Western Jet Foil and Manston Asylum Processing Centres

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2022 Commons Chamber

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

I thank the Home Secretary for her statement. Yesterday’s petrol bomb attack on the Western Jet Foil Centre was truly appalling. I am sure the whole House will condemn it in the strongest possible terms. I echo the Home Secretary’s tribute to the emergency services and Border Force staff who responded. However, I must ask her: can she tell me whether counter-terror police and counter-extremism units are involved in the investigation? It does not make sense for them not to be, so why are they not?

I turn to the dreadful conditions at Manston. Four thousand people are now on a site designed to accommodation 1,600 people, with some families there for weeks. Conditions there have been described as inhumane, with risks of fire, disorder and infection, there are confirmed diphtheria outbreaks, reports of scabies and MRSA outbreaks, outbreaks of violence and untrained staff. The Home Secretary said nothing about what she was doing to address those immediate public health crises or the issues of untrained staff.

Behind those problems are deeper failures in the Government’s policies on asylum and channel crossings. Decision making has collapsed: the Home Office has taken just 14,000 initial asylum decisions in the past 12 months, compared with 28,000 six years ago. Some 96% of the small boat arrivals last year have still not had a decision and initial decisions alone are taking more than 400 days on this Conservative Government’s watch. Can the Home Secretary confirm that the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and changes to immigration rules have added further bureaucracy and delays, leading to tens of thousands more people waiting in asylum accommodation and more than £100 million extra on asylum accommodation bills because the Government’s policies are pushing up the use of hotels and the increase in delays?

There has also been a total failure to prevent a huge proliferation of gangs in the channel. Why has the Home Secretary refused our calls for a major new National Crime Agency unit with hundreds of additional specialist officers to work with Europol and others to crack down on the gangs, as well as the urgent work needed with France to get a proper agreement in place?

On the Rwanda plan, can the Home Secretary confirm that she has spent an extra £20 million, on top of the £120 million already spent on a policy that she has herself described as “failing” and that her officials have described as “unenforceable” and having a “high risk of fraud”? Is it not now time to drop that unethical and unworkable scheme and to put the money into tackling the backlogs and the criminal gangs instead?

Let me ask the Home Secretary about her own decisions. There are very serious allegations now being reported that the Home Secretary was warned by officials and other Ministers that she was acting outside the law by failing to provide alternative accommodation. Can she confirm that she turned down contingency plans that she was offered that would have reduced overcrowding, as the reports say? There are also legal obligations, including under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and the Asylum Support (Amendment) Regulations 2018. Can the Home Secretary confirm that she was advised repeatedly that she was breaking the law by failing to agree to those plans?

One of the meetings on Manston was on 19 October. Can the Home Secretary confirm that she refused those proposals on that date—the same day that she broke sections 2.3 and 1.4 of the ministerial code? Can she tell us whether, in fact, she breached the ministerial code, which provides for Ministers’ abiding by the law, three times in a single day? How is anyone supposed to have confidence in her as a Home Secretary given those serious issues?

The Home Secretary referred in her statement to security checks. Those are very important, but her statement is undermined by her own disregard for security. Her letter today makes it clear that the incident over which she resigned was not a one-off and that, contrary to her previous claims that she reported the breach “rapidly” as soon as she realised, she instead had to be challenged several times by one of her colleagues. She has also not answered the crucial questions about security breaches while she was Attorney General. Can she tell us whether she was involved in a leak to The Daily Telegraph, reported in that paper on 21 January, on information about Attorney General action on a case involving the security service? Has she sent any other Government documents by WhatsApp, Telegram or other social media?

It has been less than a week since the Home Secretary was reappointed and less than a fortnight since she was first forced to resign for breaching the ministerial code, and every day since her reappointment there have been more stories about possible security or ministerial code breaches. How is anybody supposed to have confidence in her, given the serious responsibilities of the Home Secretary to stand up for our national security, for security standards and for public safety?

The Prime Minister promised that this would be a Government of “integrity, professionalism and accountability”. Is the Home Secretary not letting everyone down and failing on all those counts?