Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Stella Creasy Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

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

This Bill might be called the safety of Rwanda Bill, but it is really the safety of the future of the Tory party Bill. It is basically Schrodinger’s legislation—all things to all Tories. Ministers might say that it does not breach international law in order to make it a dead cat of a Bill for some, but need to say that it will breach international law to make it work for a dead cat of a Tory party, scrambling to find a reason to provide for such a policy.

I will be voting against this legislation, to stand up for Britain’s proud tradition of human rights and to urge this place to learn from the mess created by the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which replicated similar challenges. It is extraordinary that the Government are presenting us with a piece of legislation that says on its first page that the Secretary of State cannot confirm whether it is compliant with the rule of law and our convention obligations that we all signed up to support.

Many Members on the Government Benches have been listening to Oscar Wilde when he said:

“The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.”

Legislation is not vulgar—it is imperative to democracy. They should listen more to Winston Churchill, who said that the idea of a charter of human rights was for it to be

“guarded by freedom and sustained by law”.

This Bill will not sustain those laws, but diminish them.

We should be proud of the fact that we were the first nation to ratify the convention that set up the European Court of Human Rights, at a time when thousands of people were fleeing persecution and in recognition that the world did not always get things right. We remember the children on the Kindertransport who came to this country, but never their parents who we left behind. It is unimaginable in our own world to manage these issues on our own. That is exactly why we signed up to international treaties—to share the burden, to make the refugee system manageable and to deal with the fact that 60% of people on those boats are being granted asylum because they have a well-founded fear of persecution. Shipping a few of them off to Rwanda—just 5%—is at best an expensive distraction and at worst a deception.

The only thing that this piece of legislation will do is make a bad situation worse. Clause 5(3) provides that the Court cannot take an interim measure into account, even if a Minister has not blocked it. The Bill also breaks our commitment to observe rule 39 interim measures. In doing that, we breach our obligations under article 13 of the ECHR, which requires member states to provide effective remedies for the infringement of rights in domestic law. In layman’s terms, Parliament is being asked to commit the UK to a process that breaches our obligations to protect people from torture. No other country has ever tried to challenge rule 39 jurisdictions. They may not have complied with them, but we are leading on a completely new departure. That will do untold damage to our status around the world. It will also damage other treaties that we have signed up to.

The trade and co-operation agreement states explicitly that if we end judicial co-operation, we undermine the agreement. The Good Friday agreement states explicitly that denying access to domestic courts for individuals on the basis of the ECHR contradicts its own commitments. I am sure that our colleagues from Northern Ireland have recognised that we cannot override legislation in this way. That means there will be countless legal challenges. We have already heard about the millions of pounds we have spent on a scheme where not a single refugee has been sent to Rwanda for processing. We have already spent £2 million on legal fees fighting this process, and that is on top of the extra £150 million we have already pledged to spend on it. No wonder a ministerial direction has been required to uphold this policy.

Parliament can pass any law it likes stating that things should happen. We could pass laws saying that there should not be smoking on the streets of Paris, but it does not mean it will happen, and that is the legal fallacy at the heart of this Bill, along with the Home Office permanent secretary saying there is no deterrent effect. I could pass legislation to say I can sing, but if Members came to karaoke with me, they would quickly realise the truth. The cold, hard reality of the law is that the Bill does not change the facts that the Supreme Court identified, and only the people who think it is a deterrent think that they can somehow keep saying to the courts, “No, no, no—Rwanda is safe,” like some kind of Vicky Pollard approach to making legislation.

It is time the British public woke up to what this Government are doing. We cannot amend ourselves out of this challenge without, on the one side, Tweedledum and, on the other, Tweedledee arguing anymore. This is a mess. It ruins our international standing, it is more money being wasted and it is more time in this place being wasted, when we could go after the traffickers and those exploiting vulnerable people fleeing persecution. We should speak up for the values that, post war, we stood for in the world, including supporting people who are at risk of persecution.

This legislation will not stop the boats, it will not stop the rot and it will not stop the Tory party tearing itself apart. Britain deserves better. With this side of the House, it will get it.

UK-Rwanda Partnership

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We do not do this because it is easy, or because it is convenient; we do it because it is incredibly important. If, collectively, the UK and other European countries do not address the issue of people smuggling, the winners will be the people smugglers; the losers will be the people who are manipulated by the people smugglers, the ones who are robbed, beaten, raped and murdered, or who drown in the Mediterranean or in the Channel. Those are the people we are trying to help by bringing in a structure that breaks the business model of the people smugglers. The vacuum that he talks about on the Labour Benches means that the silence when it comes to ideas is deafening. Opposition Members choose to oppose at every stage, but they do nothing—nothing—to address the evil of our time.

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

I am sure, Mr Deputy Speaker, you will soon be updating us on when the next personal statement might be made to the House.

Those in Kigali appear to understand and agree with Winston Churchill. The point of international treaties and the European Court of Human Rights was to tackle oppressive Governments and the things they did to citizens. We do not sign up to international treaties just on immigration law, so a change to anything in our relationship with the European Court of Human Rights will have an impact, potentially, on the trade and co-operation agreement, because that specifically states that if we end judicial co-operation, there would be a problem. The Good Friday agreement also has the ECHR at the heart of it. Will the Home Secretary therefore tell us what conversations he has had with the European Union and the Irish about this legislation?

[James Cleverly]

This legislation does not change our relationship with the ECHR.

Criminal Justice Bill

Stella Creasy Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)]

I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak about this very important Bill, and it is of course a pleasure to follow Scottish National party spokesman the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens).

There are some very positive aspects to the Bill that are welcome. Tackling violence against women and girls, giving powers to law enforcement agencies to respond to technological change, and strengthening the law to protect the public from violence and intimidation are much-needed measures that will certainly reassure my constituents. There are communities across my constituency that have been the victims of appalling antisocial behaviour in recent years. The police and local councils are doing what they can to protect these communities with the application and implementation of community protection notices and then public spaces protection orders, but one challenge that the police have faced is that many of the perpetrators of antisocial behaviour are under 16. Lowering the age of a CPN to 10 will help the police in tackling antisocial behaviour and is much appreciated.

However, I am not comfortable with parts of this Bill—the last Criminal Justice Bill before the next election—and there are also things that are missing from it. I shall be as brief as possible. I apologise to those who have provided some excellent information, and I will probably do them a disservice as a consequence. I will also be blunt, as there is no other way of saying this, and I find myself being slightly firmer on this than the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper): I did not work as a Minister and as a Back Bencher on the repeal of the Vagrancy Act, only to see rough sleeping criminalised again via a different piece of legislation.

I get that there is an issue with aggressive begging. We on the ministerial taskforce, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) was very much a part of, were always aware of that. There was always a view that other pieces of legislation, such as the existing antisocial behaviour legislation, could cope with aggressive begging being transferred in. At no point did we, either as a taskforce or as part of the Vagrancy Act repeal, hear evidence about aggressive rough sleeping.

Rough sleepers require holistic support. They often have extremely complex needs, including significant mental health needs. Visibility may be uncomfortable for many, but it also enables support workers from the many brilliant charities and local authorities to reach out to them. Issuing prevention notices does nothing to solve the problem, but pushes them further away from the solution. Sentencing them to prison creates nothing more than extra problems for the person and the creaking prison estate.

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

What the hon. Lady is saying is incredibly powerful, and I wholeheartedly agree with her. Does she agree that one challenge we face is that we have a homelessness crisis? In my local area, our brilliant night shelters are already full, and the people working with the homeless would find it harder to help them if they had a criminal record. It would be counter-productive to the very good work we all know needs to happen to prevent homelessness so that it is one night only.

[Tracey Crouch]

I completely agree with the hon. Lady. People who find themselves sleeping rough on the streets are in a desperate situation, and the provisions in the Bill will do nothing to help them. Our local authorities, which often get a bad rap for the consequences of rough sleeping, have many officers doing brilliant work in trying to support rough sleepers. We need a holistic approach to tackling that issue. We do not need to criminalise them through these provisions, some of which, by the way, are laughable, respectfully. We have the idea that a prevention notice can be served to a rough sleeper at their last known address in writing. I am not entirely sure why that provision is even in there.

The point is that we need to be supporting people who are rough sleeping. I get that there is an issue with aggressive begging. In fact, various mayors across our metropolitan cities have said that, but rough sleeping does not need to be criminalised. We got rid of that as part of the Vagrancy Act repeal, which was supported by the Government. All we are doing is bringing that criminalisation in by the back door.

I will support the Bill on Second Reading because of the other measures, but I strongly urge the Government to remove the clauses on nuisance rough sleeping from the Bill. If not, I will certainly lend my name to amendments to remove those clauses from the Bill, on which I hope I would get cross-party support as a consequence. There are other ways of dealing with rough sleeping, rather than criminalising people.

The Bill also contains welcome measures to improve public confidence in policing after significant failings within forces to identify and investigate criminal behaviours. Those are welcome, given the shocking high-profile cases of recent years, but I suggest we reflect on how we protect good officers who do their job in challenging and fast-moving situations from prosecution. The Times on Saturday reported on the prosecution of PC Paul Fisher, who crashed en route to south London, where Sudesh Amman, a convicted terrorist, had stabbed two members of the public. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said that it

“undermines the confidence of all officers using their powers to keep the public safe.”

