Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 15th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

It is just over two years to the day since the Rwanda scheme was first announced from the Government Dispatch Box, so it would be remiss of us not to take stock of progress to date. Well, hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been sent to the Rwandan Government; civil servants, courts, parliamentarians and journalists have spent countless hours, days and weeks discussing and writing about the scheme; and not one, not two, but three Home Secretaries have flown down to Kigali. But apart from that, there is not a great deal to report. The boats have kept coming, the backlog has kept growing, and the people smugglers are still laughing all the way to the bank. We have had two years of headline-chasing gimmicks; two years of pursuing a policy that is fundamentally unworkable, unaffordable and unlawful; two years of flogging this dead horse.

I am an inveterate optimist, so I truly believe that one day Government Members will come to understand that hard graft and common sense are always more effective than the sugar rush of a tabloid front page, and they will come to accept that they should have adopted Labour’s comprehensive plan to restore order to our border by redirecting the vast amounts of money set aside for the Rwandan Government into a new cross-border police unit, and a new security partnership with Europol to smash the criminal gangs upstream.

Analysis conducted by the National Audit Office has revealed that if the Government manage to send 300 asylum seekers to Rwanda, which is just 0.5% of the 60,000 people earmarked for the scheme, it will cost the British taxpayer a truly staggering £2m per person. It is crystal clear that the scheme is doomed to fail on its own terms because people who are prepared to risk life and limb crossing continents will not be deterred by a 0.5% chance of being sent to Rwanda.

The mind-boggling costs of the scheme are quite difficult to grasp, so I have done a bit of homework—a bit of research into what else we could get for £2 million. My hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), who is not in his place, got the ball rolling during our last debate on the Bill by pointing out that £2 million will get someone five trips to outer space on the Virgin Galactic spacecraft—Madam Deputy Speaker, you look impressed, and suitably so. I have calculated that someone could live for three decades on one of the world’s most expensive cruise liners. They could charter, for a year, the Lady M yacht, which is, of course, the yacht that belongs to the “noble” Baroness Mone—it is her vessel of choice, as some Government Members may be aware—or they could even fly the Prime Minister’s favoured helicopter to Australia and back.

Speaking of the Prime Minister, I noticed that during the Easter recess, he found time to offer his services as a financial adviser to small businesses via Zoom. I do not know about you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I have concerns about a guy who is happy to pump billions of pounds into a failing fiasco like this Rwanda scheme offering his services as a financial adviser to unsuspecting members of the public. Let us hope that the Financial Conduct Authority will intervene as a matter of urgency.

[Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is proving most entertaining, but as this is consideration of Lords amendments, will he get on to dealing with the amendments? I want him to be in order!

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. If the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) was not in order, I would not have allowed him to speak. He has been drawing some very interesting facts to the attention of the House. I, for one, am likely to explore some of them—but not the yacht.

[Stephen Kinnock]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I always enjoy taking interventions from a fellow Welshman, but I feel that the right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) was well and truly put in his place by your riposte.

[Barry Gardiner]

Will my hon. Friend take an intervention from a non-fellow Scotsman?

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[Stephen Kinnock]

I will.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am sure that my hon. Friend has, like me, marvelled at the Government’s ability to legislate for Rwanda to be a safe country—Lords amendment 2 addressed that. Will he join me in urging the Government to use their amazing power to legislate to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions no longer cause global warming, and sugar, fat and alcohol no longer damage human health?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I am sure that those on the Government Benches would be delighted to oblige. Perhaps we could also legislate to say that the sky is green and the grass is blue, or that the Welsh rugby team actually won the last Six Nations—I would love to pass a law to secure that objective.

Let us be clear: not one of the amendments before us prevents flights to Rwanda taking off. On the contrary, they simply seek to put in the Bill what Ministers have previously promised—namely, they would ensure that the Bill was lawful, that the Government would protect the most vulnerable, and that we would stand by those brave Afghans who supported military efforts.

Let me address each amendment directly. I will focus first on Lords amendment 10B, in the name of the noble Lord Browne. We have spoken a lot about the unworkability and unaffordability of this policy, but we should also talk about the unethical and frankly un-British nature of deporting halfway across the world to Rwanda those Afghans who have supported Britain’s defence and diplomatic efforts. That is not Operation Warm Welcome; it is operation cold shoulder. We should have seen it coming, given that for an entire year the Prime Minister halted flights from neighbouring Pakistan for Afghans who had been granted resettlement rights in the UK under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy, and restarted them only when the Pakistani Government threatened to send those Afghans back across the border to meet their fate at the hands of the Taliban. We owe a debt of honour to the Afghans who were loyal to Britain and put their life on the line, and of course, our moral duty is most strongly felt by British armed forces personnel who worked alongside them.

In fact, this weekend, 13 senior military figures signed a letter to The Sunday Telegraph warning that

“‘any brave men and women who have fought alongside our armed forces or served the UK Government overseas’ must be exempt from removal to Rwanda.”

The signatories included former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, a former Secretary-General of NATO and a former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe. They warn that if this exemption is not granted, it will do

“grave damage to our ability to recruit local allies in future military operations”,

and explain that they have

“seen first-hand the enormous courage and dedication shown by those who have fought alongside our Armed Forces and served British interests abroad, often at huge personal risk, and we take personally Britain’s obligation to honour the debt we owe to that cohort.”

