Illegal Migration Update

Debate between Nia Griffith and Robert Jenrick

Tuesday 5th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Yes, I would be happy to continue to work with my right hon. Friend, as we have done in recent months. We have provided £3,500 per bed space to local authorities that house dispersal accommodation, which goes to meet the costs to them of looking after these individuals, but she is right to say that the wider costs of housing asylum seekers are very high—there is no escaping that. That is one of the reasons we need to reduce the number of people coming into the country in the first place.

[Dame Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Over the past few years, the Government have allowed the backlog of asylum claims to rise and rise to over 170,000. For all the Minister’s warm words, progress in tackling it has been disgracefully slow. What additional measures will the Minister now implement to get that backlog down and reduce the need for his Department to scrabble around for additional accommodation, which often proves to be unsuitable and impractical, such as the Stradey Park Hotel in my constituency?

[Robert Jenrick]

I hope I have already described in previous answers the work that we have done. I can assure the hon. Lady that it is bearing fruit and that the backlog of legacy decisions will be cleared by the end of the year, and we will swiftly move thereafter to other decisions. Order and efficiency have been restored to the asylum decision-making process, but just waving more people in and processing their claims faster is not a strategy to stop the boats in and of itself. That is why we need the full deterrent and the comprehensive plan that we have.

One of the issues that is putting pressure on asylum accommodation is the very poor performance in Labour-run Wales, which has taken only 2.9% of the total asylum population, yet Wales accounts for 5.2% of the UK’s population. In some areas of Wales—such as the constituency of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock)—there are no asylum seekers whatsoever. I would strongly encourage the hon. Lady to speak with the Welsh Government and get them to step up and help us provide more accommodation.

Illegal Migration Bill: Economic Impact Assessment

Debate between Nia Griffith and Robert Jenrick

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

The last time my hon. Friend asked me a question, he said that we would not be able to produce a barge to house asylum seekers. Actually, days later we signed the agreement to do that, and that will be coming forward, so he knows that when we say things, we mean them and we will deliver.

With respect to the time it takes to process asylum claims, it is too long. However, that is the product not just of management within Government and the Home Office, but the sheer number of people crossing every year. I have spoken to my opposite numbers in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy, and every one of those countries is struggling with backlogs of cases as much as we are—more so in some cases—because the asylum systems across Europe are being placed under intolerable pressure by the number of people making these dangerous and unnecessary journeys. That is why we have to instil deterrence, and the Rwanda policy gives us the ability to reduce the numbers and restore sustainability to the system.

[Dame Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Instead of effective measures to tackle the people smugglers and speed up the processing of asylum claims to reduce the backlog, the Bill means that the Minister’s Department will need to requisition more and more accommodation, as it is doing with the Stradey Park Hotel in my constituency. In spite of promises of job opportunities from Clearsprings, his Home Office contractor, all 100 staff have had the devastating news today that they face redundancy. What will the Department do to help those staff and those who are in similar circumstances because of the Bill?

Asylum-seeking Children: Hotel Accommodation

Debate between Nia Griffith and Robert Jenrick

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Robert Jenrick]

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. It is important that we approach this debate in the spirit not of posturing but of seeking to find solutions to this difficult problem. Obviously, the enduring solution is to reduce the number of unnecessary and dangerous crossing across the channel all together. That is the purpose of the Illegal Migration Bill. If we cannot do that, or until we do it, as soon as a young person arrives in this country we have to treat them with the greatest decency, respect and compassion, and the way to do that is to get those young people into local authority care as quickly as possible.

Given the numbers of people crossing the channel at the moment, it is not possible to do that instantaneously. On a single day last autumn, 1,000 people arrived at Western Jet Foil. The UK had literally saved their lives. We then had to feed, clothe and water them, and do security and health checks on them—all, incidentally, in 24 hours. To the point from the shadow spokesman, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), that is why I changed the law to 96 hours. I will never compromise on security checks when people arrive in this country. It is not possible to security check 1,000 people in 24 hours, and I wanted to make sure that the police and our counter-terrorism officers have the powers they need. Ensuring those young people leave Western Jet Foil and go as quickly as possible to good quality local authority care has to be the mission of us all. That means supporting local authorities in every single part of the United Kingdom to step up and play their part.

