Stephen Kinnock
MP for Aberafan Maesteg · Labour · United Kingdom
“I thank the shadow Secretary of State for her kind words and look forward to our exchanges across the Dispatch Box. I am ready to engage with her on getting the maximum benefits for the people of Wales.”
“I thank the right hon. Lady and look forward to working with her. My understanding is that there were challenges around the helicopter capability. Decisions were taken by Natural Resources Wales some time ago to change the way that the tendering for helicopter capability works. We certainly need to look at that.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. Like him, I pay tribute to all those involved in the collective and heroic response to the wildfires.”
“I thank the right hon. Lady for her question. Many of the ideas coming forward for devolving power right across our United Kingdom, beyond Cardiff Bay and Holyrood, are very exciting, and I look forward to exploring them with her.”
“Just to be clear, this is not about staying out of the issue; it is about respecting the devolution settlement, but being prepared to work constructively where we can in partnership with the Welsh Government. The hon.”
“I know about and welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s strong connections to Wales. I recognise the connectivity benefits that WSMR’s proposal could deliver, particularly for passengers in Wales and the west midlands.”
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“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Hosie. The Government’s plans to use scientific methods in verifying the age of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have been long in the making, but we would not necessarily know it from the somewhat sketchy evidence around the SI or the rather flimsy documents published alongside it. The legislative framework for such assessments was set by the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, which has been on the statute books for more than 18 months. Yet the Government have still not managed to answer some of the most basic questions that these proposals raise, in particular how much they will cost and what their impact will be on our health services, at a time when our NHS is under unprecedented strain.”
“We will certainly keep these measures under review, as would be the duty of any sensible Government. Policy making should be based on evidence, on facts and on the law, and Labour Members remain absolutely committed to those basic principles. If our review concludes that they are working, effective and accurate, then we would look to retain them. However, if such a review concluded that they were counterproductive, ineffective or damaging, particularly around safeguarding and so on, then—of course—we believe in evidence-based policy and that is a very important principle for any Government to pursue. With that response to my hon. Friend, I conclude my remarks. I thank the Minister for his attention and look forward to hearing his response.”
“That is because this is a Government who have given up on governing. They just sit there desperately clinging on to power for power’s sake and arguing with one another. The British people want a Government who see a problem as something to be solved, not something to be exploited. The choice is clear: five more years of the same Tory chaos or a Labour Government who will give Britain its future back.”
“Decarbonisation is, of course, important, not least because consumers are increasingly demanding greener products, but decarbonisation must not become a byword for deindustrialisation. It would be utterly unforgiveable if the deal that the Government have done with Tata Steel leads to the offshoring of production, good jobs and carbon emissions to other countries that use dirtier steelmaking processes and that do not always have Britain’s best interests at heart. This King’s Speech is noteworthy more for what it does not contain than for what it does. There is nothing on the cost of living crisis, nothing on the crisis in our public services, nothing to address our protracted productivity crisis, and nothing to tackle the epidemic of 6,000 business bankruptcies that we saw this summer.”
“South Wales was the cradle of the first industrial revolution, and a Labour Government in Westminster, working in close partnership with the Welsh Labour Government in Cardiff Bay, will put our proud country at the heart of the green industrial revolution. Whichever way we look at it, we need to make, buy and sell more in Britain. Labour knows that this begins with the steel industry, with our £3 billion clean steel renewal commitment dwarfing the Government’s dangerously unambitious and short-sighted approach. The Conservatives are failing to understand the growing commercial opportunities that a strong British steel industry would be well positioned to seize, and they are failing to recognise the risks of over-reliance on other countries.”
“But we need central Government to match these ambitions, delivering on the full potential of 20 GW of clean energy by offering a fair strike price for developers in return for ensuring that the manufacturing supply chain jobs are kept here in the UK. If we get this right, Port Talbot could become a green energy and manufacturing hub, with our steelworks making the steel for the floating turbine substructures in a new plate mill, and those very turbines then providing the energy to run the Port Talbot steelworks as well as powering tens of millions of homes across the UK. This bold, ambitious, pioneering plan can become a model for a new economy.”
“If we are to clear up this Conservative mess, we are going to need a decade of national renewal delivered by a mission-driven Labour Government. So Labour’s first two missions are to deliver the highest sustained growth in the G7 and to make Britain a clean energy superpower. The crucial point here is that these two missions go hand in hand. They will be the mutually reinforcing drivers of the green jobs revolution that Labour will deliver. Just look at the opportunities in floating offshore wind in my Aberavon constituency. FLOW is a prime example of where Wales’s geography offers huge competitive advantage, with the potential to create 16,000 jobs, deliver energy security and lower household bills.”
