Refugee Communities: Covid-19

I beg to move,

That this House is deeply concerned by the ongoing humanitarian crisis facing refugees across the globe; has considered the secondary effects of the covid-19 pandemic on refugees and displaced persons in fragile or low-income states; and calls on the Government to provide urgent support to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries and communities as they deal with the covid-19 pandemic.

I am incredibly grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this important debate, to its co-sponsor my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), and to cross-party colleagues who supported the call for it.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we are interconnected as a global village. We breathe the same air, drink the same water and enjoy a shared humanity that transcends borders. In that spirit, this debate addresses the plight of the world’s refugees in the face of coronavirus, and calls on the Government to do more to help.

This is not just a crisis across Asia, Africa and the middle east; it also affects Europe and the UK, as we have seen desperate people make perilous voyages across the English channel this summer and the terrible tragedy of refugees drowning at sea. These are desperate people exploited by criminal gangs and failed utterly by the international community.

As the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, I can claim some connection to the word “refugee”.

It was originally coined by the French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution after 1685, many of whom came to Spitalfields in my constituency and left their mark on the east end’s streets, architecture and heritage.

The east end was home to many thousands of Jewish refugees in the 1880s. Jewish refugees from Portugal gave us fish and chips, and much else, of course. After 1881, Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian empire came to the UK, and in the 1930s they came fleeing the Nazis; they included my hon. Friend from the other House, Lord Dubs, who escaped in the Kindertransport train. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude for all that he has done, and continues to do, to fight for refugee children. It is a great shame that our Government have not taken up his powerful case for our hosting refugee children.

We have accepted refugees who have fled civil war and conflict in many parts of the world, including the Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin, and people from eastern Europe, Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia and Iraq. As a nation at our best, we provided them with a welcome home, and a chance to succeed. We have benefited, of course, from their contribution to our politics, culture, economy and much else, which has added new dimensions to our Britishness. Of course, there are also the incredible contributions of many great figures, such as Karl Marx. There have been contributions to our business community, too—the founder of the Tesco family came from my constituency—and to many other fields.

The landing has not always been soft. There have always been bigots putting up barriers, and blaming and stigmatising refugees, but they have thankfully been in a minority. The UK can be proud of welcoming refugees, and of its global contribution to protecting them, for example through the role that Clement Atlee and Ernest Bevin played in the 1950s in founding the United Nations and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. There was also, under the Labour Government, the establishment of the Department for International Development, which this Government have sadly abolished in the middle of a global pandemic. I know the Minister will say that it is business as usual, despite the merger of DFID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; I hope so, when it comes to protecting the poorest in the world, who need our support.

Today, the refugee crisis is on a scale that none of us could have foreseen. Nearly 80 million people—more than the entire British population—have been forced out of their home by conflict and persecution. Among them, nearly 26 million are classed as refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. These children and young people have been uprooted and displaced at the most important time in their life. Millions of stateless people have been denied nationality and citizenship; access to basic rights, such as education, healthcare, and employment; and freedom of movement. They are often crowded into unsanitary camps, in which, despite the efforts of global non-governmental organisations, national Governments and the international community, there are huge issues in accessing healthcare. Life expectancy is incredibly low and infectious disease is widespread in them—and this is before we take into account the impact of coronavirus.

Over half of those affected by the Syrian refugee crisis have been displaced into refugee settlements. There are camps in Chad housing Sudanese refugees; camps on the Tunisian-Libyan border; the Kakuma camp in Kenya, one of the largest in the world; and camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan and Yemen. Of course, millions of Syrian refugees are being hosted by Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and many other countries. One of the biggest camps in the world, in Bangladesh, is for the Rohingya people fleeing murderous violence and what the UN has described as ethnic cleansing; there is an International Court of Justice case on genocide committed by the Myanmar military and Government. Millions of people are living in that camp in temporary accommodation. I saw at first hand the impact on people, the vast majority of them children and women, of the unimaginable violence and genocide committed by the Burmese military. These people cannot work, and are traumatised by what has happened, having lost everything. Homes and villages were burned down; their mothers were raped in front of them, and their fathers and the young men in their family were murdered. Those were the testimonies that I heard when I visited those camps in 2018.

There is also the Syrian crisis, which we have been witnessing for many years. I visited the Beqaa Valley in 2013, at the beginning of the crisis, and saw the impact of that conflict on the children in particular, but also on the men and women. The situation persists, and the international community has failed to force the Syrian Government to end the war. Many have argued, including the president of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, that the camps should be closed down, with refugees being allowed to integrate into communities and to work. We also need to do more to enable the right of return for refugees, which means that much more action is required of the international community to look at ways of dealing with the root causes of the conflicts that have often led to people being forced out of countries—whether it be Syria, Myanmar or elsewhere.

The tragedy is that the huge financial commitment required to host the sudden influx of refugees is placed on the shoulders of the countries that are least able to afford it. Eighty four per cent of the world’s refugees are living in developing countries, and seven out of the top 10 developing countries hosting refugees are considered fragile states in the OECD’s fragility framework.

