Chris Murray
MP for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh · Labour · United Kingdom
“I am so pleased to support a Labour Budget that is backing Scotland and backing Edinburgh, despite the best efforts of the SNP to talk down its benefits and talk down my city. In particular, I welcome the announcement, which is of importance to my constituency, of £18 million for a UK advance chip design academy at Edinburgh University.”
House of Commons29 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Yesterday, we heard a Labour Chancellor reject that, and make the decisions that will help Edinburgh to thrive. Support for entrepreneurs, start-ups, scale-ups and founders will mean that the innovation of Edinburgh researchers pushes us into the future. The SNP position on Labour’s investment in Scotland is absurd in the extreme.”
House of Commons29 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Artificial intelligence might appear digital, but it depends on something profoundly physical: chips, semiconductors and the infrastructure that powers them. We cannot afford to watch from the sidelines while the United States, Taiwan and others lead the field, and thanks to this Budget, Edinburgh will join them in the future.”
House of Commons29 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Bonfire night can be difficult in Edinburgh, and previous years have seen serious disruption and pretty terrifying antisocial behaviour in Niddrie and Craigmillar.”
House of Commons29 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Tour de France starts in my constituency in July. Portobello high school’s Girls Gone Cycling project has already got over 70 girls on to bikes, and it is now being extended across Scotland. The grand départ trophy visited Portobello this month to mark the race’s first start in Scotland and to recognise the girls’ excellent work.”
House of Commons29 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is because the SNP Government are so keen to look for grievance that they cannot even work out that they have been given more money. Labour is delivering for Edinburgh.”
House of Commons29 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
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“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.”
House of Commons11 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“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.”
House of Commons11 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“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.”
House of Commons11 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“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.”
House of Commons11 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The IMA placed on the Home Secretary a duty to remove that applied to all asylum seekers regardless of their case. For anyone under 18, the duty to remove kicked in at the age of 18, but when we were working with local authorities, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children came across and sought asylum in this country. These children are among the most vulnerable people in the world. They have lost their loved ones, they are on their own and they are in a strange country. In the UK, we have a national transfer scheme to disperse them around different local authorities. I worked with the officers who were trying to help those children to get themselves together after a really traumatic experience. The Illegal Migration Act meant that, at the age of 18, in theory those people would be eligible for immediate removal.”
House of Commons11 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Like the Safety of Rwanda Act clause, this clause is an inevitability, because it was clear from the outset that these sections of the Illegal Migration Act were never going to work. I know that the Conservatives tend to think that everybody who works in the migration sector set out to thwart their plans at every turn, but that is not the case. I was working for the strategic migration partnership in Scotland when the Illegal Migration Bill was introduced two years ago. I remember sitting down with local authorities, the police and other key stakeholders to look at the legislation, and all of us collectively said, “How is this going to work? This is never going to be feasible in reality.” I draw people’s attention to one component of the Act that is being repealed, which brings its failure to the fore.”
House of Commons11 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. My hon. Friend is making a really important point: these cross-channel operations and strategies are more diplomatic than they are legislative. Does he agree that, because the UK is unusual in that our Border Force is not a police force, whereas the French police aux frontières, the Belgian police and all other European border agencies are police forces, we have very different kinds of operations and structures, and this work needs to be done gently, through diplomacy and not through amendments to legislation?”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I absolutely recognise, support and understand that passion and compassion, but we must be clear-eyed about the reality of what is happening in the channel. Yes, people are in great danger, and they are the most exploited, most vulnerable people, but they are not there by accident. They are not panicking because they have stumbled by accident into the boat. There is a large, extremely organised, extremely well-financed criminal enterprise putting them in that position and it does not care one bit whether they live or die. We need to be able to draw a distinction between the vulnerable people who are in that situation and the people who are putting them there.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I will make a couple of points about the amendments to the clause, and the clause overall. I have always been frustrated that people from both left and right make the same mistake on immigration policy—we forget that immigrants and asylum seekers are people. That means that, just like any group of people, they vary: some are entirely innocent and exploited, and some seek to exploit others and are criminals. We need to make the distinction between those groups. Amendment 5, tabled by the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire, makes some important points, and my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd East is right about the passion and compassion that drive the amendment.