Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Roger Gale and Jeremy Wright

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 18th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

Order. The Government and Opposition Front Benchers have, perhaps understandably, taken a certain amount of leeway in a broad-brush approach to the debate. Before we proceed, I remind Back Benchers that we are now debating Lords amendments; this is not a Second Reading debate. I call Sir Jeremy Wright.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Deputy Speaker. May I begin with an apology to you and others for the fact that I will not be in the Chamber for some part of the debate because of other parliamentary business that I have to attend?

I start my remarks by recalling that the fundamental purpose of the Bill is to locate with Parliament—rather than with decision makers in individual cases or with courts reviewing those cases—the decision on whether Rwanda is a safe country to send people to. A number of the amendments before us would undermine that fundamental purpose by transferring decisions on that question away from Parliament and back to the caseworkers and courts, so they are, I am afraid, wrecking amendments. They are incredibly elegant wrecking amendments, and they come from an honourable and fundamental opposition to the purpose of the Bill—an opposition that I entirely understand.

I confess that I did not find voting for this legislation a comfortable choice. It comes very close to the line on rule-of-law acceptability, but in my view stays just the right side of it. Crucially, it asserts parliamentary sovereignty on an issue of huge political significance, where that issue is central to the delivery of a key Government policy. That significant and central issue is whether the Government of the day are entitled to pursue a policy on illegal immigration that contains an element of effective deterrence, and I think the Government must be able to do that. For a deterrent to be effective, it must be clear. To economic migrants seeking to reach the UK under cover of our asylum system, the deterrent is that they might end up in a different country—in this case, Rwanda. For that deterrent to be meaningful, the prospect of transfer to Rwanda must be a real one that it is not easy to evade, which means that the headline judgment on Rwanda’s safety must be clear to all, subject of course, as it should be, only to persuasive individual circumstances.

I think that approach is worthy of support for two reasons. First, illegal migration is a huge problem, and the Government must be able to pursue innovative solutions to it, especially in the absence of credible alternatives.