Migration

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

I will begin by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) and the hon. Members for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) and for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) for securing this important debate.

There are currently around 220,000 migrants playing a critical role in our NHS. Their contribution is hugely valued, but the question the Government must ask is this: why we are so reliant on migrant workers, largely from developing countries, to prop up our struggling healthcare system? Ghana’s healthcare system is dealing with huge challenges, yet 1,200 nurses left Ghana last year to come to the UK, with 20 nurses leaving a single intensive care unit for Britain in the past six months alone. Why last year did the Government strike a deal with Nepal, a very poor country on the World Health Organisation’s red list for health worker shortages, in order to drain that country of 100 nurses? The answer is clearly that the Conservatives have utterly failed to train our own homegrown talent. Thirteen years of neglect has seen nursing bursaries cut and the budget for further education skills reduced by 12% per pupil since 2010.

Where is the education and training that allows young people to upskill and progress? Why do businesses and public services feel that they have to look abroad when they could be recruiting homegrown talent, or increasing wages to ensure that those jobs pay a better salary that someone can raise a family on? Those are the questions that our constituents are asking.

Labour has a plan to fix the points-based system—a system that we introduced in 2008 for non-EU citizens, but that has since been broken by the Tories. There will be no return to free movement under a Labour Government, only a commitment to get the points-based system fit for purpose for both businesses and workers. That is why we are reviewing the points-based system to consider how we can put responsibilities on employers who recruit from abroad to invest in homegrown talent, and how the Migration Advisory Committee can work more closely with the Skills and Productivity Board to ensure that our immigration system feeds our wider economic aims.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) has already announced that Labour will ditch the deeply flawed Government policy that allows businesses on the shortage occupation lists to undercut British workers by paying foreign workers 20% less than the going rate. The Government’s current policy is an insult to British workers, while also causing standards for those migrants who contribute so much to our economy to be diminished. It really is the worst of all worlds. While our system of economic migration is largely connected to our country’s wider economic needs, the asylum system is about our country’s shared international responsibilities and Britain’s role in meeting a challenge that is fast becoming a global crisis. We are living in an age of authoritarian Governments, many of whom, from Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine to the Taliban in Afghanistan and China’s crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, are forcing persecuted and vulnerable people to flee their homelands. Chaos breeds chaos. It is therefore in Britain’s self-interest to work with our allies across Europe and the wider world to provide solutions. Instead, the Illegal Migration Bill, also known as the bigger backlog Bill, will make it harder to fix the system because it prevents the Home Secretary from processing asylum applications. Moreover, it breaks international law, as was confirmed this week by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. That will hardly help to facilitate international co-operation, will it?

The Rwanda scheme is an unworkable, unaffordable and unethical sham that, if it ever happens, will only be able to accommodate 1% to 2% of asylum seekers. We have had a failure to replace the returns agreement that we had when we were in the EU before Brexit. A deterrent will only deter if it is credible. These plans are not credible, and therefore the channel crossers keep coming, with 616 on Sunday alone and 8,500 so far this year. Earlier this month the Prime Minister flew on his helicopter to Dover to declare victory, but he needs to learn that an asylum strategy based on the weather is not particularly sustainable.

The Conservatives do not seem to care whether their policies work, and they certainly do not care how much they cost. They have handed the Rwanda Government £140 million for a press release. The cost of the asylum system is four times as high today as it was in 2010, at an eye-watering £2.1 billion per year. Emergency hotels are costing £7 million a day, and an astonishing £1.5 billion since the current Prime Minister assumed his role. The Prime Minister admits that the system is broken, and he should know—his party broke it. Much of this comes down to the backlog on asylum decision making, and a process that has been butchered by 13 years of Conservative incompetence. The failure to process asylum applications was initially caused by the Conservatives downgrading Home Office decision makers from higher executive officer to entry-level roles, leading to worse decisions that were often overturned on appeal, and a staff turnover rate of a whopping 46% last year. Astonishingly, the Home Secretary admitted to the Home Affairs Committee yesterday that she has no idea how many asylum caseworkers the Department employs.

The human and financial costs of the chaos are plain. Asylum seekers are stuck in limbo, unable to work as their mental health deteriorates while the British taxpayer is picking up the bill. It really is the worst of all worlds. Labour is clear: it is critical that these dangerous small boat crossings are stopped, because we cannot have people risking their lives in this way while the people smugglers are making millions by trading in human misery. We must clear the backlog quickly and securely, and we have a five-point plan to do it. We would: scrap Rwanda and plough the money into an elite unit in the National Crime Agency; negotiate an agreement with France and the EU to return asylum seekers in exchange for a strictly capped offer for resettling genuine refugees; get the backlog sorted by having triage for high grant rate and low grant rate countries; get the safe and legal routes such as those for Afghanistan working, because the Afghan scheme is completely broken; and get our international aid programme working much more in collaboration with what is happening in terms of the Home Office and countries that generate large numbers of asylum seekers.

The reality is that every single measure that Conservative Ministers have announced on asylum has turned out to be an expensive and unworkable headline-chasing gimmick. When it comes to net migration, the figure is clearly unsustainable, and yet the Government have no plan to get the number down. The root cause of the problem is that they are not taking responsibility. They blame their predecessors, they blame the Opposition, they blame the civil service, they blame the lawyers, they blame the judges and they blame the European Union—they even blame the football pundits. They also fudge the asylum statistics and fudge the cost of their legislation. They refuse to produce impact assessments. They even fudge their pledges when they realise that they cannot meet their targets. That is no way to run a country and it is no way to run the asylum system. We need to get this Government out of the way so that we can have a Labour Government who will stand up, take responsibility and fix the system, and we need that right now.