Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Stephen Kinnock

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

Here we go again: another day, another Bill designed to chase headlines and manufacture controversy, rather than tackle the asylum crisis that has been caused by the incompetence and indifference of the last 13 years. That said, a casual observer of the Prime Minister’s recent trip to Dover could be forgiven for thinking that it was all sorted—job done. There he was sporting his super-sized new boots and boasting about the slight decrease in crossings, while apparently failing to realise that strong winds in the channel were the actual cause of his somewhat premature celebrations. Since he danced his victory jig in Dover, we have seen channel crossings skyrocket, with the busiest June yet for the criminal people smuggling trade, with 3,824 asylum seekers making the dangerous journey last month. Call me old-fashioned, but an asylum strategy that is based on the weather is probably not a sustainable strategy.

Then we have the Home Secretary. She jetted off to Rwanda on a taxpayer-funded vanity photoshoot to champion the new housing being built for the asylum seekers she dreams of one day flying over there. But again, all was not as it seemed: the housing estate she was showcasing is largely due to be used to house Rwandan nationals. Last week, the Court of Appeal reminded her that, even if her plan does go ahead, the Rwandan authorities can process only around 100 asylum claims per year—less than 0.3% of last year’s small boat crossers. I am not sure what the Home Secretary plans to do with the other 99.7% of asylum seekers or, indeed, why she thinks a 0.3% chance of removal to Rwanda is likely to put off a single asylum seeker considering paying money to a people smuggler. For a deterrent to be effective, it must be credible, and a 0.3% risk of deportation to Rwanda is not going to deter.

[Sir John Hayes]

I know that the hon. Gentleman takes these matters very seriously and he will remember that I was very complimentary about him in various ways in a debate in Westminster Hall. However, he must recognise that the deterrent effect of being processed offshore, which the Australians experienced during their Operation Sovereign Borders, would mean fewer people coming here. As he described, the people traffickers’ branding is that, if someone gets to Britain, they will never leave. By challenging that sales pitch, we will deter people from coming.

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I think he misunderstands the basic psychology here. We are talking about people who have already risked life and limb and taken a very dangerous journey to get as far as the channel. The idea that a 0.3% chance of being removed to Rwanda is going to deter people who have already taken such massive risks is simply for the birds, and that is why the Rwanda scheme is fundamentally flawed.

Last but not least, we have the Immigration Minister, whose latest foray into playing the tough guy was to order that Mickey Mouse cartoons in immigration centres be painted over because they were just too cheery for his liking. Many of those children are running away from unimaginable horrors, so I really do hope that the Minister will take some time to reflect on the morality of his actions. The sheer pettiness and petulance are also quite astonishing, because painting over Disney characters in immigration centres will not stop the boats—I cannot believe I even need to say those words. Those three short stories about the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister make it clear that we are not exactly dealing with a well-oiled machine here.

Last week, we finally received the Home Office’s impact assessment for this legislation, which revealed that it will cost the Government £169,000 per asylum seeker sent to Rwanda—five times the figure being briefed out when the partnership was announced last year. That is on top of the £140 million that has already been handed over to the Rwandan Government for what must surely be the most expensive press release in history. This whole sorry tale is a shambolic farce, and the cost to the taxpayer of the Rwanda policy, this legislation and the asylum backlog has become utterly extortionate.

The cost of the asylum system is estimated by the National Audit Office to be seven times as large as it was under the last Labour Government—at an astonishing £3.6 billion. Almost 50,000 people are stuck in hotels, at £7 million a day, with 172,000 in the backlog. For the avoidance of doubt, that is the real backlog, not the imaginary “legacy cases” invented by the Prime Minister as a way of spinning the numbers. In fact, the backlog is nine times higher than it was when Labour left office in 2010. By the way, we are still waiting for the Immigration Minister and the Prime Minister to correct the record on this point after the UK Statistics Authority comprehensively demolished their claims.

