Rwanda Plan Cost and Asylum System

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend has made an important point about, in particular, the issues relating to Afghanistan, where we know there has been huge persecution by the Taliban. We also know that there are people who helped our armed forces and, effectively, worked for the UK Government in Afghanistan, and as a result have been targeted by the Taliban. The Afghan resettlement scheme set up by the Home Office has had all kinds of problems. It is important that there are proper reforms to the resettlement schemes to make sure that they are effective, and that they prevent people being exploited by people traffickers and people smugglers. That is why it is so important to take action to stop these dangerous boat crossings, which are putting lives at risk and undermining our border security, and on which the criminal gangs have made profits of probably £0.5 billion over the last few years as a result of being able to take hold along the channel.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

The right hon. Lady mentioned 34,000 cases so far since the printing of the Illegal Migration Bill. Of those cases, if people are found to have no credible case for asylum to stay in the United Kingdom, and if they come from countries to which it is virtually practically impossible to return them, what would she do with them?

[Yvette Cooper]

As the hon. Member will know, we should be returning people who do not have a foundation in persecution or conflict, who do not have a well-founded asylum claim. They should be being returned to their own country. But he will also know that there has been a 50% drop in the returns of failed asylum seekers since 2010—a huge drop. We should be working with a new returns and enforcement unit, with proper staffing in place, to reverse that drop. He will also be aware, because it was in evidence given to the Home Affairs Committee, where he has worked immensely hard over many years, and because he takes these issues very seriously, that only 5% of those who arrived from Albania—including on small boats—over the past few years have been returned to Albania. Although we support the Albania agreement, it is in fact being used predominantly to return historic cases, and has not been used for the kinds of cases he is talking about, in which decisions should be fast-tracked and people should be being returned quickly.

[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way again, but she has answered a question that I did not ask. I was referring not to Albanians but to people from countries that she knows it is practically impossible to return them to. The Iranian Government will not let them off the plane. Eritreans would put them in jail and say they would be appealed on human rights. What would her party, in government, do with those people who had come here illegally from such countries, with no basis on which they could stay and no way of negotiating returns agreements with countries like Iran?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Member will know that people from countries such as Eritrea and Iran are very often granted asylum, and will not be sent to Rwanda under his Government’s policy because Rwanda will only be able to take a hundred or a couple of hundred people a year, at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. That is the core dishonesty and the failure at the heart of the Government’s programme—they are promising people that they will make huge changes to the existing system, but they are not at all. Instead, if anything, all they will do is stack people up in asylum hotels for even longer than the taxpayer is funding them, for a bill, currently, of £8 million a day—up from £6 million a day.

The Prime Minister declared the asylum backlog cleared—that is what he said—which is taking the country for fools. There are 99,000 cases in the backlog. That is probably over 120,000 people, and all the Home Office have tried to do is clear the cases before July 2022—cases that are already more than 18 months old. Those cases should not be in the system by now anyway. Any properly functioning system would have cleared cases that were more than 18 months old, but that is the scale of Tory chaos. Why are they just trying to catch up with themselves, clearing those very old cases? Of course, the backlog since July 2022 has doubled. Even their weak, limited target to clear the so-called “legacy backlog” has failed, with 4,500 cases not cleared and 35,000 cases simply withdrawn. We want the facts about that. What has happened to those 35,000 cases?

We know from the evidence to the Select Committee in November that as of November, the Home Office had no idea where 17,000 of those claimants were. How many of the 35,000 does the Home Office know to have left the country? How many of them does it know to be deceased or to be duplicate cases? And how many are probably still here? They might be working illegally, they might have restarted their asylum application and gone back to the beginning of the system, or they might be destitute on the streets. Whatever has happened to them, they are still here and the Home Office does not have a clue. Can the Minister give us a breakdown of the 35,000 cases? Is enforcement action taken if those people should not be here? It not, this all looks like more smoke and mirrors from a dodgy salesman Prime Minister.

We support some of the Government’s measures relating to France, and we support the agreement with Albania. We want to see more proper international co-operation like that, and we should be on steroids in tackling the criminal gangs.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Tim Loughton

Committee: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

I am not alarmed by the fact that the hon. Lady has signed my new clause 53; I am flattered and encouraged. I would expect nothing else from the hon. Lady, who has taken an interest in this area. However, Calais is a sign of failure: it should not be happening. We should be dealing with those children closer to home, or leapfrogging Calais altogether and placing them in places of safety in the United Kingdom, Sweden or France itself. The issue is baffling to me—I have spoken about it many times. If what is happening in Calais was happening in the United Kingdom, our children’s services would be placing those children in a place of safety, not allowing them to remain at liberty and be exposed to people traffickers, sex traffickers and all sorts of other criminals who would harm them.

I want to get back to what my new clause attempts to do. As we leave the European Union and therefore Dublin III, the UK’s different—in this case, slightly more restrictive—immigration rules will provide the only means by which refugee children can be legally reunited with their families. As the UK looks to improve our own laws through the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and to replicate the provisions ensuring that children stranded in Europe can be brought to join asylum-seeking family members in the UK, it is imperative that it should broaden the scope of the definition of “family” in our own British immigration rules so that these are in line with the current European ones. That will allow children to be reunited with close family members, wherever they are. Hence the importance of continuity and of perpetuating the existing situation, which works well; it could work better, but the principle is certainly absolutely right.

