Illegal Migration Bill

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I will make some progress because this is a short debate and it is important that we enable people to make—[Interruption.] Well, it was only a few moments ago that SNP Members were saying that the debate was too short. I gently remind them that in both days in Committee we ran out of speakers, including on the SNP Benches.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

I really should make progress because I worry that we will run out of time.

I will say a few words in response to new clause 15 and on the issue of suspected terrorists. I welcome the shadow Home Secretary’s belated, albeit limited, endorsement of the duty on the Home Secretary to make arrangements for the removal of persons who enter the UK unlawfully—presumably including removal to Rwanda. That duty applies across the board, save in the case of unaccompanied children, so in our opinion, new clause 15 is, again, unnecessary. Protecting the public is the Government’s first priority, and the Bill includes powers to detain illegal entrants and, where necessary, release a person on immigration bail. There are existing powers to apply terrorism prevention and investigation measures where appropriate. They give the security service and the police powerful measures to help manage the risk of terrorism. They are, of course, considered case by case and used as a last resort if prosecution or deportation are not possible. We therefore judge that new clause 15 does not add anything to the Bill’s provisions or to existing counter-terrorism powers.

I have more sympathy for amendment 184, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mrs Elphicke), in that she is seeking to make a constructive contribution to the debate on how we manage the clear risk posed by terrorism. It is already the case that all asylum claims must be declared inadmissible under the Bill. That is the case for any human rights claim in respect of a person’s home country. Where we are seeking to remove someone to a safe third country, it is right that they should be able to challenge that removal where they face a real risk of serious and irreversible harm—although that is a very limited ground—and the Bill provides for that, but we will always seek to effect removal as soon as possible, particularly where somebody poses a real risk of harm to the British public. I can assure my hon. Friend that, should removal be delayed, appropriate steps will be taken to ensure that the public is properly protected. She is one of the foremost Members of this House in issues related to tackling small boat arrivals, owing, of course, to the particular concerns of her Dover constituents. I am grateful to her for tabling amendment 184, and I look forward to continued work with her as we work through these challenges.

A number of other Government amendments address the concerns raised in Committee by, among others, my right hon. Friends the Members for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke) and for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), and my hon. Friends the Members for Stone (Sir William Cash) and for Devizes (Danny Kruger), who rightly want to ensure that the scheme provided for in the Bill is as robust as possible and not open to exploitation and abuse by those who seek to frustrate removals.

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[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

I start by associating myself with the comments of the Immigration Minister about the outstanding work that our armed forces have done in Sudan. I wish all who are there a speedy return home.

I want to make one thing absolutely clear, and it is a point with which I am sure every Member of this House agrees: the dangerous channel crossings must be stopped. Those extremely perilous journeys have tragically led to lives being lost, and the only people who benefit from that trade in human misery are the criminal smuggler gangs and people traffickers, who are laughing all the way to the bank at this Government’s failure to arrest and prosecute them. Labour has a comprehensive and workable five-point plan that will defeat the people smugglers and fix our broken asylum system. Our plan is expressed through the amendments and new clauses to this Bill that we have tabled, which I will speak to in due course.

Government Members repeatedly state that they wish to stop the dangerous channel crossings, but the fact is that they are completely and utterly failing to do so. Every single measure that Ministers announce turns out to be either an expensive and unworkable headline-chasing gimmick or a policy that succeeds only in making things worse, or indeed both. In the case of this legislative sham that we are debating today—this bigger backlog Bill—it is definitely both. Under the Conservatives, channel crossings have skyrocketed from 299 in 2018 to 46,000 in 2022. Throughout that period, Ministers have subjected the country to a seemingly endless stream of nonsensical proposals that have all been given pride of place on the front pages of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, only to be swiftly consigned to the dustbin of history where they belong.

For a deterrent to be effective, it has to be credible, and of course, our credibility is severely diminished every time we fail to follow through on a commitment that we have made. Let us take a quick canter through some of the posturing and empty threats that this shambles of a Government have engaged in over the past few years. They told us that the British coastguard would be instructed to push back dinghies in the channel, which would have breached the law of the sea and potentially led to further deaths of refugees and innocent children. Then they said they were going to build a giant wave machine in the English channel—I do not know where they would find a wave machine around here, given that the Conservatives have closed down most of England’s swimming pools, although I suppose it is possible that the Prime Minister might have a spare one back at his place.

