Humanitarian Crisis: Greece

Debate between Justine Greening and Peter Grant

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

We are taking a constructive, proactive approach within the European Union. We are not part of the Schengen area, but that does not prevent us from clearly setting out our views on a more effective way of dealing with this crisis. Speaking in my capacity as Secretary of State for International Development, I think that one of the most important elements to that response has been to tackle the root cause of what is making people feel that they have no alternative to putting their lives in the hands of the people smugglers. That involves doing a better job of supporting those people in the region, closer to home and closer to their families.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

We certainly welcome the financial commitments that the UK Government have announced and are already providing. I echo the calls for the rest of the international community to match those commitments, but the fact is that no amount of money will ever provide enough schools, hospitals and homes to enable the 4 million-plus refugees to settle permanently in the small number of countries that the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) mentioned earlier, given that those countries are already looking after millions of refugees.

Information from Eurostat shows that, relative to the population of each country, Greece receives twice as many asylum applications as the United Kingdom, while Italy receives two and half times the number and the EU as a whole receives five times the number. Some countries, such as Hungary and Sweden, received 30 times as many asylum applications as the United Kingdom does. Does the Secretary of State agree that those figures destroy once and for all the myth that the refugee camps are full of people whose chosen destination is the United Kingdom?

[Justine Greening]

On the hon. Gentleman’s first point, we have an ambition to get every Syrian child who is missing school because of this crisis back into school by the end of the forthcoming academic year. One of the key outcomes of the London conference on Syria was to get the funding for those plans. We know that we can achieve this because we have already helped half the children to get back into school. We now need to finish the job. More broadly, he talked about the intentions of refugees arriving in the EU. The reality is that there are large Syrian diasporas in Germany and Sweden, and many of the people arriving on the shores of Greece might want to join their families in those countries. In the end, however, we need a more co-ordinated approach that recognises that countries such as the UK are not in the Schengen area and that we want to take our own decisions. There is no getting away from the fact that as a last resort people are putting themselves in the hands of people smugglers, but their first choice is almost always to stay in the region. Following the Syria conference in London, we need more action taken internationally to deliver on that.