Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Meg Hillier Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Home Secretary give way?

[James Cleverly]

I will give way one more time, and then I will make more progress.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

The Home Secretary says he will not reveal to the House the Attorney General’s advice, and that is fine, but on the issue of the money, his permanent secretary was in front of the Public Accounts Committee yesterday and told us that, as well as the payment of £50 million due next year, there are payments planned for years four and five. Is he willing to share with the House how much will be paid to Rwanda in years four and five of the programme?

[James Cleverly]

The hon. Lady will know that we have committed to a reporting schedule that is completely consistent with other Government Departments and with the reporting schedule of the Home Office in other areas. We intend to commit to doing that.

This Bill builds on the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and complements all other measures that this Government are employing to end illegal migration. The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill makes it unambiguously clear that Rwanda is safe and it will prevent the courts from second-guessing the will of this sovereign Parliament.

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[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

The decision to leave office is always a difficult one. The decision to disagree with the Prime Minister—someone I want to support in good times and bad—is always a difficult one, but politicians are sent here to make difficult decisions. No one is forced to be a Minister. With high office comes responsibility, and no responsibility is greater than protecting our borders and securing us from untold damage as a result of mass illegal migration.

We have made huge progress as a country over the last year as a result of the work that the former Home Secretary—my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman)—the Prime Minister and I have done, and I wish my right hon. Friend the new Home Secretary and his Ministers all the best in taking that work forward. Our record stands among the best of any European country. We have, as my right hon. Friend said, reduced the number of small boat arrivals to our country by one third. That compares with a one-third increase across Europe, and an almost 100% increase on Europe’s southern border in Italy, so the plan that the Prime Minister set out a year ago is working. It is the most comprehensive plan of any European country.

We have just heard from the Opposition that they have no plan at all. They said that even if the Rwanda scheme was working and having the deterrent effect we all want, they would still scrap it, because ultimately they do not believe in border security and they cannot be trusted to protect our borders. But this problem is not going away. It is going to be one of the defining issues of the 21st century. There are millions of people on the move—some are fleeing climate change and persecution, while others are economic migrants understandably in search of a better life. It is a great compliment to our country that so many want to come here, but it is not sustainable.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

I will give way to the hon. Lady in a moment.

We have to secure our borders, which means that all the good work that we have done over the course of the last year—the Albania deal, the asylum backlog work, and the deals with Bulgaria, France, Italy and others—is not enough. We are not going to stop the boats purely through that work. We have to interject the strongest possible deterrent, and the best deterrent—the only deterrent—that we can use in the course of the next 12 months is the Rwanda deal. That is why it is so critical that we get it up and running.

I genuinely believe, having immersed myself in this issue for 14 months, that this is a good policy, that it can work and that it will help our country to fight back against this great scourge. In my job, I have seen the consequences of that every day. I have gone with my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mrs Elphicke) to meet her constituents whose homes have been broken into and whose lives have been ruined by illegal migrants. I have spent time with my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Sir Conor Burns) and read about his constituent who was murdered by an asylum seeker, who posed as a child and then killed somebody on the streets of Bournemouth. I have worked with almost every Member of this House on their determination to close asylum hotels. Even the greatest advocates for open borders change their minds when there is an asylum hotel in their constituency. Hypocrisy is all over this issue.

That is why we have to fix this problem. When I said “whatever it takes”, I meant it, and I honestly believe that that view is shared by all of us on this side of the House and many good colleagues on the other side as well. To do that, we have to make sure that this policy works. This is a good-faith disagreement—there are good people on both sides of the House, and certainly within my party, who have disagreements about how we can make the policy work—but my point of view is this: untold damage is being done to our country and this issue will be with us for years, if not decades, to come. If we do not operationalise this policy correctly, we will see the numbers rise for many years to come. If, God forbid, there was a Labour Government, there would be a decade of small boat arrivals. I want to stop that.

To my mind, there are two big flaws with this Bill. First, as I have said to many who have asked me, including on the media, it does not address the question of individual claims. If I have learnt anything in this job, it is that those seeking to frustrate their removal from our country will stop at nothing. The small-boat-chasing law firms and legal representatives will help them to fight, each and every way. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. Even the best-meant things the country has done in recent years, such as our world-leading modern slavery laws, are abused. Some 70% of the people we are seeking to remove put in a modern slavery claim at the eleventh hour.

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[Robert Jenrick]

I will give way in a moment.

First, such a provision would bring legal certainty; secondly, there are operational reasons for it. I have met no one who really understands the operationalisation of the policy who does not believe such a provision is crucial. Those advisers have told me time and again that the scheme will be seriously impeded. People will put in claims and go to court. The upper tier tribunal, which is already under pressure, will be overwhelmed. Our detention capacity—just a few thousand spaces—will be full. In a single week in August, 2,000 beds in our detention facilities could be filled. Those arrivals will go on to our streets. They will abscond, as they always do, never to be seen again, and the scheme will be brought into quick disrepute. I do not want to see that happen. I will give way to the right hon. Lady.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

The right hon. Gentleman casts aspersions on Labour’s approach to this issue. He is in the presence of two former Immigration Ministers: myself and my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne). At the end of the last Labour Government, there was one person being returned every eight minutes. I know from my own caseload that people who have reached the end of the line are still dribbling around the system, even though, as others have raised, they want to leave the country. What was the right hon. Gentleman’s record after 14 months as an Immigration Minister?

