Illegal Migration Bill

Roger Gale Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Beth Winter]

I fully agree—[Interruption.]

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Lady. [Interruption.] Thank you. I would like the Committee to behave like that all the time. It is most discourteous for conversations to be taking place on the Back Benches, particularly among people who have not been in the Chamber for much of the debate. Some of us want to hear what Members have to say.

[Beth Winter]

Thank you, Chair. I appreciate your intervention.

In conclusion, there is an alternative, as is evident from the number of extremely progressive and positive amendments. We must clear the backlog, expand safe routes, and the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), in co-operation with Care4Calais and the Public and Commercial Services Union on safe routes, was excellent. We must be welcoming vulnerable people to what I would describe as a nation of sanctuary.

I will finish by reflecting on the words of the First Minister of Wales. A week or two ago he spoke about,

“the basic belief that, in our brief lives, we owe a duty of care…to our family and friends, but also to strangers”.

He said that that simple belief lies at the heart of

“our ambition to be a nation of sanctuary. To provide a warm welcome to families forced out of their homes…all of those who seek sanctuary from wherever, and however, they may come”

to our shores. Care, compassion, respect, dignity, humanity, inclusivity and kindness—those are the values that I hold dear, and those are the values and principles that we should seek to uphold. This Bill does not do that at all. We must reject it.

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Sir Roger. I seek your guidance. The Bill is reaching the closing minutes of Committee stage. Last Thursday, in Business questions, the Leader of the House said in answer to my question as to the whereabouts of the Government’s impact assessment of the Bill:

“I have spoken to the Home Office about the impact assessment; it is quite right that we publish it before Committee stage.”—[Official Report, 23 March 2023; Vol. 730, c. 451.]

As the right hon. Lady has previously asserted her strong support for Parliament to have impact assessments in order for colleagues on all sides to scrutinise any Government properly, and I know her to be a woman of her word, I am baffled. I am sure it could not possibly be that the Government have found the impact to be the £3 billion cost to the taxpayer that the Refugee Council found. Sir Roger, could you tell me of any mechanism I can employ, even now, in these closing minutes, to enable, encourage or merely exhort the Minister to publish the Government’s impact assessments?

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Roger Gale)]

The shadow Leader of the House has been in the House long enough to know that it is the responsibility of the Government, not the Chair, to publish or not publish Government papers. However, she asked me a question and has placed her point on the record. I am about to call the Minister of State to reply, and he has heard what the hon. Lady has said.

[Robert Jenrick]

It has been a wide-ranging and interesting debate. I am grateful to all right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions. I will not detain the Committee by dwelling on the Government amendments as they are all, essentially, technical in nature. I will instead set out to respond to as many of the amendments and new clauses that have been debated as possible. I take issue with those who said that the Government provided insufficient time to debate. I note that both today and yesterday, the debates have concluded almost an hour before the allocated time.

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[Robert Jenrick]

I am not going to give way again. [Interruption.] I am not going to give way to the hon. and learned Lady. Let me turn to—[Interruption.] Let me turn—

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. Twenty-seven Members have taken part in the debate this afternoon, and there are rather more Members present who are speaking but who did not take part in the debate. The 27 who were here, taking part in the debate, have a right to hear what the Minister has to say, and it would be good if they could do it without interruption. That means without interruption from either side of the House.

[Robert Jenrick]

Thank you, Sir Roger. The hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) does not like the Bill. She is going to vote against the Bill and she does not want to stop the boats. She has tabled a whole raft of amendments with her colleagues, and we all know what the purpose of those amendments really is.

[Joanna Cherry]

On a point of order, Sir Roger. Is it in order for the Minister to so misrepresent my position? I tabled my amendments as the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, not on behalf of the Scottish National party, and the point I wish to make is that he has not answered a single point raised by anyone who spoke from the Opposition Benches. It is a farce—a farce!

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. That is an observation, not a point of order. The hon. and learned Lady is fully aware that Members are responsible for their own remarks on the record. They have to take responsibility for that.

[Robert Jenrick]

Sir Roger, it is an observation but it is also incorrect, because I have already spoken about the many questions around children that have been raised.

Before I wind up my remarks, I want to address the issues regarding modern slavery that have been raised by my right hon. Friends the Members for Maidenhead (Mrs May) and for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). All of us in Government look forward to engaging with them and learning from their unrivalled expertise and experience in this field as we ensure that the Bill meets the standards that we want it to meet. A number of hon. and right hon. Members said there was no evidential basis for taking action with regard to modern slavery. I do not think that that is fair. Let me just raise a few points of clarification. When the Modern Slavery Act was passed in 2015, the impact assessment envisaged 3,500 referrals a year, but last year there were 17,000 referrals. The most referred nationality in 2022 was citizens of Albania, a safe and developed European country, a NATO ally and, above all, a signatory to the European convention against trafficking.

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[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. Before we go any further, I remind Members that we are in Committee. In Committee, Members are entitled to speak more than once. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) is entirely in order in seeking to speak again, and the Committee has until 8.12 pm to complete this debate.

[Alison Thewliss]

Thank you, Sir Roger, for that clarification; I am sure that other hon. Members may also find it of interest.