The Government then said that they were going to fly asylum seekers to Ascension Island, 4,000 miles away, and they even fantasised about sending them to Papua New Guinea, which is literally on the other side of the planet. That brings us to the Government’s latest cunning plan: they went to Kigali and paid £140 million for a press release, and 12 months later they have managed to send more Home Secretaries to Rwanda than they have asylum seekers. One could be forgiven for finding all of this quite comical, but the fact is that it is deadly serious, because a vast amount of taxpayers’ money is being squandered on a profoundly unethical policy that is designed to fail on its own terms.

Even if the Rwanda scheme does get up and running, which the Government admit is unlikely to happen until at least March 2024, the Rwandan Government have refused to commit to taking more than around 1% or 2% of those who arrive here on small boats. We are talking hundreds of removals, rather than the thousands per year that might have a chance of deterring asylum seekers from crossing the channel. It will fail to stop the small boat channel crossings, because if a person has experienced personal tragedy, fought their way across continents and handed their life savings to a people smuggler so that they can endanger their own life crossing the channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is simply not going to represent a level of risk that they might be averse to.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

On the Rwanda scheme, apart from paying £150 million to deport maybe 200 people, under the agreement we have to take people back from Rwanda as well.

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[Kim Leadbeater (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

I am interested to know whether I am part of the liberal establishment. As a working-class girl from Yorkshire, I am struggling a little with that concept. I wonder whether the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) is part of the liberal establishment that has been spoken about.

We on the Opposition Benches are clear that the tide of illegal migration to this country must be stemmed. We are also clear that the appalling rise in the number of people risking their lives in small boats to cross the channel is a damning indictment on this Government’s failure to secure our borders. Deflecting blame for their failure on each and every person who gets in a boat, at great risk to themselves, because they have no other option, is shameful and wrong.

I rise to support amendments 2 and 3, in the name of the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), in the hope that Ministers will recognise the inherent injustice in this blanket approach and that they will reflect on the need to address the issue on the basis of what works, not what they believe will reverse their poor poll ratings on immigration.

The truth is that people are sick and tired of hearing from successive Tory Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries that they are finally going to get tough and sort out the mess that they themselves have made of our immigration system. If we want to address the growing cynicism in the country about promises made from the Dispatch Box that turn out to be hollow, Ministers have to give up their addiction to divisive and dangerous language and headlines, and get serious about the issue of illegal migration.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Is my hon. Friend as dismayed as I am by the Minister’s comment earlier today about cannibalism, referring to refugees?

[Kim Leadbeater]

I agree wholeheartedly. I sometimes worry, on many levels, about the language used in this place and its impact on the outside world. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) has made that point very well. We all need to think about the language we use, the words we say and the impact that they can have on people outside this House.

What we need is a thorough, workable and deliverable plan. That is what the Opposition have put forward, as the shadow Immigration Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), has articulated brilliantly this afternoon. What distinguishes Labour’s plan is not only that it is practical and tough on the real criminals, but that it is rooted in justice and fairness.

I note that the Minister has described the Bill as

“the morally just thing to do”.

I beg to differ. There is absolutely nothing fair or just about detaining children, and nor will the Bill do anything to deter the criminal gangs. Equally, as we have heard, imprisoning pregnant women and those with dependent children undermines the moral basis of the policy without achieving any benefit. That would be true whether or not the Government had a good record of protecting vulnerable people, either in detention or in Home Office accommodation, which clearly they do not.

Justice and fairness cannot be cast aside lightly. They are at the heart of what makes us all proud to be British. They underpin our values. They should be the guiding principles behind everything we do in this House. Unless the system is both just and fair, it will fail, like every other so-called crackdown that has done nothing to stop the boats. Not only will it fail to work, but it will fail to convince the public that the Government are serious about stemming the flow of illegal immigration. I therefore urge the House to support our amendments.

