Paul Blomfield
Main Page: Paul Blomfield (Labour - Sheffield Central)Department Debates - View all Paul Blomfield's debates with the Home Office
(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Priti Patel
Well, I do not think I have much to add. My hon. Friend has absolutely made the case for voting for that Bill and for the reforms that we are bringing in, and the Labour party is behaving like a computer that says no all the time.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
The Home Secretary has this afternoon put the Nationality and Borders Bill at the very centre of her plans, but her Department’s own impact assessment cautioned that
“evidence supporting the effectiveness of this approach is limited”,
and it went on to say that some of its measures
“could encourage these cohorts to attempt riskier means of entering the UK.”
Will she not accept the evidence of her own Department, and abandon plans that seem more designed to provide headlines than a solution?
Priti Patel
Absolutely wrong. That is the wrong characterisation, quite frankly, of the Nationality and Borders Bill and of the new plan for immigration, which has a range of measures, including a one-stop appeal process, the ability for claims to be processed in a different way and heard offshore, and, importantly, the ability to ensure that individuals who are fleeing persecution are given the help and the support they need. I find it absolutely extraordinary that Member after Member on the Opposition Benches stands up and just says, on the one hand, “You’re not doing enough as a Government to stop illegal migration,” while on the other hand in effect saying, “What you are doing is not good enough, and we are voting against it.” I have made it quite clear from the onset not only that this problem will take time to fix—
Priti Patel
If the hon. Member would like to listen to my response, rather than yelling at me—he is not even speaking in a low voice, just yelling at me—there is no silver bullet, and the only solution is whole-scale reform. That whole-scale reform has to address pull factors, it has to ensure that we have safe and legal routes, it has to have a differentiated approach, it has to make sure that we can house people in the right kind of way and it has to ensure that we have the infrastructure in the United Kingdom to support people on resettlement pathways. Currently, our plan and the Bill will deliver that, whereas under the current broken system, which has not been reformed for 20 years, we are not able to deliver our asylum system in a fair way. The various pulls are actually bringing people to the country illegally, and we do need to stop that.