The Home Office is doing this in a number of ways. We have provided financial incentives; I created a further financial incentive—a pilot of £15,000 per young person to encourage local authorities to take those individuals as swiftly as possible on the national transfer scheme. That has had success. Today there are no unaccompanied young people in hotels whatsoever. There may well be more young people in the future if more small boats cross in the months ahead. We need to encourage more local authorities to take part in that scheme.

I completely appreciate the points that have been made by a number of hon. Members that there are huge capacity constraints within local authorities and local authority care homes, and that there is a desperate shortage of foster carers. Those are issues that we should all be united in trying to tackle. The Home Office, in the short period when we house people in an emergency situation in hotels, will always do so decently and will always ensure that those hotels are as well run as possible, but we have to get people out of hotels and into local authority care as quickly as possible.

[Dame Nia Griffith]

Will the Minister clarify whether, if he goes ahead and uses the Stradey Park Hotel in my constituency for asylum seekers, he is considering housing any unaccompanied children there? What measures will be taken to prevent them from going missing?

[Robert Jenrick]

As far as I am aware, we do not intend to use that location for unaccompanied children. I will confirm that in writing, but that is not my understanding. To the point that the hon. Lady and others made about what we do when a young person goes missing from one of the hotels, as a parent and a Minister I take this responsibility extremely seriously. When I heard that young people had gone missing from the hotels, I wanted not only to visit them, but to meet all the officials involved in the task.

When I visited the hotels, including the one in Hove, I wanted to meet the social workers privately, not with Home Office officials or others present, so that I could hear directly from them, in private, whether they believe that we are doing everything we can and that we treat a missing person who is a migrant in exactly the same way as we would treat a missing person who is a British citizen—my child or your child. I was told, time and again, that we do: that we follow exactly the same processes in reporting missing people; that we engage thoroughly with the local constabularies, which are fully involved; and that we have created a specific new process called the MARS—missing after reasonable steps—protocol by which we report missing persons

That MARS process has had some success and has enabled us to track more individuals than we did previously. Crucially, every single step is taken as it would be if any other young person in this country went missing. We also have as thorough procedures as is possible in the hotels for checking people in and out, when they leave to go to the park or for a walk, as they can in such facilities.

On that point, it is worth noting that the facilities are not detained facilities. In the debate, I heard no hon. Member urging us to create detained facilities for young people. As long as the facilities are non-detained, inevitably some young people will decide to use the opportunity to leave, which on the intelligence we have is mostly to meet family or friends, or to prearranged meetings with individuals whom they had already agreed to meet, who would no doubt then help the young people to work in the grey or black economies. We have heard no evidence that people have been abducted from outside hotels. In this important debate, we have to trade in fact, not anecdote.

Net Migration Figures

Debate between Nia Griffith and Robert Jenrick

Thursday 25th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point, which he has made in the past and with which I have a lot of sympathy. We both believe that we need a controlled migration system and that net migration has a number of impacts on communities, including further pressure on public services and housing supply and making it more difficult to integrate people into our country and maintain community cohesion. In some instances, high levels of net migration also put downward pressure on wages for the domestic economy and enable some employers to reach for the easy lever of importing foreign labour rather than training up their own British workforce. It is for those reasons what we created the points-based system that has a salary threshold—a freedom we only have as a result of leaving the European Union—and if further changes to that system are necessary in the future, we will make them.

[Dame Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Local residents in my constituency are rightly shocked and concerned to hear that the Minister’s Department is planning to house 300 asylum seekers in the Stradey Park hotel, a totally disproportionate number for the village of Furnace and local services. Will the Minister meet me to hear about local concerns, and what is he doing to prevent the need to commandeer the Stradey Park hotel and to clear the Home Office backlog of 160,000 undetermined claims so that those from safe countries can be returned and those who are genuine refugees can move out of hotels and be integrated in small numbers into suitable communities?

[Robert Jenrick]

I am delighted to hear that the Government have just chalked up another vote for the Illegal Migration Bill, because Members cannot say they want open borders, with unlimited numbers of individuals coming into this country, whether legally or illegally, but they do not want them in their own constituency—it is an inconsistent approach. If the hon. Lady feels so strongly and is getting such strong representations from her constituents, she should support the Government’s efforts to clamp down on illegal migration.