Illegal Migration Bill

Tom Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I shall be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker, because we do not have much time, although there is a great deal I could say on this Bill. There could not be a greater contrast than the one between the cold, calculating speech we have just heard from the hon. Member for Southend West (Anna Firth) and the humanitarian approach taken by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) in trying to defend international law and humanitarian principles in what we do.

This Bill is appalling in so many ways, but it is walking us rapidly away from the European convention on human rights and, with it, the European Court of Human Rights; from the 1951 Geneva convention protecting the rights of asylum; from the 1954 convention protecting people who are suffering from statelessness; from the 1989 convention on the rights of the child; and from the 2005 trafficking of children convention. That is why I strongly support Lords amendment 1, which was introduced by Baroness Chakrabarti to try to reverse this whole process. If we walk away from international conventions that this country knowingly and willingly signed up for—indeed, we drafted many of them—who are we then to criticise Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia or any other country where we believe there is a breach of those convention rights? What protection would we be offering to people we know are already being badly treated and whose only protection is the rights that come through those conventions? The Government are cynically and deliberately doing this.

I attend the Council of Europe as one of our representatives, and I have to say that Members of the Council of Europe from many countries—these are not necessarily people of the left, by any manner of means—are astonished at how Britain is walking away from all these conventions that it promoted in the past. The response from those at the Council of Europe is consternation about why we are doing that. It is consternation at the endless attacks on the European Court of Human Rights and on the European convention on human rights, which protects the rights of people in this country as well as other countries around the world.

This did not all come from nowhere; it came from the hostile environment, deliberately created by the Conservative party and the coalition Government, which had such a devastating effect on the Windrush generation. It comes from constant media references to the “asylum wave” and the horrible stories that are written about people seeking asylum. As the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and others have pointed out, the number of asylum seekers in Britain is low compared with that in the rest of Europe, and the number in Europe is low compared with that in the rest of the world.

Why are there 70 million people around the world not in a place they can call their own home? The answer is: wars; human rights abuse; and environmental degradation. What are we going to do? Are we going to put up barbed wire everywhere, send gunboats everywhere, in order to try to deter desperate people? Or are we going to do something about it by trying to improve the living conditions of people in places that they are trying to flee from and improve their human rights situation? I have met people in Calais, and I have met people in this country who have come from Calais. Believe me, they are desperate. There are people who have managed to walk, almost, from Eritrea or Afghanistan. They have crossed the Mediterranean and other seas and gone through immense danger. They are looking for a place of safety—and what do we offer them? Nothing more than a hostile environment and being sent to Rwanda. Should we not look at this thing a bit differently? Should we not look at it from a humanitarian point of view?

Should we not also give refugees here the right to work? We have 100,000 vacancies in the NHS alone and a skills shortage in almost every industry, and we have highly skilled, highly intelligent people who could no longer stay in the country they came from and are looking for a place of safety. Perhaps we could be slightly more humanitarian and decent about this and accept that we have a responsibility.

We should accept that our country is enriched by those who have come here with their skills, knowledge and determination to create a better society, rather than passing this tawdry little Bill, which may well be rejected again by the Lords—I hope it is—and by the courts, knowing full well that even if the Home Secretary’s dream of sending so many people to Rwanda were carried out, they could not be housed or processed there. Can we not just turn the dial round for once and, instead of maintaining the pretence that this country was always friendly to people who are desperate, let us prove it and show that we are supportive and welcoming of desperate people who want to contribute to our community?

[Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)]

I will speak to Lords amendments 2, 12, 20 and 22, on arrangements for removal, to Lords amendments 31, 33 and 35 to 38, on arrangements for those under the age of 18 and for pregnant women, and to Lords amendment 102, on safe and legal routes.

Where the Government have given some ground on the Lords amendments and entered into discussion, I feel confident that the main ethos of the Bill is still there. I was really keen to ensure that. I did not want to see the Bill watered down. I liked what I saw when it left this place, and I did not want to see it weakened and made unable to deliver.

On under-18s, my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) made the good point that we do not want a situation where there is a perverse incentive for young people to be sent by themselves. That is concerning to both of us. Age verification needs to be robust. We know that there is evidence of adults—particularly adult men—pretending to be under 18 when they are not. No one in this House wants to see children detained, and that was never the Government’s intention, but at the same time we cannot allow an opening for people who are not under 18 to get special treatment.

The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), said that there has not been enough time to scrutinise the Bill. This is an urgent situation. The Bill was introduced early this year. It appears to have been stuck in the other place for a huge amount of time; I understand that they have been up until 6 in the morning looking at it. I do not know how much longer the right hon. Lady would like this place and the other place to scrutinise this piece of legislation that needs to be implemented urgently.