He is spot on.

A constituent of mine—a frontline Metropolitan police dog handler—was sentenced today having been found guilty of actual bodily harm after apprehending a dangerous criminal, who was subsequently sentenced to 14 months in prison. At the time, he was hailed “brave” and a “hero”. A complaint made from prison was dismissed by every level of the internal standards process, and it was only when the prisoner appealed again that it ended up in court, with the shocking guilty verdict. My constituent’s 21 years of exemplary service are in tatters due to a system that actively works against frontline officers and instead advocates for passive policing. We do need to improve standards of policing across our forces, but, at the same time, we need to protect those officers who are doing their jobs.

I turn to issues that would be helpful inclusions in the Bill. This morning, the first part of the inquiry into the depraved acts of David Fuller in the mortuaries of the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust was published. The families of the victims of Fuller are always at the front of our minds when we, the MPs whose constituencies are covered by the trust and where many of them live, are informed about the inquiry. We collectively agree that the Government, the NHS and the trust should accept and act on the recommendations of Sir Jonathan’s report without delay.

Fuller will rightly serve the rest of his life in prison for the heinous crimes he committed, but there are two additional aspects of his crimes that the Government must also act on. First, the woefully short maximum sentence of two years for anyone found guilty of the sexual assault of a dead body needs to be substantially increased to at least 10 years, as per Baroness Noakes’s amendment to the previous Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Secondly, the current legislation applies only to the sexual assault of a dead body that involves penetration. Given the sensitivity of this matter, and on this day when coincidently the inquiry published its report and we are debating the Bill, I do not want to go into further details, but, in short, non-penetrative sexual assault of a dead body is not included under existing legislation, and that needs to be changed. I and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), who is currently abroad on Government business, will table an amendment to the Bill to that end. I truly hope that we will never see such depravity again, but in memory of those who were victims of Fuller’s crimes, we must ensure that the offence covers all acts of assault and that sentences are increased significantly.

I turn to an entirely different point. I am surprised not to see in the Bill a specific offence of tailgating at football matches. The House will have seen Baroness Casey’s report following the violence at the Euro 2020 finals. Tailgating causes significant operational, safety and security problems for major events at Wembley stadium as well as other football matches across the country—I witnessed that as I experienced the surge of those illegally attempting entry to Wembley as I queued to get into the final. I understand that the Home Office agrees with the recommendation for a specific offence and that King’s counsel has recommended to the FA that that can be done through either an update to the Football (Offences) Act 1991 via statutory instrument, or adding it to the Bill. Given that the Bill is in front of us, it feels like a missed opportunity not to include that offence in it, so I will happily table an amendment to ensure that it is in place long before we host Euro 2028.

Finally, there is one other point that I was surprised not to see in the Bill. There are many reasons for us to be disappointed that the Government dropped the kept animals Bill, but one particular reason, which is relevant to this Bill, is that it would have introduced a specific pet abduction offence. Given that there is no debate about the harm and impact of pet theft, I was surprised not to see the offence included in this already wide-ranging bill. There has been an increase in pet theft, and the Government’s pet theft taskforce believes that pet owners should not live in fear of this cruel crime. Since this was in our manifesto, I hope the Government will either table an amendment or support a Back Benchers’ amendment that creates a stand-alone offence and bring reassurance to the millions of pet owners across the country.

I appreciate that I have raised a varied list of points, and that others wish to speak and I am running out of time. In summary, this is an important Bill—our last Criminal Justice Bill before the election. There are things in it that we need to do. There are things in it that we do not need to do. There are still things that we need to put into it. Fortunately, we have an excellent ministerial team responsible for the Bill. I look forward to working with them as it progresses through Parliament.

--- Later in debate ---

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

There are a number of measures in the Bill that we can all agree are very welcome, and I want to recognise that. However, there is a wider challenge for us all when we see such a deconstruction of our criminal justice system, given that parliamentary time is so rare and precious. Are we doing everything we can do through this Bill to tackle the challenges in our constituencies?

I am sad that the Home Secretary is not here. His approach to talking about knife crime will not go down well in my constituency. We are facing an epidemic of knife crime in our community. For many of my residents it is a sign of real concern that they see a lack not only of the police they want, but of the social fabric that we need, both to tackle knife crime and to prevent it in the first place. I am also sorry that our SNP colleague, the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens), is not in his place. He talked about the Glasgow model. I would go further than a public health model; I would go for an education model to try to prevent these issues in the first place.

I ask Ministers to look again at what more we can do to tackle knife crime. It has risen substantially and I am afraid that my local police consistently seem stretched to the point where they cannot do the work I know they want to do. I put on record my gratitude to the police for the work they are attempting to do, but we all know it is not enough.

The same is true for antisocial behaviour. My office has taken to mapping out the many areas where we know there is persistent drug dealing, in the hope that at some point we might be able to use that information to effect change and progress. We hear from residents that, even when they report things and try to do everything we tell them to do to stop those problems, nothing changes. I look at the Bill but do not see the measures that will help them with antisocial behaviour.

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) is not in her seat because I absolutely agree with what she said about rough sleeping. There is a rough-sleeping epidemic in my local community. Criminalising it—separately from begging—will not help us to deal with it, and, indeed, could be counter-productive. I hope that, as the Bill progresses, we recognise the overwhelming cries from those in our brilliant night shelters, who work on the ground to tackle rough sleeping, about how counter-productive that would be.

I put on record my gratitude for the work of Daniel Johnson, a Labour/Co-op MSP, on tackling violence against shopworkers. My Front-Bench colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris), has done brilliant work on that in this Parliament. We have a model for what works. We know that our shopworkers deserve better; they are trying to help us. I hope that we can finally agree that such legislation is needed.

In an outpouring of collegiality, let me also agree with everything that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) said, as well as with my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), who is a powerhouse of changes in this place, as she has proved yet again. I agree with the case made by my right hon. Friend about the decriminalisation of abortion. I will focus on that in my speech because I will also table an amendment on that matter. I will set out why I believe we can take that way forward. I think there is growing agreement that the issue needs to be addressed.

Indeed, on 15 June, when faced again with the evidence of the continued prosecution, criminalisation and incarceration of women for having abortions, the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), challenged us by saying that it was up to this place to do something about that if it had a problem with it, particularly the difference now between the experience of women in Northern Ireland and women in England and Wales. He tried to argue that the House made a decision knowing that it would create a different regime for access to abortion in Northern Ireland. I disagree. As somebody who was heavily involved, I do not think that, when we voted, we deliberately wanted to give second-class status to our constituents in England and Wales as to their rights. But I also recognise the challenge that the Minister set us that day: to test the will of the House through a free vote on an amendment to a piece of legislation.

Let me clear: I intend to table an amendment to begin that process of testing whether an Englishwoman’s right to choose should be confined by a piece of legislation from the 1600s. We know that abortion is a routine health procedure. One in three women in this country will have one in their lifetime. This Bill is the right place to act, because even if we see abortion as a healthcare matter, it is first and foremost a criminal offence that every one of those women is enacting before seeking exemption from prosecution.

When Roe v. Wade was repealed in America last year, many were quick to dismiss the idea that such attacks on women’s basic rights were possible in this country—access to abortion was secure and reflected the settled will of the people—but in the last few months alone, we have seen what the Government have done on buffer zones, for which the House voted overwhelmingly. Those same voices are silent as the Government drag their heels on the implementation of buffer zones, which are the will of Parliament.

In the meantime, multiple women are awaiting trial, under a law that is older than Germany, for the offence of just having an abortion. Last year, six women were charged with having an abortion. Each of them could, in theory, spend the rest of their lives behind bars. It is not just about the high-profile cases that have gone to court and been in the press, and the prison sentences that the legislation drives; investigations into women have rocketed in the last few years, too. Police data shows that, since 2015, 52 women have been reported for having an abortion.

I am sorry to disagree with the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Dame Maria Miller), who is no longer in her place, but I genuinely feel that looking at sentencing guidelines alone will not do. It is having the offence in the first place that is driving those investigations and prosecutions. The cases that come to court are the tip of the iceberg of a culture in which we use a woman’s reproductive capacity against her at a time when she is most vulnerable. Many people agree that that is wrong, but we in this House have yet to address it because we have always put decriminalising abortion in the “too difficult” box.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Ind)]

I have been listening very carefully to the hon. Lady. Can I ask her to explain why there is a sudden rash of prosecutions of women? It seems extraordinary. What is the catalyst that has caused it?

[Stella Creasy]

I wish I could tell the hon. Gentleman what I think is the cause for sure. There are a number of pressures—perhaps the move towards telemedicine or a renewed interest in the issue—but I hope we can agree that in the 21st century the idea that having an abortion in and of itself is a criminal offence is outdated and unworkable with a commitment to equality between the sexes. Indeed, we are increasingly seeing—I know this will shock him—any woman who has had a miscarriage or stillbirth being at risk of being dragged into a criminal investigation.

