Jeremy Corbyn
Main Page: Jeremy Corbyn (Independent - Islington North)Department Debates - View all Jeremy Corbyn's debates with the Home Office
(11 months ago)
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Tim Loughton
I will aim to complete my speech in less time than it took the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) to start talking about the Lords amendments, which is what we are here to do—but we will see how we go. I declare an interest as the chair of a safeguarding board of a children’s company.
I thank the Minister for the extensive discussions that we have had about the Lords amendments. I fear that we have not quite got there, so we may be back here again in a while. There has been an inordinate amount of debate on the Bill, and a lot of work has been done in the Lords, which is why we have so many amendments.
I support the Bill and I want it to pass, but it needs properly to balance safe and legal routes, and assurances about looking after the most vulnerable—particularly children—with coming down hard on people who are gaming the system and do not have a legitimate case for claiming asylum in the UK.
I do not have time to talk about every Lords amendment, so I will focus on two main areas: child detention, and safe and legal routes. I am pleased and grateful to the Government for the progress that we have made on the detention of pregnant women; that was a no-brainer, frankly. I also have some concerns around the treatment of people being transported back to other countries on the grounds of sexuality, and I want further assurances on that from the Minister. I also have concerns about accompanied children. There is a real problem with so-called families, who have been put together by people smugglers, as the Home Affairs Committee saw when we went to Dover. We came across somebody claiming to be the uncle of a young girl and they did not even speak the same language. There are problems here, but I absolutely want to concentrate on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
I am also pleased that Lord Carlile’s amendments around retrospectivity have been accepted. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s 10-year strategy has some merit in it, but I do not think that it is for this Bill; it is a strategy for a Government rather than being for a piece of legislation such as this.
On the subject of child detention, despite the substantial discussions I mentioned, it would appear that the Government are setting out only a very narrow concession, just to give the possibility of bail after eight days to one small subgroup of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children detained on the grounds of removal only. The Government themselves said in March in guidance:
“A period of detention can have a significant and negative impact on a child’s mental or physical health and development”.
I think that we would all agree with that, so such detention needs to be used sensitively and sparingly.
This is a really sensitive issue. I think it was a proud achievement of the coalition Government when, after a Citizens’ Assembly back in 2010, David Cameron said that child detention was not acceptable and pledged to end it. It was part of the coalition programme in May 2010. Detention policy changed in 2011 and was codified in the Immigration Act 2014. Large numbers of children were being detained before 2010. There were 1,065 children being detained in 2009 alone. There was a case of a three-year-old girl who had spent 166 days of her life—her short life—in Yarl’s Wood detention centre. That was completely unacceptable, so it was right that the law was changed.
At the time, guarantees were also made in a debate on the Nationality and Borders Bill. The Government made explicitly clear their commitment to the rationale that unaccompanied children should not be blocked from claiming asylum and would be exempt from the inadmissibility process. As the Minister set out on Report of that Bill:
“I wish to emphasise that we will always act in accordance with our international obligations, and to be very clear that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will not be subject to inadmissibility or transferred for offshore processing.”—[Official Report, 7 December 2021; Vol. 705, c. 311.]
There was merit in that then and there is still merit in it now.
This matter was raised as a priority issue in the Committee and Report stages of this Bill. The Minister promised us changes in the Lords. That is why we did not push to a vote the amendments tabled in my name and the names of other right hon. and hon. Members at that stage. However, I am afraid that the promise did not materialise in the House of Lords, and only now, with amendments in lieu, are we seeing some concessions at this late stage, which, frankly, is not good enough. That is why, I am afraid, there is some scarcity of trust in the assurances given from the Dispatch Box, rather than stuff written, prima facie, in the Bill, or in specific guidance linked to undertakings in the Bill. We need to see more details in the Bill, not just assurances from the Dispatch Box, which have not always been forthcoming.
In changing the law, we need to comply with a clear set of principles when we are dealing with vulnerable children. Children should be treated differently from adults. Any child in the United Kingdom is entitled to the same protections whether they arrive on a boat or they were born here. Whether we like it or not, a child is a child and, as such, should be subject to the safety of the Children Act 1989, which is as relevant today as it was when it was first legislated for.
Jeremy Corbyn
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I absolutely agree with the point that he has just made. This also fits in with the 1989 convention on the rights of the child, which the British Government very rapidly and quite correctly signed up to at that time. Withdrawing from that convention surely weakens that protection.
Tim Loughton
The paramount piece of legislation in this country is the Children Act 1989. We should be proud of it, as it is copied and envied the world over. That is how we in this country look after children who need the protection of the state for an assortment of reasons. In my book, the Children Act—I always carry it with me, and i have it here today—usually trumps everything else.
Jeremy Corbyn
I shall be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker, because we do not have much time, although there is a great deal I could say on this Bill. There could not be a greater contrast than the one between the cold, calculating speech we have just heard from the hon. Member for Southend West (Anna Firth) and the humanitarian approach taken by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) in trying to defend international law and humanitarian principles in what we do.
