Migration

Debate between Sarah Champion and Robert Jenrick

Wednesday 16th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Yes, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his good service in this role and others previously. He was highly respected and is missed by his former colleagues at the Home Office.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that we need good engagement with Members of Parliament and, crucially, local authorities. When we are bringing groups of migrants to a local area, often with complex needs, we need to ensure the local authority is involved in that, can prepare for their arrival and provide good services. One issue that has been experienced in recent weeks is that the sheer number of individuals crossing the channel has put immense pressure on the Manston facility. As the Minister responsible, my first duty and priority was and is to ensure that Manston operates legally and decently. That has meant that we have needed to procure a lot of accommodation relatively quickly and that has meant some procedures have been weaker than any of us would have wished. I hope we can move forward from that, stabilise the situation, and get into a pattern of engaging MPs and local authorities in the manner that they deserve.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

Today, my International Development Committee launched an inquiry into how and why the Home Office is spending foreign aid to support refugees in this country. Does the Minister have a budget or a blank cheque? Does he have official development assistance specialists in the Home Office to make sure that that money represents value? Does he think it is morally right to be spending money, which should be going to the poorest in the world, to prop up the Treasury? Other countries are spending their own money to fund refugees in their own countries.

[Robert Jenrick]

First, it is the Home Office’s responsibility to ensure that money is spent wisely and provides taxpayer value. How it is accounted for under overseas development aid or otherwise is a matter for the Treasury, not for me and my officials. But the point at the heart of this is that we need to ensure we stop people crossing the channel illegally. We do not want to be spending billions of pounds addressing this issue. The Opposition, I think, do because they oppose every single measure we take to try to address it. We want to get people out of hotels. We would like to move to a system that is based on resettlement schemes, such as the Ukraine and Syria schemes, whereby we choose people at source, they come to the UK and we are able to prioritise our resources on them, and we do not, frankly, waste hundreds of millions of pounds managing a problem of economic migrants who should not be in the UK.