It is a pleasure to speak in the debate. I rise to speak in support of the amendments standing in the names of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), who I believe has shown considerable political and personal courage during the course of this legislation to date.
I want to open my remarks by saying how strongly I believe in the principles of the Rwanda scheme. It is imperative that we break the business model of the people smugglers in a way that means the trade is not merely dented but ceases. We have heard platitudes, I fear, from Opposition Members about how if only we worked a bit more closely with the European law enforcement agencies, everything would resolve itself. Of course, would that that was so.
I can testify not only from my own time in Government but from having spoken to Ministers in the Home Office both currently and previously that a litany of work is under way to make sure that we bear down on this evil trade, and it has had some success. Crossings are down by approximately a third on their peak in 2022, and there has been enforcement action ranging from the French coast right through to dinghy sales in Bulgaria, which testifies to the fact that the UK is working at pace with our partner agencies to try to end these crossings. However, unless we address the root causes, we will always be left dealing with the consequences of the problem. That, I am afraid, is not acceptable to me and, much more importantly, it is not acceptable to my constituents or to the people of this country.
Just this weekend we had, as the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Michael Shanks) said, a tragic reminder of the human cost of allowing this trade to persist. Clearly it also has serious consequences for the United Kingdom. It makes a mockery of our border security and damages social cohesion. The accommodation costs alone of our asylum seeker population are somewhere in the region of £8 million a day, and that is before the through-life costs of these people being in this country. It also compromises our security, as the awful murder in Hartlepool a few months ago made clear. We do not know—we cannot know—who is coming into this country, and that is a serious and substantial risk that it is incumbent on us to acknowledge.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark alluded to, the test that faces us as legislators is simple: will this legislation work? It is not, “Is this legislation the strongest ever?”, although for the record it is, but it is still likely to prove insufficient. Still less is the test, “Is this as far as the Prime Minister is willing to go?” There is a crisis of faith in our politics. That boils down, as it has done for a number of years, spanning the Brexit debate and the causes of that, to whether we as Members of Parliament mean what we say. Is our word worth anything? Are we capable as a country of asserting our national sovereignty? Are we as a country capable of policing our borders?
I welcome the fact that the Government have decided that we now need to derogate from parts of the Human Rights Act 1998, which is welcome, brave and commendable. We now need to follow that logic to its conclusion. As amendment 10, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone, sets out, we should set out clearly and unambiguously that this Act will have effect notwithstanding the Human Rights Act. We must also close the loopholes that regrettably remain in the legislation. We have proposals to do so, with an accompanying legal opinion from John Larkin KC, the former Attorney General for Northern Ireland.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark set out eloquently a few hours ago, we must in particular strengthen provisions against individual claims, as opposed
to the general principle of the safety of Rwanda. It is welcome that we are asserting that, but it will be critically undermined unless we can stop the profusion of individual claims that will materialise, not least with the help, I am afraid, of the creative legal fraternity, if we do not close off that route.
Contrary to what the hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Roberts) said a few minutes ago, we are not excluding appeal rights entirely. If, for example, someone is seriously ill, they will not be eligible for removal to Rwanda under the amendment of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone. However, we must make it clear that we will not tolerate the abuses—and they are abuses—that we witness day in, day out under the current system.
We must also make clear in the Bill that rule 39 interim injunctions from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg will not have automatic binding effect. That is something that I think many of us regarded as a settled issue. Anyone who watched the Prime Minister’s appearance on the Kuenssberg show on the BBC just 10 days ago will have seen that he was unable to offer that guarantee. He was unable to offer it in good conscience, because here we enter the contested territory of what the Attorney General is prepared to sign off and what the ministerial code will allow. That goes to show precisely why the issue is so pressing. If we do not assert it as a sovereign Parliament in the Bill, it is highly likely that the issue will rear its head again in the months ahead.
Failure to close the loopholes will mean that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark said, we will face pressing operational problems that will significantly impair, and perhaps totally frustrate, our ability to pursue what this side of the Committee wishes to deliver. Our court system will be overwhelmed, our detained estate for asylum seekers will be overwhelmed, and the public’s patience will be exhausted. We have marched the British public up this hill not once, but twice already and failed both times. This is our third attempt. The Government’s own estimate, as we know, is that as we stand today, the Bill’s best chance of success can be rated at around 50:50. That is simply not adequate.
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We hear today that 150 judges and their courts will be made available to process appeals arising under the legislation. Apart from being one of the most effective devices I can conceive of to worsen our existing court backlog, that is simply confirmation of the scale of the problems that the Government anticipate as a result of what will happen under the Bill as drafted. I do not know where we will find these judges, and it would be helpful if the Minister—I hope he knows that I have an enormous amount of personal and professional respect for him—could elucidate that in his remarks. I do not know from which cases they will be diverted, and I certainly do not know at what cost that will all be accomplished, but it is not a tenable strategy for us to set aside such a huge amount of court time when we can act now to prevent spurious abuses being sustained still further.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said, this is our last chance to act in this Parliament. We have tried on multiple occasions. Despite the valiant efforts of my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman),
my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark, my hon. Friends the Members for Torbay (Kevin Foster) and for Corby (Tom Pursglove) and others, we have not succeeded. It comes down to this fundamental question: in whose interest do we sit here? Do we legislate today? It is clearly in the public interest that we sit here.
I warned in the debates on Brexit, which I had hoped were relegated to the annals of history, that the House was playing with fire. If mainstream democratic politicians do not or cannot resolve the problems that face this country, our political process will, I am afraid, move inextricably to the extremes. We have heard a lot of rhetoric—it is rhetoric—from those on the Opposition Benches about the extremeness of the position we are advocating. Trust me: it will be as nothing compared with who will sit on these Benches if we fail in our task, because we are at the limits of the tenable when it comes to the feelings of the British public.
If the Labour party wins the general election that will be held later this year—I freely admit that the polling at the moment suggests that it will, in large part because of the frustration, frankly, that the British people feel about this issue—it will have to confront these same problems. If it is not willing to act any more than we have been willing to act, it will be eaten by this issue just the same. It is a certainty that we have to slay this beast, if it is not to destroy all the mainstream centre ground of British politics and leave it in the hands of people who will advocate genuinely radical and unacceptable solutions.