Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Richard Graham Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member is totally right. I have now heard of a series of failed asylum cases in which people want to return to their home countries and have applied to the Home Office to be able to do so, and the Home Office has told them that they will have to wait six months because it is so incapable of getting a grip. In the case that the hon. Member has raised, somebody has been waiting for 12 months to be able to return to their home country. There has been a 50% drop in returns compared with the last Labour Government, because the Tories always go after gimmicks and they never get a grip. There are 40,000 people whose asylum applications have failed and who have not been returned, and 17,000 people the Government have just lost—they do not even know where they are. It was their policy to let the backlog soar and put 56,000 people in hotels. This is the Tories’ asylum crisis, and they are failing to fix it.

The Prime Minister has made this legislation—this policy—the Tories’ flagship. It is extortionately expensive, and it is failing. Ministers have repeatedly tried to hide the cost: just 10 days ago, the Home Secretary was trying to suggest that it was only £140 million. It has already cost twice that for nobody to be sent, under a scheme that Home Office officials have described as unenforceable and at high risk of fraud. Those hundreds of millions of pounds could now be £400 million, and I would like whichever immigration Minister winds up today’s debate to explain whether this is now, in fact, a £400 million plan. That is hundreds of millions of pounds that could have been spent on thousands more police to boost our border security and smash the criminal gangs. It could have been used to clear the backlog entirely, end hotel use and save us a further couple of billion pounds, or train 1,000 doctors or 4,500 nurses.

Of course, if the Government manage to send people to Rwanda, they will have to spend further money, probably around £200,000 per person—perhaps the Minister could also confirm that figure. That is more than twice as much as it costs here in the UK, so can the Government confirm that by the time they have finished, close to half a billion pounds will have been paid to Rwanda for just a few hundred people, around 1% of those arriving in the country? The Court of Appeal has said that there is only capacity in Rwanda for around 100 people; even the judge who agreed with the Government said that talk of thousands is “political hyperbole”. The asylum system in Rwanda is also limited: it has only processed an average of 100 people a year for the past three years, so at most, it will be a few hundred people. Some 56,000 people are in hotels, 100,000 applied for asylum last year and 160,000 are waiting in the backlog, so potentially less than 0.1% of those people will be covered by the scheme. It is no wonder that the permanent secretary said yesterday:

“We don’t have evidence of a deterrent effect”.

The Government are now on their third new law in two years. The Home Secretary said that the Bill means

“if you enter Britain illegally, you will be detained and swiftly removed…to a safe third country, such as Rwanda”—[Official Report, 7 March 2023; Vol. 729, c. 152.]—

except that was not the current Home Secretary, but his predecessor, talking about the last Bill: the Illegal Migration Act 2023, passed four months ago. The main section of that Act has not actually been enacted, because the Government know it will not work. The Home Secretary has also said that the Bill will

“deter illegal entry into the UK”—[Official Report, 24 March 2021; Vol. 691, c. 922.]

and that anyone who arrives illegally will be sent

“to the country they arrived from or a safe third country”,

but that also was not this Home Secretary or this Bill: it was his predecessor but four, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), when she introduced the main provisions of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, passed 18 months ago. The main section of that Act has been revoked because it made things worse. The first Act was largely revoked because it made things worse, and the second one is not yet in force because the Government know it will not work, so forgive us for not believing a single word about the Bill that is before us today. We have heard it all before.

When he responds to the debate, the immigration Minister should explain what is going to happen about clause 2 of the Illegal Migration Act, which requires the Home Secretary to remove everyone to Rwanda or elsewhere if they arrived after July. The Government have put that provision on hold, apparently until after Rwanda gets off the ground, but even if they do manage to do that quickly, more than 15,000 people will have arrived in the country on small boats since then, all of whom the Government have now promised to send to Rwanda. If Rwanda is only going to take a few hundred people a year, it is going to take the Government over 100 years to send those 15,000 people who have arrived since they passed the last law. It will take them 10 years to send everyone who has arrived in the last fortnight alone. In the meantime, while they focus on this gimmick, they are failing to get a grip and they are failing to bring down the backlog. Instead, we have people in asylum hotels at the taxpayers’ expense at the astronomical cost of £8 million a day.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I have listened with interest for almost 15 minutes to hear what the shadow Home Secretary’s solution is to this incredibly difficult problem. She rightly refers to the fact that we have asylum seekers in hotels at considerable cost, and to the considerable difficulty when it comes to their distribution to our local authorities for all of us as constituency MPs, but I have not heard a single word about recognising that the Government are coming up with a solution that, while it may not work completely, may have a deterrent effect and may be a welcome step in a series of steps to help reduce illegal immigration into our country. Does she not recognise that?

