Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Joanna Cherry

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

Clearly the faster the claims can be assessed, the better it is for everybody, as they can be discovered either to be illegal or to be genuine victims. That is the key thing.

Clear evidence of abuse of the system needs to be published, because it is important that the figures are there to be understood. A very small number are actually claiming it, and the 73% that we were told about on Second Reading in fact refers to those who are detained for removal after arrival. That amounted to 294 people. We need to get the figures in context, then we can understand what the problem is and how we deal with it. If the evidence shows that there is an increase, we will then be able to use parts of the Bill.

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

The right hon. Gentleman and I have discussed the lack of an evidence base for this aspect of the Bill. When the former modern slavery commissioner, Professor Dame Sara Thornton, gave evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights recently about this issue, she suggested that because no replacement for her had been appointed for over a year, there was a lack of a proper evidence basis for the modern slavery aspects of the Bill. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that she is right about that, and will he use his good offices with the Government to try to ensure that an anti-slavery commissioner is appointed?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I am flattered by the idea of my good offices with the Government, and I will take that at face value—thank you very much indeed. I will speak to the Government about that, and I accept that we need to get that replacement made very quickly.

The most important point is that we need to think about exempting any victims exploited in the UK from the disapplication of modern slavery protections. There is a very good reason why that is the case. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead laid out clearly, if we do not do that, those who are affected will simply dismiss any idea of coming forward to give evidence, because they will fear that they will not be accepted and that they will therefore have to go. Many of them will not yet have given evidence to the police. The Bill suggests that the Secretary of State will be able to assess whether they have given evidence to the police, but this a longish process. This accounts for more than 60% of cases, and I really wish that the Government would think carefully about protecting them. I think the police will back us on this, because they want those people to give evidence.

The irony is that the more we help those people and the more they give evidence, the more traffickers we will catch and close down, which will probably result in fewer people coming across the channel on boats. This is all part of a circle of trust, identification and final prosecution, and it is really important. We should amend clause 21 to exempt victims exploited in the UK, and the new threshold for a positive reasonable grounds decision requiring objective evidence would prevent spurious claims. The whole point of this is to find a way.

I think we can agree on this. The work the UK has done on modern slavery, the evidence and all the rest of it, is now helping to prosecute the traffickers. If we lose that delicate flower of success, we will find ourselves in a worse position, with many more people being deliberately trafficked because we have become a soft touch on trafficking.

I fully understand why the Government are trying to deter the illegal use of these boats to cross the channel, both for people’s safety and because it puts huge, unnecessary pressure on services here, but I beg my right hon. Friend the Minister for Immigration to accommodate these concerns about modern slavery and to make sure that we do something in the Bill to protect these people in the long run.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Joanna Cherry

Monday 21st September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

That is why I gave way to my right hon. Friend—because he was there. I think he was a very good Minister too, by the way, for what it is worth.

The point is that for 10 years, Labour Governments and other Governments simply refused to put prisoners’ voting rights through. Finally, there was a fudge negotiation, where not all of what was asked for was agreed, but it was agreed that what had been done, I think on furlough—as I recall, prisoners on furlough had voting rights—was okay. That was not what was asked for.

Let us not be too pompous about this idea that international law is some God-given gospel that says, “Absolutely nobody can ever trespass away from this.” Many of these things are fudged anyway, and implementation is very important. I come back to section 38, which my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) initiated. That made it very clear that we would, if necessary, place our constitutional law ahead of both of those.

I make that point because in truth, we are now in exactly that state. That is why I believe that I can happily vote for this tonight. I am happy that, following the debate between my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst and the Government, they have tabled amendment 66, which will give Parliament a chance to say yea or nay when the moment comes. But we are not in breach until we decide to implement this. This has been done before. It is important to show that we want to do this if necessary, but we would rather find an agreement between the parties.

I come back to the point that I made about good faith in principle. I see that Monsieur Barnier has threatened our negotiators that, if they do not agree with him—he has not, by the way, wanted to move anywhere near the Joint Committee to discuss these matters—the EU will, if necessary, not give us the status of third country. That seems a bizarre threat to make. The list of third countries, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) mentioned, is long and peculiar. Belarus, for example, which we watch almost nightly on the television, would have third country status. We would not have it, apparently. Others include the Central African Republic, China, the Islamic Republic of Iran—the list goes on. I think there are now 137 countries that would have third country status, but apparently to Mr Barnier, it would be quite acceptable for a country that has been very close to the EU for years to not have third country status. I think it is a hollow threat, but it is a peculiar threat to make, and it gives an indication of bad faith.

The EU is meant to avoid bad faith in this, and so are we. The whole idea of the Bill is to say, “Stop. Let’s consider this again. We do not want—and you should not want—to end up in a situation where we are running around on your laws. This is not what the agreement was meant to be, and we are not prepared to see our constitutional settlement trashed in the pursuit of your own vainglorious idea that somehow you’re going to keep hold of us and run us afterwards.” As my right hon. Friend said, we did not vote to be a subsidiary state; we voted for independence. That is the key point.

I am going to vote for this Bill, and I vote for it with a clean heart. I vote for it because so many areas—from state aid, to transfer of goods and agriproducts to labelling—will be affected unnecessarily. If the EU seriously wants to help and to get this done, it needs to return to the table, go into the Joint Committee as it said it would and accept what we are saying: we will not allow our constitution to become the prisoner of an EU that wants to have all power over the UK.

[Joanna Cherry]

I rise to speak in favour of amendments 43 and 44, in my name, and to support the amendments tabled by the Scottish National party, our friends from the SDLP and our friend from the Alliance party.

I will focus my comments on my amendments, which I tabled to work out just how far this Government are prepared to go in ousting the jurisdiction of the domestic courts in relation to judicial review and review under the Human Rights Act in clause 45, as it appears on the face of the Bill. I also wish to highlight, as I mentioned in an intervention on the Minister, that, in so far as clause 45 seeks to restrict judicial review in Scotland by circumscribing the supervisory jurisdiction of the Court of Session, this not only trespasses into devolved territory but may well breach another treaty: the treaty of Union between Scotland and England, article 19 of which preserves the independence of the Scottish legal system.

Before I address my amendments in detail, for the avoidance of doubt, my primary position—and I find myself curiously on the same ground as the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May)—is that clauses 41 to 45 should not stand part of the Bill. Everything we heard from the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) was designed to hide from us the fact that we are talking about a bilateral treaty that was entered into by the Prime Minister and the United Kingdom less than a year ago, to deal with a specific situation that arose between the United Kingdom and the European Union; and the most controversial part of that treaty—the one dealing with Northern Ireland and the north of Ireland—is the one that this Government are seeking to drive a coach and horses through. That is what we are talking about, and that is what is so wrong.