Windrush Compensation Scheme

David Lammy Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

We received some 1,400 responses to the consultation, which is high for any consultation, and we wanted to ensure that they were all considered carefully. We worked closely with Martin Forde and others and wanted to ensure that the systems were in place from day one when the compensation scheme went live. Now that it is live, we will be able to process claims quickly.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Will the Home Secretary undertake to publicise the scheme as widely as the EU settlement scheme? Will he ensure that there is no use of non-disclosure agreements around how much compensation people get? Many people were driven into poverty and therefore crime as a consequence of the scandal, so will he say whether people with criminal convictions will still be entitled to use the scheme?

[Sajid Javid]

We will absolutely publicise the scheme widely. Indeed, the right hon. Gentleman, who is committed to providing justice for the Windrush generation, can help me by using his Twitter feed, and there are other ways of helping more people to know about this scheme. There will be no non-disclosure agreements under this scheme, and people with criminal convictions are entitled to use it. The details state that if individuals with serious convictions apply, the Government reserve the right to change the amount of compensation or not pay it altogether, but generally no one is barred owing to a criminal conviction.

Knife Crime

David Lammy Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My right hon. Friend has raised an important issue involving co-ordination and the need to make the most of the resources that are there. Last September I launched the national county lines co-ordination centre, which was intended to ensure that police forces and the National Crime Agency worked together. It is early days, but, having visited three police forces across the country over the last few weeks to see how the system was working, I know that it is bringing real results through co-ordination.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

The public health approach in Scotland also involved a cross-party approach, with much of the work beginning under Labour and continuing under the Scottish National party. The whole House wants the Home Secretary to succeed, but we have been on alert since Tanesha Melbourne-Blake was killed in my constituency on bank holiday Monday almost a year ago.

I am grateful to the Home Secretary for allowing me to be part of the taskforce in that cross-party spirit, but the questions today are really about the Government’s grip, because of what we heard from the Health Secretary this morning. What more can the Government do? I ask that question particularly because county lines is being driven by a demand for drugs, and we have cut our Border Force as a result of austerity.

[Sajid Javid]

First, let me thank the right hon. Gentleman for the work that he does, in the taskforce and elsewhere, in combating and helping to combat serious violence. He is right about the importance of a cross-governmental approach, and of ensuring that all parts of Government are joined up.

The right hon. Gentleman understandably raised the issue of drugs and drug seizures, and he mentioned the Border Force. Last year, the amount of class A drugs seized by Border Force was threefold higher than in the previous year, so it is up. That said, the volume of these types of drugs across the world has increased dramatically, and that is leading to some of the gang warfare we are seeing, especially the spread of county lines. So more needs to be done: more needs to be done both through the public health approach but also the other interventions I have just set out.

Serious Violence

David Lammy Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. I have worked with the Home Secretary and the Minister on these issues, and I am grateful to them for extending an invitation to me to the serious violence taskforce.

[Sajid Javid]

May I take this opportunity to thank the right hon. Gentleman for his membership of the serious violence taskforce and the hugely important contribution he makes?

[Mr Lammy]

I am grateful to the Home Secretary for that.

This is a very serious issue. Over the almost 20 years that I have been in public life, very sadly, I have had to comfort far too many parents who have lost their children to violence. In fact, when I reflect on my career one day, and this is an apposite day on which to say this, as a member of the serious violence taskforce moves off in a different direction—I am of course thinking of the hon. Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna)—it is right to say that two cases stand out in my mind. The first is the young woman, Pauline Peart, who, at the beginning of my political career back in 2003, was shot in a car in my constituency and lost her life. The other was on bank holiday last year, when a young woman, Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, was also shot and killed.

It is right to say that that event sparked the current national concern about violent crime in our country. At that point, there was a lot of comment about the murder rate in London overtaking that of New York. I do not think we are quite in that place, but it nevertheless caused tremendous alarm. I think it was because it was a young woman who found herself in those circumstances, just having walked out of her home with a friend to go a newsagent’s, and lost her life, that it caused such concern on that public holiday.

I guess the important thing in such a debate—this subject is probably the one I have spoken about more than other subject in this Chamber and in this House—is to ask: is the situation getting worse, is it stable or is it getting better? My judgment is that we have not got over the problem, and the situation feels significantly worse over the last period than it has done in the past. I have seen other spikes. I recall the spike back in 2008, and I remember that Ken Livingstone was the Mayor of London, but lost his post in part because crime became a very central issue in the campaign. There have been spikes over this period, but we are clearly in the grip of something at the moment.

I want to reflect briefly on some of the contexts of this spike and the national concern. The first is that, once upon a time—when I started, we talked about yardie gangs and Operation Trident had just been set up—I really thought this problem, which we had imported almost from downtown America, would go. It does not feel like that today; sadly, it feels almost a permanent feature of our urban life, and of course it has spread to areas that are very different from my own constituency. That is the first context that is very disturbing.

Why is that? We tend to focus on the violence and on the knives and the guns, but the real issue that drives much of this is not the knives or the guns. It is drugs, money and demand, as well as the increasing quality of cocaine across our country and the drop in price of that product. It is prolific, and I was first struck by how prolific it is when sitting in Highbury magistrates court behind a young man—I think he was 17—who had been arrested for trafficking that drug on county lines, and I was staggered that he had been arrested in Aberdeen. What was my young constituent doing in Aberdeen, when I have never been to Aberdeen? I wish that I had been to Aberdeen, but I have not been there. I thought, “Why was he there?” He was there because it turns out there is quite a rich market for cocaine in Aberdeen. There is a middle-class life, with some money and some spend, and like a lot of places here in London and a lot of parts of our country, cocaine is particularly rife.

