Chris Murray
MP for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh · Labour · United Kingdom
“I suspect that many of them would be happy to do so. However, let us be clear that those refugees are not responsible for the extraordinary costs of the asylum system.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Fareham and Waterlooville (Suella Braverman), who was the author of the mess that we are discussing clearing up; I am sure she will look forward to sharing her comments with Count Binface soon enough.”
“No, it is not. It is because the right hon. and learned Lady passed the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, which allowed the backlog to soar. It is because the right hon.”
“The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee and I were in northern France together. Does she share my impression from that trip that the scale and complexity of the operations the French Government were undertaking was quite astonishing? Will she join me in welcoming the new iteration of the Sandhurst treaty?”
“I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. There is some scepticism among the public about refugees, but despite the fact that twice as many people came to this country from Ukraine as crossed in small boats, there has been no public outcry and there is no public unrest.”
“Are the Government certain that they do not need further powers to sort out these contracts and recoup the costs that have already been wasted? If not, why is that not included in the Bill? Second Reading is about principles.”
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“The Minister and I have corresponded on the pilot previously, and I strongly encourage the Government to look at rolling it out more broadly. I make two final points about the steps that the new Government are taking on modern slavery. First, on labour exploitation, the Employment Rights Bill—a landmark piece of legislation that I could not be prouder to support—scraps the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority and establishes the Fair Work Agency, as many have said. That is all to the good, but the Fair Work Agency has a mammoth task enforcing the minimum wage and employment rights across the whole workforce. Are we sure it will have the focus and resource to tackle modern slavery, too? Will it have the right relationships with the police, because that will be critical to ensure enforcement?”
“It has been extremely successful, with decisions taken more quickly and with higher quality, because the people who know that child’s case are better placed to make a decision than an official in Whitehall. Before coming here, I worked on preventing human trafficking for five years. I know that the issue is complex and difficult, but I also encountered some of the most effective public servants I have ever seen in my time, such as the Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance in Glasgow, led by Bronagh Andrew, which cares for women trafficked into Scotland for commercial sexual exploitation; and Joy Gillespie, who advocates for survivors of trafficking in Scotland. The most impressive programme I have seen in five years of anti-trafficking is this pilot in Glasgow.”
“I hope that today, the Minister will set out a clear plan to clear the backlog, and will also recognise that doing so will not be some huge step of progress, but will just get us back to the baseline that we should be at. I draw the House’s attention to the child trafficking pilot that has been running for the past five years; I am so glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Tom Collins) referred to it. I should probably declare an interest, as I was involved in setting up its Scottish iteration, but it is worth our attention, because it has devolved decision making in the NRM to a panel of local stakeholders—people from social work and from education, the police, psychologists and others who know the child’s case—and empowers them to adjudicate whether that child is a victim of trafficking or not.”
“That is beyond unacceptable: it is systemic dysfunction. To be clear, that is not just a number; it has a real cost. The real-world implication of that number is re-trafficking. Women who are trafficked for sex and then come to the state for help end up back in the hands of their traffickers because of our delays. Children who are locked in houses and forced to farm cannabis in appalling conditions, who then manage to escape and come to us for help, end up back with their torturers because of our sheer incompetence. We should not be congratulating ourselves today on the passage of historic legislation; we should be hanging our heads in shame at what is happening on our watch.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for making that really important point. I remember reading about that case; it is one of the most horrific ones, but there are so many horrific cases of modern slavery. It is taking place on every high street in Britain, and we have to be completely vigilant about finding it everywhere. Today, I want to talk about the public policy response to this appalling crime. Obviously, it is a dramatic, wicked crime; we have the blandly named national referral mechanism as our tool, and to be honest, that tool is currently all but broken down. In the words of the Home Secretary when she came to the Home Affairs Committee before Christmas, the NRM “has become a bit stuck”. There are huge delays in victims getting a decision on the national referral mechanism. We heard evidence this week that the mean waiting time is 831 days.”
“Does the Minister share my astonishment at the shadow Home Secretary’s argument given that the Conservatives wasted tens of millions of pounds on accommodation that could not be used and billions on hotels? The state of the asylum system that we inherited is unbelievable. Will the Minister commit to reforming that seriously dysfunctional system, including scrutinising asylum contracts with the providers when the break clause comes up next year?”
