Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Stuart C McDonald and Iain Duncan Smith

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 20th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I am grateful to be called to speak so early, and I will be as brief as possible.

I say to my hon. Friend the Minister that we have already had these discussions. In fact, the Government moved on the issue; they did so by putting proposals into guidance. The problem with guidance is that it is guidance—it is not obligatory—so the problem with Lords amendment 26B is that the Bill is incomplete, because until these measures are in the Bill, there is no support for confirmed victims after the national referral mechanism process is completed; it is all by judgment.

The current system is deeply destabilising for confirmed victims. I am talking about confirmed victims, not other people who have come over. These are people who we agree are victims of modern-day slavery, and we should be very generous to them. What else is there to do? They are victims. Confirmed victims currently receive support under the recovery needs assessment, or RNA, process. Under this process, many victims receive support only for short periods of time. There is no 12-month period, and they therefore undergo repeated needs assessments. The Minister should go through the system and see how painful this is for confirmed victims. It is destabilising and can be harmful to victims’ mental health; we know that. It requires victims to constantly provide “evidence” of need, with support available only for “needs arising from exploitation”. They are confirmed victims, and they do not know how long they will need support, which means that they are worried about what will happen if there is no agreement. That can put them back in the hands of the traffickers—the thing that we say we are against.

Justice and Care’s recent victim navigator study showed that when victims were given support for a minimum period, 89% of those supported by Justice and Care’s programme chose to engage with police investigations, and we got more prosecutions. One does not need a bleeding heart to see the sense of this. It will enable us to prosecute the traffickers. That is what I want my Government to do. Right now, the average percentage of victims who engage with investigations is not 89%, but 33%. People who are very worried, destabilised and uncertain about how long they will be supported for will not give evidence. They will not go to the police or engage with them, because they are frightened. If we give them a minimum of 12 months of support, we will get more prosecutions. As a result, we will both save money and provide some serious security for these victims. I genuinely beg the Government to make the change now, because it is decent, reasonable and the right thing to do. Can we please discuss the matter further before it comes up again, and can we do this?

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

Members on both sides of the House might agree that the Lords got it right when they said that the timetabling arrangements for this House left a lot to be desired. We have one hour to debate 12 substantive and important amendments, and we will end up voting on them for three hours. It makes absolutely no sense.

I could be very succinct and just say that the SNP position remains that this is an atrocious and horrendous Bill, and therefore we support everything that the House of Lords has attempted to do to rein it in, but I will not. However, out of deference to some of the very good speakers on both sides of this debate, I will try to stick to points on one or two of the amendments.

First, I turn to Lords amendment 5B, which simply states,

“For the avoidance of doubt,”

part 2 is compliant with the refugee convention

“and must be…given effect as such.”

The Minister has said several times that that is precisely the Government’s objective, so why on earth does he have a problem with putting those words in the Bill? I suspect that there are two answers, the first of which is that in reality, part 2 does not remotely live up to the demands of our international obligations. Former Supreme Court judge Lord Brown said in the other place:

“I truly believe, as do many others, that several of these provisions flagrantly breach our obligations as interpreted by the UNHCR”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 April 2022; Vol. 820, c. 1882.]

We respectfully agree with Lord Brown.

I suspect that the second reason for resisting this amendment is that Ministers are desperate to keep those words out of the Bill to make it more difficult to ask a court to adjudicate on whether the Bill is, in fact, consistent with the refugee convention. As Lord Brown said—he was directly addressing something that the Minister said here at the Bill’s last outing—it was

“quite wrong to suggest that there was no need for this amendment because the courts would anyway deal with the challenge to the legislation based on suggested non-compliance. I repeat: the amendment is vital. The courts otherwise cannot go behind the definitive clauses in the Bill and would have to apply them, compliant or not.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 April 2020; Vol. 820, c. 1883.]

We agree; the Bill is fundamental to what we are doing here.