“This is an utterly shameful record, but it is not only our public services that the Conservatives have broken. They have also taken a wrecking ball to our economy, with a kamikaze Budget that cost £30 billion, and it is working people who are paying the price, with mortgages up almost £3,000, rents up 40% and the weekly food shop up 11% on last year. Their approach to the economy is plain to see. Low public investment has led to the UK having the lowest private investment in the developed world. A sclerotic planning system and rampant nimbyism have hindered house building and stymied our wind farm development, and the abandonment of our manufacturing sector has led to the UK being the most regionally imbalanced economy in the developed world.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Burnley (Antony Higginbotham). Even by the standards of this shambolic Government, this King’s Speech is a wafer-thin effort. That might be forgivable if we were living in a country where public services were in good shape and the economy was going gangbusters, but we are not. The reality is that, after 13 years of Tory neglect, Britain is breaking and nothing works any more. There is an NHS waiting list of 7 million, schools are literally crumbling and trains are unreliable, extortionately expensive and packed to the rafters. Some 90% of crime is going unsolved, with dreadful conviction rates and victims facing three-year court delays, while raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers and child poverty has tripled since 2017.”
“That is a truly shameful and humiliating state of affairs. What we now need to know from the Minister is: how many flights has he chartered? When will they be running from and until? What assurance has he received from the Pakistani Government that they will extend the deadline for Afghans who are to be expelled back into Afghanistan until after all the UK flights have been completed? Are the Government aware of any cases of Afghans eligible under ARAP or ACRS who have been forcibly returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan? If so, what steps are the Government taking to bring those people to safety as a matter of urgency? Finally, what progress has he made on clearing the record high asylum backlog and securing accommodation for these Afghans, whom we desperately need to get out of Pakistan as rapidly and urgently as possible?”
“Worse, the Prime Minister last November personally gave instructions to Ministers that no more flights should be chartered from Pakistan to bring Afghans who have a right to resettlement here to the UK, despite more than 3,000 Afghan refugees being stuck in hotels in Pakistan, when the British Government had promised those very individuals refuge in the UK through the ARAP and ACRS. Keeping those loyal-to-Britain Afghans in limbo was shameful enough, but even more disgracefully the Prime Minister changed tack only when the Pakistani Government started threatening to send those loyal-to-Britain Afghans back to Afghanistan to meet their fate at the hands of the Taliban. In short, the Government of Pakistan have strong-armed our weak Prime Minister into delivering something that it was our duty as a country to deliver in the first place.”
“We owe many Afghans a debt of gratitude for supporting British aims in Afghanistan. In the summer and autumn of 2021, the UK Government rightly promised to honour that debt by offering those Afghans resettlement in the UK. However, the Government’s Operation Warm Welcome fast became “Operation Cold Shoulder”. Of those Afghans who made it to Britain, 8,000 were crammed into hotels over a two-year period. They were then evicted, without consultation with local authorities, leaving many Afghan families facing homelessness this winter.”
“When the Government did the deal with Tata Steel about Port Talbot, did they know that Tata was actually proposing not a transition at all, but a potentially lethal cliff edge for our steel industry? Did they know that Tata would be doing that? Does the Minister not agree that the idea of this process is that it should be a transition? It needs to be a bridge, not a potentially lethal cliff edge.”
“Last Wednesday morning, Tata Steel executives in Port Talbot summoned the workforce to tell them of the plan to shut down our entire virgin steel making capability by March 2024. This was utterly shocking, because the understanding had always been that some of the heavy end would continue to function while the electric arc furnace was being constructed, but it takes years to construct an electric arc furnace. The plan is utter madness: it involves importing millions of tonnes of steel from the other side of the world. Electric arc furnaces need the products of virgin steel making, such as iron and iron ore—that is why we need direct reduced iron capability—and the loss of 3,000 jobs over a period like that is completely unacceptable and unnecessary.”
“Better still, why will this Government not get out of the way so that we on these Benches can show the leadership shown by our leader and our shadow Home Secretary on their trip to Europol recently, where they set out Labour’s plans to stop the Tory boats chaos by smashing the gangs, clearing the asylum backlog by surging the number of caseworkers, ending hotel use and fixing the asylum system, which successive Conservative Prime Ministers have utterly broken after 13 years of neglect and incompetence?”
