Papers Relating to the Home Secretary

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. There has been a real sense over many years now that the respect for standards in public life from the Government and the Conservative party has been deteriorating and has been undermining standards in our important institutions. The Prime Minister promised us that there would be something different. Instead, what we have is more of the same.

The Cabinet Office has already recognised that the Home Secretary broke sections 2.1 and 2.14 of the ministerial code. There are further serious concerns that she may have broken it a third time and also ignored legal advice that the Home Office was breaking the law. Yesterday morning, her successor and predecessor, now the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said that he had had clear advice—legal and policy advice—about dangerous overcrowding at Manston, about being in breach of the law, and about the need to take emergency measures, which he then took. We have deep concerns about how the Government could have allowed this situation to develop in the first place, why they badly failed to crack down on the criminal gangs that have proliferated in the channel and why they allowed Home Office decision making to collapse, so that only half the number of decisions are being taken each year compared with six years ago and only 4% of last year’s small boat arrivals had their claims determined, so that there is now a huge backlog of cases that has led to overcrowding and the last-minute use of costly hotels in inappropriate locations.

However, there is also a serious question whether the Home Secretary has just made things worse by ignoring legal advice and allowing dangerous overcrowding, leading to even more last-minute inappropriate procurement and running up substantial legal liabilities when she should have an alternative plan to cut the backlog and cut hotel use instead.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Plaid Cymru supports this motion. The context here is the reappointment of the Home Secretary, and the appointment of a Minister without Portfolio despite bullying allegations against him—and all that after one Prime Minister was brought down by scandals and another due to ineptitude. Is it not the problem not just those specific individuals, but the fact that the very systems of accountability here in Westminster are fundamentally unfit for purpose, save for maintaining the thinnest pretence of competency from this Tory Government?

[Yvette Cooper]

The right hon. Lady makes an important point, because the standards in our public life and public institutions have depended on people respecting them and on people across public life believing in them and taking them immensely seriously. That is why it is so corrosive when, bit by bit, they are undermined, and why it is so damaging when a new Prime Minister who promised us he would be so different from his predecessors is simply reinforcing the same problems and the same damaging situation.