Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 4th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I thank the hon. Member for keeping his comments brief. I do not intend to put on a time limit, but if people can keep to roughly Stuart C. McDonald’s length of speech—about four minutes—we will get fairly well everybody in.

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

This Lords amendment should not be a point of party political disagreement. I agree with every word that the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said. He is a fellow member of the Home Affairs Committee, and the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) is also a member of the Select Committee. We may disagree on many things, but on this we are in strong agreement, as we are with my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch).

When in the past we have helped child refugees, we have done so on a cross-party basis—be it, generations ago, with the Kindertransport or, in more recent years, with the Dubs amendment put forward by Lord Dubs, himself a child of the Kindertransport. We have done so with the investment through the aid budget supporting refugees across the regions, and with the resettlement scheme, which many of us called for and the Government rightly brought forward, to help many Syrian families restart their lives. The same principle should apply here as well.

We have always had cross-party agreement that we should do our bit to help children and teenagers who are alone with no one to look after them, and who have fled conflict and persecution but have family here in the UK who can care for them, put a roof over their head, try to make sure they get back into school, look after them and give them back a future. It is something that every one of us would want for our own families if we, for a moment, just think about walking in others’ shoes and about the awful plight of families in this situation, torn asunder by conflict or by persecution. I have teenage and adult children and, like so many of us, I would want them to be back together or to find others who could care for them from within our family if something terrible happened.

While the Government’s proposed review will, I hope, be important in looking at safe and legal routes to sanctuary, it is not an alternative to the Lords amendment. Reviews take time and consultation takes time. All of those things take time, and we do not know yet where it will end, but at the moment the rules change in January, and therefore it is not an alternative for the children and teenage refugees who may be in need of support to rejoin family now.

The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham set out clearly why the current rules do not suffice to provide that support, but Safe Passage provided us with the reason why there is so much at stake when it described the case of a 14-year-old teenage boy on the streets of Paris, whose brother is here. Safe Passage had worked with him to get him off the streets into secure accommodation, to get him support from social services and to get him into the legal process to apply to rejoin his adult brother, who is in Scotland. However, the boy and his brother became deeply anxious that the rules were about to change at the end of December, and he has now left that accommodation. He has absconded, and nobody knows where he is. The message he left behind said, “I have heard that the law will change. What will happen to me?” The huge risk is that he may now end up in the arms of people smugglers or people traffickers, trying to make a really dangerous journey. We have seen the consequences of those awful, dangerous journeys in flimsy boats, with lives having been lost so recently—children’s lives have been lost as well.

I urge the Minister to think again and go with the spirit of the things he told us this morning about wanting to be compassionate towards child and teenage refugees. I urge him to keep these provisions in place, to accept the Lords amendment and to recognise our continuing obligation to reunite desperate families. If he wants to look at this again once his review is in place, he will have done no further harm to those families in the meantime.

For the sake of these teenagers and young people, whose safety and lives may otherwise be at risk, I urge the Minister to accept the Lords amendment.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

I very much welcome the Minister’s restating of the commitment to safe and legal routes, which we all recognise are critical to tackling the risks of trafficking. I also very much welcome the commitment to existing family reunion routes.

One issue that has not received enough attention in the debate around child refugees is the humanitarian issue of what happens to them after they arrive in this country. It is important that I ask the Minister to consider some of those wider implications, because they are enormously significant in making a decision about the UK’s attitude to so many of these questions. They are vital to our care system, to local authorities and, of course, to local communities, because the children and young people we are talking about in the context of this specific amendment and debate are a very small proportion of the number the UK is involved in supporting. Indeed, from 2015, we saw around a doubling of the annual number of unaccompanied children and young people coming into the care of local authorities in the United Kingdom under the terms of the Children Act 1989, partly as a result of the Government’s commitments, but also in recognition of the fact that determining the narrow legal status of a child refugee before they arrive here and ensuring that is sustained after their arrival is something with which this debate and the legislation struggle.

One of the big challenges I have always found, having worked with the noble Lord Dubs on these issues for some time, is that the idea that Dubs created a very specific route that opens up an opportunity often turns into an illusion for these children once they arrive,. I have personally come across many examples of young people who have been lined up to come here to be reunited with a family member only for it to transpire that the family member is in no position to care for them, and that young person is, in fact, simply being lined up to be taken into the United Kingdom care system. That, of course, is the ultimate destination for many unaccompanied child refugees, because that is what our legislation requires.

Although I very much agree with the points raised by the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), we need to consider not that Dubs is unique in and of itself but that, actually, it concerns a very small, flexible and variable number within a much larger number of child refugees who are coming into the care of the United Kingdom.

When the Minister looks at the wider capacity picture, he should speak to the 30 councils that have come forward and said they would like to take Dubs children. He should ask them why they are not willing to make those places available to the large numbers of existing asylum-seeking children who are in the care of local authorities while looking for openings under the national transfer scheme. That would enable many of these children, many of whom may turn out to be Dubs eligible anyway, to move into the care of a local authority in a different part of the country. That is a critical question.

In conclusion, I welcome much of what the Minister said. I simply ask him to provide in his response a commitment on the future of global resettlement. We all recognise that this is a very small part of that much bigger picture. A clear commitment from the Government about when the scheme will commence and what its resourcing will look like would provide assurance of what the future framework is for so many vulnerable people around the world and maintain the UK’s reputation as providing a safe and honourable route to a safe haven for those who genuinely need it.