Alison Thewliss
Main Page: Alison Thewliss (Scottish National Party - Glasgow Central)Department Debates - View all Alison Thewliss's debates with the Home Office
Wednesday 26th April 2023
(1 year ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Illegal Migration Act 2023 View all Illegal Migration Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 26 April 2023 - large print - (26 Apr 2023)
Robert Jenrick
I am happy to answer that question. We have consistently said that those seeking sanctuary should do so in the first safe country. On the developing situation in Sudan, the United Nations is operating in most, if not all, of the countries surrounding Sudan. Last week, I met the assistant commissioner at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, when we discussed exactly this point. The best advice clearly would be for individuals to present to the UNHCR. The UK, like many countries, works closely with the UNHCR and we already operate safe and legal routes in partnership with it. That safe and legal route is available today. To answer the hon. Gentleman’s point directly, let me say that the UK is the fourth largest recipient in the world of individuals through routes operated by the UNHCR. So his central contention that the UK is somehow not a generous and compassionate country and that we are not working with organisations such as the UNHCR in this regard is factually incorrect. We are working with them closely.
In addition, we have a family reunion scheme, which has enabled more than 50,000 refugees to come to the UK in recent years and to meet up with their family members who have also sought refuge in the UK as refugees. That scheme is available all over the world. So if the young person in the hon. Gentleman’s example had family in the UK, that individual could come here through the family reunion scheme. In addition, the point made in the Bill is that we will expand those safe and legal routes over the course of the next 12 months or so, so that even more individuals can make use of them.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
The Minister is in danger of taking the UNHCR’s name in vain, because it has issued a statement that says:
“UNHCR wishes to clarify that there is no mechanism through which refugees can approach UNHCR with the intention of seeking asylum in the U.K. There is no asylum visa or ‘queue’ for the United Kingdom.”
Would he like to correct the record?
Robert Jenrick
With all due respect to the hon. Lady, I met the assistant commissioner of the UNHCR and had this conversation directly with her. So whatever the hon. Lady may be quoting from her iPhone, I would prefer to take at face value what I have heard in discussion with the assistant commissioner. The point is that the UNHCR selects individuals who have registered with it and to whom it has given refugee status to go to other countries on existing safe and legal routes. It currently has discretion as to who it puts in the direction of the United Kingdom. That was a choice made when the UK established that scheme, because the then Conservative Government took the perfectly legitimate view that we would offer complete discretion to the United Nations to select the people it felt were the most vulnerable in the world and help them to come to the UK. We have already opened the conversation with the UN on how we will establish a new safe and legal route, and there are a range of options on how we might configure that.
Robert Jenrick
I will not give way; I will draw my remarks to a close.
I will not detain the House by detailing the other Government amendments, which I have summarised in a letter—
Sir Iain Duncan Smith
It is a concern because we have clashing amendments. We know that. The point of this debate is to rectify that. We do not have a lot of time, so the right hon. Member will forgive me if I tentatively nod in his direction but at the same time pursue my own purposes. I will try to keep my remarks narrow. I do not want to go wide because other people wish to speak.
Amendment 4 is needed because victims of modern slavery experience inhumane torture and abuse. They are deprived of their liberty and their dignity. They are exploited and abused on British soil. Whether a UK citizen or a foreign national, they deserve care to recover and we cannot leave them subject to that exploitation. The point I keep coming back to is that victims in this category hold the key to the prosecution of the very traffickers we are after. We should not lose sight of that. If the inadvertent result of these changes to the Bill and the Bill itself is that victims are fearful of coming forward to give evidence, partly because the presumption is that they will leave the country, and partly because they do not have enough time to feel settled and protected to be able to give evidence—I think the police know this and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead has quoted from a police statement—it will reduce the number of prosecutions, damage our case and act as an opponent, as it were, of the idea of sending a message to traffickers that their game is up.