A young teenager called Megan suffered a stillbirth at 28 weeks. The police investigated Megan’s involvement in her child’s death for a year before the post-mortem confirmed that the pregnancy loss was due to natural causes. She faced that ordeal while dealing with the trauma of stillbirth, and it resulted in her needing emergency psychiatric care. She is not the only one. Another young teenager, unaware she was pregnant, delivered a stillborn child. Once this was declared, her hospital room was flooded with police officers—the presumption of foul play assumed before a post-mortem or a doctor’s examination. Although sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 have become more widely known, it is section 60 that is most frequently used to charge an individual at initial stage, and that was originally written in 1643 to be used to prosecute where there was a suspicion of abortion. That is why senior obstetricians are now raising concerns that the provision, if it stays on the statute book, leaves bereaved parents exposed to intrusive questioning and investigation from the police.

For those who have suffered a stillbirth, the knock on the door that they need is from a counsellor, not a constable. If these cases were occurring in Northern Ireland, women would not face this pressure. That is why in 2019 MPs in this place voted to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland. It is also why women in Northern Ireland now have buffer zones; they are part of a decriminalised process and protected as such. Crucially, when we know people wish to attack a woman’s basic right to choose, in Northern Ireland the Secretary of State must uphold that human right to choose to have an abortion—safely, legally and locally. Those who seek to frustrate that access, whether through formal or informal ways, face a Government who know they will have to go to court if they do not overcome those barriers and protect the rights of women to choose. That is because that legislation is founded under the auspices of the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women—a treaty that we technically have yet to ratify fully, but which expressly states that states parties should remove criminalisation of abortion and

“withdraw punitive measures…on women who undergo abortion”.

The amendment that I will table this evening, which is open to all MPs to support—and which I hope I can convince my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North to co-sign—does not ask for something new or to set a new precedent. It is rooted in practice and evidence about what works when we are protecting the human right of women in the UK to choose. This is not untested because decriminalisation of abortion has already happened not just in Northern Ireland, but in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We are simply asking for equality and for somebody in Government whose role it would be to uphold that right to access an abortion without the threat of punitive measures.

In tabling my amendment I want to be very clear, because I understand that there will be concerns, especially in the light of recent court cases: nothing in my proposal will change the time limits in the Abortion Act 1967. Indeed, my amendment would explicitly enshrine those limits in future regulations. We should all be clear that 90% of abortions in this country happen before 10 weeks and that those having late-term abortions often do so for the most heartbreaking of reasons—the fatal foetal abnormality that means that if we try to move the time limit, we force women to give birth to babies they know will die. After carrying a much wanted child, we would be criminalising them rather than medicalising this matter.

Decriminalisation is about taking away the threat of prosecution. It does not take away the principle of viability in accessing services, so I state here and now—and for the purposes to be repeated online and offline as we move through the issue—that a vote for decriminalisation is explicitly a vote against abortion up to birth, though some have tried to scare otherwise. It is not the case in Northern Ireland, and it will not be the case here. Neither is it a vote for no regulation: the removal of the criminal underpinning of our legislation would mean its replacement with a medical one that puts the health of women first and ensures appropriate professional delivery of services as well as clinical safeguards.

I know there are some who will never want this progress. I respect their views: I respect the fact that they do not believe abortion should be an option, and will fight for their voices to be heard in this democracy. Surely we all want positive sex education in all our schools and support access to contraceptives, which will reduce the number of abortions required. However, many more of us disagree that a woman should be forced to give birth, and recognise that having bodily autonomy is a human rights issue.

The Northern Ireland experience shows that it is possible to make progress but also means that we currently have a two-tier system, with women in the UK being given different rights depending on where they live. Why should the women of Birmingham, Bangor, Bradford, Bury, Broadstairs, Bournemouth and Barking not enjoy the same protection of buffer zones as the women of Belfast? If colleagues voted for those buffer zones in Northern Ireland, why would they not extend them to their own constituents? If colleagues were not in this place to vote for them in Northern Ireland, why would they accept their own constituents being considered second-class citizens when it comes to their basic human rights?

Now is the time to recognise the damage being done because our criminal code does not allow a right to be accessed safely, legally, locally and equally across our nations. We know that this will be a long fight, that the wording may change and different variations may be put forward, but we also know that the time is now. Colleagues who agree—who do not want to see women prosecuted, obstetricians worried and stillbirths penalised in this way—should co-sign our amendment and say, “It is now an equal time to choose for all our constituents.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Florence Eshalomi]

This is where we need clarity, not only for offenders but for prison officers who are going to be dealing with those people and making sure no harm comes to them. There must be a clear definition of the use of force, recognising that this is a very distressing time for the families and those in the dock but also recognising that there must be appropriate use of force.

Many Members have highlighted the second area I want to focus on: the new proposal on the power of nuisance begging and nuisance rough sleeping. The hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) and my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) are not in the Chamber at present, but I agree entirely with their comments. There is no mention in the proposals of any support to address rough sleeping, yet we have a number of punitive measures that will only end up criminalising people who are already facing a difficult and challenging time. Those measures will do nothing to end rough sleeping and homelessness. Specifically, the penalty for nuisance begging or nuisance rough sleeping is one month of imprisonment. The measure might not work, either, because the Government have been honest in saying that there is a lack of capacity in prisons—there is just no space. That is evident in the Government’s proposals in clauses 25 to 29 to transfer individuals to rented prisons abroad.

Short-term prison sentences are expensive, and studies show that they do not work in having a positive impact on re-offending. I am co-chair of the all-party group for ending homelessness, and our inquiry last year heard from many people who had experienced rough sleeping and homelessness. The key issues they highlighted were mental health problems, substance abuse, domestic abuse, alcohol and poverty. All of them are key drivers in forcing people to experience rough sleeping and homeless.

[Stella Creasy]

Given that this is a Home Office Bill, does my hon. Friend recognise that one of the challenges we are seeing is an increasing number of people who are refugees becoming homeless because they are given such short notice that they are no longer going to be housed in hotels? Perhaps if we had a little more notice and planning we might be able to avoid some of those people sleeping rough, because we could work with them to make sure they were able to find housing or other accommodation in their new country when they have the status they need to be here.

[Florence Eshalomi]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising that matter, because it is as if she is reading my mind. Our all-party group took evidence from a number of different organisations as well as London councils, refugees and people from the Homes for Ukraine scheme. We heard about people who had been housed and supported by various councils and host families, but who were now presenting to councils up and down the country as homeless with nowhere to go. The Government need a joined-up approach to addressing this.

We also have to recognise that people who are rough sleeping are also very vulnerable and are more likely to be victims of crime and antisocial behaviour, yet they will not report that to the police because of the stigma of being homeless.

Everyone needs a good-quality home to live in. It is central to our wellbeing and our physical and mental health, and it should be a basic human right. I urge the Minister and the Government to remove the clause in question and instead to work with local authorities, charities, shelters and organisations including St Mungo’s, Crisis, Shelter, Homeless Link and a range of others, who are working hard to provide support to people so that everyone can find a decent home and keep it.

I also want to talk about the vetting, suspension and misconduct of police officers. This Bill presented a good opportunity to introduce reform in those areas. We have had various reports and studies on police conduct both in London and across the country, and the fact that seven of our police forces are still in special measures should alarm us. The duty of candour for police under clause 73 falls short of the wholesale review we need in policing. There is a requirement on the College of Policing to issue a code of practice to set out the actions to be taken by a chief officer. That essentially leaves the College of Policing to determine what

“acting in an open and transparent way”

means.

One of the key areas cited in Baroness Casey’s report was the defensiveness of organisations such as the Met police when faced with criticism. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) put forward a number of sensible proposals to look at reforming that, and they go way beyond what the Government are outlining in the Bill. They include automatic dismissal for a serving officer convicted of a serious criminal offence, automatic suspension of an officer charged with a serious criminal offence and automatic dismissal of a serving officer who fails their vetting. That would help restore some of the trust and confidence in our policing, because at the moment criminals see that those who are supposed to uphold the law are not within the law themselves and are facing criminal charges. That should not be happening.

We welcome some of the good measures in the Bill. Some of the measures on knife crime are good, but on their own will they not go far enough to address knife crime. One of the most difficult things I have had to do as a Member of Parliament is to meet bereaved families. I have sat in a family’s front room and looked over their shoulder and seen a picture of the loved one they have lost—that young smiling face. I held my constituent’s mum earlier this year after her daughter was brutally murdered at 4 pm on 1 May. She asked me, “Why?” She asked why she has to wait over a year to get justice for her daughter. There is nothing you can say.

Just introducing new measures and legislation on zombie knives and other knives will not address the chronic issue of knife crime that we see across the country. We need a full-scale, holistic public health approach. We need funding, education and a mental health approach to dealing with the root causes of knife crime. We cannot just lock people up to get out of this—that is not the solution. Those who have lost family members know that is not the solution, and they want to work with the Government to address this matter properly. I ask the Government again: instead of introducing yet another measure on knife crime, will they work with local authorities, youth services, councils and police forces up and down the country to have a wholesale public health approach to dealing with this pandemic of knife crime?