I welcome the review by Dame Carol Black that has been announced. This does open broader questions about drugs in our country, about the war on drugs and its failure, about our position and the repositioning of public policy on drugs, and—I have to raise this with the Home Secretary—the successive cuts in our Border Force. If we want enforcement on drugs and not to relax our position—although I think that is highly unlikely for cocaine—we have to police our borders.

When I met people at the National Crime Agency recently, they explained that they cannot possibly prevent the vast majority of drugs from coming into this country, although they do their best. Our Border Force is seriously stretched to police the market that is coming across the Atlantic, up through Spain, or across from Holland.

Drugs are the first major issue, and then it collides. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), the Opposition spokesman, has raised this, and I hate it being such a partisan issue, but there are real issues at a local authority level. Local authorities set the strategies for youth. They set the strategies for youth violence. They do it alongside the police—we turn to the police so often—but much of this falls to local authorities. My sense—I got around a lot when I was doing the review for the Government on the disproportionality of the criminal justice system for black and ethnic minorities—is that it is patchy across the country. It is not just patchy in terms of strategy and approach, but in terms of resource to address some of the problems, so investment in new services is important. It certainly means that issues such as how the pupil referral units are working and how alternative provision is working are central to this discussion.

The subject has come up in the serious violence taskforce and I remain concerned about the amount of young people who are effectively excluded from school, who are not getting an effective education and who are falling into the hands of adults who are exploiting them. That takes us to another issue: how do we address not the young people but the grown men who are exploiting them and trafficking them across the country? Is the law robust enough to send the message to these modern-day pimps—because that is how we should describe them—who are exploiting these young people in this way? The frustration is that we can go back quite a number of years, back to Dickens, and there will always be adults there to exploit young people. We have to bear down very hard on them.

The other colliding force affecting all young people across our country is of course social media and technology and, in this context, some of the rabbit holes down which young people can go in relation to particular types of music and particular types of violence. My concern is that much of that remains heavily unregulated and voluntarily policed by the industry. We have to do more to protect young people. It affects all young people. We see it in terms of suicide, anorexia, bulimia and those sorts of mental health issues among young people. In this area, it has a bearing on some of the increase in violent crime as well. I look forward to continuing to work with the Home Secretary, but there are issues with funding. It does not all fall to the police. The local context is important, and I am very concerned about the rise in drugs in this country, the rising market and the need to fully grip what we, as a nation, are to do about it.

Windrush Scheme

David Lammy Excerpts

Tuesday 5th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Home Secretary to make a statement on the operation of the Windrush scheme.

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sajid Javid)]

Righting the wrongs done to the Windrush generation has been at the forefront of my priorities as Home Secretary. That is why I apologised on behalf of this Government and our predecessors. History shows that members of the Windrush generation, who have done so much to enrich our country, were wrongly caught up in measures designed to tackle illegal migration long before 2010. We all bear some responsibility for that. This Government are acting to right that wrong. Our Windrush taskforce is helping those who have been affected. We are making it easier for those affected to stay and we have waived all fees. By the end of last year, some 2,450 individuals had been given documentation confirming their status. They were all helped by the taskforce which we set up in April. At least 3,400 have been granted citizenship under the Windrush scheme, which we opened on 30 May 2018.

The taskforce’s vulnerable persons team has provided support to 614 individuals, with 52 cases ongoing, and it continues to receive up to 20 new referrals each week. The taskforce has made 215 referrals to the Department for Work and Pensions to help people to restore or receive benefits, 177 individuals have been given advice and support on issues relating to housing, and 164 individuals have been identified by the historical cases review unit. Eighteen people have been identified who we consider to have suffered detriment due to their right to be in the UK not being recognised. Sadly, three of them are now deceased. I have written to the remaining 15 to apologise.

As part of putting right what has gone wrong, we are putting in place a compensation scheme to address the losses suffered by those affected. We have consulted on this to ensure we get it right, and we will bring forward more detail on the final shape of the compensation scheme as soon as possible, having carefully considered the views submitted. In December, the Home Office also published a policy for providing support in urgent and exceptional circumstances. This set out the approach and decision-making process for such cases. The policy will support those who have an urgent and exceptional need, and compelling reasons for why they cannot wait for the full compensation scheme.

Mr Speaker, I said on the day I became Home Secretary that I am determined to right the wrongs suffered by members of the Windrush generation. Let there be no doubt: my commitment remains resolute.

[Mr Lammy]

Home Secretary, I have asked you to make a statement to the House on the operation of the Windrush scheme. Your Department’s treatment of the Windrush generation has been nothing less than a national scandal. In November, we learned that at least 164 Windrush citizens were wrongly removed, detained or stopped at the border by our own Government. Eleven of those who were wrongly deported have died. You have announced three more today. Every single one of those cases is a shocking indictment of your Government’s pandering to far right racism, sham immigration targets and the dog whistle of the right-wing press. You have spoken about being a second—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I have the highest regard for the right hon. Gentleman. Occasional descent into the use of the word “your” by accident is one thing, but a calculated repetition of the word “your” is not appropriate because a debate is conducted through the third person. I have not made any statement. I am not responsible for any scandal and I mildly resent any suggestion to the contrary. [Interruption.] Well, not this one anyway, as an hon. Lady rightly chunters from a sedentary position. But I do not want to interrupt any further the flow of the right hon. Gentleman’s eloquence, or, for that matter, the eloquence of his flow.

[Mr Lammy]

You are quite right, Mr Speaker.

Every single one of these cases is a shocking indictment of this Government’s pandering to far right racism, sham immigration targets and the dog whistle of the right-wing press.

