European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Tim Loughton Excerpts

Committee: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard]

Can I make a little progress? I do not usually say that, but I am barely halfway through at the moment.

The word “appropriate” is one of those words that is so open-ended and ambiguous that it could literally mean all things to all people. That is why I am a big fan of amendment 2, in the name of the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), which attempts to give some definition to what we mean by “appropriate”. I was not quite sure what he was implying about pressing it to a vote, but I hope that he is going to—I would be very happy to support it.

Amendments 205, 206, 216, 17 and 265 also attempt to define the word “appropriate”, with the effect of substituting the word “necessary”. That is a much more agreeable term, because “appropriate” is subjective: what is appropriate for one person may not be appropriate for the other, but what is necessary has to be evidenced by reasons. If something were to be appealed and come to court, it would be much easier to question necessity than appropriateness. These amendments would also be useful.

Let me now talk about the aspects relating to devolution—again, without getting into the phase 1 agreement. Clearly, the whole matter of how powers are exercised by Ministers, whether those powers are residual or broad-brush, has a critical impact on the devolved Administrations. I hope that the Committee will support amendment 161, which requires Ministers to get the consent of devolved Administrations when they are making secondary legislation on matters that affect them. I hope that that sort of qualification will be uncontroversial, but I dare say that it will not be.

Perhaps the most important amendment is 158 in the name of the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth. It simply says that the Scotland Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 2006 should be exempt from the set of powers that we are giving to UK Ministers to bring forward secondary legislation. The Government already accept that the Northern Ireland Act 1998 has been exempted, so Ministers need to explain why they would exempt one devolved legislature and not the others. How can it be justified in one place and not in the others? Surely it is a simple matter of common sense to say that this provision should confer on UK Ministers an exercise of power in relation to the matters that this Parliament is responsible for, not in relation to those that other Parliaments are responsible for.

I want briefly to mention human rights. I appreciate that the Secretary of State has tabled an amendment, now to be part of what we are discussing, in which he refers to examining the equalities implications for any particular piece of legislation. However, we can do more than that. I want to know why the amendment says that we should exempt the Equality Act 2010 and the Equality Act 2006 from the powers being given to Ministers. If the Government do not accept that, there is always the danger of people implying from their actions that they may wish to do something that would constrain or overturn some of the safeties and securities in those Acts.

Let me talk about the experience that this place has in making secondary legislation. This will not be so important, I suppose, if we end up with a tiny number of residual matters that need to be considered in this way, but if that is not the case—if, because of a lack of legislative time, the Government try to put an awful lot of matters through secondary legislation—then we will be very ill-equipped to deal with that.

Like many Members, I have sat on Delegated Legislation Committees. They are effectively a rubber stamp; we hope that the officials and civil servants who draw up the regulations have worked them out, double-checked them and made sure of them, because we rarely get the opportunity to get into a debate. I well remember a recent Delegated Legislation Committee to which I turned up determined to get involved in a discussion of what the regulations were about, to the dismay of other Members. They were dismayed not by the content of what I said, but by the fact that I said it and made the meeting last 30 mins rather than three, so they missed their subsequent appointments.

That is how Delegated Legislation Committees work at the minute. People regard them as a rubber stamp and something of a joke. If we did not have faith in our civil service and those who prepare the regulations, we would be in a bad way indeed, and that cannot continue. I accept that the amendments tabled by the Procedure Committee are an attempt to overcome many of those deficiencies, but I think that they are baby steps. Of course they are worth taking, but they are minor changes to our procedures. If we try to load on to the existing procedures a vast array of secondary legislation, those procedures will not be fit for purpose and we will end up making bad and ridiculous legislation.

The debate has been about Henry VIII powers. I hope that those who argue for such powers do not go the way of the architect of the previous Henry VIII powers, Thomas Cromwell, and end up in the Tower or dead. I am sure that they will not, but I caution them, when they are considering how much power to give to Ministers—how much power to transfer from the legislature to the Executive—to take a minimalist rather than a maximalist perspective. If they do not, those of us who argue that this is a major power grab by the Executive from the legislature will be entirely justified in doing so.

I urge Ministers to tell us this in their summing up: if they reject every single amendment that is designed to constrain their area of operation—to define the manner in which they might exercise judgment on such matters—what on earth are they going to do instead to reassure this House? We need to know that we are not giving them carte blanche to go forward and do what they want without reference to the democratically elected representatives of the people in this country, for whom control was meant to have been taken back.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak. I will do so perhaps rather more briefly and concisely than many others have done, because I know that lots of people want to contribute to this debate.

