Illegal Migration Bill

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

The hon. Gentleman is right, we have had this conversation before, and he consistently refuses to listen to the fact that the Dublin regulation acted as a deterrent, so the numbers that he talks about were small. The number of small boat crossings was small when we were part of the Dublin regulation. We left the Dublin regulation, and now the number is large—it is not rocket science. There is a clear connection, a correlation, a causal link between the two.

[Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. The reason the small boats problem has grown exponentially is that we dealt with the lorries issue. We closed the loophole when it came to lorries and the channel tunnel in particular, and that is why people are now resorting to small boats. It is nothing to do with Dublin. Surely those are the facts.

[Stephen Kinnock]

I simply say to the right hon. and learned Gentleman that last year, we had 45,000 people coming on small boats and goodness knows how many on lorries—of course, those coming by clandestine means in the back of a lorry are far more difficult to detect than those coming on small boats, so the small boats crisis is, by definition, far more visible. It is true that that juxtaposition and the new arrangements have had a positive impact, but we still do not know how many are coming. I have been to camps in Calais and spoken to many who are planning to come on lorries rather than on small boats—not least because it is a far cheaper alternative. The reality is that a very large number of people are coming to our country through irregular means, but it is also clear that that number was significantly smaller when we were part of the Dublin regulation. That is because it was a comprehensive deterrent, compared with the utterly insignificant power of the Rwanda programme as a deterrent.