“And why does the Minister not come back to update this Chamber when he has actually achieved something—not when he plans to achieve something or done a small part of what has been promised, but when the Prime Minister has actually achieved what he said he was going to achieve? At the moment, he sounds like an arsonist who has burned our house down and is expecting us to thank him for throwing a bucket of water on it.”
“On the issue of hotel use, today’s announcement illustrates better than any other the utter lack of ambition the Prime Minister has for our country. It beggars belief that the Minister has the brass neck to come here today to announce not that the Government have cut the number of hotels being used but that they simply plan to do so, and by a paltry 12%. Is that really it? Is it really their ambition that there will still be 350 asylum hotels in use at the end of the winter, despite promises last year that they would end hotel use this year? Further questions for the Minister. Is it really true that the hotels he is considering closing will be in marginal constituencies? Does he really think that the public might not see through that ruse? Will he publish a list of the hotels he plans to close over the next six months?”
“The Government also like to claim to be bringing the backlog down, but it stands at 176,000. They like to talk about a legacy backlog, but this is just nonsense. It is a figment of the Prime Minister’s imagination. He is taking last year’s workload but ignoring this year’s workload. The backlog is the backlog is the backlog. You can slice the cake however you want and spin it however you want, but the cake is still the same size: 176,000 in the last quarterly figures—up, not down. As for those who are being processed and rejected—slowly, it must be said, at half the productivity of seven years ago—are they actually being returned? Removals are down 70% since Labour left office, with a 40,000 removals backlog.”
“A Rwanda plan, but they have sent more Home Secretaries than asylum seekers to Rwanda; an Illegal Migration Act that is counterproductive and has not even been brought into full force yet; and a new barge that was meant to bring down hotel costs, but has only added to them. Also, the military bases promised by the Prime Minister last December are still not ready. All of this has left the Prime Minister with an asylum strategy this summer that was less akin to the Australian asylum model that he is so desperate to replicate and more in tune with the Australian cricket team during this summer’s Ashes: cross your fingers and pray for rain. Surely the Prime Minister knows that this was the wettest summer since 1912, and surely he recognises the impact that this had on small boat crossings.”
“I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. At the time of the last election, the asylum backlog had already spiralled under Conservative mismanagement, but the number of small boats crossing the channel was close to zero, as was the number of emergency hotels being used. If we fast-forward four years, we see before us a picture of Tory boats chaos. For the third year running, more than 25,000 people have crossed the channel in small boats, while the number of hotels being used is about 400, at an eye-watering cost to the taxpayer of £8 million a day—higher than the cost last year. And what is the Government’s response?”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wish to raise a point of order on the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) in the statement. The immigration guidelines were changed in August 2023 to enable eviction within seven days as opposed to 28 days, and my hon. Friend has the letter from Clearsprings to the person she is representing that confirms a seven-day deadline. I wonder whether the Minister might wish to correct the record based on the exchange he had with my hon. Friend earlier.”
“We must ensure that local supply chains are developed for the manufacture of turbines and their sub-structures as well as their operation and maintenance. We cannot have a situation, for example, where these structures are built in China or somewhere else and merely assembled and serviced at Welsh ports. That is the case with the Scottish SSE wind farms, for example, which use no British steel whatever. We must use local steel. Tata Steel can adapt and reconfigure its production processes if it knows what the order book looks like, but it needs that advance warning. Could I ask the Minister to tell us what steps he is taking to secure those supply chain commitments right from the outset of the Crown Estate licensing process?”
“Secondly, Wales must get its fair share of the floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme programme. There is a pot totalling £160 million for the whole of the UK. Welsh ports must get their fair share of that pot. It is critical that the UK Government understand the enormous potential for Welsh ports to deliver this game-changing new industry. We need the UK Government to back the two very strong bids from Port Talbot and Milford Haven for FLOWMIS funding. Could the Minister update us on FLOWMIS and assure us that Wales will get its fair share? Thirdly, Aberavon in Wales will secure maximum benefit from floating offshore wind only if the developers are held to firm supply chain commitments. The Crown Estate must get this right when awarding licences.”
“They need assurances that the market will reach its full 24 GW capacity. Of course, the first round of FLOW, as confirmed by the Crown Estate, is only set at 4.5 GW, but it is the long-term line of sight on this and the pipeline that we really need to focus on. Associated British Ports is developing its plans for Port Talbot at pace, investing more than £500 million in developing a major floating offshore wind integration assembly port and a wider green energy hub. But the length of the leasing window by the Crown Estate is of crucial importance. We need a clear outline of the development window to that 24 GW target for flow in the Celtic sea. This is to act as a clear signal in that FLOW global market. Could I ask the Minister to outline the steps he is taking to secure clarity about the long-term pipeline?”