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I am afraid I completely disagree with him on what this Bill is doing. Being an asylum seeker is a self-declaration. It is anticipatory. Someone just declares themselves as one; the system later ascertains whether that is correct and whether they are a refugee. He mentioned earlier that the refugee convention does not penalise people for the mechanism by which they enter; he is quite correct, but that is not a blanket immunity from any criminal act committed in the process.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, if his amendment 5 were accepted, someone could orchestrate a boat crossing the channel, throw a child off—which this measure is trying to prevent—and then, when they arrive on the shores of the UK, just say, “I am an asylum seeker”? That would be an obstacle to any prosecution. The only way we could get over that obstacle—even if the person were French—would be for them to go through the entire asylum process. They would be placed in a hotel in one of our constituencies and, given the huge backlog we have, it would be almost two years before we are able to prosecute them.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I take on board the hon. Gentleman’s point, and I can assure him that no one has higher respect than I do for the organisations that have supplied such evidence. I have been in conversations with them myself. The issue at hand here, however—I know this from having worked in the sector—is that they are not set up to stop the gangs or take through criminal prosecutions. That is not their objective. Their job is purely, and properly, to protect migrants. They will lean towards a broad definition, and that is why I think he has inadvertently fallen into a trap. In excluding everyone from the provisions, we avoid the traffickers, but it is not the job of those organisations to target them.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is proper that the Home Office officials who seize such data are subject to the rules that we have in this country about protecting the data and returning it when it is decided that it is not required, but we cannot separate out different types of data, and we would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we did not allow the powers to seize it.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“On the point about whether the powers are applied on a blanket basis, they are not. The Home Office is clear that there will be statutory guidance. The people who seize these phones will be subject to the same rules that are already in place on the handling of material seized from any individual, and they need those powers. The point about family life and private life is absolutely fair, and it applies whenever someone’s phone is stolen, which is a wider debate that we have in society. The truth is, there is no capacity to only seize part of someone’s phone. We cannot seize only some data and not detect, for example, private text messages or family photographs.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We know that they are evolving, so it is really important that we give officials the power to seize those phones not only to understand where these smuggling networks are coming from, which is the only way to intercede and save people in unsafe vessels, but to disrupt those networks later. We heard a whole set of arguments earlier about the insufficiency of deterrents in stopping sea crossings. Professor Walsh from the Migration Observatory was really clear that the demand is inelastic. No matter how many deterrents we introduce, there will still be some demand rising to meet them. That is why disruption is so important, which we can only happen if we have the ability to seize those phones. There is a really important distinction between targeting the demand and targeting the supply of the ability to cross the channel.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I want to make just a couple of points on the seizure of phones. We have to be incredibly realistic about the threat that the country faces and how these things are organised. We have seen people-smuggling networks and trafficking networks developing in complexity and scale. It does not start in France; it goes all the way through European countries—our allies—and then through countries that are very difficult for us to engage with, including some countries that are at war and some that are hostile states. The evidence from the National Crime Agency is very clear that the networks are organised by phone, and that that is the primary means by which these criminals orchestrate them.”
House of Commons6 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It created a closed, secretive and defensive culture. So I can tell the House that the new entities will not have agency status and will sit in the Home Office, reporting to Ministers.” —[ Official Report , 26 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 1500.] Although we are trying to correct what has clearly gone wrong over the previous 14 years of Conservative government of Border Force, it is important that we do not overcorrect and go back to the situation we were in before, which Baroness May pointed out did not work then.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The shadow Minister suggested that we should discuss the suitable qualifications for the role, but the role is very operational so we should be wary of setting out in legislation or in this debate the exact specifications of every task. Finally, we must be careful of the pendulum swinging in one direction with one Government and then, with a change of Government, straight back in the other direction, meaning we repeat the mistakes of the past. When the coalition Government came into office in 2010, Home Secretary Theresa May—now Baroness May—restructured the UK Border Agency, as it was under the Labour Administration. She commented at the time that the UKBA had been structured in such a way as to be so independent that it would “keep its work at an arm’s length from Ministers—that was wrong.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The role compares to Home Office roles such as the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration and the commissioner on modern slavery, who are separate from the Home Office apparatus and often report—especially at the Home Affairs Committee—that they do not get the support and structural backing they need. Clause 1 would obviate that. The commander will also be subject to the civil service code, which is important given the high levels of public expectation for the role. The one difference between this and other directors general, and other senior figures in the Home Office, is that the role is set out in primary legislation. We will thereby create a distinction for the role by passing the Bill.