“Q8. According to the charity Shelter, there are more homeless children in my city of Edinburgh than in the whole of Wales. That is an appalling legacy of 18 years of SNP Government. Does the Prime Minister agree that there should be no homeless children, and will he work with me, the Scottish Parliament and anyone who will listen to end child homelessness in Scotland?”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, was first a refugee in the UK, and she said that, in Britain, people would say to refugees, “You’re welcome here…and when are you going home?” whereas, in America, they said, “You’re welcome here…and when will you become a citizen?” Does the hon. Member not think that the problem the last Government created was that they moved to a high-churn model of migration, with huge numbers of people coming in, working in low-paid jobs, not integrating and then leaving, and more people coming in? We want to incentivise people to learn the language, engage with our institutions and follow our rules, which means that pathways such as this are really important, not the model that we have seen for the past 14 years.”
“I wonder whether there have been any new scientific discoveries in the last seven months for identifying someone’s age that the Home Office would not have been aware of over the last 14 years. Is it not the case that the methodologies used are very imprecise and do not often actually lead us, in the liminal cases, to draw the distinction that the hon. Lady is advocating for?”
“I think that the hon. Gentleman is somewhat overstating the impact of the Albania policy. After the initial agreement was signed, we saw a massive spike in numbers coming from Albania, and the numbers had already started to fall before the communiqué was signed. The correlation and causation arguments that he is making on the Albania scheme do not add up at all.”
“Would the hon. Gentleman at least accept that the Albania returns were largely due to large numbers of foreign national offenders, who are a completely different category of people from those we are talking about in either this clause or this Bill?”
“Looking at the proposals set out in this new clause, how exactly is the hon. Gentleman proposing to calculate the £38,700? Is software available in the Home Office or in His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs? What if someone was found to have overpaid taxes after they were found not to meet the amount? Would the Home Office go and find them overseas and bring them back? This proposal sounds absurdly unworkable.”
“I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman could just assume that we are familiar with those two cases by now and either not bother citing them or think of some new examples to support his arguments.”
“This proposal is just advocating that we repeat that exact mistake, but hoping for a different outcome, which seems bonkers to me.”
“Will it apply throughout the whole of the year? How will businesses plan if they want to recruit from overseas? As my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East said, what if emergencies mean that there are more people coming in? The last Conservative Government set a cap for tier 2 visas, then, of course, ended up hitting it and just exempting doctors and nurses from it anyway. Is it not inevitable that we will just be condemned to repeat history if we do that here? We have talked a lot about public trust in the immigration system and how that has been so deeply sapped by failures on immigration policy. The Conservatives had a net migration target of 100,000 a year, which they consistently failed to meet and had to revise.”
“Opposition Members also made the point about how the legislation needs to look backwards and make sure that migrants are net fiscal contributors over their lifetimes. I would say, again, that that is not a realistic thing to ask Governments to do. We will only know whether we have been net fiscal contributors when we die, so we cannot really ask people to make those projections. Finally, there is the numerical visa cap in new clause 40. Again, that is a gimmick that is not addressing the actual structural problems in the immigration system. First, it treats all migrants the same, as one big monolithic whole, yet we know that the impact of migrants on communities is different, whether they are spouses, students, doctors, lorry drivers or refugees. If we are going to have this kind of cap, how do we prioritise?”
“What is new in new clause 35, which is a very strange and horrible power to give Ministers, is the ability to either restrict the nationalities that British people can marry or set thresholds on them. I have huge respect for my ministerial colleagues in the Home Office, but I do not think that they should be able to choose what nationalities I am allowed to marry. We got rid of anti-miscegenation laws in the 20th century; we do not want returning through the back door, through measures such as this. Most of all, this arbitrary figure of 7% is very strange; if I were to marry, say, an Australian or an American, I would have to hope that I was not in the 8th percentile of people to do that. That would be a very strange way for us to ask British citizens to live their lives and fall in love with people.”
“It was interesting to hear the hon. Member for Weald of Kent setting out her argument articulately, and it was good to hear her say that she recognises that the last Government made a lot of mistakes on immigration, and that the evidence shows that. Sadly, although it is good to have that recognition, it does not seem as though very much has been learned from the Conservatives’ experience in office, based on each of the new clauses that they have set out. First, on the spousal visas, quite a lot of what is in new clause 35 actually exists already. There are already salary thresholds and things like that. It is unlike me to praise the previous Conservative Government on immigration, but, actually, across previous Administrations, both Labour and Conservative, very good work has been done on issues such as sham and forced marriages.”
“Will the hon. Gentleman accept that that number has “ballooned”—or gone up highly—not just in the aggregate but per asylum seeker? The hon. Gentleman wants to try to charge people, but his party let the system get completely out of control. Maybe it was the backlog that let it get out of control, rather than the kind of hotels that people were staying in.”
