Illegal Migration

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 5th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for your response. I thank the Home Secretary for her apology.

The Prime Minister flew to Dover today to congratulate himself and to tell us that his plan is working, even though the asylum backlog he promised to clear is at a record high, decisions are down, caseworker numbers have dropped, hotel use is up, returns are still down, only 1% of last year’s small boat cases have been processed, and seven and a half thousand people arrived on dangerous small boats in the last few months alone. The massive gap between the Tories’ rhetoric and reality shows that the Home Secretary still has no grip on the system. This Conservative chaos is letting everyone down.

The Prime Minister claimed today that he is stopping the boats, but the 7,600 people who have arrived in the last few months alone is three times more than two years ago and eight times more than before the pandemic. We all hope that the limited reduction in the winter months, compared with last year, will be sustained when the weather improves, but criminal gangs have already made an estimated £13 million in the last few months alone from putting lives at risk and undermining our border security as a result of the Conservative failure to go after the gangs and maintain that border security. The Home Secretary boasts about an increase in enforcement, but that is compared with the covid period. Compared with before the pandemic, enforcement visits are down 22% and arrests are down 17%. This is not an achievement.

The Home Secretary also says she has cut the backlog, but the backlog is at a record high of 170,000. It has gone up, not down, since December. There has been an 18% drop in asylum decisions in the last quarter, and it is no good claiming they are only clearing a so-called legacy backlog of cases from before June 2022. What about the growing backlog of 60,000 people and more who have arrived in the last 12 months? They are still in the asylum system, still in hotels and still in limbo. A backlog is a backlog, no matter how much the Government try to spin it away. The only legacy we are talking about is the legacy of Tory failure to tackle the problem. All the Home Secretary has managed to do is take a few decisions on cases that are more than a year old. That is not an achievement—that is her job.

The Prime Minister and Home Secretary promised to end hotel use, but it has gone up, to 47,000 people, which is higher than the 40,000 she told us about in December. The Prime Minister also said in December that he already got locations for accommodating 10,000 more people, but now the Home Secretary says it is only 3,000, from the end of this year. What she has not admitted is that this is not instead of hotels—it is additional, because of their failure and the consequence of their new immigration Bill, the bigger backlog Bill, which is just going to make the backlog worse. Today’s press release reveals the truth. It says that these accommodation changes

“could reduce the need to source an additional 90 hotels.”

Why are the Government in such a mess that they need to be thinking about sourcing an additional 90 hotels? Why have they so totally lost any grip that the backlog and costs are getting worse and worse?

Enforced returns are lower than they were pre-pandemic, and only 23 of the 24,000 people the Government have tried to return to safe countries they have travelled through have actually been returned. Even in the case of Albania, with which there is a return agreement in place, we find that 12,000 people arrived on small boats last year but fewer than 1% of those cases have been decided and barely a few hundred people have been returned. As for Rwanda, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) has said, the Government have sent more Home Secretaries there than asylum seekers, and no one expects the numbers to be high. The taxpayer is already footing the bill for Conservative failure, and now we hear reports that the new legislation will cost £6 billion. Is that true—yes or no?

The Home Office has already had to claim £2.4 billion extra from the Treasury reserve, so how much more will it claim this year? The Times reports that illegal immigration will have to fall below 10,000 a year for it even to be possible to implement the new legislation, because the Home Office says that Ministers’ plans are “based on demented assumptions”. So will the Home Secretary tell us whether the demented assumptions are hers or the Prime Minister’s?

Time and again, the Government have voted against Labour proposals to help stop dangerous crossings. They have voted against action to go after criminal gangs; against the cross-border police unit, against fast-track decisions for safe countries; and against new return agreements and legal routes with Europe. People want to see strong border security and a properly controlled and managed asylum system, so that our country does our bit, alongside others, to help those fleeing persecution and conflict. Under the Tories, we have neither of those, because the gangs have been allowed to let rip across the borders and the asylum system is in chaos. All we get is rhetoric, while the reality gets worse; we get demented assumptions, unworkable plans and empty spin. Instead of all the press conferences, we need a proper plan. The asylum system is broken, the Tories broke it and there is still no plan today to sort it out.

