Illegal Migration Update

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right—I speak as a former solicitor, so I mean no harm to the profession, but the abuse that I have seen in my role over the past nine months is truly shocking and has to end. I am pleased that the Solicitors Regulation Authority has taken swift action against the lawyers and legal representatives who were identified by the Daily Mail over the summer, but that is the tip of the iceberg. There is much more work to be done by the profession and I hope this taskforce will root out that abuse as quickly as possible.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I envy the Minister’s apparently limitless capacity for self-congratulation, but it does not bear much relationship to what people are experiencing on the ground. I went to visit migrants in a hotel in Chesterfield; there were 81 people there, not a single one of whom had had their case heard. The Minister is apparently congratulating himself on the most basic improvements that any competent Home Office should have been making over the past 18 months. How does he explain the fact that, under this Government, more migrants are arriving, yet 70% fewer are being returned than in 2010?

[Robert Jenrick]

I can tell the House what would happen if the Labour party was in charge of returns. [Interruption.] No, this is an important point to make. The right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), during his campaign to be leader of the Labour party, campaigned to close detention centres. Dozens of Labour MPs have campaigned against immigration removal centres, and numerous Labour MPs have sided with dangerous foreign criminals versus the British public, opposing their removal from this country. The Labour party, including the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), opposed our reforms to modern slavery legislation—reforms that were essential in order to remove people from this country expeditiously. While we are getting returns up—as I said in my statement, they have already risen substantially—I worry what would happen under the Labour party, because it has absolutely no strategy to tackle that issue.