Asylum Policy

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Steve Race

Monday 17th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

We will never send someone back to a country where they will be tortured—we will always abide by our international obligations in that regard. We believe that the totality of the reforms I have set out today strikes the right balance between ensuring that we continue to fulfil our international obligations and having an asylum system that retains public support for having an asylum system at all.

[Steve Race (Exeter) (Lab)]

Exeter is a proud city of sanctuary and has welcomed communities of Hongkongers, Ukrainians and Afghans over recent years. Many of my residents will be pleased with and welcome this re-establishment of safe and legal routes for refugees, which were long forgotten by the Conservatives. Does the Home Secretary agree that safe and legal routes are an element of a system that has control and order, and can she set out how the system will be flexible when geopolitical factors change?

[Shabana Mahmood]

We will always retain the flexibility to respond to particular crises, as we have done in the past, which we supported even when the previous Government were in power. We will design these routes alongside international and domestic partners to ensure that the community sponsorship model learns all the best lessons from previous schemes and is a world-class system, so that we can play our full part in offering sanctuary to those who need it most.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Shabana Mahmood and Steve Race

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

What I am shocked about is that we can see a disparity in the overall cohort sentencing outcomes. Everybody accepts that we are not quite sure why it is happening, and there has not been sufficient curiosity over the last few years to work out why that is the case. My view is that if we can see a problem or think we have one, we need to get to the bottom of what is actually going on before we start coming up with broad policy solutions to fix that problem. I also think that some of these broad policy decisions are better made by Ministers, because we are directly elected individuals who will pay the price for the consequences of our choices. That is a conversation that I will pick up with the Sentencing Council when we meet later this week.

[Steve Race (Exeter) (Lab)]

In 2020, Lorraine Cox was brutally murdered in Exeter. Her murderer dismembered her body, and as a result her family have never been able to fully lay Lorraine to rest. Her father, Tony Cox, has been campaigning for the implementation of Helen’s law 2, meaning that desecrating or concealing a body would become a separate criminal offence. Will the Minister meet me to discuss whether the implementation of Helen’s law 2 is possible?