This Bill is appalling in so many ways, but it is walking us rapidly away from the European convention on human rights and, with it, the European Court of Human Rights; from the 1951 Geneva convention protecting the rights of asylum; from the 1954 convention protecting people who are suffering from statelessness; from the 1989 convention on the rights of the child; and from the 2005 trafficking of children convention. That is why I strongly support Lords amendment 1, which was introduced by Baroness Chakrabarti to try to reverse this whole process. If we walk away from international conventions that this country knowingly and willingly signed up for—indeed, we drafted many of them—who are we then to criticise Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia or any other country where we believe there is a breach of those convention rights? What protection would we be offering to people we know are already being badly treated and whose only protection is the rights that come through those conventions? The Government are cynically and deliberately doing this.
I attend the Council of Europe as one of our representatives, and I have to say that Members of the Council of Europe from many countries—these are not necessarily people of the left, by any manner of means—are astonished at how Britain is walking away from all these conventions that it promoted in the past. The response from those at the Council of Europe is consternation about why we are doing that. It is consternation at the endless attacks on the European Court of Human Rights and on the European convention on human rights, which protects the rights of people in this country as well as other countries around the world.
This did not all come from nowhere; it came from the hostile environment, deliberately created by the Conservative party and the coalition Government, which had such a devastating effect on the Windrush generation. It comes from constant media references to the “asylum wave” and the horrible stories that are written about people seeking asylum. As the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and others have pointed out, the number of asylum seekers in Britain is low compared with that in the rest of Europe, and the number in Europe is low compared with that in the rest of the world.
Why are there 70 million people around the world not in a place they can call their own home? The answer is: wars; human rights abuse; and environmental degradation. What are we going to do? Are we going to put up barbed wire everywhere, send gunboats everywhere, in order to try to deter desperate people? Or are we going to do something about it by trying to improve the living conditions of people in places that they are trying to flee from and improve their human rights situation? I have met people in Calais, and I have met people in this country who have come from Calais. Believe me, they are desperate. There are people who have managed to walk, almost, from Eritrea or Afghanistan. They have crossed the Mediterranean and other seas and gone through immense danger. They are looking for a place of safety—and what do we offer them? Nothing more than a hostile environment and being sent to Rwanda. Should we not look at this thing a bit differently? Should we not look at it from a humanitarian point of view?
Should we not also give refugees here the right to work? We have 100,000 vacancies in the NHS alone and a skills shortage in almost every industry, and we have highly skilled, highly intelligent people who could no longer stay in the country they came from and are looking for a place of safety. Perhaps we could be slightly more humanitarian and decent about this and accept that we have a responsibility.
We should accept that our country is enriched by those who have come here with their skills, knowledge and determination to create a better society, rather than passing this tawdry little Bill, which may well be rejected again by the Lords—I hope it is—and by the courts, knowing full well that even if the Home Secretary’s dream of sending so many people to Rwanda were carried out, they could not be housed or processed there. Can we not just turn the dial round for once and, instead of maintaining the pretence that this country was always friendly to people who are desperate, let us prove it and show that we are supportive and welcoming of desperate people who want to contribute to our community?
Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)
I will speak to Lords amendments 2, 12, 20 and 22, on arrangements for removal, to Lords amendments 31, 33 and 35 to 38, on arrangements for those under the age of 18 and for pregnant women, and to Lords amendment 102, on safe and legal routes.
Where the Government have given some ground on the Lords amendments and entered into discussion, I feel confident that the main ethos of the Bill is still there. I was really keen to ensure that. I did not want to see the Bill watered down. I liked what I saw when it left this place, and I did not want to see it weakened and made unable to deliver.
On under-18s, my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) made the good point that we do not want a situation where there is a perverse incentive for young people to be sent by themselves. That is concerning to both of us. Age verification needs to be robust. We know that there is evidence of adults—particularly adult men—pretending to be under 18 when they are not. No one in this House wants to see children detained, and that was never the Government’s intention, but at the same time we cannot allow an opening for people who are not under 18 to get special treatment.
The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), said that there has not been enough time to scrutinise the Bill. This is an urgent situation. The Bill was introduced early this year. It appears to have been stuck in the other place for a huge amount of time; I understand that they have been up until 6 in the morning looking at it. I do not know how much longer the right hon. Lady would like this place and the other place to scrutinise this piece of legislation that needs to be implemented urgently.
I find it deeply frustrating when I see individuals who have never had to live with the consequences of uncontrolled mass migration and illegal migration, and people who have never had to talk to constituents who are desperately concerned about the situation—they may have hotels in their constituency that have been adversely impacted by it—opining and moralising about what they think is right and demonising anyone who supports a Bill such as this.
As I have said many times before, the House of Lords should tread carefully, because it is unelected. It is oh so tempting to moralise on this deeply complex issue without engaging in any plan, and there is no plan from the other House. Lords amendment 102 would introduce uncapped safe and legal routes. What would happen if we had alternative safe and legal routes that people could apply to? If they were uncapped, they would fill up incredibly quickly, and if they were capped, the cap would be met incredibly quickly and we would be back at square one. We would still have people entering our country illegally. What would we do then? That is not a plan.
Let me turn to Labour’s five-point plan of vagaries and platitudes—because that is what it is. All we hear about are safe and legal routes. Then there is the cross-border police force—as if that has not already been looked into. Labour Members say, “We have to do more to talk to France”. Again, it is as if we are not already doing that. It is as if the Prime Minister does not already have a good relationship with the President of France; he has, but we still are where we are.