Border Security: Collaboration

Nick Timothy Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right that the only way to deal with this issue is not through gimmicks—we have seen those fail time and again—or through the kind of posturing that the Conservative party continues with. It will be dealt with only through partnership, hard work and graft.

We have set up the Border Security Command, put in place new agreements with countries not only in Europe but beyond, such as Iraq, and strengthened our law enforcement capabilities—£150 million is going into the Border Security Command over the next two years. We are also getting on with returns and enforcement, which substantially increased this summer as a result of the actions we have taken to get them back on track after the system’s previous failings.

People are fed up with gimmicks, and we need to take a serious approach to get a grip on this issue.

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

The Home Secretary has not answered very many questions today, so can she answer this very clear question: which metric should we use, and by which date, to allow us to judge whether the Government have succeeded in smashing the gangs?

[Yvette Cooper]

I think everyone will be clear that no one should be making these dangerous boat crossings that undermine our border security and put lives at risk. We need to pursue the criminal gang networks that spread across Europe and beyond, which is why we welcome last week’s arrests in Germany as a result of the French-led operation supported by the National Crime Agency. We will continue to support and accelerate this work so that we can take stronger action against the criminal gangs.

Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill

Nick Timothy Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

What has been striking about the debate so far is the extent of cross-party consensus on this matter. My worry is that the Bill contains a set of proposals that we might be supporting because they are something that we deem possible to do, whereas we may be neglecting some things that are harder to do. In the inquiry into the bombing, several aspects of the story were very concerning, from the way the asylum system worked through to the Prevent programme. While 90% of MI5’s counter-terrorism casework is Islamist, the latest data shows that the number of Prevent referrals for young people suspected of Islamist radicalisation has fallen from 3,706 in 2016-17 to only 781 in 2022-23. As a former police officer, does the hon. Gentleman agree that we have to do something to ensure that Prevent is properly targeted at the real threats we face?

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[Chris Murray]

Absolutely. There is a small element of burden in the Bill, but it is light-touch and proportionate, and the alternative scenario is significantly more burdensome. In my own city of Edinburgh, the impact of a terrorist attack and of people not feeling secure in the aftermath could be destructive not just to the lives affected by the attack, but to the whole economy on which our city is based, which is event-focused. It is right for us to draw that distinction, and to seek to get the balance exactly right.

[Nick Timothy]

The hon. Gentleman is making an eloquent speech about the “protect” element of the counter-terrorism strategy. It is clear from the Manchester attack inquiry report that the asylum system is a big part of the story.

Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem—who planned the attack and prepared the explosives, and was as guilty of the attack as Salman—were born in Britain to Libyan asylum seeker parents. Their father, Ramadan Abedi, was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an Islamist militia. He was granted asylum in this country, but travelled back and forth between Britain and Libya throughout that time, which is a story that we often hear about people who are granted asylum here. Given the number of people who come here illegally and across the channel, whom we have no ability to investigate and on whom we cannot make checks, how does the hon. Gentleman think we might reform the asylum system to prevent such things from happening again?

[Chris Murray]

I am struggling to understand quite how that falls within the scope of this debate, but it is important to discuss the issue of how we deal with terrorism. As we have seen in the history of this country, terrorist attacks can be both foreign and domestic. They can be homegrown, or they can come from overseas. I have talked about the need to prepare for an attack before it happens, so that mitigations can be introduced. They can be long term, which means looking at where the threat is emanating from, or they can be immediately in advance of an attack, which means introducing security measures. My argument, however, is that the benefit of the Bill relates to what happens after the attack has taken place. We need to help the smaller venues that now find themselves within the scope of terrorist attacks to prepare for those attacks. It is not a question of who committed the offence, but a question of how they are prepared to deal with that event.