Hate crime has sadly risen, too. Earlier this year there was a horrific hate crime attack at the Two Brewers in Clapham in my constituency. We have seen a massive increase in LGBTQI+ hate crime. Someone being attacked simply for who they love is wrong. Again, the community feel that when they come forward to report such crimes to the police, their concerns are not taken seriously. Will the Government look at the inefficiencies in reporting and addressing those crimes?

A number of Members have mentioned retail crime and visits they have made to stores in their constituencies. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), I visited a Co-op store in my constituency. In the South Lambeth Road store, shopworkers mentioned a situation where the same offender had come to the shop 17 times. Shopworkers are going out to work every day knowing that they could be physically attacked and abused, and that is not right. I started my working life in Sainsbury’s on Clapham High Street. Yes, customers could sometimes be aggressive, especially when the focaccia bread was sold out by 11 am on Saturday morning—it was Clapham High Street—but no one should have to tolerate abuse and physical abuse just for going to work. Staff on the frontline in our retail shops are being attacked day in, day out, and that cannot go on. The Government are not recognising that, and are saying that thefts under £200 will not be looked at. We need to ensure that the police have the resources to address this issue, because low-level antisocial behaviour escalates. In some cases, that physical and verbal abuse, God forbid, turns into a stabbing and an innocent shop worker being killed. We should not have that happening to our frontline workers. There are sensible proposals in the Bill, but I urge the Government to think carefully about those that will not have an impact in addressing the key issues of crime and antisocial behaviour.

Illegal Immigration

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his kind words. My focus in this role is making sure that the Department is highly effective in protecting the British people and protecting our borders. This is not about trying to look tough; it is about trying to deliver for the British people, and that will be my relentless focus. My right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General reminds me that her advice, like that of all very good in-house lawyers, is limited to the client, which is His Majesty’s Government. However, I have no doubt I could persuade her to meet my right hon. Friend on a private basis.

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

I welcome the Home Secretary to his new role. I am sure he would want to join me in expressing gratitude to all those in our public services who came here as refugees and make such a fantastic contribution to our country. At the heart of this case are a series of asylum seekers, one of whom I know has been confirmed as a victim of trafficking. He has been stuck in an asylum hotel since May 2022. As yet, the Government have not even begun to look at his claim for asylum. Can the Home Secretary tell us when his Department will begin to process the claims of those people and get on with finding out whether they are illegal asylum seekers? Or is he just going to continue with the charade that he can make Rwanda workable?

[James Cleverly]

I do not have the details of the individual case that the hon. Lady raises, so I cannot comment on the specifics, but I remind her and the House that, as part of the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan, eliminating that historic backlog of case files was a commitment. At the start of this process, the backlog stood at 91,000 cases; it has now been reduced to—

Illegal Migration

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

The two hotels; my right hon. Friend corrects me. I would obviously like them to be closed at the earliest opportunity, but today we are setting out the beginning of a phased closure, with the first 50 hotels being notified. I hope that more will follow in the weeks and months ahead. I am fully aware of the situation in Chelmsford that she described, and I would like it to be resolved.

I take my right hon. Friend’s broader point about the importance of the Home Office working closely with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), is sitting beside me. She and I and the Secretary of State are working closely together to ensure that local authorities can plan for any new individuals who might live in their area.

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

Further to that response, the Minister talks about the planning between the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and the Home Office, but I wonder what experience he has of the London private rental market. In my constituency, refugees who have been granted asylum are being kicked out of their hotels by the Home Office contractor within a week.

[Robert Jenrick]

indicated dissent.

[Stella Creasy]

The Minister shakes his head, but I am happy to share with him the letter that shows that. No assistance has been provided for those people. They are being told to go back to the council, but the council does not have time to follow up with them, so they end up at our local homeless night shelter, which will ultimately cost us all more than an orderly system. The Minister is shaking his head, but what does his data show about the number of refugees granted asylum while staying in migrant hotels who have been rehoused? Will he look at a more orderly system, and work with those of us on the ground to ensure that today’s announcement will not just be a way of passing on the cost to another Department?

[Robert Jenrick]

First the hon. Lady wanted us to clear the backlog; now she does not want us to do that because of the consequences of clearing it. Perhaps it would be better if she just supported us in trying to stop illegal migrants coming to the country in the first place. On her specific points, it is not correct that the Home Office gives seven days’ notice; it gives 28. [Interruption.] I am happy to look at what she is waving in my face, but I assure her that the policy is 28 days’ notice. The key point is that everybody who is granted asylum has access to the benefits system and can get a job. Given that the overwhelming majority are young men, that is exactly what they should do now: get on and contribute to British society, and integrate into our country.

Migration and Economic Development Partnership

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

My hon. Friend speaks for the British people in his powerful question. My answer is simple: yes.

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

Contrary to what the Home Secretary has just told the House, the vast majority of those in the boats are Iranians and Afghans—just 1% are Albanians. Iranians and Afghans have an asylum grant rate of 98%, because—surprise, surprise, given what is happening in those countries—they are refugees fleeing persecution. The only phoney thing here is the Home Secretary’s attempt to avoid responsibility for spending so much taxpayers’ money on a policy on which—going by the judgment, and yes, I have read it—she clearly did not do her due diligence.

The Home Secretary will have had to put forward a budget. She says that the Government will do whatever it takes to make this policy work. Are they going to spend whatever it takes? Will she be honest with the British public about how much money she has allocated to continue on this folly to save her blushes in the run- up to the general election? It could go towards processing cases and getting the backlog down.

[Suella Braverman]

I am not in the business of taking lectures from Labour on this issue.

[Stella Creasy]

How much money?

[Suella Braverman]

The reality is that last year, 12,000 Albanians came—

[Stella Creasy]

How much money?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. The hon. Lady has asked her question. It is discourteous for her to sit there repeating it when the Home Secretary is answering it. A bit of courtesy is necessary on all sides.

Stop and Search

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 19th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

My hon. Friend puts it very well. The police—our frontline partners who are dealing with this issue day in, day out; who have to break that tragic news to parents, every parent’s worst nightmare—report back that stop and search, when used lawfully, proportionately and reasonably, is a vital tool in the fight against crime and is fundamentally very effective in saving lives.

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

Frankly, I hope that my residents in Walthamstow are not listening to this statement, because it is just plain offensive to those of us at the heart of this challenge. Just a few weeks ago, I got up to ask the Prime Minister about a 16-year-old boy murdered in my community outside his school, and another 16-year-old in court charged with that murder. This weekend, last night, I was sat with residents, having an emergency residents’ meeting because we had had a serious shooting in my community—another young man, critical but stable in hospital.

None of my residents would dispute the role that stop and search can play, but we are all arguing—begging, pleading—for this Government to recognise the epidemic of youth violence in our country. If the Home Secretary cares about these young people, as she says she does, she should invest in their future. Under her Government, investment in youth services has plummeted from £158 per head to just £37. I asked the Prime Minister to make this issue one of his national priorities, but he ignored the question. Will the Home Secretary do something different and put her budget into correcting that deficit?

[Suella Braverman]

I am very proud of what this Government have achieved when it comes to law and order. We have falling crime; we have a record number of police officers—ever, in the history of policing; this financial year alone, we have put over £100 million into tackling serious violence; and since 2019, 136,000 violent offences have been prevented in places operating Government initiatives. That is thousands of lives saved and thousands of violent incidents prevented. I only wish the hon. Lady would welcome that.

Illegal Migration

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Monday 5th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

I am grateful to my French counterpart in the French Government for their very good co-operation on this challenge. It is clear that we have a common challenge. The illegal migration problem that many European countries are facing is similar to the one we are facing. Almost all my European counterparts are grappling with this issue, because we are facing a global migration crisis. That is why it requires a collaborative approach, and that is why I am pleased that the Prime Minister has been working hard to achieve consensus among European allies.

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

In this month of all months—Pride month—I want to follow-up on the answer that the Home Secretary gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant). We know that Uganda has introduced a law that brings in the death penalty for what it terms “aggravated homosexuality”—goodness knows how that would go down in Soho. Is she saying that, if a Ugandan was on a boat and came here on a boat, she would deport them to Rwanda when, in 2021, during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, it was detaining LGBT people and claiming they did not represent Rwandan values? Has she even read her own Home Office equality impact assessment that details the illegal treatment? Will she rule out today deporting any Ugandans to Rwanda from the UK?

[Suella Braverman]

I ask the hon. Member whether she has even read the High Court judgment that looks extensively at our agreement with Rwanda. It looks in detail at our arrangements with Rwanda and concludes emphatically that our agreement is lawful and that, when it comes, for example, to article 3—the kind of claims she is talking about—there is no issue with the treatment of asylum seekers if they were to be in Rwanda. So I encourage her to do her homework before she makes gross misassumptions about Rwanda.

Illegal Migration Bill

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[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.

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

Will the Minister give way?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Stella Creasy]

rose—

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

I am going to draw my remarks to a close now, because all Members want others to have an opportunity to speak.

