Southport Attack
Rupert Lowe Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Yvette Cooper
Ministers were of course updated throughout. The Home Office was advised about ricin in August, and we were advised about the document much later on in October. We made sure that the official Opposition were also briefed. In the end, those decisions and investigations are matters for the police on an operational basis. The tradition in this country is that we have operational independence for policing, and operationally independent decisions made by the CPS.
It is really sad that so many Opposition Members have chosen to ask questions about the timing of the release of information—they know that such issues are governed by the Contempt of Court Act, and that this is about providing justice for the families who lost their loved ones—rather than asking the serious questions about why that terrible, horrific and barbaric act took place. I would just ask the hon. Member, and others deciding what issues they want to focus on, to think very seriously about what the most important issue is here, when so many lives were lost.
Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
In her statement, the Home Secretary said, “Let there be no doubt: responsibility for this outrage lies squarely with the perpetrator.” That is indubitably true, but I would argue that there is blood on the hands of the myriad very difficult to understand Government agencies and quangos that charge around in ever decreasing circles, blaming everybody else when something goes wrong. Will she commit to reviewing every single dropped or downgraded case on which Prevent failed to act appropriately, to avoid another heartbreaking catastrophe like this one?
Yvette Cooper
We have announced two important things today. The first is the inquiry, which needs to go to the heart of what went wrong in this case—why so many agencies knew about this incredibly dangerous perpetrator who committed this barbaric act. The second is establishing the new Prevent independent commissioner, who can review different cases and ensure that the right approach has been taken, that risks are being identified and, frankly, that action is being taken. What disturbs me about some of the information—particularly the knife crime issues identified in this case—is that strong enough action was not taken. To keep people safe, we need to ensure that such action is taken.
Asylum Seeker Hotel Accommodation: Reopening
Rupert Lowe Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Bradley Thomas
I agree with the hon. Lady’s point about the appropriateness of the location. We all recognise that hotels are often based in rural areas or in an economy without any relevant services nearby, which is wholly inappropriate.
To return to the broader question of the Government’s approach to dealing with illegal migration, I am grateful that, in Bromsgrove, every one of the unsuitable sites that was previously used is no longer in use. There is a more fundamental point, however, about fairness to the UK taxpayer.
Successive Governments have tended to view people as an economic unit, but they cherry-pick the category of person they define either as a net economic contributor or as a draw on the economy. Students, for instance, go through university and accrue student debt, which is a debt to society that will be repaid after graduation when they are net economic contributors. When illegal migrants arrive in the UK, however, a financial accrual starts ticking that includes everything to do with the cost to the state of processing applications, the cost of hotel accommodation and the cost to the UK taxpayer of giving them an allowance to spend while they are out and about in the communities where they are residing.
On the point about fairness, that does not feel equitable to many of my constituents and, I am sure, many constituents across the country. It strikes me as perverse that students accrue debt while they are at university and, when they become economic contributors, that is drawn down through the PAYE—pay-as-you-earn—system from their earnings, yet we allow a seemingly bottomless pit of funds to accrue as a debt to be absorbed by the UK taxpayer. Why do the Government not explore a scheme whereby, if asylum seekers are deemed to be genuinely in fear and are allowed to integrate and remain in the UK, they repay their debt when they become economic contributors and are active in the workplace? It could be a tiered, sliding scale that recognises the cost that the UK taxpayer is expected to shoulder for people fleeing from a state of alleged persecution.
We must significantly redress the balance in favour of the UK taxpayer. I speak to numerous constituents who are concerned about the extent of the debt that the state is accruing. We have heard about increasing dependency on welfare, and countries across the west already face a demographic time bomb and a demographic twilight as populations age and burdens on the state grow. We in the west do not have enough of a pipeline of economic talent coming in at the bottom end, so we already face what we could call a time bomb of indigenous welfare dependency, exacerbated by the additional costs of processing illegal migrants on ludicrous timescales that the general public laugh at. Frankly, they feel short-changed by the efforts of—I will be quite honest—successive Governments, who have failed to get a grip on the situation.
