Stella Creasy
Main Page: Stella Creasy (Labour (Co-op) - Walthamstow)Department Debates - View all Stella Creasy's debates with the Home Office
Wednesday 26th April 2023
(1 year, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Illegal Migration Act 2023 View all Illegal Migration Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 26 April 2023 - large print - (26 Apr 2023)
Robert Jenrick
It is a pull factor to the UK that individuals can work in our grey economy, which is a cause of serious concern. If we were to add an additional pull factor, by enabling people to work sooner, it would be yet another reason for people to choose to come to this country. I will return to that point in responding to other questions before the House today.
Robert Jenrick
I will not give way at the moment.
The vast majority of people arriving on small boats come from an obvious place of safety—France—with a fully functioning asylum system, so they are choosing to make that additional crossing. They are essentially asylum shoppers, even if they originally come from a place of danger, and they are doing that because they believe the United Kingdom is a better place to make their claim and to build a future. Their ability to work is obviously part of that calculation, as our north European counterparts frequently say.
Robert Jenrick
I do, and I commend that arrangement wholeheartedly. I took part in what is, in one sense, a successor to that scheme, the Homes for Ukraine scheme, and it was an incredibly rewarding experience for me and my family. The principle at the heart of that is that it is not purely a matter for the state to provide support; individuals, groups, churches, synagogues and mosques might want to come forward to gather support and funding to meet the state halfway and assist those people to come to the UK. That scheme is available. We would like more people to take part in it. It is exactly the sort of scheme that could be considered alongside the future expansion of safe and legal routes.
Robert Jenrick
I am going to draw my remarks to a close now, because all Members want others to have an opportunity to speak.
Robert Jenrick
I am not giving way, because time is very limited.
I have summarised the other Government amendments, which are more detailed and technical in nature, in a letter to the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), and placed a copy of it in the Library of the House. I stand ready to address any particular points in my winding-up speech, if necessary. For now, I commend all the Government amendments to the House and look forward to the contributions of other Members. I will respond to as many of those as I can at the end of the debate.
Stella Creasy
I understand why the Minister did not want to give way on this issue, despite saying that he would, but my hon. Friend raises the question of people being in hotels. Does he agree that the Government need to be honest with their own Back Benchers about the statutory instrument that they tried to slip out at the end of the previous Session that will remove the licensing laws from houses of multiple occupancy for asylum seekers? That will presumably prevent local authorities from refusing to license those places, and it will also have the consequence of meaning that we no longer require places where we are expecting families, pregnant women and small children to live to have fire alarms, smoke alarms or running water. Does he agree that the Government need to be honest about how awfully they wish to treat asylum seekers and how they will avoid local authorities being part of that conversation?
Stephen Kinnock
I thank my hon. Friend for that powerful intervention. She is absolutely right. We are talking about basic standards of decency and humanity. Houses of multiple occupancy need to be properly regulated. They need a basic floor of certification and registration and of health and safety, particularly when we are talking about families. The Government should consider being more transparent and straightforward on that point.
Fortunately, we on the Opposition Benches care about secure borders, and we will clear up the mess by delivering a firm, fair and well-managed system that will stop the dangerous channel crossings, because we know that good government is not about chasing headlines; it is about common sense, hard graft and quiet diplomacy. Those are the qualities that underpin our new clauses and amendments to the Bill.
Mrs Elphicke
I rise to speak to amendment 184, which was tabled in my name and supported by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) and many other right hon. and hon. Friends.
The stop the boats Bill is important to my Dover and Deal constituency because it focuses specifically on the problems of small boat arrivals by dramatically reducing the pull factor that draws people to the United Kingdom—namely, that once people are here, it is very hard to remove them. The Bill cuts through all that. It says, plainly and simply: “If you’ve arrived here illegally, you won’t be allowed to stay.”
I have long said that the small boats crisis will end only when migrants and people smugglers alike know that they will not succeed. Stopping the boats is the right and compassionate thing to do. It will save lives that are being risked in the channel. The Bill and today’s amendments, particularly new schedule 1, will send a clear and unmistakable message to would-be channel migrants: “If you are thinking of breaking into Britain in a small boat, don’t bother. Save your cash and stay safe on land.”
Let me turn to the details of amendment 184. Clause 4, to which the amendment relates, sets out the circumstances in which human rights and other protection cases can be excluded. Put simply, if a person arrives through the small boats route, they will not be allowed to try to prevent their removal through endless legal appeals paid for by the British taxpayer.
The amendment focuses specifically on those who would put our public safety or national security at risk. This approach is in line with the UN refugee convention and the European convention on human rights, which has always allowed countries to protect themselves from those who would cause the most serious risk of harm to them and their countrymen and women.
The amendment would apply whether or not the country of origin can be identified—for example, if someone is undocumented, perhaps because they have eaten their identity papers or thrown their passport in the channel, or, as border officials tell me has shockingly been the case, if someone has taken razor blades to their fingers to damage and destroy their fingerprints to avoid identification.
