Illegal Migration Bill

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

I start by associating myself with the comments of the Immigration Minister about the outstanding work that our armed forces have done in Sudan. I wish all who are there a speedy return home.

I want to make one thing absolutely clear, and it is a point with which I am sure every Member of this House agrees: the dangerous channel crossings must be stopped. Those extremely perilous journeys have tragically led to lives being lost, and the only people who benefit from that trade in human misery are the criminal smuggler gangs and people traffickers, who are laughing all the way to the bank at this Government’s failure to arrest and prosecute them. Labour has a comprehensive and workable five-point plan that will defeat the people smugglers and fix our broken asylum system. Our plan is expressed through the amendments and new clauses to this Bill that we have tabled, which I will speak to in due course.

Government Members repeatedly state that they wish to stop the dangerous channel crossings, but the fact is that they are completely and utterly failing to do so. Every single measure that Ministers announce turns out to be either an expensive and unworkable headline-chasing gimmick or a policy that succeeds only in making things worse, or indeed both. In the case of this legislative sham that we are debating today—this bigger backlog Bill—it is definitely both. Under the Conservatives, channel crossings have skyrocketed from 299 in 2018 to 46,000 in 2022. Throughout that period, Ministers have subjected the country to a seemingly endless stream of nonsensical proposals that have all been given pride of place on the front pages of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, only to be swiftly consigned to the dustbin of history where they belong.

For a deterrent to be effective, it has to be credible, and of course, our credibility is severely diminished every time we fail to follow through on a commitment that we have made. Let us take a quick canter through some of the posturing and empty threats that this shambles of a Government have engaged in over the past few years. They told us that the British coastguard would be instructed to push back dinghies in the channel, which would have breached the law of the sea and potentially led to further deaths of refugees and innocent children. Then they said they were going to build a giant wave machine in the English channel—I do not know where they would find a wave machine around here, given that the Conservatives have closed down most of England’s swimming pools, although I suppose it is possible that the Prime Minister might have a spare one back at his place.

The Government then said that they were going to fly asylum seekers to Ascension Island, 4,000 miles away, and they even fantasised about sending them to Papua New Guinea, which is literally on the other side of the planet. That brings us to the Government’s latest cunning plan: they went to Kigali and paid £140 million for a press release, and 12 months later they have managed to send more Home Secretaries to Rwanda than they have asylum seekers. One could be forgiven for finding all of this quite comical, but the fact is that it is deadly serious, because a vast amount of taxpayers’ money is being squandered on a profoundly unethical policy that is designed to fail on its own terms.

Even if the Rwanda scheme does get up and running, which the Government admit is unlikely to happen until at least March 2024, the Rwandan Government have refused to commit to taking more than around 1% or 2% of those who arrive here on small boats. We are talking hundreds of removals, rather than the thousands per year that might have a chance of deterring asylum seekers from crossing the channel. It will fail to stop the small boat channel crossings, because if a person has experienced personal tragedy, fought their way across continents and handed their life savings to a people smuggler so that they can endanger their own life crossing the channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is simply not going to represent a level of risk that they might be averse to.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

On the Rwanda scheme, apart from paying £150 million to deport maybe 200 people, under the agreement we have to take people back from Rwanda as well.

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[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point, which I will use as a prompt to also talk about the Israel scheme. Of course, Israel and Rwanda did a deal. What happened with that scheme? Every single one of the people who was sent from Israel to Rwanda had left Rwanda within a matter of weeks and was on their way back to Europe, so it is a very expensive way of giving people a round trip, and I would not recommend it as a deterrent.

Then, just to add to the general sense that the Government have lost the plot, we had the bizarre and frankly appalling spectacle of the Home Secretary jetting down to Rwanda with a carefully vetted gaggle of journalists to indulge in a photo shoot that was akin to a “Visit Rwanda” tourist promo. I may have missed something, but I thought the idea was to deter the channel crossings by using Rwanda as a threat. I am not quite sure how that tallies with the Home Secretary likening Kigali to the garden of Eden. One minute, Rwanda is the perfect place imaginable for a person to rebuild their life; the next, the threat of getting sent there is being deployed as a deterrent.

