Rwanda Plan Cost and Asylum System

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

It is unfortunate that Back Benchers will have under a third of this already truncated debate on what is a very important subject, but I start by praising the Opposition for starting the new year as consistently as they ended the last one: consistently undermining and attacking the Government’s policies to tackle illegal migration and questioning the cost and cost-effectiveness of such measures, while consistently voting against those measures to tackle illegal migration—no fewer than 86 times—and consistently failing to come up with any serious, practical alternative measures to clamp down on illegal migration themselves. When they do produce flimsy and ill-thought-through measures, as they did before Christmas, they are completely opaque about the cost, or any aspect of any effectiveness at all.

Today, the Opposition have excelled themselves with another Opposition day debate that is light on substance, light on comprehensiveness, completely light on viable alternatives, and light on throwing any light on anything at all that they would do. Time and time again, they have been challenged to come up with their own plans, and have failed. As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have been pretty consistent myself—both on and off the Home Affairs Select Committee—in challenging Ministers and officials on the workings and, often, shortcomings of migration policies for more clarity and evidence. That includes the withdrawals figures, on which we challenged the permanent secretary just before Christmas. That is the only part of the motion with which I agree; clearly, the Opposition got the idea from the Home Affairs Committee, and have just cut and pasted it into the motion today.

Having visited Tirana, Paris, Brussels, Calais, Belgian beaches, asylum seeker accommodation, detention centres, Border Force operations and so on with the Home Affairs Committee, I know that illegal migration is a complex and challenging issue that the PM has quite rightly identified as a priority for the British people. However, the Rwanda scheme is just one element of that bigger solution. No one is claiming that the scheme is ideal—as the Supreme Court has judged, it has flaws in its design to overcome, which the Government are now addressing—but essentially, it is there to deal with one major problem, and an unfairness that undermines the generosity of the British public in rightly providing and funding a safe haven for asylum seekers who are genuinely fleeing conflict, persecution and danger.

There is a question here, and until you can answer it, you lack credibility when attacking the Government’s attempts to do so. It is the question I raised earlier with the shadow Home Secretary, to which she did not have an answer: “What do you do with migrants from certain countries who have entered the UK illegally, who do not have credible claims to remain in the UK, yet where it is virtually impossible to return those people to their country of origin?”

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

On that point, my hon. Friend will know, as I do from my experience with foreign national offenders, how difficult it is for countries of origin to accept people back. Very often, they just will not acknowledge their existence, because it is not in their interests to take back people who they may think are a detriment to them. He mentioned Eritrea and Vietnam, and there are a lot of other countries. This is difficult stuff, and he is right to press the loyal Opposition to come up with something more than the soundbites we have heard.

[Tim Loughton]

I completely agree with my right hon. and learned Friend, because once those people make it into British territorial waters, they are in effect guaranteed to be living in the UK at the UK taxpayers’ expense for the foreseeable future, and that is what the Rwanda scheme aims to address. It is a deterrent to stop people making that dangerous journey in the first place, and it will become a lottery whether they end up in a hotel in Kent or on a plane to Rwanda. As I have said time and again, when the Home Affairs Committee went to Calais in January, we were told by all the officials dealing with the schemes over there, that when the Government initially announced the Rwanda scheme, there was a surge of people at Calais seeking to regularise their migration status in France, because they did not want to risk being put on a plane to Rwanda, so we know that it has a deterrent effect.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), who addressed the motion tabled in the name of her Front Benchers and came to the meat of the issues in a succinct way. The arguments that she has put before the House are legitimate and merit close scrutiny by both her Committee and the Public Accounts Committee, and were the subject of a letter that she jointly sent with the Chair of that Committee, the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), on 8 December. Putting my Select Committee Chair hat on, I associate myself with those remarks in the spirit of cross-party co-operation.

However, Opposition Front Benchers have stumbled into what is, frankly, a debate between the Select Committees and the Government. They have missed a trick on this motion. We are now used to Humble Addresses, as they became a fad and a fashion much beloved of the now Leader of the Opposition when he was shadow Brexit Secretary back in 2017-18. Those of us who were Members of that Parliament may not want to be reminded of those times. I certainly remember being on the Front Bench as Solicitor General during the great debate on contempt of Parliament that we well remember—I bear the scars on my back.