Although many countries suspended their refugee resettlement schemes due to the coronavirus pandemic, many of them have now resumed, but not here in the UK. The Government have also cruelly voted down the Dubs amendment, which would have guaranteed family reunion rights for child refugees after our withdrawal from the EU. I call on the Minister today to think again and work with his colleagues in the Home Office to make that happen. If there is one way to pay tribute to the courage and determination of Lord Dubs, who was a child refugee himself, this would be the way to do it, and I hope the Minister will take that on. The UK has accepted only a small number of refugees and asylum seekers, amounting to about 0.25% of the UK’s total population. Let us compare that with what some of the poorest countries are doing in hosting hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, refugees.

This year, on top of all the problems facing refugees, we have seen the impact of the pandemic. We know that covid-19 thrives in crowded, cramped conditions where people cannot wash their hands frequently and where medical assistance is extremely limited. We know also that the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, which is one of the biggest in Europe, desperately needs assistance. CAFOD is warning about the Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon, saying that the concern for the large refugee populations is that social distancing, self-isolation and frequent handwashing are nearly impossible in the communities in which they live. This problem is widespread—whether we look at Syria, Lebanon, Bangladesh or elsewhere.

From the Greek islands to Gaza and from Bangladesh to Botswana, the pandemic is set to sweep through the world’s refugee camps, and we need to do more. The United Nations Secretary-General has said that the covid-19 pandemic

“is menacing the whole of humanity–and so the whole of humanity must fight back,”

That is surely the right approach. In early April, more than 200 Members of Parliament signed a letter to the Prime Minister, which I co-ordinated, calling for urgent support. Those calls remain necessary. Our call was for the UK Government to support the UN’s $2 billion global humanitarian response to covid, to scale up the public health response, to support refugees who need help, to deliver personal protective equipment, to work with international partners, the World Bank and the IMF to cope with the impact of covid in middle income countries, and, of course, to support the UN General-Secretary’s call for a global ceasefire, including any UN Security Council resolution for a global ceasefire, to de-escalate conflicts in many of the parts of the world that are giving rise to the forced displacement of people.

The Government have gone some way to provide humanitarian assistance, but we call on the Government to do more on this particular agenda—on ending conflicts, holding to account certain Governments who are not doing enough, and also working with the international community to provide the much-needed funding.

For many years, I have campaigned with colleagues from across the House on the Rohingya crisis, so I want to focus my final remarks on the plight of the Rohingya people who have faced, as I said earlier, incomprehensible atrocities, killings, torture, executions, mass deportations, the razing of villages, and women and girls enduring gang rape and other forms of horrific sexual violence. I heard their testimonies at first hand when I went to Rakhine state in 2013 and then in 2017 and then to Cox’s Bazar, which hosts a million refugees from Myanmar who have been persecuted.

We have just recently marked the third anniversary of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to Bangladesh to escape the genocide, but the genocidal violence against the Rohingya in the summer of 2017 did not come out of the blue. It came from a combination of decades of persecution, systematic discrimination and the denial of citizenship and basic human rights. In Myanmar, there has been and continues to be a significant escalation of violence, and the UN continues to document violence against children, including killings, maiming and sexual violence. The recent clearance operation was among the worst, and hundreds of thousands of Muslims who live in Burma continue to be vulnerable.

Earlier this year, The Gambia lodged a case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice. Canada and the Netherlands have formally joined the case. As penholder for Burma in the UN Security Council, the UK should follow suit, and I have called the UK Government to do so time and again, as have others. I hope the Minister will be able to take that on and follow the lead of The Gambia, the Netherlands, Canada and a number of other countries in the prevention of genocide. This particular case is so important, because it will prevent the Burmese military from committing further atrocities and prevent people from having to take their lives in their hands once again. That is why it is so important that our Government support that move.

In terms of what we do next and how we provide support to those who desperately need it, I draw attention to the calls by former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who has said of the refugee crisis:

“This is not a problem in far-off lands that rich countries can ignore”.

There is growing demand that the Governments of the developed world, including our own, shoulder more of the responsibility. It is in our interest. That means we need to provide funding. I know the British Government are doing some of that, but we need to go further. We need to lead the way, working with the new US Administration. We need to act to try to ensure that there is a proper global health and economic recovery plan for those countries, because that is what will stem the rise in conflict, the increase in refugees and people being forced out of their homes, and it will help to reduce conflict.

We need to double funding to the World Bank for emergency aid. We need to provide more support to the International Monetary Fund to help those countries, so that they do not end up being desperate and the economic troubles do not cause further conflict and division, thereby causing more people to suffer and end up as refugees. We also need to do more to tackle climate change, which will create more refugees. In Bangladesh, 30 million people are likely to become climate refugees, so there is a great deal that we need to do going forward.

I hope our Government will take a stronger role in the international arena. If global Britain means anything, it means our responsibility to help the poorest in the world, because it is in our interests to do so. If we do not, those refugees out of desperation will want to flee and come to the shores of Europe, and we have seen the shameful experience over recent years where we have not been able to respond as generously as some of the poorest countries have.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. Does she agree that we must do our part in the UK, particularly when, as we did just after I was elected in 2015, this House voted to bomb Syria? I did not vote for that, but none the less, a majority of Members did. Where we are bombing countries, we need to be taking responsibility when people are displaced from those conflicts.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that many conflicts have been caused by failures of the international community, so we bear a responsibility, whether it is Iraq, Libya or Syria. We need to act. We need to provide refuge to those who end up being displaced, and also we need to take action at the international level to bring an end to the conflicts that continue to rage.

