Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Shailesh Vara and Yvette Cooper

2nd reading
Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The right hon. Member is just kidding himself if he thinks that any of the Government’s plan is actually going to happen, or if he thinks it is actually going to work.

Clause 9 deals with what happens to all of the people who cannot be returned—the tens of thousands of people who, according to the Government, are expected to arrive after 7 March. It says that the Home Office will provide those people with accommodation and support: in other words, they will go back into asylum accommodation and hotels, but they will never get an asylum decision. Tens of thousands of people will be added to the Home Office backlog every year, only it is going to be a permanent backlog that the Home Office is never even going to try to clear. Those who would have been returned after their asylum claim was refused now will not be, and those who would have been granted sanctuary will be stuck in limbo instead. That is tens of thousands of people just added to the asylum backlog, costing billions of pounds more—up to £25 billion over the next five years.

As for the backlog the Prime Minister promised to clear, it is going to get worse, not better. Effectively, the Government have concluded that the Tory Home Office is so rubbish at taking any asylum decisions on time that they have decided to just stop doing them altogether, and they are hoping that no one will notice. Last week, I said that the Government might have decided not to call this an asylum system any more, but everyone is still going to be in the system nevertheless. Well, I got that wrong, because I have read the Bill’s explanatory notes again, and they say that:

“Subsection (2) amends section 94 of the 1999 Act…so that the term ‘asylum-seeker’ covers those whose asylum claims are inadmissible by virtue of Clause 4 of the Bill.”

In other words, the Government are amending the law so that all the people who they are going to exclude from the asylum system are still going to be called asylum seekers after all, and are still going to be in the asylum system.

You could not make it up: more chaos, more people in the asylum system, even fewer decisions taken, more people detained with nowhere to detain them and more people stuck in limbo, with no one credibly believing that anything in the Bill is going to act as any kind of deterrent to any of the criminal gangs. The Government are chasing headlines, but it is all a huge con.

What is the price of that con? What is the price of those empty headlines—of cancelling asylum decisions, rather than getting a grip? The Government are damaging our international standing, our chance of getting new co-operation agreements to tackle the problems, and our commitments to the rule of law. They are saying that Britain, uniquely, will not take asylum decisions, yet are expecting other countries to keep doing so. They are saying that Britain, uniquely, will not follow the refugee convention, the trafficking convention or the European convention on human rights, yet are urging other countries to follow those conventions. Think, too, of the price for the people we promised to help—for the Afghan interpreters who worked for our armed forces but who missed the last flight out of Kabul, and who the Government told to find an alternative route. If those people arrive in the UK now, the Conservatives plan to lock them up, keep them in limbo, and treat them as forever illegal in the country they made huge sacrifices to help.

Think of the Ukrainian family who travelled here via Ireland, as I know some people did in the early days of the conflict, without the right papers. They could have been the family staying with me, or the family staying with the Immigration Minister. I have listened to teenagers talking about how they had 20 minutes to pack before they fled their homes, not knowing whether they would ever return or see friends and family again. Under this law, those teenagers who arrived with the wrong papers would be locked up, denied any chance to ever live or work here lawfully in the future. That is the Tories’ position: in the interests of a plan that is actually a con and will not even work. It will not work to deter the criminal gangs; it will not work to remove people, because the Government do not have the returns agreements in place, and it will make it harder to get those returns agreements. In exchange for that con that makes nothing any better, they believe that no one who arrives in Britain without the right papers in their hands should ever be able to seek protection here or live here, no matter their personal circumstances.

[Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I am most grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. Which parts of France are such that people need to flee from there to seek refuge in this country?

[Yvette Cooper]

As the hon. Member knows, the majority of people who are seeking asylum and arrive in France stay in France, rather than seeking to travel to the UK. However, we believe that we should be seeking to get a returns agreement with France, alongside new arrangements on issues such as family reunion, but at the moment, the Government have so undermined their relationship with France and other European countries that they have totally failed to get any of those agreements in place, and they are making it harder to do so with this Bill. If the hon. Member believes that returns agreements are needed, or if he believes that new, alternative arrangements around family reunion or other issues are needed, he should oppose the Bill, because it will make it harder to get any of those agreements in place. The Bill is undermining the international co-operation and international law that all of those other countries depend on.

Consider what the Bill means for the young Vietnamese woman who has been trafficked into sexual exploitation, repeatedly raped and beaten by the criminal gangs who brought her here and who control and dictate her life. Under the Bill, if the police find her when they bust the brothel, she will not be able to get modern slavery support any more: she will not be able to go to a safe house or get help from the Salvation Army. Instead, she will just be locked up in one of the Home Office detention centres. If she co-operates with the police for a bit, she might get some temporary support, but if that police investigation is closed, her world comes crashing down again. Here is what the Prime Minister tweeted about all of that:

“If you come to the UK illegally…You can’t benefit from our modern slavery protections…you will be…DENIED access to the UK’s modern slavery system”.

Think on that. Bringing people into the UK illegally in order to control and exploit them is exactly what trafficking is. Cross-border trafficking is, by definition, a major form of modern slavery, yet this Government are proposing to just wish it away—to exclude it entirely from the modern slavery system, as if the very fact of crossing borders somehow stops it from being slavery at all. The message from the UK Government to the criminal trafficking and slavery gangs is this: “Don’t worry, so long as you bring people into the country illegally, we won’t help them. In fact, we will help you: we will threaten those people with immediate detention and deportation, so that you can increase your control over those trafficking victims.” This Bill is a traffickers’ charter.

The previous Prime Minister but three, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) promised to end modern slavery, and I respect the work that she did, but this one—the current one—wants to enable it. How low has the Tory party fallen? It is even worse for children. This Bill allows the Home Secretary to lock them up indefinitely, with all safeguards removed. It allows her to remove unaccompanied children without even considering the details of their case and whether they have fled from persecution. Once they hit 18, the Bill requires her to remove them, even if the only family or support they have in the entire world is here in the UK, and even if they have been exploited and abused by criminal gangs. The Bill denies them any protection from modern slavery and makes them forever illegal in the UK.