Illegal Migration Bill

Rosie Winterton Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

I think we may have to, because that is certainly not my understanding. There are Henry VIII paragraphs in clause 10 that still give ultimate discretion to the Secretary of State, with or without what is going to happen to clause 12. I am afraid that is symptomatic of the continuing problems with the Bill. It has become so complicated, there are many double negatives within it and only last night, at about 7.45 pm, did the Government publish their amendments, which we had just a few hours to scrutinise before today’s debate.

This matter needs proper explanation and it has not been properly explained. The assurances that we were promised have not materialised—or, if they have, I am afraid no one understands them. On that basis I am afraid that we, and I hope I speak here for many on the Government Benches, cannot take these amendments in lieu at face value. More work needs to be done. I hope this House will make sure that this matter goes back to the Lords in order for further concessions to be given. Clause 10 certainly needs to be overhauled.

If we go back to the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009, there was a clear duty on the Secretary of State. Section 55(3) states:

“A person exercising any of those functions must, in exercising the function, have regard to any guidance given to the person by the Secretary of State”

for that purpose. There is no such undertaking in this Bill about having to observe and abide by guidance. Why not? Perhaps the Minister will come back to that in his response later.

The Minister keeps referring to the Detention Centre Rules 2001. They certainly need an overhaul, but I repeat my earlier point: they are all about things such as clean clothing, access to nutritious food, respect for religion, family visits and so on. Where are the special provisions for support services specifically for children, the child psychologists, access to social workers and other child support? That is what age-appropriate accommodation and support means—not just a suitable house that, without wishing to labour the point again, may or may not have cartoons on the walls.

Also, the Government have to admit that although those detention laws have been in place since 2001, that did not stop young children, and young children with families, being detained, for upwards of two weeks in some cases, at Manston, and certainly not in age-appropriate accommodation. Frankly, I am afraid that the system is not working now, yet we are looking to dilute the age-appropriateness of what is now on offer. That is where we on the Conservative Benches have serious concerns, and it is not just us: many children’s charities are concerned, and the Children’s Commissioner said:

“The Home Office has still not been able to provide me with vital information I have requested about the safeguarding of children in their accommodation. I am therefore unclear about how they can make informed assessments about the impact of the Home Office accommodating children without having this data.”

We were led to believe that there would be clear distinctions for children who are clearly and genuinely children: they would be detained for no more than eight days on the way in as well as, potentially for a few, on the way out; they would have age-appropriate accommodation; and there would be some form of foster care, children’s homes or whatever it may be. There would then be differential accommodation for those for whom there is an age-verification question mark. We do not know if that accommodation exists, what sort of accommodation it will actually be, or how we will separate adults from those who turn out to be children.

The Minister assured us that if age-appropriate accommodation was not available for that subset, they would be treated as children and subject then to the lesser restrictions on genuine children. That is not in the amendment and it is still not in the Bill. What and where is the available accommodation for children and for disputed children? What is the legal status of detained unaccompanied children during that eight-day period, where it applies to them? What local authority duties apply on arrival and for the eight days, and what is the Home Office responsible for in those eight days? Do the children retain looked-after status while detained, or does the Home Office propose that that status ceases, as with a custodial sentence?

Those are, I am afraid, all the questions to which we needed answers, but we are still in the dark with the amendments tabled in lieu, which is why we just cannot support them. This is a far cry from the undertakings in the Immigration Act 2014, which states:

“An unaccompanied child may be detained under paragraph 16(2) in a short-term holding facility for a maximum period of 24 hours”.

In the absence of a suitable amendment in lieu covering all those considerations, as promised, I am afraid that we must oppose the amendment in lieu. Although it would revert to Baroness Mobarik’s amendment to return to the 24-hour status quo, which is not practical, I agree—we will have to come up with something more—that is all that is on offer at the moment.

I will be very brief, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I have broken my pledge. I was pleased that we got safe and legal routes on to the face of the Bill, and that some concessions were made in this place on the understanding that they could be beefed up in the House of Lords. That is what the noble Baroness Stroud’s amendment would do. Clause 59 only accepts a duty to produce a report—a work that requires consultation with local authorities. That should be happening now; it should have started months ago, so saying, “Oh it is going to take several months; we need to do the consulting” is nonsense. That work should already have started.

All the clause amounts to is a loose assurance that something will come in by the end of next year, and it is not in the Bill. The Baroness Stroud amendment seeks to make regulations come in within two months of the report. As she said on Report, her amendment

“is designed purely to place a duty on the Government to do what they say they intend to do anyway—introduce safe and legal routes”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 5 July 2023; Vol. 831, c. 1248.]

That goes beyond just reproducing a report on how they might do it.

That is what we need to see, and it is why I will vote against the amendment in lieu of the child detention. I will vote in favour of the Baroness Stroud amendment on safe and legal routes. I will certainly not repeat everything that was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), but she made a strong case, and I am tempted to follow her into the Division Lobby on the Randall amendment as well. Those are the three main areas. There is still much more work to be done on the Bill, so that is how I will vote, and I urge hon. Friends to do the same.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I remind Members that the debate has to finish at 5 o’clock, so please bear that in mind when making speeches. I call Dame Diana Johnson.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker; I will try again.

