Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Andrew Gwynne and Stephen Kinnock

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

The hon. Lady is right. The Afghan schemes are a case in point. The Afghan relocations and assistance policy has more or less collapsed, the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme is not working at all, and which nationality is always in the top two or three that are crossing on small boats? The Afghans. It is pretty straightforward.

We oppose the Rwanda policy because it is not a deterrent; it is a distraction. It would be far better, as the shadow Home Secretary, I and others have set out many times in this Chamber, to redirect the vast quantities of taxpayers’ money being wasted on the Rwanda scheme into a new cross-border police unit and a new security partnership with Europol that can smash the criminal smuggler gangs upstream.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an important point about how we need to co-operate much more intensively with the law enforcement agencies across Europe. The brutal fact is that these gangs are putting people into boats that were made for rivers, not seas, in treacherous conditions. Who in their right mind would go in one of those dinghies in the English channel right now? But people are being forced to do that by the gangs. We need to smash the gangs, and we can do that only by working with our colleagues across Europe to ensure that we bring the situation to an end.

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we accept that international co-operation with our European partners and allies must be at the heart of dealing with the gangs, as he so eloquently sets out, the possibility of that co-operation is fundamentally undermined when our Government are flagrantly prepared to break international law, which should underpin the trust that is a prerequisite for all such co-operation. Co-operation based on joint working and intelligence-sharing with our partners and allies is possible only if Britain is deemed a trustworthy partner.

That brings me to the third reason for our opposition to the legislation and the amendments tabled by so many Conservative Members. We find ourselves in the utterly extraordinary position of debating a Government policy that has been found to be unlawful by the highest court in our land. Amendment 35, which I will come to shortly, reflects that very fact. We find ourselves confronted by a Government who are seeking to legislate for an alternate reality. Although Ministers appear to believe that they can pass a Bill that determines that the sky is green and the grass is blue, that does not make it so.

HM Passport Office Backlog

Debate between Andrew Gwynne and Stephen Kinnock

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

Is it not extraordinary that the Government’s response to the crisis we are seeing is to cut the civil service by 90,000 jobs? In what world is that going to work, when we clearly need more resources, and people focused on customer-facing services? We need to build morale, not destroy it, and we need to show people that they should have good jobs on which they can raise a family. Instead, it is about cutting, undermining and passive-aggressive notes from the Secretary of State for Brexit Opportunities, I think he is called, put on the desks of his civil servants. It really is a disgrace.

Some applicants are having to travel the length and breadth of Britain to get an appointment. One man, as has been mentioned, had to travel all the way from London to Belfast to get his passport sorted. Others are having to pay extortionate costs for fast-track passport services or face losing hundreds of pounds. The number of monthly fast-track applications has more than doubled since December 2021. In April 2022, British families spent at least £5.4 million on fast-track services. The Passport Office’s own forecasts show that it expects to receive more than 240,000 fast-track applications between May and October this year, amounting to up to £34 million.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is right to raise the issue of fast-track applications. My constituency office, like his and no doubt like those of every other Member, is inundated with application cases, but even the fast-track applications are only just coming in under the wire, causing lots of anxiety and lots of work for my staff. What does he therefore have to say about the ability of the private contractors operating passport services? The Home Office has known for some time that this privatised system is deeply inadequate in how it operates passport services.

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He is referring to the two main companies, I think, which are TNT and Teleperformance. In both cases, the level of performance is abject. The question is: to what extent are they being held to account by the Government to ensure that they are delivering? I believe that TNT is on the record saying that its performance is meeting the service level requirements. I would like to see what those service level requirements are, because frankly it is an abject performance.