Before I address the remarks relating to this amendment, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, to the chair. I understand it is her first Committee outing as a Deputy Chairman. As an alumnus of that role, I know the fear and intimidation of being faced with the Marshalled List in a very difficult Committee. I am sure all members of the Committee will be very sympathetic to her on her first day.
No one can be unmoved by the quality of the contributions to this debate—I declare myself a father and a grandfather. We identify absolutely with the pain and suffering which people are feeling at this time. I agree with the UN Secretary-General that this particular migration crisis is one of the greatest since the formation of the United Nations. He was right in talking about the scale of the problem.
It might help the Committee if I set out the rationale behind the Government’s current approach and set that in context of the fact that we are dealing with a very fast-moving situation. There is quite a lot of pressure which, rightly, comes from people who are trying to nail the Government down and ask, “Where are you with this particular Statement?” It is very fast moving. A significant number of discussions took place on the margins of the Supporting Syria conference a week last Thursday. Some 35 countries were there discussing these issues. On Thursday, James Brokenshire will be hosting a round table with Save the Children, UNHCR and UNICEF to discuss the specific statements on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children made by the Government on 28 January. This issue was raised by Save the Children and underscored by the DfID Select Committee. There is also the ongoing International Syria Support Group meeting in Munich on Thursday which will be attended by the Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary. I am trying to set this in context: it is very fast moving.
If I was standing here in this capacity last year, I would have been facing questions—I was standing here last year and I did face questions—from noble Lords who asked me repeatedly to tell them how many people had currently arrived. Officials would tell me to avoid putting a number on it, because it was not very impressive. It was fewer than 100, then 120 and 130: complaints came that it was derisory. Then came the Prime Minister’s announcement in September that it would be 20,000 over the period of this Parliament. So far, 50% of those have now arrived. He said it would be 1,000 before Christmas and I then got repeated questions asking whether they would all be here by Christmas. More than 1,000 arrived by Christmas. That process is continuing. Last year we might have talked about £500 million of aid committed to the
region, particularly to help Syrian refugees. That figure went up to £1.1 billion and last week it was doubled to £2.3 billion.
It is right that we are moved by the terrible situation which people are facing but, outside this Committee, it would be unfair to present a picture to the many organisations who are doing incredible work in this area that the Government, and particularly the Prime Minister, are unmoved by this. He is deeply moved by it and the Government are trying to work their way through.
As to the approach we are taking, the crisis we identified was that people were undertaking a perilous journey. I understand the arguments made about “we are where we are” or “they are where they are”, but that was the context in which we began this policy. The European Union’s policy at that point was relocation: in other words, people arrive and then you simply move them around different countries. We felt that simply having the same policy was not the right approach. The total number it aspired to move around was 160,000; currently some 340 have actually been moved. I do not want to start from the premise that we have somehow just plucked this approach from the air and that it has been proved to be fundamentally wrong.
We said that we needed to stop them undertaking that journey, because we knew that they would then immediately fall prey to the criminal gangs—we know the figure of 90%. These gangs are making vast fortunes from trafficking individuals. In fact there was one particular gang which was broken up by the National Crime Agency, working with Europol on 2 December, when 23 people were arrested. This one gang was responsible for 100 Syrian migrants a day coming into Greece and was making estimated earnings of €10 million in the process. This is a very lucrative business. Our first principle is to say that everything we need to do is to stop people making that journey. You then say, “How do you stop them making that journey if you are just giving them humanitarian aid?” They need some hope that they can potentially get out of that area through a safe route—and therefore the Syria Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme was expanded. We worked with the International Organization for Migration and the UNHCR to identify the most deserving people, based on established international UNHCR criteria—namely, those who had been victims of torture or persecution; women and girls at risk of violence; and those in acute medical need. Those were the priorities. When they were identified, they could be brought out not as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children but in family units. They are put on a plane with papers; they come to Glasgow, London or wherever it is, and they have a house. They have social workers around them; the children have a place in a school prepared for them when they arrive, they are able to work immediately when they arrive, and they get language support.
So while noble Lords say that we are not doing enough, it is perhaps wrong to say that there is no logic underpinning our approach. In fact, all the way through this process, we have worked very closely with the UNHCR, which believes that it is best to keep families together, particularly for children. That is why
we have been following that approach. Of course, there are many more things that need to be done. In terms of how the amendment is worded, to come to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, it talks about unaccompanied asylum-seeking children without designating a specific country. That is one of the things that we have discovered is a real issue. Under humanitarian law, to designate the specific country is very difficult, because you are then differentiating between people on the basis of geography rather than need. So the wording of the amendment is correct.
In the year to September 2015, 1,570 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children arrived in the UK, and 61% of those children were 16 or over. Only 7% were 14 and under. I have to say that those figures surprised me when I read them, because when I thought of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children I thought of my grandson, who is five or six. As we have discussed in Questions before, a large number of that particular group come from certain areas such as Eritrea, which is not to say that Eritrea is not a country that people would want to leave because of their conscription and national service in an open-ended way. They also come from Albania and other countries. At the moment, Albania forms 632 while Eritrea forms 460 of the total unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, while Afghanistan forms 179 and Syria 118. I present that as simply an expansion on the designation and the general term of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. In other words, are we actually helping those whom we want to help the most?