Immigration Bill

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

Justice does not accept the assurances that were given by the Home Secretary. I can therefore tell the hon. Lady that we will co-operate with her in Committee, if she takes part in it, to get those assurances into the Bill, because she is right to call for them.

Let me turn to human rights and civil liberties. The Bill extends the power of the Executive in a number of troubling ways. Part 4, as the Home Secretary said, proposes a major extension of the “deport first, appeal later” approach from foreign national offenders to all human rights claims. What case has the Home Office made to persuade Members that it can safely be given such sweeping powers? It has hardly covered itself in glory over the years with the speed or quality of its decision making. Let us remember that this is a Department that today has a backlog of over 300,000 immigration cases—a Department where up to 50% of the initial decisions that it makes are found to be wrong on appeal. With these figures in mind, are we really ready to give the Home Secretary much greater powers to remove migrants before their appeals have been determined? Again, the Government are asking us to legislate before the impact of the last extension has been fully evaluated. The Equality and Human Rights Commission says that, by denying people the ability to be present at their own appeal, the Bill is potentially in breach of articles 6, 8 and 13 of the European convention on human rights.

I ask all colleagues on both sides of the House to think, before they vote tonight, of the genuine cases they have dealt with and the people they have got to know at their surgeries whom they have rightly helped to stay here in challenging a Home Office decision. They should think of them before they legislate to allow people in a similar position to be removed without being able to attend their own appeal.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I can give my right hon. Friend exactly such an example. One of the many cases my office is dealing with at the moment is that of a Sri Lankan Tamil whose application has been refused and who bears the mental and physical scars of torture. His application is now on appeal. If the Home Secretary’s proposals had been in place, he would already have been returned to Sri Lanka, where, given the human rights situation there, his life would potentially be at risk. I cannot support those measures and I do not understand how the Home Secretary can propose them.

[Andy Burnham]

I think that in their heart of hearts a lot of Government Members are not able to support the measures, because they have seen in their surgeries cases similar to that mentioned by my hon. Friend. They will know people who would have been deported if this Bill had been in place and who would not have been able to exercise their legitimate right to be present in person at their own appeal. That is why my hon. Friend is right to say that this is wrong.

The Bill also extends the power of the Executive to override the independent decisions of the first-tier tribunal with regard to immigration bail. It also allows the Home Secretary to impose bail conditions, including Executive electronic tagging. That raises important issues about the rights of people in our judicial system, and it could undermine the independence of our courts. Again, what confidence has the Home Office given us that it can be trusted with those powers? There is evidence that, under the coalition Government between 2011 and 2014, £15 million was paid out in damages for unlawful detention and abuse of the powers the Home Office already has.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) on his new role as shadow Home Secretary. I also congratulate the Government on introducing this vital Bill and pay tribute to the Home Secretary for her courage in the face of the bien pensant commentariat and the liberal elite. What she did last week was articulate the views of millions of people, including many in my own constituency.

I welcome the Bill, especially those measures that will have a significant impact on illegal working and on illegal immigration in relation to the housing sector, particularly the right to rent. I am puzzled by the right hon. Gentleman’s remarks, because surely he can see that such housing proposals will ameliorate the sometimes pitiful condition immigrants find themselves in as a result of rapacious slum landlords. He does not seem to recognise that.

The Bill also specifically establishes the common sense premise that it is we—this sovereign Parliament—that should ultimately be responsible for who comes to our country, not some supranational body such as the European Union. Frankly, if it is good enough for the Germans to casually disregard the Schengen agreement in an emergency, we should at least, in a measured, reasonable and moderate way, be able to make our own policy.

[Wes Streeting]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could give us some insight into what the Prime Minister is asking for in his renegotiation, specifically on freedom of movement and migration.

[Mr Jackson]

That is a fair question, but it is way above my pay grade, so I will move swiftly on. I will, however, touch on those issues later.

The fact is that the Labour party has not learned any lessons. It has collective amnesia about what happened on 7 May. The reason it got only 232 seats is that very many of its bedrock, blue-collar supporters did not trust it on immigration and decided to elect other people—or, indeed, to vote for a party such as UKIP—because they trusted them more. That is lamentable, but that is what happened to the Labour party, although you would not think it to listen to them.

The Government also have a very strong mandate to introduce this Bill, as a result of an overall majority. It is certainly the case that, for the first time in probably 25 years, immigration is the No. 1 issue for voters. According to an Ipsos MORI poll at the end of September, it is more important than the health service, the economy, jobs and the environment—56% of people said that the No. 1 issue was immigration.

At least the former shadow Chancellor had the good grace, at the 2014 Labour conference, to apologise for the big errors that were made under the Labour Government, particularly in respect of the free movement directive. What I found positive in the speech of the right hon. Member for Leigh is that he is prepared to look at the directive’s impact on certain areas, whether Leigh, Dudley North, Peterborough or other parts of the country.

Goodness knows, we have to address this matter because it is a major issue of concern. In my constituency, unrestricted immigration, largely under the Labour party—to the extent that 34,000 national insurance numbers were issued to EU migrants between 2004 and 2011 in a city of 156,000 people—has had a big impact on the delivery of core public services such as housing and health. We have a primary school places crisis in my constituency because of the sheer weight of the number of people coming from the European Union. Yes, we welcome people who are hard-working, decent, civic-minded and law-abiding and who will accept our British values, but we cannot cope with unrestricted immigration. In that respect, this Government are doing exactly the right thing.

As the right hon. Gentleman and the House may know, on 31 October 2012 I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill to disapply the European Union free movement directive 2004. That was not a Europhobic response of closing the doors; it was about nuancing and finessing the free movement directive—the pull factors—as has been done in places such as Spain, which has suffered from the problem of 50% youth unemployment. Unfortunately, the Government did not take on board those arguments at the time. I commend them for now doing so. We should establish the fact that we believe in the free movement of labour and people; yet I do not think that it is unreasonable for us to make a value judgment on the people we want to come to our country. The free movement directive has not been nuanced in the way it should have been.

No evidence has ever been produced—both Migration Watch and Balanced Migration have made this point several times—that immigration is necessarily “a good thing”. There is no evidence for that. There is perhaps no evidence that it is a pernicious or bad thing, but there is certainly no cumulative evidence, in terms of the delivery of public services, that it is a good thing. If I take only the issue of low wages, it is obviously the case, as is proved by what data there are, that although immigration may not drive down wages, it certainly restrains wages at a certain level for indigenous workers, particularly low-skilled people or those with no skills and young people.