A Bill would usually go upstairs for Committee stage and be scrutinised line by line. Every one of the more than 150 amendments to this Bill would have been discussed and we would have had the opportunity to vote on them all. We would have scrutinised the Minister in significant detail on each and every amendment, and each would have been properly discussed. He would have had to work to get this Bill through the House if it had gone upstairs to Committee rather than being discussed in this farce of a process today.

It is also important for those watching this at home to understand that no evidence has been taken on this Bill. Usually when we would go upstairs to a Bill Committee, we would be allowed to take evidence from experts in the field. The experts in this field have done their absolute utmost to get that evidence to us, and I am holding in front of me just some of the evidence I have received from organisations, which I have tried to present through the many amendments that I have tabled.

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. I now do have to call the hon. Lady to order, because she is making a general speech. She is well aware that a series of amendments is under discussion and that we are not having a general debate like on Second Reading. Perhaps she would like to return to the amendments under discussion.

[Alison Thewliss]

Thank you very much, Sir Roger. I would be glad to return to the topics of the Bill.

At the back of the Bill is the schedule, which may be of interest to hon. Members, as it contains a list of 57 countries, including countries from which people are known to be trafficked into sex slavery in this country. The Republic of Albania is the first on the list. We know, because the evidence supports it, that there are people—women—being trafficked to this country to be held in facilities where they are raped repeatedly by men. Those women will now not be able to ask for safety, because if they do, they will be putting themselves at risk of being deported to Rwanda. As we know, traffickers will hold that over women as a threat; this Bill is a traffickers’ charter.

I had a look through the Human Rights Watch profiles of some of the countries on the list of 57 that Ministers deem to be safe countries to which people can be removed, and I had a long conversation with Rainbow Sisters about the difficulties for lesbian and bisexual women being returned to these countries. Men are also mentioned in the list, which reads:

Gambia (in respect of men)…Ghana (in respect of men)…Kenya (in respect of men)…Liberia (in respect of men)…Malawi (in respect of men)…Nigeria (in respect of men).”

Men can be removed to these countries, but Gambia, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Nigeria and Sierra Leone—which are in this list—all outlaw same-sex relations. Ministers are not going to ask when somebody arrives in this country in a dinghy or on a plane—however they arrive—anything about the circumstances of those people. They will quite simply put them on a plane and send them back, if they can. If they cannot, those people will be in limbo in this country forever because there will be no means of removing them.

[Patrick Grady]

I am sure that lots of Members in the House and lots of people watching at home will want my hon. Friend to continue the line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill in the time that is available by the order agreed to by the House. She mentions Malawi as an example. I am proud to chair the all-party parliamentary group on Malawi. Is not precisely the point that the individual circumstances of any asylum seeker who comes here need to be assessed? We cannot arbitrarily make decisions about individuals, because we do not know their individual cases. But the clauses in this Bill, and the schedule that she is talking about—

[The Second Deputy Chairman]

Order. I know that this measure arouses strong opinions, but we do have a process in this House: we have to stick to the amendments. There are no amendments to the schedule and the hon. Gentleman was not referring, so far as I can see, to any amendment. In the remaining stages of this debate, can we please now confine our arguments to what is on the amendment paper, not to what is not on the amendment paper?

[Alison Thewliss]

Yes; my hon. Friend would be referring to amendment 191—in clause 2, page 2, line 33—which would disapply the section

“where there is a real risk of persecution or serious harm on grounds of sexual orientation”

if a person

“is removed in accordance with this section.”

This is important. We think that people’s individual rights and risks ought to be assessed by the Government, but that is not happening; the Government are not looking at individual risk.

It was interesting to find Nigeria on the list, because if LGBTQ people are returned to Nigeria, they are at significant risk. Nigeria topped a danger index of countries for LGBT people. Men would face the death penalty by stoning and women whipping and imprisonment if they were found to be LGBT. So the very real risk that we are trying to prevent through this amendment is to prevent people being returned to these countries. Jamaica is No.18 on that same danger list, but it is listed here as a country that the Home Secretary is perfectly happy to return LGBT people to, even if it is to an uncertain future where they would be outlawed from living their life and expressing the rights that they have.

Sir Roger, there are many amendments that we could speak to, because all of this Bill is an assault on human rights. We believe that human rights should belong to everybody. The Home Secretary should not get to deny them to a group of people just because of how they happened to arrive in this country. We know that there are many people who will flee very dangerous circumstances and will try to reunite with a family member who is already here—that family member might be the very last person in their family who is alive. They could have seen the rest of their family killed in front of them, and have an uncle here in the UK, but if they cannot get here by any safe or legal routes to that uncle, to that last remaining family member, as is referred to in our amendments, then how will they possibly be able to live their life?

We are sentencing people to a life in limbo—a life that they will no longer be able to live. The Government have not thought through the full consequences of the Bill. What will happen to these people who are forever left in limbo?