[Stella Creasy]

rose—

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

This bungling Government just keep doubling down on their own incompetence. The more posturing they do, the more small boats we see. The longer they govern, the longer the asylum backlog grows, and the more our constituents will ask themselves, “With record-high immigration figures and a record-high asylum backlog, are our borders more or less secure under the Tories?”

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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?

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

indicated dissent.

[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.

[Sir William Cash]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[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.

Illegal Migration Bill

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree. We accept that the Government have made an absolute hash of the asylum system. The asylum backlog is enormous and they should pay attention to it, but tackling the problem by denying anybody else asylum ever does not seem the legitimate way to deal with it.

Clauses 11 and 12 expand the power of detention. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on immigration detention, I find that an incredibly worrying development. It includes people who cannot be removed to their country of origin. The UK Government have previously said that their policy was to decrease the immigration detention estate, but that will now be expanded dramatically. The harm done to people in detention facilities is immeasurable. It exacerbates existing trauma, tears families apart and has crushing impacts on mental and physical health. After the Home Secretary has removed the right to apply for bail, thousands more will be trapped in the system indefinitely.

The UK’s detention system is already an international outlier, with people held indefinitely, out of line with provisions in the criminal law system. I received an email earlier from Elspeth Macdonald, who works for Medical Justice, on worrying and serious reports of a death at Colnbrook immigration removal centre. I would be grateful if the Minister stopped playing with his phone and confirmed whether the reports of the death there are true, because it is incredibly worrying. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that there will be an investigation, if the death did happen. There have been deaths in other immigration centres, and we do not want the Government repeating those dangerous errors. I would like to know what appropriate counselling and bereavement support have been made available to people in that detention centre, because that is a frightening experience for them.

It would be useful to know why the Home Office has stopped including the number of deaths in immigration detention from the official immigration statistics. They were published every year from 2017 to 2021, but in the latest statistics for 2022, deaths were not included. Immigration detention is bad for people. It is bad for their mental health. If there is to be further immigration detention—[Interruption.] The Minister shakes his head, but the evidence is incredibly clear that immigration detention is bad for people.

The Bill also expands detention criteria to include children, which rolls back on hard-won rights that the Glasgow girls and others fought for. Immigration detention is no place for anybody, and certainly not for children. Some of the detainees that the Minister wishes to hold will be pregnant. The British Medical Association has said that under the Illegal Migration Bill, the 72-hour time limit on the detention of pregnant women, introduced by the Government in 2016, will be denied to women who arrive by irregular means. Instead, pregnant women will be locked up indefinitely, while the Government attempt to remove them from the UK. They will not be allowed to apply for immigration bail for the first 28 days that they are detained or for juridical review of the lawfulness of their detention. Many pregnant women are likely to languish in detention for some time, since there are few returns agreements in place by which they could be removed from the UK.

I highlight a particular case study from Women for Refugee Women of a woman called Priya, a trafficking survivor detained in Yarl’s Wood when she was 20 weeks pregnant and held there for almost two months before being released. Priya said:

“I only had one hospital appointment while I was there, for my 20-week scan, and even then I was escorted by officers who took me 40 minutes late for my appointment. I felt frustrated that I wasn’t able to speak to the midwife after my scan because there was no time. The officers just took me straight back to Yarl’s Wood instead. It was not easy. I often felt weak and in pain; I’m anaemic and my blood pressure is very low. On one occasion I passed out in Yarl’s Wood, but they just took me back to my room and left.”

Pregnant women are being locked up in detention centres. What kind of message does that send to the rest of the world? It is inhumane.

Clause 12 amends the Immigration Act 1971, and specifies that determining what is a reasonable period to detain people is for the Secretary of State rather than the courts. Those changes would apply to existing detention powers as well as the new powers provided in clause 11. The amendment removes the considerable latitude given to the Home Secretary to decide what is reasonably necessary to enable examination or removal. Clause 13 amends the immigration bail provisions in schedule 10 to the Immigration Act and restricts the jurisdiction of the courts to review the lawfulness of a decision to detain or to refuse bail.

Clauses 15 to 20 deal with the provision of asylum accommodation for children by the Home Office rather than local authorities, which is entirely unacceptable. The Children’s Commissioner for Scotland has condemned that move in the strongest terms, saying:

“The Home Office’s history of neglect renders it an unfit parent for vulnerable children.”

The Children’s Commissioner for England says:

“The Bill as it stands leaves profound areas of uncertainty–for example, as to what form the accommodation provided to children by the Home Office will take–making proper scrutiny deeply challenging.”

The Home Office has already lost children from the accommodation it has used, so we cannot trust it to look after things at present. Why would we give it more powers in this area? On Second Reading I spoke about treating people as we would like to be treated. We would not treat our own children in that way, so why do the Home Secretary, the Minister and this Government think that we should?

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

The hon. Lady is giving incredibly powerful testimony. Will she consider supporting new clause 18, which would require that we treat every child on UK soil with the same care and that we safeguard every child equally, whether they are refugees or not?

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely support the hon. Lady’s amendment and her work in this area. This Government forget, in their talking about people as though they were an amorphous blob, that we are talking about children, and they have rights under the UNCRC. Scotland has done a lot of work on looked-after children with “the promise” and we should not treat those children any less well than we treat our own.

We would amend the Bill so that clause 23 shall not come into effect without the consent of the Scottish Parliament. Parliamentarians in both Scotland and the UK are human rights guarantors, and an important part of our role is to ensure that legislation is compliant with international human rights obligations. The incompatibility of the Bill with the European convention on human rights, the refugee convention, the convention on action against trafficking, and the convention on the rights of the child means that we as lawmakers are obliged to vote against it. The undermining of rights conveyed upon individuals by those agreements must be resisted by all spheres of government. If they are coming after this group now, it will be another group soon enough.

The Bill will negatively impact those seeking international protection in Scotland, as well as on the powers and duties of the Scottish Government, local authorities, and other public bodies under the devolution settlement. I strongly urge—I expect it, to be honest—the Scottish Parliament to withhold legislative consent for the Bill. I expect the UK Government to override that consent.

The SNP amendments to clause 25 would remove provisions that allow the Secretary of State to make regulations that would alter the operation of the two-year sunset clause in relation to clauses 21 to 24.

Clause 27 amends the Modern Slavery Act 2018 and removes provisions for leave to remain for victims of slavery or human trafficking. As protections will no longer be in place, it will be difficult for third-party agencies to encourage victims of trafficking to come forward, or to work with them should they do so. The Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance in Glasgow has told me that it is increasingly difficult to reassure service users, who are victims of sex trafficking, that they will not be returned or sent to Rwanda for speaking up, and the Bill will mean that TARA cannot reassure them at all.

People who are trafficked were often in very vulnerable situations in their home countries, and those circumstances are exploited by traffickers—that is why they are here. The risk of being returned to those situations means that people will either stay in a dangerous situation or escape and go underground to other dangerous situations. If they are apprehended and returned, the risk of re-trafficking is high if the reasons for their vulnerability are not addressed. Third-party agencies have been clear that the Bill will fetter their ability to reach out to vulnerable groups, to support women, children and victims of torture, trafficking and all kinds of human rights abuses, and that there will be a sharp drop-off in the number of people seeking help, because they will fear doing so.

This Bill will not stop the boats. It will not fix the asylum backlog. It will do nothing other than put lives at risk. It is an anti-refugee Bill. It is a traffickers’ charter. It rips up human rights. Scotland wants no part of it. We want an independent country in which we can stand up for human rights, not diminish them, as this UK Government seek to do.

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[Mr Carmichael]

“Unconscionable” is one of the more polite and measured terms that we could use about it. I reflect on the fact that when I visited Dungavel in 2007 or 2008, my own children were about six and 10 years old. The staff in Dungavel did a phenomenal job to mitigate the horrors of what they were dealing with, but at the end of the day, we were keeping children behind a razor wire, lockdown institution, and that was downright inappropriate and unacceptable. Nobody will ever persuade me that we should treat any child differently from the way in which we would want to treat our own.

[Stella Creasy]

The fact that the Minister has just said on the record that it is okay to incarcerate minors—another word being “children”—because we think some of them may not be children reflects why we need to clarify the safeguarding and welfare responsibilities of all public agencies that deal with these children. Everybody is a child until the age of 18 in international law. Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that he supports new clause 18, to ensure parity in those responsibilities and put beyond doubt the direct responsibility of the Secretary of State and Ministers to look after every child equally well in this country?

[Mr Carmichael]

It will come as no great surprise to the hon. Lady that I do. That brings me to thinking about what we do here. There is a danger that those of us who follow the evidence and actually care about what will happen if this dreadful piece of legislation is ever implemented disappear down the rabbit hole of trying to improve, amend and mitigate it. We have all tabled dozens—hundreds, some of us—of amendments, but this piece of the Bill has simply to be excised. I will be seeking to divide the House on clause 11 stand apart, because, frankly, there is no mitigation and no polishing of this—I avoid the vulgarity, but everyone knows what I am talking about. There is no way we can polish and improve on something that is so fundamentally removed from the way we would tolerate our own children being treated.