As the Home Secretary and her officials have confirmed, numbers are going up, not down. Yesterday, the permanent secretary to the Home Office confirmed to the Public Accounts Committee that the Prime Minister is failing in his pledge to reduce asylum seeker hotel use. To make matters worse, the National Audit Office has declared that the Government will also fail to achieve their aim of clearing the so-called legacy backlog of 92,000 cases by the end of this year.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Stephen Kinnock

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

Thank you for your wise counsel, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I have already pointed to the work and refugee convention amendments, but we also need to address differential treatment. Lords amendments 6D, 6E and 6F provide that a person can be a tier 1 refugee if they have travelled briefly through countries on their way to the UK, as somebody from Kabul or Kyiv would have to, or if they have delayed presenting themselves to the authorities for a good reason. They would also require compliance with the refugee convention and state that family unity must be taken into account. The Government should get behind the amendments. What in them can there possibly be to disagree with?

The channel crossings have been taken out of the Home Secretary’s hands and handed to the Ministry of Defence and the Royal Navy. The Ukrainian refugee scheme has been handed over to the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. This Sunday, the former director general of borders and immigration called for a new immigration Department to remove responsibility from the Home Office. With her Department now effectively in special measures, will the Home Secretary not just for once do the right thing and accept the amendments today, so that we can begin to repair some of the damage done by this deeply counterproductive legislation?

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I will not delay the House unduly; my colleagues would not want me to. I just want to make two points. The first is that the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) is right: these matters should have been addressed earlier, by successive Governments—including Labour Governments, by the way. Our immigration policy has not been planned strategically, as it might have been. The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point.

The hon. Gentleman also said that the system needs to be efficient. I spoke about Edmund Burke on Second Reading; he said that the test of civil society and the policy that relates to it was justice, and that when a policy ceased to be just it was barely a policy at all. For a policy to be just, it has to be ordered, efficient and consistent. Immigration policy has struggled with order, efficiency and consistency for a very long time. On that, the hon. Gentleman was also right.

However, the hon. Gentleman is fundamentally wrong about the amendments for the following reasons. First, the Lords seem unwilling to grasp a nettle that, as he described, previous Governments have also failed the grasp. That nettle is sorting out and amending a broken system to ensure that we can continue to give safe refuge to people in desperate need, and that the system cannot be routinely and persistently gamed—by people traffickers and, actually, by economic migrants pretending to be asylum seekers. That is the fact, and we have to face it and reform the system so that we can differentiate between the two. The Government are trying to do that. It is not an easy process, but the Lords seem to me to misunderstand the Government’s intention, which is to create a consistent, ordered and effective system.

In specific terms, the amendment pertaining to the Refugee Council is unnecessary because part 2 of the Bill is already in line with the Refugee Council. I am amazed to hear the hon. Gentleman say that asylum seekers should be allowed to work. What sort of signal does that send out to legitimate migrants who have come to this country seeking to perform a role in our economy to serve this country? What sort of signal does it send out to indigenous Britons—of all types and races, by the way—who are unemployed and seeking a job, when they are told they must compete with people arriving in the country as asylum seekers? That seems to be a nonsense, yet that is what the Lords amendment suggests.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Stephen Kinnock

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The whole thing smacks of a kind of bureaucratic trickery whereby every option is blocked off by some additional piece of bureaucracy. The Bill should have been an opportunity to unlock some of that, but instead it leaves us in stalemate.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Appositely to the remarks of the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) about where people claim asylum and how it is processed, the Bill will allow a claim to be processed elsewhere before people get here. Based on what the hon. Gentleman says, that will be a positive move, will it not? It will also mean that people who are travelling through safe countries where they could claim asylum can do so there and have their claim processed there.

[Stephen Kinnock]

I think that the right hon. Gentleman is referring to offshoring, but as we have seen, offshoring does not work: it is costing millions and millions in Australia and every expert is panning the idea. If I have understood his intervention correctly, I am afraid that it is simply a non-starter.

