Refugee Crisis in Europe

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary on securing this very important debate. The International Development Committee met this morning and agreed to undertake an urgent inquiry into DFID aspects of the refugee crisis. As other Members have said this afternoon, the very strong public response throughout our country surely shows our country at its very best.

Both yesterday and today, we have seen the Government’s response with the new figure of 20,000. I support those who have said that there is urgency about granting access to as many of those 20,000 as possible. With the onset of winter, this is an immediate crisis. I particularly highlight the point made by Save the Children about the need to give the 3,000 unaccompanied children safe haven.

Part of the announcement concerns what the Chancellor said on Sunday about the use of the DFID budget to accept more refugees. That will require very careful scrutiny. The rules on official development assistance are clear: they allow for domestic expenditure to fund refugees for the first 12 months. However, I urge the Government to proceed with caution, for the reasons that Members have set out in this debate. Surely the focus of effective development policy must be to prevent crises from happening in the first place.

There is a balance to be struck. The Home Secretary spoke about the 0.7% commitment and about how, with the growing economy, the amount of cash available will increase. I seek a commitment from the Government that if the costs associated with refugee resettlement exceed the increase in the cash available, they will look elsewhere for the money, including to the contingency reserve.

[Mark Field]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, because his Committee should scrutinise such issues very closely. Does he accept that community cohesion should be one of the goals of DFID expenditure? It is right that a safe haven for people who will come to this country—I hope, temporarily—should be done under the DFID budget, rather than through the Department for Communities and Local Government or other Departments.

[Stephen Twigg]

We will certainly examine that matter as part of our inquiry. My instinct is that the current provision for 12 months goes as far as we should. If the Government proposed going beyond that, we would want to look at it in real detail.

The hon. Gentleman brings me to my next point. I am delighted that in my own city of Liverpool, our mayor, Joe Anderson, has responded to the shadow Home Secretary’s call to take 10 refugee families by saying that Liverpool City Council will take 100 refugees. As Joe Anderson put it:

“In Liverpool, a city famous for our warm welcomes and as a safe port in the storm of global conflict, we are prepared to play our part.”

Like other cities, however, Liverpool faces very large cuts in its funding from central Government. It is important that central Government provide support to enable communities across the country to take the refugees.

One of the central themes of this debate is the prevention of and the response to conflict. There is no doubt that we can be proud as a country of reaching the 0.7% target, about which the Home Secretary was right to remind us. We are second only to the United States in what we have contributed in bilateral aid to Syria, and we should be very proud of that. We need to say to our European partners who are nowhere near achieving 0.7% that they should rise to the challenge and match what we have done.

However, I do not believe that this is an either/or situation in which we either fulfil our obligation to 0.7% or take more refugees. In the crisis that we face, we have to do both. We need to say to our European partners that they need to rise to the 0.7% aid challenge, but we need to rise to the challenge of accepting more refugees. The figure of 20,000 is a very important development, but as others have said, the need is immediate, the crisis is now and we should seek to accept refugees as quickly as possible both from the camps in Syria and from among those in Europe. It is only right that we share that burden with our European partners.