Earlier, we were talking about returning people. I was privileged yesterday to meet a group of Hongkongers, who are among that privileged group of people who came here by a safe and legal route. They still have their problems, of course: their journey did not end when they arrived at Heathrow, and they still have to deal with the trauma of leaving friends, family and others behind in circumstances where they would ordinarily have chosen not to do so. However, I heard a quite remarkable story from one person who did not come through the safe and legal route because her arrival predated that visa scheme being opened up. She told me that her twin sister had been here, but had left the country, and now she was being told that she would need to leave because the Home Office had confused her biometrics with those of her twin sister. That is the sort of ruthless efficiency of which the Home Office is capable. Are we seriously hearing now that we are going to start sending people back to Hong Kong because they happen to have come here before the start of the British national overseas visa scheme?

Dame Rosie, I feel that I have detained the House for long enough—that is probably a matter of consensus among Members—but when it comes to Divisions, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches will do everything that we can to improve the Bill. However, ultimately, there are pieces of it that simply cannot be left to stand.

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The Home Office has no legal capacity to care for a child, so even a child who is in immigration detention pending removal by the Home Office will still be in the care of the local authority under the terms of the Children Act 1989. Once again, we need to make sure that we have clear sight of how those duties and responsibilities will be discharged. For example, will detention centres for children be regulated and inspected by Ofsted?

[Stella Creasy]

I recognise the hon. Gentleman’s long expertise on this issue, but does he recognise the challenge of what we have seen over the past year in the treatment of unaccompanied and accompanied children? It is impossible for local authorities to undertake that safeguarding role and the duties under the Children Act without the direct involvement of the Home Office, which is discharging its duties by commissioning providers, for example, that do not then have clear safeguarding responsibilities. The decision to do that lies with the Home Office, which wrote contracts that did not include safeguarding provision for these children. Unless we are clear that everybody involved in the care of these children from start to finish has a responsibility for their welfare, including the Secretary of State, as new clause 18 does, that gap will remain. In that gap, we have seen some horrific examples of what happens to these children not just with their access to education, but with sexual assault and other serious offences.

[David Simmonds]

The hon. Member very clearly highlights the fact that this is sometimes to a degree a grey area. I completely understand the position of the Home Office in that, sometimes in the early days of an emergency situation when there is nowhere else for a child to go to have a roof over their head, the accommodation and support provided do not meet the standards that apply. However, ensuring, as our laws require, that we very swiftly move to a situation where they do seems to be a reasonable expectation, and certainly one that would be upheld by the courts.

That point draws attention to the situation of children in transit through the United Kingdom who come to be unaccompanied children because the adults with whom they are travelling are s arrested or found to have no direct responsibility for the child with whom they are travelling. As I know the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) will be aware, over the years at Heathrow airport, significant numbers of unaccompanied children have come into the care of a local authority not because they are seeking asylum, but, for example, because they are being trafficked into the sex trade on the continent from another country by way of the United Kingdom. Again, we need to ensure that appropriate care and support are provided for those children and young people, and that they are not simply placed into a process that is focused on immigration control when they being trafficked for nefarious purposes. All these issues are clearly fixable, and I am confident that the Government, once sighted on them, will be able to bring about their resolution.

I would like to finish with a note about the issue of “notwithstanding” clauses, which was much debated yesterday. One of the challenges I find is that in the case of a number of pieces of legislation, such as the Children Act and the Modern Slavery Act, it would be possible for the Government to say that, notwithstanding those provisions, they expect this Home Office process to be followed. Clearly, those are all matters within legislation of the United Kingdom passed by this sovereign Parliament, but it seems to me that there is a risk if we seek to introduce “notwithstanding” clauses to matters that are the subject of international law.

Any of us who has been the recipient of legal advice at any time in our working lives will be aware that, if we were to be offered a contract about which it was that said, “The other party has decided that, notwithstanding what it says in the contract, they don’t have to follow it if they choose not to, after the event”, we would not regard that as in any way sound. Therefore, it seems to me that there is a significant risk that, if we seek to apply “notwithstanding” clauses, we will get ourselves once again into a legal and reputational tangle. That would be more broadly addressed by looking at whether those international conventions are still fit for purpose.

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[Jonathan Gullis]

I rise to speak to the amendments in my name: amendment 135, which intends to block courts from ordering individuals to be returned to the UK once removed; and amendment 136, which intends to restrict to the use of hotels. I put my name to other amendments that were debated yesterday, which I am proud to support.

First, I want to thank the Minister for Immigration, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) for the assurances he gave yesterday evening at the Dispatch Box to meaningful engagement over the Easter recess to find a way forward on the amendments I signed or that are in my name. I look forward to working with him and colleagues, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger), my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke), my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes). I will therefore not press any of my amendments to a Division this evening.

It is critical that the policy is delivered. In Stoke-on-Trent we understand generosity better than anyone, having 1,279 asylum seekers or illegal economic migrants in our great city. We have been a long-term member of the voluntary asylum dispersal scheme and now have 30% of that population purely in hotels in inappropriate places—directly opposite our railway station, right by levelling-up projects, undermining the work to regenerate and level up the great city of Stoke-on-Trent. It is abhorrent that this has been going on.

For far too long, Stoke-on-Trent has been at the forefront of stepping up and delivering. It was the fifth largest contributor to the asylum dispersal scheme and was voted the kindest city in the United Kingdom only last year. We as a city will do our fair share, but it is inappropriate that we continue to see more than 40,000 people illegally choose to put thousands of pounds in the hands of smuggling gangs when they are already in safe mainland France, to come across on small boats, needlessly risking their own lives and undermining our UK visa system, the rights of our borders and the democracy and sovereignty of this House. It is essential that we do everything we can.

When 73% of people voted to leave the European Union, they wanted to take back control of their laws and their borders. People in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke were outraged to see only yesterday the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights interfering in this place, giving their opinion from Strasbourg and Brussels, demanding that we vote this legislation down. Yet again, foreign dignitaries and foreign judges are trying to interfere with the democratic rights and processes of our great country. It is simply not acceptable. That is why it is so important that the amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes is taken seriously. I would like it be fully supported. Ultimately, we must deliver this important legislation.

[Stella Creasy]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jonathan Gullis]

I will happily take an intervention at the end of my speech, as I promise to keep within the 10-minute limit that you have asked of me, Dame Rosie.

Amendment 135 is about the block on returns. If we are to ensure the offshoring of illegal migrants, we cannot see people return to our United Kingdom, because that will undermine the Rwanda policy and other world-leading schemes that I hope we will agree with other safe third countries. I support the Opposition wanting safe and legal routes and returns agreement. Like many, I was outraged that we gave £500 million of UK taxpayers’ money without getting a returns agreement with France directly. I fully endorse that. It is essential that the law makes it clear that if someone tries to make a last-minute claim to an upper tribunal and they are removed, they have no right to return. They may win damages in court, but the right to return must not be granted. If it is, that will undermine everything. The imagery will be shocking, and will be used by smugglers across mainland Europe as an advert for what could happen if people were lucky.

It is essential that we deliver on the important policy of hotels. Rightly, the British public are livid at seeing £6 million a day of their hard-earned British taxpayers’ money going to house people in hotels. It is totally unacceptable in places such as Stoke-on-Trent, where we have a thriving hospitality and tourism sector, which has been undermined by the use of the hotels. People are losing their jobs. At certain hotels, people have lost the ability to take their children to the swimming baths to learn how to swim. They are unable to go to the gym and other such facilities because, sadly, this abhorrent trade has carried on. In Staffordshire as a whole, nine hotels have been taken up. It is not something that anyone in this House wants, and I hope my amendments get widespread support.

I thank the Minister for his engagement and for the fact that plans will come forward soon for alternative places to move people out of hotels. I was delighted that my petition to end Serco’s abuse of Stoke-on-Trent, which I presented on the Floor of the House, gathered more than 2,000 signatures. We have seen continued movement from the Minister, the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary to find suitable accommodation in the short term until we implement, very soon I hope, the policy to get people deported to safe third countries such as Rwanda.

[Stella Creasy]

I will let the hon. Gentleman gather his breath. He made a strong case that he was concerned about the work of the European Court of Human Rights making judgments about overbearing Governments and trying to stand up for citizens. Does he, therefore, deplore the recent judgment by the European Court of Human rights—another rule 39 interim measure—in the cases of Pinner v. Russia and Ukraine and Aslin v. Russia and Ukraine? They concerned British nationals who were members of the armed forces in Ukraine, who had surrendered to Russian forces and been sentenced to death. The European Court of Human Rights got stuck in to stand up for British citizens. But by his logic, I assume that he would oppose that because he does not like such bodies standing up for citizens being oppressed by Governments.

[Jonathan Gullis]

Rule 39 interim measures were not part of the European convention on human rights when we signed it in 1950. While we have obligations under the convention, they should never trump the sovereignty of what happens in this Parliament. We are democratically elected parliamentarians who speak on behalf of our constituents—well, we do on the Government Benches—and that is important to understanding why we deliver such policies.