Police Reform

Nick Timothy Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. High streets are the lifeblood of our local communities. We want to ensure they are as safe as possible, and that businesses are not suffering losses through shop thefts and assaults on their workers. Our package of measures will deal with antisocial behaviour, put in place the neighbourhood policing guarantee, allow new prosecutions under the legislation we will introduce about assaults on retail workers, and get rid of the £200 threshold for shop theft cases to go forward. One approach will not solve the problems, so we will ensure we have a whole package of measures to make high streets, neighbourhoods and communities safer and to allow businesses to thrive. We need businesses to thrive so that they can pay their taxes, and we can invest that money back into public services.

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

Two years ago, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner said that 3,000 officers were not deployable for reasons of physical fitness, and 500 officers were not deployable for reasons of misconduct allegations: that is more than 10% of the Met’s headcount. Will the Minister tell us the latest numbers? Does she plan to make it easier for chief constables, as they have requested, to fire underperforming officers?

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I can write to the hon. Gentleman with the figures, but clearly, there have been issues with the Metropolitan police over the last 14 years and I know that the current commissioner has raised concerns about the procedures for getting rid of police officers.

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[Nick Timothy]

You’re in charge now.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I have been the Policing Minister for five months, compared with the 14 years that those on his side of the House were responsible for policing. I did not see any action then on dealing with the issues that he raises with me.

I can guarantee that this Government will be looking at the workforce and making sure that we recruit the right people into policing and vet police officers throughout their careers. Because of the shocking cases that we have seen—David Carrick and others—we will take action, which we set out in our manifesto, to have a workforce that is fit for purpose. I know the hon. Gentleman is very new in this place, but he needs to remember the legacy that his Government and his party delivered to us when we arrived in July.

Asylum Seekers: Hotel Accommodation

Nick Timothy Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I agree that it is about doing the day job effectively and efficiently, and if it cannot be done effectively and efficiently, redesigning it so that it can be, rather than having huge rows with the international community, threatening to leave the European convention on human rights, and setting up a parallel scheme that was not agreed by anybody, which spent vast amounts of money and ground the system to a halt. That is not the way to achieve success in this area. Considering the use of a wave machine to somehow send boats back to France just about sums up the reality of the Conservatives’ attitude to what is a difficult situation.

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

The Prime Minister has pledged to smash the gangs, and the Minister appears to be very confident in her position, so can she tell the House which metric we should use to judge whether the gangs have been smashed and the channel crossings ended, and by what date that will happen?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

The Conservative party allowed—

[Nick Timothy]

Can you answer the question?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I will answer in my own way. The Conservative party allowed channel crossings to be industrialised. We are now facing a very sophisticated set of international supply chains that need international co-operation to be taken down and disrupted. We have established the border security command, we have announced the investment of £150 million, and we are getting 100 additional investigators to look at this matter. We managed to achieve a very significant arrest of an offender just the other week, which will begin to degrade the capacity of international organised criminal gangs to smuggle people on to our shores. The hon. Gentleman will see when the numbers start to go down, as will the rest of us.

Oral Answers to Questions

Nick Timothy Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson]

That is an important point, and we are actively exploring all ways that we can improve guidance around redaction, streamline current processes, make better use of technology, and ultimately reduce unnecessary burdens on the police and prosecutors, so that they can get on with their primary task of keeping the public safe and putting away criminals.

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

The Home Secretary told the House that by ending the retrospective element of the duty to remove she was saving £7 billion in 10 years. The impact assessment assumes that all those subject to the duty would have remained in Britain at a cost to the Home Office, but in his letter to me her permanent secretary said that the sum included the cost of sending the same migrants to Rwanda. I wrote to the Home Secretary about that on 1 September and I have raised it with the Minister for Immigration in Westminster Hall, but I have not had an answer. Can she explain that double counting, and if she cannot, will she apologise for using that statistic in the House of Commons?

[Yvette Cooper]

As the hon. Gentleman will know, the impact assessment is provided by the Home Office, and what we inherited from the previous Government was not simply the incredibly costly Rwanda programme, but also the retrospective element of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, which was so damaging that the shadow Home Secretary, when he was in the job, did not implement many of the measures. That retrospective element has cost the Home Office hundreds of millions of pounds, and those costs would go forward into the future.

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.

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[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.