Yvette Cooper
Main Page: Yvette Cooper (Labour - Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley)Department Debates - View all Yvette Cooper's debates with the Home Office
(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Amber Rudd
The important point for my hon. Friend is that the system I will now put in place will not require people to go to their lawyers. I hope that it will be sufficiently constructive, sympathetic and helpful that it will not require people who are seeking to regularise their position to have lawyers.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
The Home Office has been warned repeatedly about failings in its decision-making processes and weaknesses in the “hostile environment” operation. The Home Secretary’s response to this problem now is far too passive: just a taskforce that relies on the Windrush generation raising their problems with her. That is not good enough. She should now be instituting a huge review, right across the Home Office, of all Windrush-generation cases, and not just suspending deportations and detention, but working urgently with the Department for Work and Pensions and the NHS to make sure that nobody from that generation loses their benefits, their homes or their healthcare, while this is being sorted out.
Amber Rudd
I respectfully say to the right hon. Lady, who usually has such careful knowledge in this area, that of course we do not have individual numbers for the Windrush generation, because they were not identified as such when they came here. The hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) referred to the assessment of 50,000, but we do not know whether that is the case, because, obviously, we do not have identification cards in this country; we do not know until people approach us. The point I am trying to convey here, which I hope will go out from this House, is that we will help anybody who would like to have their position regularised and there will be no cost to it.