Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Steve Baker

Thursday 6th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I am absolutely delighted to speak in this debate with you in the Chair, Ms Ali—it is the first time, I think, so congratulations to you. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for the absolutely exemplary work that she is doing in this area—we are very grateful that she is in her position. I want to make two points. The first is on the position in Wycombe, and the second is to ask a few questions about what we should do, but what I will say will not surprise my hon. Friend because it was the essence of my question to her following her statement on the Floor of the House earlier.

According to the 2010 census, about one in six of my Wycombe constituents are British Asians. As I know my constituents, I know that those people will overwhelmingly be Kashmiri. That means, of course, that they are very much embedded in the wider region, so it is no surprise to me that a significant number of my constituents—a larger number than I might have expected, in fact—have family and friends in Afghanistan, or cousins who are married to people in Afghanistan. This issue is very present in Wycombe, as things often are in the region.

Having grown up as a white British person in a homogeneous community in Cornwall, I confess that for many people across our country, these are distant events with which they will not feel closely associated. Indeed, I do not doubt that I will see that on my social media after this speech. I have to say to people, however, that we must remember that the UK is now a diverse country and I am very proud of that—I am proud to represent Wycombe—and people in the UK with friends and family who are connected to Afghanistan deserve our diligent representation and support.

[The Minister for Afghan Resettlement (Victoria Atkins)]

indicated assent.

[Mr Baker]

My hon. Friend is nodding, and I know that she knows this, but I will put it on the record for others: we have to look after everyone who is British, and I am glad that we are doing so.

The particular issue that comes up in Wycombe is that constituents very often believe that family—and possibly friends—in Afghanistan had visa entitlements to come and join them in the UK prior to our departure from that country. Of course, they are most concerned that those people should—on top of any other scheme—continue to have those entitlements to visas and to come and be here, notwithstanding the change of circumstances. Although there are other questions about why people who worked for the Government have not already been extracted, I am putting that particular question to the Minister because it is such a present issue in my constituency. I am sure our goal is the humane treatment of everybody, but I sympathise with Ministers as we go through this. We are not taking a very large number of people. Carrying through people’s prior entitlement to visas would be a good way to show good faith with the British people who have friends and family—a good way to go beyond the 5,000 would be to bring those people over as well, as they were expecting to be able to do.

I come on to some specific asks. What should people do? In the Chamber earlier, the Minister talked about safe and legal routes in answer to the SNP spokesperson, the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin). Pakistan has some very legitimate interests of its own. We would not thank a country that created a crisis on our own borders—indeed, that perhaps comes up with France at the moment—so it is perfectly reasonable that Pakistan should ask us not to act in such a way as to drive illegal immigration into their own country. This is a very important and sensitive humanitarian situation across multiple dimensions.

We should of course respect Pakistan’s legitimate requirement for legal migration in its own country. I am being asked by people whether friends and family should go to Pakistan and whether they will be processed there. It is a legitimate question, and I need to ask my hon. Friend the Minister for an answer to it, even though I recognise that she may well have to discourage people from doing so in order to respect the interests of Pakistan. I am sorry to give her that difficult problem to answer, but we need to say something to our constituents.

That is the final point I need to raise. My constituency caseworkers are now very highly connected to the surprising number of people with direct contacts and connections in Afghanistan. We all know the sensitivity and the danger of the situation. People are in hiding in Afghanistan, fearful for their lives, fearful of being physically tortured and dismembered for what they have done, obviously quite wrongly. Tensions and emotions are running extremely high and people are desperate for information. There is a great need to give all our constituency caseworkers what information we can, respecting that none of us can second-guess the security situation of particular individuals in the country. We need to give guidance and support to caseworkers. They are under immense stress themselves. We can help alleviate that stress by giving them good information to pass on, in so far as we can.

I finish where I began, in thanking my hon. Friend the Minister. I absolutely sincerely welcome the job she is doing, which I know is very difficult. She is doing it with great skill and diplomacy. I absolutely wish her well in carrying forward her task and I can certainly promise to give her any support she might like.

Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Steve Baker

Thursday 6th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I welcome the right hon. Lady to her new place. I very much look forward, I think, to being scrutinised by her formidable Committee. I am very happy to thank those local authorities, some of which have gone way beyond what we could have hoped for in offering actual properties for people to move into. This is why we have already been able to achieve 4,000 people being moved into or about to move into their homes. This is an unprecedented scale compared with the Syrian resettlement scheme, in which 5,000 people were resettled in a year. We have now managed to resettle around 4,000 in just six months, but there is so much more to do. We are very much working with councils to encourage and persuade them, and to clarify the funding arrangements, because I know that some have had concerns about that. We really must have every council play its part, so that we can welcome people across the country and so that they can contribute to our local communities across the United Kingdom.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on everything that she is achieving. I listened carefully to the answers she gave to the Scottish National party on safe routes. I want to put before her the plight of people in Wycombe who have family in Afghanistan. They believe that those family members were eligible for visas before the evacuation, but those family members are now often in hiding and afraid, and they have no means of getting a visa and coming to join their family in the UK. What should we be telling those people? Will we honour the visas, and how?

[Victoria Atkins]

I know that this is an issue that is concerning many of our constituents. We have the safe and legal routes under the new plan for immigration, of which the ACRS and ARAP are a part. The family reunion rules will continue to apply, but I appreciate the difficulty that some are having in relation to still being in Afghanistan. That is why the work being done by the Minister for the Armed Forces, my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey), is so important. It is through working with countries and regions that we will, I hope, be able to find other routes out, but we must emphasise to those individuals in Afghanistan that they will have a far better evaluation of their own safety and what they need to do to keep safe than I, sadly, can offer from the Dispatch Box today.

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Steve Baker

3rd reading
Monday 5th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

This Bill delivers on our promise to the British people to keep them safe and to crack down on criminals. This Bill backs the police, recognising the unique and enormous sacrifices they and their families make to protect us all. This Bill imposes a legal duty on local councils, the police, health services, schools and prisons to work together to prevent serious violence in their neighbourhoods.

This Bill balances the rights of protestors to demonstrate with the rights of residents to access hospitals, to go to work, to let their children sleep at night. And, despite some of the claims from the Opposition, this Bill includes measures that will help to protect women and girls, but that go further than that and protect the whole of society from some of the most dangerous offenders that are sentenced. This includes managing sex offenders before and after conviction and, importantly, providing clarity on the extraction of data from victims’ phones, in line with the rape review that the Government published only a few weeks ago.

Let me briefly address the Government amendments in this group. In Committee, I undertook to consider further whether the reporting duty in respect of the police covenant should be extended to apply to the British Transport police, the Ministry of Defence police and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. Having reflected further, we agree. We want the wider policing family to be included in the covenant, and amendment 34 does exactly that, covering not only these three forces but the National Crime Agency. They do essential work for us, and we want them and their families to be looked after.

Government amendments 35 to 45 standardise the traffic offences in clauses 4 and 5, and clauses in relation to serious violence reduction orders, for the British Transport police—again, consistency in how we deal with these important matters.

Let me turn to the non-Government amendments. I will not be able to deal with them all, but I will pick out the ones that have been talked about most frequently. First, I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and many other Members across the House for raising the issue of sexual harassment, not just in the context of this Bill but in our wider work.

The murders that, sadly, we have heard so much about in this Chamber—the murders of Nicole Smallman, Bibaa Henry, Sarah Everard and PCSO Julia James—have caused millions of women and girls to share their own experiences and fears of walking in our towns and cities. We have also heard girls’ stories about their experiences at school through the social media platform Everyone’s Invited.

We are listening to women and girls. In March, we reopened the survey on violence against women and girls and received more than 180,000 responses in terms of the survey as a whole. Each of those responses is helping to shape our work developing this vital strategy. We therefore recognise the shocking extent of street harassment and the strength of feeling concerning the need for a new offence.

While it is the case that there are already offences available to address sexual harassment behaviour, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham, whom I have met recently to discuss this, can rest assured that we remain open-minded on this issue and are continuing to examine the case for a bespoke offence. As part of the commitment, the new strategy on tackling violence against women and girls will focus on the need to educate and to change cultural attitudes. A new offence can do so much, but we need to go further than that, and that is our intention.

