Illegal Immigration

Nick Timothy Excerpts

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Westminster Hall

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) on securing this debate and on his excellent speech. I also congratulate the Minister on her appointment to the Home Office. She won the lottery with that job.

The starting principle of a functioning immigration system is that it has to work in the interests of the citizens of this country and we must decide who comes here. Illegal immigration destroys this principle for all the reasons set out by my hon. Friend in his speech. That is why we must have no tolerance for the channel crossings, and why we need a policy that breaks the link between entering the country illegally and staying here for good thereafter.

Just before the summer recess, the Home Secretary made a statement in which she set out the Government’s policy on illegal immigration, including getting rid of deterrents through deportation to third countries and scrapping the retrospective element of the duty to remove that was set out in the Illegal Migration Act 2023. She said that her policy was instead to consider the asylum claims of all illegal immigrants subject to the retrospective duty and admitted, in the impact assessment if not in her speech, that that meant granting asylum to up to 70% of them.

I will come to the cost of that decision, but I want to address the Home Secretary’s claim about the cost of the previous Government’s policy. She claimed that by making the change, she would save the taxpayer £700 million a year for a decade. Labour MPs are repeating that statistic, not knowing that they have been sold a pup, because the claim is clearly ridiculous. After that statement, word soon reached me that Home Office officials were appalled that it had been used. If any Labour MPs want to dispute that, I suggest that their Ministers speak to Home Office civil servants as often as I do.

I wrote to the permanent secretary on that news, and went through the impact assessment. The numbers were the result of what might be called the Reeves method, because they were a work of political fiction. We know, for example, that the Home Secretary’s calculation double-counted costs. On the one hand, Sir Matthew Rycroft in his letter to me said it included expenses for implementing the Rwanda policy, while on the other hand, the impact assessment assumed Rwanda would never be implemented.

Indeed, the impact assessment assumed not a single migrant would be deported under the Conservative policy and that migrants would have stayed in hotels for 10 years, which is clearly an absurd proposition. However, the Labour policy excluded massive costs from welfare bills and categorised them as housing policy, which it admitted as “significant” and that it

“could undermine…this impact assessment”,

yet the results of the impact assessment were presented to the House of Commons as unquestionable fact.

The impact assessment reveals the real Government policy: to deal with the huge number of claims by accepting them and to deal with the cost by hiding the numbers from the public in the welfare system. The Home Office admits that 63,053 illegal immigrants previously due to be deported will have their asylum claims heard instead, and up to 70% of them—that is 44,137 people—will be successful. But it also admits that, for those refused,

“the scale and timing of removals is highly uncertain”,

and that

“the Home Office may continue to support a number of”

them.

These figures are just the beginning, because they apply to only one cohort of migrants, with the duty to remove unlikely ever to be implemented by Labour. Unless the Minister corrects me by naming a start date, the Home Office admits its policy

“is expected to increase the number of asylum claims”,

which “consequently increases…costs”. Instead of facing deportation, hundreds of thousands more migrants will stay here for good. The policy is to shift migrants from the Home Office budget, the costs of which are published clearly, to the welfare and local authority budgets, the costs of which are not published clearly.

The impact assessment says:

“Any asylum seekers who are granted asylum will have full access to…the welfare system”,

and local authorities will also “incur costs”. So lacking in transparency is this approach that the impact assessment says the Home Office has

“not been able to establish a generally usable figure.”

That is obviously ridiculous.

We know from studies in Europe that the average channel migrant will be a net lifetime recipient of public funding, not a contributor. In a Danish Government study, immigrants from the middle east, north Africa, Pakistan and Turkey were shown to cost a net £10,000 per year. A study at the University of Amsterdam calculated that, over a lifetime, the average asylum migrant costs the Dutch public more than £400,000.

On that basis, for those granted asylum in just this one cohort, the lifetime cost of Labour’s new policy is £17.8 billion, which is far more than the bogus £7 billion figure cited by the Home Secretary, which she said was the cost of the duty to remove policy. Hundreds of thousands more people will be claiming asylum here in the next four to five years, so the final cost of the new Labour policy will be many multiples more expensive than that. That is the reality of the Government’s illegal immigration policy—more illegal immigration, not less, and vastly higher costs. For that, we will all pay the price.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Angela Eagle]

We have to do what we can to disrupt this trade. We have already seen that the boats are becoming more unseaworthy and that more people are getting on them. Just because that is happening, it does not mean we should do nothing to get in the way of the supply of boats and engines that criminals use to facilitate this trade. Even though they have not agreed on the wherewithal, all Members in the debate have agreed that we should be doing our best to stop this trade. No Government would not want to be in control of their external borders—I think we all agree on that. It is therefore important that we take a much more sophisticated and integrated approach to dealing with these increasingly integrated cross-border gangs.

We must not leave the gangs to flourish or organise, reaching even deeper back into places such as Vietnam, but instead harass and disrupt them and their financing. My hon. Friend the Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) was spot on to say that this has been done before in different contexts, particularly drugs and international crime, and it can certainly be done with this trade. We should try to be a bit more optimistic about the potential for concerted, cross-border action among states to deal with the issue.

A different approach must be workable. We believe it must respect international law, which is why the Government scrapped the partnership with Rwanda. The Opposition, and particularly their Front-Bench spokesperson, the hon. Member for Stockton West (Matt Vickers), have been acting as if the Rwanda deal was somehow a deterrent, but from the day it was agreed to to the day it was scrapped, more than 84,000 people crossed the channel in small boats. That does not sound like a deterrent. Since it was scrapped, the number of small boat arrivals has gone down 24% compared to the same period last year, and down 40% compared to the same period in 2022. If it was a deterrent, it worked in an extremely odd way.

[Nick Timothy]

Can the Minister explain why, in calculating the figure the Home Secretary presented to the House of Commons—as part of the claim that scrapping the retrospective element of the duty to remove would save £700 million a year for 10 years—the impact assessment assumes absolutely no deportations to Rwanda at all? In a letter to me, the Home Office permanent secretary said that the cost of removing people to Rwanda is included in the number.

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I have not seen the letter to the hon. Gentleman, but I am happy to write to him if he wants a further explanation. We must remember that in its three years in existence, the Rwanda scheme cost hundreds of millions of pounds. We were going to pay £150,000 per person deported to Rwanda; that was part of the agreement. In those three years, only four people were sent to Kigali, and they went voluntarily, so I do not think the Conservatives’ view that the Rwanda scheme was an answer to all their problems and prayers was borne out by the experience of it. Scrapping it has not made a blind bit of difference to some people’s desire to get into this country.