“Member has pointed out, can provide energy storage facilities and a whole range of other vital components for this huge opportunity. This is a global market and we are in a global race for green investment. Port infrastructure needs to be ready ahead of time to capture first-mover advantage for Wales, so that we can land investment in port infrastructure and manufacturing to generate good job opportunities and deliver energy security. Without the first-mover advantage, Wales and the UK risk repeating the experience of earlier waves of offshore and onshore wind development, where the jobs and investment ended up going to other countries. So what do we need to do to seize these opportunities? First, we need to make sure that the port infrastructure is built. The port and the prospective developers need certainty.”
“The Celtic sea and Wales’s geography offer us a significant competitive advantage that we cannot afford to squander. We must seize this opportunity to place ourselves at the forefront of the green industrial revolution, just as Wales was the cradle of the first industrial revolution two centuries ago. Floating offshore wind has the potential to deliver 16,000 new jobs and could land £1.7 billion of investment in port infrastructure and manufacturing in south Wales. FLOW offers the opportunity to unlock a truly game-changing £54 billion of investment into the UK economy, with the Crown Estate aiming for approximately 25 GW by 2045. Indeed, the first 1 GW of projects alone is anticipated to create 5,000 jobs. Our Port Talbot port has both the space and the steel to manufacture these giant structures, while Milford Haven, as the right hon.”
“From the food shipped into Britain’s supermarket shelves to the exporting of British goods sold overseas, our ports play a crucial role both in the everyday lives of families across the UK and in the growth and success of hundreds of thousands of British businesses. As well as adding close to £7 billion to the UK economy, ports employ more than 100,000 people directly, and more than that again in their supply chains, meaning that they are pivotal to supporting local economies and providing communities with good job opportunities. British ports transport around 60 million international and domestic tourists in and out of the country every year. Today I want to focus on the once-in-a-generation opportunity represented by the new industry of floating offshore wind and the crucial role that the ports will play.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Cummins. I thank the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) for securing this vital debate. It has been a real pleasure working with him cross-party in the interests of our two communities, and communities right across the south Wales corridor and the whole of Wales and the United Kingdom. What we are discussing today genuinely has UK-wide significance. We worked together to develop and deliver the successful Celtic freeport bid, and I look forward to further collaborating on maximising the benefits it will bring. Britain’s ports are both the gateways and the drivers of so much economic activity in the UK and, in turn, are crucial to the prosperity of British people and their families.”
“Perhaps the Minister could say what he will do to knock heads together to unlock all of the blockages. This is a huge, game-changing opportunity for Aberavon, Wales and the entire United Kingdom. Ports play an absolutely crucial role in this opportunity. I look forward to the Minister’s comments so that we can find a pathway towards maximising the opportunities before us.”
“We need the UK Government urgently to reshape the contracts for difference for AR6 and make them more attractive to developers if we are to realise Britain’s potential to become a world leader on FLOW. Finally, the UK and Welsh Governments must work collaboratively. We cannot allow bureaucracy to slow us down. Planning and consenting for major infrastructure is devolved. We need the UK Government to look for ways to support the Welsh Government to ensure that current capacity and resource blockages for planning and consenting are resolved to ensure that the seabed licensing is accelerated and that port infrastructure in Wales is ready in time. We also need strong cross-Whitehall co-ordination. I worry that the large number of Government Departments involved means that the process is not as streamlined as it should be.”
“Thank you, Mrs Cummins. I will try to pick up where I left off. On the planning side, the Government need to find a solution to the national grid’s capacity issues. The National Grid says it has to develop up to five times as much energy infrastructure over the next seven years as it has developed over the past 30 years, such is the clamour for net zero projects, in terms of both energy generation and demand. How will the UK Government and, more specifically, the Minister work with the National Grid to end the gridlock, and how will they send a clear message to developers that these problems are going to be fixed? That brings me to my next point, which is about the administrative strike price. Allocation round 5 was a shambles, with no bidders for offshore wind.”
“I am sure that the Minister is absolutely delighted that the voting interruption has given us some additional time. He was talking about floating offshore wind infrastructure. I do not know if he is coming to this, but I asked about grid capacity. There are real concerns that there will not be the grid capacity to facilitate all this, which is having an impact on developers’ thinking, too. What comments does he have on that?”
