Unaccompanied Children (Greece and Italy)

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Thursday 23rd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

Of course the French should be dealing with the trafficking that is taking place in Dunkirk, and there should be enforcement. Frankly, though, other countries need to do something as well, because we can be in no doubt that the gang that is operating there, taking families across from Dunkirk to Britain, will have a lot of operations in Britain as well. There ought to be co-ordinated police action against that trafficking gang, because that is absolutely important.

The joint action between Britain and France to get the children into French centres was working in the autumn. Some of the children were then going into the asylum system and safety in France, and rightly so; some of the others—perhaps the most vulnerable or those with family in Britain—were getting sanctuary in Britain. The two teenagers we spoke to both said that they have family in Britain. They had been turned down, but given no reason—there was no piece of paper and nothing in the system—for why they had been turned down. As a result, they had turned up in Dunkirk and in Calais again. We will see more and more children arriving in Calais and Dunkirk and going back, at risk, pushed by the fact that the safe legal route has been taken away.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I rise to respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham). I was with the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) in Dunkirk on Monday, and I came away thoroughly depressed and really angry with the French authorities for letting this happen again. It took me a few days to digest what I had seen, and I came away feeling that it was not right and that they should be doing more, but the point is that they are not. If we do not work further downstream, in Greece and Italy, the children will continue to come and they will come back to Calais. Dunkirk is like groundhog day—it is Calais II. When they come back in volumes, as they will, it will then become our problem.

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Lady is right. We need to prevent young people from ending up in Calais and Dunkirk in the first place. That means working through the Dublin and Dubs schemes, whether in France or, better still, in Greece and Italy, to prevent them from travelling in the first place. We need all countries to work together to share responsibility for these deeply vulnerable young people.

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[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

We have heard some very passionate speeches and, I am sure, heartfelt views, but we ought to get back to reality and exactly what is happening. I think that some Members just did not listen to what the Minister said or to the statistics he gave about the numbers of people being brought into this country.

I have not been to Dunkirk or Calais, or to Greece or Italy, to see the refugees there, but I have been to Jordan and Turkey, where I have seen the camps in which children and adults are living. Nobody in their right mind wants to be in a refugee camp. It is not somewhere any of us want to go, but it could be us at some point. We might need to do that—I hope not—but any country in the world could find itself in that situation.

Given the desperate situation that the Syrian people are in, they are in a pretty safe place in those refugee camps. They are being fed, they are being given a health service, and their children are being given an education. Many people do not realise this, but the Jordanian Government have said that any child on Jordanian soil, of whatever nationality—they have Palestinian refugees as well as others—will receive the same education that their own children are receiving. This is not the case for the trafficked children who have been taken across the continent to come to Britain. As they have been trafficked, they are out of education and do not have a health service. They should have been settled in the refugee camps because people are getting a pretty good deal there. Interestingly, the Azraq camp is not full—there is plenty of space there—so it is not as though there is nowhere for people to go.

[Heidi Allen]

I mean this with no disrespect to my hon. Friend—I completely understand her point—but the problem is that Europe reacted too late, so these families and children had already made the journey to Greece and Italy and are trapped there. If we do not contribute, who will take responsibility for them?

[Pauline Latham]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point, but does she not recognise that France, Italy and Greece are safe countries? They are not Nazi Germany, where Lord Dubs came from. He escaped from being murdered. These children and families are not under threat of murder—they are in safe countries whose Governments should be respecting and dealing with them under all sorts of international rules.

Going back to the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, every building at the Azraq camp has been provided by IKEA. Nobody gives it credit for supporting so many of these refugees. In the desert, all the solar panels that are heating and lighting the buildings have been given to the region by IKEA to help these young people. We are providing a lot of the education and health services.

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[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I take the House back to April 2016 when, in response to the national outpouring that followed the dreadful and unforgettable image of poor little Alan Kurdi washed up so limply on a beach, this Government made a commitment in legislation to help some of the thousands of unaccompanied children who had escaped persecution and war and made it to European shores. The Dubs amendment was a complementary but, critically, unique part of our response to the humanitarian crisis that was sweeping across Europe.

As a continent, we must acknowledge that we did not respond swiftly enough to this mass migration, so millions of desperate men, women and children made perilous journeys, which means they are here now. I visited the Greek island of Lesbos in January 2016 with my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) and wept with disbelief at the hundreds and hundreds of abandoned lifejackets: yours for €20 courtesy of your friendly local trafficker—fake, of course. I remember naively commenting that some of them were branded Kawasaki or Yamaha jet ski water jackets and how at least they were real. “Oh, no,” I was told, “they are still fake. They just sell for a premium because they look more authentic.” What kind of parallel universe had I landed in?

At that time, anywhere between 3,000 and 9,000 refugees a day were arriving on the Greek islands. Greece, already financially on its knees, was in chaos. Yet despite the overwhelming challenge, the Greek people could not have been more hospitable, with local restaurateurs delivering food to the queues of cold but patient refugees. I will never forget the sight of a young mother using her hand to sweep the dirt off the blanket on which her family were sitting. Just a few carrier bags and the blanket were all she had in the world, but it was her home and she was keeping it clean, I remember a woman and her baby. The mother still had a slick of pink lipstick on her lips. She had a dirty face and dirty clothes, but she was proudly still a woman.

Although I saw similar images in Calais in the spring and summer, I am ashamed to say that, because of the euphoria of refugees finally being transferred to safe centres, those images have started to fade. The media have been quick to replace those images with all things Brexit and Trump. When I look back, as the day of camp demolition approached, our Government rose admirably and worked hand in hand with the French authorities to identify and process at speed children with family reunification rights under Dublin and those who might be suitable for the Dubs scheme. Mistakes were made, and it is undeniable that some of the age assessments were wrong, but that was symptomatic of the rush and urgency of the situation. It is not a reason to change our policy on helping lone children.