The Opposition support Lords amendment 6, which removes the Government’s attempt to introduce differential treatment of refugees based on method of arrival. For instance, if a Ukrainian citizen were to flee and travel here across Europe while waiting for a Government visa office to open or a safe route to be provided, clause 11 would make them a second-class refugee. To be a first-tier refugee, they would have to have taken an aeroplane directly from Ukraine. That absurd technicality shows just how unjust the proposal is.

National Security and Investment Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Stephen Kinnock

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 17th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

It is such a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), and I genuinely hope that your naughty finger will not be pointing towards me at any point in my remarks, Madam Deputy Speaker.

We on the Opposition Benches will not oppose the Bill, because it is a step in the right direction. It is good to see the Government finally recognising the need to put national security at the heart of how we deal with foreign investment. However, the Bill fails to address the broader issue of how takeovers and acquisitions should be regulated to promote our broader national and economic interests and, indeed, the interests of British workers and their families across the length and breadth of our country. In that sense, it draws a false distinction between national security and economic security, because it is absolutely clear that the two are intrinsically linked.

In order to properly reflect on the effectiveness of this legislation, we therefore need to go back to first principles and ask ourselves this single basic question: what is the economy actually for? It is only by reaching consensus on that fundamental point that we shall be in a position to assess the extent to which the Bill will make a positive contribution to the lives and livelihoods of our constituents.

The British economy is unbalanced, it is unstable and it is therefore profoundly lacking in resilience. It is too reliant on the financial services sector at the expense of manufacturing—our manufacturing sector has collapsed since the 1970s from 30% of GDP then to just 9% now. It is too London-centric, thus failing to harness the talents of so many people from other areas of our country; it is too inward-looking, with persistent trade deficits; it is too unequal, pushing the proceeds of growth to the wealthiest 1%, and it is too short-sighted, constantly aiming for the fast buck rather than long-term, sustainable prosperity driven by patient capital.

Every piece of legislation that is brought forward by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy should be relentlessly focused on fixing those faulty foundations of our economy—those fundamental weaknesses—and every step that the Business Secretary takes should be a step towards an active industrial strategy that is designed to drive a modern manufacturing renaissance. He should be focused on home-grown industry, home-grown investment and home-grown technology. Those critical steps will help to build that sense of purpose and resilience into the UK economy that we are so desperately missing.

The culture of the UK’s corporations is also in urgent need of change. The prevailing business strategies are driven by short-termism, with the delivery of fast buck profits to shareholders taking precedence over all other considerations. Addressing that will require a new deal between shareholders, companies and their workforces, and between the public and private sectors. Far too many of the corporations listed in the FTSE 500 are characterised by a transactional, rootless form of ownership, which militates against the investment in R&D, innovation, skills development, new technology, plant and machinery that is desperately needed if we are to put our economy on to a more balanced and sustainable footing.

The Government’s laissez-faire approach makes a major contribution to this short-termist culture, because it opens the door to acquisitions by foreign companies, resulting in the UK’s having by far the highest number of successful hostile takeover bids of any advanced economy in the world. Time after time since 2010 we have seen our strategic national assets being flogged off to the highest bidder. Let us just look at the case of Arm, a jewel in the crown of the British tech industry, which is in the process of being sold to Nvidia, or Cadbury’s, an iconic British brand, sold to Kraft without any proper consideration of what that would mean for the long-term sustainability of the business.

Moreover, our sovereign capability is profoundly undermined by the fact that much of our critical infrastructure is not in our own hands. In fact, 57 of our critical national infrastructure supply chains depend on China, from our energy suppliers to our airports, our pharmaceuticals and our personal protective equipment. The repercussions of that overexposure have been felt during the pandemic. Our lack of capacity to produce PPE has cost the UK taxpayer an eye-watering amount of money; a breaking story today shows that a Spanish businessman has pocketed £21 million of British taxpayers’ money simply for acting as a broker between the Government and overseas suppliers—a potent symbol of systemic failure.