The hon. Lady talks about the European court of human rights, but let us not forget that 47% of ECHR judgments have not been complied with over the past 10 years. In Spain and Germany, it is 61% and 37% respectively. The UK is, I believe, at 18%, so we are better at upholding our ECHR obligations than most mainland European countries, of which I know the hon. Lady is a huge fan. She would love to see us return to the European Union, which she so avidly campaigned for and continues to make the case for privately, I am sure, within the parliamentary Labour party. I commend her bravery in taking that stance but, of course, the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke simply said, “No. Go away. Bye-bye, Labour”—hopefully for decades to come—after 70 years of failure, neglect and under-investment in our great area.

Returning to the debate, I thank Professor Richard Ekins of the University of Oxford and Sir Stephen Laws KC for their work with the Policy Exchange and for helping me and other colleagues with the changes we proposed today. When people are losing their jobs at hotels and the hospitality and tourism sectors of our towns and cities are being damaged, that undermines public confidence in our ability to deliver this policy. There are disused Army bases, and I have no issue with the use of portakabins or tents. They are perfectly acceptable short-term accommodation, so long as we deliver on the policy of ensuring that people are removed after 28 days to a safe third country. Rwanda is perfectly safe and has so far welcomed the fact that the UK Government have been so successful at explaining in UK domestic courts that our world-leading policy is something to be celebrated.

Despite the shadow Minister suggesting that this Government are worried about compliance, the fact that they are winning court battles on other legislation that was deemed to be on the line shows that they are confident that they will be on that side again. He talked about a Labour plan, but I am still searching for something other than processing people quicker, which would mean we would still accept seven out of 10 people coming here—70% of 45,000 would be completely unacceptable to the people of the United Kingdom—and would lead to smugglers advertising a 70% success rate. That is why I am unable to support many of Labour’s amendments today.

The only exception that intrigued me was the new clause—I forget the number—that proposed engagement with local authorities. However, the assurances that the Minister gave yesterday to one of my hon. Friends who tabled a similar amendment gave me confidence, and I will be unable to join Labour in the Lobby today. I am delighted that Councillor Abi Brown was brave enough to force this Government to remove the voluntary opt-in and ensure that all local authorities are part of the asylum dispersal scheme after threatening to legally withdraw from the scheme.

Thank you for the time, Dame Rosie, and apologies for going one minute over.

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[Sir John Hayes]

I hope the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not. I have great respect for him, but I promised you that I would be brief, Dame Rosie, and I know that if I take interventions that will not be true, and I will break my promise. You would never forgive me for that and, worse still, you would not call me again.

I shall speak to some of the amendments that stand in my name, which I hope will help the Government in that endeavour. My amendments, along with those tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and for Stone (Sir William Cash), among others, are designed to improve the Bill rather than to frustrate the Government’s efforts. Indeed, they are framed in order to make the Bill work—for the Bill must work.

The British people are at the end of their tether, tired of a liberal establishment blinded by its own prejudices which seems oblivious to the needs of working-class Britons but ever more indulgent towards economic migrants and anyone else who comes from abroad, for that matter. The British people demand and deserve something better than that. They deserve a Government who take their concerns seriously.

Just in case there is any doubt about those concerns, I refer Members to the work of Professor Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at the University of Kent, who has studied these matters. He has revealed the opinions of an immense number of voters in so-called red wall constituencies. You will remember, Dame Rosie, that those are the seats that Labour hopes to win back, but it will not, because they are in the hands of very able Conservative Members of Parliament, many of whom take a view of the Bill that is similar to mine, including my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North. Interestingly, 59% of people in those constituencies think that we

“should withdraw the right of asylum-seekers and illegal migrants who cross the Channel illegally in small boats to appeal against their deportation.”

That number

“jumps to more than three-quarters”

of 2019 Conservative voters and 39% of Labour voters. A large majority, six in 10, support

“stopping migrants in small boats from illegally crossing the Channel using any means necessary”.

Benjamin Disraeli said that

“justice is truth in action.”

My amendment 283 is designed to restore justice to our asylum system by affirming the truth. Little epitomises the anger felt by my constituents and many others about the unfairness of the system more than those economic migrants with no legal right to be here who arrive in Dover claiming to be younger than they are in order to game our asylum rules. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) pointed out when she was Home Secretary, in two thirds of age dispute cases, it has been found that an individual claiming to be a child is over—sometimes considerably over—the age of 18. This is a widespread problem.

Amendment 283 would introduce a scientific age assessment to ensure that those under 18 who need to seek shelter here can do so, as well as to find out those over 18 who lie to cheat our rules. The amendment is in keeping with the practices used in Europe by countries that verify the ages of those crossing their borders. The scientific age assessments used in many European countries for these purposes include dental and wrist X-rays in France, Finland and Norway, and CT or MRI scans in Sweden, Denmark and elsewhere.

I would be amazed if anyone who believed in the integrity of our asylum system opposed such an amendment, and I hope the Minister will confirm when he sums up that the Government intend to adopt it. Without such a change, we cannot properly break the business model of the people smugglers. These vile traffickers will simply tell the people whose lives they are risking to lie about their age to prevent them from being removed.

My amendments 129 and 130 would strengthen the Bill by ensuring that those who have no right to be here are swiftly removed. At present, the language in the Bill promises to “deport”. However, deportation is a distinct legal process from removal. Deportation is reserved for those who are a “risk to the public good”—typically foreign national offenders. By contrast, removal is a legal term for a process by which certain people may be removed from the UK, usually because they have breached immigration rules by remaining here illegally, but who do not necessarily pose a public risk or danger by so doing. Again, I hope that the Minister will enter into a discussion with me about how we can improve the Bill in that way and make it more effective.

I know, too, that the Minister will look at the amendments that aim to toughen the Bill further in terms of its language. Amendment 135, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North, is vital as it will block courts from ordering that individuals who have been removed be return to the UK. If those removed to Rwanda were allowed to return to the UK following legal challenges, the deterrent gained from successfully sending them there would be diluted or lost altogether, so it is essential that those who want to join the small boats and the smugglers who organise their dangerous journeys know that the deterrent is credible.

Amendment 132 would ensure that other provisions of the Human Rights Act were disapplied. Right hon. and hon. Members know my view on the Human Rights Act: I would repeal it. And they know my view on the convention: I would leave it. But that is not what we are debating today, and it is not what these amendments seek to do. They simply aim to ensure that the Government’s policy, which has found form in this Bill which I hope is soon to be an Act, is not once again mired in appeals to foreign potentates and powers who will frustrate the will of the Government, this House and, more fundamentally, the British people.

I will not comment on amendments 139 and 140 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), except to say that they are arguably well-intentioned, but not necessarily so. A report last year, as my hon. Friend must know, showed that nearly two thirds of asylum seekers suspected of lying when they were unaccompanied children were found to be over 18. Of course care and sentiment matter, but we must exercise sense to avoid being naive about this subject.

For the sake of brevity, Dame Rosie, I will not say much more, except to conclude in this way: the British people want to deal with the boats. They want to restore order to our borders. They believe in the integrity of a system that determines whether someone is a genuine seeker of asylum in fear of persecution and in profound need or an economic migrant gaming the system in respect of their age. That is what the British people want, and that is what this Bill will do. By the way, just a quick word about judicial activism: it is a well-established concept and I would advise the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) to read about it in more detail, as he does not seem to have heard of it.

I say to the Minister that we must avoid listening to the bleats and cries of a bourgeois liberal establishment who will go out of their way to stop the Government doing what is just and right. I look forward to further engagement with him and, assuming that he says something sufficiently generous—indeed, slightly more than that; I would like to feel flattery—I will not press the amendments that stand in my name.

[Stella Creasy]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), a knight of the realm, lecturing us all on being in touch with the people and on class warfare. What a dystopian vision he paints of this country. I will confine my remarks to the three amendments in my name, because he does not speak for the majority in this country with his callous disregard for people seeking sanctuary, and in his callous disregard for the evidence and facts.

Amendment 293 reflects the challenge set by the right hon. Gentleman and by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who complains about people with visas. He must be disappointed that the Illegal Migration Bill does nothing about people who overstay their visa, which is clearly illegal. If this Bill were actually about things that are illegal in our asylum system, it would tackle visa overstayers. The Bill says nothing about people traffickers, and it contains no further sanctions and makes no further efforts to catch organised crime gangs. I now realise why it does not, having heard how the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North objects to the European Court of Human Rights standing up for British citizens who face the death penalty—he could not even say that stopping people being sent to their death for standing up to Putin is a good thing.

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[Stella Creasy]

I will happily give way to the hon. Gentleman, as long as he will clarify on the record that his comments about me were mistaken. I am sure that he would not wish to malign somebody’s good reputation, even if he disagreed with them.

[Jonathan Gullis]

I do not remember seeing the hon. Lady on the streets of the west midlands, campaigning to vote leave in the 2016 referendum, so I feel confident that my comments about her being a pro-European are perfectly acceptable.

