Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Robert Buckland and Richard Graham

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

[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.

Protecting the Public and Justice for Victims

Debate between Robert Buckland and Richard Graham

Wednesday 9th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Buckland]

Having met and talked, in a professional and now a political capacity, to many of the victims that the hon. Lady describes, I say this: an apology is due, and I give that, but action is due as well, and that is happening.

The hon. Lady talks about independent sexual violence advisers. From day one of taking office, I made the case consistently that the expansion of their important role was a vital part of my policy, and we have done that. In 2019, I put an extra £5 million into investing in ISVAs. We have now expanded that; the total that we are investing in increasing ISVAs as we speak is £27 million. That means hundreds more ISVAs who will be available to support victims of crime from the get-go. She is right: the evidence is clear that, where an ISVA is involved, the rate of dropped cases falls dramatically—by about 50%, in fact.

I take up the hon. Lady’s challenge and exhortation, and I say that this is work in progress but we are getting on with it—yet another example of the action that I and this Government are taking to deal with the heart of the matter. Of course, that is going to be followed up very soon by the important end-to-end rape review, which we will publish. That piece of work has, quite properly I think, considered and reflected on a very important judicial review launched against the Crown Prosecution Service that was dealt with earlier this year, and indeed on the representations of many groups in the sector, reflecting the important views of thousands of victims of the most heinous crime of rape. That review will be published imminently, and I can assure her that it will be a full and proper reflection not only of the problems that we have encountered but of what can be done and what will be done to help to remedy the situation.

I am not going to hedge or qualify; I am going to be absolutely frank about the fact that the current rates and numbers of cases being brought to court are inadequate. They do not reflect the reality of what has been happening to thousands of women and girls in our country, and we are determined to do everything we can to change that. That involves a change from end to end—police, prosecution and the court system itself. That is what we need to encapsulate and get right, and I can assure the hon. Lady that, when that document is published, it will be the fullest proper reflection of the important points that she is properly so passionate about.

[Richard Graham]

My understanding from the judge of our Crown court is that there are ways to speed up the handling of the rape cases to which the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) so correctly referred. One of them, for example, is making the Crown court available for certain sittings at certain times as a magistrates court, so that a case can be heard in the magistrates court and immediately moved into the Crown court. That is a way of speeding up the whole process. Does my right hon. and learned Friend, who knows far more about these things than I do, agree that there are practical ways in which courts can work with the Crown Prosecution Service to speed things up so that these cases get heard faster?

[Robert Buckland]

I have the happy advantage of having spoken, I think, to that very same judge myself last week when I visited our Nightingale court at Cirencester. Indeed, my hon. Friend is right in several respects to highlight the important work being done in the western region to deal with the heavy case load. The proactive work that is being done by dedicated judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and all court staff to come together to resolve cases that are capable of proper resolution and to identify and list those cases that absolutely need a trial has been a shining example of how to do it. Similar success has been achieved in Wales in eliminating and dealing with the so-called backlog, and we see that in other parts of the country too.

That is no reproach to those parts of the country that are facing a particular challenge. There is no doubt—the right hon. Member for Tottenham knows this from his constituency experience—that there is a particular pressure in London and the south-east, where there are still a great number of cases yet to be resolved. However, it is right to say that, in the good work that is being done, supported by investment from Government, we are seeing the sorts of results that my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) talked about. He mentioned potential ways in which—