Nationality and Borders Bill

Stephen Timms Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 19th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making that point, which the Labour party should also recognise. A little earlier, the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) said, “In 11 years, what have you done?” As my right hon. Friend has just pointed out, cumulative efforts have been made—[Interruption.] Perhaps the hon. Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) would like to listen as well. It is important to note that over the years —my right hon. Friend is right, and in fact I am going to refer to a piece of legislation with which she will be familiar—change did come in, but unfortunately, for a range of reasons, the system is now being abused and gamed.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Will the Home Secretary give way?

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

Will the Home Secretary give way?

[Priti Patel]

I will give way shortly.

Our plan will increase the fairness of our system so that we can better protect those who are in need of genuine asylum. That is absolutely right, and it is important that we have that fair principle. However, it will also do something that I sense does not interest the Labour party: it will deter illegal entry to the UK, and, importantly, will break the business model of the smuggling gangs and protect the lives of those whom they are endangering.

[Stephen Timms]

One of the big problems at present is the very long time that it takes to determine asylum applications. Since the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), left the Home Office, the number of case workers has gone up but the number of decisions has gone down in every single year. Why has that catastrophic fall in productivity been allowed to occur?

[Priti Patel]

I shall go on to refer specifically to the time it takes to process cases, but the right hon. Gentleman will also be familiar with the number of appeals involved. This is not just about initial decisions; it is about the system itself, seen from an end-to-end perspective. That is why—and I will go on to make this case as well—in our new plan for immigration, as the right hon. Gentleman and all other Members will be aware, we are speaking about comprehensive end-to-end reform of the asylum system that looks at every single stage.

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[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

With great respect to the right hon. Lady, she was making the point about late filing of evidence, and I was making the point in response—I will come on to it in a moment, and I am quite happy to give way to her again when I do—that the way this Bill is framed, in terms of the direction to give very little weight to late evidence, is very concerning with respect to victims who are unable to talk about their trauma at an early stage in the proceedings. I will come back to that and I will be very happy to give way to her again when I do.

On asylum accommodation, the idea of sending people to offshore processing sites is dehumanising and unconscionable. As the UN Refugee Agency puts it,

“The UK should abandon plans to ‘externalise’ its refugee commitments, which would see it shift responsibility for protecting refugees on to states with less capacity and more refugees.”

Frankly, it is an attempt to distract from Government failure on the housing of those seeking asylum.

[Stephen Timms]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, and I agree with him about this point. Of course, Australia has undertaken offshore processing, and there are terrible stories, which shame Australia, about what has happened to some people in those places. Has he had any indication: where might these offshore places be where asylum applicants could be processed?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that. Unfortunately, I have had no such indication beyond leaks to the media, a fact which will probably not surprise him.

Last month, the High Court judgment on Napier barracks found inadequate health and safety conditions and a failure to screen victims of trafficking and other vulnerabilities. The Home Office continued to house people against the advice of Public Health England, endangering those in the accommodation, staff and the local community. It resulted in what the Court described as an “inevitable” covid outbreak in January 2021, with nearly 200 people testing positive for the virus. No wonder the independent chief inspector of borders and Her Majesty’s inspector of prisons published an emergency report that raised “serious safeguarding concerns”. On asylum accommodation, this Government have failed and failed dangerously.

The idea that this Bill helps those fleeing violence and persecution does not stand up to scrutiny. Let me take one example, because the former Prime Minister raised it a moment or two ago. The Bill says that evidence submitted late without good reason should be given only “minimal weight” by asylum judges. Asylum seekers have been required for the past 19 years to submit arguments and evidence at an early stage. Now it seems we are going to have a situation where judges are directed to have minimal regard to evidence being given late. But there are many reasons why refugees, and particularly victims of human trafficking, cannot provide evidence at an early stage, not least the fact it is difficult for survivors of trauma to talk about their experience immediately, including—and, indeed, especially—women and other survivors of sexual violence. That shows the real failure at the heart of this Bill. It fails victims of human trafficking, and it is a glaring missed opportunity to address the vile crime of people smuggling. Instead, the Government will turn their back on some of the most vulnerable people on Earth.

The Bill changes the law so that helping an asylum seeker will no longer need to be done “for gain” to attract criminal liability. That is what the Bill does, and it is a profound and dangerous change in the law. It could criminalise the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for saving people at sea, and it seems to take no account whatsoever of the international law of the sea, which requires ships’ captains to assist those who are in distress. Let us be frank about this. Had this measure been in place when Sir Nicholas Winton was rescuing hundreds of children from the holocaust on the Kindertransport, he would have risked being criminalised—[Interruption.] There is no point in Members shaking their heads, because this legislation risks bringing into the scope of the criminal law those who are helping people for humanitarian reasons.

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[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker, and congratulations on taking the Chair. I am delighted to see you there.

Every year or two, we hear from a Conservative Home Secretary that they are going to fix the broken system. The Home Secretary has told us again tonight that the system is broken, and of course she is right: it is broken. All the previous attempts—we have heard about exactly the same things in the past—have not fixed it, and this one will not either. I cannot agree with the thinking in this Bill that making life more miserable for people whose circumstances are already utterly miserable will fix these problems and deter people from their desperate efforts to reach the UK.

Most people think that distinguishing between asylum seekers on the basis of their route to the UK is contrary to the 1951 refugee convention. No doubt that will end up in the courts. I am particularly dismayed by plans to process asylum applications overseas. We have no idea where this will happen. We certainly should know before we agree to this Bill.

Australia has offshore facilities in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, although nobody has been sent there since 2013. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees urged that they should be evacuated because of poor health standards, highlighting in particular the number of suicides there. Those facilities shame Australia, and if we go down the same road, it will shame us too.

The long wait for asylum decisions is a massive problem. I asked the Home Secretary about this earlier. There are 50% more asylum caseworkers now than there were in 2014-15, but the number of decisions they make has gone down every single year in that time. Why has productivity fallen so far? I asked the Home Secretary that and she did not give me an answer. Without fixing the problem, things will just carry on getting worse.

The number waiting more than a year for initial decisions, as we have been reminded repeatedly in this debate, has risen tenfold since 2010. I have seen that in constituency surgeries. People wait four years, and they have no idea when they will hear anything. Sometimes a reply to me is the only way they know they actually are in the Home Office system. They have no other evidence that they are.

I strongly support the proposal of my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) for legally binding targets to process asylum cases more quickly. If people cannot stay, they should be told soon, not, as happens so often at the moment, after years, so that leaving is impractical and in practice hardly ever happens. The current gross inefficiency helps nobody. I hope the House will reject this Bill.