In short, we desperately need to redress the balance. We cannot be in denial about the extent of the cost to the British state. Any migrant who comes to the UK and is able and willing to make an economic contribution will almost certainly always be welcome—we have dozens of potential growth industries that our economy desperately needs to support—but this is about getting the balance right. If the Government choose to view people as economic units, the interests of the UK taxpayer must be first and foremost. We cannot view UK taxpayers as just being there to shoulder a bill and disregard their concerns for their communities, while the Government at the same time choose to consider asylum seekers for more than just their economic value.
Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)
Order. I will call the hon. Gentleman, although he has not bobbed throughout the debate despite the fact that I said that was the appropriate thing to do. With the exception of the Minister, the shadow Minister, myself and Sir Gavin, we are all new Members here, so it is important to respect the conventions and courtesies.
Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
Thank you very much, Sir John, and apologies for not bobbing appropriately. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.
Our message to the world has to be this: if you come here illegally, you will be deported. Not housed in luxury accommodation, fed and cared for at the taxpayer’s expense; deported. Not allowed to roam the streets entirely unchecked, with no limits; deported. Not free to apply for asylum under whatever lie the Home Office is buying this week; deported.
Removing those with no right to be here is not cruel; it is not heartless; it is necessary. Language matters, and these men are not desperate asylum seekers; they are not irregular migrants—they are illegal migrants, and they should be treated as such. Spreading them across the country into unsuspecting communities is pure insanity. Members should ask themselves honestly: if a hotel at the bottom of their road was suddenly filled overnight with young foreign males who had entered the country almost entirely unchecked, would they be happy for their teenage daughter to go out after dark? The answer is no.
Anna Gelderd
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that women across the country face very difficult situations walking home at night, and that often the tone of debate is incredibly important to maintain our safety in all situations?
Rupert Lowe
I do not think the tone of the debate is in any way relevant. What is relevant is what the Government do to protect the interests of the British people.
The answer to the question I asked is no, and if Members disagree they are even more deluded than the Home Office. When I try to explore the actual cost of these hotels and the surrounding healthcare, travel, translation, recreational activities and more, I am denied vast swathes of information by the Home Office. It is a cover-up. It says that it does not pay for x or y, but that is because it is all subcontracted out on billion-pound contracts spread over 10 years. The list of further subcontractors on those contracts is fully redacted. Why might that be? Again, it is a blatant cover-up. Let me be abundantly clear: the full cost of these hotels is being concealed from the British public. I am doing everything in my power to uncover the truth.
Locals are not even informed about what has happened in their town. I asked the Home Office to develop a consultation process with residents before a hotel is hijacked. It refused and reminded me of its obligation to care for illegal migrants. What about the safety and needs of taxpaying local residents?
Hotels are being filled with young men in close proximity to girls’ schools. Does anyone here find that acceptable? I have pushed the Government to undertake a review of the impact on British women and girls of crime emanating from these hotels. Again, they refused. Who is the Home Office actually serving? Sadly, I have little doubt that far more crime is being committed by illegal migrants than we are being told.
I have raised the matter time and again with the Government. Nobody seems to care. There are roughly 30,000 illegal migrants in hotels around the country. As we know, the vast majority are young males, many from cultures that do not respect women. That is not racist, far right or whatever else; it is a reality, and one we must start to deal with.
Secure detention is required, not open hotels. If the facilities do not exist, build them. If we get serious on deportations, they will not be necessary for long. Send the following message and the boats will stop: “If you come to the UK illegally, you won’t be met with luxury accommodation. What will the British Government do to you? Two words: detain and deport.” That is the only way.
Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse
Rupert Lowe Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is exactly right. Wherever there are serious problems or failings and it is believed that local inquiries are needed, we want those areas to be able to conduct the kind of effective local inquiry that Telford was able to conduct, rather than having to start from scratch. Tom Crowther will work with five areas so that he can draw up conclusions about how we can most effectively learn the lessons of what happened in Telford, where victims and survivors felt supported and also felt that they delivered change—that things had actually happened as a result—rather than having inquiries whose recommendations just sit on a shelf, letting everyone down.
Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
As well as withheld court transcripts, I have been pushing the Ministry of Justice for data on the following: how many Pakistani or other foreign rapists have been deported, are still in prison, did not serve a custodial sentence, are back in the same community as their victims, had previous convictions or have reoffended, with a full nationality breakdown of those involved in the gangs. The response was that the requested information
“is not centrally identified in the data systems relevant to these questions.”
If this were a state inquiry into the private sector, it would be accused of negligence. My view is that we need a full national inquiry. This is a rotting stain on our country, and it needs to be exorcised in full. It cannot continue to be kicked into the long grass. The British public want transparency, and they want to know why this has taken so long to be dealt with.
Yvette Cooper
We do believe that better, more comprehensive data needs to be collected. That is why I have said that the overall data on child sexual abuse needs to be overhauled, with immediate changes to the gathering of data on ethnicity of both perpetrators and victims, because the system we inherited from the previous Government simply is not strong enough. We will need further changes as well.
On the issue of foreign national offenders, where foreign citizens have committed sexual offences in this country, they have no right to stay in this country, and we have to increase returns. That is why, rightly, this Government have increased returns of foreign national offenders by over 20% since the election.
Border Security: Collaboration
Rupert Lowe Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. We inherited a situation where the Conservatives let the entire system get way out of control. They let criminal gangs take hold along the channel and left us with total chaos in the asylum system and extortionate costs, as she rightly pointed out, with nearly £9 million a day being spent this time last year on asylum hotels. The result of our action since the election to get asylum decision making, which they had frozen, going and to get the system working again is already saving hundreds of millions of pounds for the taxpayer, which Conservative Members were happy to spend rather than getting a grip of the system.
Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
I am pleased to hear from the Home Secretary that she is making progress with our neighbouring countries in Europe in stopping what I now call a national emergency. As she probably knows, however, that is only a third of the issue. Another is that boat crossings have increased. Will she consider securely detaining the people who arrive here? If we are to solve the problem, we have to remove the incentive to come to Britain. The questions I am asking are uncovering quite how much the cost of those illegal migrants is to the country, and this is now, as I say, a matter of national emergency.
The third part of the equation is the illegal migrants who are here. I had a case in my constituency of Great Yarmouth only this week, where one Alius Ambulta was convicted of drug dealing—a 17th offence that received a very light sentence. Will the Home Secretary commit to deporting those illegal migrants here who are damaging the interests of the British electorate?
Yvette Cooper
We need to clear the backlog and the chaos in the asylum system that we have inherited. There is already a detention system as part of both the immigration and asylum systems. However, the core issue over a long period of time has been around the lack of proper enforcement and a proper system to ensure that the rules in both the asylum and the immigration systems are properly respected and enforced. We have seen returns, for example, drop substantially compared with under the last Labour Government. We have put additional staff into the returns and enforcement system, but also making sure those returns increase. That is why we have seen nearly 10,000 returns since the general election and a significant increase in returns of both foreign national offenders and failed asylum cases to make sure the system is properly respected.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rupert Lowe Excerpts(2 months, 4 weeks ago)
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The Minister for Security (Dan Jarvis)
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The taskforce is examining closely the threats that he raises, and we shall have more to say about that shortly.
Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
I am sure that the Home Secretary would agree that good government is transparent government. I have been told by her Department, in response to a written parliamentary question, that the number of crimes committed by illegal migrants is not available through published statistics. I am sure that the Home Office does hold the data, so will the Minister commit to publishing it in full?
Dame Angela Eagle
There will be a huge drop of immigration-related national statistics at the end of the week.
