Immigration Controls

I want to pursue this issue for a while as it relates directly to a point raised by the Home Secretary. This is a phenomenally easy country in which to disappear and the message that goes out is, ““If you can get in to Britain, you are very unlikely to be removed.”” Twice today, the Home Secretary came up with a ludicrous statistic: that we are removing somebody from this country every eight minutes. Once the Government have stated targets, it is, as the Home Affairs Committee pointed out, the soft targets that are removed. We do not have an army of immigration officials trying to find those people who came over here, registered and then disappeared into the system precisely because they are mighty hard to find. Instead, we have people going to the doorsteps of those who have stuck by the rules, given their names and addresses to the Home Office and reported faithfully every week. Before now, on constituents' behalf, I have given chapter and verse in this regard. Then we hear, ““Oh look, it is a removal.”” We must distinguish between removing those who are seriously abusing the system and removing those who have stuck to the rules but who may then be unsuccessful. There is a huge distinction and it is one that the Home Secretary was very careful not to make. I can only say that I stand by the policy that I have always advocated for the control of the abuse, not the use, of the asylum system. I believe that all new asylum seekers should be housed in secure reception centres while we consider their claims, so that we can distinguish much more quickly the genuine ones who get clogged up in the system. That cannot, of course, be done by Tuesday afternoon; it has to be rolled out. Under that system, we will know where those to whom we will say no, which can be 80 per cent. in any given year, are and will be able to remove them. Then the message will go out: ““Come to Britain with a false or flimsy claim and you will be detained, dealt with quickly and sent back.”” Nobody will pay £5,000 to a human trafficking agency for that. That is not to say that we do not welcome those who are genuine, but simply trying to solve this by finding—by whichever way it is done—some overall number, as the Home Secretary seemed to suggest, and saying that everything has to be dealt with within that number will not allow us to make the distinction between those who use the system and those who abuse it.