Tim Loughton
Main Page: Tim Loughton (Conservative - East Worthing and Shoreham)(4 months ago)
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Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend has made an important point about, in particular, the issues relating to Afghanistan, where we know there has been huge persecution by the Taliban. We also know that there are people who helped our armed forces and, effectively, worked for the UK Government in Afghanistan, and as a result have been targeted by the Taliban. The Afghan resettlement scheme set up by the Home Office has had all kinds of problems. It is important that there are proper reforms to the resettlement schemes to make sure that they are effective, and that they prevent people being exploited by people traffickers and people smugglers. That is why it is so important to take action to stop these dangerous boat crossings, which are putting lives at risk and undermining our border security, and on which the criminal gangs have made profits of probably £0.5 billion over the last few years as a result of being able to take hold along the channel.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
The right hon. Lady mentioned 34,000 cases so far since the printing of the Illegal Migration Bill. Of those cases, if people are found to have no credible case for asylum to stay in the United Kingdom, and if they come from countries to which it is virtually practically impossible to return them, what would she do with them?
Yvette Cooper
As the hon. Member will know, we should be returning people who do not have a foundation in persecution or conflict, who do not have a well-founded asylum claim. They should be being returned to their own country. But he will also know that there has been a 50% drop in the returns of failed asylum seekers since 2010—a huge drop. We should be working with a new returns and enforcement unit, with proper staffing in place, to reverse that drop. He will also be aware, because it was in evidence given to the Home Affairs Committee, where he has worked immensely hard over many years, and because he takes these issues very seriously, that only 5% of those who arrived from Albania—including on small boats—over the past few years have been returned to Albania. Although we support the Albania agreement, it is in fact being used predominantly to return historic cases, and has not been used for the kinds of cases he is talking about, in which decisions should be fast-tracked and people should be being returned quickly.
Tim Loughton
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way again, but she has answered a question that I did not ask. I was referring not to Albanians but to people from countries that she knows it is practically impossible to return them to. The Iranian Government will not let them off the plane. Eritreans would put them in jail and say they would be appealed on human rights. What would her party, in government, do with those people who had come here illegally from such countries, with no basis on which they could stay and no way of negotiating returns agreements with countries like Iran?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Member will know that people from countries such as Eritrea and Iran are very often granted asylum, and will not be sent to Rwanda under his Government’s policy because Rwanda will only be able to take a hundred or a couple of hundred people a year, at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. That is the core dishonesty and the failure at the heart of the Government’s programme—they are promising people that they will make huge changes to the existing system, but they are not at all. Instead, if anything, all they will do is stack people up in asylum hotels for even longer than the taxpayer is funding them, for a bill, currently, of £8 million a day—up from £6 million a day.
The Prime Minister declared the asylum backlog cleared—that is what he said—which is taking the country for fools. There are 99,000 cases in the backlog. That is probably over 120,000 people, and all the Home Office have tried to do is clear the cases before July 2022—cases that are already more than 18 months old. Those cases should not be in the system by now anyway. Any properly functioning system would have cleared cases that were more than 18 months old, but that is the scale of Tory chaos. Why are they just trying to catch up with themselves, clearing those very old cases? Of course, the backlog since July 2022 has doubled. Even their weak, limited target to clear the so-called “legacy backlog” has failed, with 4,500 cases not cleared and 35,000 cases simply withdrawn. We want the facts about that. What has happened to those 35,000 cases?
We know from the evidence to the Select Committee in November that as of November, the Home Office had no idea where 17,000 of those claimants were. How many of the 35,000 does the Home Office know to have left the country? How many of them does it know to be deceased or to be duplicate cases? And how many are probably still here? They might be working illegally, they might have restarted their asylum application and gone back to the beginning of the system, or they might be destitute on the streets. Whatever has happened to them, they are still here and the Home Office does not have a clue. Can the Minister give us a breakdown of the 35,000 cases? Is enforcement action taken if those people should not be here? It not, this all looks like more smoke and mirrors from a dodgy salesman Prime Minister.
We support some of the Government’s measures relating to France, and we support the agreement with Albania. We want to see more proper international co-operation like that, and we should be on steroids in tackling the criminal gangs.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
It is unfortunate that Back Benchers will have under a third of this already truncated debate on what is a very important subject, but I start by praising the Opposition for starting the new year as consistently as they ended the last one: consistently undermining and attacking the Government’s policies to tackle illegal migration and questioning the cost and cost-effectiveness of such measures, while consistently voting against those measures to tackle illegal migration—no fewer than 86 times—and consistently failing to come up with any serious, practical alternative measures to clamp down on illegal migration themselves. When they do produce flimsy and ill-thought-through measures, as they did before Christmas, they are completely opaque about the cost, or any aspect of any effectiveness at all.