Up to now, I have sought not to encumber the House and the Government with lots of amendments to an already extensive and comprehensive Bill. I have certainly sought not to bind the Government’s hands in the very difficult process of exiting the EU in the months and years to come—particularly in the complex and important negotiations, which received a substantial boost last Friday. No hon. Member should be in any doubt that there is a serious and growing prospect of our agreeing to a mutually beneficial conclusion to the Brexit negotiations. Why would anybody in this House not want that to happen?

There is, however, an aspect of the Bill that merits a new clause. I am speaking primarily to new clause 53, which is in my name and that of other right hon. and hon. Members from all parts of the House. The new clause is designed simply to perpetuate an existing arrangement in family reunion rules. We should take great pride in our involvement in that arrangement. Many of us are concerned that if it does not continue, vulnerable children who are fleeing conflict in the middle east, in particular—this House has heard much about them in the last few years, and is familiar with the situation—could be detained in places of danger. We are doing much to help such children, and we need to do more.

I have seen at first hand the benefits of the Dublin arrangements. My right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) and I went to Athens as the guests of UNICEF earlier in the year to visit the refugee projects. I am aware that many other hon. Members have been to Greece, Italy and Calais to see the results of getting it wrong further up the line. The situation in Italy, in particular, is rather more extreme than that in Greece. In Greece, we saw UNICEF and other aid agencies working with a Government under great pressure, and doing a pretty impressive job. Some 30,000 refugees arrived in Greece in 2016, but the number of arrivals has since fallen to a more manageable level. That—not least the almost 3,000 unaccompanied children among those 30,000 refugees—still represents a serious challenge, however.

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[Tim Farron]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for all the remarks that he has just made. I, too, have visited many camps and spoken to unaccompanied child refugees. Does he agree that the case he is making serves as a reminder that our acting honourably and decently, as a country and a continent, does not constitute a pull factor—we are simply responding to the push factor of the appalling circumstances from which those people are fleeing?

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Gentleman’s interest in this subject, like that of most others in the House, is exceedingly well founded, but I do not want to confuse the Dublin scheme with other schemes, about which we have had debates in this country.

This approach is aimed at—Government policy is also, quite rightly, aimed at—trying to keep children who have lost their parents or become separated from them in places of safety. Where possible, such places should be close to their places of origin, from where they may, if possible, be repatriated to countries such as Syria. They can be housed in communities who speak the same language and have similar cultures, which will provide some degree of continuity in their otherwise traumatic, ruptured existence. When that is not possible and there are family members in other European countries, the children can be given stability with them.

I do not want to get into the schemes, such as those set up in the past by other countries, that I am afraid have acted as a magnet for children who, at the hands of people traffickers and others, have taken to boats in very dangerous circumstances. The policy of this Government has been the absolutely right one of trying to keep such children out of the hands of those who want to profit from human misery and take advantage of their desperate circumstances.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

It may disturb the hon. Gentleman to know that I have signed his new clause, and I agree very much with him and the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) on this issue. This weekend, I was in Calais, where a 10-year-old is sleeping rough because we do not have the systems in place under the legislation to be able to assess his right to be in the UK. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that what is so important about the amendments to protect the Dublin process is not just its principles, but its practice and what happens if and when we leave the European Union?

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[Tim Loughton]

I am not alarmed by the fact that the hon. Lady has signed my new clause 53; I am flattered and encouraged. I would expect nothing else from the hon. Lady, who has taken an interest in this area. However, Calais is a sign of failure: it should not be happening. We should be dealing with those children closer to home, or leapfrogging Calais altogether and placing them in places of safety in the United Kingdom, Sweden or France itself. The issue is baffling to me—I have spoken about it many times. If what is happening in Calais was happening in the United Kingdom, our children’s services would be placing those children in a place of safety, not allowing them to remain at liberty and be exposed to people traffickers, sex traffickers and all sorts of other criminals who would harm them.

I want to get back to what my new clause attempts to do. As we leave the European Union and therefore Dublin III, the UK’s different—in this case, slightly more restrictive—immigration rules will provide the only means by which refugee children can be legally reunited with their families. As the UK looks to improve our own laws through the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and to replicate the provisions ensuring that children stranded in Europe can be brought to join asylum-seeking family members in the UK, it is imperative that it should broaden the scope of the definition of “family” in our own British immigration rules so that these are in line with the current European ones. That will allow children to be reunited with close family members, wherever they are. Hence the importance of continuity and of perpetuating the existing situation, which works well; it could work better, but the principle is certainly absolutely right.

