Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Tom Pursglove

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove]

The hon. Gentleman’s remarks are effectively a charter for doing nothing. What is unacceptable is for people to continue putting their life in the hands of evil criminal gangs whose only regard is for turning a profit—they do not care whether people get here safely. We have a moral responsibility to stop this, and we have a moral responsibility to act, which is precisely what we will do through this Bill.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend accept my congratulations on the Patel-Pursglove plan vis-à-vis Rwanda? And will he ensure that, when people arrive here, they are on a plane as quickly as possible before some dodgy activist or fat-cat human rights lawyer can get their hands on them?

[Tom Pursglove]

My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary should rightly take a lot of credit for getting this new world-leading partnership over the line. My right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) has been a passionate advocate for this approach, and I am pleased we are delivering it. I think it will make a genuine difference in acting as a deterrent and ensuring that we have global solutions to a global challenge.

In that sense, I welcome the steps that have been taken in the last few days. I hope my right hon. Friend will be reassured to know that we are working hard to make sure this is operationalised without delay and that, of course, people are on flights as quickly as possible. What we do not want at any stage—this goes back to why we need fundamental reform of the asylum system—is delay in the system. We want people to have certainty either way.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Tom Pursglove

Report stage
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Pursglove]

I am conscious of the wide interest in a significant number of these amendments, so I will predominantly focus my remarks on the Government amendments in this first instance and address other matters in the wind-up.

Our asylum system must not reward those who enter the UK illegally from manifestly safe countries where they cannot possibly still be fleeing persecution and fear. People must claim asylum in the first safe country they come to, and making a secondary and unnecessary move to the UK puts lives needlessly in danger while pushing aside other vulnerable people, including women and children.

We must break the criminal networks that facilitate illegal immigration and exploit people. People who come to our shores illegally will be treated differently. Although we cannot resettle everyone who needs sanctuary, the large numbers we resettle in the UK will be made very welcome. We will be fair but firm in how we continue to embark on this landmark reform of our asylum system.

New clause 20 is a minor, technical amendment that will ensure a small number of references to justices of the peace in immigration legislation in the context of obtaining entry and search warrants in Northern Ireland instead become references to lay magistrates. This is a simple measure that tidies up the statute book.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The Minister makes a critical point about claiming asylum in the first safe country. People traffickers rely on the idea of selling a destination, regardless of where the person starts. The measures my hon. Friend describes will frustrate the people traffickers and do a great service both to this country and to their many victims.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tom Pursglove]

The point that I would make is that the Government will set out their intentions in due course. I think it is right not to pre-empt. It is important to make sure that this House is kept updated as to that work, and we will be very clear in our intentions.

[Sir John Hayes]

It is extremely encouraging news that the Government are going to—at last, I have to say—consider the Blair legacy of the Human Rights Act, but to substantially reform it will require legislation. That much is implicit, is it not?

[Tom Pursglove]

As I say, Ministers will come to the House with further details in due course.

Work is under way in relation to resolving the question of retained EU law, led by Lord Frost, with input from the Attorney General and the Ministry of Justice. For these reasons, I ask my right hon. and hon. Friends to withdraw their amendment 150.

I turn to new clauses 18 and 19 on illegal immigration offences, tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) and for Kettering (Mr Hollobone). I hope that they and other hon. Friends supporting the new clauses will recognise that, as part of our groundbreaking new plan for immigration, the Government have sought robust changes to the law around illegal entry and similar offences through the very Bill we are discussing today. The Bill, which my hon. Friends seek to amend, already addresses and indeed exceeds the changes proposed in new clause 18.

Let me turn now to new clauses 24 and 52, tabled by the hon. Members for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) and for Halifax (Holly Lynch), my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) and the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis). As both new clauses regard settlement fees for non-UK members of our armed forces, I would like to debate them together. It is a fact that our Government and our nation highly value the service of all members of the armed forces, including Commonwealth nationals and Gurkhas from Nepal.

Funeral Director Services Regulation

Debate between John Hayes and Tom Pursglove

Wednesday 17th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Tom Pursglove]

At the moment we are looking at a self-regulation approach to this issue. There are challenges in going down the route of formal regulation, which, of course, takes time because it needs statutory underpinning, often involving primary legislation. We expect the sector to look intensively and at speed to improve the situation. There is an onus on all those providing these services to live up to the standards that we would all expect funeral directors taking care of our loved ones or friends to live up to, for the reasons so eloquently outlined by my right hon. Friend.

[Sir John Hayes]

My right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) has done a great service to his constituents. He has been their champion and drawn this tragic case to the attention of the House. Out of the tragedy, the family will be hoping that something positive will come, and today can be the beginning of that. My right hon. Friend drew attention to the work of David Heath, who recently met the all-party parliamentary group. Will the Minister agree to meet the all-party parliamentary group to take these matters further, in exactly the spirit of my right hon. Friend’s speech?

