Immigration Bill

Debate between Keir Starmer and Stephen Phillips

Monday 25th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer]

I hope that I made it clear that I support the Government’s changed position and recognise how far they have gone; I simply said that it is not enough. I do not think this sets a precedent. We are talking about a particular group. All those in immigration detention are vulnerable in one way or another, but it has long been recognised that pregnant women are a particularly vulnerable group within that group. This amendment speaks only to them, and therefore should be taken in those terms.

Amendment 60 deals with overseas domestic workers. This is a very important matter because it concerns another very vulnerable group, many of whom are abused by the households who employ them and find it very difficult to escape that abuse. When the Bill that became the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was going through this House, the Government, under pressure, commissioned the Ewins report. That report was clear in its conclusion that overseas domestic workers should be able to change employer and to apply for further leave for up to 30 months, and that they should be informed of their rights. The basis of the amendment is to support the Ewins conclusions. The driving theme behind the report in putting forward those proposals is that Ewins said that they are the only practical way out of abuse for this very vulnerable category of workers. There is more to be done on overseas domestic workers, and amendment 60 addresses a very thin slice of the problems they face. However, I urge all Members to support it.

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

For me, as a parent, the decision on whether to support the amendment made to the Bill in the other place on the resettlement of unaccompanied children in Europe reduces itself to simple questions. If I were separated from my children—if they were destitute in a foreign country, cold, hungry and far away from home—what would I want for them? Would I be content for them to be at risk of violence and exploitation, often sexual in nature, or would I want them to be offered safe haven with the desire that they be looked after and reunited with family members in due course? Those questions are, to my mind, rhetorical. They admit of sure and certain answers. I greatly regret that those are not answers that—with the best of motives, I accept—the Government appear to be willing to give.

Let us, for a moment, leave out of the equation what seems to me to be the grave inconsistency between arguing, on one hand, that the country has a role at the heart of the EU, and yet refusing, on the other, to shoulder the burden of the fact that Europol estimates that 10,000 unaccompanied refugee children went missing in Europe last year after they had been registered with the authorities in the countries in which they found themselves. Let us leave out of the equation the fact that the true number of minors subjected to abuse, exploitation and violence is, self-evidently, far higher. Let us even leave out of the equation the fact that, as the former Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out in a national newspaper over the weekend, doctors report that as many as half of unaccompanied African boys in the EU require treatment for sexually transmitted diseases—diseases almost certainly acquired from sexual exploitation during their passage to Europe. Let us also forget about those children we do not know about who have died cold and lonely deaths in Europe or the Mediterranean, driven from their homes and separated from their parents and loved ones, usually through no fault of their own.

Let the House instead reflect on our history in this, the greatest migration challenge in my lifetime, and on how we have behaved in the past. In that respect, the contribution that this country has always made to doing the right thing—to providing a home for children who have been driven from theirs by war and conflict—is unmatched. Exceptional times call for exceptional measures. That was the case with the Kindertransport programme, which benefited those who would undoubtedly have lost their lives in the holocaust had this country not acted in the run-up to the second world war. It was the case with those who fled Uganda after Idi Amin decided to expel them. It was the case with those who fled Vietnam and Iran in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. But now, apparently, either we should not act or we cannot act, using our heads as well as our hearts; to do so would simply encourage more children to make the dangerous journey to Europe. So says the Minister, and I accept that he has a point. That point does not, however, answer the point that these children are already in Europe, and that they are at risk as I stand here and speak to the House.

I do not doubt for a moment the Minister’s desire, and that of the Government, to do the right thing. I do doubt, based on what I have heard in the House this evening, that that is what we are proposing to do. As I have said, these children are already in Europe. They are alone, and far from their families. They are cold, frightened, hungry and frequently without help or access to those who might help or protect them. Their lives are miserable and brutish, and at least half of them have experienced or seen violence that we can only dream of in our nightmares—or, rather, hope that we do not.

Of course, the announcement last week, welcome as it is, that we will take 3,000 children from Syria and elsewhere who have not already made the dangerous journey to Europe was a good one, in the best traditions of recognising the obligations that this country enjoys in times such as the present—obligations that were recognised in January, and to which the announcement adds. That is no comfort to the children who are already in Europe, who have fled war and conflict that have torn their lives apart, and who need our help now. Those children are in Calais; they are on the Greek-Macedonian border; they are at the Gare du Nord in Paris and Midi station in Brussels; and they are sleeping rough in Berlin, Rome, Skopje and Vienna. Tonight they will sleep in fear, and tomorrow they will wake to the hopelessness to which their position exposes them. Today, in this House, we can do something. We cannot solve all their problems, remove all their troubles, or take from their consciousness the memory of the horrors that they have witnessed and endured, but we can do something.

That something is not to disagree with their Lordships on this amendment. That is the something that I can and will do, by joining the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) in the Opposition Lobby this evening. This is not an easy decision, or one that I have taken lightly, but it is the right decision, made of a conviction that I have reached after searching my conscience, as I pray other right hon. and hon. Members will search theirs. The House should support the Lords in their amendment and vote against the motion to disagree.