UK Parliament / Open data

Immigration Bill

Proceeding contribution from Keith Vaz (Labour) in the House of Commons on Tuesday, 22 October 2013. It occurred during Debate on bills on Immigration Bill.

As a member of the Committee—there are four Committee members in their places this afternoon—I am not going to offer to take on more work, given our work load. As the hon. Gentleman knows, every quarter we look at the work of the Home Office on immigration, and I am certain that some aspects of the Bill will be included in the work that we do. We will therefore scrutinise some aspects of the Bill but not its entirety.

In pursuing an immigration policy that is fair and just, we need to be very careful with our enforcement methods. We also need to welcome decisions taken by the Government when they move in the right direction. The Home Secretary was right to shelve the ad vans, and I congratulate her on doing so. As the shadow Home Secretary and others have said, those vans caused enormous concern in the communities. We do not have a figure for how many people got into the vans and asked for a lift back to the airport, but the vans cost £10,000 and were out for six days in inner-city London. As yet, we do not know how many people have gone back. When the pilot is over, we will need those figures. Meanwhile, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) for his superb Adjournment debate. It gives us all heart to know that we can call for an Adjournment debate to advocate the abolition of an aspect of Government policy and for it to happen two weeks later. It gives us comfort to know that we have some powers as Back Benchers.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
569 c180 
Session
2013-14
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
Back to top