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[Yasmin Qureshi]

The right hon. Lady is making an excellent point. In fact, the Government should take this on board because we are told that one of the reasons for wanting to curb this is the cost to the public purse of maintaining people, but if they are allowed to work, we would not have to pay them to be in accommodation or pay them benefits. It is a win-win situation.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

Indeed it is.

We know that our economy is suffering from chronic labour shortages, and that is in part down to Brexit. Why can we not think out of the box? Why can we not stop looking at people as a problem and start looking at them as part of the solution? I know this because Ysbyty Tywyn in my constituency has closed its wards because it cannot get staff. I represent an area with an older demographic, and we cannot get carers. And yet we are a week away from the local elections in England and this is what we are talking about. We are not thinking sensibly in the 21st century. Meanwhile highly skilled asylum seekers are sitting idle in detention centres, eager to work and keen to contribute to our society but banned from doing so.

There are 1.2 million job vacancies in the UK. Businesses are crying out for workers, and 70% of businesses want to give asylum seekers the right to work after six months. New clause 1 would allow those people detained for six months or more to apply for permission to work, including self-employment and voluntary work. This could do so much; it could be such a boost for our economy when we are suffering after Brexit. The right to work is a fundamental human right and it is crucial for the wellbeing of asylum seekers and their integration into society. It is also beneficial for the economy, as businesses want to be able to access the skills and experience of asylum seekers.

I call on the Government not to look at asylum seekers as a political threat but to see this as the thing that the United Kingdom is proud to do well. We should be proud to do this well and proud to hold our heads up high within the global order. These people are always a potential, not a threat, and we should be working with that potential as best we can.

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

Before I begin, I direct the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which outlines the support I received from the RAMP project.

I support the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) and for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson). These amendments attempt to mitigate the damage the Bill will do to some of the most vulnerable people, by requiring reports on how it will affect the pregnant, victims of modern slavery and the health and human rights of refugees.

New clauses 2 and 3 would safeguard pregnant women and girls from removal. I have spoken to people working on the frontline in detention centres who feel deeply uncomfortable and ill-equipped to deal with pregnant women in such settings, so these amendments are vital. In fact, every woman who arrives in a detention centre is given a pregnancy test because staff recognise that where they work is not appropriate for pregnant women.

New clause 4 would support young people under the age of 18 in their interaction with the asylum system. This stands in stark contrast to the Government’s obsession with trying to discredit and dehumanise children, either by proposing bogus scientific assessments to determine their age—I say that as a biomedical scientist—or by bizarrely claiming that granting safety to children is some sort of pull factor. Lobotomies were once widespread across the globe too, but that does not mean they were scientifically valid, accurate or moral. Just because someone else is doing it does not mean we have to do it here, especially when the evidence for the accuracy of these tests is so poor.

It is a damning indictment of this Bill that my hon. and right hon. Friends have needed to table this extensive list of new clauses. The protections they are attempting to introduce are outstripped only by the litany of rights that this Government are attempting to remove from some of the world’s most vulnerable people.

The Government’s contemptible proposals have been tabled for entirely cynical reasons. We all want to stop the boats. But when the Government say, “Stop the boats”, it is not because they want to end the crisis in the channel, because they want to have safe borders where people do not die on them or because they want to end the suffering of people who are trying to come here to claim asylum. It is not even because they want to end the horror of people drowning as they attempt to reach refuge in the UK. It is because they are intent on vilifying people who have survived some of the most harrowing and worst things human beings can go through. I know that because I have spoken to many, many refugees and asylum seekers who have come here on boats. The Government are taking this approach because on these big issues they have no answers, so they are resorting to scapegoats.

It is clear that that has been an agenda long before this Bill was presented and that the Government are being pushed around by a very small and extreme group within the Conservative party, as we see when we look at Government new clause 22. It shamefully bars UK courts from interim measures to stop someone from being deported if they bring a legal challenge. The Government claim that they are considering fairness and the rule of law, and that that is a key British principle and value, but this measure sheds that. The Government are only too keen to undermine these principles if it helps them in the scapegoating of the most vulnerable. They want to bypass the European Court of Human Rights and harm Britain’s standing in the world, eroding the foundations of the international refugee systems and the refugee convention, all to appease their Back Benchers and throw red meat to a small portion of their base.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point. Does she agree that part of this dog-whistle politics is about what the Conservative party deputy chairman said, which is that the next election is going to be fought on woke, culture and trans issues. Of course, stigmatising refugees is part of that.

