Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Lia Nici and James Daly

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, having been a solicitor for nearly 20 years. Every lawyer I met during those 20 years of my working life disagreed with every other lawyer on the issue in front of them. I can guarantee that a lawyer’s advice tends to be somewhat in line with their client’s instruction and the ends that their client wants, so Members may want to ponder the source of some of the legal advice that has been mentioned.

I have sat on the Justice Committee for four years, and I also sit on the Home Affairs Committee. I went on a trip to Calais with my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell), who is no longer in his place, and the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. We spoke to people on the beaches, and we saw what some may call France’s functioning asylum and immigration system, but that is not what I witnessed in the slightest.

Calais is effectively a waiting room with no resources, where people are directed to wait for a boat to come to the United Kingdom. We saw that immigrants are housed in tents, and they are treated in the most appalling manner. When the French authorities get fed up with them, they burn down their tents, physically attack them and throw them into the next area or field. The idea that we are an outlier in how we treat immigrants is for the birds.

Too often in this Chamber, as a number of my hon. and right hon. Friends have rightly said, we ignore the concerns of our constituents in order to pontificate about our moral and liberal conscience.

[Lia Nici]

Does my hon. Friend agree that France is supposed to be a safe country and that people have an option when they arrive in France, or in any other EU country, to claim asylum in that first safe country? When they make a decision to come over the channel, they make a decision to be illegal and to be involved with criminal gangs. Nobody is forcing them to do that.

[James Daly]

I agree with my hon. Friend. We have heard some blanket statements about immigration, but one of the curious things I found when speaking to people on the beaches was that the people seeking immigration to this country were all males, all single and all of a certain age. There were virtually no females in any of the places we were taken.

We are escaping both from what our constituents want and from the reality that motivates people. When I was in those camps, people told me, “We are told that the United Kingdom’s streets are paved with gold. When we go there, we are going to be provided with a lot of financial support through benefits and other things.” That is what is motivating the vast majority of these people to come to this country. Listening to Opposition Members, we would think that nobody in the world has that motivation to come here; that everyone is fleeing some type of persecution. That is utter nonsense.

Our constituents expect us, as a Government and as a Parliament, to put in place a suite of measures to address the problem happening in the channel. This Bill, as many of my hon. and right hon. Friends have said, is one of a number of measures being taken by this Government, on which they should be congratulated.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness said, although nobody seemed to pick up the point, the French authorities told us that a deterrent effect and policy—the Rwanda policy—is absolutely necessary. We saw, as did the French authorities, that when the policy was first announced, even though people were potentially coming over the channel, there was a drop in cases. The spike came only when it became clear that, through various legal means, the policy would not be taken forward.

Not only do the French authorities think we need a deterrent, and not only are countries such as Germany, the United States, Italy and Austria all saying that they need some type of policy and they need to follow the UK’s lead, but it is what our constituents want. We cannot have a situation where we cannot house people, where people cannot get a doctor’s appointment and where people cannot afford a house. That may be acceptable to Opposition Members, but we cannot have a situation where we have 10,000 foreign national offenders in our prison system. We have to take measures that reflect the will of the people, not the will of middle-class, liberal consciences. I sometimes feel it is more important for some to moralise than actually be concerned about what motivates their constituents and what we should be doing in this place.

I have heard two objections to the Bill, one of which relates to rule 39 injunctions. I wish to ask the Minister about that, because I agree completely with what my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Sir Geoffrey Cox) said. May I ask the Minister to comment on the Government’s legal advice? I say that because, technically, the Government can ignore rule 39 injunctions; that is what the Bill states, although he may be able to tell me something different. I think that is an important part of the Bill and I would be grateful if he would comment on it.

I respect every contribution made by a Conservative Member, but I cannot believe that anyone thinks—I have certainly not read any legal advice that thinks this—that we should exclude the right of appeal or, in extreme circumstances, the right to challenge whether someone should be taken to a foreign country. There must be such circumstances. Even the star chamber advice says that there must be at least form of allowance in respect of that. The legal test that the Government have put in place, whereby somebody must show “compelling evidence” that they would suffer “serious and irreversible harm”, is a strong one. It will address, both legally and practically, everything that our constituents want us to do.

This is a good policy—one that the Government have worked hard to refine. It is within the bounds of international law and of what this Government have undertaken to the country, which is to tackle illegal migration and stop the boats crossing the channel.

Sentencing Bill

Debate between Lia Nici and James Daly

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

I find the wording of the Bill quite curious. I will limit my remarks to issues relating to suspended sentences under 12 months. The sentencing code is amended to add:

“The court must make a suspended sentence order in relation to the sentence where this section applies unless the court is of the opinion that there are exceptional circumstances”.