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Murrison. I would like to make a couple of points about the amendment. As the Minister set out, clause 1 does not mean that someone who is not a civil servant cannot apply for the role. We have to be careful not to have an old-fashioned view of how the civil service operates. External candidates are increasingly common nowadays as outside specialisms are required by the Government, even for roles that are not particularly senior. Even if an external candidate applies, they will get the support of the civil service.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Does the hon. Gentleman accept that although Commissioner Miekelson is a fictional character, the role was created by statute—by the SNP Scottish Government when they created Police Scotland?”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“What, then, is the hon. Gentleman’s view of how UKBA functioned? In her testimony, Theresa May said that, where it had that kind of independence, it became “closed, secretive and defensive”, and she had to completely restructure UK border defence because the independence that the hon. Gentleman is talking about actually made it difficult for Ministers to have proper oversight.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Before I was elected and before Brexit, I was the justice and home affairs attaché at the British embassy in Paris. I helped to co-ordinate engagement between the Home Office, the French Government and Europol. I do not know how much the hon. Lady knows about how Europol functions, but it has a lot of operations and is a very busy organisation. It would frequently take us more than three months to arrange a meeting. Would the new clause not put civil servants at risk of breaching the law just because they could not set up a meeting fast enough?”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The most comparable piece of legislation on this topic in a devolved context is the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015. That Act does not require a clause that specifies the obligation to respect international law. Those things are implicit in legislation passed by the Scottish Government, even on this topic.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“On that point, the 2015 Act does refer to the Council of Europe protections and its definitions are taken from there. But there is not a clause that says that due regard has to be given—”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“But in an implicit way, just as this Bill is. There is nothing on the face of the Act, in the way the hon. Member is proposing for this Bill.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That brings me to the point I was making about this being a civil service role; there need to be proper conflict of interest considerations. That is what we are taking account of here.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is quite interesting to hear the points that the Minister is making, considering the conversation we had this morning about the commander being functionally a civil servant. Although I was never officially a civil servant in the proper sense, from my experience it is really important that senior leaders within the civil service are able to avail themselves of delegation capacities as needed. It can be done for many reasons. It could be a bandwidth issue, where someone has multiple priorities and needs to delegate to someone else because they are not able to be in two places at once—and looking at the responsibilities of the commander as set out in the legislation, there are a lot. It could also be a resourcing issue or because of a conflict of interest.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There is an issue around taxonomy and categorisation here. Anyone is entitled to claim asylum. It is a universal human right. Anyone from any nationality and background, whatever their criminal history, is entitled to make a claim to be an asylum seeker. It is possible to be a member of a criminal gang and plan on claiming asylum. From my 15 years of working in the asylum and immigration service, I know it is an undeniable point of fact that some people exploit that to delay or get around the system, and we must act on such abuse. Does the hon. Member agree that we have to be careful in our classifications? There is a distinction between an asylum seeker who has a genuine claim to refugee status but who might not be eligible, and someone exploiting the system.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I know it is not intended that way, but it would in reality be a wrecking amendment to any kind of intervention on a crossing at sea.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That then breaks down into different categories: someone who is genuinely eligible for asylum in the UK and will, when they go through the process, get refugee status; someone who is genuinely seeking asylum, but will not meet the threshold when they go through the process and will not get such status; and someone who knows that they are ineligible, or might be eligible on some counts, but is engaged in the criminal act of facilitating illegal entry into the UK and putting those other people’s lives in danger. At that moment, it is not possible to distinguish between those people; the asylum process is there to do that. Were we to accept the premise of the hon. Gentleman’s amendment, it would be a wrecking amendment.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“On the point about criminalising all asylum seekers, ahead of oral evidence, I read carefully the submissions we have had from organisations I have worked with in the past. I found the testimony of the Crown Prosecution Service very convincing. It stated clearly that in addition to the primary legislation, the CPS will produce guidance that will set out both the public interest threshold and evidential test that it would seek in order for a case to go to prosecution. It was very clear that the kind of hypothetical examples set out by the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire would not meet that threshold. On the point about decriminalising all asylum seekers, to clarify the point I was trying to make in my interventions, during a crossing anyone can declare themselves an asylum seeker.