“T6. Does the Minister agree that community ownership projects will be crucial to achieving our world-leading net zero goals, and will he come to Edinburgh to see some of our fantastic community power projects?”
“The hon. Gentleman is talking about Natural England and NHS England, which obviously operate only in England. Is he aware that in another part of the UK, Scotland, we have seen an absolute proliferation of quangos under the SNP? We now have more quangos in Scotland than there are Members of the Scottish Parliament. Does he, like me, look forward to the day when the SNP no longer runs the Scottish Government and a Labour Administration promise to crack down on these things?”
“Does the hon. Gentleman agree that what is causing that huge bill is not the fact that people cannot work, but that they are waiting for a decision? They are stuck in backlog, but if they got a decision that would obviate this discussion completely.”
“On the timing of this measure, does our experience not show us that it is better to do these things in advance rather than later, when migrants come out of the woodwork having been let down? That happened with the Windrush experience.”
“Member for Perth and Kinross-shire said that safe routes are the only way to stop people getting on boats and freezing in the channel. Let us be really clear: that is the whole purpose of the Bill. However, the channel crossings are a new phenomenon. They were not happening five or 10 years ago, when we did not have safe routes either. The way to tackle people getting on those boats is by tackling the supply of boats and ways to cross the channel by tackling the gangs. Safe routes may have other values, but not for the purposes of stopping channel crossings.”
“Gentleman is proposing that we say, “Don’t get on a boat—there’s a 1% chance that you can come in on a safe route.” I would argue that that would have the same impact on people crossing the channel. The only way we could have a safe routes phenomenon would be to open them to a select group of people from a select few countries. That would basically be deciding who we thought was the most deserving and who was not, which is not how the refugee system should work. People’s cases should be judged on their merits and on individual circumstances. People can come from ostensibly safe countries but face things such as LGBT discrimination. People could be from a country at war but ineligible because they are one of the perpetrators of that war. We need to judge people on their cases. Finally, the hon.”
“Although the Ukrainian and Hong Kong schemes are not specifically refugee schemes —they are analogous, I accept that point—they are open to a much broader cohort of people. There are some 254,000 Ukrainians and 120,000 Hong Kongers in the UK right now. Those figures are off the top of my head; I am ready to be corrected. It is because of the comprehensiveness of that safe route that we see such high numbers in the declines in the channel. If we followed the hon. Gentleman’s advice, we would fall into the same logical trap as the Conservatives did with the Rwanda scheme. With Rwanda, the so-called message to the migrants was, “Don’t get on a boat—there’s a 1% chance that you’ll be sent to Rwanda.” First, it was not credible. Secondly, it clearly had no impact on people’s decision making. The hon.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. I have listened with interest to the points made by the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire. We need to go back to the evidence we heard from the researcher from the Migration Observatory who I keep quoting. He said that demand for channel crossings is essentially “inelastic”. The hon. Gentleman is predicating his argument on tackling the demand side of the equation. We have been told by the experts that policy will have only a limited impact on the demand, and that is particularly salient when we think about safe routes. The hon. Gentleman is quite correct; we already have safe routes in this country. We have the Afghan scheme, but because that is not available to everyone from Afghanistan, some of those who are not eligible come across on unsafe routes.”
“Does the hon. Gentleman accept that it is the same dynamic as the Rwanda programme? If we are offering only 1% of people safe routes, it is the same as saying to 1% of people that they will be sent back. The impact on those people’s decision making is exactly the same.”
“I admire the hon. Gentleman’s forthrightness in putting forward his argument. I have thought about this issue for a long time. Two cantankerous Scotsmen talking about their hobby-horse while everyone else waits for lunch is an exquisite torture to subject the rest of the Committee to. I was surprised even to see the new clause on the amendment paper—”
“I would argue that after 20 years of the SNP Scottish Government running our economy and leaking our taxes, that is the cause of our challenges.”
“Gentleman made, we have to be honest about the challenges we face in Scotland. Even in this era of record-high net migration to the UK, the figure for which is 900,000—way higher than the goal the Conservatives set—parts of Scotland still struggle to attract migrants. When we had access to European free movement, or 300 million potential people to come and fill vacancies in our labour market, we did not attract them. We have been talking about demand and supply and migration, but the problem is not the supply of immigrants coming to Scotland. It is that we are not generating the demand for them to come to our part of the UK. That is what we need to work on. The reason for that is the Scottish labour market: it is not dynamic or attractive enough to solve the challenges we have.”