[Robert Jenrick]

There has been a tenfold increase in the pace of asylum decision making, so we have absolutely transformed the decision-making system. We have massively increased the number of returns—the hon. Lady is on rocky ground on this one, I am afraid—as 22,000 people have been returned. The difference between our side of the House and hers is that we have the guts and the determination to fix this problem once and for all, which means interjecting the strongest possible deterrent. Were there a Labour Government, I would worry for this country, because we would see a massive increase in the number of small boat arrivals, and the people smugglers would be celebrating. That is why it is so important to Conservative Members that we—

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[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

We have heard the sounds of optimism over truth coming from the Conservatives. The idea that the measure is a deterrent has not yet been proven, yet it has been cited as if it is actively deterring people from arriving in boats. We all know that the boats are a challenge. They are a real problem; people are dying in the channel. But let us be clear: the Government were the architects of this policy, and it is the second time they have legislated on it. Its architects have stood up, including the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) just now, and said how proud they are that they drew up the policy. But they drew it up so badly that they are having to revisit the legislation. I think they should be a bit less proud. Even though I do not agree with the policy, proper policy making means ensuring a policy works before announcing it. There are so many flaws in this scheme that the Government are struggling along, believing that a headline and a pledge that it will deter people is enough. That is not good policy making.

We on the Labour Benches have often been challenged on what we would do differently. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) and I were on the frontline dealing with immigration matters during the last Labour Government, and my right hon. Friend was the architect of a system that meant that one person was being returned every eight minutes. I have people in my constituency who have reached the end of the line, and they know it. They come to me and we talk about voluntary return, but it is difficult to do that when the Home Office does not return those people’s documents and they have all these problems. These are people who actively want to leave because they know that is their only option, but they cannot do so.

This Government must look much more closely at the existing system and how it is working. It has been 13 years of downgrading the asylum system and the immigration system generally, and now all these extra people have gone into dealing with the backlog of asylum cases—there are 20,000 legacy cases still left. Was 13 December the day on which the Prime Minister said that number would reach zero? He has missed that target, and 160,000 people have been backing up in the asylum system. People in my constituency, including a top surgeon, those coming in on work permits and those on student visas, are all behind in the queue because all the Home Office’s effort is going into the Prime Minister’s pledge to deal with the backlog, which is just creating more chaos in the entire system. That approach is not working.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) touched on the question of money, and of course, we on the Public Accounts Committee have been trying to look at the money on this issue. I will not go through the figures, because my right hon. Friend has already set them out, but this is a five-year plan, and we have no figures for how much money will go to Rwanda in years four and five. My right hon. Friend and I, along with the other members of the Public Accounts Committee, asked the permanent secretary that question yesterday, but he was not forthcoming on that figure. He only released a figure to us when it was leaked to the International Monetary Fund—an investigation is happening into why that was. That is a ridiculous way of releasing figures. It is not normal parliamentary protocol to release information about major projects in the annual report and accounts, especially when we are voting on them in this House.

For the benefit of colleagues who may not follow the annual accounts of Departments with the same enthusiasm as members of the Public Accounts Committee, the accounts for the financial year we are in will be published to Parliament in July next year, 15 months after the £100 million was allocated this year. That is not scrutiny. In other areas and for other projects—I look to the Minister to answer on this point, or take it back to the Home Secretary—we get updates to the House every six months, or even more frequently, through Committees or laid before the House. That is not uncommon, yet the Minister’s permanent secretary was saying that it is normal to provide updates just through the accounts. We need more scrutiny of this issue: if it is a flagship Government policy, there is nothing to hide, so let us see those figures. The Public Accounts Committee and the Home Affairs Committee will work together on that issue—it is really important that we do that.

We need to tackle the backlog and we need transparency on the numbers, and I would be also be grateful if the Minister clarified whether any conditions are attached to the money going to Rwanda. We got a useful breakdown from the permanent secretary in Committee yesterday—I will not repeat it, but it is on the record from yesterday’s Committee meeting—but is there anything that it would be out of order for the Rwandans to spend that money on? It has been spent on reasonable things such as education, health and so on, but is there anything on which the Rwandans cannot spend the money that is given to them by the UK? It would be very helpful to know that.

There was also an expression of interest for a contract for Manston and Western Jet Foil. That is a £700 million contract for the first six years, which could extend to be worth £1.16 billion over 10 years. The money is intended to improve those reception centres, which definitely need improving, but according to that pre-tender document, the facilities are expected to be active between 2030 and 2034. I am a bit puzzled: £700 million is being invested in Manston and Western Jet Foil, and although that may be necessary, we have been told all afternoon—I have been here for five and a half hours—that the Rwanda policy is already deterring people. If it is working so well, why do we need to invest that much money in those facilities? They need the investment, but it seems to me that the Government are trying to have it both ways. I would welcome clarity from the Minister.