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I apologise for my longer interventions, Mr Stuart; I will try to bundle them all into this speech. One of the most important things that we heard during evidence was from Dr Walsh from the Migration Observatory. He said that demand for cross-channel crossings is essentially inelastic. Even if the price of a crossing doubles, there will still be demand for it; people rise to meet that price. That tells us that deterrence and disruption of the demand alone will never be enough to tackle the horrors that we are seeing in the channel at the moment. We must also disrupt the supply of ability to cross the channel. That is an important part of the Bill, and these clauses go right to the heart of it.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“This proposal is how we stop them doing it, and that affects every one of our communities. I am aware that I am testing people’s patience, but I want to make two final points. The first is about the criminalisation of organisations that help asylum seekers. That is an important point, and the distinction has to be clear. I did have concerns about this measure being in the Bill, but the evidence sessions completely reassured me. The testimony of the CPS was that asking about the weather in Dover when in Calais, and those kinds of things, would not be facilitating immigration crime. The testimony that the National Crime Agency is using these measures to tackle serious and organised crime makes it clear what the purpose of the clauses is. The hon. Member for Kent—”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The hon. Gentleman is making an important point, but I do not accept that the proposal is creating new criminal offences for all asylum seekers or for all people; it is creating new criminal offences for those engaged in the exploitation of people and the trafficking or smuggling of them across the channel in great danger. We cannot allow that to continue if we care about those people’s lives at all. In the constituency of every single MP in this room, there will be a cannabis factory where a probably under-age Vietnamese child is working at cultivating cannabis. If they arrived in the past two years, they came across in one of those boats. Significant, serious organised crime networks are exploiting the vulnerability of those people in order to facilitate such crossings.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Weald of Kent, sorry—that is quite far south for me. The hon. Lady made a point about the sector and charging for services. Some organisations out there are charitable and provide services for free, and some organisations charge enormous fees and are extremely exploitative. That is where that distinction comes from. That would be my interpretation of the legislation.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is because we know that the data taken from those phones is critical in the fight that phones are excluded. That is why it is important that that component remains in the Bill.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Last week, we heard so much evidence—there is so much evidence out there—that the crossing of the channel is the final stage in a very long process involving criminal gang networks, organised crime networks and just immigration networks that stretch through Europe, including allied countries and countries very difficult for us to have relationships with. We know that those smuggling networks are all orchestrated by mobile phone, so it is important that the Bill incorporates that. On the concerns that the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire about criminalising the most wretched people in the world, the exemptions in the Bill are clearly humanitarian. They are clearly the kinds of things that people need to survive on a dangerous sea crossing or on their arrival. The only exception is their phone.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That is absolutely right—but, in my experience of the channel coast and of working in the refugee sector, those do not exist. Anyone who was to do that would probably be giving immigration advice, which is a regulated component under UK legislation. That would be structured differently from someone on the coast or on a boat or vessel, in the way that this legislation sets out. I am happy to be corrected, but that would be my interpretation. Finally, I come to the point about mobile phones and the different things listed that can be seized when a vessel is disrupted.”
House of Commons4 March 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There are so many things we could be doing to try to make this better, such as settling children in communities with proper language teaching. The No.1 thing that children tell me that they want, given that they are here, is to learn—to be educated—so that they can function well. For me, particularly with some of the children who I have seen, they do not in any way mirror the stuff that we read in the media about freeloading—coming here for whatever. Most of them are really serious cases, and given that they are here, they want to try to learn and be good productive members of our communities. There is much that we can do.”
House of Commons27 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Of course, let us not forget that a lot of those children were older teenagers, and a lot of the provision that they were going to was not care, but a room in a house with all sorts of other people—teenagers and older people. They were left to fend for themselves, which was incredibly disorientating. We have a problem with 16 and 17-year-olds in the care system. There was a massive stretch on social care. Every director of children’s social care who I spoke to said that it is a massive stretch on their budgets, and that they do not know what to do with those children. I think we could be more innovative. Again, there is massive good will out there in the country. We should be looking at specialist foster care, and not sticking 17-year-olds in rooms in houses on their own.”
House of Commons27 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Some of the best provision that I saw for children who were just arriving was put on by Kent, which had managed to get school going and get interpreters in, but it was overwhelmed. What I will say, to pay tribute to local authorities around the country, is that whenever there was a very young child or a disabled child, they would step up and help. But it was hard to get the national transfer scheme going and the children were confused by it as well. The Hghland council offered a range of places to some of the children, and they were like, “Where is the highlands and what are we going to do there?” It felt discombobulated at best. It was really tricky.”
