Asylum Reforms: Protected Characteristics

Debate between Carla Lockhart and John McDonnell

Wednesday 17th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I have no time limit, Dr Huq, but I have only a limited number of questions. This debate is sparsely attended, but I do not think the Minister should interpret that as a lack of interest in the issue. It might well be because of where we are at in the parliamentary cycle—it is the day before our break, and there might not be the whipping on this penultimate day that there is on other days. In addition, people might not have understood the breadth of the potential of this debate when we talk about protected characteristics.

I want to talk about the protected characteristic of age, which includes children and young people. We identified age as a protected characteristic and we have signed up to the UN convention on the rights of the child. A group of 100 organisations, the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium, have come together to provide an excellent briefing—I will send to the Minister, if he has not received it. Their main objective is to protect the rights and safety of young migrants and refugee children. I do not think I can get across the depth of concern among those who have been engaged in dealing with refugee children in particular over the years.

I have to say—I am trying to be as diplomatic as I can on this—that some of the language used by Ministers has been a disgrace. A Minister putting out tweets saying, “Deport. Deport. Deport.”, does not reflect what we are about across the House and all parties. That is not what we are intending to do. We are trying to uphold the British tradition of welcoming people here who seek sanctuary and to put in place a system that deals with their needs. Many of us have argued that the best way of doing that is safe routes, fast processing and more support for integration. I am not sure, and I think many people are anxious about this, that some of the statements made by Ministers reflect the view of the House overall—as I say, across all parties. I regret that. I was shocked even by some of the language used by the Secretary of State on the day that the statement on asylum policy was made.

Maybe I have repeated this too often, but in my constituency, I have two detention centres, and I have been dealing with them now since when I was a councillor in the Greater London Council—40 years. There are 2,500 asylum seekers in hotels in my constituency, and I welcome them. My community has held together very well on that; we rub together pretty well. There have been some recent demonstrations in one small area of my constituency, but that has largely been provoked by outsiders pursuing their own political ambitions. Overall, we have welcomed asylum seekers.

I congratulate my community on the work that they have put in. Various local community organisations and religious groups, across the whole field of religion, have provided support. From that experience, when we have discussed over the years those who have suffered the most, in many instances it has always been the children. I welcome Government Ministers to sit down with some of the professionals who are working with these children. I declare an interest: my wife is an educational psychologist and she works in the schools in our community that asylum children go to. Many of these children are deeply traumatised by their experience in their country of origin and by their journey here. Now they are being traumatised by some of the treatment they are receiving as a result of some of the political campaigns going on in our society.

There can be nothing worse for a child or family than to look out of their hotel window and see baying crowds outside, demanding that they go or that they be evicted. A few weeks ago, we even had a group of masked men who turned up at one of these hotels and tried to break into it. The police valiantly addressed that situation, but some of them were injured as a result.

Those children have gone through experiences that none of us would ever want our own children to go through. I am worried that we are in the process of introducing reforms that could retraumatise them in a way that some of them will never recover from.

The Government are on the first steps of the path of the new system that they are proposing, but a lot more debate and discussion needs to take place. I think this debate is about trying to make it clear to the Government some of the issues that we need more information about and that need to be addressed in a much wider-ranging consultation, not only with MPs, but with those on the frontline who have to deal with them.

Basically, I have five specific issues that I want to raise today. The first is indefinite leave. The second is family reunion and the third, linked to that, the review of article 8, which we have been told will happen. The fourth is financial support and the final one is appeals. I am sorry if some of what I am about to say repeats anything that has already been mentioned by other hon. Members.

On indefinite leave, the Government are now introducing this core protection status. I chair the Public and Commercial Services Union parliamentary group. PCS includes the civil service workers who process these claims, and I have not yet met one of them who thinks we have the ability or resources in place to conduct a review of every case every two and a half years, because that is what we are talking about. We cannot process the cases as they are now.

I congratulate the Government on the work that they are doing to speed up the processing. The reason we are in such difficulty is that the previous Government had started to speed up the process—I actually went on to the Floor of the House and congratulated a Tory Minister on doing so—but then they introduced the Rwanda scheme and everything stopped. It is no wonder that we now have a backlog. This Government are speeding up the processing, which I welcome, but then to load on to that system a new review every two and a half years—it just cannot be done. No one believes that it can be done. The proposal has no credibility

There is also the issue with regard to the individual country reviews. Exactly as the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) said, it is about more than individual countries; we are talking about case-by-case reviews, which will be necessary. In addition, some of the Foreign Office assessments of individual countries are either out of date, or do not reflect the reality of what is happening on the ground there now. As a result, the system will place people here in positions of immense vulnerability.