As I announced in Committee, I am pleased that as part of the cross-government work and work across agencies, the College of Policing intends to develop advice for police forces to assist them to use existing offences in the most effective way to address reports of sexual harassment, and the CPS will be updating its guidance to include specific material on sexual harassment.

Moving on, new clauses 26 and 27 have been tabled by the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson)—indeed my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) has spoken to me about this—and they come out of the very tragic circumstances of the rape and murder of Libby Squire. As a constituency MP near the Humber, I very much join both the right hon. Lady and my hon. Friend in paying tribute to Libby and her family.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with me and my constituent Lisa Squire that it is vitally important that non-contact sexual offences are promptly reported so that the provisions can work?

[Victoria Atkins]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend and, indeed, his constituent, Mrs Squire. We need please to get the message out from this Chamber to encourage victims, where non-contact sexual offences are being committed, and where they are able to and where they feel able to, to report those offences to the police, so that these escalating behaviours can create a pattern that the police can review. That is why I have great sympathy with the new clauses that the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North has tabled. I am pleased to reassure her that we are very much taking the point on board when it comes to developing the strategy.

In terms of other matters relating to sex offenders, the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke have pressed upon me the need for a review of how registered sex offenders can change their name without the police’s knowledge. We have some of the toughest rules in the world for the management of sex offenders, but we recognise those concerns.

We do not want any loopholes that can be exploited by sex offenders to enable offending and to evade detection by the changing of names. Indeed, only last week I met the Master of the Rolls and my counterpart Lord Wolfson in the Ministry of Justice to discuss this critical issue. I am pleased to advise the House that we are conducting a time-limited review of the enrolled and unenrolled processes for changing names to better understand the scale and nature of the issue, whether current processes are being or could be exploited to facilitate further offending and, if so, how that can be addressed.

Colleagues have expressed understandable concern regarding the treatment of key workers, particularly those who keep our shops and supermarkets open and stocked, those who keep our buses and trains running, and key workers such as refuse collectors, park staff, teachers and others who perform a vital duty at any time, but particularly in the very difficult 18 months we have all experienced. We are very conscious that when our constituents are serving the public and delivering key services, they must feel safe doing so. No one should feel unsafe in their workplace. We therefore all feel anguish about some of the stories we have heard in relation to retail and other workers over the past year.

The Lord Chancellor and, indeed, the Government, completely understand the sentiments behind the new clauses tabled by the Leader of the Opposition and my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (Matt Vickers), and I hope that Members have heard the indication that we gave earlier in the debate. There is a range of existing laws, with significant penalties, that cover assaults and abuse of all public-facing workers. Sentencing guidelines already require the courts to consider as an aggravating factor, meriting an increased sentence, an offence that has been committed against a person serving the public. However, I make it clear that we want to assure my hon. Friend and Members of all parties that we are not complacent about the matter and that we are actively considering tabling an amendment, if appropriate, in the Lords.

Our genuine concerns about the new clauses relate to technical issues with some of the drafting. There is vagueness about the nature of the assault offence. It overlaps with existing offences and there seems to be reference to Scottish provisions, which we believe to be unnecessary. I say to the House in an open-hearted, open-handed way that we are looking at the matter and that we want to work not only with hon. Members with but the retail sector to improve the reporting of those offences and the police response.

I turn now to the public order provisions. There has been much debate about those measures. Some of it has been informed by fact, but some has been informed by misunderstanding. The measures have been developed in consultation with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Metropolitan police to improve the police’s ability to better manage highly disruptive protests. Such protests have brought parts of London in particular, but also elsewhere, to a standstill. There have been instances of ambulances being obstructed. Protesters have disrupted the distribution of national newspapers and, given that we are discussing freedom of expression and freedom of speech, I hope that colleagues will understand why we are so concerned to ensure that newspapers can be produced.

Protests have prevented hard-working people from getting to work and drawn thousands of police officers away from the local communities they serve.