It is a truly farcical state of affairs, but it is also of central importance to what we are debating today, because the entire Bill is predicated on the Government being able to remove those who arrive here on small boats to a safe third country, and right now Rwanda is the only safe third country they have. As such, the fact that the Rwanda plan is unworkable, unaffordable and unethical renders this entire Bill unworkable, unaffordable and unethical.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

This is an issue that the hon. Gentleman has raised before. As I said during the Bill’s earlier stages, when the Home Affairs Committee went to Calais in January and we met all the people involved in patrolling the beaches and the local officials, they told us that when the Rwanda scheme was announced, there was a surge in migrants approaching the French authorities about staying in France, because they did not want to end up on a plane to Rwanda. There was a deterrent effect; the trouble is that it has not actually started yet, but if it did, it would have an impact. That is the point.

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I am not sure I follow the logic of it. He said that there was a deterrent effect, but it has not started yet, which suggests to me that there has not been a deterrent effect. If we look at the numbers, channel crossings continue to skyrocket, so I think what matters to this House is results and outcomes. As things stand, there is no evidence whatsoever that the Rwanda scheme has acted as a deterrent.

This bigger backlog Bill is rotten to its very core, because it prevents the Home Secretary from considering those who arrive here on small boats as asylum seekers, and instead obliges her to detain and remove them. However, there is nowhere to detain them, and there is nowhere to remove them to either. We already have 50,000 asylum seekers in around 400 hotels, costing the taxpayer an eye-watering £6 million every single day, and on average, each asylum seeker is waiting a staggering 450 days for a decision. The backlog now stands at 166,000, more than eight times larger than when Labour left office in 2010, when it stood at just under 19,000. Incidentally, I am still waiting for the Prime Minister and the Minister for Immigration to apologise to the House and correct the record on that point.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentioned detention, and a number of amendments have been tabled today on that topic. I listened carefully to what the Minister said about detaining unaccompanied children, but I also wanted to ask my hon. Friend for his views on detaining children, families with children and pregnant women. This House has made very clear in the past its view about safeguards being required for the detention of the vulnerable groups I have just described. Does he think that we now need to think again about the detention of pregnant women and families with children?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that excellent intervention. She is absolutely right to highlight this issue, and she has tabled a compelling amendment to deal with it. Members on both sides of the House fought very hard for these legal limits, as she rightly pointed out, and when we are talking about the detention of pregnant women, removing those limits and paving the way for vulnerable individuals to be detained individually is morally wrong, wrong-headed and deeply counterproductive. I have not heard any argument from Ministers to justify it.

New figures reveal that this bigger backlog Bill could end up putting an extra 50,000 people into permanent taxpayer-funded accommodation this year, with hotel costs rising to more than £13 million a day, which is more than £4 billion a year during a cost of living crisis. That is because, according to the Government’s own forecasts, 53,000 who cross on small boats will be classed as inadmissible, without any prospect of being removed. What is particularly astonishing is that the Government made this same mistake last year by including similar inadmissibility provisions in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. The result is a cost of £400 million to the taxpayer in just six months, with only 21 people returned to their country of origin.

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[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.

[Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)]

I intervened on the shadow Minister in Committee, and I found out that apparently the Labour party supports a cap for safe and legal routes, which was news to me at the time. Has he had any time to think about what that cap level would be? Bearing in mind how many people would like to try to get to our country, what would the approach be to those who failed in their application, but had still travelled here illegally and got here? Would any potential future Labour Government be open to deporting those individuals?

[Stephen Kinnock]

The cap has to be determined in consultation with local authorities and Parliament—that is absolutely right. In terms of removals, what we need is a processing system that actually works, so that we can get to a decision. People from safe countries who should be removed need to be swiftly removed from our country, and those who are genuine asylum seekers should be granted leave to remain, so that they can get on with their lives and we can start to clear up the abject mess that this Government have made of our asylum system.