At the frontline of my constituency in Dover and Deal, this is not a matter of open-borders fervour or pro-migration ideological dogma, as some of the contributions today have suggested; it is a matter that directly affects my constituency and our country’s safety, security and peace of mind. A key reason why the small boats Bill and amendment 184 matter is that when Dover and Deal residents raise matters of concern, the official Opposition do not back them and do not even believe them. When migrants ran amok and broke into a woman’s house, before being apprehended in a bedroom, the leader of the Labour group on Dover District Council went on TV to cast doubt on residents’ accounts, dismissing them as misreportings. He said that we should be “more generous” to illegal channel migrants.
The reality is that Labour’s new clause 15 is a smokescreen for allowing more legal challenge and more taxpayer costs —more potential loopholes to allow those who would wish our country harm to stay here. New clause 15(2) would require a Secretary of State to consider imposing TPIMs on illegal migrants who are suspected of terrorism, if they cannot remove them, but as the Minister has said, the Government are doing that anyway. The Government will always act to protect the country’s national security.
If Opposition Members want to ensure our country’s safety and security, they should back the Government’s “stop the boats” Bill and they should back swift removals. New clause 15 pretends to be tough, but in fact it would result in slower appeals than the fast-track process the Government have set out. In my constituency we see Labour’s true colours: it is an open-borders, pro-immigration party. It does not want to stop the boats. Just like Brexit, so on small boats: Labour cannot be trusted and does not listen.
I thank the Minister for engaging with us on amendment 184. I have had the reassurance that I sought, as have my right hon. and hon. Friends who support the amendment, so we will not press it to a vote today. I look forward to continuing to engage with the Minister to stop the boats.
Stella Creasy
Let us be very clear: demonising refugees will not tackle the cost of living crisis in this country, but it might create some local election leaflets, just like this piece of legislation. We know that this legislation will not survive the other place, thankfully, so the question for us today is: what messages do we need to send to our colleagues in the other House as they scrutinise and hold to account this Government, given that the Government have systematically failed to provide the time for scrutiny in this place?
Stella Creasy
The Minister has not explained why he has put forward that statutory instrument. People will still come because it is still better than the death that they face in the country they are fleeing from. We see that with the Sudanese. The Minister said earlier that he would listen to the UNHCR when it came to taking Sudanese refugees; in that case, he needs to tell us how many he will take because right now, there are people facing that very same situation. There are no queues in a war zone.
Stella Creasy
With the greatest respect, I have listened at length to the hon. Member for Stone and have yet to find any common ground on these issues.
Frankly, it is about time that we stood up for the importance of the international rule of law and helping people when they are facing these situations. There are no queues in a war zone, there is no administration or bureaucracy: there is fear, terror and persecution, and those people who are in Sudan now will be asking those questions. If the Minister wants to answer them and give those people hope that, if they make it to the border or to one of the refugee camps—they may find one of those UNHCR people who does not think that the UNCHR has that relationship with the UK but thinks the Minister is prepared to do that—we will take a certain number of people, that might stop them fleeing. This legislation will not do so.
More people will keep coming, including from Afghanistan, where the Government have failed to bring in a safe and legal route, and where they still fail to listen to those of us who have constituents who have been affected by that fact. They will come from Eritrea. They will come from the war zones and places of persecution—those people whose religion means that they are at risk. They will come because they see what we did with the Ukrainians; they see this country, and they know that there is a better way of doing it. The Lords will take this legislation on—that is probably the point of it for the Government—but let nobody be under any illusions: the Bill is just about 4 May. It is not actually about resolving the problem.
Tim Loughton
It is difficult to know in five minutes how to address the five amendments with my name at the top, including the two that have been leapfrogged by the Home Secretary. I have spent many hours cossetted with the Minister for Immigration and others to try to get some of the adjustments being made, and I am grateful for the time he has spent to try to get us to a better place. I certainly do not have time to respond to the extensive assurances that he aimed to give me from the Dispatch Box earlier.
I support safe and legal routes. I am glad we will now have them on the face of the Bill. We need a balance. I support this Bill, but if we are to be tough on the abusers of our immigration system, we also have to ensure we are open and generous to genuine asylum seekers, to whom we owe a duty of care. The amendments on safe and legal routes are also timely because we needed to address the question that I posed to the Home Secretary some months ago about how the 16-year-old orphan from east Africa with relations in the UK would make it to the UK. This week, that apocryphal scenario became a reality. The measures that the Immigration Minister will be bringing forward need to address that question.
It is essential that the Immigration Minister consults local authorities about capacity, but he also needs to consult refugee organisations and others about the type of schemes with which we will come forward. How will they operate? Who will qualify for them? How will people access them? Let us make sure that those schemes are in place sooner rather than later in 2024, although I would have liked them to be contemporaneous. We have a deal on safe and legal routes, but we need to see some real workable details in the coming months and as the Bill goes through the Lords.
I have no time to talk about amendment 181 on the return of children or amendment 182 on best interest and welfare checks. My real concern has been on child detention, so I was grateful for the assurances that the Immigration Minister gave me, because the measures as they stand do not differentiate between children and adults in detention terms. They ride roughshod through the safeguards on child detention under the Immigration Bill 2014, through which this Government specified the 24-hour limit, and the Government have not even offered to put the maximum detention times for children in this Bill. That is a must when it comes to any amendments that the Minister can bring forward in the House of Lords.