I wish to mention amendment 246, which says that these measures can be put forward only with the consent of the Welsh Senedd, the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Government will not get legislative consent for these measures. I have a letter signed by a significant number of Members of the Scottish Parliament who do not give consent for this, who do not accept the Bill, and who do not think that it is something that they want to see. It is an affront to our human rights in Scotland. It is not the kind of country that we wish to build. I was very proud to see Humza Yousaf become our new First Minister in Scotland. Humza’s family—

[The Second Deputy Chairman]

Order. Let us try again. The new First Minister of Scotland, however honourable he may be, is not part of this legislation. Will the hon. Lady please stick to the amendments that are on the Order Paper? Otherwise I shall have to ask her to take her place.

[Alison Thewliss]

This matter is certainly pertinent to the amendments that we have tabled. Humza’s grandparents came here as immigrants. Under this Bill, they would not be able to find their way here in the same way. That is true of many people in this country who have come here and built their lives. Some of them have ended up as legislators in this place and are drawing the ladder up behind them. Humza has made it incredibly clear how grateful he is that he has this opportunity. His grandparents could not have imagined, when they came to the UK with very little and with no money in their pockets, that they could work their way up through society and that their grandson could aspire to achieve the highest position in Scotland—to be the First Minister of Scotland.

Instead of demonising immigrants, instead of demonising the people who come to this country, instead of saying to people such as Mo Farah that they would not get to come here in the future, we should listen to the experiences of people who have come here, who have made their lives here. We should thank those people for what they have contributed. We should thank them for doing us the honour of choosing to come to this country and making their home and life here. When we do not recognise that contribution, when Ministers pull the ladder up behind them, and when they prevent people from coming here, it makes this country poorer.

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[Patrick Grady]

Am I not right in thinking that Sabir Zazai has been made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire? That is what asylum seekers can achieve in this country if they are allowed to flourish. That is what our amendment—

[The Second Deputy Chairman]

Order. Hon. Members are in danger of abusing the House. I am being scrupulously fair and trying to ensure that everything that is said remains in order. The hon. Gentleman was out of order. Now, will the hon. Member for Glasgow Central please conclude her remarks so that the Minister, if he wishes to, may respond? We will then move to the Divisions.

[Alison Thewliss]

With reference to amendment 189 and the contribution of Afghans, Sabir Zazai tells a story of when he was given a letter from the Home Office saying, “You are a person liable to be detained and removed.” More recently, at a celebration to mark his being awarded an OBE, he said he had received a different letter telling him he was being awarded this great honour of the British state. He said he would put those two letters on the wall next to one another, because they show that, regardless of the circumstances by which someone came to these islands, there ought to be nothing they cannot achieve.

There ought to be nothing—but this Bill pulls up the drawbridge. It makes this country smaller, it makes this country meaner and it makes this country crueller—for every Sabir Zazai, for every Abdul Bostani, for every person that the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) is outraged about. People can come here and make a contribution. They could live a dull, boring, ordinary life, they could be an OBE, they could be the First Minister of a country, but they have a contribution to make and they deserve to get to make that contribution without the UK Government pulling up the drawbridge and saying that they are unwelcome.

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[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady. I sat through many phone calls at the time with Ministers and with constituents who were terrified for their family members. Many of them still do not know whether they will get to safety at all, despite having applied through the process. They are waiting with an uncertain future in Afghanistan, where their lives are under threat, where their daughters cannot go into education and where they are pursued by the Taliban day in, day out. The point about Afghans in this Bill is particularly serious.

However, there are other nationalities of whom we could equally say that: Iraqis who helped to support British forces, and other people from other countries where Britain has a footprint. Many people come here because of the footprint Britain has had in the world, and we have a particular responsibility to those people. The Afghan interpreters in their exhibition used the phrase, “We are here because you were there.” That speaks also to the legacy of empire, the legacy of the English language and the legacy of Britain around the world. That is why people seek to come here.

I believe very firmly that we have a duty and a responsibility to people around the world. This Government renege on that responsibility. That is what the Bill is all about. My real fear is that, having seen Britain do it, other countries will pull up the drawbridge; that they will renege on their international obligations, saying, “If Britain can do it, other countries can do it, too. If Britain will not stand up for human rights, why do we need to bother? If Britain does not stand up for the refugee convention, why should we? If Britain does not stand up for the UN convention on the rights of the child, why should we bother either? Let’s get children back into slavery to be trafficked all over the place.”

This Government are not protecting children. That is why we have tabled these amendments: we seek to protect people who are being trafficked and exploited. This Government, by ignoring our amendments, seek to refuse people that protection, that human dignity, the rights that they have under our international obligations. We have those rights because of the things that we have done in the past. We should no longer have to put up with this Government. Scotland needs independence. It cannot trust this Government to look after it.

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Roger Gale)]

Does the Minister wish to respond?

[Robert Jenrick]

indicated dissent.

[The Second Deputy Chairman]

Does the hon. Lady wish to press the amendment to a Division?

[Alison Thewliss]

indicated dissent.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Amendment proposed: 189, page 2, line 33, at end insert—

“(1A) This section does not apply to a person (“A”) who is an Afghan national where there is a real risk of persecution or serious harm to A if returned to that country.”—(Alison Thewliss.)

Question put, That the amendment be made.