Illegal Migration Bill

Wayne David Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

As the hon. Member knows, the majority of people who are seeking asylum and arrive in France stay in France, rather than seeking to travel to the UK. However, we believe that we should be seeking to get a returns agreement with France, alongside new arrangements on issues such as family reunion, but at the moment, the Government have so undermined their relationship with France and other European countries that they have totally failed to get any of those agreements in place, and they are making it harder to do so with this Bill. If the hon. Member believes that returns agreements are needed, or if he believes that new, alternative arrangements around family reunion or other issues are needed, he should oppose the Bill, because it will make it harder to get any of those agreements in place. The Bill is undermining the international co-operation and international law that all of those other countries depend on.

Consider what the Bill means for the young Vietnamese woman who has been trafficked into sexual exploitation, repeatedly raped and beaten by the criminal gangs who brought her here and who control and dictate her life. Under the Bill, if the police find her when they bust the brothel, she will not be able to get modern slavery support any more: she will not be able to go to a safe house or get help from the Salvation Army. Instead, she will just be locked up in one of the Home Office detention centres. If she co-operates with the police for a bit, she might get some temporary support, but if that police investigation is closed, her world comes crashing down again. Here is what the Prime Minister tweeted about all of that:

“If you come to the UK illegally…You can’t benefit from our modern slavery protections…you will be…DENIED access to the UK’s modern slavery system”.

Think on that. Bringing people into the UK illegally in order to control and exploit them is exactly what trafficking is. Cross-border trafficking is, by definition, a major form of modern slavery, yet this Government are proposing to just wish it away—to exclude it entirely from the modern slavery system, as if the very fact of crossing borders somehow stops it from being slavery at all. The message from the UK Government to the criminal trafficking and slavery gangs is this: “Don’t worry, so long as you bring people into the country illegally, we won’t help them. In fact, we will help you: we will threaten those people with immediate detention and deportation, so that you can increase your control over those trafficking victims.” This Bill is a traffickers’ charter.

The previous Prime Minister but three, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) promised to end modern slavery, and I respect the work that she did, but this one—the current one—wants to enable it. How low has the Tory party fallen? It is even worse for children. This Bill allows the Home Secretary to lock them up indefinitely, with all safeguards removed. It allows her to remove unaccompanied children without even considering the details of their case and whether they have fled from persecution. Once they hit 18, the Bill requires her to remove them, even if the only family or support they have in the entire world is here in the UK, and even if they have been exploited and abused by criminal gangs. The Bill denies them any protection from modern slavery and makes them forever illegal in the UK.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Does the shadow Home Secretary share my concern that there was not pre-legislative consultation with the Children’s Commissioner? Why does she think that was the case?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right, and the Children’s Commissioner is appalled by some of the measures in the Bill and the lack of consultation, too. Remember those hundreds of children missing from asylum hotels, who have almost certainly been picked up by the smuggler and trafficking gangs? This Bill makes it even harder to get those kids back, and it makes it even easier for those gangs to increase their control. It means no sanctuary, or just temporary support at most for Eritrean girls, who will most likely have been raped or exploited, or for the 12 and 13-year-olds I met a few years ago, brought here by gangs from Afghanistan, or for children who endure what happened to Mo Farah. They would be denied refuge; they would be denied citizenship; they would be locked up and threatened with return. The Home Secretary may not want to admit it, but that is what this Bill does. It denies citizenship forever for people like Mo Farah.

The Tory party once voted to introduce safeguards on the detention of children, and it was right to do so. The Tory party once voted to introduce the Modern Slavery Act 2015, and it was right to do so, but what has happened to the Tories now? How low have they fallen and how far down are they trying to drag our proud country? That is what this Bill is: an attempt to drag our whole country down. They know that the Bill will not work to stop boat crossings or the gangs. They know it will not clear the backlog and that it will make the chaos worse. They know it will stop children and trafficked people getting help and will play into the hands of criminal gangs, and they know it will undermine our reputation in the eyes of the world as a country that believes in the rule of law, but they do not care, because this is about political games. This is about a lame Prime Minister making promises that he has no intention of keeping. All he wants is a dividing line, all he wants is to pick a fight, and all he wants is someone else to blame. He does not care if our international reputation or some very vulnerable people pay the price.

Illegal Migration Bill

Wayne David Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

I am going to make some progress.

A range of proposals have been put forward, including by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), who has a record of huge commitment to addressing these matters. The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) also have a long history of working diligently on these issues.