Small Boat Crossings
Rupert Lowe Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
In the Home Office annual report, it is confirmed that in 2022-23 £3 billion was spent on hotel costs for illegal migrants, averaging £8 million a day. The cruel inheritance tax assault on British family farms and businesses is estimated eventually to raise £520 million a year. Do the Labour Government need to rethink their spending priorities urgently?
Dame Angela Eagle
No. We have just had a Budget, which we are in the middle of debating and will be voting on, and I expect that that will be the way we go forwards.
Oral Answers to Questions
Rupert Lowe Excerpts(4 months ago)
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Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point about how employers have exploited illegal migration. As a result, we set up a major programme through the summer, including raids, pursuing illegal working in different places across the country. We have also substantially increased our work on returns, including redeploying 1,000 additional staff to work on returns and enforcement, to make sure the rules are being properly respected and enforced. That has led to an increase of more than 20% in enforced returns this summer.
Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
Given that dangerous foreign criminals have been using the European convention on human rights as a loophole to remain in the UK, does the Home Secretary agree that it is time to leave the ECHR and restore the sovereignty of our own borders?
Yvette Cooper
The purpose of setting up a border security command is to strengthen the security of our borders. We will do that by working with other countries. It is crucial that we do so to tackle the gangs and the boats before they reach the French coast in the first place. We have increased our co-operation, with new agreements in place with the G7, Europol and Italy, and we are working on new agreements with France, Germany and Belgium. Those agreements would not be possible if we were somehow abandoning international law.
Illegal Immigration
Rupert Lowe Excerpts(5 months, 1 week ago)
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Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Reform)
It is a pleasure to serve under you, Sir Mark. I hope to stay within five minutes, just about.
When we see pictures of boats entering Dover packed full of supposedly desperate asylum seekers, I want to ask, “Where are the women? Where are the children?” The craft are filled almost exclusively with men—young men. How did they secure the rumoured £5,000 to pay for the cost of their crossing? Even according to the Home Office’s own 2022 figures, 87% of these people were men. We must be abundantly clear and honest with the British people: these are foreign males looking to take advantage of our soft borders and our incompetent establishment. They are not, in the vast majority of cases, people genuinely fleeing war and persecution.
Now we are told we should refer to these people as “irregular migrants”. Language matters. The vast majority of these men are not “irregular”, or asylum seekers; they are illegal immigrants and should be labelled as such.
What have we done with these males who have illegally entered our country—unchecked, undocumented, unknown individuals? We have spread them across the UK, often putting them up in luxury accommodation—all at our expense—and damaging the fabric of our country, particularly in my constituency. They are free to come and go as they please. Why? If any reach our shores, they should be securely detained until rapid deportation can be arranged. Allowing thousands and thousands of foreign young men free rein across our country is pure, unadulterated insanity.
The public are furious. In no way does that justify any violence, but we must accept the reasons behind so much of the anger. Starmer has misread the room badly, and the fury will not dissipate until the crisis is taken seriously by the Government. The boats could be stopped virtually overnight with the correct will. Put the Navy in the channel, send the boats back to France, and ensure that no one setting foot here illegally stays. That means deportations, and lots of them.
The Australians deployed a zero-tolerance approach. It worked. We must do the same, and urgently. The first step to delivering that is to declare a national emergency. Send a clear message to the illegal migrants and the smugglers: if you come here illegally, you are not welcome. Until that happens, more and more will come.
Does the Prime Minister have the political will to tackle this crisis? The British public will not forgive him and his colleagues for failure to deliver now. Tony Blair opened the floodgates in 1997 via the Human Rights Act, and the Tories accelerated the process. The Prime Minister must now close them as a matter of urgency. Illegal migration is mortally damaging our sovereign nation. Given that the Department is having trouble maintaining its staff, as are most Government Departments of which I have experience, none of us believes that smashing the gangs has any hope of getting any traction.