I find it deeply frustrating when I see individuals who have never had to live with the consequences of uncontrolled mass migration and illegal migration, and people who have never had to talk to constituents who are desperately concerned about the situation—they may have hotels in their constituency that have been adversely impacted by it—opining and moralising about what they think is right and demonising anyone who supports a Bill such as this.

As I have said many times before, the House of Lords should tread carefully, because it is unelected. It is oh so tempting to moralise on this deeply complex issue without engaging in any plan, and there is no plan from the other House. Lords amendment 102 would introduce uncapped safe and legal routes. What would happen if we had alternative safe and legal routes that people could apply to? If they were uncapped, they would fill up incredibly quickly, and if they were capped, the cap would be met incredibly quickly and we would be back at square one. We would still have people entering our country illegally. What would we do then? That is not a plan.

Let me turn to Labour’s five-point plan of vagaries and platitudes—because that is what it is. All we hear about are safe and legal routes. Then there is the cross-border police force—as if that has not already been looked into. Labour Members say, “We have to do more to talk to France”. Again, it is as if we are not already doing that. It is as if the Prime Minister does not already have a good relationship with the President of France; he has, but we still are where we are.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir John Hayes]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Tom Hunt]

I am sorry, but I will not be taking any interventions.

Ultimately, what Brexit was about in many respects was taking back control of our borders, and controlling the migration system. If it gets to a point where we feel that, even having delivered Brexit, the popular sovereignty of the people’s wish to decrease net migration and tackle illegal migration robustly is impossible, it is only right that we then look at the legal infrastructure and the different arrangements that this country is subject to. We must listen to the British people, the vast majority of whom do support this Bill. They want to see it enacted and I will be supporting the Government every step of the way. I really hope that, before we get to the summer recess, this vital Bill gets Royal Assent.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

When the Minister was first appointed, I thought that he was largely going along with the Home Secretary’s language and policy on refugees and asylum seekers out of a sense of loyalty and collective responsibility. But as this Bill has progressed, it appears from the statements he has made in the Chamber and the responses he has given to questions and to Westminster Hall debates that he really has drunk the Kool-Aid. I think he genuinely believes the Government’s rhetoric: that this country is being invaded, that people who come here fleeing war, persecution and famine are actually economic migrants on the make, and that outright hostility and denial of their basic human rights is the only way to dissuade them from coming here. So hostile does he want the environment to be, he will not even allow a splash of colour and cartoons on the walls of the family reception centres. It is more than disappointing. It is worrying that the Government’s attitude seems to be that the way to stop people coming here from countries where they are at risk of oppression and human rights abuses is to create an environment that is at least as hostile as the place from which they are fleeing.

That would explain the Government’s opposition to Lords amendment 1. The safeguards that it provides should otherwise be seen as absolutely essential, and make it clear that nothing in the Bill requires the Home Secretary to break with international human rights law and the treaties and convention that this country has been signed up to for decades. Nowhere in the Conservative manifesto was there a commitment to take the UK out of these conventions, so their Lordships have every right to continue to press this and similar amendments during the next stages of their proceedings.

The Chair of the Justice Committee said earlier that this was an incorporative rather than an interpretive amendment. Perhaps the Lords will come back with something in lieu that will be more attractive to the more level-headed elements on the Conservative Back Benches. But then perhaps that is what the Government have been looking for all along—the Government want a fight with the House of Lords, they want a fight with the Supreme Court and the Home Secretary certainly wants an excuse to withdraw from the European convention on human rights. Those perhaps are the real purposes of the Bill, and the impact on refugees and asylum seekers is really only secondary.

It is ridiculous that we are being asked to consider these amendments barely 24 hours after the Lords gave the Bill its Third Reading. It shows the Government’s contempt for both Houses of Parliament. The explanatory notes and the amendment documents were only available through the Vote Office at 7.45 last night, as the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, and yet the Government are proposing 58 motions to disagree with the Lords in their amendments this evening. If that is not picking a fight, I am not sure what is. Well, let us have that fight. Let us vote on all 58 of them and then see how desperate the Government and their Back Benchers are to get this Bill on to the statute book.

Almost all the amendments made in the Lords speak to a basic humanity and respect for the rule of law and the fundamental principles of the global asylum system. That is essentially what the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’s amendment 104 calls for. Government Members may wish to wish those Lords away, but they are supposed to support the House of Lords and the system that exists. If they want to pick away at it, that is fine, because I do not think there should be a House of Lords in its current form.