James Clappison
Main Page: James Clappison (Conservative - Hertsmere)Department Debates - View all James Clappison's debates with the Home Office
(13 years ago)
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Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson)—even on this occasion. He was a decent Home Secretary, but I am afraid that his argument today was indecent in its preposterousness, especially when he tried to claim that the large increase in migration that took place after 1997 was somehow the result of international considerations beyond anybody’s control, and nothing to do with the policy decisions taken by the then Labour Government. I ask the right hon. Gentleman just once in this debate to look at the facts—
Mr Clappison
If the hon. Lady will listen to the facts first, I will give way to her afterwards. If the right hon. Gentleman looks at the facts of net migration and migration as a whole before 1997, he will see that in the month after his Government took office in 1997, net migration stood at 52,000. It had been 70,000 the previous year. In the years that followed, it went up to 74,000, 157,000, 161,000 and 187,000—almost entirely due to the decision of that Labour Government to grant more work permits for workers from outside the European Union, which was a conscious policy decision.
Robert Halfon
I note that my hon. Friend speaks with great expertise on these matters. Does not what he has just said explain why the chief adviser to the Labour party leader, Lord Glasman, said that the Labour party lied to the people about immigration?
Mr Clappison
The facts are facts: we can see what the deliberate policy decisions were, and the motives behind them may come to light in due course.
As for what took place after that period when net migration exploded up to 233,000, we have to look at what happened when the accession countries joined the European Union in 2005 when the then Labour Government estimated the number of workers who had come from within the European Union at about 13,000 a year. We know that that was completely wrong. While we saw the huge increase in the number of workers coming to this country from within the EU, the Labour Government—and this is particularly reprehensible—continued giving just as many work permits to workers from outside the EU.
Mr Clappison
If the hon. Lady wants to say that any of those facts are wrong, I will give way to her.
Angela Smith
There was an increase in migration in the late ’90s, due partly to a major conflict in the Balkans, which was made necessary because of the appeasement delivered to Slobodan Milosevic by the previous Tory Government. They bear responsibility for that migration as well.
Mr Clappison
I am sorry to tell the hon. Lady this, but at the time of the Balkans conflict, net migration was negative. The policy decisions to increase the number of work permits to workers from outside the European Union are crucial; there is a close correlation. Those are the facts.
Matthew Hancock
I am listening carefully to my hon. Friend’s speech. Does he agree that nobody will believe a single word from Labour Members until they apologise for the mess they made?
Mr Clappison
Yes.
Coming back to this motion, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) has thrown everything but the kitchen sink into this debate. I am afraid that she and her party have failed to produce a single fact or any evidence in support of the motion. They have not even bothered to wait for the evidence of the Home Affairs Committee or for any of the three inquiries that the Home Secretary has rightly put in place, including the one by John Vine, who is the chief inspector and an appointee of the previous Government.
In trying to throw the kitchen sink into the motion, the right hon. Lady even mentioned the 100,000 legacy figure. She asked who was responsible for how the 100,000 people under the legacy exercise have been dealt with. She need not have looked much further than the person sitting next to her—the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne)—because the former Immigration Minister was partly responsible for the legacy exercise. The question she really needs to ask is how she thinks the 500,000 cases arose before 2006, which had to be dealt with in the legacy exercise. Asylum cases had not been properly dealt with. Some of the people involved had waited for many years and some had been refused permission to remain in the country. Now, however, the right hon. Lady is trying to blame the Government for that. She made some comment about 2006 being a starting point, but who had been in power before 2006? She need look no further this time than the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), who has been in his place for this debate. He was the Home Secretary who put the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 in place. Against that background, how did we reach a position whereby 500,000 people’s cases were lingering, mouldering, waiting to be dealt with and had to be the subject of a legacy exercise in 2006?
Mr Clappison
Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will speak in this debate, so I will get a chance to intervene on him. He can explain how each of two previous asylum exercises came to admit more and more people irregularly.
Mr Clappison
I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman if he will tell me what a success that was.
Mr Straw
As was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), the problems involving asylum backlogs date back until at least the early 1990s, when the Berlin wall came down. I do not think that we are assisted by the trading of histories—what matters is today—but if the hon. Gentleman wants to do that, let me add that a computer system introduced by Lord Howard, which we were promised would become operational in November 1998, failed to operate at all. That was the mother and father of the backlog then, and it still is.
Mr Clappison
I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will allow me an equally long intervention when he makes his own speech.
I happened to be a member of a Committee that the right hon. Gentleman addressed, as Home Secretary, in 1999. I will stand corrected if I am wrong, but I recall that he said, “There is no greater challenge to the Labour Government than to put in place an asylum system which works.” We can see what happened after that.
The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford overlooked another problem that occurred in 2006: the terrible problem of prisoners who were not deported. A thousand prisoners were not even considered for deportation. It was not just a question of people being allowed into the country; people were allowed into the country, committed offences, and then were not considered for deportation. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary on having established a system which now ensures that criminals who commit offences are considered for deportation; and, as will be acknowledged by the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), his Committee’s report congratulated her on that as well.
I shall wait for the evidence and the facts to be produced. What I am clear about, however, is that the present Government have a policy intention of reducing migration to proper levels, of establishing a proper system enabling the right migrants to be chosen to come to this country, and of not allowing the unrestricted immigration that we have seen in the past. Furthermore, they are tackling the long-standing problems of asylum, and are introducing systems to bring about the deportation of foreign prisoners that is so important to my constituents.
I believe that the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford is a person of high intellect and high ability who puts the case as well as she can, and she did that today. I am afraid, however, that she completely failed to establish any facts or evidence in support of the motion. What she did demonstrate beyond peradventure was that, however great her intellect—and it is great—she has an even greater brass neck, in view of the record of the last Labour Government.