Mike Tapp debates involving the Home Office during the 2024 Parliament

Police Reform

Mike Tapp Excerpts
Wednesday 20th November 2024

(1 day, 8 hours ago)

Commons Chamber
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.

Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.

This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record

Diana Johnson Portrait Dame Diana Johnson
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I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his comments. It has been a great pleasure to work with him on various Committees over the years. He is correct that this is an operational matter. It is for chief constables to decide how they use the resources available to them. My understanding is that very little time is actually spent on non-crime hate incidents, but I will check that with His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary.

Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
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Coming from a policing family, and having served with the National Crime Agency, I am immensely proud of British policing. However, I am equally devastated at the decline overseen by the Conservatives. Can the Minister outline what we are doing to rebuild British policing and return it to being the best in the world?

Asylum Seekers: Hotel Accommodation

Mike Tapp Excerpts
Wednesday 20th November 2024

(1 day, 8 hours ago)

Commons Chamber
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Angela Eagle Portrait Dame Angela Eagle
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We have a relatively new Government in France just bedding in. I reassure the right hon. Gentleman that we are working closely with them to see how we can strengthen and deepen our co-operation and partnership.

Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
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The right hon. Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson) who raised the urgent question appears to be suffering from some memory loss. Under the Conservative Government, we saw 130,000 small boat crossings and record backlogs at the Home Office. The Conservatives opened 400 hotels—that is, 21,000 places costing £8 million per day to the taxpayer. Does the Minister recall him raising that issue under the previous Government?

Angela Eagle Portrait Dame Angela Eagle
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No, I do not. I noticed the revelations at the weekend about why the Conservatives decided to call the election earlier than some of us had perhaps thought. One reason set out in Tim Shipman’s book “Out” was that illegal migration was a problem,

“with a new armada of small boats predicted and the issue of whether they would be able to get a repatriation flight to Rwanda in the air before polling day.”

They evidently decided that they could not. We are now hearing this complete fiction from Conservative Members that somehow the Rwanda scheme was just about to work before we scrapped it, when they had spent £700 million on an increasingly futile and ridiculous attempt to get the scheme off the ground.

Small Boat Crossings

Mike Tapp Excerpts
Wednesday 6th November 2024

(2 weeks, 1 day ago)

Commons Chamber
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.

Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.

This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record

Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
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In 2018, 400 crossed the channel. Since then, more than 140,000 have crossed, the majority of them on the Conservatives’ watch. All they could introduce were ridiculous gimmicks, such as Rwanda, which cost taxpayers millions of pounds. Does the Minister agree that the new injection of cash into border security command is a better use of taxpayers’ money than the gimmicks that the Conservatives introduced?

Angela Eagle Portrait Dame Angela Eagle
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Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. The issue here is dealing with cross-border organised immigration crime. To do that, we have to talk to our international allies and co-operate with them across borders. That is exactly what the creation of the border security command will do, both operationally and politically, and we will see the results.

Police Accountability

Mike Tapp Excerpts
Wednesday 23rd October 2024

(4 weeks, 1 day ago)

Commons Chamber
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Yvette Cooper Portrait Yvette Cooper
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The hon. Member makes an important point, because often when we talk about trust and confidence for communities, young people, who are frequently those who have the most contact with the police, feel left out of those discussions. It is important that they, too, have confidence in the police to keep them safe. Restoring neighbourhood policing and having back in our communities police officers who know the local area, and whom young people can get to know, is one of the most important and powerful ways to rebuild trust and make sure that everybody has confidence. That is also how we prevent crime and damage in communities.

Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
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It is important that such officers remain anonymous until conviction, and I fully back this statement. As the Home Secretary will know, it is not just the officers facing trial who have to go through intimidation and threats, but their families. Justice is essential, as is protecting our brave officers. Will the Home Secretary join me in acknowledging the huge toll that these policing roles can take not just on officers, but on their families?

Yvette Cooper Portrait Yvette Cooper
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I agree. Families often face some of the most challenging burdens and pressures, and we hear from police officers that their concern about the impact on their families often affects them strongly. That is why the presumption of anonymity to the point of conviction is really important to support families, as well as officers.