[Tom Pursglove]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I want to really engage with this issue in the spirit in which all Members have come to the debate. With that in mind, I would be delighted to meet the APPG and to hear the concerns of its members. In fact, my right hon. Friend has pre-empted what I was going to offer later in my remarks. As a parliamentarian, he is very good at teasing out these sorts of commitments.

[Sir John Hayes]

I have stood in the Minister’s place many times.

[Tom Pursglove]

My right hon. Friend has indeed. He has managed to extract that commitment from me and I will certainly look forward to that discussion. As he has described, none of us in this House wants to see any other family go through the wholly unacceptable distress that the family in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen have been through, at a most difficult time for them. We cannot allow that to happen in future. There is an enormous onus on the sector to drive forward this improvement and these quality standards. At this point, we think it is right that they take responsibility for achieving that, but we reserve the right to have a greater involvement in these matters if we do not see the sort of improvement that I think we would all expect.

In light of the Competition and Markets Authority’s recommendations, both the sector’s representative organisations—the National Federation of Funeral Directors and the National Society of Allied and Independent Funeral Directors—are taking positive steps to introduce and embed improved self-regulation and complaint-handling arrangements. Encouraged by the sector’s proactive approach to the Competition and Markets Authority’s findings, we are continuing to work closely with it throughout the implementation of its new self-regulation regimes, with a view to assessing their effectiveness once they have bedded in. I hope that that gives some reassurance as to the improvement that my right hon. and hon. Friends are seeking.

Where funeral directors are not members of these representative bodies, I would expect them to look to the standards that the bodies are developing and to adopt and advance those standards within their own set-ups. I think that that is an important point to make. Cost, which Members have raised, is of course a matter for the representative bodies, but I know that the NAFD in particular is looking to make improved regulatory structures accessible across the profession, which again is very welcome.

In addition to its findings on quality standards, the Competition and Markets Authority made recommendations to address the lack of accessible and comparable information on the products and services that funeral directors provide. In the light of pandemic pressures on the sector, the Competition and Markets Authority has not pursued remedies to address that issue fully. Instead, it has introduced a range of “sunlight” provisions to support customers in making choices about funerals, and to ensure that the pricing, business and commercial activities of funeral directors, as well as the quality of the service that they provide, are exposed to greater public and regulatory scrutiny. The remedies include an obligation for all funeral directors to set their prices out clearly and prominently so that families needing to arrange a funeral can, if they wish, compare that information before deciding which provider to use. The Competition and Markets Authority has also recommended that, once conditions are more stable, it should consider whether a further market investigation is needed to identify whether additional customer protections are needed.

To return to the regrettable experience of the constituents of my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen, there are numerous pieces of legislation with which all traders, including funeral director businesses, must comply. In particular, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 sets out the standards that consumers can expect when they contract with a trader or business for the provision of services, and the remedies if those rights are breached. Where a trader or business fails to meet the standards for the supply of a service required by the 2015 Act, or the service does not conform to the contract, that could potentially be a breach of contract, and if so, the consumer is entitled to seek a remedy. If that cannot be agreed in correspondence, the consumer could then pursue a claim against the funeral director in the courts.

I want to pick up on the point made about the cross-Government nature of this issue, which again is important. I have made the point that, as a result of the pandemic, what we have seen is a stronger working relationship between Government and the sector. It is essential that that is reflected across Government, given the fact that elements of policy in this area intersect with various Departments. My right hon. Friend referred to there being silos and the fact that we do not want operations within silos. I hope that he will be slightly reassured by the fact that, as a joint Minister, across both the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, I am quite well versed in ensuring that elements of Government do not act in silos. In that spirit, I would want to engage with colleagues across Government to ensure that we get this right, and that is precisely what I intend to do. He has my reassurance on that.

I conclude by again thanking my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen for introducing this debate this afternoon. It would be impossible for anybody—any Minister or any Member of this House—not to be affected by hearing about the experience that he has described with real understanding, care and sympathy for his constituents who have been caught up in this terrible situation. I am very grateful to him for bringing this to the House’s attention. I want him to know that I am very mindful of the situation that he has described, that this is something that I want to go away and look at further, that I do want to engage with the APPG that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) chairs, and we will ensure that that happens, and that, as I have described, there is a piece of work going on at the moment around self-regulation, but we need to monitor that closely, to see whether it achieves the objectives that I think all of us wish to see, and if that is not the case, we reserve the right to look at this issue again and to take matters from there.

I hope that that will provide my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen with some reassurance. I would also ask whether he could please express my condolences to his constituents family. They have been through a terrible time, and it really is very important that no other family go through the experience that they have.

Question put and agreed to.