“Why is it that the only boat this Government have managed to stop is their own?”
“It has been more than a month since all 39 asylum seekers were hauled off the 500-capacity Bibby Stockholm because of the detection of legionella, but the Home Secretary is yet to give a date for when the barge will actually be ready for use. We still do not know why she chose not to wait for the legionella results before ploughing ahead, and why her Minister was so slow to act once the results came in. We are still yet to hear a denial from the Home Secretary that it is one of the most lethal strains of the bacteria, as reported in the media. Today, will she set out her responses to those questions and confirm the exact cost of the barge? Half a million pounds per month to house zero asylum seekers on this floating symbol of failure feels utterly extortionate.”
“There are literally dozens of hydrogen-based steel projects ongoing across Europe. They are not necessarily ready to make steel but at least they are out of the traps, whereas we are still in the changing room putting our trainers on. Why have the Government not actually entered the hydrogen race?”
“When all is said and done, the purpose of the deal should have been to protect the current order book and to prepare us for the opportunities of the future. All investment is welcome— I do thank the Minister for her work in this area—but I am afraid that the deal will fail to keep us competitive and to deliver a just transition for the thousands of my constituents whose dedication to our proud steel industry is second to none. Could the Minister kindly address the following questions? Why have the Government put all their eggs into the electric arc furnace basket? Where is the investment in hydrogen, direct reduced iron and carbon capture technology so that we can continue to produce virgin steel, as the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Holly Mumby-Croft) pointed out? Why were the steel unions not consulted in advance of the announcement?”
“Q10. Steel- workers in my constituency have watched in frustration as other Governments have pumped investment into decarbonisation while successive Tory Governments have sat on their hands. When will the Prime Minister finally conclude the talks with Tata Steel? Can he guarantee that level of investment will match what other European Governments are doing on decarbonisation? And will he guarantee that the conclusion will be based on serious engagement, comprehensively with the steel unions?”
“The Prime Minister keeps declaring victory, but the reality is that nothing is working and everything the Government do just makes everything worse, so when will they get out of the way so that we on the Labour Benches can take over, implement our plan and retake control of our broken asylum system?”
“The problem is that there has been a lack of Government enforcement. Employers who are exploiting and illegally employing migrant workers should face the full force of the law, but in reality, the number of penalties issued to firms has fallen by two thirds since 2016. There are so many questions that it is difficult to know where to start, but let us start with these: when did the Minister know about legionella on Bibby Stockholm? How much is the barge currently costing? How many people are currently in hotels? Does he actually intend to implement the much-vaunted Illegal Migration Act 2023?”
“Forty thousand are awaiting removal, and, at the current rate, it will take the Government more than 10 years to achieve their target. Two thousand fewer foreign national offenders are being removed per year compared with when Labour left office in 2010. The Minister brags about the legacy backlog—a figment of the Prime Minister’s imagination—going down, but he knows full well that the only backlog that matters is that of the 175,000 people, and that number is still going up. We know that the Government are cooking the books in that regard, marking large numbers of asylum seekers as “withdrawn” because they have missed a single appointment or failed to fill in a form correctly. A Conservative Back-Bench MP described that as an amnesty in all but name. The Minister has decided to make illegal working even more illegal.”
“The Minister speaks now of this new deal with Turkey. Well, I am glad that the Government have started to listen to Labour—we have been calling for tough action to disrupt the gangs upstream for well over a year—but this looks pitifully weak. This announcement comes with no new funding or staff, meaning that officers could be taken off existing functions. That stands in contrast to Labour’s fully funded plan to hire hundreds of specialists specifically to work on that challenge. Meanwhile, Turkish nationals have become one of the largest groups crossing the channel this year. The Minister boasts about returns of failed asylum seekers going up, but they are actually down 70% compared with when Labour left office in 2010.”
“On top of that, new Home Office data in August showed us that the asylum seeker backlog has grown ninefold to an enormous 175,000 under the Conservatives at a cost of £4 billion a year to the taxpayer—incredibly, eight times higher than it was when Labour left office in 2010. That waste is the cost of 13 years of Conservative neglect. Today, we debate the cost of the spiralling asylum backlog, driven by cutting the costs of asylum decision making in 2013. Yesterday, the Chancellor was promising to spend “whatever it takes” to fix crumbling classrooms caused by the Prime Minister’s cuts to the schools budget as Chancellor. Tomorrow, we will no doubt be back to the economy and the financial costs of low growth and spiralling mortgages. Everywhere we look, we see the costs of Conservative incompetence.”