Illegal Immigration

Mike Tapp Excerpts
Tuesday 10th September 2024

(2 months, 1 week ago)

Westminster Hall
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Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
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I have worked for the National Crime Agency in the past, and also in a counter-terror role. There are ways we can deal with this. The fact is that what the previous Government set up only dealt with the processing of those who arrived. The new border security command can bring in not just enforcement but disruption, which will ensure that people are not even getting on to the boats. There is not just one way of cracking this nut. If we bring in the likes of MI5, with new counter-terror powers, tools and a culture of disruption, then it can have a massive impact. I have been part of that in the past and have seen it happen, so it can work and I have full faith—

Mark Hendrick Portrait Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
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Order. I ask for interventions to be quite short. Those who are intervening are subtracting time from those who want to speak later in the debate.

--- Later in debate ---
Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
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I apologise for my late arrival after the vote, Sir Mark. My constituency is Dover and Deal, so I have been engaging on this serious issue for a number of years and it means a lot to my constituents. The Labour party has made it clear that what matters to voters matters to us, too, and that is why we are taking this so seriously.

In 2018, 299 people crossed in small boats. Since then, we have had 136,000 crossings. The asylum backlog reached record highs, which has cost £8 million a day in hotels. The hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) made the point that we will speed up the processing and therefore grant more asylum claims, but the alternative is to have a backlog of five years that costs £8 million a day. We will also deport those who should not be here, which the Conservatives completely failed to do.

Our plan is sensible and pragmatic. The border security command, as I touched on earlier, is not the same as what was previously in place to deal with those arriving at the borders. It will work upstream and bring in counter-terror powers. Let us give that a chance—we have had eight weeks, so I am surprised even to be having this debate right now. We have had 13 flights off the ground, one of which was the largest on record. That is a show of intent as to exactly how seriously we take the matter.

My final point is that the Labour party has strong values on this. We believe in secure borders, but we play the ball, not the player. Those seeking a better life are doing nothing wrong, but we will secure the borders and take out the smuggling gangs.

Mark Hendrick Portrait Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
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The number of Members wishing to speak has dwindled slightly since the Division, so I will relax the time limit from five to six minutes to more like seven to eight minutes. Members will have a bit longer. I know that does not help those who have already spoken, but they spoke before the vote.

--- Later in debate ---
Nigel Farage Portrait Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)
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I thank the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) for calling this debate. He must find it excruciatingly embarrassing how badly the previous Government dealt with this issue.

With my strong connection in Kent and Sussex with the commercial fishing industry, the angling trade and indeed the lifeboats, I started to feel in early 2020 that —after the odd boat had crossed in 2018 and 2019, as the hon. Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) mentioned—something big was about to happen. The gangs had realised that the chances of deportation from this country were very low. So I went out repeatedly from Dover into the English channel, filming boats and meeting face to face with boatfuls of the young men who have been described—in many cases, very aggressive young males.

I also got to the bottom of the use of the word “escorts”. I kept being told that escorts were crossing the channel. I was not quite sure what that meant, to begin with, but then I understood that it was the French navy—that the French navy literally escorted boats across the English channel and handed them over to Border Force or the Royal National Lifeboat Institution —so I made a bit of a fuss about the whole thing. I said that unless something was done, huge numbers would come. I said that there might even be an “invasion”, a word that got me in very big trouble. Given that we are pushing up towards 140,000 who have come, I do not think I misused the word.

The efforts of the last Government to deal with this were frankly pretty pitiful. Rwanda might have worked in theory, but of course in practice it was not going to work. All the while, we are subject to that Court in Strasbourg, as we saw that evening. More interestingly, the incorporation of the convention into British law means that actually British judges will always rule in favour of the ECHR, so we have to face up to that reality.

I also believe that what we are facing is a national security emergency. When ISIS boasted in 2015 that it would use the Mediterranean to get its operatives into Europe, perhaps the European Union should have taken it more at its word. It was interesting to note that Sir Keir Starmer himself used the phrase “national security emergency” during the general election, so he is going to have to act accordingly.

