Unaccompanied Children (Greece and Italy)

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Thursday 23rd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Goodwill]

We must certainly be aware that pull factors can be created when statements are made that might encourage people to enlist people traffickers.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the Minister recognise that the smugglers’ best sales technique is to say that there is no alternative safe, legal route for children to get to safety in the United Kingdom?

[Mr Goodwill]

The whole point of the Government’s approach is to help people in the region, so as to prevent them from making those perilous journeys. In the majority of cases, these are not orphaned children but children whose parents are sending them on a hazardous journey. We have only to look at the mortality in the Mediterranean, where pull factors are encouraging children to make those journeys. Sadly, many of them end up in a watery grave.

Our £10 million refugee children fund for Europe prioritises unaccompanied and separated children. It provides immediate support and specialist care, alongside legal advice and family reunification where possible. In Calais, we responded to a humanitarian need to deliver a complex and urgent operation in tandem with a sovereign member state.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) because although I passionately disagree with his approach to the motion I respect his commitment to tackling trafficking. That echoes what my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) said: this is not a partisan issue. Members on both sides of the House feel strongly about this matter. Arthur Helton, a well-known American refugee advocate, once said:

“Refugees embody misery and suffering, and they force us to confront terrible chaos and evil.”

In the time available to me, I will argue that refugees also force us to confront something about ourselves and our nationhood. That is why I disagree with the approach advocated by the hon. Member for Wellingborough. I also want to discuss what the Dubs scheme and what has happened to it says about us as a country.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) is no longer here, because she talked about having had no experience at all of visiting the European refugee camps. I spent quite a bit of time in Calais last summer, but I have not been to Greece or Italy. I do not know where the Minister has visited, but we know that a million refugees have come to Europe in the past two years alone and that 2,500 children are in Greece, 1,000 of whom are sleeping rough. There are widespread reports of the poor quality of the conditions in which those children and their families are living. We also know just how few have been transferred here to the UK despite their family links. The same is true in Italy, where thousands are passing through the camps, and there are widespread reports of children suffering human rights abuses. Yet just three have been reunited with family here.

While the motion refers to Greece, Italy, and France, we should not forget the children who are travelling through Europe, because the Dubs scheme was about children who are in Europe and about our responsibility, as part of Europe and as part of the modern world, to those children alongside our European counterparts. We all know that we will probably get abuse on Twitter or Facebook for taking part in this debate, but we sometimes have to advocate what might seem an unpopular opinion. I am saddened that doing our bit is now an unpopular opinion in this country, but that is the debate that we are having. When our politics might feel so futile, children should not suffer, and I agree with much of what the hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) said about that. When we passed the Dubs amendment, that was the best of this House. No matter how unpopular the issue might have seemed on social media, we knew in our hearts and in our heads that it was the right thing to do.

That is why closing the Dubs scheme prematurely is the wrong thing to do. There is no evidence that closing the scheme early will do justice to those children and their needs. There is no evidence for the push or pull factors in this process; there is only supposition. We are not talking about a migrant crisis; we are talking about a refugee crisis—60 million people are fleeing persecution. We should call it a refugee crisis and not pretend that it is the same as people coming here to work. Above all, after the Government voted down proposals in Committee to treat children using the UN convention on the rights of the child, we should ask ourselves why closing the Dubs scheme took our moral purpose forwards, not backwards—it did not.

The hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire talked about other countries and their responsibilities, and I agree with her. We should all be doing more, but because one country is not doing enough does not absolve us of doing our bit. That is the problem. How can we look Turkey in the eye when it is taking 2.8 million Syrian refugees and just 3,000 have come to the UK in the past year alone? The promise of the Dubs scheme is what we should speak up for. Children got on buses to go to centres on a promise and a pledge from the British authorities to treat them fairly, but just two days later the Home Office sneaked out guidance saying that half of them would not even be considered due to their nationality, not their need. Those children are languishing in Dunkirk because they have lost all hope. That is not British. That is not a popular opinion that we should uphold.

I will join other Members in tabling amendments to the Children and Social Work Bill to try to reopen the Dubs scheme, to try to hold the Government to account for what we promised a year ago that we would do, and not to let the Minister get away with claiming that it was said in the small print that we should leave these children languishing in the mud and that we would abandon them in Italy and in Greece. We did not listen to the French authorities when they said that the scheme should continue or to the UK’s Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner, who confirmed that he knows of cases in which the Dubs amendment has helped and of children who were being exploited but are now safe. We cannot be confident that there are not more of those children, just as we cannot be confident that there are not more local authorities that will step up to the plate. Indeed, when I spoke to my own local authority today, I was proud to hear of the work it is doing to take refugees and its commitment to working with other local authorities.

We have to confront the fact that our nation has to do its bit, alongside other European nations. We can either be followers or leaders in that process. Whatever the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire has to tell herself about this issue so that she can sleep at night, let her tell herself that. Let us not decry these children but stand up for them, because that is the best tradition, that is what will keep them safe and that is what will do justice to this House and this country.