[Yvette Cooper]

Well, £400 million for a failing plan is a hell of a lot of money. What we need to do is clear the backlog, and Labour has set out a proposal for 1,000 new caseworkers to clear the backlog and for a new returns unit to make sure that, instead of this 50% collapse in returns, we actually return people who have no right to be here. Do that—clear the asylum backlog and end the asylum hotels—and that will save the taxpayer £2 billion. Instead of throwing away hundreds of millions of pounds, it will save the taxpayer billions of pounds.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I would say it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), who served with me on the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, but he rehashed quite a lot of what has been said from the Opposition Benches, with various misunderstandings and inaccuracies. He had his moment of fun trying to describe different groups of colleagues on the Government Benches, but let me pull him back to something that he will recognise, as I think all colleagues in the House will.

I recently had a conversation with a distinguished recently retired UN senior official who was previously the British ambassador in several countries in Africa. He not only painted for me, but described for me factually the statistical possibilities of what is going on in that great continent at the moment. He described vividly the combination of civil wars, mismanagement, instability, insecurity, climate change challenges and food shortages that are affecting millions of people in Africa. Of course, we know that has added to the incredible level of insecurity in the middle east and, indeed, further east from there.

All of this amounts to one of the great challenges for democracy in our time. We are dealing with a huge issue that will get bigger, and we are all going to be stretched in our answers to those challenges. It is not just us in the United Kingdom; as we know, there are issues in the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, France, Denmark—you name it, all our European neighbours are wrestling with similar challenges. Therefore, it is simply not enough for Opposition Members to point at various things that they do not like about this Bill without really considering what a constructive alternative might look like.

The hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) said earlier that immigration should be looked at as an opportunity to be seized, not a problem to be managed. He is partly right, but he would be more convincing if county after county in Scotland were taking more asylum seekers and putting up their hands to the Government of the United Kingdom in order to take more, because the truth is that it is a challenge to be managed.

We need a practical response, because we do not outsource immigration to people smugglers. The point of stopping the boats, and the point of the Bill, is to play a trailblazing role, not just for us but for other countries. On balance, I believe that we will see more such agreements, and that this will not be the only one. While I have always taken the view that none of us can be sure that the Rwanda scheme will work in terms of the number of asylum seekers who will transfer to Kigali, we should keep an open mind and not assume, to quote Labour’s amendment, that the Bill

“will not work to tackle people smuggling gangs, end small boat crossings or achieve the core purposes of the Bill…whilst applying to less than one per cent of those who claim asylum”.

That is fundamentally wrong, and we can show so in a number of different ways.

First, will the Bill actually act as a deterrent? Migration Watch says it will be a powerful deterrent if illegal migrants are swiftly and continually sent to Rwanda. How many would we be able to send? The Rwandan spokesperson said himself only a few days ago that the country is

“ready, and willing, to take in as many people as the UK is able to send”.

All those Opposition Members talked about 100 or 200 people going there, but that is not at all the potential of the scheme. As other people have mentioned, Rwanda is already hosting 130,000 asylum seekers and the UNHCR has 1,700 Libyans there, so clearly the numbers are not the fundamental issue with the proposal.

We have had a lot of red-herring soundbites—“can’t work”, “won’t work”, “unprecedented”—but there are precedents. In fact, the Labour party knows that better than anyone, because in 2001 the Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), was in a very similar position in not being able to confirm to the ECHR that the Government were necessarily compliant in a proposal that she was putting forward. We know that the Blair Government talked to Tanzania about something similar; in fact, the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 built on the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004. So there are precedents and reasons to believe that the Bill might work. It will be awkward, and it is an issue that we and many other Governments will have to tackle, but the most important thing is that we get behind the Bill and see it through safely.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Richard Graham Excerpts

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

[Stephen Kinnock]

Of course Parliament is sovereign, and of course we in this place are sent here to make laws, but we must make those laws with restraint; we must make them while respecting the judicial function. The separation of powers is fundamental to our identity as a liberal democracy, so although the hon. Gentleman very often talks about the sovereignty of Parliament, it is vital that his comments are always founded on the principle of separation of powers and the checks and balances that it gives us.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Just to tease out a little more Labour policy on the specific issue that the hon. Gentleman referred to, is he ruling out any consideration of this House determining to overturn the wrongful convictions of hundreds of sub-postmasters simply because that would set a new precedent in the relationship between this House and the courts?