Let me be clear that many of these so-called private takeovers and infrastructure investments are carried out by companies and investment vehicles that are a front for authoritarian state actors who have wider political and national security agendas and whose values are at odds with our commitment to democracy, liberty and the rule of law.

The crucial point here is that our values should not be for sale.

The most obvious and pressing case, of course, is the Chinese Government, who are relentlessly expanding their influence economically, politically and militarily. We need only recall the case of Imagination Technologies, which was recently the target of a hostile takeover attempt by an investment vehicle with direct links to the Chinese state. Of course, there are also substantial Chinese stakes in Hinkley Point and other sizeable chunks of our critical national infrastructure.

Successive Conservative Governments since 2010 have been naive and complacent in their approach to China, exemplified by David Cameron and George Osborne’s disastrous “golden era” strategy. It is time for this Government, this House and, indeed, the entire country to wake up to the reality of these matters and to come to the realisation that, while we must always seek constructive engagement with China, we must take a clear-sighted, hard-headed approach to defending our national interest and our sovereign capability.

I also take this opportunity to raise another more specific way in which the Government’s lethargic tendencies have proved costly to British business and weakened the economy as a result. The Government have been naive about the deliberate attempts to weaken UK businesses through market distortion by the undermining of competition laws. The most obvious example of that is the deliberate over-production of steel way beyond global demand and the subsequent illegal dumping of that steel on European markets.

The result of those illegal uncompetitive practices combined with Conservative inertia has been the weakening of UK steel companies and the opportunity for foreign investors, many of whom come from countries that are the origin of the dumping in the first place, to buy up our strategically and nationally important asset. Some 80% of China’s steel industry is state owned, and the key point is that the illegal dumping of products from those state-owned industries into European markets is an example of the practices that are undermining the international rules-based order.

That in turn has a damaging and direct impact on our industrial base and on our communities and their families—the workforces that are directly impacted. It is a perfect example of how the global is truly local. We need a level playing field, and this legislation should be about—this is everything that the BEIS Department should be about—developing that level playing field so that our workforce is not competing with one hand tied behind its back against a system that is rigged against it from the word go.

This Bill is a big missed opportunity to strengthen the UK’s wider industrial strategy and for the Government to show that they are committed to building an economy of purpose and resilience. Moreover, it fails to reflect the impact of coronavirus on UK businesses and the increased vulnerability in the face of vulture capitalists and state-backed actors that are waiting to pounce. This legislation only really seeks to protect the UK’s national security and appears to do little to support the UK’s wider national interest, such as the need to protect jobs and support communities in this time of national emergency.

Focusing on the all-too-narrow scope of the Bill, I also have genuine concerns about the process for arriving at a decision on whether to block a takeover. Currently, the plan is that the process sits firmly within BEIS. That is an issue, first, because such a decision would have huge cross-departmental impact, so it would surely be better to create a multi-agency taskforce to rule on key decisions. Such a taskforce would include the Treasury, the Home Office, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the intelligence and security services, and the Ministry of Defence. It could follow a similar model to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. All the signs were that BEIS was a cheerleader for the Huawei deal, when it was clearly against our national interest to go ahead with that deal. That does not augur well for its ability to police the effective implementation of the Bill.

Secondly, handing all the decision-making power to the Business Secretary could lead to problems further down the line, should a future incumbent—I am in no way implying that such a fate would befall the current Business Secretary—be influenced by political or commercial interests in this country or overseas.

[Sir John Hayes]

I had not intended to intervene again in the debate, except that I want to emphasise, and perhaps amplify, the point that the hon. Gentleman has just made. The legislation brings us into line with other Five Eyes players—the intelligence community with which we work directly—but he is right to say that the mechanisms that they use are different, in some cases, from the ones employed in the Bill in exactly the way he describes. Will the Minister look at those mechanisms and see what more we can learn from them as the Bill is improved during its passage through the House?