“The immigrants we currently have in Scotland are obviously allowed to move around the country, as we have free movement within the UK, but we already have the component of their job location, so the new clause is completely irrelevant. Secondly, we have had some international examples of a federated country or state introducing a specific visa system, such as Canada and Australia, and 20-odd years ago we had the Fresh Talent scheme in Scotland. The evidence is that specific systems are not very effective at either achieving the aims they set out or tackling any of the deep-rooted challenges that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire alluded to. All the evidence shows that such schemes are not the right tool to address those challenges. To come to some of the points the hon.”
“Because the Bill is about border policy and asylum policy, which have very little to do with visas, migration and the running of the immigration system. I do not think this Committee is the place for it, but I am learning that people sneak amendments in wherever they can in this place. The new clause refers to the granting of visas “to enable certain workers to work in Scotland only.” First, let us be clear: that is absolutely a part of our immigration system. An international student who wants to study at the University of Edinburgh, or Queen Margaret University in my constituency, gets a visa to that university. I suppose they could commute from Worthing or Dagenham, but in reality they live locally. Equally, when people get a job, they get it on the basis of a specific role, so it is tied to that location.”
“We do not suddenly put people in and find that we have solved our demographic challenge. There are whole sets of things that we have to do. Most of all, the main point is that this is a debate that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire and I need to have at length over the course of this Parliament, not as part of the Bill.”
“We are seeing a move in Scotland from the west coast to the east coast, as Scottish people move about, and we are also seeing international migrants focusing on certain parts. Some areas have vacancies, especially the highlands and the north of Scotland, because moving there is not attractive to people within Scotland. A Scottish visa could end up with everyone moving to Edinburgh, which would not at all solve the problems that other Members in the room face. I made the point at the beginning that if we want to use migration to solve our demographic challenges, we are falling into the same mistake as the far right: we are forgetting that migrants are people. They are not just cogs that we put in a machine to be placed in and taken out at will. They are people who grow old, get sick, fall in love, move around and do stuff.”
“Member for Perth and Kinross-shire makes the point that people are coming to Scotland now, but once again the SNP is making the mistake of seeing all of Scotland as some monolithic whole, rather than trying to think about what is happening in Scotland. My constituency of Edinburgh East and Musselburgh is seeing record population growth, at 15%, and it is 20% in the East Lothian part of the constituency. We are struggling to put in houses because we are so attractive and wonderful. But other parts of Scotland are not finding that. The hon. Member for Inverclyde and Renfrewshire West is present, and there are serious challenges in Inverclyde as population is declining.”
“I do not think it is the state of the Scottish health service that is attracting people to Scotland. Other Members are seeing what it is like dealing with the Scottish nationalist party. To a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. To the SNP, the solution to every question is Scottish independence, or some specific Scottish legislation. Where there are specificities in Scotland, such as our health service and some of our labour market, there absolutely should be action from the Scottish Government to deal with it. However, this problem is not that. The issue is not that Scotland needs to become independent to attract people. We need to reform our labour market so that we can deal with the demographic issues. The hon.”
“Does the hon. Lady accept that there is a fifth option? Just because someone does not have the right to be in the UK, it does not mean that they do not have the right to go to any other country in the world. The programme of voluntary returns, which massively went down under the Conservatives but has gone up massively under this Government, is part of the solution to that.”
“Is my hon. Friend also aware that under the previous Government, the Home Office tried to secure additional detention estate for asylum seekers but catastrophically failed to do so? For example, at Northeye, they spent hundreds of millions of pounds to secure the site—far more than the previous owners had paid—yet found that it had contaminated ground and could not be used, and the Bibby Stockholm in Dover closed very swiftly after opening.”
“We can have a debate about how best to manage an asylum system—voluntary returns, swift processing, meaningful decisions and removals are clearly components of that—but we can surely say in debating this clause that the Rwanda Act was not the solution. Some £240 million of our constituents’ money was wasted on the scheme, which the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire was quite correct to call “crackpot”. Passing legislation to assert that reality is not what it is will never be an effective way to govern anything, never mind the asylum system, so I am pleased that the Act will finally be off the statute book.”
“The Minister was correct when she talked in her initial remarks about the interaction between the Illegal Migration Act and the Safety of Rwanda Act. That meant that nobody was getting processed, so the country ended up with a perma-backlog of asylum seekers with nowhere to go; they could not return to the country they came from through a voluntary returns agreement or be recognised as refugees. The Rwanda scheme would never have worked at a meaningful scale, and it would never have been able to deal with the backlog. We were on track to having to take over half the hotels in the country to accommodate asylum seekers.”