When the Minister came to the Dispatch Box with regard to the 200 missing children, he said that 95% of them were 16 to 17 years old—smugglers encourage people who they think can get away with looking that age—and 88% were Albanians. Why would any parent spend £4,500 on sending their child here illegally on a small rubber boat, when they could go on an aeroplane for £30? Also, it is important to understand that the Minister made clear that there was no evidence that any of those 200 had been kidnapped—they left of their own accord.

[Stella Creasy]

When the Immigration Minister was dismissing concerns about locking children up, suggesting that they probably were not children because of concerns about age verification, the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael)—I am sorry that he is no longer in his place—used a gentle phrase that his mother might say: “Have a long look in the mirror.” Well, I suggest that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North gives his head a wobble for what he has just said about children who have gone missing; 16 and 17-year-olds are children—[Interruption.] He is chuntering from a sedentary position. If those children turn up, I hope to goodness that they all turn up safe and well, because if they do not, what the hon. Member has just said will come back to haunt him—[Interruption.] He can keep shouting all he likes, but the vast majority of the British public are horrified by the idea that 200-plus children have gone missing from hotels that the Home Office was supposed to be overseeing.

There is due to be a public inquiry into the Manston centre. The Government have accepted that because of possible article 3 breaches—basically, concerns about how we were treating pregnant women and young children going into Manston—but that investigation has not yet happened and cannot yet inform this legislation. Clause 11 extends detention for families and pregnant women, and clause 14 removes the duty to consult the independent family returns panel about the treatment of children. Children are under the age of 18; we accept that in law.

We have provisions in law—on, for example, the use of bed and breakfasts—that have not been mirrored to date in our treatment of children who have come in through this system. I can hear why in the callous disregard of the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North, but I go back to this simple principle: whatever we think of the parents of these children, we should not be punishing children by agreeing in law that they have second-class citizenship. That is what this legislation will do to refugee children.

[Robert Jenrick]

indicated dissent.

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[Stella Creasy]

The Minister is shaking his head, but there is a very simple answer, because all new clause 18 does is commit to parity. It says that we should treat every single child on UK soil with the same concerns. We could safeguard every single child.

[Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Stella Creasy]

I will happily give way, but then I want to finish because I promised Dame Rosie that I would be brief.

[Alexander Stafford]

Everyone wants children to be safe: nobody wants a child to be living in a hotel; and, fundamentally, nobody wants a child to make a very dangerous crossing in a small boat. The safest place for a child is not to make that crossing. There are safe and legal routes, which we should try to focus on, rather than encouraging people smugglers to take children on the channel. Does the hon. Lady agree that that is the worst thing for a child?

[Stella Creasy]

Nobody is encouraging the smugglers. Given the heat that has been generated in this Chamber, it is important to recognise that nobody across the House supports the smugglers. Equally, there are no safe and legal routes. The example of Iran proves that very clearly. The fact that the Minister does not seem to understand that is troubling. If a child does come here, what happens to them? New clause 18 would provide parity of treatment for all children resident in the United Kingdom—for example in the rules around bed and breakfasts and putting a child in with a single adult. If the hon. Gentleman were to find that happening in his constituency, he would probably, rightly, challenge his local authority about it. Why are we saying that, because a child has refugees as parents, it does not matter how they are treated? That is what this legislation is saying. All new clause 18 is looking for is parity. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North may disregard those children, but I wager that there are other Members in this Chamber who recognise that when it comes to children, we have responsibilities and obligations.

I hope that, in his summing up, the Minister will say on the record that, yes, absolutely, the same standards of safeguarding will apply. The Home Office failed to put safeguarding in the contracts. I had to use a freedom of information request to get the contract from his Department to be able to check it. I did check it, because the Minister does not do his own homework, so somebody else has to. The contract very clearly does not mention it. [Interruption.] It is not a fantasy. What is a fantasy are the figures that the Home Secretary and the Minister just came up with on the safe and legal routes from Iran. Perhaps the Minister might want to reflect on that and on what the UK Statistics Authority said about the Home Office’s relationship with the truth when it comes to the numbers and to asylum.

I wish to finish simply by urging the Government to stay on the record. If I am wrong, they should correct me. They could say that every single child in this country will be covered by safeguarding, and that the Home Office itself will take a direct safeguarding duty for these children. It would not be that difficult.

[Jonathan Gullis]

rose—

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[Stella Creasy]

I will not give way. The hon. Gentleman has made his feelings clear, even if he has taken the Shelley’s grandmother approach to communicating any sense about them. What matters now is that this Government speak up for every single child, because, if they do not, I promise that there are people in this House who will continue to do it no matter how much barracking we get, because every child matters.

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Dame Rosie. I would like to echo what my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) said earlier about how strongly people feel about this issue. He provided the statistics to back that up. Some 35% of all policy inquiries to my office last week related to this issue of illegal migration and small boats. People often say to me, “You are in the middle of the country in Mansfield, so why do people care?” It is a simple matter of fairness. It is a massive Government commitment. One of the Prime Minister’s key pledges to the people of this country was to tackle the issue of small boats.

The people of Mansfield are generous, but they believe in the rules and they believe in law and order. They are happy to help those people who follow the rules, but when they are struggling and when they see people facing genuine safeguarding and personal safety issues, they feel the unfairness when they see others coming from the safe country of France and jumping the queue. When they are sat on housing waiting lists and unable to get a home, but someone who has no legal right to be here is able to get accommodation, they feel that unfairness. It is very easy for us in this Chamber, none of whom, I would imagine, rely heavily on our public services, to say that there is no negative impact to all of this. In reality, though, if a person is on that housing waiting list and unable to get a permanent home for themselves or their family, if they are struggling to access primary care, if they are told that they cannot get the help that they need, if they are sacked from their job at a hotel because it has become a migrant accommodation, or if they are seeing public funds intended to support people in this country being diverted to support people who have no legal right to be here, then, of course, they feel the unfairness. To suggest that that is not a problem is to deny the experience of many of my constituents, and of many people around the country, who feel that very strongly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

People do come here directly from places of danger. The hon. Lady is incorrect. We have long-standing arrangements for those people who transit through other countries to come here, so her point is wrong.

The wider issue, which she and I have debated on many occasions, is that we have heard continuously from her and her SNP colleagues a kind of humanitarian nimbyism. They come to this Chamber to say how concerned they are for those in danger around the world, yet they take disproportionately fewer of those very people into their care in Scotland.

Let me turn to the serious questions that have been raised about children. We approach these issues with the seriousness that they deserve and from the point of view that the UK should be caring and compassionate to any minor who steps foot on these shores. These are not easy choices, but the challenge we face today is that large numbers of minors are coming to the United Kingdom at the behest of human traffickers or people smugglers, and we have to deter that. We must break the cycle of that business model.

Since 2019, the number of unaccompanied minors coming to the UK has quadrupled, meaning that thousands of unaccompanied minors have been placed in grave danger in dinghies and then brought to the UK, in some cases to enter the black economy and in others for even more pernicious reasons. I have met those children. I have seen them at Western Jet Foil, and I can tell the House that there is no dignity in that situation. As a parent, seeing children in dinghies risking their lives is one of the most appalling things one could see. I want to stop that. The measures we are bringing forward today intend to stop that.

We are going to do this in the most sensitive manner we can, and the powers that we are bringing forward under the Bill do just that. The duty to make arrangements for removal does not apply to unaccompanied children until they become adults. There is a power, not a duty, to remove unaccompanied children. As a matter of policy, the power to remove will be exercised only in very limited circumstances, such as for the purposes of family reunion, or if they are nationals of a safe country identified in clause 50 and can be safely returned to their home country. It is important to stress at this point that that power is already in law and is used on occasion when an unaccompanied child arrives and we are able to establish arrangements for their safe return. The Illegal Migration Bill simply expands the number of countries deemed safe for that removal.

[Stella Creasy]

The Government have accepted that they will be subject to an article 3 investigation to see whether there have been breaches of the Human Rights Act at Manston—basically the treatment of people in inhumane and degrading ways. The Government are resisting that being an independent inquiry. Why not wait until that inquiry happens? Why not learn the lessons of how they got into the mess at Manston before moving forward with this legislation, so that we do not risk again seeing pregnant women and unaccompanied children in the dinghies and in the devastation that the Minister just set out? Why press ahead without learning the lessons of his previous failures?

[Robert Jenrick]

Nobody could dispute the seriousness with which I took the situation at Manston in the autumn, or dispute that the situation we are in today is incomparably different. Manston is a well-run facility, led by a superb former Army officer, Major General Capps, and we are ensuring that the site is both decent and legal. Responsibility for the failures at Manston in the autumn of last year does not rest with the Government. It does not rest with the people who work at Manston. It rests with the people smugglers and the human traffickers. It was a direct result of tens of thousands of people coming into our country illegally in a short period of time.

I can tell the hon. Lady that the same thing will happen again if we do not break the cycle and stop the boats. More people will come later this year. She knows that the numbers are estimated to rise this year unless we take robust action. That is what this Bill sets out to achieve. If we take this action, fewer people will put themselves in danger and fewer children will be in this situation. That is what I want to see, and I think that is what the British public want to see as well.