House of Commons27 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Q We heard from the previous panels about how the Illegal Migration Act and the Rwanda Act caused wholesale dysfunction in the immigration system and especially in asylum. I want to ask you about the impact that that dysfunction had on children. As we were moving unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from Kent around the rest of the UK, how dysfunctional was that system? What was it like for local authorities that were trying to support them and the local communities? They have statutory obligations about child protection. Dame Rachel de Souza: Down in Kent, because needs must, hotels were set up, so I visited the hotels that children were in. The situation was wholly inappropriate. Many children were languishing there for months, without English teaching. Kent county council was doing its best.”
House of Commons27 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“As a new Member, I sadly never knew Sir David Amess, but from what people have said about his dedication to his constituents and his good humour across the House, he is a model for all new Members to follow. At the Home Affairs Committee last week, we heard from the permanent secretary about how Prevent is changing and how the terror threat is changing. As we can see from the learning review, there are clearly gaps and there are lessons that still need to be learned. That requires independent scrutiny and independent oversight. Will the Minister tell us how the new Prevent commissioner will be able to provide the scrutiny we need?”
House of Commons12 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Of course, the issue is that Scotland is not the same everywhere. My community in Edinburgh and East Lothian is seeing its population grow, while other parts are seeing their population decline. The reason is Scotland’s labour market and economy. Even when we had access to 300 million people as an EU member, with net migration of 900,000, there were still parts of Scotland that were unable to attract migrants. The problem was not the immigration system; the problem was our labour market.”
House of Commons10 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Immigration is obviously a challenging topic politically, but as with the economy and public services, public trust is conditional on the Government having a firm grip on the immigration system. Folk understand that we live in a complex world and that people cross borders. They want to be compassionate to save those fleeing for their lives. They do not want to see people drown. Most of all, they want to see the system managed. It has to be firm and fair—it has to be both. The measures in the Bill should have been on the statute book long ago. Rather than just standing on our shores and shouting, we are seeing the Government get down to doing the hard graft of what it takes to secure our borders.”
House of Commons10 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We have to change the risk calculation of the people getting on those boats, which the Rwanda plan clearly failed to do. It should shame us all that we have somehow contrived a situation where innocent people drown off our shores, and it is right that we treat the people who endanger their lives like terrorists. Finally, I cannot welcome enough the emphasis on working with other countries. Immigration is, by its very definition, a cross-border phenomenon, so immigration crime is a cross-border crime. Countries such as France, Germany and the rest of the Calais group will be central to helping Britain tackle our challenges, and intelligence sharing, access to databases and joint operations are the bread and butter of fixing immigration challenges.”
House of Commons10 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“There is no point in arresting someone when they step off the boat if we do not disrupt the network that funnelled them to the shore in the first place. The new powers on seizing electronic devices, biometric testing and intelligence gathering and the serious crime prevention orders are exactly what is needed. For four years before I was elected I served as the justice and home affairs attaché at the British embassy in Paris, where I saw at first hand the kind of interventions that make a difference in securing the channel border. These measures are exactly what we need. We are talking about large, well-funded organised crime networks, and we need to treat them as such. Secondly, I strongly welcome the new offence of endangering a life at sea.”
House of Commons10 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am pleased we are having this debate today, as the measures proposed in the Bill are long, long overdue. Anyone can see that confidence in the immigration and border security system broke down under the previous Government, when hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was wasted on hare-brained schemes, tens of thousands were crossing the channel every year, and 69 people died in the waters off our shores while trying to cross the channel last year. We do not need more gimmicks and headline grabbing; instead, we need serious measures and hard graft. There are three key components to the Bill that I think will have the most impact. The first is the counter-terror-style powers on immigration enforcement. These important measures will make immigration enforcement properly intelligence-led.”
House of Commons10 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Let us be clear: Palestinian land belongs to the Palestinians, and any implication that they should be forced from it should be unequivocally condemned. Individual Palestinians are routinely forced from their land by illegal settlement building in the west bank. Will the Minister join me in unequivocally condemning illegal settlement building in the west bank?”
House of Commons6 February 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