Summer Adjournment

Paul Sweeney Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is nice to round off my first year in Parliament with a recap of some of the highlights that I have been able to contribute to as a new Member. I think that any Member would agree that the most satisfying aspect of our job is seeing the real benefit we can have for our constituents’ lives, particularly in casework. That has made a real impression on me in the past year, in particular when it comes to dealing with the hostile environment policy that this Government have been foisting on some of the most vulnerable people in our communities.

My constituency has a relatively large migrant population, and some cases have struck me as particularly damning. It took a total of 18 years for the Government to grant the Kamil family, who are Iraqi-Kurdish refugees, leave to remain as a refugee family. They have spent their lives in limbo. Indeed, the youngest was denied the opportunity to go to university because the immigration status the family faced was insecure, and the eldest was unable to secure work at an engineering company, despite graduating with a first-class engineering degree from Aberdeen University.

These are highly motivated citizens who have so much to contribute to our society and our economy. We have to recognise the benefits that many of these people can deliver for our country, having overcome such terrible hardship and usually fled some of the most war-torn and desperate situations in the world. We cannot treat them with contempt any more. We have to recognise the value they bring to our country. I hope we can recognise that in a debate in the House in the forthcoming parliamentary term.

Another case was Duc Nguyen, who was not so much a refugee but was trafficked to this country from Vietnam. He was arrested and put in prison for being forced to work in a cannabis factory, released and then detained by the Home Office, even though its own guidance says that it should not detain trafficking victims. The Home Office recognised that. We need to have a debate about how the Home Office puts its policies into practice, particularly in relation to detaining victims of human trafficking. That was another case that struck me as particularly difficult.

I was very pleased to welcome a constituent, Giorgi Kakava, to the House yesterday, and he sat in the Gallery to watch a debate. It was great to bring him to the heart of our democracy, given that he has been under so much stress in the past few months. His mother tragically died in February this year, leaving him an orphan. He is 10 years old and has lived in this country since he was three, yet he was threatened with deportation by the Home Office. Luckily, after my intervention in Prime Minister’s questions, the Home Office decided to grant him temporary leave to remain, but we have to continue to fight for him to be given permanent leave to remain. He speaks with a Scottish accent. He is one of us, and he is at school with his friends in Glasgow. The notion that he could be deported to Georgia—a country that is alien to him—is totally absurd.

Those are some of the absurdities that we see in our immigration system. I hope that we can address them in the forthcoming term, to re-establish confidence and dignity in our immigration system and uphold British values.

We have to address the Government’s industrial strategy, particularly in relation to renewables. Gaia-Wind, a company in my constituency that is a world leader in small-scale renewable energy, nearly went into liquidation because of the Government’s failure to introduce a transition from the feed-in tariff for small-scale renewable energy. That needs to be addressed, and it is irritating and extremely frustrating that the Government continue to leave companies that offer so much potential for wealth creation in our country in limbo.

I am worried about the roll-out of universal credit in my constituency in September. We have already seen failures when it comes to personal independence payment assessments. The level of appeals is absurd, and 71% of appeals are successful, which shows how broken the system is. We have to deal with that. I am worried about the transition from disability living allowance to PIP in my constituency, given that there have been 1.6 million underpayments. That shows that there is a severe drop-off in entitlement, which we need to address.

I have been asked by my constituent Daniel Haggerty to raise the issue of social housing. Last year, the number of social rented houses built was probably the lowest on record since the second world war. We need to seriously address that, and Labour’s commitment to increase the number of social houses built and increase our social house building programme to the largest in 30 years is laudable.

I want to address the industrial strategy in this country. In an announcement sneaked out today, the Government have said that they will delay the procurement of the Type 31e frigate. We have already seen disruption to the shipbuilding programme in the UK from changing the Type 26 programme to a Type 31 build split, and we now to have a delay to that programme. As a matter of urgency, we need to address this and provide certainty for our shipbuilding industry. As someone who grew up around it, I know what that means. In the 1990s, yards competed against each other for contracts—drip fed—which meant insecure employment, disinvestment and a lack of competitiveness. We need to get into a virtuous cycle for our industrial benefit, which means having highly secure jobs. The Government must get a grip on the Type 31 programme as a matter of urgency, which is why I look forward to debating it in the forthcoming term.