[Olivia Blake]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in this week alone the horrifying news about Sudan has reached us and we have seen the horrific circumstances being faced by not only British and dual nationals, but everyone there. While Britain is working hard to evacuate our citizens, we are not talking about safe routes for Sudanese refugees or a homes for Sudan scheme, and there are no dedicated resettlement routes and no numbers confirmed in respect of what countries the UNHCR should be prioritising in trying to help with what the Minister was outlining earlier. Even with Government new clause 8, the best this Bill could offer is a commitment to a report on safe routes, but with no actual, tangible commitments to open new ones. What are people fleeing war and persecution in Sudan, or anywhere else, supposed to do with that? By the time anything comes from this report, it will be too late for them, they will be on their way.

The amendments I cited earlier have been tabled because no serious attempt has been made in this Bill to ensure that vulnerable people are protected. That has been outlined well in the discussion we have had on modern slavery, so I will not add to that. The purpose of the Bill is the complete opposite of providing safe and legal routes for people to claim asylum. At their core, these proposals are not about helping anyone or making anyone safer, and they are not about making our borders safer; they are simply about attacking the rights of refugees, for the sake of electoral expedience and managing unruly Government Back Benchers. At the centre of this is a paradox: how can someone claim asylum if they are not on UK soil and they have to be on UK soil to claim asylum? How can they take a safe and legal route if there is no safe and legal route that works for them or is available to them? How can they claim safety in the first country they get to if that country persecutes them because they are LGBT, or they have a disability or religion—

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[Robert Jenrick]

My right hon. Friend does not, I think, agree that Rwanda is a safe place for those who are victims of modern slavery to be supported. The critical point here is that of course we want to support those individuals, and we have no intention of removing them, whether home to their own country or to a safe third country, unless that is a place where there are sufficient safeguards to ensure that they are protected. That is the nature of the agreement we have struck with Albania and the one we have struck with Rwanda, which was upheld by the High Court and we hope will be upheld by the Court of Appeal. It is natural, therefore, that in many cases individuals can go to those countries and participate in any law enforcement activity from there.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

rose—

[Robert Jenrick]

I will not give way to the hon. Lady, but I thank her for her suggestions.

The last issue that was the subject of debate centred around the questions raised by my hon. Friends the Members for Stone (Sir William Cash) and for Devizes (Danny Kruger) and others about how we strengthen the Bill, particularly regarding the interim measures. I will say again, as I said in answer to the former Attorney General, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Sir Geoffrey Cox) that this ministerial discretion will be exercised judiciously and in accordance with our treaty obligations. We take international law and our treaty obligations extremely seriously.

I will not dwell on the Labour amendments today because, as in Committee and on Second Reading, Labour offers no credible policy to stop the boats. The truth is that tweaks to our system will not suffice. In an age of mass migration, only a significantly more robust approach can end the injustice of illegal migration. The totality of Labour’s policy on illegal migration is to accept more people into our country and as quickly as possible. That is weak, and it is also frankly dangerous. We have yet again seen today that Labour is decades behind when it comes to illegal migration. It is 20 years behind the views of the British public and 20 years out of date with its policy proposals. That perhaps comes as no surprise when the shadow Home Office team is being led by the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), whose own colleagues say should have left politics 20 years ago. One briefed the papers that

“she knows where the door is”.

Given Labour’s record on immigration, we can assume it is an open door.

While Labour Members are fighting each other, the Conservative party tonight has been united. We are united in fighting the people-smuggling gangs. Only the Conservatives are taking the tough but necessary action to stop the boats, because it is only this party that is ultimately on the side of the British public. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings said, from Worthing to Walthamstow, the British people want to stop the boats. The only way to stop the boats is to sever once and for all the link between crossing the channel illegally and being able to live and work in the United Kingdom. That, at its heart, is what this Bill does. Nothing else will cut it; we have tried it all before. The British people demand that we stop the boats, and only the Conservative party will do so.