All the evidence shows that, with appropriate consistent support, more victims engage with investigations and prosecutions, providing the vital information that brings criminals to justice. Support needs to come first to create that stability, otherwise they will not feel safe. If we put ourselves in their situation, we would not give evidence either if we thought that the next stage would be to go out of the country, where the traffickers would catch us and our families and others being abused. So it will get harder to get convictions.
I am pleased my right hon. Friend the Minister accepted there may be consequences, although we need to go further than “may”. There will be consequences as a result of the legislation. I do not believe that the Government want victims of modern slavery to be trafficked. I do not think they want the Modern Slavery Act 2015 to be damaged. In the minds of those in the Home Office, I think there is a genuine dislike of that legislation and a wish to blame it for excesses, but there is no evidence of that. Only 6% of those who claim to be victims of modern slavery have come across on boats.
First and foremost, there is not a huge, great swell. Secondly, the Nationality and Borders Act that preceded this Bill has tightened up on all the elements that claimants have to provide to show that that is the case. The rules are already tighter, and I suspect that will lead to fewer cases already. The question is, what is the point of putting these elements into the Bill, because they are in the previous Act, and we have still not seen the effects? We are putting at risk the prosecution of all those traffickers and bringing them to justice, for something that almost certainly will not happen. If it did happen, there is plenty of scope for that evidence to come forward through statutory instruments if necessary, but I do not believe that will be the case.
I am told endlessly that people will come and give false claims, but let me remind Members that referrals can be made only by official first responders who suspect that the person is a victim. In 2022, 49% of referrals were made by Government agencies— it is ironic that the Government themselves decided who were the victims. The idea that any person could come forward and suddenly say, “I’m a victim,” and therefore get lots of time, is not the case. The test of evidence is tough.
We should remember that our amendment is about those who are trafficked and abused here in the UK. That means that the evidence base will almost certainly be incredibly strong, because it is based around what we know to exist here in the UK. I understand that it is difficult when people are trafficked from abroad, but we are talking about people in the UK and their evidence is clear to all of us. Under the changes made to the national referral mechanism statutory guidance on 30 January 2023—which, again, we have yet to see the full effects of—the threshold for a positive reasonable grounds decision has been raised to require objective evidence of exploitation. This is an unnecessary element of the Bill because we have yet to see the effect of the previous Act, which I believe is already having an impact, as do the police.
Other Members want to speak, so I will conclude my comments by saying that we should proceed with caution when it comes to modern day slavery. I am deeply proud of what we did and what my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead brought through, because it deals with victims, who cannot speak for themselves and are being used and abused by others. We were the first country in the world to do so, and others have followed suit. We need to send the right signals. The problem with the Bill is that it unnecessarily targets a group of people who are not the problem. They will suffer and, ironically, we will fail as a Government in home affairs because the police simply will not be able to get those prosecutions. On every ground, it is wrong.
Government amendment 95 is a disastrous attempt to make it almost impossible for anyone in the country to feel confident before they give evidence. I ask the Government to make it clear at the end of the debate that they will take this issue away, genuinely look at the unintended consequences and make that case to us, before we vote on their amendment.
Alison Thewliss
I will speak to the amendments that stand in my name and those of my hon. Friends. It is interesting to follow the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). Given his concerns about the Bill, I hope that he will join us in the Division Lobby later, because I do not expect that he will get the assurances that he hopes for from the Minister.
The Bill remains an affront to human decency and to our obligations to our fellow human beings. It rips up hard-won international protections and is in breach of the European convention on human rights, the refugee convention, the Council of Europe’s convention on action against trafficking in human beings and the UN convention on the rights of the child. The Children and Young People’s Commissioner of Scotland has said that the Illegal Migration Bill
“represents a direct assault on the concept of universality of human rights and the rule of law.”
Organisations have lined up to condemn the Bill, from the UNHCR, Liberty, Amnesty International, trade unions and medical bodies. It seeks to turn ships’ captains and train drivers into border guards, and it creates a sub-class of people in immigration limbo forever.
