Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2020-10-05
Topic: Immigration
Alfred Dubs (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who spoke in this debate. I would take rather a long time if I commented in detail, because some important points were made, but I am grateful that they were made On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, my understanding has for some time been his understanding: although the Government want to negotiate, the EU is not showing any signs of reciprocating, but the outcome will be a total gap on 1 January I shall comment briefly on some of the Minister’s points. She said that the Home Secretary wants to get rid of the broken asylum system. We all do. We all have criticisms of the asylum system—the length of time that it takes to reach decisions and all the other things—but we went to mend it in a different direction from that of the Home Secretary. That is the purpose of this amendment Secondly, I welcome the fact that some small numbers of children and others have come under the Dublin III arrangements from Greece. That is a good thing. However, we have only till 1 January and, unless something happens, such as this amendment, there will be no way in which people, and these young people particularly, can come to this country Thirdly, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. I do not understand why our saying that we will take unaccompanied child refugees through an Act of the British Parliament in any way undermines anything with the EU. This would be a humanitarian move and other EU countries are making humanitarian moves. Various countries—the Germans, French, Portuguese and Irish—have said that they will take people from the Greek islands. They do not undermine anything; they do it in a spirit of international co-operation I remind the Minister, before I come on to local authorities, that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whom the Minister quoted with approval about helping the process, said recently that he supported Section 67 on taking unaccompanied child refugees and thought it was a good thing. I should have thought that that was an additional argument Lastly, on local authorities, let me just say that I have a list. I am not going to quote them all; some of the commitments were made about a year or two ago and we would not want to quote them unless they were willing to stand by those commitments in the new circumstances today. However, I shall mention a few of them. There is West Dunbartonshire Council, an SNP-Independent minority council, Dumfries and Galloway, which is Conservative, and Hammersmith, which is a Labour council. The London borough of Richmond was a supporter of legal routes—and then there are Dorset, Bournemouth and Brighton and Hove councils and, as I mentioned, those in Scotland. There are others. I shall write to the Minister and give her a list of local authorities that are willing and able to take unaccompanied refugee children I thank the Minister for her very gracious way of responding and her constant helpfulness in being willing to meet and talk to many of us about some of the issues. I appreciate that. I am afraid that on this occasion we will have to differ. I wish to put the amendment to a vote.