Borders and Asylum

Andrew Pakes Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

This Government have managed to get the agreement with France in place—that pilot agreement that we seek to build. France, obviously, is not the country where most of the people passing through started from, so it is effectively a third-country agreement that we have already put in place and are now working to implement on a pilot basis. We are also working with other European countries to explore returns hubs. But what we do not think is the right thing to do is have an incredibly expensive programme that sent just four volunteers and, during the two years-plus that it was in operation, ended up costing £700 million while 84,000 people arrived in the UK.

[Andrew Pakes (Peterborough) (Lab)]

Peterborough is a proud and generous place and has welcomed many people through its doors over generations. I pay tribute to the churches, mosques and community groups that are welcoming people and looking after them. But people are getting fed up with a system that is broken, and it was broken before my right hon. Friend became Home Secretary. Many of my constituents will welcome the record deportations and the focus on article 8 and making efficiencies in driving forward the system. But to be honest, the biggest issue in my constituency remains the hotel that was opened by Serco with no consultation with the police or the council beforehand. Can my right hon. Friend assure me that she will ensure that there is no single bureaucratic block and no stone left unturned in getting the Dragonfly hotel closed as soon as possible, as part of fixing this rotten, broken system?

[Yvette Cooper]

We have made it clear that we need to end all asylum hotels, including the hotel in my hon. Friend’s constituency. It is because we believe in the UK’s long history of helping those fleeing persecution and conflict in an ordered way that we also need to get control and fix the chaos that we inherited, including ending asylum hotels, which are undermining confidence in the whole system and were introduced exactly because the previous Government lost control of the system. That is what now needs to be turned around, and those are the foundations we are putting in place.