Illegal Migration Update

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, thin though it is, and I echo his sentiments in sending condolences to the families of those six people who died tragically in the accident in the channel earlier this summer. We simply must stop these dangerous crossings.

I am absolutely bewildered that, after the summer we have had, yesterday the Prime Minister claimed victory in his broken pledge to stop the boats. This Saturday we saw the year’s record number of channel crossings, with more than 870 people making that dangerous journey in a single day, and the total number has now soared to a whopping 21,000 for the year. The only reason the number is not breaking last year’s record is the poor weather in July and August—and a strategy that depends on the weather is probably not a very sustainable strategy at all.

What has that left us with? A Government flailing around, chasing headlines with gimmicks and stunts rather than doing the hard graft of actually stopping the boats, clearing the backlog and getting people out of the hotels. Take their much celebrated small boats week last month, which turned out to be an absolute omnishambles, with taxpayers paying the price. No wonder the Home Secretary did not want to do a single interview, and no wonder she is not in the Chamber today.

Do not take my word for it: that well-known pro-Labour publication the Daily Mail did a day-by-day review. On the Monday, just 39 migrants were brought into the 500-capacity Bibby Stockholm barge. On the Tuesday, the Conservative deputy chairman admitted that his party has “failed” on immigration. On the Wednesday, the Immigration Minister sparked fresh Tory infighting over whether Britain should leave the European convention on human rights. On the Thursday, channel crossings hit their highest daily number for the year. Then, to cap it all, on the Friday, all the asylum seekers were removed from the Bibby Stockholm because of the presence of legionella in the water supply. You could not make it up.

The Bibby Stockholm was supposed to be a symbol of the Conservatives’ cutting asylum costs, but the Minister has not even mentioned those costs today. Instead, it stands alongside the boats and the hotels as a floating symbol of Conservative failure and incompetence that is costing the taxpayer half a million pounds a month. On top of that, new Home Office data in August showed us that the asylum seeker backlog has grown ninefold to an enormous 175,000 under the Conservatives at a cost of £4 billion a year to the taxpayer—incredibly, eight times higher than it was when Labour left office in 2010. That waste is the cost of 13 years of Conservative neglect.

Today, we debate the cost of the spiralling asylum backlog, driven by cutting the costs of asylum decision making in 2013. Yesterday, the Chancellor was promising to spend “whatever it takes” to fix crumbling classrooms caused by the Prime Minister’s cuts to the schools budget as Chancellor. Tomorrow, we will no doubt be back to the economy and the financial costs of low growth and spiralling mortgages. Everywhere we look, we see the costs of Conservative incompetence.

The Minister speaks now of this new deal with Turkey. Well, I am glad that the Government have started to listen to Labour—we have been calling for tough action to disrupt the gangs upstream for well over a year—but this looks pitifully weak. This announcement comes with no new funding or staff, meaning that officers could be taken off existing functions. That stands in contrast to Labour’s fully funded plan to hire hundreds of specialists specifically to work on that challenge. Meanwhile, Turkish nationals have become one of the largest groups crossing the channel this year.

The Minister boasts about returns of failed asylum seekers going up, but they are actually down 70% compared with when Labour left office in 2010. Forty thousand are awaiting removal, and, at the current rate, it will take the Government more than 10 years to achieve their target. Two thousand fewer foreign national offenders are being removed per year compared with when Labour left office in 2010.

The Minister brags about the legacy backlog—a figment of the Prime Minister’s imagination—going down, but he knows full well that the only backlog that matters is that of the 175,000 people, and that number is still going up. We know that the Government are cooking the books in that regard, marking large numbers of asylum seekers as “withdrawn” because they have missed a single appointment or failed to fill in a form correctly. A Conservative Back-Bench MP described that as an amnesty in all but name.

The Minister has decided to make illegal working even more illegal. The problem is that there has been a lack of Government enforcement. Employers who are exploiting and illegally employing migrant workers should face the full force of the law, but in reality, the number of penalties issued to firms has fallen by two thirds since 2016.

There are so many questions that it is difficult to know where to start, but let us start with these: when did the Minister know about legionella on Bibby Stockholm? How much is the barge currently costing? How many people are currently in hotels? Does he actually intend to implement the much-vaunted Illegal Migration Act 2023? The Prime Minister keeps declaring victory, but the reality is that nothing is working and everything the Government do just makes everything worse, so when will they get out of the way so that we on the Labour Benches can take over, implement our plan and retake control of our broken asylum system?

[Robert Jenrick]

That was a desperately thin response. We can deduce from it that the Labour party has absolutely no plan to tackle this issue. Of course the hon. Gentleman has had a quieter summer than me, but that is because the Labour party is completely uninterested in tackling illegal migration.

The hon. Gentleman talks about small boats week. Well, let us see how it went for the Labour party. On Monday, the Government announced the biggest increase in fines for illegal working and renting for a decade, while Labour MPs called for illegal migrants to have the right to work immediately, which would act as a massive magnet for even more crossings. On Tuesday, we announced our professional enablers taskforce to clamp down on lawyers who abuse the system, while Labour MPs were awfully quiet, weren’t they? They did nothing to distance themselves from the litany of councillors and advisers exposed as being implicated in efforts to stop the removal of criminals and failed asylum seekers. On Wednesday, we announced a partnership with Turkey to smash the gangs, while the shadow Home Secretary claimed that morning that what we really needed was a return to the Dublin convention—something that even the EU described as “prehistoric”.

The truth is that the Labour party has no plan to tackle this issue, and does not even want to tackle it. We on the Conservative Benches are getting on with the job, and we are making progress: while the rest of Europe sees significant increases in migrants, we are seeing significant falls. Our plan is the most comprehensive of any country in Europe and it is starting to work.