This refugee ban Bill is based on myths, mistruths and the myopic pursuit of clicks and tabloid headlines. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the wild claims made by the Home Secretary and her acolytes. The Bill will not meet its stated aims, but it will cost lives. It fails to provide safe and legal routes, and it will cause untold suffering. It diminishes the UK in the eyes of the world and it yanks on the thread that will unravel refugee protections across the world.
The Bill delivers people who have been trafficked back into the hands of those who would exploit them. In his article published this morning in ConservativeHome, the Immigration Minister descended yet further, speaking of those with “different lifestyles and values” cannibalising compassion. That is not a dog whistle but a foghorn.
The process by which the Government have brought forward the Illegal Migration Bill is an insult to democracy and to the House. It has been rushed through without a full Committee stage or evidence sessions—no evidence whatsoever from the Government about the things they have put forward. Swathes of Government amendments have been brought forward today in haste, but there has not yet been an impact assessment, even at this very late stage. It is unacceptable that we are being asked to vote on something without an impact assessment.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) has requested an impact assessment umpteen times in the House and via a freedom of information request, but nothing has yet been forthcoming. I know the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) has also been tirelessly pursuing an impact assessment of the Bill. It is testimony to the Government’s dogged evasion of scrutiny, not to their lack of effort, that that has been fruitless.
As Members of Parliament, we are guarantors of rights. The SNP’s amendment 45 seeks to hold the UK Government to their international obligations—how utterly bizarre and reprehensible that we even have to introduce an amendment to ensure that—and to attempt to have the provisions in the Bill line up with convention rights in the UN refugee convention, the European convention on action against trafficking, the UN convention on the rights of the child and the UN convention relating to the status of stateless persons.
Anyone reading the UNHCR legal observations on the Illegal Migration Bill can plainly see how far the UK Government are deviating from international norms. Those observations say:
“The Bill all but extinguishes the right to claim asylum in the UK…breaches the UK’s obligations towards stateless people under international law…would lead to violations of the principle of non-refoulement…would deny refugees and stateless people access to their rights under international law.”
They go on to say that the Bill violates article 31(1) and 31(2) of the UN refugee convention and international human rights law,
“puts at risk the safety and welfare of children”
and
“would increase the pressure on the UK asylum system”.
What an atrocious mess this Government are making.
Further to this condemnation from the UNHCR, the Council of Europe’s group of experts on action against trafficking in human beings stressed that, if adopted, the Bill would run contrary to the United Kingdom’s obligations under the anti-trafficking convention to prevent human trafficking and to identify and protect victims of trafficking, without discrimination.
The Home Secretary appears to misunderstand the very nature of modern slavery and human trafficking, as right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Benches have outlined. Perhaps that could be accounted for by the lack of an independent anti-slavery commissioner, as the post has now been standing vacant for a year. The previous holder of the post, Professor Dame Sara Thornton, gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee last week on how the national referral mechanism actually works. I suggest the Immigration Minister should have read that evidence before coming to the House with such proposals as he has today.
New clause 26 replaces the placeholder clause 51 and gives the Government the power to ignore interim measures from the European Court of Human Rights and remove people who would otherwise have not been removed. The clause hands powers to Government Ministers to unilaterally decide whether the UK should uphold its international obligations. Liberty has described this as a concerning shift of power away from Parliament and towards the Executive. Yet again we are seeing the stripping away of crucial checks and balances—another Westminster power grab that has become a hallmark of this Government.
I tell you what this is really about, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is about setting up a fight with the European Court of Human Rights. It is about setting out to breach international law. It is about sleight of hand and deflection from the Conservatives’ failure to get a grip on the immigration backlog that they created. They think that if the public are somehow distracted by judges in their jammies, they will forget about the incompetence of the Minister. I give my constituents and people up and down these islands more credit than that—their heids don’t button up the back.
