Lindsay Hoyle
Main Page: Lindsay Hoyle (Speaker - Chorley)Department Debates - View all Lindsay Hoyle's debates with the Home Office
(1 year, 12 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Let us start the first urgent question—[Interruption.] Sir John, what are you doing? [Interruption.] Well, why didn’t you go out the other way? Give him a job on that Front Bench! I call the shadow Home Secretary.
Robert Jenrick
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the productive and constructive conversations that we have had. It is absolutely essential that the Home Office and partners such as Serco treat local authorities and Members of Parliament with respect and engage with them productively. Since my arrival in the Department, I have set in place protocols so that all Members of Parliament and local authorities will be notified in good time before hotel and other accommodation is procured, and so that we move to a better procedure, whereby there is effective and constructive engagement in the days prior to taking the accommodation.
It is worth saying, however, that those are the symptoms of the problem. The core of the issue is the fact that 40,000 people have chosen to cross the channel this year alone and that places immense strain on our system. That is what we need to tackle, that is what Government Members are committed to doing and that is what the Opposition refuse to address.
Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)
The £120 million totally wasted on the Rwanda plan could have quadrupled the number of caseworkers and cleared the backlog in asylum cases urgently. Can we have a Department focused on the nuts and bolts of getting the job done, instead of crazy, brutal and counterproductive headline-chasing policies? After all, that is the root of all our problems—that and the lack of safe and legal routes. A number of months ago, I tabled a written question asking for a list of all the safe and legal routes and it would not even have filled half a page. So can we do something about that?
The revelations in ITV’s “The Crossing”, a documentary about 27 channel deaths last November, were utterly heartbreaking and horrifying. Did the Home Secretary discuss with her counterparts how best to ensure that disputes about precisely where a boat is play a distant second fiddle to saving people’s lives?
May I end by saying how disappointed I am? The Minister distanced himself from the Home Secretary’s crass comments on migrants, but today we have heard him talk about murderers and foreign offenders. We are talking about asylum seekers, and he brings up murderers as if they are one and the same thing. It is an absolute disgrace, because he knows the impact that that has on not just asylum seekers but all migrants.