“On the Wednesday, the Immigration Minister sparked fresh Tory infighting over whether Britain should leave the European convention on human rights. On the Thursday, channel crossings hit their highest daily number for the year. Then, to cap it all, on the Friday, all the asylum seekers were removed from the Bibby Stockholm because of the presence of legionella in the water supply. You could not make it up. The Bibby Stockholm was supposed to be a symbol of the Conservatives’ cutting asylum costs, but the Minister has not even mentioned those costs today. Instead, it stands alongside the boats and the hotels as a floating symbol of Conservative failure and incompetence that is costing the taxpayer half a million pounds a month.”
“What has that left us with? A Government flailing around, chasing headlines with gimmicks and stunts rather than doing the hard graft of actually stopping the boats, clearing the backlog and getting people out of the hotels. Take their much celebrated small boats week last month, which turned out to be an absolute omnishambles, with taxpayers paying the price. No wonder the Home Secretary did not want to do a single interview, and no wonder she is not in the Chamber today. Do not take my word for it: that well-known pro-Labour publication the Daily Mail did a day-by-day review. On the Monday, just 39 migrants were brought into the 500-capacity Bibby Stockholm barge. On the Tuesday, the Conservative deputy chairman admitted that his party has “failed” on immigration.”
“I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement, thin though it is, and I echo his sentiments in sending condolences to the families of those six people who died tragically in the accident in the channel earlier this summer. We simply must stop these dangerous crossings. I am absolutely bewildered that, after the summer we have had, yesterday the Prime Minister claimed victory in his broken pledge to stop the boats. This Saturday we saw the year’s record number of channel crossings, with more than 870 people making that dangerous journey in a single day, and the total number has now soared to a whopping 21,000 for the year. The only reason the number is not breaking last year’s record is the poor weather in July and August—and a strategy that depends on the weather is probably not a very sustainable strategy at all.”
“We shall continue in our attempts to persuade the Government to come to their senses. I shall seek to do that today by setting out why the arguments that the Immigration Minister has made against the amendments from the other place are both fundamentally flawed and dangerously counterproductive.”
“It prevents her from processing and returning failed asylum seekers across the channel to their country of origin, instead forcing her to return them to a third country such as Rwanda. However, Rwanda can take only 0.3% of those who came here on small boats last year. The Rwanda plan is neither credible nor workable, because the tiny risk of being sent to Kigali will not deter those who have already risked life and limb to make dangerous journeys across the continent. Yet here we are again today, responding to the realisation that, in their typically arrogant and tin-eared fashion, Ministers are once again refusing to listen. They are once again closing their eyes and ears to the reality of what is happening around them and choosing to carry on driving the car straight into a brick wall. But we on the Labour Benches refuse to give up.”
“On Tuesday, I described the way in which this Government have “taken a sledgehammer to our asylum system”. —[ Official Report , 11 July 2023; Vol. 736, c. 218.] I outlined the massive and far-reaching costs and consequences of 13 years of Tory incompetence and indifference. I described this bigger backlog Bill as a “shambolic farce” that will only compound the chaos that Ministers have created. I urged the Government to accept the amendments proposed by the other place and to adopt Labour’s pragmatic, realistic and workable five-point plan to stop the boats and fix our broken asylum system. I set out how the Bill’s unworkability centres on the fact that it orders the Home Secretary to detain asylum seekers where there is nowhere to detain them.”
“The crucial point is that for a deterrent to be effective, it has to be credible. A deterrent based on a 0.3% risk of being sent to Rwanda is completely and utterly incredible. The only deterrent that works is a comprehensive returns deal with mainland Europe. If someone knows that, were they to come here on a small boat, they would be sent back to mainland Europe, they will not come and they will not pay €5,000 to the people smuggler. The only way to get that deal is to have a sensible and pragmatic negotiation with the European Union based on quid pro quo—give and take. That is the fundamental reality of the situation in which we find ourselves, but unfortunately those on the Conservative Benches keep closing their ears to that reality.”
“Surely the hon. Lady sees the direct connection between us crashing out of the Dublin regulation because of the utterly botched Brexit of the Government she speaks for, and the number of small boat crossings starting to skyrocket. There is a direct correlation between crashing out of the Dublin regulation and skyrocketing small boat crossings. I hope that she will look at the data and realise the truth of the matter.”