The Home Secretary has spoken about being a second generation migrant himself. On taking this job he promised to do whatever it takes to put this wrong right. We are now 10 months on from when the scandal broke. Not a penny has been paid out to any Windrush victim in a compensation scheme. The independent Windrush lessons learned review has not yet reported. I say to you, Home Secretary, before the review is even complete, why, why are you deporting people? We have heard about deportation flights to Jamaica this week. You have detained up to 50 black British residents and given them open window removal notices. Why are you deporting them, given that this review has not reported and there has been no compensation?

How can you be confident that you are not making the same mistakes? Movement for Justice is working with 26 of those who are at risk of removal. Thirteen first came to the UK as children; nine came under the age of 10. Eleven people have indefinite leave to remain. Another has a British passport. Thirty-six British children will have their parents taken away by this charter flight—once enslaved, then colonised and now repatriated. Why do you say that these children should live without their parents? Why do you say, to the families of black British people who have been killed by your Department’s incompetence, that this is acceptable? That is what happens. We are now 20 years on from the Macpherson review, which found institutional racism in this country. I ask the Home Secretary: why is it that still in this country, black lives matter less?

[Sajid Javid]

First, let me thank the right hon. Gentleman. At least he has raised this important issue of Windrush—it is good at any time to update the House on this, in many different ways—but I have to take issue with his tone. He does himself no good service—a huge disservice—in the way that he speaks and the tone that he has used to suggest that there is even an ounce of racism in this House, and to ignore the facts. He chooses to ignore—[Interruption.] He could have made this into an honourable debate by looking at the actual issues and thinking about how we can help people who have been affected.

The right hon. Gentleman chooses to ignore that, for members of the Windrush generation who have been affected in a wrong way—as I have recognised and as many Ministers have recognised at the Dispatch Box—this began under previous Governments and continued under successive Governments, including the Government that he was part of, when he voted time and time again for compliant environment restrictions. He supported those restrictions on a number of occasions and now he chooses to speak out about some of the inadvertent effects of that.

The right hon. Gentleman also rightly brought up the issue that—as I have said before, including in the House—sadly, some people who were wronged are deceased, but he should know that a number of those people died under a Labour Government. The deportations took place under a Labour Government and he makes no apology for that. The right hon. Gentleman mentions the deportations of foreign national offenders. I think the information that he referred to, if I have understood him correctly, is about a charter flight to Jamaica of foreign national offenders only—every single one of them convicted of a serious crime. The UK Borders Act 2007, which he supported, requires that the Home Secretary issues a deportation order for anyone who is a foreign national offender. It does not matter which part of the world they are from, whether it is the United States, Jamaica, Australia or Canada. That is a legal requirement. If he does not want that to happen, he is asking me to break the law, and he is also saying that a person who is convicted of a serious offence as a foreign national offender should be allowed to stay in this country, so either he has changed his mind or he does not know what he is talking about.

Lastly, the right hon. Gentleman brings up the compensation scheme. He is right to raise that because we are absolutely committed to making sure that those who were wronged receive proper compensation. That is why I appointed an independent person, Martin Forde, QC, who has done an enormous amount of good work on this. He asked for an extension of the compensation scheme so that he could speak to even more people who were affected. I brought that to the House and I accepted that extension, and we are now working through what he and his team have done to come forward with a well thought through compensation scheme that is generous and supports members of that generation. In the meantime, we have put in place the vulnerable persons scheme that I referred to earlier, and an exceptional payments scheme, which has started making payments.

I just say this finally: if the right hon. Gentleman really wants to help, he should reflect on his tone and not use this as some kind of political football.

Knife Crime

David Lammy Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate, but I have to acknowledge that after 19 years in this place I am weary, depressed and upset. Here we are again: colleagues—often the same ones—coming to use our words in debates such as this. Hansard will record the issues we explore, and the tremendous number of ideas conveyed.

When I began my career in this place, Operation Trident was just getting going in London. At that stage the discussion was about whether we could get over the gun violence then happening in London, associated with gangs often described as Yardie gangs. There was a sense that we would be able to get on top of the problem, and that it would go—that the issue was really to be associated with downtown America. Almost two decades later, we might view the situation we have got to with knife and gun crime and gang activity in the UK—in London and England, overwhelmingly—as if it were a patient, being assessed by a doctor. The patient’s condition could be getting worse, stable or improving. Sadly, it has clearly got a lot worse. Something has gone drastically wrong.

I agree with everything said in the debate so far, and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer), who secured the debate. I send love, humility and respect to the family of Jaden, aged just 14, who lost his life recently. When I think of him, I cannot but think of my eldest son, who is just a year younger. It breaks your heart. I also reflect on the loss, on Easter Monday last year, of a beautiful young woman, Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, who was shot and killed leaving a newsagent in Tottenham. That led to the current debate, which is currently overwhelming us.

Things have got worse. We have heard that there were 40,147 offences in the year ending in March 2018. Today we found out that violent crime has gone up by 19%. Homicide and knife crime are up. It is all up. The problem is, in a sense, not new: we just have to read Dickens’s description of Fagin and the gangs that populated London in 1839. However, it is a problem that grips us hugely at this time.

An important issue has been touched on, in relation to county lines, and that is drug use. What we are talking about is not just kids knifing each other because they happen to be violent. Behind much of the knife crime lies a huge industry, which reaches all over the world. It begins in countries such as Colombia. I have spoken to quite a lot of young urban people aged 12, 13 and 14 and many of them cannot even tell me where Colombia is. They certainly could not organise the trans-shipment of cocaine across the Atlantic and through Spain and Amsterdam to this country. They are not the men in suits—often anonymous—who deal with that traffic. Those men are not sufficiently made the subject of debate in this House. Yes, such organised crime traffics huge amounts of drugs. However, it also traffics people—women—and guns, which is why there is an increase in gun crime.

