Illegal Migration Bill

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

Here we go again: another day, another Bill designed to chase headlines and manufacture controversy, rather than tackle the asylum crisis that has been caused by the incompetence and indifference of the last 13 years. That said, a casual observer of the Prime Minister’s recent trip to Dover could be forgiven for thinking that it was all sorted—job done. There he was sporting his super-sized new boots and boasting about the slight decrease in crossings, while apparently failing to realise that strong winds in the channel were the actual cause of his somewhat premature celebrations. Since he danced his victory jig in Dover, we have seen channel crossings skyrocket, with the busiest June yet for the criminal people smuggling trade, with 3,824 asylum seekers making the dangerous journey last month. Call me old-fashioned, but an asylum strategy that is based on the weather is probably not a sustainable strategy.

Then we have the Home Secretary. She jetted off to Rwanda on a taxpayer-funded vanity photoshoot to champion the new housing being built for the asylum seekers she dreams of one day flying over there. But again, all was not as it seemed: the housing estate she was showcasing is largely due to be used to house Rwandan nationals. Last week, the Court of Appeal reminded her that, even if her plan does go ahead, the Rwandan authorities can process only around 100 asylum claims per year—less than 0.3% of last year’s small boat crossers. I am not sure what the Home Secretary plans to do with the other 99.7% of asylum seekers or, indeed, why she thinks a 0.3% chance of removal to Rwanda is likely to put off a single asylum seeker considering paying money to a people smuggler. For a deterrent to be effective, it must be credible, and a 0.3% risk of deportation to Rwanda is not going to deter.

[Sir John Hayes]

I know that the hon. Gentleman takes these matters very seriously and he will remember that I was very complimentary about him in various ways in a debate in Westminster Hall. However, he must recognise that the deterrent effect of being processed offshore, which the Australians experienced during their Operation Sovereign Borders, would mean fewer people coming here. As he described, the people traffickers’ branding is that, if someone gets to Britain, they will never leave. By challenging that sales pitch, we will deter people from coming.

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I think he misunderstands the basic psychology here. We are talking about people who have already risked life and limb and taken a very dangerous journey to get as far as the channel. The idea that a 0.3% chance of being removed to Rwanda is going to deter people who have already taken such massive risks is simply for the birds, and that is why the Rwanda scheme is fundamentally flawed.

Last but not least, we have the Immigration Minister, whose latest foray into playing the tough guy was to order that Mickey Mouse cartoons in immigration centres be painted over because they were just too cheery for his liking. Many of those children are running away from unimaginable horrors, so I really do hope that the Minister will take some time to reflect on the morality of his actions. The sheer pettiness and petulance are also quite astonishing, because painting over Disney characters in immigration centres will not stop the boats—I cannot believe I even need to say those words. Those three short stories about the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister make it clear that we are not exactly dealing with a well-oiled machine here.

Last week, we finally received the Home Office’s impact assessment for this legislation, which revealed that it will cost the Government £169,000 per asylum seeker sent to Rwanda—five times the figure being briefed out when the partnership was announced last year. That is on top of the £140 million that has already been handed over to the Rwandan Government for what must surely be the most expensive press release in history. This whole sorry tale is a shambolic farce, and the cost to the taxpayer of the Rwanda policy, this legislation and the asylum backlog has become utterly extortionate.

The cost of the asylum system is estimated by the National Audit Office to be seven times as large as it was under the last Labour Government—at an astonishing £3.6 billion. Almost 50,000 people are stuck in hotels, at £7 million a day, with 172,000 in the backlog. For the avoidance of doubt, that is the real backlog, not the imaginary “legacy cases” invented by the Prime Minister as a way of spinning the numbers. In fact, the backlog is nine times higher than it was when Labour left office in 2010. By the way, we are still waiting for the Immigration Minister and the Prime Minister to correct the record on this point after the UK Statistics Authority comprehensively demolished their claims.

As the Home Secretary and her officials have confirmed, numbers are going up, not down. Yesterday, the permanent secretary to the Home Office confirmed to the Public Accounts Committee that the Prime Minister is failing in his pledge to reduce asylum seeker hotel use. To make matters worse, the National Audit Office has declared that the Government will also fail to achieve their aim of clearing the so-called legacy backlog of 92,000 cases by the end of this year.

[Tim Loughton]

We are here to discuss rather a lot of Lords amendments. The hon. Gentleman has now been speaking for six minutes. I have been listening hard and, by my reckoning, he has not mentioned a single amendment. Can he give us an ETA for when he is likely to start talking relevantly about what we are here to discuss? Many of us would like to discuss the amendments.

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I simply note that the Immigration Minister was on his feet for one hour and 15 minutes. There was plenty of context and background in his comments, too. We need to understand that the Bill has been brought forward against a backdrop of crisis and chaos and it is important that we have that on the record.

Interestingly, the Prime Minister seems to have concocted a new solution, which is simply to allow asylum seekers to slip off the radar, never to be seen or heard of again. The Government claim that their decision-making rate has increased and that they are getting on with clearing the backlog, but the reality is that more than half of the so-called asylum decisions are withdrawn applications or so-called administrative decisions. In other words, asylum seekers are melting into the underground economy, and many of them will never be heard of or seen again by our authorities. The Government are just letting them go. Withdrawals, as a proportion of completed cases, have increased from 20% to 55% on this Prime Minister’s watch. If that is not turning a blind eye to people absconding and disappearing into the system, I do not know what is.

It is against that backdrop of crisis and chaos that Ministers introduced the legislation before us this afternoon. As we have consistently pointed out, the Bill will only make a terrible situation worse. Far from cleaning up the awful mess that has built up over 13 years of ineptitude, it will simply grow the backlog, increase the cost and ensure that people smugglers are laughing all the way to the bank.