The first part of our five-point plan is to repurpose and redirect the funds currently being wasted on the money-for-nothing Rwanda plan into a new, elite, cross-border, 100-strong police force that will relentlessly pursue the ruthless criminal smuggling gangs upstream. The latest £500 million payment that the British Government have made to the French Government will be having some effect on reducing the crossings, but the reality is that we will not succeed if we focus all our efforts on the hundreds of kilometres of French coastline, where resources are bound to be spread thin. We also need sophisticated operations with the British authorities working with EU member states, Europol, Interpol and Frontex to tackle the gangs upstream. New clause 16 instructs the Government to lay before Parliament a framework for a 12-month pilot co-operation agreement with those Governments and agencies to do just that and secure the prosecution and conviction of persons involved in facilitating illegal entry to the United Kingdom from neighbouring countries.

New clause 16 also incorporates the second part of our plan: securing a returns agreement with the European Union, which is essential. Since the Conservatives botched the Brexit negotiations and Britain left the Dublin convention, which had provided agreements on returns, the number of channel crossings has gone up by an astonishing 2,400%. For every one person crossing the channel in a small boat in 2019, 24 are crossing now.

There are three vital points to make on getting a returns deals. First, international challenges require international solutions. Secondly, we need an agreement with our nearest neighbours that must include returns. Thirdly, we will only strike a returns deal with the European Union if we bring something to the negotiation, and that should include a proper plan for capped safe and legal routes for bona fide asylum seekers located in mainland Europe. We suggest that Britain prioritises unaccompanied children with family in the UK, and new clause 14 reflects that.

[Sir William Cash]

I would like the hon. Gentleman to reflect on the fact that when President Macron made his assertions about returns to France, the following day the European Union said it would countenance no such proposals; the EU simply does not agree about returns. Furthermore, France is not a place that people associate with persecution or threats of irreversible harm. What is his argument all about?

[Stephen Kinnock]

My argument is about a negotiation. We clearly have to do a returns deal; it is an important part of the deterrent effect. We do not get a returns deal unless we have something on the table. There is a clear link between policies on safe and legal routes and getting a clear position in terms of negotiations with the European Union. The reality is that it is the only deterrent effect that will work. We are dealing with people who have risked their lives, fought their way across Europe and are prepared to spend their life savings to pay people smugglers to cross the channel. We will not deter them unless they know there is a returns deal in place, and one reason that the Dublin convention worked is that it acted as a deterrent. How else can we explain that the numbers have gone through the roof since we left the Dublin convention?

[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, because this is just nonsense. In the last year that we were covered by the Dublin convention, before the pandemic struck, we applied to the EU for 8,500 returns under that returns agreement and only 105 were granted—that is 1.2%—so what he says is complete nonsense. It did not work when we were in the EU, and he is now expecting to magic up some agreement that the EU will not give us anyway. Stop misleading the House about those figures.

[Stephen Kinnock]

I find the hon. Gentleman’s response bizarre, because there are some simple facts, which are that we left the Dublin convention, and since then the number of small boat crossings has gone through the roof. It is not rocket science; it is a simple fact of mathematics. The point is that we cannot solve an international problem without international co-operation. We have to recognise the flow of asylum seekers coming across the European Union. The idea that we just say to the EU, “You can take them all; we are not going to take any” is for the birds. It is fantasy politics, and I am stunned that Government Members do not seem to understand that simple political fact.

[Sir Chris Bryant]

If the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) does not mind me mentioning her, I remember that when she was Prime Minister the first letter that she wrote to the European Union in trying to trigger article 50 said that we wanted a security treaty with the EU. That is what I would dearly love us to have. One of the great flaws of how we have left the European Union is that we have not ended up with that. Surely this measure should be part of that security treaty, so that we have better relations with Interpol, Europol and Frontex and proper sharing of information, so that we know all the details of anyone arriving in the UK. Is that not where we need to go?

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We know from our long period of being in the European Union that, in order to get a deal with the EU, there has to be a quid pro quo. There has to be a negotiation based on a grown-up conversation about how to tackle the challenge we face, and an all-encompassing security agreement could be a very good way of opening that door, because of course the EU knows that the United Kingdom is a very important security partner for all sorts of reasons. I agree with my hon. Friend entirely on the very strategic point he has made. Although we support the Government’s new clause 8 on safe and legal routes, we believe it should be linked to securing a returns deal with the European Union. As I said, our approach is based on hard graft, common sense and quiet diplomacy, and we urge the Government to start thinking and acting in the same vein.