Appointing a new border chief commander? Yes, we may get some better intelligence—fine, but the French, whom we have given hundreds of millions of pounds, already stop a lot of dinghies from crossing. They put knives in the dinghies, but the problem is that the prospective illegal immigrants just hide in the dunes and come back the next day. So that is not going to work.

Smashing the gangs? Well, I don’t know. What I have been hearing for the past 30 years is that we are going to smash the drugs gangs in this country, and yet there are more class A drugs being taken today than there ever were before. A good operative gang, working out of those sand dunes in northern France in a reasonable week of weather, can expect to make at least €2 million. The financial rewards are very, very high.

Really, what this comes down to is two things. No. 1 is political will. Successive Australian Prime Ministers attempted to deal with the problem; they all failed. They tried offshore processing and so on, until in the end Tony Abbott just towed the boats back to Indonesia. There was international outrage from the UN, the EU and indeed the Foreign Office.

Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp
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Are you aware of the fact that they were steel-hulled vessels—

Mark Hendrick Portrait Sir Mark Hendrick (in the Chair)
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Order. Can I just say that if somebody intervenes, you should sit down?

Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp
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If we attempt to do the same, we are likely to kill people in our waters. Is that what you want to see?

Nigel Farage Portrait Nigel Farage
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Just a few weeks ago, for the first time, Border Force did an emergency pick-up on the other side of the line. Rather than bringing the people back to this country, as previously Dover lifeboat and Dungeness lifeboat had done, it actually took them into Calais. That is the way we do it. Yes, these are far flimsier vessels, but the principle of taking people back whence they came is the point that I am trying to make.

We can do this. We can do it under the international law of the sea. I ask the Minister to say that, given the money that we have given to the French, we will no longer accept escorts from the French navy. The day after 12 people died in the channel, a French naval vessel escorted a dinghy from a couple of hundred yards off Wissant all the way to our 12-mile line. No more French naval escorts—I think that is vital.

We need political will. The Germans, of course, are now showing it. The Germans will ignore the ECHR; the Germans, by the way, sent a plane full of young men back to Afghanistan the other week. With political will and by leaving the ECHR, we can solve this.

I promise the Labour Government one thing. This issue caused great pain to the Conservative party, and it had an impact in the general election. This issue of illegal migration and the crime that it leads to, which is a conversation that has barely started in this country but that in France and Germany is now very big, will do massive damage to Labour’s electoral chances. You are going to have to get tough, and I am afraid your leader is going to have to rethink his position on the ECHR.

Border Security and Asylum

Mike Tapp Excerpts
Monday 22nd July 2024

(4 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Yvette Cooper Portrait Yvette Cooper
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No, I do not believe that is the right approach, because we need to make swift decisions and ensure that the rules are properly respected and enforced. I am concerned about employers who exploit those who have sometimes arrived as a result of criminal gangs, trafficking or smuggling. I do not believe that employers should be able to exploit those kinds of routes and journeys. If people who have fled persecution are granted asylum in this country, of course they should be able to work and to do so swiftly, but if they are not entitled to be here—if they have not fled persecution—and should be turned down and returned to their home country, they should not be able to work in the UK.

Mike Tapp Portrait Mike Tapp (Dover and Deal) (Lab)
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My constituents take this issue seriously as they are at the very frontline and the Conservatives have left us with open borders. I thank my right hon. Friend for dealing with the matter with such seriousness. How long will it take to put the border security commander in place, and what sort of impact will they have in assisting law enforcement?

Yvette Cooper Portrait Yvette Cooper
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I thank my hon. Friend and welcome him to his position. I know that his Dover and Deal constituency has faced real pressures as a result of the criminal gangs and the small boat crossings. I thank him for his work and experience in tackling these issues. He knows very well the work of the National Crime Agency, for example, in tackling the criminal gangs.

We are putting in place the steps for the border security command straight away. We have already begun recruitment not just for the new commander but for additional staff: hundreds of additional cross-border police, security and intelligence officers, and specialist investigators and prosecutors. That work will start straight away. We have already immediately increased the UK presence in Europol and its European migrant smuggling centre so that we can get on with that work to build those partnerships and take action.