Immigration: Pausing the Hostile Environment Debate

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Department: Home Office

Immigration: Pausing the Hostile Environment

Stephen Doughty Excerpts
Thursday 12th July 2018

(5 years, 9 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Stephen Doughty Portrait Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
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This is not the only pause that the Immigration Minister has tried to sneak out in the past month. She admitted to me in a written answer on 4 June that she had paused deportation flights to the Caribbean. She said in her answer that this was because of the need for “added levels of assurance”. Some 991 flights were booked in the past year to deport individuals to the Caribbean. Why did she pause the flights? Will they remain paused? And how many of those 991 individuals does she now believe were deported wrongly?

Caroline Nokes Portrait Caroline Nokes
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It is absolutely right that, at a time when we were looking very closely at whether anybody of the Windrush cohort had been negatively impacted, we paused flights to the Caribbean. It is important, going forward, that we look at those flights with utmost rigour, and we are determined to do so.