One of the most egregious aspects of the Bill is its impact on children. The Children’s Commissioners are crystal clear about the harm that it will cause; the Minister should heed their calls. The Scottish National party is happy to support new clauses 2 and 3 on pregnancy, given the impact on both the mother and the child in the circumstances; amendments 2 and 3 and new clause 14 on safe and legal routes and family reunion for children; amendment 5 on unaccompanied children; and new clause 4 on an independent child trafficking guardian.
Lia Nici (Great Grimsby) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady recognise that it works both ways? I have a constituent who offered her home to a “17-year-old” asylum-seeking young man. He had all the benefits of being under 19, but then he revealed that on his next birthday he would be 24. We need to talk openly and fairly about the safeguarding issues, both for our own children and for children coming from other countries.
Alison Thewliss
The hon. Member makes an interesting point, but the fact is that the medical professionals just do not support the methods that the Government are suggesting to determine age.
Alison Thewliss
Is the right hon. Member going to disagree with the British Dental Association?
Sir John Hayes
The hon. Lady will know that I tabled an amendment in Committee which the Government have now refashioned and tabled on Report, precisely because there is a pedigree for such testing across European countries. Many European countries routinely use such testing to establish whether children are actually children and to avoid the eventualities that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici) has just mentioned.
Alison Thewliss
The British Dental Association, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and Unison’s experts disagree with the right hon. Member. These are professionals. [Interruption.] The Minister is laughing on the Front Bench and denigrating a trade union. Given the Government’s current position with respect to industrial disputes, I do not think that that is particularly wise of him. He might want to think about that.
I acknowledge Government amendments 134 and 136, but I am afraid I have real problems trusting the Government, because detaining children is wrong: that is the fundamental point here. The Government want to make regulations specifying the circumstances in which unaccompanied children should be detained, and further regulations on time limits. They do not have the courage to put those proposals into the Bill, and they know that we cannot amend statutory instruments should they deign to introduce them at some point in the future. We do not trust them to do the right thing here, because children are children, and it would be extremely harmful for them to be detained.
We tabled amendment 47 to try to humanise the Bill. Much has been said about hordes of people coming here and trying to claim asylum, but this, fundamentally, is about individual people, many of them fleeing circumstances that Conservative Members cannot even imagine. Accordingly, the amendment seeks to disapply the provision in clause 2 from people in a range of categories. The first, in subsection (a), covers
“a person who was under the age of 18 when they arrived in the UK”,
such as Shireen, whom I mentioned earlier, and many others like him.
Subsection (b) refers to a person from Afghanistan
“where there is a real risk of persecution or serious harm…if returned to that country”.
In Committee, I tried to personalise my amendments by putting a name to each of them. I could call this “Sabir’s amendment”, after Sabir Zazai, the chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council. He came here as a child in the back of a lorry, but he would be prevented from so doing, criminalised and removed to Rwanda if the Government had their way. He makes an outstanding contribution to Scotland. He has two letters which he said he would put on the wall in his house. One is from the Home Office, saying, “You are a person liable to be detained and removed.” The second was sent on behalf of the royal family when he was awarded the OBE.
Subsection (c) specifies
“ a person who is a refugee under the Refugee Convention or in need of humanitarian protection”.
That would cover many people who are currently fleeing from Sudan. Earlier, the Minister failed to identify a proper “safe and legal” route—
Alison Thewliss
No, the Minister did not do that. What he has done is push this on to those at the UNHCR, who say that it is not their job. They have also said that the tiny minority, the 1%, who manage to gain access to its relocation scheme are not suitable, in that there is not enough in that very small scheme to replace a functional asylum system.
My constituent Ilios is a British citizen whose wife and son are trapped in Sudan and are unable to obtain their documents because the British Embassy staff are out of the country, although they now have the right to travel. Will they be able to come to the UK safely through some other mechanism? Will it be possible for people who happen to be in Sudan with refugee travel documents, perhaps with family members visiting there, to be evacuated by the UK forces? The position remains unclear.
Subsection (d) refers to
“ a person…where there is a real risk of persecution or serious harm on grounds of sexual orientation if”
that person
“were to be removed in accordance with this section”.