At the heart of the Bill are two instructions to the Government—to detain and remove every asylum seeker who comes to the UK via irregular routes—but with our asylum accommodation capacity already at breaking point, where on earth will the Home Secretary detain them? And with her unworkable Rwanda plan in tatters and with negotiations with the EU on a successor to the Dublin regulation nowhere to be seen, where on earth is she going to remove them to? We therefore commend the work of all the Lords and Baronesses who have sought to improve this profoundly flawed and counterproductive Bill. They really had their work cut out for them, given that the Government were defeated a staggering 20 times in the other place.

Amendments throughout the Bill’s passage have focused on mitigating its most egregious excesses, while trying to steer the Government in the direction of Labour’s five-point plan to fix the broken asylum system that, despite their protestations, Conservative Members know full well is a comprehensive agenda based on hard graft, common sense and quiet diplomacy, rather than the headline-chasing gimmicks they have come up with. Our plan includes repurposing the Rwanda money to the National Crime Agency to recruit a specialist unit of officers to tackle the criminal gangs upstream. Lords amendment 103, in the name of Lord Coaker, places responsibility on the NCA to tackle immigration crime.

Of the other substantial Lords amendments, the majority seek to prevent the utterly unnecessary attacks on some of the most vulnerable people in society, commit Britain to complying with international law, or seek to find long-term solutions to the global asylum crisis via international solutions and controlled and managed routes.

To ensure that Britain meets its obligations under international law, we support Lords amendment 1, which adds a requirement that nothing in the Bill should require any act that would violate the UK’s relevant commitments under international law. We are extremely concerned that the Government are subjecting unaccompanied children to the so-called hostile environment. While the Minister paints over Mickey Mouse murals, we on these Benches want unaccompanied children to be treated with respect. That is why we support Lords amendment 33, which retains the current 72-hour limit on the detention of children, and Lords amendment 31, which retains the current 24-hour limit on the detention of unaccompanied children, both in the name of Baroness Mobarik. We do not believe the Government’s concessions offer enough.

[Sir Robert Neill]

I was superficially attracted to Lords amendment 1, but will the hon. Gentleman consider these two points? First, it is an established principle of interpretation that the courts will always read statute in accordance with international convention obligations, as far as it is possible to do so—that was most recently established in the Assange case. Secondly, Lord Wolfson raised the point in the other place that the effect of clause 1, as amended, however intended, is substantively to entrench or incorporate those conventions in UK domestic law. Surely that is not something that should be done through an amendment to an Act of Parliament. There may be arguments for or against it, but that is its effect. It is not an interpretive clause but an incorporative clause, and some of us have a problem with doing it in that way at this time in this particular Bill.

[Stephen Kinnock]

I thank the Chairman of the Justice Committee for that intervention. Let us not forget that page 1 says the Government cannot confirm that the Bill complies with international law. I also remind him that we are dealing with a Government who seem to be more than prepared to break international law, with the Northern Ireland protocol being just one example. I am afraid it is just not possible to take the Government’s word on trust or at face value, which is why additional safeguards have to be built into the process.

Lords amendment 8, in the name of Lord Dubs, seeks to ensure that asylum and human rights claims from unaccompanied children who are exempt from the duty to remove are treated as admissible, and Lords amendment 50, in the name of the Bishop of Durham, limits the Secretary of State’s power to transfer a child out of local authority care and into accommodation provided by the Home Office to cases where to do so is

“necessary to safeguard and promote the welfare of the child.”

We are also determined to protect vulnerable women, particularly those who are pregnant or victims of modern slavery. In that spirit, we on these Benches support Baroness Lister’s amendments 37 and 38, which retain the 72-hour limit on the detention of pregnant women. We are less than satisfied with the Government’s concession on this point.

We support the amendments that protect victims of modern slavery, including Lords amendment 56 in the name of Lord Randall, which exempts victims of modern slavery from being removed and from being denied access to support during the statutory recovery period, and Lords amendment 57, tabled by Lord Carlile, which removes the Bill’s presumption that it is not necessary for victims of modern slavery to remain in the UK for the purposes of co-operating with any criminal proceedings against alleged perpetrators. That of course might sometimes be the case.

Ultimately, the Government need to accelerate the national referral process as a matter of urgency because the average wait time is 553 days, which is unacceptable. The Immigration Minister’s incorrect comments on modern slavery have been well documented, and he was recently rebuked yet again by the UK Statistics Authority for making those unfounded claims.

The constant stream of factually incorrect claims distorts the debate and plays into the hands of the people traffickers. I strongly encourage us to start seeing the facts and evidence before us as the basis for debate, otherwise there is such a danger that the Bill will turn into a traffickers charter, with the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and the Immigration Minister effectively enabling the criminal gangs.

We also support Lords amendment 23 in the name of Lord Etherton, as we cannot have a situation in which we remove LGBT refugees to third countries with Governments that pursue homophobic and transphobic policies.

I stress that, on these Benches, we are strongly committed to working with our international partners as we seek to find long-term solutions to the global migration crisis. In Committee and on Report, we tabled an international co-operation amendment to connect the need to achieve a returns deal with the EU and France for small-boat migrants with the need for Britain and other European countries to play our part in giving sanctuary to genuine refugees in need of our support, starting with those who have family in the UK. This remains our commitment for when we enter government.

To that end, we support Lords amendment 104 in the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which requires the Government to publish a 10-year strategy on countering human trafficking and responding to international refugee crises, and Lords amendment 102 in the name of Baroness Stroud, which places a duty on the Government to establish safe and legal routes to asylum.