There are many different types of young people in the urban communities affected by the problems we are debating, but I will give Members a picture of some of them. Of course, there is the young man or woman who has fallen into a gang. We talk about them a lot; but there is also the young man or woman growing up on one of the great housing estates. They are not in a gang. They do not know anything about gangs, really. They are just seriously scared.

I think about those young people a lot, because that was me once—scared. They are picking up knives and burying them in bushes, because they do not feel safe in the communities where they live. I must tell the House that if they do not feel safe in the communities where they live it is the responsibility of this place, of the Met Commissioner, of Government—the Home Secretary—and of the Mayor. We have failed those young people living on estates who do not feel safe and who pick up knives and bury them before and after school and at the weekends, to protect themselves—and then find themselves using them.

There is another group of young people. I care a lot about them. They are the kind who might be in a park after school, following the crowd. Often they have special needs such as dyslexia, ADHD, mild Asperger’s or autism. They are just following the crowd, in the park, but they are another group who get rounded up. We could be having a debate about joint enterprise. Why do we have a law that throws young people into prison, even though they did not commit the murder, because they happened to be in the same place? They are vulnerable and impressionable—like most teenagers—and some of them are in jail as I speak. Why? It is because the police are not close to the intelligence, and there is a culture of “no snitching” and not telling tales. Therefore we round them all up. To put it bluntly, because we are mainly talking about black lives, no one really cares.

There are different groups of young people, and then, of course, there are the victims. All of that is largely driven by drugs, which are prolific. The price of cocaine has dropped, the purity has risen, and it is estimated that 875,000 people used cocaine in England and Wales last year, a rise of 15%—it just gets worse—with an 8% rise among 16 to 24-year-olds and 432 deaths related to it.

All that is driving the gang activity, serving markets across the country. That struck me when I was in Highbury Corner youth court. I had a young constituent, 17 years old, and the magistrate announced that he had been arrested in Aberdeen. I have been to all four corners of this country, but I must admit I have never been to Aberdeen. I thought, “What’s he doing in Aberdeen?” It turns out there is a big cocaine market in Aberdeen. There is a lot of money coming off the oil rigs, and there was my young constituent, serving the market in Aberdeen—or rather being pimped out by an adult to serve that market.

Of course, the trafficking of that drug drives a culture of violence back home. It can affect kids who are not county lines, because it creates a culture of violence in the communities we represent. I must ask the Minister: in that context, why, oh why has the Home Office budget for the UK Border Force been cut by £110 million, or 18%, since 2012? We talk a lot about cuts, but if we cut the Border Force it will have an impact on the drug market.

Most sane commentators, who in this country stretch from William Hague, the former leader of the Conservative party, to Charlie Falconer, the former Secretary of State for Justice under the previous Labour Government, are beginning to talk very seriously about the idea that the war on drugs has failed, yet we in this place have failed to keep up in our responses. That is for another debate, but let us put that squarely at the centre of this discussion. Sadly, just as was the case when Dickens was writing about London all that time ago, where there is poverty, where there is hardship—I will return to that in a moment—there will always be young souls who can be taken up. Much can be said about prevention, but let us address the seriousness of the demand driving this whole agenda and the need to support the different kinds of young people I discussed.

Many in this debate have talked about the importance of policing, but there are other crucial services beyond policing. We require our local authorities and young offending teams to set effective violence reduction and youth strategies, but it is hard to be effective when council budgets have been slashed by 54%. Youth centres, after-school activities—gone. Between 2012 and 2016, 600 youth centres closed, 3,500 youth workers lost their jobs and 140,000 places vanished. Spending on universal youth services has fallen by 52%. Interventions at local level have disappeared. That is on top of the neighbourhood policing that we have discussed.

Let us be clear about what that neighbourhood policing is really about; my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) made this point. We have housing estates where, I am afraid, the police cannot be found. That is why the young people are scared. The police are just not there in the numbers they need to be. I think of the Broadwater Farm estate in my constituency, which has 3,500 people. The police are not there in the numbers, and that is why the young people are scared.

When those young people are making a decision about whether to tell on a young person they know who has a knife or a gun hidden in his bedroom—“Do I worry about him and his mates on the estate or do I tell the police?”—they are making a reasonable judgment. Of course they do not tell the police, because they do not think the police can protect them; they do not see them in the numbers and the police are not present on the estate. It is not an unreasonable judgment that these young people are making.

I must also make it absolutely clear what is happening in reality in these young people’s lives and those of their parents. This is not to make excuses: poverty is never an excuse for violence. I grew up poor and working-class. Many Members of this House, including some who have spoken already, grew up in those circumstances. I never, ever say that poverty and being working-class or poorer is an excuse for violence. Nevertheless, black youth unemployment in this country between the ages of 16 and 24 is currently running at 26%. The national average is 12%—it is more than twice that for this community. People say, “Oh, why is it always black youth that we see?”, but my mother would have said, “Idle hands make the devil’s work.” It is quite simple. I am sure you too have heard that saying before, Sir Graham.

Young people must have jobs, and we must do something about the housing crisis, which is also creating polarised communities: people living perpetually in houses of multiple occupation, again in the context of the housing estates I am describing, with a lack of services, polarisation and increasing poverty, against a backdrop of huge cuts to welfare—they, too, have a bearing on this—and unemployment. The cauldron in which the story we are telling is mixed starts to feel akin to what Dickens was writing about. That is the point.

Yes, we need a public health approach, but it will have to be more than just a nice slogan or phrase; I am worried that it is becoming one of those in politics. I have seen it happen before. It happened with another phrase that we started using a few years ago: “affordable housing”. Affordable housing? In London? At 80% of market value? We still use that phrase, but it means nothing to ordinary people, and I am worried that the public health strategy, which had a great name when it came out of Glasgow, is being tarnished, because it needs resource, joined-up activity and real co-ordination.