Our third commitment is that Labour will fix the problems with current resettlement programmes. This includes the broken Afghan schemes, and our new clause 21 instructs the Government to report every three months on progress—or lack thereof—in meeting their own targets in supporting those loyal-to-Britain Afghans who sacrificed so much to protect our servicepeople and to stand up for our liberal values in Afghanistan. All resettlement routes need to be properly controlled and managed, of course, and they therefore cannot be unlimited, but they do also need to work.

Fourthly, Labour’s long-term international development strategy will include tackling the root causes of migration upstream through increased humanitarian assistance and greater emphasis on conflict prevention and resolution programmes. This is slightly beyond the focus of the Bill, but an important aspect of migration policy—and a lesson that needs to be learned from Afghanistan in relation to Sudan, of course, which was mentioned earlier—is that if we cut aid and cut the right kind of aid, we will end up increasing the challenges around the dangerous channel crossings and hurt British values and interests.

Our comprehensive plan will also fix what is perhaps the Conservatives’ most astonishing failure of basic governance: the failure to clear the backlog. It is truly staggering that just 13% of small boat asylum claims are being processed within five years, and it is deeply troubling that, while around half of the huge 166,000 backlog is down to small boat crossings, another 80,000 has built up organically under the Conservatives since 2010.

This is no coincidence. Home Office decision making has collapsed. In 2013 the Conservatives downgraded asylum decision makers to junior staff, hired by literally going from a Saturday job one minute to making life or death decisions the next. No wonder this resulted in worse decisions, often overturned on appeal, and it is deeply troubling that the staff attrition rate in 2022 in these teams stood at an astonishing 46%. There is little prospect of improvement, given that Home Office statistics published on Monday show that this year the number of decision makers has decreased.

So let us be clear: the incompetence and indifference of consecutive Home Secretaries since 2010 have brought the basic functions of government to a grinding halt, and during this cost of living crisis the British taxpayer is paying the price. Our new clause 10 therefore sets out how the Government should get on with expediting asylum processing for the countries listed in the schedule to this Bill. If an applicant has no right to asylum in the UK, they should be removed, safely and swiftly, to the safe country from which they have come, such as Albania.

Further to new clause 10, our new clause 13 instructs the Home Secretary to publish a report every three months on the progress she is making on clearing the backlog.

[John McDonnell]

I am sorry to interrupt the shadow Minister’s flow, and I wholeheartedly support him, as we have time and again, with regard to the criticisms of the Government’s lack of processing of cases, including the lack of staffing resources. On new clause 10 and the proposal for an expedited asylum process, can my hon. Friend reassure me that there will be no lessening of the legal rights of asylum seekers, of access to legal representation and of the application of international human rights treaties and conventions?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. Absolutely, the proposal is that there are a number of countries with very low grant rates and that must therefore be where we triage, and put them into a category where the processing can be expedited. However, all the processing must be done on an individual, case-by-case basis, in line with our treaty obligations; we cannot have block definitions of any particular category of asylum seeker, which of course is one of the main issues concerning the legality of the Bill, and that includes access to legal aid. So I can absolutely reassure my right hon. Friend on that point. We have to get the balance right: we must focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of dealing with the backlog—which must be based on triaging, giving much more support and upgrading the staff in the Home Office—but that must be underpinned by the provisions to which my right hon. Friend refers. Of course, the return on investment for improving the quality of decision making would be rapid and substantial, because quicker processing means fewer asylum seekers in hotels.

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[Tom Hunt]

If this quiet diplomacy was not as successful as the shadow Minister hopes and a lot of these return agreements did not materialise, and all these people who arrived here illegally were green-lighted if a Labour Government were ever in charge, would there ever at any point be any policy whatsoever to deport to a safe third country?

[Stephen Kinnock]

As I have just pointed out, we are proposing, for example, a fast track for people from safe countries. We absolutely are of the view that people whose asylum claims are not successful or legitimate should be rapidly and safely sent back to their country of origin. I hope I have understood the hon. Gentleman’s point; I am not quite sure what it was.