We should try to walk in that child’s footsteps. What will it be like for that child to know that, every 30 months, they will not necessarily be going to the same school, living in the same place, or having the same friends, but will risk being shipped back to a country of origin that some of them barely know? We need to think.

The hon. Member talked about working with those who are trauma-experienced. It is vital that the Government now do that, and sit down to discuss with professionals in this field the worries and fears that they have. Indeed, it is also worth the Government sitting down with some of the asylum seekers themselves, just to get an understanding of what they have gone through: the trauma that they have experienced is not only caused by what happened in their country of origin; the traumatising journey that they have had to make is also bad and, as I have said, when they get here they have been faced, under previous Governments in particular, with a “hostile environment”. That insecurity has led to deep psychological concerns. For us to revisit all that on children on a regular basis is cruel as well as unworkable.

Regarding the process itself, I still have not got my head around the way people can qualify for reduced routes—the five-year route, or the 15-year route. There is real anxiety that, if anyone receives any form of public assistance by way of social security, benefits or even accommodation, they will somehow be debarred from the 20-year route. There was even an example reported in the press a few weeks ago where someone had been trying to borrow money to pay back the benefits that they thought they had received because that would disqualify them and force them into the 20-year route. There needs to be a great deal more clarity about how that works.

As the hon. Member said, 92% to 93% of family reunion visas—I think about 1,200—in the last year were for wives and children. In my experience of dealing with asylum seekers over the years, the family has simply sat down and taken the decision that it will be the male who will seek refuge first because they are concerned that the female and the children will not survive the route. If we consider our own families, that is exactly what we would do: we would try to get at least someone to safety, and often it would be the one who has the best overall chance of surviving. Once that person is here, they want their family to join them. That is not exploiting the system; that is how the system should work. That is how refugee systems work across the world. By denying any element of family reunion—I look forward to the detail of the review on that—we are penalising the child by preventing them from being with their parents in the future.

[Carla Lockhart]

I have to disagree with the right hon. Member. I believe that if he were fleeing a war-torn country, he would want to see his wife and family—particularly his family—brought to safety first. Sadly, we do not see that. We see young males making that trip. That is not right and they should be sent back.

[John McDonnell]

The hon. Lady and I will have to disagree on that. In my experience, the decision for the male to come here is often made on the basis of the family itself asking, “Who can get here? Who can survive that journey? Who can get through?”. That provides some hope that the family can join them. There is a difference with those that move into the next country in close proximity—but, again, we have to fulfil our responsibility to the whole family. I am concerned that if we start in any way undermining that right to family reunion, the people who will be penalised most will be the children deprived of being brought up with their parents.

We are told that the article 8 review will take place in 2026. It would be invaluable to have the earliest and broadest consultation possible. Exactly as the hon. Member for Aberdeen North said, we need early impact assessments on all the decisions being made so that we have the detail of what the impact could be. We can consult the wider public. A lot of false information goes out into communities about the whole asylum process and causes resentment. If we are going to review article 8, we need to explain how it operates now, what its intentions are, what changes could be made when it is reviewed and what impact that would have. I am hoping that the review is about beneficial impact, rather than being a prejudicial attempt to prevent family reunion from taking place overall.

Let me explain very crudely my anxieties about financial support. The Government are going to revoke the legal duty to provide housing and financial support and make it discretionary for some bodies. I have a Conservative council. Its housing policy at the moment has changed the length of time that someone has to be within the area. It was five years; it is now 10 years to be able to even get on the housing waiting list. As a result, I have families who wait 10 years and, by the time a property is allocated to them some of their children have grown up and they no longer qualify as a family. We go through that process. If we make it discretionary, we need to know from the Government what happens to the organisations, such as my council, that are not willing to fulfil some basic duties and responsibilities.

I have one final point—I can see, Dr Huq, that you are getting anxious about time. On the replacement of judges with adjudicators in appeals, we need to see the detail, such as adjudicators’ qualification and training, and how they will be selected and monitored. The adjudicator is only one process, however. Unless there is proper representation and resourcing, particularly of legal aid access, the system will grind to a halt, there will be bad decisions and we will be back to appeals. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North said, the bulk of victories will be on appeal because the system is not working effectively. I hope for a response from the Government and for detailed consultation, as rapidly as possible, on all these matters.