Points of Order

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Thursday 8th June 2023 Commons Chamber

11.47 am

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is about communication today between the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), and the Home Secretary. To give a quick recap, on Monday the Home Secretary gave what I understand to be inaccurate information to Parliament when she claimed that the asylum decision backlog is down by 17,000 since the Prime Minister’s statement. That contradicts what the Home Office’s published statistics say; they seem to make it very clear that the “asylum initial decision backlog”—it uses those precise words—has increased from 131,292 to 137,583 for the main applicants since the end of November and from 160,919 to 172,758 for total applications in the first quarter, which is clearly an increase. The shadow Home Secretary raised this with the Home Secretary first in the House on Monday, and the record was not corrected by the Home Secretary then or since, to my understanding. My right hon. Friend then wrote to the Home Secretary this morning.

Mr Deputy Speaker, have you received any notification from the Home Secretary of her intention to correct the record since Monday’s statement, and can you confirm that the ministerial code requires that

“Ministers should give accurate and truthful information to Parliament, correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity”?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank the hon. Lady for forward notice of her point of order. In response to question No. 1, no; and to question No. 2, yes. However, as she knows—this has been noted before—Ministers are responsible for the content of their answers, and it is therefore not a matter for the Chair. Those on the Government Front Bench will have heard her concerns and the Table Office can advise further on how she and other Members may pursue the matter.