Those are powerful words indeed. I urge Government Members to join us in supporting Lords amendment 10B, which seeks to prevent that travesty.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

As the shadow Minister and I know, the key issue is not that ARAP people are coming via small boats, but the unbunging of the resettlement scheme. How many spaces does he envisage we will need to ensure are available for resettlement under that scheme?

[Stephen Kinnock]

A number of people who served the British defence, development and diplomatic effort have been identified for resettlement, so they should be resettled in the United Kingdom. Let us get that bit of the scheme unblocked before we get into speculation about the quantum. The key point is that they have already been accepted into the resettlement programmes, but are being left high and dry in Pakistan.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend was accused of levity earlier. This House has so many things to discuss. There are good, sensible and workable policies to deal with in relation to migration, as he and I know, but this one—the Rwanda scheme—reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch, which he is probably too young to remember. The scheme is a dead parrot; the sooner the Government wake up to the fact that it is dead, the better.

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is right that so many practical, pragmatic and sensible measures could be taken to deal with the crisis in the channel—the Tory small boats chaos—but instead of focusing on those sensible and pragmatic measures, we are dealing with this white elephant of a programme that will never get anywhere and is costing millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and absorbing huge amounts of our time. I absolutely agree with him on that.

Lords amendment 9, in the name of the noble Baroness Butler-Sloss, is also based on a moral imperative, as it would prevent the removal of potential victims of modern slavery to Rwanda until the individual’s process under the national referral mechanism is complete. It should go without saying that modern slavery victims should not be sent to Rwanda, and we are disappointed that the Government’s amendment (a) in lieu is a profoundly unserious attempt to reassure the House—not least because we have been here before and know that such promised reports are rarely worth the paper they are written on.

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[Tahir Ali (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that although the Bill is inhumane, costly and unworkable—despite the best efforts to amend it—the Tories seem resolved to pursue it rather than getting to grips with our broken asylum system? It is just another indication to the country that this Government are unfit to govern.

[Stephen Kinnock]

There is a clear choice between the common sense, hard graft and positive international co-operation set out in Labour’s plan to deal with this issue, and the headline-chasing gimmicks and empty gestures that are symbolised by the Rwanda policy. Politics is about choices; the Government have taken their choice and we have taken ours.

In that spirit, Lords amendment 1B is a Labour Front-Bench amendment that places a responsibility on the Government to have due regard for its current obligations under domestic and international law. Lords amendments 3B and 3C, in the name of the noble Lord Hope, together state that Rwanda may be considered a safe country only if and when the measures set out in the Rwanda treaty have been fully implemented and the monitoring committee has established that that is the case. The Government claim that the measures in the treaty address concerns in the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous ruling, so there is absolutely no reason for Ministers to refuse to accept Lord Hope’s amendments.

Finally, Lords amendment 6B, in the name of the noble Baroness Chakrabarti, allows Ministers, officials and courts to consider whether Rwanda is safe on a case-by-case basis. Given that the Government have accepted that some appeals will be allowed, we see no reason for them to reject this amendment.

I hope that colleagues from across the House will join Labour in voting for all the amendments. Of course, the amendment are no more than an exercise in damage limitation; the fundamental problem is that this hare-brained Rwanda policy is breaking all records for being the most unworkable and worst value for money policy in the history of the Home Office. But there is an alternative. In addition to our policy to go after the criminal smuggler gangs, we will deliver our backlog clearance plan to get asylum seekers out of expensive asylum hotels by surging decision makers and caseworkers to the Home Office, and by creating a new returns and enforcement unit with 1,000 dedicated staff focused on the faster removal of those with no right to be here, including failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals.

The Government are failing on all fronts. Despite their misleading boasts about progress, the Minister for Legal Migration and the Border, the hon. Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), admitted today that there are still almost 300 asylum hotels in operation. They are returning 44% fewer failed asylum seekers compared with 2010, when the last Labour Government left office, and 27% fewer foreign criminals. The number of small boat crossings has gone up again year on year—January to March figures—and the Government have no plan for the 99% who cannot be sent to Rwanda. We need Labour’s plans to smash the criminal smuggler gangs, save lives in the channel and strengthen our border security. We need Labour’s plans for faster processing, the end of hotel use and the removal of people who have no right to stay in the UK, and we need a Labour Government to deliver a firm, fair and well-managed asylum system that works for Britain.

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

I do not really feel that there is anything terribly useful I can say at this stage—I have heard all this before. The hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), who speaks for the Opposition, is simply repeating what he has said before. Not only that; it is perfectly apparent that these amendments are just wrecking amendments, and the hon. Gentleman has not even addressed the arguments about international law. He knows perfectly well—because he cannot answer my questions on this issue—that we have a dualist system, and if we decide to legislate in our own Parliament, the courts themselves will implement that legislation.

The real point is this: let us get this Bill done, and let us get the House of Lords to calm down a bit. At the same time, let us wait for what is inevitably going to be another claim and then see the judgment of the Supreme Court on the wording of this Bill, provided that it is clear and unambiguous. That is all I need to say. I may come back again, however, if the Lords insist again on these ridiculous amendments.