It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), a knight of the realm, lecturing us all on being in touch with the people and on class warfare. What a dystopian vision he paints of this country. I will confine my remarks to the three amendments in my name, because he does not speak for the majority in this country with his callous disregard for people seeking sanctuary, and in his callous disregard for the evidence and facts.
Amendment 293 reflects the challenge set by the right hon. Gentleman and by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who complains about people with visas. He must be disappointed that the Illegal Migration Bill does nothing about people who overstay their visa, which is clearly illegal. If this Bill were actually about things that are illegal in our asylum system, it would tackle visa overstayers. The Bill says nothing about people traffickers, and it contains no further sanctions and makes no further efforts to catch organised crime gangs. I now realise why it does not, having heard how the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North objects to the European Court of Human Rights standing up for British citizens who face the death penalty—he could not even say that stopping people being sent to their death for standing up to Putin is a good thing.
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The Bill says nothing about the liaison with Europe we would need to catch these organised crime gangs. I tabled amendment 293 because this House should not be running the Government’s election campaign, and it should not pass legislation that is not about anything illegal—it is not illegal to seek asylum. We will keep reminding the British public of that. This Bill is just about the Conservative party getting its leaflets done on the cheap, by getting them done in this House. Amendment 293 would remove the word “Illegal” from the Bill’s title, because the Bill does not cover illegal behaviour or, indeed, the illegal elements of our asylum system that we should address, and that I am sure Conservative Members would want to address.
Amendment 138 is about safe routes. We discussed this yesterday, and the Immigration Minister was outraged when I suggested that there are no safe and legal routes. After all, if we have a Bill about illegal behaviour, we need a legal system that underpins it. The Minister, in direct response to my question, claimed that 6,000 people
from Iran have claimed asylum here via a safe and legal route. If a safe and legal route exists, surely it should be part of the decision-making process on asylum. The amendment simply sets out that a person’s asylum claim can be rejected if they can be shown the safe and legal route they should have taken to come here.
Let us look at the Minister’s figures. He said, on the record, that
“the UK has taken more than 6,000 Iranians directly for asylum purposes.”—[Official Report, 27 March 2023; Vol. 730, c. 747.]
The Home Office’s figures show that 59 people from Iran have been granted asylum via a safe and legal route since 2015, not 6,000—that is the number of people from Iran who have used the family reunion route. Family reunion is not a safe and legal route. The Immigration Minister does not understand, so I will put it in layman’s terms. A safe and legal route would mean that a person in Tehran who is standing up to the Iranian Government—Conservative Members want to stand with these people—is able to leave. A safe and legal route is not for people with the wherewithal to marry and to get their spouse to leave the country ahead of them, while they campaign for democracy.
If the Immigration Minister does not understand that family reunion visas are not the same as a safe and legal route, what hope is there for this Bill? What hope do we have that he is being open with Parliament about the number of people this Government have helped? If he thinks family reunion is a safe and legal route, he does not even understand the Ukrainian system, which he is supposed to be overseeing. Amendment 138 says that, if a safe and legal route exists, it should be part of the decision-making process. That might seem relatively straightforward but, given that the Government do not know what a safe and legal route is, I can understand why they might object to the amendment.
Let me turn to new clause 18, which really ought to be a no-brainer if we are a decent, possibly liberal society —although I would just say British and patriotic—that does not like to see children suffer for the decisions that their parents make. The new clause is about safeguarding duties. I can see that the Minister is not going to look me in the eye on this, because he and I have had several meetings about his failure to oversee the safeguarding of children in hotels—and they are indeed children—whether they are accompanied by their parents or carers, or whether they are unaccompanied.
I am talking about children who have experienced sexual assault because of the failures of safeguarding in hotels in this country; children who have not had education places; children who have not had clothes on their back, apart from those they fled with, to cope with the British weather; and hundreds of children who have gone missing and not been found. The Government will point to the Children Act 1989 and say this is all about local government, but the safeguarding of these children cannot be done without the active involvement of the Home Office. What we have seen to date shows that very clearly, because those children have gone missing, have experienced sexual assault and have not been in school. I am sure that even the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North would agree that it would be a good thing for any child to be in school and learning.