Today, the Opposition have excelled themselves with another Opposition day debate that is light on substance, light on comprehensiveness, completely light on viable alternatives, and light on throwing any light on anything at all that they would do. Time and time again, they have been challenged to come up with their own plans, and have failed. As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have been pretty consistent myself—both on and off the Home Affairs Select Committee—in challenging Ministers and officials on the workings and, often, shortcomings of migration policies for more clarity and evidence. That includes the withdrawals figures, on which we challenged the permanent secretary just before Christmas. That is the only part of the motion with which I agree; clearly, the Opposition got the idea from the Home Affairs Committee, and have just cut and pasted it into the motion today.
Having visited Tirana, Paris, Brussels, Calais, Belgian beaches, asylum seeker accommodation, detention centres, Border Force operations and so on with the Home Affairs Committee, I know that illegal migration is a complex and challenging issue that the PM has quite rightly identified as a priority for the British people. However, the Rwanda scheme is just one element of that bigger solution. No one is claiming that the scheme is ideal—as the Supreme Court has judged, it has flaws in its design to overcome, which the Government are now addressing—but essentially, it is there to deal with one major problem, and an unfairness that undermines the generosity of the British public in rightly providing and funding a safe haven for asylum seekers who are genuinely fleeing conflict, persecution and danger.
There is a question here, and until you can answer it, you lack credibility when attacking the Government’s attempts to do so. It is the question I raised earlier with the shadow Home Secretary, to which she did not have an answer: “What do you do with migrants from certain countries who have entered the UK illegally, who do not have credible claims to remain in the UK, yet where it is virtually impossible to return those people to their country of origin?”
Sir Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)
On that point, my hon. Friend will know, as I do from my experience with foreign national offenders, how difficult it is for countries of origin to accept people back. Very often, they just will not acknowledge their existence, because it is not in their interests to take back people who they may think are a detriment to them. He mentioned Eritrea and Vietnam, and there are a lot of other countries. This is difficult stuff, and he is right to press the loyal Opposition to come up with something more than the soundbites we have heard.
Tim Loughton
I completely agree with my right hon. and learned Friend, because once those people make it into British territorial waters, they are in effect guaranteed to be living in the UK at the UK taxpayers’ expense for the foreseeable future, and that is what the Rwanda scheme aims to address. It is a deterrent to stop people making that dangerous journey in the first place, and it will become a lottery whether they end up in a hotel in Kent or on a plane to Rwanda. As I have said time and again, when the Home Affairs Committee went to Calais in January, we were told by all the officials dealing with the schemes over there, that when the Government initially announced the Rwanda scheme, there was a surge of people at Calais seeking to regularise their migration status in France, because they did not want to risk being put on a plane to Rwanda, so we know that it has a deterrent effect.
James Daly
As a fellow member of the Home Affairs Committee, would my hon. Friend agree that the same official said it was crucial that the United Kingdom Government have a strong deterrent policy as part of other policies to protect our borders?
Tim Loughton
That is exactly right. Other countries have shown an interest in the scheme, as did the officials when we spoke to them in France, and other countries want a part of the action that Rwanda may be getting once this scheme actually starts. It can unlock a whole host of opportunities, and I hope that we can ultimately have a series of European countries, particularly in north Europe, working together as a multifaceted network on a Rwanda-type scheme.
People smugglers thrive on any attempts to suggest that schemes such as this will not take off, so the Opposition are doing us a disservice. They are only playing into the hands of the people smugglers by trying to undermine the Rwanda scheme without coming up with any alternative that would seriously damage the trade of the people smugglers in the first place. So it is right that we should give the Rwanda scheme space to get off the ground—literally—and it is also right that we should scrutinise the effectiveness of the scheme.
The scheme needs to be put in the context of the alternatives. What is the cost of accommodating asylum seekers who have entered the UK illegally in hotels or other rented accommodation while awaiting their decisions? On the basis of £6 million or £8 million a day for hotels alone, every additional £100 million estimated to be spent on the Rwanda scheme would accommodate people in hotels for just 17 days. Let us put it in that context. What is the cost of multi-agency control and operation centres, and of Border Force and others patrolling the English channel and picking up the boats? Where is a reference in this motion to more transparency about how the £480 million subsidy we now give to the French police force is being spent? Despite the fact of that record subsidy, interception rates by the French authorities actually fell last year, and there is evidence that some of our money is being used in operations on the Franco-Italian border, rather than on the channel. Those are the comparisons that need to be made.
Labour—the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper)—came up with the five-point plan in March last year, but it turned out that most of those five points were already being undertaken by the Government anyway. Before Christmas, there was a story that Labour is considering detailed plans for a so-called offshoring scheme, and that the last Labour Government—David Blunkett and others—apparently discussed a scheme for offshoring to Tanzania, something that has been described by the current Labour leader as a “gimmick”, so why the change of heart? What is different in the principles of what they are apparently looking at now from those of the Rwanda plan for offshoring migrants? Is this a change of heart on the policy, and if so, why are they still objecting to the Rwanda scheme? Is it that they just do not like Rwanda, or that they just do not like the cost of it, in which case, what is the cost of their own scheme? If they are going to criticise what the Government are doing because of a lack of transparency, their potential schemes, which have been denied and then not denied, are completely and utterly opaque.
