Rwanda Plan Cost and Asylum System

Robert Syms Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

When I first came to the House, under a Labour Government, I was on an immigration Bill Committee. The key difficulty then was people coming on aircraft and ferries and, for road hauliers, people coming in lorries. That was eventually dealt with in places such as Dover by putting in machinery to look at heat from bodies, and that stopped that trade.

This is a profitable trade where inventive people—criminals—look at how they can get people in. They have decided that rubber boats are one way of doing so, and our maritime tradition and the treaties to which we have signed up over hundreds of years mean it is difficult to deal with people once they have set off to sea. The Government have a plan and a strategy to deal with that. The Opposition would have more authority in the debate had they not opposed the plan and strategy but instead shuffled the papers around, asked all these questions and bemoaned all the costs rather than setting out what they would do.

Of course, the Humble Address wants paperwork and more paperwork. Governments have internal debates and then come to a fixed position. The Treasury, the Education Department and the Home Office will have different views. We would expect Ministers to argue privately and then come to a fixed position, but if people keep asking for papers to try to find out what those differences are, that will drive those debates underground, into private meetings and on to WhatsApp, which would not mean good government. The fact that the current Prime Minister argued a slightly different point when he was in charge of the money proves that he was doing a good job as Chancellor—he was kicking the tyres and ensuring that things had been thought through. We can see the Opposition’s motion as a substitute for having a policy. It just says that we are rubbish and that they would do things better, but they do not specify what they would do better.

The Government have a policy, and the $64,000 question is, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, about those people who come to the UK and cannot be returned to their countries. The ideal thing is to have country-to-country agreements, which are proven to be working—I am glad we have more of them—and are a strand of dealing with the issue. However, where we have an Iran, an Eritrea or another country where someone’s life might be threatened were they returned, we need somewhere else for them to go. Rwanda has made it part of its agenda, because it is financially to its benefit, to do deals with countries such as Britain to help to deal with the problem. Everybody can be a winner if we get there in the end.

There is no point in people in this debate saying it will not be a deterrent when it has not actually been tried and when every time we have tried to implement it there has been a range of people to deal with, not least some of the courts. The Government are legislating to deal with the concerns of our Supreme Court. We have a treaty that is based on international law and we will see whether it works. I hope that when it is proved to work, some of those who are criticising will stand up in this Chamber and say, “Actually, you were right.”