Rwanda Plan Cost and Asylum System
Debate between Yvette Cooper and Tim Loughton
Yvette Cooper
My right hon. Friend has made an important point about, in particular, the issues relating to Afghanistan, where we know there has been huge persecution by the Taliban. We also know that there are people who helped our armed forces and, effectively, worked for the UK Government in Afghanistan, and as a result have been targeted by the Taliban. The Afghan resettlement scheme set up by the Home Office has had all kinds of problems. It is important that there are proper reforms to the resettlement schemes to make sure that they are effective, and that they prevent people being exploited by people traffickers and people smugglers. That is why it is so important to take action to stop these dangerous boat crossings, which are putting lives at risk and undermining our border security, and on which the criminal gangs have made profits of probably £0.5 billion over the last few years as a result of being able to take hold along the channel.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
The right hon. Lady mentioned 34,000 cases so far since the printing of the Illegal Migration Bill. Of those cases, if people are found to have no credible case for asylum to stay in the United Kingdom, and if they come from countries to which it is virtually practically impossible to return them, what would she do with them?
Yvette Cooper
As the hon. Member will know, we should be returning people who do not have a foundation in persecution or conflict, who do not have a well-founded asylum claim. They should be being returned to their own country. But he will also know that there has been a 50% drop in the returns of failed asylum seekers since 2010—a huge drop. We should be working with a new returns and enforcement unit, with proper staffing in place, to reverse that drop. He will also be aware, because it was in evidence given to the Home Affairs Committee, where he has worked immensely hard over many years, and because he takes these issues very seriously, that only 5% of those who arrived from Albania—including on small boats—over the past few years have been returned to Albania. Although we support the Albania agreement, it is in fact being used predominantly to return historic cases, and has not been used for the kinds of cases he is talking about, in which decisions should be fast-tracked and people should be being returned quickly.
Tim Loughton
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way again, but she has answered a question that I did not ask. I was referring not to Albanians but to people from countries that she knows it is practically impossible to return them to. The Iranian Government will not let them off the plane. Eritreans would put them in jail and say they would be appealed on human rights. What would her party, in government, do with those people who had come here illegally from such countries, with no basis on which they could stay and no way of negotiating returns agreements with countries like Iran?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Member will know that people from countries such as Eritrea and Iran are very often granted asylum, and will not be sent to Rwanda under his Government’s policy because Rwanda will only be able to take a hundred or a couple of hundred people a year, at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. That is the core dishonesty and the failure at the heart of the Government’s programme—they are promising people that they will make huge changes to the existing system, but they are not at all. Instead, if anything, all they will do is stack people up in asylum hotels for even longer than the taxpayer is funding them, for a bill, currently, of £8 million a day—up from £6 million a day.
The Prime Minister declared the asylum backlog cleared—that is what he said—which is taking the country for fools. There are 99,000 cases in the backlog. That is probably over 120,000 people, and all the Home Office have tried to do is clear the cases before July 2022—cases that are already more than 18 months old. Those cases should not be in the system by now anyway. Any properly functioning system would have cleared cases that were more than 18 months old, but that is the scale of Tory chaos. Why are they just trying to catch up with themselves, clearing those very old cases? Of course, the backlog since July 2022 has doubled. Even their weak, limited target to clear the so-called “legacy backlog” has failed, with 4,500 cases not cleared and 35,000 cases simply withdrawn. We want the facts about that. What has happened to those 35,000 cases?
We know from the evidence to the Select Committee in November that as of November, the Home Office had no idea where 17,000 of those claimants were. How many of the 35,000 does the Home Office know to have left the country? How many of them does it know to be deceased or to be duplicate cases? And how many are probably still here? They might be working illegally, they might have restarted their asylum application and gone back to the beginning of the system, or they might be destitute on the streets. Whatever has happened to them, they are still here and the Home Office does not have a clue. Can the Minister give us a breakdown of the 35,000 cases? Is enforcement action taken if those people should not be here? It not, this all looks like more smoke and mirrors from a dodgy salesman Prime Minister.
We support some of the Government’s measures relating to France, and we support the agreement with Albania. We want to see more proper international co-operation like that, and we should be on steroids in tackling the criminal gangs.