As a lawyer, I know that if we had 10,000 lawyers here, they would give us 10,000 different definitions of what “exceptional circumstances” means. But the court can take into account those that

“relate to the offence (or the combination of the offence and one or more offences associated with it) or the offender”—

so, if a court finds a fact about the offender or the offence that falls within the general definition of exceptional circumstances, it can impose an immediate custodial sentence—and

“justify not making the order.”

I hate to break it to colleagues, but that is actually what happens in the courts now; there is very little difference. This is an attempt, rightly or wrongly, to encourage some magistrates in some parts of the country to impose fewer immediate custodial terms.

The Bill will not stop custodial sentences being imposed for offences under 12 months. As I said in my intervention on the Lord Chancellor, it would be utterly bizarre if that were the case. Over 17 years, I represented thousands of people in the criminal courts and the vast majority of cases were drug and shoplifting related. I represented people with 400 or 500 convictions—the full gamut of offending—who never complied with an order in their life and literally had hundreds of failure to comply with court orders. What magistrate in the world is going to think, “I know what we’ll do, we’ll impose a suspended sentence”? If a characteristic of the offender is that they do not carry out the order imposed on them, the magistrate is not going to impose it in the first place.

If there is something particularly abhorrent about an offence—this is why I have some sympathy with what those on the Opposition Front Bench were saying—there will be an immediate custodial term. What I do not like is the debate that we should treat some crimes differently from others. Yes, there is a full range of seriousness in terms of offending, but if we are getting to the point where we are saying that for some you can get an immediate custodial term and for others you cannot, then I think that is nonsense. We have to be realistic.

When we are dealing with people in the criminal justice system, we are dealing with broken, fallible individuals. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) said, we are dealing with people and their lives and motivations, and all the other things that go into making them, at a certain time and point, commit a criminal offence. In this Chamber, we never, ever discuss what, in my opinion, could deter crime: work when children are growing up, a stable upbringing, and a set of values that they can carry with them through their lives, whether through education or parents, of whatever type. That is what matters.

Having a debate and judging whether we as a Parliament are successful on criminal justice by how long we send people to prison is utterly preposterous. What is the point in that? It is like we discuss money in this place: “We’ll send you to prison for 15 years.” “No, let’s go to 16 or 17 years.” That is not the point. The point is to allow our independent judiciary, within the sentencing framework we set down—bearing in mind that none of us will be in that court, none of us will know what motivated the person and none of us will know the circumstances—to make the decision that they want to make.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) made some very telling points. We cannot run away from the fact that this legislation is about prison numbers. However, it is fair to say—I repeat something that has been said—short-term custodial sentences are decreasing. One thing I am proud of is that under this Government longer-term sentences of 10-plus years for the most serious offences are increasing. We are having an impact on the most serious offending.

[Lia Nici]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the issue is that non-custodial sentences are, frankly, often pathetic? They are not inconvenient enough, or do not make such a change for people that they are deterred, without custody, from offending.

[James Daly]

I agree. We cannot have a debate about criminal justice simply on the basis that everyone should be sent to prison; there has to be some form of alternative sentence. My experience over 17 years, however, is that none of it works—little or none of it—because this is about the individual.

I have not met an individual—unless they are suffering from severe mental health problems—who does not know what they need to do with their life to be a better person or to not commit crime, whether that is to stop taking drugs or drinking alcohol, or whatever it is. The vast majority of people who appear in court are not demented fools; they are intelligent, articulate people who are choosing not to make the correct decisions that could put their life on a more even footing. The range of sentencing options, such as a curfew, or all the types of modern technology we talked about, are nonsense. They will not make a blind bit of difference to anyone’s behaviour.

The point I am making is that the criminal justice system is, by its very nature, fallible. It will never be efficient or give us the outcomes that we want. The idea that any MP in this place could set up a structure that will deal fairly with every offender that appears before the courts is absolutely for the birds. My view is that the Bill does not make much difference to the position we are in. It is not something that colleagues should get overly concerned about, because having spent 17 years in front of magistrates, I can tell the House that they will still send people to prison on the basis of this Bill. A few people might well get a chance, with a curfew or something like that, but they will breach it in five minutes and will be sent to prison.

Under the Bill, someone is forgiven for the first breach, but they go to prison for the second breach. Whatever happens, they will go to prison at some point, because most of them breach the order that is imposed in the first place. I support the Bill because I support—