I am very pleased that I was asked to be on the violence reduction task force, but there is a hell of a lot to do. On the issue of drill music and YouTube, some of the commercial companies have a lot to answer for at the moment, but we should not focus entirely on the music that young people listen to. There are issues across social media with all young people in Britain, including young girls bullied on forums such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

[Lyn Brown]

I am not sure whether my right hon. Friend was here for my speech, but the only thing I would like taken down is the specific drill video that celebrated the murder of a 14-year-old in the playground, not all drill music. I do not intend to blame a genre of music for the deaths of children.

[Mr Lammy]

Let me put it on the record that my hon. Friend is entirely right; if my comments came out the wrong way, they were not what I meant. However, there are issues about what it is acceptable to put on social media—what it says and what it is driving—and there is a real question about regulation. That is absolutely clear.

France has just banned smartphones for under-14s in school, I think. We have heard nothing from the chief medical officer in this country—nothing. Nothing has been said. But we know that there are issues of mental health. We know that self-harm is up and anorexia is up. In a way, knife crime is a different sort of self-harm in the community, is it not? So there are some ingredients here, but we need to be careful about focusing on one particular group when actually this is an issue across the board.

I hope that the Minister might say something about serious organised crime and about cocaine—about drugs. I hope that she understands that the thrust of much of what has been said here is entirely about the resources available for the police, local authorities, youth services and families themselves to grip and deal with this problem so that we are seeing a reduction and not—as we are seeing now, month on month and year on year—a rise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Jones]

That is absolutely true. There is a greater vulnerability to influence. There are lots of issues with PRU systems. For example, children tend to finish much earlier than in mainstream schools; they finish at 2 o’clock, so they are more likely to be on the streets for longer. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) has mentioned before in Parliament, if we look at when knife offences occur, we see that there is a peak after school and before parents come home from work. It is absolutely tragic, but the number goes up, and then it goes down again. It would be good to keep children busy for that time, before their parents get home from work.

[Mr Lammy]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. In pressing the point about PRUs and alternative provision, will she also recognise—I am sure that she sees this in Croydon—the very real concerns about the disproportionality in the number of black and minority ethnic children who are excluded from schools and find themselves in alternative provision, and, frankly, the seeming scarcity of public concern about that escalation in school exclusion rates?

[Sarah Jones]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely, completely right. I have had cases in my constituency, as we probably all have, and I have talked before in the Chamber about the worst case that I had.

A young boy who was black was permanently excluded from school. He was on the route to being diagnosed as autistic, which takes a very long time. Everybody knew that he was autistic. His classroom was turned around over the half-term period, so when he came back to it everything was different. He kind of freaked out: he was violent and was permanently excluded. This child was five—five years old. We appealed the case and won, but for obvious reasons his parents did not really want him to stay in that school, so we found alternative provision. His mother is a wonderful woman, who has the wherewithal to be able to fight the system—get in touch with her MP, and do all the things that people need to do. I just feel for the people whom I do not meet; they are the ones who do not have that wherewithal, so they suffer much more.

We absolutely need to look at education. The Government are looking at the issue. Ofsted is looking at it, too, and the Children’s Commissioner has done great work. We really need to work out how some schools manage to keep these kids and not exclude them, while still running a good school without disruption to the other children in their classes.

I will talk a little about the public health approach. My hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead said that there is no magic bullet for these issues, and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) said that of course we know what the solutions are, and we just need to follow what works. I think both those things are true, and we need to be clear about that.

We actually know a lot about what works. Violence is not inevitable; how we reduce violence is absolutely evidence-based. The public health model is a way of reducing violence. When we talk to surgeons such as Duncan Bew from King’s College Hospital, he will say that he is a great advocate for the public health approach. He spends his time putting back together children who have been stabbed. Actually, we should also recognise that there would be a lot more dead young people were it not for surgeons’ improvement in their practices over the years. The survival rates for stabbings have gone up massively and it is a credit to our medical profession that they have managed to do that.

Duncan Bew, this great surgeon who is an advocate for the public health approach, would say that if he, as a doctor, knew that there was a cure for a disease but he did not implement it, then he would be done for medical negligence. Why on earth, then, are we not doing what we absolutely know works—looking at violence as an epidemic? That is what it is. It goes up then it goes down, and it spreads and then contracts. Reducing it is all about interventions. As the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said—completely rightly—we have to keep doing things, because we can do all the right things and reduce the violence, but then it will go up again.

The public health approach is very simply about interrupting the violence, preventing its future spread and changing social norms so that it does not happen again. It is very clear. The World Health Organisation has done plenty of work on this issue as well; it will give people the seven strategies of intervention, which work. We just need to look at the evidence of that work, and as my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham said, there needs to be more than words. We need to make sure that we actually put the funding in underneath, to ensure that we make all the interventions that we know work.

On county lines, I agree with everything that has been said already. Croydon has a line to Exeter and I have met Exeter police. They say that if they go to the coach station in Exeter and see a little chap getting off the coach with no baggage, that is someone they need to be looking out for. However, one of the issues they have highlighted to me is how we make sure that those young people, when they are picked up by the police, are looked after; sometimes the police will ring the council and the council say, “Well, the foster parent doesn’t want them any more, because they have just been found with drugs. We haven’t got any emergency foster care. Can you just keep them there for a bit?” The police end up with these kids sitting in their office for hours on end while the council tries to find someone to look after them.

