Unaccompanied Children (Greece and Italy)

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Thursday 23rd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Law]

I thank the Minister for raising that point. That £28 million is to be saluted—it is very important—but it is not what we are discussing today. We are discussing the issue of refugees coming to this country.

According to UNICEF, more than 30,000 unaccompanied children fleeing war and persecution arrived by sea in Greece and Italy last year. Only eight of those children were transferred to the UK, where they had family links. Our country is quite simply failing to play our part in caring for those children.

It was only last year that we were told by the previous Prime Minister, David Cameron, that “a specified number” of vulnerable refugee children would be given a home here under the Dubs amendment to immigration legislation. Lords Dubs, as we know, was himself rescued from Nazi persecution and brought to the UK in 1939 by Sir Nicholas Winton.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way: he is being very generous compared with the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham), who spoke immediately before him. Does he agree that the Government’s refusal to live up to what people expected them to do when they accepted the Dubs amendment is a betrayal not only of the thousands of children who will not be able to come here, but of the many hundreds of thousands of our constituents who wrote to us, campaigned and signed petitions? They expected the Government to live up to the commitment for which they all campaigned.

[Chris Law]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point and I agree with him completely. In fact, I received emails leading up to today’s debate that made exactly the same point.

It now emerges that we will take only 350 children, including the 200 who have already come over from Calais. We have been told by the Minister that the door is still open, but, to be frank, the impression is that it has been slammed shut. The UK Government have stooped to a new low, targeting the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, namely unaccompanied children.

Even the timing of ditching the Dubs scheme was appalling. The Home Secretary cynically ditched it on the eve of the most recent parliamentary recess. Lord Dubs condemned the move, saying that the bad news was buried

“while most eyes were focused on the Brexit debacle”.

In her statement, the Home Secretary claimed that the scheme created a “pull factor” for unaccompanied children to make perilous journeys to the UK and, therefore, increased the risk that they would fall into the hands of traffickers. That has been touched on several times today. She said:

“we do not want to incentivise perilous journeys to Europe”.—[Official Report, 9 February 2017; Vol. 621, c. 637.]

Why would she say that? Why on earth would anyone think that we only have pull factors, when I have already described so many of the push factors? The real message that my constituents and constituents across the country are getting from this is, “Not in my back yard.” There is no evidence that there is a pull factor. In fact, relocation services that provide safe and legal routes to the UK for those seeking asylum disrupt the people traffickers, who seek to profit from smuggling desperate people across borders.

I urge the Minister not only to allow the Dubs scheme to continue, so that the UK receives at least 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees, but to increase the total number of refugees he intends to settle under the Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement programme. I remind the House that Scotland is not full up. The Scottish Government have always said they are willing to take their fair share of refugees and have called on the UK Government time and again to increase their efforts to respond to this humanitarian crisis. That is a cross-party stance that has wide public support.