The Bill feels like a series of poor choices made on the basis of ignorance of the evidence, or maybe even contempt for it.
Let us start with the Bill’s major premise, which is that we are overwhelmed with asylum seekers. That is not true. The United Kingdom had 35,000 or so asylum seekers last year; Germany had 120,000; France had 96,000. By the number of people we take in and consider for asylum each year, we are behind 16 members of the European Union, so we are low or mid-table. We are an island, so there is an extent to which we are protected; that has some horrific consequences as well, but the notion that we are overwhelmed with asylum seekers is bogus nonsense. It is not true, yet it is the premise of much of the Bill.
There is a problem with the asylum system, but it is the colossal backlog. Somehow, even though the number of people claiming asylum here has dropped by 58% in the past couple of decades and by 21% in the past two years, the number of people languishing in the asylum system has increased by 28%. That is proof that we are overwhelmed not with asylum seekers, but by the incompetence of the Home Office, which is what the Bill ought to be tackling. It pretends there is a problem that there isn’t, and it pretends that there isn’t a problem that there is.
Secondly, let us be quite honest about the whole issue of safer routes. So many comments have been made by Members on both sides of the House about how we need safer routes to prevent people from making dangerous crossings. There is such a need, but unless the Government allow people to apply for asylum from outside the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom will be complicit in and responsible for people making dangerous crossings. That is the safer route, but the Bill sets out nothing of the sort.
Creating two categories of asylum seekers—which I am sure the Government are doing because it winds up namby-pamby liberals and therefore somehow pleases them and their base—is probably illegal under international law. It is morally repugnant and wicked, and surely it is utterly counterproductive. Maybe that is the argument that might land with Ministers: that it will make things worse.
Just yesterday, I was talking to one of the Home Office’s own asylum accommodation providers. I will not name it, because that would not be fair, but it told me that the two-tier system will make no difference whatever to the number of people who come here via the irregular route; it will simply lead to refugees coming here, not claiming asylum and slipping into the informal economy. In other words, the Government are presenting to the House and the people a charter for a massive increase in exploitation, modern-day slavery, a wicked use of people through trafficking and all the awful things that come about when people go below the radar.
That seems an obvious consequence. the Government’s own suppliers know it, and I assume that the Government know it themselves, but they somehow think that they can get some useful clickbait by separating desperate people into the deserving and the undeserving. That is shocking. It undermines what it is to be British, and the Government should be ashamed of themselves for proposing it. Even if they have no shame, surely they have some practical understanding of the consequences of this foolish procedure: that it will force people underground into exploitation, modern slavery and appalling things like that.
It is not just on those issues that the Government have shown contempt for the evidence, or let us say an accidental ignorance of it. There is a huge impact on the world of work. In my constituency and right across Cumbria, the hospitality and tourism industry is by far our biggest employer. If I were to tell the House that, in the Lake district, 80% of the entire working age population already work in hospitality and tourism, Members will be able to see that there is no huge, sufficient reservoir of the additional people we need to work in our hospitality and tourism industry. Eighty per cent. of the working age population already work in hospitality and tourism. We are Britain’s second biggest destination, behind only London. Do the maths: we need overseas labour.
This year, and in the past few days especially, people I have spoken to right across my community, from Grasmere to Grange, from Sedbergh to Staveley, have been telling me that they have fought and struggled, spent their life savings and gone into debt to survive covid. They have been grateful for the Government support that has helped them to just about do that. Having survived covid, guess what? Loads of them are closing now. Why? Because of the Government’s barmy, impractical, stupid visa rules.
Home Secretary, why did you do all this? Why did the Government make provisions to support hospitality and tourism in the past 16 to 17 months if they were only going to kill them off by stupid visa rules at the end? The simple fact is that, if an Italian restaurant or a gastropub in the Lake district sources half its staff from overseas and half from the local area, if it cannot get the half from overseas and the business therefore closes, as dozens have done, the half who are local will lose their jobs too. So I will use the last few seconds to ask the Government to do something sensible— I and many Conservative Back Benchers think this should happen—and have a youth mobility visa with the countries that are close to us in Europe so that we can at least provide a source of labour to protect excellent businesses from going under because of stupid Government policies.
3.46 pm