Nationality and Borders Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-19
Topic: Immigration
Neil Coyle (Labour, Centre-left): I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Member’s Financial Interests because I have help from the Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy—RAMP—project for my work in this area. RAMP is brilliant, in direct contrast to this Bill, which is the worst I have ever seen. This dog’s dinner would have been avoidable, however, if Ministers had listened to the evidence of experts, or even to the consultation responses, which they have promised, and failed, to publish. I hope that they will publish them as they finalise the Bill. It was strange after 11 years of a Conservative Administration to hear the Home Secretary admit, on the Second Reading of her own Bill, that it was not yet complete, in response to the question from the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) At a time of rising global crises, this Government could help to stop asylum seekers being created by intervening, perhaps under "global Britain", but that has sadly proved to be an empty slogan, often mouthed by emptier heads. That given, we have a Government who have twice betrayed their own manifesto—and, of course, the people who voted for them—by cutting our aid and by cutting our armed forces personnel, which will mean shrinking our global reach and influence. This Government are also shrinking our international standing by seeking exclusivism in the form of a new special status for the UK outside international law, to the direct detriment of and cost to other countries, including our immediate neighbours. It is bonkers, but Ministers present this fiction to us. They have a real battle with reality ahead It is a fiction to pretend that we have deals with other countries to return anyone to them, except for Albania, a country that we accept asylum claims from. It is a fiction to claim that it is fair to criminalise someone fleeing communist torture and slave labour in Xinjiang, or that it is fair to criminalise RNLI volunteers or anyone on any boat who rescues asylum seekers from drowning. It is a fiction to claim that this Bill is fair on councils, who already pay for Home Office failures and delays, because they will face additional costs through the rough sleeping that these plans will create and the estimated additional £55 million of the new costs of these proposals, which will create 3,000 more people experiencing the pernicious Home Office "no recourse to public funds" restrictions. It is a fiction to pretend that this is fair to the taxpayers who will pick up the bill, whether it is through the Home Office, through councils’ emergency social services or through the new criminal justice and imprisonment costs, which are estimated to be more than £400 million a year The only truth I heard from the Home Secretary today is that the system is broken, with the number of people waiting over a year for a decision rising tenfold since 2010, with 33,000 in that position in 2010, including almost 7,000 children. What is maddening is that the number of people working for the Home Office has risen but productivity has collapsed, with around 2,500 people now having waited three years or more for a decision. It is a decade of Tory rule that has broken the Home Office. The party who used to claim to represent law and order has run the Department for law and order into the ground, with nine in 10 crimes now going unpunished in this country. But now, Ministers are asking the Home Office to act unlawfully in pursuing an aim that breaks international law. Sadly, the idea that the people who broke the Home Office now have ideas about how to fix it is also a fiction. I would ask Ministers to think again about these plans, but there is little evidence that they put much thought into the Bill in the first place.