Future Immigration

David Lammy Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

First, the plan is to introduce the new system from January 2021—so from the end of the implementation period. Of course, if that period is extended—this assumes a deal scenario—it could be later. My right hon. Friend asked for an assurance that there will not be any change to employer checks between now and when the system comes in. The changes here will only come in from 2021, so there will be no changes to employer checks, including for EU citizens. She also asked for an assurance that the salary threshold will not be set suddenly. We will make sure in our work that it is not a sudden change and that businesses have time to prepare.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary was right to pay tribute to his parents. His father, a bus driver, and my mother, who worked at Camden Town tube station, belong to a generation that took so little and gave so much. They were like today’s careworkers, security guards and fruit pickers. He knows that they did not earn anything like £30,000 in the prices of the ’70s and ’80s. How will he look his children in the eyes and say he slammed behind him the door of opportunity that enabled him and me to sit in our seats today?

[Sajid Javid]

The door was closed on my parents and people from those Commonwealth countries in 1968 by a Commonwealth citizenship Act brought in by a Labour Government—so it was a Labour Government who closed that door. [Interruption.] This is important. It is important that the right hon. Gentleman has all the facts in front of him. Going forward, it is important that we continue to provide opportunities for people with multi-skill levels to come and help in the UK, to settle and to study, which is why we have presented a system here that is focused on high-skilled workers but which, as he will have heard me say earlier, also includes a short-term workers scheme, and there will be other routes as well.

Stop and Search

David Lammy Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

As a fellow London MP, representing constituents in Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, I have a personal view on this which I think is reflected by my constituents. Given a choice between £1 of their money being spent on more bureaucracy in the centre and £1 being spent on local police officers, we both know what their priority would be. It is for the Mayor and his office to explain to the public they serve their decisions and the allocation of their budgets at this time.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I was first stopped and searched in the wake of the Scarman report aged 12, and it was so scary that I wet myself. We got to a place where the Home Office did a review that found there was no discernible, significant decrease in crime with the use of stop and search, and the current Prime Minister reached a cross-party consensus on the issue in the House. I caution the Minister against his party breaking that consensus, which would damage relations with Britain’s ethnic minorities once again. It is finding the drug dealers and gangsters, and dealing with cocaine, that will reduce the knife crime on our streets, as the Minister knows. Why have we cut the Border Force and what are we doing about the drug market in this country?

[Mr Hurd]

I understand where the right hon. Gentleman’s passion comes from. I have a great deal of respect for his passion, and I also have a great deal of respect for the fact that he has stood up and offered to serve on the serious violence taskforce because of his passion and his insight into the problem and the drivers that underlie it, not least the drugs market. He and I have sat in on presentations on the subject.

To give some reassurance, I meant what I said at the Dispatch Box. There is no appetite or desire to go back to the bad old days of stop and search, but we have gone from a situation where over 1.4 million people were stopped in 2009-10 to one where 1 million fewer people were stopped last year. In the context of the problem we face—this scourge, this terrible spike in serious violence—we have to make sure that all the tools in the box are being used.

The reality is that stop and search is an effective tool. I will give one brief example. In one week in January, during Operation Engulf, 27 people were arrested outside Stratford station, and 10 highly offensive, dangerous, scary weapons were seized. Stop and search has its place, but it must be used lawfully and it must be targeted. Nothing about the Government’s approach to the reform has changed.

Immigration Control

David Lammy Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am very grateful to have the opportunity to bring this issue to the House.

Like an immigrants, my constituent Alberta came to this country with the dream of a better life. Hers was to serve the NHS as a midwife. Aged 19, she was studying health and social care at college. Life was going well—so well, in fact, that she used her free time to help others as a mentor for young children at her local primary school. Arriving in Tottenham from Ghana in 2012, she was a shining example of what migrants contribute to the United Kingdom.

Alberta was, and still is, a proud and intelligent young woman with dreams, the capacity for hard work and the compulsion to help others on her way up. But one June morning last year, everything changed for Alberta. It was a day that she would later describe to me as one of the worst in her life. Showering to get ready for college, she heard a loud knock at the door. Quickly, she began to get dressed, but she was too slow. When five immigration officers burst open the front door, she was still half naked. Loudly, they ordered Alberta to come out of the bathroom. The indignity of her situation grew as, in her own words, she felt a “spontaneous gush of blood” between her legs; the terror caused her period to come early. Mortified, she explained to the officers that her five-year immigration permit was still valid. They did not listen. Instead, they arrested her and locked her in the back of their van, where she remembers feeling “like a caged animal.”

Alberta was taken to Yarl’s Wood detention centre, imprisoned despite committing no crime. Yarl’s Wood, of course, is essentially a prison. Victims of rape, torture and trafficking are held inside. Almost half the women detained in Yarl’s Wood have experienced suicidal thoughts. In 2015, the chief inspector of prisons described Yarl’s Wood as a “place of national concern”. After more than three weeks of misery and detention, the Home Office released Alberta, admitting that it had acted on incorrect information. But this was not the end of her suffering at the hands of immigration control.

While detained in Yarl’s Wood, Alberta missed critical deadlines and her grades dropped rapidly. With this handicap, her performance in college began to decline. To this day, bi-weekly visits to the immigration reporting centre force Alberta to revisit her trauma. For days ahead of these visits, she struggles to eat, has problems sleeping and breaks down in tears. Because of the Home Office’s gross errors, her dream of becoming a midwife is now uncertain. Alberta’s story is one of mistreatment, cruelty and inhumanity, but sadly it is not unique. So many others echo these horrors when they recount their experiences of living under immigration control.

Each year, the Government pay out more than £4 million to people as compensation for having been detained unlawfully. Half those detained between 2013 and 2018 were ultimately released back into their community. They were therefore people the state deemed had the right to remain. Alberta’s story illustrates a broken immigration system that treats humans without dignity—a system that stains the fundamental principles of our legal system and our state.

