Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Robert Buckland]

I agree with my right hon. Friend that we are not just another public agency. This is Parliament and this place has a particular status, position, responsibility and privilege—that word privilege that he and I know and cherish so much in its true sense—that means we are absolutely at the core of our democracy and our constitution. But it is also our responsibility to make sure that the legislation we pass works. I know that he and my hon. Friends who are supporting the amendments want this law to work—I absolutely accept that—but I say in all candour and frankness that I genuinely think the amendments they have tabled will make it less likely. I do not say that with any pleasure; I say it with a heavy heart. History has taught us that where, despite good intention, we end up being too expansive and we overreach, the check and the balance that exists in our constitution will then apply. All that we will do is end up having the sort of arguments about the constitution—not arcane to me, but arcane to many people—which, while important, do not solve the problem, and do not deal with the issue that is facing us as a people.

That is why I urge the Government today to ensure that the intention in the treaty becomes a reality, that Rwanda does what it says it is going to do so that we can avoid refoulement, and that we focus on the practicalities and also avoid more unnecessary legal clash. If I may paraphrase Matthew Arnold, ignorant armies clashing by night is something that we as Conservatives should seek to avoid at all costs.

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

Let me begin by declaring my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which refers to the help that I receive from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy project, and my position as co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on migration.

I agree with much of what was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) about the process involved in the Bill and the way in which we are debating it today. This is our third immigration Bill in less than two years, and throughout that time Ministers and Back Benchers alike have engaged in progressively more inflammatory rhetoric about refugees without addressing any of the real problems in our asylum and migration system.

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[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Many of the amendments relate to whether or not Rwanda is a safe country. Would we not be in a different place if there were a much broader range of safe and legal routes? We would not see small boats crossing the channel, and there would be no need for us to discuss whether or not Rwanda is safe, which is not helpful to Rwanda or to us.

[Olivia Blake]

I entirely agree. That is an important point, and we are struggling to get much sense out of the Government on it. I have asked repeatedly whether safe and legal routes are available to people trying to flee from parts of the world where genocide has been declared, but unfortunately the answer has always been “The safe and legal routes that exist are all that we will offer.” I do not think that that is good enough, and I think we need to have that conversation about safe and legal routes.

The problems that I have listed are the real, human problems. That is the real cost to human life and wellbeing that the Government’s “hostile environment” policy brings. This Bill is another example of Ministers’ doubling down on that approach, and the amendments tabled by Conservative Back Benchers—I believe they are amendments 10, 19, 20, 21, 22, 56 and 57—take it even further.

[Tim Loughton]

As the hon. Lady knows, I agree with her that we need to extend safe and legal routes—that is why I tabled my amendment previously, which I hope the Government will honour—but does she not also acknowledge that, even if there were safe and legal routes that could be used by legitimate refugees fleeing from genuine violence and oppression, the bogus asylum seekers who do not meet those criteria would still use people smugglers? That is why we need to be able to deter and clamp down on them so that they do not set foot on our shores.

[Olivia Blake]

We need the safe and legal routes first. The rates at which people are accepted as having a reasonable claim and are given a form of leave to remain in the UK are very high: in recent years, the rates at which applications are accepted have been as high as 67%. I do not believe that a large number of people are coming here illegally without good claims. Indeed, I think the opposite is true, given the evidence from our own systems.

[Tim Loughton]

That is an interesting point, but how does the hon. Lady explain the fact that France receives more asylum applications than we do but rejects twice as many? What are we doing differently?

[Olivia Blake]

I would hope that our system has the trust of its politicians and is robust enough to ensure that we are making the right decisions whenever possible, although I still believe that there should be an appeals process within that system. I cannot say that the system always gets it right, and that is certainly borne out by the casework that I have seen. It is more complicated than saying, “This action will reduce this and that action will increase that.” It is a very complicated system, and the most obvious thing to say about it is that in the past few years and months the second or third highest number of people arriving here in small boats has been people from Afghanistan. We are also seeing people fleeing from Syria and from all sorts of other complex and difficult situations at the moment. That does not take away from the fact that it is not necessarily about the nation those people come from and that it is also about their individual circumstances. I have spoken a lot about the rights of LGBT people and disabled people seeking asylum and how we need to make sure that any system maintains that individual view of an individual going through our system. That is a lesson that should be learned from the Windrush review.

