Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Nick Thomas-Symonds and Stephen Timms

2nd reading
Monday 19th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

With great respect to the right hon. Lady, she was making the point about late filing of evidence, and I was making the point in response—I will come on to it in a moment, and I am quite happy to give way to her again when I do—that the way this Bill is framed, in terms of the direction to give very little weight to late evidence, is very concerning with respect to victims who are unable to talk about their trauma at an early stage in the proceedings. I will come back to that and I will be very happy to give way to her again when I do.

On asylum accommodation, the idea of sending people to offshore processing sites is dehumanising and unconscionable. As the UN Refugee Agency puts it,

“The UK should abandon plans to ‘externalise’ its refugee commitments, which would see it shift responsibility for protecting refugees on to states with less capacity and more refugees.”

Frankly, it is an attempt to distract from Government failure on the housing of those seeking asylum.

[Stephen Timms]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, and I agree with him about this point. Of course, Australia has undertaken offshore processing, and there are terrible stories, which shame Australia, about what has happened to some people in those places. Has he had any indication: where might these offshore places be where asylum applicants could be processed?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that. Unfortunately, I have had no such indication beyond leaks to the media, a fact which will probably not surprise him.

Last month, the High Court judgment on Napier barracks found inadequate health and safety conditions and a failure to screen victims of trafficking and other vulnerabilities. The Home Office continued to house people against the advice of Public Health England, endangering those in the accommodation, staff and the local community. It resulted in what the Court described as an “inevitable” covid outbreak in January 2021, with nearly 200 people testing positive for the virus. No wonder the independent chief inspector of borders and Her Majesty’s inspector of prisons published an emergency report that raised “serious safeguarding concerns”. On asylum accommodation, this Government have failed and failed dangerously.

The idea that this Bill helps those fleeing violence and persecution does not stand up to scrutiny. Let me take one example, because the former Prime Minister raised it a moment or two ago. The Bill says that evidence submitted late without good reason should be given only “minimal weight” by asylum judges. Asylum seekers have been required for the past 19 years to submit arguments and evidence at an early stage. Now it seems we are going to have a situation where judges are directed to have minimal regard to evidence being given late. But there are many reasons why refugees, and particularly victims of human trafficking, cannot provide evidence at an early stage, not least the fact it is difficult for survivors of trauma to talk about their experience immediately, including—and, indeed, especially—women and other survivors of sexual violence. That shows the real failure at the heart of this Bill. It fails victims of human trafficking, and it is a glaring missed opportunity to address the vile crime of people smuggling. Instead, the Government will turn their back on some of the most vulnerable people on Earth.

The Bill changes the law so that helping an asylum seeker will no longer need to be done “for gain” to attract criminal liability. That is what the Bill does, and it is a profound and dangerous change in the law. It could criminalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for saving people at sea, and it seems to take no account whatsoever of the international law of the sea, which requires ships’ captains to assist those who are in distress. Let us be frank about this. Had this measure been in place when Sir Nicholas Winton was rescuing hundreds of children from the holocaust on the Kindertransport, he would have risked being criminalised—[Interruption.] There is no point in Members shaking their heads, because this legislation risks bringing into the scope of the criminal law those who are helping people for humanitarian reasons.

State Pension Age (Women)

Debate between Nick Thomas-Symonds and Stephen Timms

Thursday 7th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I commend the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) for securing and opening this debate. It is perhaps an irony, however, as we are discussing pensions, that she is further from retirement age than any other Member of this House. I also want to pay a warm tribute to WASPI on its campaign and the dignity with which it has conducted it. It is a measure of the campaign’s success that every Member of this House knows the meaning of the acronym WASPI. I also pay tribute to the other groups and individuals who have been advocating the cause of women born in the 1950s.

The level of interest in this debate is summed up by the fact that we have had 26 Back-Bench contributions from Members from all parts of the United Kingdom. I want to pick out two contributions: that of my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), who has done so much work on this in recent years, and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), whose deep commitment to this is known across the House.

I also want to pay tribute to my Labour colleagues who in 2011, when the Pensions Act was going through this House, pressed the issue of transitional provisions as hard as they could. It is a shame the Government did not listen to many of our proposals set out at the time.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

At that time, the Secretary of State said in debate said he would consider transitional protection. Has my hon. Friend seen any evidence of that consideration being given?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

That points to what has happened here. In previous debates on this matter the Minister has talked about the cap on the increase being reduced from 24 to 18 months, but that was as far as it got, and we see the Government today have no positive proposals. They keep asking the Opposition about their proposals, but it is the Government whose mind has gone completely blank on this issue.

Let us not forget the fundamentals of this debate. Many women born in the 1950s will have started their working lives without even the protection of the Equal Pay Act 1970. Many of those women will have been paid at a lower rate than men for no reason other than that they were women. The gender pay gap is at its widest for many of the women under discussion today. Also, let us not forget the time that many of them took to work part-time or bring up children when they have not even had the chance to contribute to occupational pensions.

The Pensions Act 1995 increased the state pension age from 60 to 65 for women between April 2010 and 2020, to bring it into line with the state pension age for men, but the coalition Government moved the goalposts. They decided to accelerate the increase in the women’s state pension age from April 2016 so that it reached 65 by November 2018. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has pointed out, in the Second Reading debate in this House on 20 June 2011 the Secretary of State made it absolutely clear that the Government would “consider transitional arrangements.”

The much vaunted reduction in the cap—capping the maximum increase at 18 months—that the Minister has pointed to in recent debates simply is not enough. Do the Government understand the anger at the fact that more transitional provisions have not been considered—over 100,000 signatures for a debate in this House, the online campaign and the great response to it in the media? Recently I was told by the Sunday Post that a feature on this subject brings an unprecedented response from the hundreds of thousands of women who are affected.

Let us ask ourselves what the Pensions Minister in the coalition Government at the time thinks. This is what he told the Institute for Government:

“There was one very early decision that we took about state pension ages, which we would have done differently if we’d been properly briefed, and we weren’t.”

He added:

“We made a choice, and the implications of what we were doing suddenly, about two or three months later, it became clear that they were very different from what we thought.”

He then said:

“So basically we made a bad decision. We realised too late. It had just gone too far by then.”