Immigration and Home Affairs

I inform the House that I have selected amendment (l) in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, which will be moved at the start of the debate, and amendments (d), in the name of Stephen Flynn, and (k), in the name of Ed Davey, which will be moved at the end of the debate.

I call the shadow Home Secretary.

I beg to move amendment l, at the end of the Question to add:

“but respectfully regret that the Gracious Speech does not commit to boosting defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030 with a fully funded plan, fails to include measures that provide an adequate deterrent to migrants crossing the channel illegally, fails to mention rural communities, farming and fishing, does not include a legally binding target to enhance the UK’s food security or a commitment to increase the UK-wide agriculture budget by £1 billion over the course of the Parliament, introduces new burdens on businesses without sufficient measures to support them, fails to set out a concrete plan to tackle the unsustainable post-covid rise in the welfare bill, does not adequately protect family finances and the UK’s energy security in the move to net zero, and fails to provide adequate protections for pensioners and working people to keep more of the money they have worked hard for.”

Yesterday, at the Dispatch Box, I welcomed the Home Secretary to her role, and I now take the opportunity to congratulate the wider ministerial team who work with her. They will have inherited a hard-working team of civil servants dedicated to the protection of this country and the people within it. However, I am sad that the hon. Member for Aberafan Maesteg (Stephen Kinnock) has not made the transition from shadow immigration Minister to immigration Minister. His contributions are a great loss to the Conservative party.

With the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham (Dame Diana Johnson) in her new ministerial role, I am sure the Clerks of the Home Affairs Committee will be looking forward to arranging her first session promptly and will, like me, be closely monitoring how quickly her new boss fully implements all the recommendations of the Committee she formerly chaired.

While I do not have time to mention each of the new ministerial team individually, I want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips). She knows I planned to single her out and I do not apologise for doing so; I think that it is a very good appointment and she is well suited to her role as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State with responsibility for victims and safeguarding. She knows that tackling violence against women and girls was a priority for me. We have previously shared the stage at events in the House discussing that subject. I genuinely look forward to working with her and contributing in any way I can to her success in this incredibly important area of public policy. She has highlighted some of the crucial work that this place can do in bringing to the attention of the country and the wider world the continued plight of too many women.

The election highlighted the important work of the Home Office in defending democracy. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), the former security Minister, for his work with the defending democracy taskforce. Again, that is an area where we will seek to be a constructive Opposition. I was disgusted to see how the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley and many other, mostly female, colleagues and candidates were treated during the general election campaign. No one who cares for democracy, irrespective of their party affiliation, should be willing to tolerate that. The defending democracy taskforce continues to have incredibly important and urgent work to do. We should continue to work together, as we did when our roles were reversed, to root out violence and intimidation, and to ensure that candidates and Members can vote with their conscience and campaign with their hearts, free from intimidation or threats.

Will the right hon. Member give way?

The Home Secretary will be making a speech in due course.

As I say, almost 500 asylum seekers arrived in the first week, and, as of today, more than 2,000 asylum seekers have arrived in small boats since Labour took office. The second week at work was not much better.

Will the shadow Secretary of State give way?

The right hon. Member has the opportunity to speak in a moment. We have seen riots in her back garden, on the streets of Leeds, and police officers, clearly not confident that they will enjoy her support, having to take a backseat. Like so much of what was said ahead of this general election, “Take back our streets” was clearly just a Labour slogan.

We then saw Neil Basu, a very highly respected former police officer, with whom I worked when I was on the Metropolitan Police Authority, and General Stuart Skeates, a senior official at the Home Office, with whom I worked in a former life as well as when I was Home Secretary, ruling themselves out of leadership of the new so-called border security command. They did so, I am sure, because they know what we know, which is that that is little more than a fig leaf to hide the fact that the Labour Government are doing less on migration and hoping to achieve more. The reality, as everybody including the people smugglers know, is that the small boats problem is only going to get worse under Labour.

