Thangam Debbonaire
Main Page: Thangam Debbonaire (Labour - Bristol West)Department Debates - View all Thangam Debbonaire's debates with the Home Office
(5 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Sajid Javid
I very much agree with my hon. Friend. As he will know—no doubt this is one of the reasons why he has rightly raised the issue—there was a landing on the coast of Lincolnshire in, I believe, December. That is being looked into closely, but he is right to say that we should look more widely than just the south-east coast.
Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)
This is a time of unprecedented global refugee crisis, and the vast majority of refugees end up in countries adjacent to their country of origin. Only a small minority come to this country. I agree with the Home Secretary that we want to protect and save lives, but will he please tell us how many border officers he has sent to Calais to process people who have a claim to family reunion, what he is doing to increase the number taken under the schemes for family resettlement—a safe and legal route that allows people to leave an overburdened country next to a country at war and come to this country—and what else he is doing to enable us to take our fair share of the world’s responsibility for this global refugee crisis?
Sajid Javid
As I am sure the hon. Lady will know, we do a great deal. This Government, and successive previous Governments, have done much to help refugees across the world. We have the vulnerable children’s and the vulnerable persons resettlement schemes, and we will work actively with our European partners to reunite families, particularly children. One of my first acts as Home Secretary last summer was to ensure that a new right to stay would be established for unaccompanied refugee children brought into the UK from Calais, to make it easier for them to do that. We will continue to meet our obligations on family reunion under the Dublin regulation.
Just a couple of months ago, alongside Canada and unlike many other countries, we were the first to help the former White Helmets who were facing certain death under Assad in Syria. We took more than 25 of them, along with their families—nearly 100 people—and gave them our protection, because that is in accordance with our values and the kind of country that we are.