I recently had a call with LGBT rights activists in Uganda, which is introducing brutal laws to persecute LGBT people, up to the point of the death penalty. People are terrified over there. They are talking about mob justice, and of families being at risk as a result of even knowing that their loved ones are LGBT. If they were able to escape Uganda and come here, there would be no means under the Bill to prevent the Government from sending them back rather than protecting them, so we seek to put that protection into the Bill.
Subsection (e) covers
“a person who, there are reasonable grounds to suspect, is a victim of torture”.
In Committee I mentioned Kolbassia, who founded Survivors Speak OUT. I talk to people in my constituency surgeries who have been victims of torture. They deserve protection; they do not deserve this Bill.
Subsection (f) refers to “a Ukraine citizen”. There is no Ivan or Oksara who needs to come here in a boat, because there is a safe and legal route: they can come here perfectly legally, without having to resort to that. We should be making that route available to more people.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
I am listening closely to what the hon. Lady is saying. When I was the Children’s Minister, every single local authority in Scotland bar one was refusing to take any unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Why?
Alison Thewliss
The right hon. Lady may not be as well-informed as she hopes she is. Every single local authority in Scotland took people under the Syria scheme and they were proud to do so. We took a greater proportion than the rest of the UK. We would be willing to take more people if the Home Office would only honour its side of the bargain. The Minister is looking at me askance, but the Home Office is choosing where people go. The Home Office is booking hotels. The Home Office is not working with local government in Scotland to do this properly, and I can tell him that it is not working properly with local elected Members. I am aware of plans to put an asylum hotel in my constituency—[Interruption.] The Minister asks me if I am opposing it. I would not know, because he has not given me the details of it. I have known about it since January, but he has not even bothered to get in touch with me as the local elected Member to discuss it. It is absolutely ridiculous.
Subsection (g) of amendment 47 relates to
“a person who, there are reasonable grounds to suspect, is a victim of trafficking or modern slavery”.
I mentioned at a previous stage of the Bill that this could be Eva’s amendment. She is a survivor who was helped and supported by the Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance —TARA—in my constituency. She came here and ended up being trapped in sex work. Those people deserve particular help and support, but it will be denied to them under this Bill. Services such as TARA will find it difficult to operate once the Bill passes.
Subsection (h) refers to exempting
“a person who has family members in the United Kingdom”.
We could call this Ibrahim’s amendment. He is a constituent of mine who had family stuck in Iran. He has found it very difficult to get them here. People should not have to wait in situations of danger for the Home Office eventually to get round to processing their applications, because for many it is a situation of life and death. They cannot wait for the Iranian authorities or the Taliban to come and find them. They cannot wait to be persecuted or tortured or killed. People are fleeing for their lives and the Home Office’s very slow decision making puts people at risk.
Subsection (i) refers to a
“person who meets the definition of an ‘adult at risk’ in paragraph 7 of the Home Office guidance on adults at risk in immigration detention (2016), including in particular people suffering from a condition, or who have experienced a traumatic event (such as trafficking, torture or sexual violence), that would be likely to render them particularly vulnerable to harm.”
I have talked previously about Priya, a trafficking survivor who was detained in Yarl’s Wood when she was pregnant and unable to access the services that would have kept her safe. There are many people like that, and under this legislation we will see more women, including pregnant women, being locked up in immigration detention.
Government amendment 95 states that
“it is not necessary for the person to be present in the United Kingdom”
to give evidence regarding trafficking. Professor Dame Sara Thornton, the former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, gave evidence on this to the Home Affairs Committee last week. She said that asking people to give evidence after they had been removed from the UK would be “astonishingly difficult operationally”, “complex and complicated” and “very challenging indeed”. I would question the very efficacy of this process, because there is no recognition of the difficulties that it would cause. Co-operation with people once they have moved away will be practically very difficult, as will dealing with police forces in other parts of the world. It is unclear what level of co-operation will be required to get some kind of exemption to this requirement to give evidence after removal. What will those “compelling circumstances” be? There is also no recognition of the trauma that this will cause to people.
