Rwanda Plan Cost and Asylum System
Debate between Luke Evans and Alison Thewliss
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
I would like to put on the record yet again that the SNP wholeheartedly opposes the principle of the Rwanda plan, of offshoring people as if they were some kind of tiresome trash that the UK does not want to deal with—a plan that amounts simply to state-sponsored people trafficking. It is not just about the money, as Labour set out in its motion today, as egregious and obscene a waste of money as this is; it is about how we treat our fellow human beings. These are people who have experienced torture, have seen their families murdered and are running from horrors that we are fortunate never to have known. They deserve much better than being yeeted to Rwanda, a country that the Supreme Court has found is both unsafe and without the administrative capacity to take on the sensitive role the UK Government are putting on it.
According to the latest UNHCR data, the majority of those who flee—69%—stay in neighbouring countries. Low and middle-income countries host 75% of the world’s refugees and other people in need of international protection. Those who do make it to our shores more often than not already have ties to the UK—of family, language or the long legacy of war and empire. UK Ministers often make the wild assertion that the 110 million displaced people around the world are somehow all making their way to Dover and that the Rwanda plan is some kind of deterrent. That is not an assertion based in reality.
Alison Thewliss
I would like to make some progress because, as Mr Deputy Speaker said, we are quite short of time.
To take Afghanistan as example, 6 million Afghans have been classed by UNHCR as refugees, of whom 91% have stayed in neighbouring countries, with 3.5 million in Iran and just over 2 million in Pakistan. There are 239,600 in Germany, 71,200 in France and just 12,200 in the UK—a mere 0.2% of the total.
Alison Thewliss
I have just made the point that, of those 110 million people, a very tiny proportion actually come here. I also point out to the hon. Member that putting a specific numbered cap on things has not worked either. I remember the Government saying they were going to get net migration down to the tens of thousands, and that has not worked out. So numbers are not worth speaking about in this debate in the way he thinks they are. That is a spurious argument and he should learn to look much harder at the issue, rather than putting a very basic interpretation on it.
The hon. Gentleman ought to know that Afghans have consistently made up a very high proportion of the people coming across the channel in small boats. As I have pointed out repeatedly in this place to various Ministers at various times, that is a sign of the failure of the supposed safe and legal routes they have set up. For every Afghan who has arrived on a resettlement scheme, around 90 have arrived by small boat. Just imagine if the UK Government schemes were not so riddled with incompetence. No Afghan would need to risk setting foot on a dinghy, and no one would need to sell everything they own, be exploited, beg, borrow and steal, and be bonded in debt to people smugglers if the Government had schemes that worked.
It bears repeating that the only way for people to claim asylum is to get themselves to the UK. They cannot claim in an embassy overseas, and airlines and ferries will not board them if they do not have the requisite visa to get here. Small boats are very much a last resort, not an easy option, and their use has increased as the routes via lorries and other means have become more difficult.
Ministers talk about the expense of the asylum system, but that has come about largely as a result of their own incompetent administration. They have downgraded roles in asylum casework and created a work culture so toxic that employees do not stay, with a lack of expertise and unmanageable caseloads. The issues with the backlog are entirely of their own making, and they deserve no brownie points at all for attempting to fix what they broke. We know that the Home Office’s new asylum backlog stands just shy of 100,000 people who still require to have their cases processed. I see those folk at my surgeries every week, and they certainly do not perceive much of an improvement from the Home Office, despite the Minister’s spin.
Ministers appear to have massaged the figures to make the legacy backlog reduce from 92,000 to just under 5,000, but a cynic might wonder why around a third of those backlog cases are not actually decisions made, but withdrawals. Free Movement has said:
“The heavy use of withdrawals to reduce the number of pending applications does make it look as though the backlog clearance was an exercise in number management more than anything else.”
Ministers cannot tell us where those 30,000 people are within the system, and it is also worth noting that the first-tier immigration tribunal has seen a 20% increase in outstanding appeals, which now stand at 31,000.
I also note the further cost to other parts of the immigration system due to the political focus on dealing with the backlog. For example, I have heard increasing instances of international student visas not being processed in time for the start of term, with people having to defer their studies because they have missed so much of their course that they cannot turn up and study as they had planned to.