[Suella Braverman]

I thank the right hon. Lady again for her extensive words. The theatrics get even more colourful every time we meet. I say “words” because, as ever, that is all we get from the Opposition; we get no serious alternatives and no credible plan, just empty rhetoric and endless noise.

Last December, the Prime Minister and I set out a plan to stop the boats. Since then, we have been working flat out to deliver that programme. What has the right hon. Lady been up to? It is hard to say. The question is: will Labour ever bring forward a plan of its own, a plan with details, a plan that delivers? I am sorry to say that the answer is that Labour does not have a plan and does not care that it does not have one. It is this Conservative Government and this Conservative Prime Minister who are dealing with the priorities of the British people.

So what is Labour actually doing? Labour Members are good at carping from the sidelines, but when it comes down to it, how do they actually act? They have voted against every single measure that we have put forward to stop the boats. They would scrap our world-leading plan with Rwanda, and they continue to oppose our laws to detain and remove. Contrast their opposition to our common-sense proposals with their urgent activism when it suits them. Let me tell you, Mr Speaker, more than 100 Opposition Members—over half the parliamentary Labour party—signed a letter campaigning for dangerous foreign criminals to be spared deportation. Those criminals included murderers and rapists who went on to commit further terrible crimes here in Britain. Indeed, 14 of the current shadow Cabinet campaigned to stop those vile criminals from being deported, including the shadow Foreign Secretary, the shadow Attorney General, the shadow Health Secretary and even the Leader of the Opposition. I will spare the rest. I am still waiting for an apology, Mr Speaker, but I fear that it will never come.

I know that the right hon. Lady did not sign that letter. Perhaps the Leader of the Opposition should take that into account before he decides to remove her from the Front Bench. Labour Members continue to oppose our Illegal Migration Bill, saying that it will not work. Frankly, that is totally unsurprising, because, unlike the British people, Labour wants more migration, not less; it wants open borders, not control.

I am a democrat. The British people have spoken clearly and repeatedly. They welcome genuine refugees and do not want people to come here illegally. The Opposition parties and the right hon. Lady are supremely indifferent to this problem. They are happy with the status quo that lines the pockets of the gangsters, is lethally dangerous and grossly unfair on taxpayers, and puts intolerable pressure on our local communities. We on the Conservative Benches are committed to stopping the boats. We have a plan to do so and we are delivering that plan.

--- Later in debate ---

[Suella Braverman]

Asylum seekers, whether they are accommodated in the UK or relocated to a safe country such as Rwanda, will always receive the appropriate level of support to which they are entitled. Where we have legal duties, we abide by them; and where we have a duty of care to asylum seekers, we meet it.

[Yvette Cooper]

rose—

[Sir Chris Bryant]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Ordinarily, points of order are taken only after all statements and urgent questions are finished. However, I will take a point of order from the shadow Home Secretary if it relates specifically to the statement that has just been delivered.

[Yvette Cooper]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is specific to a sentence in the Home Secretary’s statement and her answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle). It is a factual issue. She said that

“the asylum initial decision backlog is down by 17,000”

whereas Home Office official statistics say that the asylum initial backlog is now over 170,000, up from 160,000 in December. The facts are that the asylum initial decision backlog is up by over 10,000, not down by 17,000. I know that there was a lot of nonsense in what the Home Secretary said, and sometimes it is hard to know where to start, but this is about the facts given to Parliament. Will she now withdraw the incorrect statement that she has made, because her facts are wrong?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Let us remember that this is not a continuation of a debate; it is a point of order to the Chair, and it is not a matter for the Chair. The way in which facts are presented here in the Chamber is entirely—[Interruption.] Who is shouting at me? The way in which facts are presented in the Chamber is entirely a matter for the Minister, or any other Member who is presenting the facts. If the Home Secretary wishes to say anything further to the point of order—[Interruption.] She does not. [Interruption.] No, that is enough. This is not a matter for the Chair and we cannot continue the debate. It is a matter of debate and interpretation of statistics. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) for drawing her concerns to the attention of the House, the Chair and, indeed, the Home Secretary.