I thank the shadow Home Secretary for giving way. It is a shame to puncture his fantasy and bring him down to the real world in which he and his party trebled net migration and left us with the highest level of spring boat crossings on record. Perhaps he can answer just one factual question. He has spent £700 million over two and a half years running the Rwanda scheme; can he tell us how many asylum seekers he has sent?

As I said on the radio this morning, if the right hon. Lady is going to pluck figures out of the air, she should avoid nice round numbers, because it is a bit of a giveaway. She will know that we brought people into detention and that we had chartered flights. The fact that the new Government scrapped the scheme and, with a degree of diplomatic discourtesy, did not even—[Interruption.] Labour Members can groan from their Benches, but they will get used to the fact that we cannot treat international partners in this way.

Our relationship with Rwanda was entered into in good faith by both parties. The Rwandans discovered that the incoming Government were tearing up that bilateral relationship in the pages of the British media. The Home Secretary should learn that her new Foreign Secretary should have had the diplomatic courtesy at least to pick up the phone to his opposite number in Rwanda to explain what was going to happen before they read about it in the British press. She and I both know that her Government would not have acted with that level of vile discourtesy had that partner been a European country. [Interruption.] Labour Members can groan all they like, but we all know that is true.

The simple fact of the matter is that the new border security command replicates in all respects the work of the small boats operational command. It took almost the whole general election campaign before the right hon. Lady attempted to clarify the roles. We still have very little clarity on the division of labour between the so-called new border security command and the small boats operational command. Yesterday, at the Dispatch Box, she tried to imply that there had been no returns under the Conservative Government, but let me put some facts and figures on the record. Last year, we returned more than 25,000 people to their home countries, including almost 4,000 foreign national offenders, in order to keep ourselves safe—foreign national offenders for whom, I would remind the House, her Prime Minister in his former guise fought tooth and nail to prevent being deported. Voluntary and enforced returns were both up by more than two thirds, at their highest level for five years—operations done by our immigration enforcement officials, which sounds a lot like a returns unit to me.

The shadow Secretary of State should also remember that the Labour party opposed our measures for bringing in 20,000 extra police, and during the general election campaign it committed to having 13,000 extra neighbourhood officers, which many police and crime commissioners have said cannot be funded, because they are not clear how they are to be funded. Is it not the case that the Conservative party has a track record of delivering on more policing, and the Government have no idea whatsoever?

I am very proud of the fact that in many parts of the country, including my county of Essex, there are now more warranted police officers than at any time in the force’s history—in sharp contrast to Labour-run London, where the Conservative Government put money on the table to recruit extra Metropolitan police officers and the Labour Mayor of London has spectacularly failed to recruit those officers, has not backed officers when they said they needed to do more stop and search, and has seen knife crime accelerate, distorting the whole national picture. I really hope that the right hon. Lady takes this seriously. She can chuckle all she likes, but this is about kids getting stabbed on the streets of London, and she should take this more seriously. [Interruption.] She should recognise that we introduced tougher sentences under the Public Order Act 2023 to clamp down on disruptive protests—the benefit of which we have already seen this week with the jailing of Just Stop Oil protesters—in addition to plans to grant the police further powers to clamp down on protests that go too far and disrupt the lives of people around this country.

The shadow Home Secretary knows he should not make such disgraceful, unfounded allegations about my response to knife crime. He knows that I have met families right across the country who are devastated by knife crime, including in towns and smaller communities and suburbs where this terrible crime is going up. His party, when in government, repeatedly failed to ban serious weapons on our streets. Will he now support this party and this Government when we bring in the bans on ninja swords and dangerous machetes that he should have brought in long ago?

I made the observation that, while I was talking about young people getting stabbed, the right hon. Lady was chatting and chuckling with her colleagues on the Front Bench. That was a statement of fact. The point is that we have got a grip of crime, but in the parts of the country controlled by Labour police and crime commissioners, including London, that is sadly not the case.

I have a lot of respect for the right hon. Gentleman, but he will know from his tenure as Home Secretary that those sorts of crimes—stabbings and shootings—are happening all across the country, and not just in cities; they are happening in towns such as Warwick and Leamington, where we have had someone shot dead through drug dealing, many people stabbed maliciously and some killed. The reality is that under his watch over the last 14 years we have seen a degradation of the numbers of police officers on our streets and rising knife crime. Does he not accept that?