For those who recall my mention in the previous debate of a Sudanese constituent whose wife has been shot in the leg while waiting a year and a half for a family reunion application, I wrote to the Home Secretary on the subject and finally received a letter from a civil servant saying there are
“considerable delays in family reunion decision making at this time”
and that
“applications are being considered outside of the 60 working day service standard”.
In fact, 60 working days would have been quite good for that woman, because had her application been processed in time at the time, she would have been out of Sudan before the current conflict broke out. Now she waits in a very unsafe situation for a Minister to make progress on this matter. How long must she and others wait?
The former Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), even admitted on TV in August that processing asylum claims quickly
“just encourages more people to come”.
Of course he has never presented evidence to back up that assertion. If delays of several years are a feature, not a bug, Home Office Ministers are on shaky ground when they girn about the cost of keeping asylum seekers in hotels. They have set the system up to work in this way.
Quite aside from the eye-watering £8 million a day—over £3 billion a year—that it costs to house asylum seekers in inadequate hotel accommodation, there is a human cost to keeping people in limbo. The asylum seekers I listen to want to be able to work, contribute and rebuild their lives. They are skilled and talented people with a lot to give to their communities, and they are grateful for the opportunity, but as long as they are kept out of the labour market and prevented from working, they lose their skills and confidence, and their mental health deteriorates. I have seen far too many people at my advice surgeries who cannot understand a system that treats them with such disdain.
A recent Scottish Government paper draws on analysis from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, which suggests that granting people who are seeking asylum in Scotland the right to work would add £30 million per year on average to the Scottish economy if it were granted immediately on arrival, or £16 million per year if it were granted after a six-month waiting period—tax revenues increase and support costs are reduced. Only a Government so wedded to a toxic ideology would refuse to accept such a logical position.
It is stranger still that that persists because, as we in this place know, all policies come through the Treasury. The Prime Minister himself apparently voiced concerns regarding the cost of the Rwanda policy during his time as Chancellor. It was reported that he wished
“to pursue smaller volumes initially, 500 instead of 1,500”
in the first year of the scheme, and
“3,000 instead of 5,000 in years two and three”.
The papers, seen by the BBC, also suggested that he was
“reluctant to fund so-called ‘Greek-style reception centres’, sites where migrants could be housed, rather than being put up in hotels which were said to be costing £3.5m a day at that point, the documents suggest. They say, the ‘Chancellor is refusing to fund any non-detained accommodation, eg Greek-style reception centres, because hotels are cheaper’.”
We can see that clearly from the example of the Bibby Stockholm, which, at over £22 million, is more expensive per night than putting people in hotels. Neither the Minister for Legal Migration and the Border, the hon. Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), nor the director general for migration and borders at the Home Office could vouch for the value for money of the vessel or provide comparative figures when they came to the Home Affairs Committee in December. The private companies that provide such accommodation—Mears, Serco, Clearsprings, Corporate Travel Management and the rest—are raking it in. Misery is lucrative.
Home Office Ministers often talk up the nebulous concept of deterrence, but oddly enough, they provide little evidence to back it up. We know from those papers seen by the BBC that the then Chancellor did not believe that the deterrent would work, but now that he is Prime Minister, he will chuck any amount of money into the same vague concept. The Minister for Countering Illegal Migration, the hon. and learned Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson), said that the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill was the toughest Bill ever—well, since the last one, and the one before that, neither of which have worked, and some of which has not been implemented.
Free Movement has published a useful graph indicating that the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and Illegal Migration Act 2023 have not had any deterrent effect on the figures. There is no evidence to suggest that the new Rwanda legislation will be any different. No wonder the Home Secretary is reported to have called it “batshit”. It will not even work; we know that because the Home Office has earmarked at least £700 million to manage small boats until 2030, which it would not do if it expected the boats to stop coming—it is ludicrous.
As well as being illegal and immoral, the Rwanda scheme is eye-wateringly expensive. The UK Government’s own figures suggest that removing each individual to Rwanda would cost £63,000 more than keeping them in the UK. If the Government were to send every asylum seeker who arrived last year, it would cost £7.7 billion. Do Conservative Members truly believe that that is a price worth paying, particularly when people are struggling to feed themselves during a cost of living crisis?
