Stephen Kinnock
Main Page: Stephen Kinnock (Labour - Aberavon)(3 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, but I have to say that this really is getting quite difficult to watch. Not for the first time, the Minister has come to the Dispatch Box desperately fishing for compliments, when it is his Government, his Home Secretary and his Prime Minister who are the cause of the catastrophic state of both the work-based migration and asylum systems. This is their bin fire—their chaos—yet they expect praise each time they half-heartedly attempt to throw a single teacup of water towards the flames.
Net migration has trebled since 2019 to a barely comprehensible 745,000. Under this Government, the number of people crossing in small boats has spiralled from a few hundred in 2018 to tens of thousands every year. It was toe-curlingly embarrassing to watch the Minister claim that he has made “solid progress” on stopping the boats, when this year the number of crossers is at the highest level on record—more than 7,000 between January and April.
It was excruciatingly painful to watch the Home Secretary boast on social media about removing people with no right to be here, when the removal of failed asylum seekers has collapsed by 44% under this Government since 2010, when the removal of foreign criminals has plummeted by 27%, and when he has completely lost track of the 3,500 asylum seekers he claims have been identified for deportation to Rwanda. It is also painful to hear Government figures bragging in the media that their Rwanda policy is somehow a success because a single person, who did not even cross the channel on a small boat, has chosen to fly to Rwanda voluntarily, with thousands of pounds of Government money stuffed into his pocket by the Home Secretary. This is not a policy; it is a headline-chasing gimmick, a fiasco and a farce.
Labour has been absolutely clear that we reject the £500 million Rwanda scheme, based on its unaffordability and unworkability. It will cover only 1% of small-boat asylum seekers, and the Government have no plan for the other 99%. We will repurpose that money to smash the criminal smuggler gangs with our new cross-border police unit and a security partnership with Europol. Crucially, our new returns and enforcement unit will ensure that more flights take off to other countries, which will remove foreign criminals, failed asylum seekers and visa overstayers so that we can restore some control and integrity to our asylum system in a way that is firm, fair and well managed. We will also end the use of 250 asylum hotels and other inappropriate accommodation for asylum seekers, which is costing the British taxpayer millions of pounds every single day.
It is painful to hear the Minister bragging today about the reduction in the number of health and social care visas awarded as a way of bringing down net migration—first, because it is based on such a small data sample; secondly, because this is only one sector of the economy; and, thirdly, because the Minister seems to care not one iota what the reduction in workers will mean for our elderly parents. Where is the impact assessment, and where is the plan to recruit local talent?
Can the Minister explain why net migration has trebled since his party pledged during the 2019 general election to lower it? Will he admit that the huge surge in work-based migration over recent years is evidence of this Government’s total failure to deliver on domestic skills and training? Labour pushed the Government into scrapping the unfair 20% wage discount for jobs on the shortage occupation list, which allowed companies to undercut British workers by hiring overseas. Can he explain why it took so long for his party to steal our policy?
On asylum, Home Office sources have told The Times that only 400 to 700 detention spaces are reserved for migrants who are due for deportation to Rwanda. Can the Minister confirm that this equates to less than 1% of the current asylum backlog in the UK? The Prime Minister promised to detain everyone who has crossed the channel on a small boat—over 30,000 last year. Given that we have only 2,200 detention spaces, what will happen to the remaining 28,000?
The Government’s immigration and asylum policies have failed. We need to put the grown-ups back in charge so that we can fix this broken system and once again give our country an asylum and immigration system that it can be proud of.
Tom Pursglove
What a quite extraordinary response! The fact is that this is a Government who have a credible plan to bring net migration down by 300,000, and all those measures are now in flight. As I have been able to set out for the House, it is beginning to deliver the results we said it would deliver.
I will take no lectures from the shadow Front Bench about the issue of domestic employment. I was one of the Ministers in the Department for Work and Pensions that was proud to bring forward the back to work plan and the comprehensive reforms of the welfare system that we are taking forward as a Government. We are also seeing enormous cross-Government join-up to support more domestic workers into those roles. That is the right thing to do: to support people in this country to take on those roles and fill those vacancies. And let us not forget the record of every single Labour Government: without fail, they leave unemployment higher at the time of leaving office than it was at the start. Under this Government, we have seen record low unemployment benefiting communities across the country.
We have begun the process of delivering the measures in relation to legal migration, and we are also delivering when it comes to illegal migration. We have a plan. We are now getting on and closing hotels—150 asylum hotels have been closed. That is a positive thing. It is the right thing to do to make sure that we accommodate people in appropriate accommodation, but get away from the model of providing hotel accommodation for people. What is Labour’s plan on that? We have seen massive gains when it comes to asylum decision making and productivity around those processes. What is Labour’s policy on that? We have seen crossings down by over a third last year compared with the year before. We have seen Albanian arrivals falling by 90%. Again, what is Labour’s offering to achieve likewise? There isn’t one.
We will continue to sustain the progress that we have made, and we know from everything that has been said in recent days that the Rwanda policy is beginning to have the desired effect: the deterrent is clear. When it comes to the hon. Gentleman’s meagre offering, I would just say that we have already doubled funding for the National Crime Agency for organised immigration crime work, and we already have approximately 5,000 officials working on these matters within migration and borders. That is all that Labour Members are offering; it virtually resembles a blank sheet of paper. The truth is that they offer no deterrent. They have nowhere to send people. They have no plan. They have no solutions. They try to bluff that they do, but they are kidding nobody. They are terrified that our plan is going to work. They are terrified that they will have to scrap it, and they are terrified that they have no alternative. Only we have a plan. It is delivering results and we will see it through.