Illegal Immigration

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend for his support. He makes a good point. As I said earlier, the vast majority of European countries already reject almost 100% of claims from asylum seekers from Albania, for example. They are all signatories to the same conventions and treaties as us, so there is no reason why we should not be able to move to exactly the same rejection rate.

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

I express my heartfelt sympathies to the people of Solihull following this week’s terrible disaster.

We all know what today’s announcement is: a sop to the right-wing press. It continues the Prime Minister’s obsession with scapegoating asylum seekers. Fast-tracking applications and weakening modern slavery protections directly undermine Wales’s nation of sanctuary policy, which includes an explicit commitment to prevent people seeking sanctuary from becoming victims of modern slavery. What discussions has he had with the Welsh Government to guarantee that fast-tracking will not frustrate our ambition to be a proper nation of sanctuary?

[The Prime Minister]

We were the first country in the world, thanks to the leadership of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), to pass the Modern Slavery Act 2015, with a dedicated regime that does not exist in that form in basically any other European country. We require our businesses to enforce their supply chains and we have life sentences for people who traffic modern slaves. I am very proud of our record. That record will continue, but we need to ensure our system is not abused and exploited. That is what we will fix with our reforms.