The number of new clauses, including one of my own, that seek to build on and expand access to family reunion visas for refugees clearly reflects the high level of support for such schemes among Members on both sides of the House. In speaking to new clause 24 on behalf of the Opposition, I make it clear that providing better safe routes for unaccompanied children with family in the UK is not just right from a moral point of view; it will also demonstrate to our European neighbours, whose support on issues from returns to tackling people smuggling is so fundamentally important to this country, that we are serious about making progress in negotiations on the range of issues that I outlined in relation to new clause 25.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that so far the Bill comes with no children’s rights impact assessment? We are desperately concerned about the plight of children.

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend makes an absolutely valid point about the lack of an impact assessment for children, but there is a broader point about the lack of impact assessment full stop. It is completely and utterly unacceptable that we in this House should now be debating a Bill with no impact assessment having been published in advance. That shows a sort of disrespect to the House that really needs to be put on the record.

I am having to limit my time to discussion of the Opposition Front Benchers’ amendments, so I will not be able to raise my many questions and concerns about some of the provisions on legal proceedings in clauses 37 to 49. Some clearly appear to pose a real threat to due process and to our respect as a country that upholds the rule of law. The entire Bill is shot through with inconsistencies, unresolved questions and bizarre contortions of logic that can only have the effect of worsening the very problems the Government say they are trying to solve.

Just one example of that is highlighted by amendment 41, which I tabled as a means of probing the Government’s thinking on a measure that simply does not appear to have been properly thought through. Clause 45 states that where an appeal against a removal notice is upheld, the duty to remove that person no longer applies—so far, so sensible. The problem is that nothing in the Bill says that any asylum claim made by a person in such a situation would then be considered: those claims would continue to be inadmissible. That means we will end up with situations where there are people who cannot be removed, because a court has ruled that doing so would pose unacceptable risks to their safety, but who also cannot lawfully remain in the UK because of the Government’s refusal to accept their claim for asylum. The law would effectively be saying that a person can neither leave nor remain in this country. If the Minister has an answer to the question of what then happens to a person in that situation, I would love to hear it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Loughton]

The reality, as the Home Affairs Committee found when we were last in Calais in January, is that the French authorities do not arrest a lot of the people trying to cross the channel; they turn a blind eye. These people are therefore not registered and the authorities do not have a record of who many of them are. They only show an interest in arresting and recording somebody who has come from a country with whom they have a returns agreement, where there may be a reasonable chance to return them. Otherwise—surprise, surprise—the French authorities’ problem becomes our problem if those people then get into boats.

Those are things that I hope we all agree with across the House, whatever our stance on this Bill. We also need to challenge some assumptions. Not all asylum seekers coming across the channel have a credible asylum claim. We are told, “Other countries do more,” but when we look at the totality of the issue, and the amount of people to whom we offer safe haven and support outside of the United Kingdom in refugee camps—those people who just want to go back to their own countries—it is more generous than virtually any other country in the world. We need to look at the totality.

Coming to the UK is not always the appropriate solution for many people. The resettlement schemes that we have generously operated already, particularly with regard to Ukraine and Hong Kong passport holders, are potentially huge. In the case of Hong Kong, it could be up to 2.9 million people. We have also heard the criticism from the French that we are too generous. They describe us as “El Dorado”, which is why so many refugees apparently want to come across to the UK.

The other reality is that even if we wanted to, we cannot take an unlimited number. The fact that almost 10,000 Afghan refugees legally brought here after the airlift from Kabul in the summer before last—more than 18 months ago—are still in hotels is testament to the fact that we have an accommodation problem. Whatever we come up with, we need a system that is disciplined, orderly and sustainable so that we can make sure that people are processed quickly and put in appropriate accommodation, because hotels for young children for a sustained amount of time, be that with their families, let alone on their own, are frankly just not the most appropriate place for them to be.

[Wayne David]

Is it appropriate, in the hon. Gentleman’s view, that former RAF camps are now being used and planned to be used for migrants?

[Tim Loughton]

None of this is ideal, but when people arrive in their hundreds—one day last summer it was more than 1,000—and all of a sudden become the responsibility of the United Kingdom Government, there is a practical limitation on what accommodation is available physically to house them. That is why our hotels are being taken over and are full and why various military bases have been used, with mixed success. It is why the Government are having to look at other solutions. However, we have a serious problem accommodating our own constituents, as we all know, because of the shortage of local authority accommodation, and we just have to be realistic about how we can properly look after people coming across the channel.