Over the past year, attention has been drawn to the Government’s hostile environment. The Windrush scandal revealed that thousands of British citizens were incorrectly deported, detained, made jobless, left without housing and healthcare, split from their families, left destitute and treated like strangers in their homes. But Windrush is not an isolated mistake. The Home Office has been broken by a public discourse that has got out of control—a xenophobic rhetoric that has become accepted by too many in this House, with the UKIP-ification of our newspapers, of our television and of the Government themselves.

The United Kingdom has built a proud reputation for liberalism and fairness. As a member of the United Nations Security Council, we have been a world leader in the spread of human rights and justice, but our treatment of immigrants leaves us no better than the human rights abusers. It leaves our moral authority, frankly, in the gutter. Government-condoned prejudice permeates every one of an immigrant’s first encounters with the state. The Home Office imprisons tens of thousands of people every year, including survivors of torture, trafficking and rape, with no time limit. We are the only EU country that allows the indefinite detention of migrants.

But it is not only this that singles Britain out. We have one of the slowest and least efficient immigration processes in the developed world. In France, the average stay for detained migrants is just one month. In the United Kingdom, the average stay in a detention centre is 19 months—yes, 19, more than double the EU average. Detention has the potential to be harmful and unlawful from the very first day to the very last. Why has detention become the default, and why are alternatives never used? Bail with reporting restrictions and electronic monitoring should surely be considered before we lock migrants up and throw away the keys.

The brutal treatment of immigrants such as Alberta not only denies them their freedom; it can leave emotional scars that torment them for the rest of their lives. In a fair society, only a court should have the power to detain. In a fair society, detention is not the default response—it is the last resort. In every other sphere of British life, innocence is presumed while guilt must be proven, but the legal basis of our immigration system is upside down. The burden of proof is the wrong way round. Why are people imprisoned by the Home Office without the assessment of any judge or jury? Instead of forcing detainees to demonstrate why they should be released, why does the Home Office not have to demonstrate why they must be detained?

Access to justice is another principle that runs across every aspect of UK law. It allows people to have their voice heard, to exercise their rights, to challenge discrimination and to hold decision makers accountable. But access to justice is impossible without legal representation. So why is legal representation impossible to access for so many under immigration control? In the UN, we prescribe these standards internationally, but on our own soil, more than half the people in detention are denied access to a lawyer. These legal aid deserts have grown due to systematic cuts to legal aid. There has been a 56% fall in the total number of legal aid providers for asylum seekers since 2005. This lack of legal representation means that vulnerable people are sent back to their country of origin when they should have been granted the right to remain.

As champions of human rights and the rule of law, MPs in this House must ask ourselves some tough questions. How can we deport migrants without granting them legal representation? How can we split migrants from their children and partners without giving them access to justice? How can we pull migrants away from their homes and livelihoods without respecting our own rule of law?

Our current system is not only cruel, unjustifiable and damaging to the lives of detainees; it is a great burden on the British taxpayer. The country’s detention estate is one of the largest in Europe, costing more than £160 million a year. The average cost of detaining one person in this system is about £36,000—greater than the fees of Eton, Harrow or any of the country’s poshest boarding schools. What justifies this enormous waste of money? What justifies a system that treats the vulnerable as criminals and expects taxpayers to foot the bill?

For individuals, too, the cost of being trapped under immigration control continues to spiral. The Home Office is making up to 800% profit on applications and putting profit before principles, even when it means ruining people’s lives. As the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) said in Westminster Hall on Tuesday, the fees for children under immigration control in this country are a particular disgrace. It is a shame on our nation that it is 22 times more expensive for a child to become a citizen in this country than in Germany. The Minister for Immigration was responding in that debate, as she is today. I understand her claim that the Government need to “balance the books”, but when the Government are intent on keeping taxes low for the richest in society, can flagrant profiteering off the most vulnerable ever be justified?

Much of the blame for the state of the immigration system in this country lies with this Government and this Prime Minister, who single-handedly coined the “hostile environment” policy. However, any constructive debate on immigration will recognise that no party—and that absolutely includes my own—has been innocent. The Labour party should also be ashamed of its treatment of people under immigration control during its three terms in power. With the mutual recognition of past failures, we can begin a cross-party response to heal these wounds, but to do so, we must first clean up the injuries of the past.

The Home Office’s war against undocumented immigration has built a shadow economy fuelled by workplace exploitation, human trafficking, drugs and other crime. Some 600,000 people live illegally in the UK, and they will remain here regardless of their legal status. The question is whether to keep them illegal, fuelling crime and the shadow economy, or to regularise their status, allowing them to pay income tax and national insurance, live safely and become respected members of society. I support the latter option as the first step in cleaning up the Home Office failures of the past. I urge those who think that proposal too radical or perhaps too left-wing to consider the comments of my unlikely ally on this issue, the former Foreign Secretary. In the wake of Windrush, even the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) called for the very same measure. A one-off immigration amnesty would allow this country to start afresh and to create a new system that respects migrants’ rights and their contribution, while apologising for the mistakes of the past.

Today, we must recognise that this is a crucial turning point in British history. The Government’s lurch to the hard right and their decision to leave the European Union leaves Britain alone, isolated and on track for decline. If the Government continue to pursue Brexit, as they are minded to do, they must do so while learning the lessons of the past, not by compounding them. The opportunity to reshape our immigration system that comes with it must reflect back on the hostile environment that has routinely abused human rights and brought shame on our nation.

If we are to build a truly open, global Britain that engages with the world, as the last debate demonstrated, redrawing our immigration policy is a vital part of that. We must continue to attract the talent and hard work of immigrants such as Alberta. Otherwise, our public services, our schools, our NHS and our businesses will be starved of workers and will further decline. We must look forward to a future with a just immigration policy, motivated by compassion, fairness and the rule of law—an immigration system where migrants are treated like human beings, not criminals.