Dr Katarina Schwartz of the Rights Lab presented evidence to the Home Affairs Committee this morning on the impact that this proposal could have on prosecutions. She said that
“if a survivor is heavily traumatised and being questioned by the police, they will not be able to give good testimony”.
She also said that
“the impact of decreasing support for survivors on both their own experiences of recovery and integration and on their inability to testify is enormous”.
She spoke about the benefits to the person, to the prosecutions and economically to the UK of doing it right and of having people come through a process and do well from it.
This is a dangerous, atrocious Bill. It rips up rights, it undermines our international obligations and it rides roughshod over devolution. It puts children at risk and it places those who have been trafficked more firmly than ever back into the hands of the exploiters, who will more easily avoid prosecution due to the measures in this tawdry Bill. It will not work. We will amend it, but we know that amendments are not enough to fix this unfixable Bill. We know in Scotland that better things are possible, and we wholeheartedly reject this Bill. We are appalled at its imposition against the will of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government. We on the SNP Benches say it loud and clear: refugees are welcome here. We reject this fascist, dystopian assault on human rights.
Robert Jenrick
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and return the compliment. It is important that we in the Government listen to the expertise we have among Members from all parties. I hope Members will agree that that is the approach we are taking to these sensitive issues, of which age assessment is certainly one. I do not want to see a situation in which young adults are regularly coming into the UK illegally, posing as children, and ending up in our schools, in foster-care families and in unaccompanied-minor hotels, living cheek by jowl with genuine children. That is an evil that we have to stamp out, and the approach we are taking in the Bill will help us to do so.
The third issue that was the subject of debate and, again, a high degree of unity—certainly on the Government Benches, but perhaps more broadly—is the approach to safe and legal routes. We want to stop the boats; we also want to ensure that the United Kingdom continues to be one of the most respected countries in the world for the way in which we provide sanctuary to people who are genuinely in need. We are doing that already, as evidenced by the fact that since 2015, half a million people have come into our country legally on humanitarian grounds. We have safe and legal routes today, but I appreciate the views of a number of right hon. and hon. Members, including most notably my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham.
That has led us to the agreement that we will rapidly bring forward the consultation with local authorities that grounds the desire of this House to be generous with the reality on the ground in our communities and councils. Within six months, we will bring forward the report that will result from that consultation, and as soon as possible over the course of next year, we will set up or expand the existing safe and legal routes so that the UK can be an even greater force for good in the world. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) laughs at that—of course, Scotland could step up to the plate as well. Since she tempts me, I will just say that her and her colleagues asked for an extension to today’s debate, but as far as I am aware, only two spoke in it. Fewer SNP Members spoke in the debate than could fit into Nicola Sturgeon’s battle bus.
Alison Thewliss
Is the Minister aware of the fact that other SNP Members had put their names in for this debate because it was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but the Government changed the timing at the last minute?
Robert Jenrick
I find that rather unconvincing, given that so many were able to turn up earlier. It does rather reinforce the point that the Scottish National party’s approach to these issues is entirely performative: they talk the talk, but they do not act. On this occasion, we did not even get the talk.
Alison Thewliss
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. We have just passed a Bill for which the Home Secretary is unable to make a declaration under section 19 of the Human Rights Act 1998 that it will be compatible. Others have suggested that it will break the refugee convention, the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings, the United Nations convention on the rights of the child and the UN convention relating to the status of stateless persons. I seek your guidance, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am sure that none of our constituents sent us to this place to break the law, and it seems to me that we have perhaps done so in voting for the Illegal Migration Bill. Given that we have a very special duty in this place to be guarantors of human rights in this Parliament, collectively and individually, can you advise what we might do?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order and forward notice of it. I can only respond to the bits for which the Chair is responsible, and I am content that the House has proceeded perfectly properly, but her comments are on the record.