Nationality and Borders Bill

Kim Leadbeater Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

The hon. Gentleman has clearly not been paying attention. I set out Labour’s plan last week. I have just told him about the returns agreement and giving more resources to caseworkers and decision makers. If he would care to listen to the rest of my speech, he may not need to make another meaningless intervention.

Fourthly, in respect of the Government failures that I touched on earlier, the Bill is emblematic of the Home Secretary’s tendency to make the challenges of our asylum seeker system even harder to overcome. She claims that the Rwanda offloading plan will solve the challenges that our immigration system faces, but her Minister for Refugees dismissed the plan as impossible just a week before the announcement, saying:

“If it’s happening in the Home Office, on the same corridor that I’m in, they haven’t told me about it…I’m having difficulty enough getting them from Ukraine to our country. There’s no possibility of sending them to Rwanda.”

Up and down the country, the British people are counting the cost of this Government—£4 billion of failed or overrunning defence contracts under this Prime Minister since 2019 alone; £16 billion of covid fraud; and a £7-a-year increase on energy bills without any meaningful support whatsoever—and now British taxpayers are told that they have to foot the bill for this pie-in-the-sky Rwanda plan, which will cost at least three times the amount we currently spend on asylum seekers, and possibly even 10 times more.

[Kim Leadbeater (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the proposal to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda is not only extremely expensive but almost certainly ineffective? It is also inhumane. The evidence from Australia shows that offshore detention often has a massive impact on the mental health of people who are already vulnerable, and can lead to self-harm and suicide if no adequate support services are available. How can we, as a fair-minded and generous nation, stoop to this?

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As we know, the Australia scheme ended up costing approximately £1 million per person. The Israel scheme on which the Rwanda scheme is based failed completely, with just about every single person who was sent to Rwanda leaving the country within days and many of them trying to come back to the place from which they were sent. It is an absolute farce.