The UK’s immigration rules can apply to children anywhere in the world, and they therefore provide a safe and legal route for children, avoiding the need for them to embark on perilous journeys to Europe, which have been discussed. We need to build on this very positive aspect of the rules. The UK should amend its immigration rules on refugee family reunion to allow extended family members who have refugee or humanitarian status—adult siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, as I have mentioned—to sponsor children in their family to join them in the UK when it is in the child’s best interests to do so. That point about the child’s best interests must be absolutely paramount, as it is the basis of all our child welfare legislation in this country. After years of conflict, many of these children have been orphaned or do not know where their parents are, but they may have grandparents, aunts and uncles, or adult brothers and sisters in the UK, who can care for them.

If these changes were made to the UK immigration rules, that would enable children to be transferred from their region of origin and reunited in a regular, managed and safe way. Refugee family reunion transfers would all be processed by UK embassies or consulates, meaning that we could take back control of this process and ensure it works at a speed—it needs to be quicker than it is now—that is in the best interests of the children.

Without the changes, children will continue to be vulnerable in being forced to take dangerous journeys and put themselves at risk. The whole thrust of our asylum policy on looking after these vulnerable children has been to keep them away from such harm. Last year, some 700 unaccompanied refugee children were united with their families using the European system, which is on top of all the other schemes to which the UK currently subscribes.

I hope that my new clause is a helpful probing amendment. I am grateful to the Minister for Immigration, who has met my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough and me to discuss this issue. He is sympathetic to what we are trying to achieve. I acknowledge that the timing of the new clause might be better in a forthcoming immigration Bill, but it is useful to put it on the record now to get a comment from Ministers about the Government’s intentions at the appropriate time and perhaps with more appropriate wording; the word “appropriate” continues to appear.

My new clause is intended to build on the good work that the UK Government have done for so many thousands of child refugees so far. That good work has resulted from the huge investment—now of over £2.3 billion on Syrian refugees alone—aimed at frustrating the people traffickers and others who would harm these very vulnerable children. Such a change would show that the United Kingdom intends to continue, after Brexit, to be a leading force for humanitarian good outside the EU on the basis of British principles, British attitudes to the welfare of the child and British generosity in looking after, as we have done for so many years, those most in need. This system works, and we must make sure that it continues to work after Brexit.

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I rise to speak briefly to amendments 48, 49 and 52 in my name. They have cross-party support, including from other Select Committee Chairs, because they are about safeguarding the role of Parliament and preventing the concentration of power in the hands of the Executive.

Before I talk in detail about those amendments, I want to support new clause 53 and the words of my Home Affairs Committee colleague, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). He is right that we need to continue with our historical obligations towards refugees and with the principle of family reunion, ensuring that child refugees are not separated from their family and do not lose their rights to be reunited with family members who can care for them, especially when families have been separated by persecution and conflict. He is also right that this is about preventing the people traffickers, the exploitation and the modern slavery that can cause such harm and blight so many lives.

Our Committee has often found evidence that leads us to want the Dublin III process to work faster and more effectively, not for the principles behind it to be ripped up and thrown away. I therefore welcome the fact that, as the hon. Gentleman has said, Ministers have shown an interest in supporting the continuation of these historical obligations. I hope that that will be addressed if not in this Bill, then in either an immigration Bill or in the withdrawal agreement Bill in due course.

The amendments I have tabled to clause 7 address the concern, raised by so many of us, that Parliament is being asked to hand over considerable powers to the Executive without sufficient safeguards. That concentration of powers in the hands of the Executive—a concentration not seen since the days of the infamous Tudor monarch—goes against the very reason why all of us were elected to this place: the legislature has an historic obligation to place checks on the power of the Executive, in order to prevent concentrations and abuses of power, in relation to Brexit or to anything else. It is an obligation that each of us takes on when we swear the oath at the Dispatch Box.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I do. The issue was debated in Committee, but, given the huge effect that the present situation has on some people’s lives, it tends not to be considered much in comparison with the consideration that is given to other issues. The House of Lords was able to consider it at length, and I believe that we should support its amendments. I know that some Members of both Houses wanted more changes to be made to the Bill, or indeed opposed it in the first place.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

May I ask the right hon. Lady a question that I should have asked her earlier? The “humanist” amendment, which she supports, prescribes a clear timetable: a review must be

“produced and published before 1 January 2015.”

Why did she not consider it necessary to demand a timetable for the review of civil partnerships, which she supported during an earlier stage of the Bill’s passage? That provision is open-ended.

[Yvette Cooper]

I am in favour of a similar, or even more rapid, timetable for the civil partnerships review. In fact, during one of our earlier debates I said that I should like it to proceed alongside consideration of the Bill. Obviously it is for the Government to set the timetable, and, as the hon. Gentleman will know, many of the amendments are a result of discussion and compromise along the way, but I agree that rapid progress and consultation on the civil partnerships review would be useful.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Yvette Cooper and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 5th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making. I will deal specifically with whether extending marriage in this way will have an impact on wider family life and the stability of society—it is a point with which I disagree—but I pay tribute to the important work that he has done to tackle homophobic bullying.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

In 2004, I voted enthusiastically for the Civil Partnership Bill, whereas the right hon. Lady did not. I am sure that she had good reasons. That measure gave full equality in the eyes of the law for people in same-sex relationships. Were either of us homophobic for not going for full marriage at the time? What exactly has happened in the past nine years? Is not the problem that we need to address not a lack of equality in the law, but a lack of equality, in some people’s eyes, in society? Just changing the name of a ceremony will not address that.

[Yvette Cooper]

I have addressed that point before. I have always strongly supported civil partnerships: I think that they were the right thing for the Labour Government to do at the time. However, I also think that attitudes have changed and moved on—it is good that they have done so—and it is the right time to introduce same-sex marriage.