When we discuss in this House the trade deals that we will strike with the Chinese and the Indians, let us be honest: the first thing those nations will ask for is the immigration of their citizens to this country. Because of the position this country finds itself in, with no significant trade deals with the rest of the world, we will grant them that right. For all those reasons, it is time to reform cross-party our response to those controlled by immigration in this country.

Immigration: Pausing the Hostile Environment

David Lammy Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): May I ask the Minister of State if she will make a statement on the decision to pause the hostile environment and to slip that information out during the World cup last night?

[Mr Speaker]

One is supposed to read out the precise terms of the question, but the right hon. Gentleman indulged in a degree of poetic licence before I had the chance to stop him. Very good.

[The Minister for Immigration (Caroline Nokes)]

I welcome the opportunity to respond to this question, and I want to make our position very clear. We have put in place additional safeguards to ensure that legal migrants are not inadvertently caught up by measures designed to tackle illegal migration. It is right that we make a clear distinction between those who are here legally and those who are not. We have made it clear that it is not acceptable that those of the Windrush generation have been impacted negatively, and this Government have apologised.

We are keeping under constant review the safeguards that were immediately put in place. We have introduced a temporary pause in the proactive sharing of Home Office data with other organisations, including banks and building societies, for the purpose of controlling access to services. Data on persons over 30 has been excluded from sharing, to ensure that members of the Windrush generation are not inadvertently affected. This is a temporary measure. We are also providing additional support to landlords, employers and public service providers through the Home Office checking service to ensure that we are not impacting the Windrush generation. We have issued new guidance that encourages employers and landlords to get in touch with the Home Office checking service if a Commonwealth citizen does not have the documents they need to demonstrate their status. We have issued similar guidance to other Government Departments providing public services.

The Home Secretary has said that it is his top priority to right the wrongs that have occurred. A lessons learned review, which will have independent oversight, will help to ensure that we have a clear picture of what went wrong and of how we should take this forward. We are carrying out a historical review of removals and detentions. At the same time, our taskforce is helping to ensure that those who have struggled to demonstrate their right to be here are supported to do so, and we have committed to setting up a compensation scheme.

[Mr Lammy]

It is important to put on record the fact that immigration has brought considerable benefits to this country. We saw last night in England’s World Cup team 11 of the players from black or mixed-race heritage backgrounds. That is a tribute to the modern diversity of this country. When the Secretary of State took up his position a few weeks ago, he said that he wanted a decent system, a fair system and a system that treated people with respect. Is it respectful to slip out this information during yesterday’s World Cup spectacle? Is it respectful for the Minister’s Department still not to be able to tell us how many people have been detained? Is it respectful not to have any information about a transparent hardship scheme for those who are still in trouble? Is it respectful to have said nothing about whether the Minister is going to allow for a proper appeals system?

Will the Minister confirm that these changes are not just for the Windrush generation and that they are in fact for everyone who has been affected by the hostile environment? She talks about a “pause”, but why not scrap the hostile environment that is bringing this country into disrepute? Will she also confirm that we will no longer be asking teachers, nurses, doctors and landlords to act as the country’s border enforcement in the months and years ahead?

[Caroline Nokes]

The right hon. Gentleman has raised a number of important points. First, I want to make it clear that it was the former Home Secretary who requested the pausing of proactive data sharing with other Government Departments, and that that started in April. That is a temporary measure. However, the data sharing cannot be recommenced without my ministerial consent, and it is certainly not something that we will begin again until we are confident that we will not be impacting members of the Windrush generation further.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned hardship, and of course our first priority has been to help people to secure their status through the taskforce. We have put in place a dedicated team for vulnerable people, whom we are linking up with other public sector bodies to ensure that they get the support they need. I chaired a cross-ministerial group early on in all this, and I was impressed by the steps that the Department for Work and Pensions in particular had taken to ensure that those affected would be able to have their benefits reinstated, indeed retrospectively, from the moment that they demonstrated that they had an appointment with the Windrush taskforce.

When conducting our review of those who may have been detained, it is important that we are meticulous. It would be wrong to come out with a number that we were not confident about and we will ensure that, as soon as we have figures that we are content are accurate, which will go through the same independent assurance process that we used for removals, they will be made available to the House.

The taskforce’s first priority is to ensure that those who are assisted achieve status, and that has happened in the vast majority of cases. Those over whom some question remains will have access to an administrative review and, in due course, could proceed to a judicial review if that were appropriate. Obviously, we do not want it to come to that.

As I have said previously and as the Home Secretary has made clear, we have sought to ensure that mitigations are in place for the measures that are within the compliant environment that have impacted the Windrush generation. As I said earlier, we have paused proactive data sharing for all nationalities for people over 30. However, it is important to reflect that compliant environment policies commenced a significant time ago under a previous Labour Administration, and it is also important that this Government have ways of identifying those who are actively accessing services in this country to which they are not entitled.

Visit of President Trump: Policing

David Lammy Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

The hon. Gentleman, as always, is entitled to his own robust views, but the fact of the matter is that President Trump is the democratically elected leader of the United States of America, which is historically, and currently, our most important ally. It is a hugely important relationship for the security and prosperity of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents and those of all Members of the House. We should make the President welcome.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

“Together against Trump” has organised an important protest against this most divisive global figure for tomorrow afternoon. It is usual for those who gather at Portland Place to be able to hear speeches. Why on this occasion has the Metropolitan Police said, unusually, that it will not allow a stand, which would enable those gathered to hear people speak before they begin their march?

[Mr Hurd]

I have spoken to the gold commander of this operation, and she is adamant that the police have worked closely with the organisers of the protest. The police are determined to respect people’s fundamental right in this country to peaceful protest, but they also have the right to impose some conditions on protests in the interests of public safety. I am not aware of the specific details to which the right hon. Gentleman refers, but I am happy to ask and furnish him with a response.