--- Later in debate ---

If I may digress for a nanosecond, the point about the House of Lords Judicial Committee is that it was a body of Parliament making law. That was an elegant solution and response to our unwritten constitution. The same goes for the office that I used to hold. What a mess the previous Labour Government made of reform to the office of Lord Chancellor, which was the embodiment of the checks and balances that we have in our constitution. It is a bit of cod philosophy that is overused and is not part of our system, but I will go on to qualify that in an important way.

[Richard Graham]

I want to bring my right hon. and learned Friend back to the amendments. Does he agree that between the absolute conviction of the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) and the Opposition that the Bill cannot ever work, and the absolute conviction of my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) that it can work only with his amendments, there is a landing space where we can deliver something that will make a difference and will act as a deterrent, without getting rid of all the individual rights in our domestic and international law? That is what we should aim to achieve.

[Sir Robert Buckland]

My hon. Friend puts the point very well. There is a landing space for this policy. I disagree with Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition and their leader when he said that he would not support the Rwanda policy even if it worked. Frankly, that is an extreme position and not one that chimes at all with what the British people want, because they want solutions to these problems. This party and this Government are coming up with solutions. They might be novel or untested, but at least we are working on it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Robert Buckland]

My right hon. Friend is right. He is building on the frustration that I had. That is not a criticism of Ministers. The way in which the Home Office was working did not seem to allow the expedition that was needed. I know that he and others have done a lot of work to improve that—by scaling up the number of officials dealing with cases and creating a sense of urgency with a wartime emergency approach that is entirely right—but I can tell him that back in 2020 I was deeply frustrated not to see a decrease in the backlogs, bearing in mind that in other areas we were actually making a difference and taking at least some benefit from the awful covid crisis. The challenge facing my hon. and learned Friend the Minister is significant and we should not pretend otherwise.

[Richard Graham]

The practice of Government, certainly over the last 14 years, has been that where there were bottlenecks—we saw them during the pandemic in the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, the Passport Office and the Home Office—the answer to those questions was for Ministers to energise that particular department, recruit more people, allocate more resources and get the backlogs down. If it can be done in all those places, there is surely no reason why it cannot be done in this hypothetical instance of lots of extraneous claims by people to avoid extradition to Rwanda, given the very narrow scope allowed in the Bill.

[Sir Robert Buckland]

Where there is a will there is a way. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. I do not want to detain the Committee unduly lengthily today—some would perhaps say uncharacteristically, but I really do not—[Laughter.] Self-deprecation takes you only so far in this place! I yield to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) in that department.

To conclude, the Privacy International Supreme Court case from about three or four years ago is a warning. Where Governments, with good intention, try to overreach and wholly exclude a particular judicial review approach, they will often fail. In that case, we saw an inevitable consequence of a line of thinking that has gone back in our law for about 50 or so years since the Anisminic case. We have to be alive to that reality. We should not put the courts in a position where we end up with what was a highly contested case with dissenting judgments. In the end, it gives us a very important guide on how carefully we need to approach these matters.

I will not pretend that I can ever love notwithstanding clauses. I do not like them, because they create all sorts of internal conflicts. Those conflicts are not necessarily in international law—I am less interested in that; I am more interested in conflict in our own domestic law—but anything that this House does that is ambiguous, contradictory, self-contradictory or unclear serves only to draw the courts further into the realm of politics, where none of them ever want to go.

We do not have a constitutional court in this country and I hope we never, ever see one. Because of our unwritten constitution, we are able as a Parliament to legislate as we wish. But—this is the qualification—I said on Second Reading that the principle of comity, that mutual respect that needs to exist between the arms of the constitution, is one that means we need restraint and to take care when we legislate. However grave the situation might be—previous generations faced wartime challenges—we must remember that in legislating in this place, we do not protect ourselves out of the very freedoms we cherish.