Given the absurd costs, the Home Office has been understandably reticent to provide more details of the scheme. Permanent secretary Sir Matthew Rycroft initially provided details of the £140 million paid—£120 million through an economic transformation and integration fund, and a separate £20 million to cover initial set-up—but told the Home Affairs Committee that he could not provide details of further payments as that was “commercially sensitive” information and would only be released in the annual report and accounts each year. He was then forced into disclosing further costs in a letter to the Public Accounts Committee, in which he outlined that a further £100 million was paid to Rwanda in April last year, with another payment of £50 million due this year.
During the debate on the Rwanda Bill, the Home Secretary confirmed that the deal with Rwanda also included further payments of £50 million in 2025 and £50 million in 2026, bringing the total cost of the scheme to nearly £400 million without a single asylum seeker having been sent there. That is a cost of about £130 million per Home Secretary who has been to Rwanda.
A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that as of last month, the UK Government have spent £2.1 million defending the scheme in the courts. With new legal challenges to the Bill and the treaty, more costs to the taxpayer are surely yet to come. All the time, while this cruel posturing continues, the number of people waiting for asylum decisions grows, safe and legal routes have not emerged and have been closed down, and Home Office staff are left without the resources they need. All in all, it is an expensive distraction from the dull and boring work of governing well.
As it is Labour’s debate, I want to focus briefly on its plans. As the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) highlighted in his question, the shadow Home Secretary did not rule out offshoring people should Labour be in government, so I ask the Labour party whether it is the cost of offshoring that it objects to, or the principle. I was particularly interested in the papers released by the National Archives over Christmas, including the paper presented by Jonathan Powell to the Blair Government entitled “Asylum: The Nuclear Option”, which suggested interning people on Mull or the Falkland Islands and deporting people to Turkey and Kenya. When officials from the Home Office warned that those measures would fall foul of the UK’s international obligations to refugees, the Prime Minister’s handwritten note read
“Just return them. This is precisely the point. We must not allow the ECHR to stop us dealing with it.”
Twenty years on, that is chillingly reminiscent of the current Conservative Government.
Back in 2003-4, Labour was also trying to find a way of offshoring people to Tanzania, and it has been reported that it has recently been consulting with the architects of that plan. If Labour still plans to offshore people, I ask how many, on what terms, and at what cost? How can it possibly be cost-effective to send people halfway around the world, only to bring them back if their case is successful? When Full Fact asked Lord Blunkett about those historic plans, he said that he had
“looked at a system for processing appeals for failed asylum seekers in other safe countries but rejected it as impractical”,
so is Labour for or against offshoring, and is that in principle, or on the basis of cost? Will it categorically rule out offshoring, or is it prepared to sell out the world’s most vulnerable just to get Labour over the threshold of No. 10?
It does not need to be this way—everything that has happened has been a political choice. This is about our duties and obligations in the world; about the European convention on human rights, which protects all of our rights; and about the refugee convention, which treats others as we would expect to be treated if a catastrophe happened on our own doorstep. Scotland wants none of these cruel, inhumane plans. The Scottish Government have published papers setting out our direction of travel on this issue, which I commend to all those who are listening. The Scotland we seek would take her duties to the world seriously: the spirit of Kenmure Street tells us that these are our neighbours and our friends, and we must do our part to see that they are safe.
Public Order Act 2023
Debate between Luke Evans and Alison Thewliss(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Alison Thewliss
The legislation is having a chilling effect on people’s ability to protest. The Minister knows that that is the case because that is the very purpose of the legislation.
I will go on. I have campaigned for the self-determination of Kashmir; I have supported the protest that is Pride; I supported the March of the Mummies along Whitehall; I have supported the Women Against State Pension Inequality campaigners, who have campaigned outside this building against the atrocious loss of their pension rights; I have joined trade union demos; I have joined protests in support of those excluded from the Government support scheme; I have campaigned alongside people protesting about the Government’s intransigence on contaminated blood; I have protested on the side of the paragraph 322(5) highly skilled migrants the Home Office sought to remove for no good reason; and I have joined regular demonstrations in my constituency in Glasgow, including in George Square, on the Buchanan Street steps and on Glasgow Green. Like everybody on the SNP Benches, and the many thousands of SNP members and independent supporters over generations, I have protested the radical and necessary aim of Scottish independence and breaking up this failing British state.
Alison Thewliss
If the hon. Gentleman wants to tell me which protests he has joined, I would be glad to take his intervention, too.
Alison Thewliss
People should have the right to protest in the way they see fit. This Government are running scared of protesters, who have had to take radical steps because the Government are not listening to their legitimate concerns.