Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Jerome Mayhew Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

I will start by looking at the foundation and principles of the Bill. It is worth remembering that it tries to do what our constituents want us to do. That is not a bad start for any Bill on Second Reading. I knock on doors week in, week out, and I have spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of my constituents over the past few years. Without question, the single most common issue raised in those conversations is illegal migration, so we in this place owe them an absolute duty to do our very best to deliver on their wishes to produce an effective control on migration and illegal migration. That is what this Bill intends to do: to provide an effective deterrent that breaks the business model and that will lead to stopping the boats. However, it will not do so by itself. This is not an isolated policy; it is part of a whole suite of policies that this Government, to their enormous credit, have introduced over the past years and that are already bearing fruit. We have seen this year crossings by small boats down by a third—I think it is slightly over a third—at a time when they are going up by a third in Europe as a whole and up by 80% in the Mediterranean countries.

Therefore, the schemes that the Government have already implemented are working. They include bilateral agreements with countries such as Albania, a dedication of a safe country status, which is not novel to this Bill. That has had an immediate deterrent effect. It is not that everyone who comes to this country has then been immediately deported to Albania—that has not been the deterrent effect. It is the fact that people know that they will be deported that they have stopped coming in the first place. Crossings by Albanians have dropped by more than 90%. That is why Rwanda is so important. It is not that the capacity of Rwanda has to accept every single migrant who currently comes across the channel; it is the deterrent effect to stop them coming in the first place. We have seen it work, so why not follow the evidence?

We also have the upstream destruction of equipment. As I understand it, just last week there was a Bulgarian seizure of boats, engines and engine parts, preventing the ability of people to cross the channel. There is also increased co-operation with France, which I wholeheartedly welcome, as it has led to increased patrols and increased interdiction of attempts to cross the channel—although not all of them. There has been a 70% increase of raids on illegal employment in this country, and an enormous increase, which I very much welcome, in the number of claims handlers to speed up the process of assessment, bringing down the backlog from 90,000 to below 20,000 now.

The Rwanda Bill is important, but it is just one tool of many. Let us be clear about what the real dispute is in this Chamber today. It is not about the intentions of those on the Government Benches, as we are united in wanting an effective policy for Rwanda. Where the real dispute is—[Interruption.] Yes, every single Member on the Government Benches are entirely united in that objective; it is how we get there that we are debating.

While we want an effective deterrent, those on the Opposition Benches do not. Labour and the Liberal Democrats do not want an effective deterrent. They want to scrap it. Even if the Rwanda policy is demonstrated to be working, they have committed to replacing it. We want flights to take off to Rwanda, as do our constituents. Opposition Members want to prevent them. We want to restore control over our asylum processes, but Labour and the Liberal Democrats say that the only policy is to hire more staff—“Hire another 100,000; have safe and legal routes.” That is important, I accept, but it does not answer the question of how many people come over in the safe and legal routes.

We can have a process that welcomes everyone, but the UN tells us that there are 108 million people in the world at the moment who have been displaced by violence from their own country. Safe and legal routes is a great cliché, a great strap line, but it does not solve the problem of control of our borders.

This Bill responds to the Supreme Court judgment. It does not say that black is white. It does not say that the risk of refoulement then was a false decision by the Lords. The Bill solves the problem by an international treaty, preventing refoulement, and that, in the rare occasions where Rwanda may wish to export people to a third country, they come back to the UK. That is sensible. That is not going against the Supreme Court; it is respecting its judgment and solving the problems that the Supreme Court judges raised in their judgment, and I wholeheartedly support this Second Reading.