We took 250 Dublin and 200 Dubs children from France, which was a great start, so why, oh why, are we here today debating the Government’s decision to close the Dubs scheme when only another 150 will come? I am so proud of the £2.3 billion commitment to aid in the region and of the 23,000 refugees we will welcome from there, too, but the glow of pride in those other commitments should not dazzle so brightly that it disguises the separate but very real commitment we made on Dubs. Let us not be blinded.

Dubs was the final jigsaw piece in our refugee response, offering sanctuary to children who had lost everything and were already in Europe. We wisely set a cut-off date so that the offer would extend only to those who had come before the Turkey-EU deal in March, and we all agreed that was critical to ensuring that there was not a swell of new arrivals. Crude though it was, the Turkey deal worked and the flow to the Greek islands reduced significantly, but Greece could not and still cannot cope with the level of people who had already arrived. Dubs recognised that, enshrining in law a promise to help ease the burden on Greece and offer sanctuary to children who are vulnerable to trafficking and prostitution. These children are no less vulnerable now, so why are we turning our backs on them?

Ministers will say they are worried about the pull factor. First, let me say that we had this debate when we debated Dubs last year, and we accepted the evidence and expertise of NGOs that this legislation would not exacerbate a “pull”. Secondly, and so clearly, the very opposite happens. Having finally encouraged children to trust volunteers and the authorities, and coaxed them on the coaches to go to the centres in Calais, we now propose to whip the system away from them. When people cannot trust western Governments, whose welcoming arms they have sought, is it any surprise that the smiling face of the trafficker is the only place left to turn? I believe that opening the Dubs scheme and then shutting it so rapidly will actually cause more harm and a greater “pull”, through southern Europe towards Calais and then to our shores. In Dunkirk, on Monday, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and I heard at first hand from youngsters who had absconded from the safety of those regional centres because they had heard about the imminent closure of the scheme. Desperation clouds judgment and makes for poor choices—choices that lead straight into the hands of traffickers and prostitution rings. Closing Dubs so abruptly will give the traffickers the greatest promotional opportunity they could ever ask for.

We have never invested fully in a structured approach to Dublin processing in Europe, with scant Home office personnel available in those French centres and only one person in Greece and another in Italy. Refugees showed us their paperwork on Monday; nothing at all in writing from the Home Office is given to them and basic asylum rights information is provided in French, despite the very first item on the documentation saying that the person cannot speak French. We can and must do better.

Putting Dubs to one side, Dublin legislation means there is a proactive duty already incumbent on us to assist with family reunification. I am pleased the Government have recently agreed to review the casework of children in France who were turned down at the first attempt, but if we are to do this meaningfully we need an improved process, with dedicated Home Office staff, translators and the commissioning of organisations such as Safe Passage and the Red Cross, which know what they are doing. As we have heard, it has so far taken, on average, 10 months to transfer just nine children from Greece and two from Italy under Dublin, and, I am ashamed to say, none under Dubs.

My visit to Dunkirk on Monday so depressed me, as it was a horrid repetition of everything I had seen in Calais in the summer. I do not want us to feed that vicious cycle, so I feel it is sensible to restrict our activities in France to establishing a high-performing Dublin system. But 30,000 unaccompanied children arrived in Greece and Italy last year. About 1,000 wait in shelters in Greece, and about the same number again sleep on the streets, with thousands more doing the same in Italy. So it is in Greece and Italy where we should focus our Dubs attention.

As I draw my comments to a close, I want to focus on the capacity of local authorities, as that is the main basis for the Government’s argument. The Government say they have consulted and local authorities can take only 150 more. Even as I was writing this speech last night, I received a text message from an old St Albans councillor friend, Anthony Rowlands, who said that his council had just backed a motion to uphold the Dubs amendment. All across the country, councils are stepping forward to say they can do more. Councillor David Simmonds of the Local Government Association told the Home Affairs Committee just yesterday that only 20 councils across the UK have met their 0.07% target. Lewisham Council has offered 23 places but has thus far been sent one only child. Birmingham City Council could take 79 more and Bristol City Council could take 10 more. My own authority in Cambridgeshire has taken 61 but still hopes to reach its full quota of 93. Hammersmith and Fulham Council, after its people visited the Calais camp, upped its offer to the Home Office and asked for an additional 15 children on top of its 0.07% commitment. How fantastic is that? It has 13 spaces filled and has been asking the Home Office for two more children but has experienced “resistance” from Home Office officials. This evidence, I am sorry to say, suggests that a lack of capacity has not been proven and, as we know, this will be challenged in the courts. Evidence I have taken from the LGA says that all councils were written to once, regardless of whether they are district, unitary or county councils, but there has been no follow-up after that one letter.

Our world is in turmoil and moral leadership is needed like never before. What kind of country are we? What kind of Government are we? The country that I know and love is outward-looking, proud, welcoming and, above all, sharing. We have talked a lot recently about being a friend to Europe post-Brexit, but I tell you what, Mr Speaker, actions speak louder than words. We must step up and be the partner that our European neighbours need. We must go back to our local authorities and ask again—and again.

The humanitarian crisis will not end neatly at the end of this financial year, so neither must our compassion. In the event that we are unsuccessful today, I have already tabled an amendment to the Children and Social Work Bill, which will return to the House soon. There is substantial cross-party support for this debate. So long as Europe is under pressure to find homes for the most vulnerable casualties of war and persecution, we must keep asking, what more can we do?