the police and the CPS should have withdrawn that arrest warrant much earlier; it was the wrong thing to do. I also think it important for the police to be able to work with other police forces right across European and right across the world, and to have these particular powers in place to work in Europe. The Home Secretary agrees, and we agree with her that this is the right thing to do, but the way in which we have had this debate in Parliament today has been utterly chaotic.

[Geraint Davies]

We have heard from the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) about the Kings, but what about Hussein Osman, one of the 21/7 bombers, or the murderer Jason McKay and many more appalling cases of appalling crimes that have been brought to justice by the European arrest warrant? Yes, there have been a few odd mistakes, but a massive number of criminals have been brought to justice who, if the hon. Gentleman had his way, would still be lounging around, posing a threat to the public.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. A huge number of people, including more than 1,000 foreign citizens, are deported from this country, having been suspected of committing crimes, to face justice. I think it is right that we have the ability to do so.

The Home Secretary has basically told us that we should be grateful for the debate that the Government have somehow conceded should take place. You gave your ruling, Mr Speaker, that we were not having a vote on the European arrest warrant. The Home Secretary then stood up and completely contradicted that. She went on to say that we were voting on a package of 35 measures and that it was not a “pick and mix”. Why, then, has she picked and mixed only 11 of the measures and put them on the Order Paper rather than the full package of 35? The Prime Minister said categorically that we would have a vote on the European arrest warrant, yet he has refused to allow it.

Again I urge the Home Secretary to rethink. It is not too late for her to rethink and to provide the House with a specific vote on the European arrest warrant. It is true that some of her Back Benchers would vote against it, but the rest of us would vote for it. On the Labour Benches, we want enthusiastically to endorse the Home Secretary’s measures; on the Conservative Benches, Members want rebelliously to oppose them—but we all want a parliamentary vote.

Is not the truth that the Government took the European arrest warrant out of the motion because the Home Secretary and the Chief Whip thought they were being clever? They took it out because they wanted to minimise the rebellion. They wanted to tell journalists that it was a vote on the European arrest warrant, but tell the Back Benchers not to worry because they were voting only on prisoner transfer agreements. They wanted to pretend to Parliament that this was a vote on a package of 35 measures, yet let their MPs fend off UKIP in their constituencies by claiming that they never voted for the most controversial plans.

Women (Government Policies)

Debate between Geraint Davies and Yvette Cooper

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend mentioned in passing the fact that 65% of public sector workers are women, so they will be hit disproportionately. In my constituency, some 40% of workers are in the public sector. Does she accept, given what she has just said, that further cuts will tend to generate more domestic violence because of the economic pressure put on family life? There is a disproportionate impact on women not just economically but through domestic violence and the lack of funding to support increasing demand for services at a time when there are also cuts to the police budget. That is terrible for communities such as the one I represent.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. There are increased pressures on services, as well as cuts to many resources. Women workers in public services are feeling the strain, too.

The Minister for Women and Equalities will doubtless tell us about the good work that she and the Minister for Equalities are doing to improve women’s lives, which we welcome, but we believe that we need to go further and do more. We want to support them in their work, but we need them to do much more than they are doing now. We need them to start standing up for women in the Government. We will back them if they do, and we will support them even if their colleagues do not. However, they must act. They cannot just stand on the sidelines. They have a duty to stand up for women in this country, and to get in there and fight. They need to undertake some proper, independent research on the impact of the cuts and their reforms on women. They should use the work that has been done by women’s organisations in Coventry with the university of Warwick, because if they do not, we will. We will work with local groups and institutions to monitor what is happening to women across the country.

The truth is that equality for women is not just about women, it is about everyone. A fairer society for women and an economy that uses women’s talents is better not just for families but for everybody. I have always believed that every generation of women would do better than the last, have more opportunities and choices, break through more glass ceilings and challenge more conventions. However, I fear for our daughters and granddaughters as a result of what the Government are doing. We owe it to them to further the march for women’s equality and not to be the generation of women who turn back the clock.