Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Tracey Crouch and Damian Green(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
The Minister, sadly, missed out on an excellent visit that the Secretary of State paid to my constituency recently, when he met offenders who were on the Royal British Legion Industries scheme; they had been through the criminal justice system and are now in work. Although it is essential that a cross-departmental approach is taken to help ex-service personnel re-integrate into society to stop them entering the criminal justice system, it is even more important to do so after they have been through it. What are the Government doing to raise awareness of the schemes that are out there to provide support and help?
Damian Green
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who makes a good point. As I said, spreading information about best practice is extremely important. That is the basis of many of the reforms that we are introducing through the criminal justice system. If she perceives an information gap somewhere, I will be happy to discuss this with the Minister of State, Ministry of Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois), who is the Minister with responsibility for veterans and who has significant overall responsibility in this area.
Temporary Immigration Cap
Debate between Tracey Crouch and Damian Green(15 years, 1 month ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Damian Green
I am sorry that the hon. Lady did not listen to the answer that I gave the shadow Home Secretary, but I am quite happy to repeat it. The judgment was given on Friday but we do not have the written judgment yet, and we will not get it until January. It is clearly absurd to ask us to decide what to do about individual applications in advance of deciding whether to appeal against the judgment, and we cannot do that until we have the judgment in writing.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that it is a bit rich for the shadow Home Secretary to talk about chaos, given the parlous state of the immigration system that the new Government inherited?
Damian Green
My hon. Friend makes a perfectly good and valid point. The reason why we needed the interim limit was that we inherited an immigration system that was in complete chaos. We said at the election that we were going to introduce a permanent limit that would come into force next April. Between that point and next April there would have been an unimaginably large surge in applications if we had not imposed an interim limit. It is a perfectly sensible policy, and we will take steps tomorrow to ensure that it meets the Court’s requirements so that it can continue to do the essential job of bringing immigration numbers back down to a level with which this country can feel comfortable.