Borders and Asylum
Debate between Tim Farron and Yvette Cooper(1 week, 3 days ago)
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Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. We need to end asylum hotels across the board, and that means ensuring that we can clear the appeals backlogs through major appeals reform, because that is currently the main obstacle to the faster closure of hotels. It means preventing people from taking up accommodation in the first place when they are not entitled to it, and it means looking for alternative sites that are more appropriate, which will mean working with other Government Departments. It also means, crucially, recognising that carrying on with the system that we inherited—the frozen system, in which the last Government were not returning people and not making asylum decisions—would have left us with tens of thousands more people in asylum hotels. That is the system that Conservative Members want to go back to, but it would be deeply damaging for my hon. Friend’s constituents, and for the country.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
Providing safer routes for refugees is not going to eradicate the entire problem—none of us is saying that it will—but it is surely part of the solution to stopping trafficking across the channel. Is it not just cruel madness to restrict family reunion, which is one of the few safe routes that currently exist, particularly when we know that 93% of the refugee family reunion visas granted this year were for women and children? Will this not increase the number of people putting themselves at the mercy of evil traffickers, and the number of tragedies in the channel?
Yvette Cooper
I know that this is an issue in which the hon. Member has taken a very strong interest over a long period of time. Since he and I first started discussing this issue many years ago, the way in which the family reunion system is used has changed. It has gone from people applying one or two years after they have refugee protection here in the UK to people applying in around a month. That means that the people applying have often not left asylum accommodation or asylum hotels. They do not have housing, jobs or ways to support family members whom they seek to bring to the UK, and we have also seen that criminal gangs are using and exploiting the system. That is why we are temporarily pausing the existing refugee family reunion route, and we will consult on the new arrangements that should be brought in. We will aim to bring in some of those arrangements by this spring.
In the interim, refugees will be covered by exactly the same rules as everyone else, and by the same conditions as everyone else, through the appendix FM process. But there is a concern, because there are no conditions on refugee family reunion at the moment. The way in which it is being used has changed, and there is a responsibility on us to not have huge problems with homelessness assistance for local authorities, and to have a managed system that also supports contributions and does not simply end up being exploited by criminal gangs.
Immigration System
Debate between Tim Farron and Yvette Cooper(3 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Yvette Cooper
Returns dropped by around a third under the previous Conservative Government. I think that is very damaging; I think the rules should be respected and enforced. We have inherited a system in which it seems the only people they tried to remove or to get information on were those who had been convicted and had prison sentences. We believe that we need information much more widely and a faster process to ensure that the rules and the laws are upheld.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
Given that lengthy A&E, cancer treatment and ambulance waiting times in Cumbria are a direct result of the lack of social care workers, meaning that our hospitals are full to bursting, what assessment has the Home Secretary made of the damage that this policy could do to patients and NHS workers in my communities, where the most regular experience we have of migrants is that they care for us and our loved ones?
Yvette Cooper
We need to support social care and recognise the importance of that job. That means tackling the long-term recruitment issues here in the UK, not simply always thinking that we can ignore those problems and turn to migration instead. The hon. Gentleman will know that there have been huge problems, including abuse and exploitation, as a result of that route. Some 39,000 people who came here on a care worker visa, often in good faith, ended up being displaced when checks were finally introduced. That is why regional hubs have been introduced to ensure that employers can still recruit from those displaced workers, rather than continuing to recruit from abroad.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Tim Farron and Yvette Cooper(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
Refugees here from Ukraine under the Homes for Ukraine scheme are not eligible to indefinite leave. They have a three-year visa, which in many cases, obviously, is about to expire. They have a very short window to apply for what is only an 18-month extension. Does the Home Secretary agree that that is not long enough for Ukrainian families here to be able to plan their future, and will she reconsider?
Yvette Cooper
I can say to the hon. Gentleman that we continue to support the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which remains extremely important—I have a family from Ukraine still living with me in Yorkshire. We will continue to support those families and will ensure that people are not disadvantaged by the deadlines that have been set.
Migration and Border Security
Debate between Tim Farron and Yvette Cooper(9 months, 1 week ago)
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Yvette Cooper
Clearly the Rwanda scheme failed, and the Leader of the Opposition knows that it failed. That is why she does not want to reinstate it, contrary to the views of the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), who seems to want to spend another £700 million over another two years to send another four volunteers to Rwanda. The criminals who organise the boats are incredibly dangerous. We have seen children crushed to death and people drown as a result of these flimsy and dangerous boats, and the gangs are making profits of hundreds of millions of pounds. We should not be letting them get away with it. That is why we need to work across borders to go after them.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
Migration plays a significant part in our economy. In the Lake district, 66% of hospitality and tourism businesses report that they are failing to meet demand because of a lack of workforce capacity. Migration is part of the answer. Will the Home Secretary listen to leaders of the Cumbria hospitality and tourism economy and meet them to discuss options such as a youth mobility visa scheme? It would enable us to shore up our workforce, which is brilliant, but far too small.
Yvette Cooper
All I would say to the hon. Gentleman is that there are some deep and fundamental problems in the UK labour market that we have inherited. He is talking about workforce shortages when net migration has quadrupled and when overseas recruitment for work has quadrupled. I think that shows that there is a much bigger challenge in the workforce, where we have a huge drop in training and where we do not have proper strategic approaches to the workforce. That is what we should be putting in place instead. We have to look at the issues around training, pay and conditions and at the key sectors to make sure they get support, rather than continually looking to increase migration instead.