Illegal Migration Bill

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

I hope that the Minister gets a hold of Hansard tomorrow, reads what he has just said and, as my mother used to say to me, takes a long, hard look at himself, because the idea that that is a justification for locking up children is absolutely disgraceful. For him to try to draw and to invent a causal link where none exists is a consistent line of the way this Government act. It is the same way that they tried to draw a causal link between the Modern Slavery Act and those coming in small boats—it just does not exist.

[Sir Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I agree with what the right hon. Gentleman is saying. The current proposal in the Bill is that unaccompanied minors coming here to claim asylum will spend the balance of their childhood here knowing that the day they become 18, the Home Secretary will have an obligation to remove them from the country. Is that not an unconscionable way for any Government to treat children?

[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.