“The returns to Albania happened before the communiqué was signed with Albania, so the two are not related—perhaps he was arguing that the prior readmission agreement was the variable that led to the increase, but it came after the spike, so it cannot be held responsible. The Albania agreement was not just about illegal immigrants; it also included a huge number of foreign national offenders—a different group of people entirely. It was also about people from Albania returning to Albania, not third-country nationals. The idea that the Albania scheme is somehow an alibi for Rwanda can be completely rejected. That is not actually the point, however, because the Rwanda scheme would never have worked at the scale required, even if it had been able to work at all.”
“The Conservatives manifestly failed to avail the country of that power we had, and then failed with the Rwanda system. Clearly, the Conservative track record on third countries is very poor. There is a component in the immigration system for people going to third countries when they have no right to stay here, which is something we need to look at further ahead. The hon. Member for Stockton West made reference to the Albania relationship and returns increasing to Albania, as if that somehow proves that the Rwanda scheme would have worked if we had just let it take its course, but it is a completely spurious parallel.”
“Before it passed, the European Council on Foreign Relations said that the scheme was doomed to failure and a “floundering disaster”, because it was unlikely to deter illicit migration, it would damage the UK’s standing in international law, it would endanger refugee lives and it would come at huge financial cost. Every single one of those predictions came to pass, so it is no surprise that we are having to deal with this today. I would also say that it presaged the Conservatives going down in an historic election defeat, so it was clearly a failure politically for them as well. On the point about removal to third countries, before we left the European Union, the UK had the capacity to remove people to safe countries in the EU that they had travelled through.”
“Deterrence has to be real and believable, which the scheme clearly was not. I listen closely to what the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire says about the role of deterrence in migration policy. The exchanges we are having are helping to clarify the thinking. It is clear from the Bill that deterrence can only ever be a component. We must focus on the supply—the ability for people to cross the Channel—and not just the demand. That requires the measures in the Bill, but also diplomatic work and upstream work. The repeal of the Rwanda legislation was inevitable and written in the stars from the very beginning of that hare-brained scheme.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stuart, especially after we have had such an interesting debate with some very thoughtful contributions. I will respond to some of the issues that have been raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East mentioned that I keep quoting Peter Walsh, and I am going to again, because the point he made in the evidence sessions was one of the most critical points on immigration policy in Britain overall. He said that demand for Channel crossings is “fairly inelastic”. The demand will not wax and wane hugely in response to Government policy, which tells us that deterrence will have only limited use. That is the conceptual flaw at the heart of the Rwanda plan. It put all the country’s cards and money on a deterrence-only approach.”
“I worked closely with Police Scotland and the Crown Office, including in the Perth and Kinross council area. We saw, particularly in the Vietnamese community, the growth of that development. We must not see the world in black and white. I am by no means saying that every victim of trafficking is somehow an imposter and we must stop them getting any protection, but it is happening, so it is proper that we keep the clauses in place so that we can tackle that. If we do not have that component, the system will break down. Just as we saw with the asylum system, if we do not have clauses to make the system functional, it will break down and everybody loses.”
“It was also bad for communities, because people could not be moved through that process, which clearly put pressure on an already febrile immigration situation. It is good that we are repealing this duty; as I said, it was inevitable, because it was never going to work. Finally, I understand the points that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire made about human trafficking. It is really important that we offer the victims of modern slavery proper protections, especially when they are forced to commit crimes in the course of being trafficked. This legislation does not completely take that power away, but again, I have to draw on my experience of the last couple of years. There was an increase in the number of exploiters—those who were perpetrators of trafficking—using the trafficking system to evade prosecution.”
“More broadly, the duty to remove, which this clause repeals, essentially shut down the asylum system and created what IPPR has called a “perma-backlog”. We have talked about deterrents and incentives, but I do not see any greater incentive for someone seeking to exploit the asylum system in this country than shutting it down overall, which is what that duty to remove did. It created a vicious circle, which frankly was bad for asylum seekers themselves, because genuine refugees had to spend years in hotel accommodation, which is not a particularly nice thing to do, and for the taxpayer in the UK, because costs soared from £18,000 per asylum seeker per year in 2019 to £47,000 in 2024.”
“What does the Committee think that did to those children in terms of their attempts to secure any services, learn English or get any education? It made it impossible for them and it had a direct impact: they did not leave the country, but they disappeared. Some of them are probably out there being exploited right now, as a direct consequence of clauses in the Illegal Migration Act. The Act did not just put those children at risk; it put incredible pressure on overstretched local services around the country. For the previous Government to set out to use immigration legislation to put further pressure on overstretched local services was only going to have negative consequences in communities, and it should never have happened.”