At some point there will not be a Conservative Government sitting on the Treasury Benches, but a Government of another hue. I hope, having been in my party for nearly 40 years—I am much older than I look—that we do not see that day, but a day will come when we, as an Opposition, will be worried about an overweening socialist Government that will try to impose their will through the will of Parliament and will not show the restraint that we expect a democratically elected Government to show. That is why the challenges we faced during Brexit were exceptional. I do not think that, despite the maelstrom we all went through and some of the things we had to do to get that done, we should be seeking to normalise them now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh]

They may not concoct it; it may be entirely true—we do not know. However, what we all know is true is that every asylum seeker who arrives in Dover will say that they cannot be sent to Rwanda because of their own personal history, and every single one of us would do the same thing.

Last year, we had the farce of the judgment issued by the Council of Europe, which we will be discussing in more detail later. I have been a member of the Council of Europe for 14 years. We now know that this ex parte judgment, this rule 39, was perhaps not delivered according to international law, and apparently, in discussions with the European Court of Human Rights, we have now sought assurances that it is going to be tidied up. But even if our own courts allow somebody to proceed through them, with their case to be heard, even if we manage to appoint a sufficient number of judges, even if the person does not create a history and even if our own courts allow them to be put on a flight, there is this right of appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. We therefore have no certainty that these cases will not be heard and delayed.

I accept that this is the toughest Bill we have ever had. It is a good Bill in its own right. If we had produced it two years ago, we may have been getting people to Rwanda by now, but time is running out. We have perhaps nine months until the next general election. If we do not amend the Bill, we could end up in the worst possible situation, where we, as a Government, say that we are committed to stopping the boats, we have passed the necessary legislation and then we have egg all over our face because nobody is actually put on the flights. We will look extremely stupid.

In my view, the only solution is that when people arrive here, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark said, they are detained, but within a matter of days they are offshored, and the only justification for not being put on a flight is a proper medical condition. That is the only way we will get people on these flights.

[Richard Graham]

May I posit a slightly different approach? As my right hon. Friend says, all of us on the Government Benches want to do something about the problem. There are Opposition Members who are quite happy to subcontract our immigration decision making to the evil people smugglers operating small boats across the channel, but we are united on trying to do something. The only issue on which we differ is the extent to which we wish to override domestic and international law on individual human rights. My right hon. Friend has stood up for his constituents in their most difficult times, so he will understand that to do so would be a massive step that most of us on the Government Benches are not prepared to take.

Is my right hon. Friend prepared to see the Bill through, in the face of opposition from those who, at times, risk looking as if they are keener on putting sub-postmasters in jail than illegal immigrants, and make sure we have an option and a deterrence that will almost certainly work? Or is he prepared to sacrifice that huge step forward on the altar of an amendment to try to rule out all possibility of any individual human rights complaint being upheld?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

To be fair to my hon. Friend, I do not like what I am suggesting, but we are faced with a national crisis and we have to look at our own experience of what has and has not worked. We all know that overwhelmingly the people who are crossing are economic migrants. They are all perfectly nice people—I make no complaint about them personally; they are just trying to get a better life—but we all know the truth is that they would do anything to avoid being put on one of these flights.

I agree with my hon. Friend that we would not normally want to circumvent human rights, but in this case we know that is what is going to happen. We are almost arguing on the head of a pin about legal uncertainties, when we know from practical experience that everybody will appeal and be able to create a credible case, based on personal political involvement, mental health or some other reason, and nobody—or only a derisory number of people—will be put on the flight. The Government should grasp this nettle and accept these amendments, although I fear they will not. If they do not, we will be in a very dangerous place in relation to public opinion.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Richard Graham Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 18th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Michael Tomlinson]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend, who speaks with great experience and authority. He will be aware of other instances in which we have legislated and continue to legislate, and have deemed countries to be safe.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

My right hon. and learned Friend is making a good case for the importance of the Bill and the irrelevance of the amendments offered by the other place to what we are trying to achieve. Does he agree that when people criticise the Bill on the ground of the cost of sending people to Rwanda, they entirely miss the point that this will act as a huge disincentive to people in families and communities, predominantly in the middle east, who fundraise vast sums of money in order for their children to arrive here in the UK and not end up in east Africa? Does he also agree that the accusations based on cost hugely underestimate the actual cost of housing current illegal immigrants in hotels across the country?

[Michael Tomlinson]

My hon. Friend is entirely right on both counts. I will develop the point about the deterrent effect in a few moments, because it is a point that is missed repeatedly by the Labour Members. He is also right about the cost, and the cost of not acting—not least the human cost of not acting.