Humanitarian Crisis: Greece

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I thank my hon. Friend for her comments. I am still very happy to meet her directly and I am sorry she was not able to make the meeting we had planned. She is right to raise the issue of how children are affected by this crisis. It is why we have put education at the heart of our response.

On children who are arriving in Europe, my hon. Friend will be aware that we have announced a £10 million fund to ensure that we have a much better system of identifying children across Europe, working with UNHCR to make sure children are specifically protected and in safe spaces, and are able to get to where they are trying to get to in a way that does not put them at any more risk. A number of countries across the European Union can help to provide safety for children. That is what we want to happen—we want a more co-ordinated approach. My hon. Friend will be aware that we are extending our vulnerable persons scheme to include unaccompanied children. The one bit of good news in all of this is that, in part because of DFID’s work in the Syria region, children arriving in countries such as Jordan and Lebanon are being reunited with their families.

I can absolutely reassure my hon. Friend that our desire is to make sure that children are taken care of. Implicit in her assumption is that many children want to come to the UK. Under the Dublin convention, if they are able to claim asylum and have links into the UK, we can consider their cases. This is one reason why it is so important to make sure that children are registered and inside the system. We are focusing on making sure that that happens. As she will know, it can be a very chaotic situation. Sometimes one of the biggest challenges we face is that children are very reluctant to come forward to the authorities. That is a problem we are trying to overcome.

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

The situation in Greece is becoming dangerous and could well implode as the crisis gets worse. I am sure the Secretary of State agrees that the humanitarian aid from Britain and the EU is not yet enough to help Greece to cope with the crisis. Will she agree to look at how many refugees arriving in Greece have family in Britain who could look after them? Will she get that assessment done? Will she consider whether the refugee resettlement programme could be extended not just to cope with young, unaccompanied refugees, as the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) said, but others with family in Britain who could look after them, so that Britain can do its bit in a fair way?

[Justine Greening]

Today’s EU announcement is possibly one of the first big steps towards ensuring that the level of response in Europe is on the scale required. I agree with the right hon. Lady on that. Countries, including Britain, have stepped forward to do what they can. We work where we can with the Greek authorities, but more is required. It is good that the announcement appears to be scaling up against those needs.

On the right hon. Lady’s second point, I reiterate that we have good and sound processes that sit behind our asylum and refugee system here in the UK—obviously, we are not part of the Schengen area. Those are perfectly sensible approaches to work through the issue of where refugees will finally end up. We will not be a part of a pan-EU relocation approach. We think that that simply plays into the hands of people smugglers, who are perhaps the only people who gain from the present situation. We prefer a much more sensible approach, which is taking people directly from the region.