I want to start by agreeing with the Minister about the vital role that the other place plays as a revising Chamber in asking us to look again, particularly when we have not had pre-legislative scrutiny of a draft Bill and when, as I think most Members would agree, this legislation has been rushed through Parliament. I echo the comments of the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) about how complicated the Bill has got and the fact that we have not had much time to consider the amendments tabled by the Government late last night.

I also want to say at the outset that, in our report on small boats last year, the Home Affairs Committee made it very clear that it was not the number of people coming across in small boats that has overwhelmed the asylum system but the failure to process the asylum applications that have been made over a number of years. The Home Office has allowed the backlog to grow—it is now over 170,000—which has the effect of gumming up the system, and that is why we are spending £7 million a day on hotels. I know that the Home Office has in train plans to deal with the backlog, and the Prime Minister has said that the legacy backlog will be cleared by the end of the year. We all want to see that happen; it is in no one’s interest to see that backlog grow even more.

--- Later in debate ---

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

It is quite important that we think of others and remember that, as I said, the debate finishes at 5pm. I call David Simmonds

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will endeavour to be swift and to the point. Like the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), I must draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as someone who is sponsored by the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy project—RAMP—to provide research capacity.

As the Minister outlined, the UK has proved willing to rise to the challenge of the international refugee situation, with 550,000 people settled in the UK through humanitarian routes. In 24 years in a local authority covering the area of Heathrow airport, I certainly have experience of being on the receiving end of many different sets of Government policy—not just from the coalition and Conservative Governments, but from Labour Governments, too—many of which sounded very good when debated in this place but which did not always work in contact with the real world. I would express the concern that until we have a fully comprehensive asylum visa system, we will not have full control of the way in which we interact with the global refugee situation.

I want to see this policy pass through Parliament and be implemented in a way that works operationally to stop the boats and deliver all the other objectives that Members throughout the Chamber broadly support. There are clearly plenty of disagreements about the detail, but none of us wishes to see the continuation of the cross-channel traffic in human misery and criminal activity that the Bill seeks to address. I know that my constituents share the concern, beautifully expressed earlier, about the fact that we, as British people, believe in the fine old British tradition of queueing. When we see people using criminal means to jump that queue at a time when our country is seeking to be more compassionate through resettlement in a global world, we are concerned about that.

I remain concerned about a number of aspects of how the Bill will operate in the real world. It is enormously positive that the courts decided, having considered the matter, that the Rwanda policy was lawful and compatible with the UK’s international human rights obligations, but we cannot provide sufficient evidence of the effectiveness of one element of our agreement with Rwanda. That element is one example of the things that could, operationally, derail what we all agree are worthy objectives in the Bill. I took part in the Joint Committee on Human Rights evidence session that considered modern slavery in detail, and that has convinced me to follow the lead of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) this evening.

We need to ensure that we live up to the standards we have set for ourselves in this House, and that the positive obligations that much legislation, including the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Children Act 1989, places on our public authorities do not undermine the objectives of the Bill. Detention is a good example of that. I totally agree with what the Minister said about his approach to the detention of unaccompanied minors. A major challenge for Hillingdon Council was the arrival of unaccompanied children at Heathrow airport. The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) will know that many of them were accommodated in his constituency, at Margaret Cassidy House and at Charville Lane children’s home, both of which I visited.

It was at the point of arrival that those children were at the greatest risk from traffickers. The right hon. Gentleman will remember examples of traffickers arriving on Bath Road to collect girls whom they had targeted for trafficking. We as the local authority were powerless to stop that, because there was no power of detention that we could use to keep those young people safe. In one case that I am aware of, Hillingdon recovered a girl from the sex trade on the continent of Europe, after six months of tracking her from place to place. During that time, she suffered a great deal of abuse, which potentially could have been prevented if we had been able to intervene more swiftly at the beginning.

I am entirely sympathetic to the Minister’s motivations for introducing provisions on that issue, but these questions need to be answered: who will ensure that the places where those children are accommodated and detained are of an appropriate standard? What discussions have taken place with local authorities, such as Hillingdon and Kent, to ensure that a secure estate, based perhaps on secure children’s homes, is available, so that the children coming through the system can be appropriately accommodated? What arrangements have been made with Ofsted—in my view, it is Ofsted, rather than the chief inspector of prisons, that needs to regulate this—to ensure that regulation will give us confidence that the accommodation for children, and for families, is appropriate for children?

Finally, I have asked this question many times, but I do not get the sense that we have reached an appropriate answer. The Bill sets out how individuals are to be dealt with under the asylum and immigration process, but it does not take away the obligations on local authorities under the Children Act, the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000 or the Modern Slavery Act, or the other many obligations on local authorities. Members will say, “Let us pass this legislation and demonstrate that we are tough, and wish to stop the boats,” but in six months, will we be looking at a slew of judicial reviews that say that the policy was in conflict with the obligations on local authorities and the police under the Modern Slavery Act and the Children Act, and is therefore not effective?

If the Minister wishes to enjoy the full confidence of all Conservative Members, and wishes them to vote with the Government tonight and over the next few days, I urge him to address those points. Literally decades of policies from Governments of all parties have not quite managed to get to the heart of these issues. He must demonstrate that this policy will do that, and that it has properly covered all bases across government. He must demonstrate that the policy does not leave us vulnerable to finding that the boats do not stop coming; that the frustration of the challenges continue; and that people continue to die. This country wishes to show that it will not walk on by and ignore the needs of refugees, that we will be compassionate, and that we will prioritise our resources on international and global resettlement.