At its core, the hostile environment is a policy designed to make life as uncomfortable as possible for everyone who comes here and to prevent anyone from accessing the support that international law says is rightfully theirs, and now the Government are proposing to outsource what little responsibility they have taken by offloading their obligations and offshoring refugees against their will. It is no wonder that they are recklessly declaring Rwanda as safe, despite the known risks. As the shadow Minister pointed out, since the Government signed their deportation deal, six people from Rwanda have been granted asylum here in the UK. Torture persists there, along with continued risks of refoulement to third countries, which is the reason I support amendments 35 and 37.

Human Rights Watch’s reports on Rwanda as part of its World Report series published in 2021, 2022 and 2023 all include examples of torture in Rwanda. In the UN Human Rights Council’s periodic review of Rwanda published in January 2021, it was the UK Government who criticised Rwanda for

“extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture”.

The country has a continued history of breaching obligations under the refugee convention, and between 2020 and 2022 the UNHCR found that Afghan, Syrian and Yemeni asylum seekers had 100% rejection rate in Rwanda. Those are statistics that I am sure people would find shocking given our granting rate. It is common for discrimination and abuse to be faced by LGBTQ+ people in Rwanda. Same-sex marriage is prohibited, and LGBTQ+ people are not protected from discrimination by any specific legislation there. All this makes a mockery of clause 2 of the Bill.

Ministers can continue to use ad hoc Bills such as this one to paper over the cracks in their asylum policy, but the truth is that the foundations of their approach are completely rotten. Rather than chasing headlines, it is time they thought again and built an asylum system that puts respect for international law and basic human dignity first.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Immigration is quite possibly the most important issue facing this Government or indeed any Government in Europe. It is the issue of our age, and mass immigration, whether legal or illegal, is undermining trust. This debate has to be held against the backdrop of the overwhelming numbers coming into our country. Sir Roger, you and I entered Parliament on the same day in 1983. During that year, net legal migration was only about 17,000. It is now 600,000. This debate about small boats is held against the backdrop of this huge influx into our society, on which the British people have not been consulted. It is changing our society and undermining the work ethic of our own people. Too many people are languishing on benefits. Perhaps some of our public services are not paying adequate salaries. We are bringing more and more people into this country, whereas we should be encouraging and training our own people to work.

The whole small boats crisis is made much more toxic by that debate. When people say, “Well, 40,000 people a year isn’t a great deal compared with the sort of numbers coming across the Mediterranean”, we have to see it in terms of that overall debate. Unless the Government can sort this out and actually stop the boats, which was the commitment made by the Prime Minister, it will be extraordinarily politically damaging to the Conservative Government and also damaging to the public’s perception of and belief in democracy. When the Prime Minister says he wants to stop the boats, he should stop the boats. That is why, tonight and tomorrow, I will support the amendments tabled most ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). I tabled amendments 56 and 57, which I will explain in a moment.

Against this backdrop, we have an extraordinary and absurd situation in which people are arriving in Calais having travelled through an entirely safe country. There is no threat to their human rights. They may find it difficult to speak French, or they may not want to learn to speak French, and they may not be able to find a job, but they are in an entirely safe country. They are putting their life at risk—even this week, there has been an appalling tragedy—and we are encouraging the most horrible criminal gangs to get involved in this trade. They then arrive here and claim asylum.

Unbelievably, we are putting them up comfortably in hotels, which other European countries do not do. Even more extraordinarily, and I will not labour this point because I have made it many times before, such is the crisis in our hotels that the Government are now spending tens of millions of pounds on trying to convert former military bases such as RAF Scampton in my constituency—by the way, we have now been arguing about RAF Scampton for nine months and not a single migrant has arrived there. The court cases are still ongoing.

If we put ourselves in the migrants’ place, we can see that the draw factor to this country is extraordinarily high. First, we speak English. Secondly, unlike in France or Germany, they will be put in a comfortable hotel. Thirdly, they are given benefits. Fourthly, there is probably a 95% chance that they will be given asylum at the end of the process. If they have come from a hell-hole like Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, why would they not want to take that risk? We must be mugs, frankly, and the rest of Europe must be laughing at us.