Migration

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2022 Commons Chamber

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

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if she will make a statement on migration.

[The Minister for Immigration (Robert Jenrick)]

The continued rise of dangerous channel crossings is completely unacceptable. This phenomenon is not only a clear abuse of our immigration laws and deeply unfair on the British people, but puts the lives of those who attempt these journeys in grave danger. This Government are determined to put the people smugglers out of business and to make this route unviable.

This week, my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary met her counterpart, Minister Darmanin, to agree a new multi-year strategic and operational plan with France. That will be supported by UK investment of up to €72 million in 2022-23. It includes a 40% uplift, with UK-funded officers patrolling the French coast over the coming months, improved security at ports, cutting-edge surveillance technology, drones, detection dog teams and CCTV, to help detect and prevent those crossings. For the first time, reciprocal teams of embedded officers will be deployed on the ground in control rooms, to increase joint understanding of this issue. This renewed partnership will enable us to build on our joint partnership with France, which so far has seen good progress, with more than 30,000 illegal crossings prevented since the start of the year, hundreds of arrests made and 21 organised crime gangs dismantled.

Beyond our ever closer collaboration with France, we will also work closely with other international partners, including further upstream, to help address issues closer to their source. The UK will be joining near neighbours and other countries, to agree collective action to tackle illegal migration. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is today discussing those issues at the G7 Interior Ministers meeting in Germany.

These are issues of the utmost seriousness, and they have been discussed at prime ministerial level. We are taking action to deter those intent on exploiting the UK’s generosity, by implementing the Nationality and Borders Act 2002, pursuing migration partnerships with safe countries such as Rwanda, cracking down on those here illegally, and expediting returns agreements. There should be no doubt whatsoever about the Government’s determination to grip this problem and deliver the strong and secure borders that the British people desperately want and deserve.

[Yvette Cooper]

Twenty-seven lives were lost in the channel a year ago, and a criminal gang profited from sending people to their deaths. Will the Minister tell the House whether anyone has been prosecuted or convicted for that awful event? We have long called for a stronger agreement with France to stop these dangerous boat crossings. That is why it is important that there is scrutiny on this issue. Additional beach patrols are welcome, and intelligence sharing is vital—it is unfathomable that it was not happening already.

The level of convictions is pitiful: just four a month, on average. The Minister said that 21 gangs had been dismantled, but on Monday the Home Secretary said that it was 55. Which is it?

Journalists report 100 gang members operating in one small corner of Calais alone. The scale of response to the criminal gangs is tiny compared with the scale of the challenge, and the Government are simply not doing enough. This multimillion-pound criminal industry is putting lives at risk. The Minister referred to a joint intelligence cell. How many national crime agencies are currently involved in that, how many are deployed in Europe, and what will that number increase by? We need to know.

This agreement does not include anything on safe returns or safe family reunion. The number of children safely reuniting with family has plummeted since the end of the Dublin agreement, and charities warn that they are trying to go by boat instead. Asylum returns have plummeted from 1,000 people returned to the EU in 2010 to a tiny handful today. Of the 16,000 referred to the third country unit, just 21 returned. Did Ministers even try to get an agreement on returns and family reunion, and if not, why not? What is the Minister’s timescale for getting a grip on the total collapse in Home Office decisions on asylum, and at what point will they double so that we get a faster pace? The way the Home Office is handling local authorities has been disgraceful, with many of them not being told what is happening.

Finally, what is the £140 million from the Rwanda agreement actually being spent on? Too often, the Home Office talks about things but is not delivering—this is too important.

[Robert Jenrick]

I am pleased that the right hon. Lady welcomes our agreement with France. She is right to raise the anniversary of the tragic and abhorrent deaths that occurred in the channel one year ago. I am pleased that a concerted effort with partners across Europe has led to arrests and the disruption of gangs, and to the capture and destruction of boats, directly as a result of that. The good work that our intelligence services did with respect to that incident is now being rolled out with respect to other criminal gangs right across Europe.

The agreement that we have reached with France will enable our world-class intelligence services to be directly in the room with their French counterparts, ensuring that the intelligence they are gathering, which is rich—I observed it myself on visiting the clandestine command in Dover—can now be passed on in real time to their French counterparts, ensuring that more crossings are stopped, more arrests are made and more criminal gangs are disrupted. That will make a positive impact in the months to come.

I politely point out to the right hon. Lady that she is becoming like a broken record on immigration. She opposes everything helpful that the Government have done and suggests nothing useful. She voted against the Nationality and Borders Act that created deterrents for people crossing the channel. She voted against measures that would have increased sentences for people smugglers. She would scrap our world-leading migration partnership with Rwanda. She voted against our plans to remove dangerous foreign national offenders. One of the key policy platforms on which her leader, the Leader of the Opposition, stood for the leadership of the Labour party was to close down our immigration removal centres—the very centres where we house people like foreign national offenders, murderers and rapists as we are trying to get them out of the country.

The truth is that Labour is the party of uncontrolled migration and the party of mass migration. We understand the instincts of the British people, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary and I will do everything to ensure that their will is implemented and we secure our borders.