Nationality and Borders Bill

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Robert Buckland]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that offer, which I accept with alacrity. I would like to bring colleagues such as the noble Baroness Stroud, who did so much work on this issue, to meet him and officials to look into the detail of the volunteering question in particular. While we encourage asylum seekers to volunteer and they get reasonable expenses, even payments in kind for the volunteering they do are prohibited. There is a real issue there that is preventing many people from making a contribution to the local community, as I have seen for myself in Swindon.

We know the reality that many people under that pressure go off the radar. They end up being exploited, or even bound into modern-day slavery, and we lose them from the entire system. The effect of creating a right to work could deal a hammer blow to that type of exploitation.

I therefore welcome the comments of my hon. Friend the Minister and urge the Government, in the spirit of co-operation, to look carefully at how we can do what other countries such as Denmark have started to do in allowing some asylum seekers the right to work. The Migration Advisory Committee has said there is no meaningful evidence to suggest that doing so would create a pull factor. The question is begged: if that is a pull factor, why do we have small boats now?

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

I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I have help from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy Project for my work in this area.

I have said throughout the debates in Parliament that this Bill is divisive. As my constituents reach across borders to help and house those fleeing the war in Ukraine, this Government are sowing division by making an insidious distinction between “good” and “bad” refugees—a division that we should all completely reject. That is why I rise today to support amendments 4 to 9, especially amendment 6.

Clause 11 makes a totally spurious division between group 1 and group 2 refugees that flies in the face of the 1951 refugee convention. The convention clearly states that refugees, wherever they come from,

“shall enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination.”

The Government know that there are no visa or pre-entry clearances for someone wishing to claim refuge. There is no such thing as an illegal refugee in international law, yet that is exactly what the new group 2 category attempts to establish. All clause 11 seeks to do is lazily turn far-right talking points about asylum seekers and refugees into legislation, without seriously thinking through any of the consequences for the people involved.

For example, currently people fleeing war can apply for humanitarian protection leave. The protection grants them five years in the UK, access to the NHS and other public funds, an option to apply later for indefinite leave to remain and the right to work. However, the Government are scrapping humanitarian protection as we know it and aligning it instead with the new group 2 status, meaning regular visa reviews every two and a half years compared with every five, no recourse to public funds, no right to work, restricted family visa rights and no route to indefinite leave to remain. That is something I think many in this House have missed, and I hope they will reflect on it.

It is remarkable that in the middle of the Ukraine crisis, as thousands of people join the effort to support people from Ukraine, the Government are actually proposing that people running from the horrors of war should have fewer rights to come here. Those rights were brought in through an EU directive that became British law, and now the Government are using the smokescreen of this Bill to remove them, all by aligning them with a faulty two-tier refugee system.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very interesting speech. Does she agree that the UN refugee convention was about our common humanity? I have heard a lot of talk about a “great country”, but what we see now from this Government is an attempt to split humanity into two tiers. That undermines the concept of human rights and of there being one, sole, universal understanding of what it is to be a human being. This Government are putting humanity into categories, and history tells us that that is a slippery slope and fundamentally wrong.

[Olivia Blake]

I agree—it is fundamentally wrong. That is why we should ensure that clause 11 is not included in this Bill. Clause 11 is out of tune with the hundreds of thousands of people who have come forward to help Ukrainian refugees. It is an affront to the 1951 refugee convention, and I urge hon. Members to reject it and to reject this Bill.