This is a sham, a shambles, a Labour gimmick and a con. It is a feeble attempt to show that the Opposition are somehow tackling illegal migration by talking about it, attacking the Government and voting against every attempt to bring forward practical measures, while having no credible working plans of their own. They need to be called out for it, and I shall be voting against this motion.
Andrew Western
No, I will not. I apologise, but time does not allow me to do so.
Ministers need to be held to account for an expensive shambles that has sent more Home Secretaries than asylum seekers to Rwanda. Meanwhile, our borders remain in a state of chaos and desperate people suffer enormously at the hands of people smugglers, but here we have a Government ducking transparency yet again when it comes to the cost of the scheme.
What we do know is that £240 million has been sent to Rwanda already, with £50 million more scheduled for this spring. We know too that the Home Office has admitted that at least two further payments are planned for the next two years, but it will not confirm how much these payments will be. Why not?
We also know that Ministers have promised extra payments for every individual asylum seeker sent, but again they have refused to say how much—why on earth not? Presumably they have told their Rwandan counterparts how much they are paying them, so if the Minister is still refusing to disclose those costs in this place, perhaps he can answer why he thinks the Rwandan Government should know more about how British taxpayers’ money is spent than British taxpayers themselves.
Andrew Western
The hon. Gentleman is aware of the time constraints, so I apologise, but I will not.
The Prime Minister and this Government are taking the British public for fools—not just over the Rwanda scheme, but over asylum backlogs too. It is categorically false to claim that these backlogs have been cleared. The current overall backlog is almost 100,000 asylum cases. Even so, the so-called “legacy backlog” remains at 4,500 cases. Amidst this chaos, Home Office officials have admitted that as many as 17,000 asylum seekers are now missing from their system and they have no clue where they are.
But perhaps the worst thing is that this complete dysfunction no longer shocks anybody. Who could be surprised that asylum policy is in chaos, with a Conservative party that has given us eight Home Secretaries in eight years and three failed pieces of legislation on channel crossings in three years, and spent vast sums of money on a Rwanda scheme that has been declared unlawful by the highest court in the land?
Convictions of people smugglers are 30% lower under this Government than under the last Labour Government, and returns of failed asylum seekers are 50% lower now than they were under Labour. Ultimately, if the Government had confidence in their record on asylum or the strength of their Rwanda scheme, they would have nothing to hide, and if they had nothing to hide, they would release the figures requested by supporting the motion today.
Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)
We are having an interesting and important debate, set in the global context of increasingly large numbers of people on the move. Climate change is driving them forward. The entrepreneurial among them are looking for economic opportunity, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly) mentioned, but I think it is worth dwelling on what our Rwanda scheme seeks to stop.
What is actually happening to some of the most vulnerable people in the world? They have criminal gangsters coming up to them, in countries in Asia, the far east and Africa, getting hold of them, maybe even coercing them slightly, and saying, “You know what? Sell granny’s farm, because the streets of the UK are absolutely paved with gold. You give us five, eight, 10 grand, sell granny’s farm to mortgage it, and you’ll be able to make a fortune and look after her.” Only when they are on a beach in Calais, with a gangster pointing a gun at them, telling them to get in an overcrowded and dangerous boat, do they understand what we are trying to stop. They are being sold a pup by criminals.
Today’s debate is not about point scoring and policy, although you would not believe it from listening to some of the stuff the Opposition say. We are taking action to tackle it. We are saying that if someone comes to this country illegally, they cannot stay here illegally, because otherwise we would be opening the window to a demand model for gangsters who were strapping kids under lorries under Tony Blair and are now strapping young men, teenagers, women and children to dangerous boats across the channel.
So we are working with France, and with Albania. The Home Office is taking a lot of steps to tackle what happens further upstream, including where the boats are bought from. We have got a treaty with another country, we are sorting out accommodation, and we are sorting out the backlogs. We are getting involved, putting more staff in.
What do the Opposition offer us? They offer us a highly moralising case. If this has not been clear from my remarks, there is a moral case to take every action we can possibly take to stop people getting done by criminals. So what do Labour Members do? They vote against it—is it 76 times, 73 times, 83 times? Goodness knows.
Katherine Fletcher
I defer to my hon. Friend’s knowledge.
Government Members are putting practical ideas in place, and what is the Labour party doing? Changing its mind. It has no plan and no ideas. Its soundbites are so brittle that its Members cannot take interventions from Conservative Members.
We have a worked-through plan that is trying something different to make sure we handle this in a global context. Everybody is facing this problem and, with channel crossings already down by a third, a nascent deterrent effect is occurring. We are working with the social media firms to make sure these—rude word—gangsters cannot sell absolute nonsense on TikTok and Facebook to kids who just dream of a better life. That is the action we are taking, and what are Labour Members doing? They are tabling process motions and asking for details but, crucially, they will not tell us their plan, because they do not have one.