The UK’s immigration rules can apply to children anywhere in the world, and they therefore provide a safe and legal route for children, avoiding the need for them to embark on perilous journeys to Europe, which have been discussed. We need to build on this very positive aspect of the rules. The UK should amend its immigration rules on refugee family reunion to allow extended family members who have refugee or humanitarian status—adult siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, as I have mentioned—to sponsor children in their family to join them in the UK when it is in the child’s best interests to do so. That point about the child’s best interests must be absolutely paramount, as it is the basis of all our child welfare legislation in this country. After years of conflict, many of these children have been orphaned or do not know where their parents are, but they may have grandparents, aunts and uncles, or adult brothers and sisters in the UK, who can care for them.

If these changes were made to the UK immigration rules, that would enable children to be transferred from their region of origin and reunited in a regular, managed and safe way. Refugee family reunion transfers would all be processed by UK embassies or consulates, meaning that we could take back control of this process and ensure it works at a speed—it needs to be quicker than it is now—that is in the best interests of the children.

Without the changes, children will continue to be vulnerable in being forced to take dangerous journeys and put themselves at risk. The whole thrust of our asylum policy on looking after these vulnerable children has been to keep them away from such harm. Last year, some 700 unaccompanied refugee children were united with their families using the European system, which is on top of all the other schemes to which the UK currently subscribes.

I hope that my new clause is a helpful probing amendment. I am grateful to the Minister for Immigration, who has met my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough and me to discuss this issue. He is sympathetic to what we are trying to achieve. I acknowledge that the timing of the new clause might be better in a forthcoming immigration Bill, but it is useful to put it on the record now to get a comment from Ministers about the Government’s intentions at the appropriate time and perhaps with more appropriate wording; the word “appropriate” continues to appear.

My new clause is intended to build on the good work that the UK Government have done for so many thousands of child refugees so far. That good work has resulted from the huge investment—now of over £2.3 billion on Syrian refugees alone—aimed at frustrating the people traffickers and others who would harm these very vulnerable children. Such a change would show that the United Kingdom intends to continue, after Brexit, to be a leading force for humanitarian good outside the EU on the basis of British principles, British attitudes to the welfare of the child and British generosity in looking after, as we have done for so many years, those most in need. This system works, and we must make sure that it continues to work after Brexit.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I rise to speak briefly to amendments 48, 49 and 52 in my name. They have cross-party support, including from other Select Committee Chairs, because they are about safeguarding the role of Parliament and preventing the concentration of power in the hands of the Executive.

Before I talk in detail about those amendments, I want to support new clause 53 and the words of my Home Affairs Committee colleague, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). He is right that we need to continue with our historical obligations towards refugees and with the principle of family reunion, ensuring that child refugees are not separated from their family and do not lose their rights to be reunited with family members who can care for them, especially when families have been separated by persecution and conflict. He is also right that this is about preventing the people traffickers, the exploitation and the modern slavery that can cause such harm and blight so many lives.

Our Committee has often found evidence that leads us to want the Dublin III process to work faster and more effectively, not for the principles behind it to be ripped up and thrown away. I therefore welcome the fact that, as the hon. Gentleman has said, Ministers have shown an interest in supporting the continuation of these historical obligations. I hope that that will be addressed if not in this Bill, then in either an immigration Bill or in the withdrawal agreement Bill in due course.

The amendments I have tabled to clause 7 address the concern, raised by so many of us, that Parliament is being asked to hand over considerable powers to the Executive without sufficient safeguards. That concentration of powers in the hands of the Executive—a concentration not seen since the days of the infamous Tudor monarch—goes against the very reason why all of us were elected to this place: the legislature has an historic obligation to place checks on the power of the Executive, in order to prevent concentrations and abuses of power, in relation to Brexit or to anything else. It is an obligation that each of us takes on when we swear the oath at the Dispatch Box.

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[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful for the Minister’s clarification, and I do hope that we can make some progress in, say, an immigration Bill. Nevertheless, will he explain to me why it requires the co-operation and agreement of 31 other countries for the UK to be able to say that we will take genuine unaccompanied asylum-seeking children with relatives who are legitimately in this country but who happen not to be their parents?

[Mr Baker]

My hon. Friend makes his case with particular force. I am sorry to have to tell him that I am not in a position to accept his new clause on that basis. I ask him to work with members of the Government on the immigration Bill that will contain the measures that he and the rest of us wish to see to ensure that we meet our humanitarian obligations.