I could simply fold my arms and say that Humble Addresses are very 2019, and perhaps we have moved on, but I will not because a number of past Humble Address motions have related to disclosure not to the full House but direct to Select Committees. Here is the point that we might have reached some compromise on. Select Committees are more than capable, through the good offices of their Chairs and Clerks, to hold sensitive information in a confidential way, yet still provide the scrutiny and accountability that, clearly, Parliament is here for. It has been done in the past, and on this occasion my hon. and hon. and learned Friends on the Front Bench should actively consider whether commercially sensitive information can be shared in a sensible way with the appropriate Select Committees.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman makes an interesting point. Both the Home Affairs Committee and the Public Accounts Committee have asked for information that we would hold confidentially, just to reassure ourselves about the value for money of these schemes. Sadly, we have been refused that information by the Home Office.

[Sir Robert Buckland]

I know that a letter was sent to the permanent secretary. I could not find a reply—the Committee may not have had one—and I suggest that civil servants in the Home Office need to respond with expedition to the Committee to furnish them with information. That is how we could have proceeded. The Opposition Front Benchers have missed a trick by not couching their resolution in more specific terms, with the consent that I am sure would have been forthcoming from the respective Chairs of the Select Committees. But that is not the motion that we have before us.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

As deputy Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, let me inform my right hon. and learned Friend and the House that the Committee has some of the most sensitive information available in a private reading room capacity, so there is no reason at all why we should not hold that information.

[Sir Robert Buckland]

I am hugely grateful to my hon. Friend, a parliamentarian of great experience. He is absolutely right to make that point. I urge consideration of that course upon my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) at the Dispatch Box, to consider whether that could be a way forward.

When Labour has a policy, it should be outlined in the form of an Opposition day motion. When it does not have much of a policy, it relies upon process arguments and Humble Address motions. That is what we see today. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) put it extremely powerfully in his remarks a moment ago that Labour is a party still in search of a coherent and cogent approach to this most serious of issues. It is all very well coming up with ideas that are already being deployed by the Government, or saying, “We’ll do it the same but a bit better,” but that is not up to the level of the events that face us. With climate change and conflict, mass migration of peoples out of harm’s way, or indeed for economic reasons, is a challenge not just for the United Kingdom but for the entire western world. These challenges face Governments of all stripes and colours.

I am glad to say that it is this Government who, through their arrangements and agreement with Albania, have achieved singular success in the past year in reducing those unacceptable numbers of small boats coming across the channel. It is this Government who are painstakingly working their way through bilateral agreements with key countries to speed up the process of returns to ensure that we can clear our prisons of foreign national offenders, rather than having to hold them in immigration facilities after the expiration of their sentence.

This Government are seeking, in an honest and realistic way, to answer the question of, “What on earth do you do with individuals who have had their applications determined, who have failed in their applications, but whose country of origin refuses even to recognise they exist?” I am afraid that is the big question—the $64,000 question, although perhaps I should adjust that for inflation—that needs to be addressed and faced up to. I know my hon. Friend the Minister is grappling with that problem, as have his predecessors.

There is nothing wrong in law or in principle with seeking to work with third countries to process asylum claims. I will reserve my remarks for next week’s two-day debate on the Floor of the House, when I will ask that question, but it is interesting that the Rwanda scheme is different from other schemes, such as the Australian scheme, in that we are not using UK law to determine these applications, but are outsourcing the whole thing to Rwanda. That sometimes is not fully understood, and I have to say that that has been a bit of a glass jaw, and it was quite broken by the Supreme Court in its judgment in November. Having said that, we are in a position now where the Government are seeking to try and deal with a position, and the Opposition are saying that even if Rwanda works, they will not do it. I do not think that sort of extreme approach is what the British people want to see, and it is not what this policy debate needs. We need an acceptance that what was being looked at by the previous Labour Government on third-country solutions is the right approach. Only by taking that particular line will we manage to crack this most difficult of problems.