Members on both sides of the House have raised concerns about the way in which this Bill will undermine our ability to crack down on modern slavery, and we do have to ask why it is that the Prime Minister has taken the attitude he has towards trafficked women and young girls being sold as sex slaves and is so accommodating to terrorists and other criminals on the other hand. We just need to look at his tweet of 7 March, threatening victims of modern slavery with deportation; it was disgraceful, and now his Government’s amendments 114 to 116 have made it even harder for victims to come forward. It will be held up, I am afraid, by the pimps and traffickers to threaten their victims. Two former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioners, Sara Thornton and Kevin Hyland, recently warned that this Bill will devastate modern slavery protections and is a gift to criminals. All of us in this House know that this Bill is a traffickers’ charter.

Then we should look at the Prime Minister’s shocking record on deporting foreign criminals. Astonishingly, 19 terror suspects are currently living in taxpayer-funded British hotels because the Government have failed to remove them. Labour’s new clause 15 places a duty on the Secretary of State to remove suspected terrorists who have entered the country illegally or to consider the imposition of terrorism prevention and investigation measures upon them.

Deportations of criminals have fallen off a cliff since the Conservatives came to power in 2010. They plummeted by 66% to 5,000 a year before the pandemic and to just 2,100 in 2021. This is an insult to victims, and it again proves what we all know: Labour is tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, but under the Conservatives criminals have never had it so good.

The Minister for Immigration was appointed to his position as the moderate voice who would curb the more fanatical tendencies of his boss, but that simply has not happened. Instead, it appears that he has either been kidnapped by the hard right of his party, or he has willingly hitched his wagon to it because he thinks that is the way the wind is blowing. However, the Minister is not alone, because his right hon. Friend the Prime Minister also appears to have caved in to the Home Secretary and the Trumpian faction she leads. He has caved in by adding Government new clauses 22 and 26 to the Bill, thereby completely torpedoing his own negotiations with the European Court of Human Rights. It really is quite extraordinary that Conservative Prime Ministers never seem to learn from the fate of their predecessors: the more they appease the extremists, the more they demand. The Prime Minister is weak, and he is being played. This weakness did for his predecessors, and ultimately it will also do for him.

Arguably the most shocking part of this whole sorry tale is this Conservative Government’s contempt for taxpayer cash. Aside from losing billions to fraudsters during the pandemic, dishing out overpriced contracts to their mates for unusable personal protective equipment and crashing the economy to the tune of £30 billion, the Government’s asylum policy stands out as a prime example of Ministers scattering taxpayer money to the four winds and receiving absolutely nothing in return—chasing headlines while buying failure.

There are so many vital questions to be answered. Why, for instance, have the Government failed to publish an impact assessment? For example, do Ministers have any idea of the increase in detention capacity that will be required because of this Bill? The Home Secretary was completely unable to answer this simple question during her car crash of an interview on the radio this morning. How much will these additional detention places cost? How much will the Government pay Rwanda per asylum seeker, and how much will each flight cost? We still do not know the answer to that question one year after the £140 million was given. Our constituents deserve to know, as these decisions impact directly on their communities and on the state of our public finances. It is outrageous that the Government are not providing an iota of information about the impact of a Bill with such huge financial and community impact implications.

So we are bound to ask: what are Ministers afraid of? If they truly believe that this Bill will succeed in achieving its objectives, surely they would happily have published the impact assessment well before Second Reading, and they would have been delighted to stand at the Dispatch Box to defend it. However, there is of course another possibility, which is that Ministers have not even attempted to assess the impact of this bigger backlog Bill because they are utterly terrified of what they would reveal if they did. They are terrified of seeing the cost of their own incompetence. They are horrified by the thought of being transparent because transparency reveals the truth, and the truth is that this Bill will just make everything worse. It will boost the profits of the people smugglers. It will add tens of thousands to the backlog. It will add hundreds of millions to the hotel bills. It will tarnish Britain’s reputation as a country that upholds the international rules-based order. It will further inflame community frustration and tension, and it will add to the desperate misery of those who are seeking sanctuary from persecution and violence.

Many Conservative Members agree with every word of what I have just said, and I urge them to support our new clauses and to join us in the No Lobby when we vote against this deeply damaging and counterproductive Bill this evening.