The figures speak for themselves. People will be able to see the levels of crime, including violent crime, in Conservative-run parts of the country, and compare them with those in Labour-run parts of the country. The figures are in the public domain. Anyone can check them.

Unfortunately, it appears that the Government have not seen fit to lay out their plans to address the issue of violent, aggressive, intimidatory or disruptive protest. For the safety of our streets, and for the confidence of the officers who need to police protests, I hope that the Government do the right thing and change that vacuum where policy should be.

Under Conservative leadership, we announced a raft of changes to support victims of domestic abuse, putting more abusers under management of the police and under increasingly strict arrangements by designating violence against women and girls as a national policing priority—a national threat on a par with the threat of terrorism. As I have said, the Home Secretary and her Front-Bench colleagues should know that I will always give my wholehearted support to actions they take to protect women and girls. We have made improvements through Operation Soteria, changing the way the investigatory system operates to ensure that victims of rape and serious sexual assaults can get justice and providing specialist training for officers.

We were committed to ensuring that rape victims felt confident to come forward to report, because we know the sad truth that, even with the good work of Operation Soteria, far too few people come forward. We want to encourage them to do so, and we will support the Government in any action they take in this area.

I thank the shadow Home Secretary for giving way on that important point. He will recognise that one issue we have all campaigned on is the fact that many of those women do not come forward because they have no trust in the police. A key issue we have been working on is getting senior officers to suspend those police officers who are found guilty of wrongdoing. Does he agree that we need to make sure that that works now, so that those women can have the confidence to come forward, including where those allegations are against other police officers?

The hon. Lady is absolutely right; although it did not make its way through all its parliamentary stages, the proposals that we put in the Criminal Justice Bill strengthened the accountability framework for officers and strengthened police leadership to take action. Again, I hope that the Government will continue that incredibly important work, and once again I put on record my willingness to support them in ensuring that the disciplinary practices within policing give women the confidence to come forward.

Is it not true that the net number of police is lower after 14 years of Tory Government? There has been a net loss to policing. Does the shadow Home Secretary agree that the reason we have not hit our numbers in London for the Met Police is that we are in special measures, and there needs to be caution over the police who are recruited? We need to ensure there are good police officers, so it is about quality, not just quantity.

I disagree with the hon. Lady’s assessment of police numbers. That does not accord with the figures that I have seen. Police numbers are up, and we had plans to recruit even more. I get the party loyalty towards the Mayor of London, but the simple fact of the matter is that all police forces have to ensure that there are vetting procedures in place. The vetting procedures for the Metropolitan Police are no more onerous than for other forces around the country, yet many other police forces, including my own, have record numbers of police officers. The Metropolitan Police is the best-funded police force per capita in the country, and yet, with all the freedoms that the Mayor of London has and with all the money that was put on the table, he has failed to recruit the police officers that the capital city needs. That has an impact not just on people who live and work in London, but on visitors and people who travel through it.

In a constantly evolving criminal landscape, we delivered the online fraud charter. It was a world-first agreement, with 12 of the biggest tech companies as signatories, proactively to block and remove fraudulent content from their platforms. Facebook, Instagram and Amazon were among those key signatories. We introduced the National Security Act 2023 and the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, and we proscribed Hizb ut-Tahrir, Terrorgram and the Wagner Group, to make promotion and membership of those organisations illegal.

To conclude, the right hon. Lady has a tough job. Home Secretary will always be a tough job. However, during our time in government we ensured that she has more police officers at her disposal, an effective small boats operational command, an effective immigration enforcement command and a suite of legislation to allow her to match the rhetoric of the campaign to her action in government.

The Home Secretary has inherited falling met migration figures, a growing economy and a large parliamentary majority to ensure she gets her business through the House. While we will be critical when the Government make mistakes and will seek to ensure that they do the right thing, we all have a desire for her Department to succeed and indeed an interest in its doing so. On that point, I wish her the very best of luck.