In conclusion, we need our Government to take action, not only to provide the humanitarian assistance, but to work hard to hold to account Governments who are causing persecution, Governments who are failing to protect their populations and Governments who are actively responsible for ethnic cleansing and genocide in countries such as Myanmar. We also need to take a stronger role in mobilising support in the international community to provide more assistance to those countries; refugees are among the most vulnerable in the world, and covid has exposed them to even graver danger. We must protect them against the virus. We must press the world’s Governments to step up aid programmes, end conflicts, tackle poverty and prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of displaced people around the world. If we are to tackle this pandemic, in the words of the United Nations Secretary General,

“we are only as strong as the weakest”.

This is not just a matter of humanitarianism; it is also a matter of self-interest.

May I ask Members to be mindful that we have not only the call list for this debate, but another debate to follow? Both debates are on important subjects, but it all has to finish by 5 o’clock, so please be mindful as to the length of your contributions.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) for securing this debate and for her speech, which demonstrated her own commitment to this agenda. As she said, she represents a part of London that demonstrates the proud history of this country in welcoming some of the poorest people from around their world to make their home here and make an enormous contribution to our national life. I pay tribute to her and I agree with much of what she said.

In this crisis, as a country we have turned inward somewhat; we have looked to our own problems and challenges. We have discovered our neighbourhoods and lived more locally. We have discovered, in many ways, that we are citizens of somewhere, each of us in our local lives, yet we are also citizens of the world. As the hon. Lady said, we know that the poorest people are most at risk and most vulnerable to the effects of the global pandemic. I am incredibly proud of the UK’s record this year. The Government have committed significant sums—£750 million—to the global fight against covid-19, much of it for the poorest countries in the world, with £300 million alone to be spent in the region of Syria this year.

Beyond the immediate response to the crisis, we have a very proud recent record of contributions to the imperative of building up the global economy and the economies of the poorest countries in the world. I wish to draw attention to a remark made by the World Bank last month, which observed:

“With the notable exception of the UK, which has been an absolute leader, the contributions by governments have been…flat or declining”.

It is talking about the contributions we made of nearly $4 billion to support the poorest economies in the world, which were more than those of the United States, Japan, France and many other leading countries.

Much more can be done, and I recognise many of the points made by the hon. Lady, but I wish to focus on what we here in the UK are doing for refugees, where we still have major responsibilities to fulfil. She mentioned unaccompanied children, so I wish quickly to make the point that I regret that Opposition Members persist in pretending that this Government are somehow hostile to family reunion for refugee children—that is patently untrue and it would be political madness if it were true. Their making that point is irresponsible, as it causes fear and anxiety where none is needed. The Government are absolutely committed to creating reciprocal arrangements with the EU to ensure that unaccompanied children can continue to be reunited with their families, and I have confidence that that will happen. There will be a review of the routes that unaccompanied children can take, which will be presented to Parliament and be accountable to this House.

I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman probably means well, but his characterisation of the UK system certainly does not chime with the constituents I see coming to my surgery week in, week out. In particular, he talks about what this Government can do, saying that all they can do is give cash, but I disagree with that in the strongest possible terms. In Scotland, as I will set out in my contribution, we set up a scheme where Syrian doctors, nurses and health professionals have been able to retrain and come to Scotland, and they are now at the forefront of fighting the covid-19 pandemic. I am sorry, but I do not buy what the hon. Gentleman is saying. Surely he and his Government must recognise, as the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) said in her speech, that so much more can and should be done.

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I absolutely agree that there is more that can be done than giving out money, but it is not just the responsibility of Government to do that. That is the point I want to make. We need more than welfare, and more than a roof over our heads. Our needs are higher up the hierarchy of needs than that. We need friends and we need culture. We need agency, responsibility and a sense of purpose and belonging, and we need work to do, as she says. All of this is the responsibility of all of us in society.

I want to end with another tribute to the Government, this time for the community sponsorship scheme, which was first introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) when she was at the Home Office. It was inspired by the way in which refugees in Canada have been resettled over many decades. It is an inspirational model whereby refugees—individuals and families—are received into a community by a local community group working with the local authority and the public services. They provide so much more than a house and welfare. They provide English language support and employment and training support, and they provide friends and opportunities to access local social networks, faith communities and so on.

There are two such groups operating in Wiltshire, and they are doing a tremendous job. They have supported families to integrate properly into our communities in a way that the council on its own would never have been able to do. For example, we have a tailor that we did not have before in Wiltshire, working away; we have a painter and decorator; and we have people working for the council. We also have a whole range of new volunteers making a tremendous contribution to our community. These are the new Huguenots that the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow referenced. They are enriching our county and our country, and they are welcomed by local people. This is the model we need much more. These community-sponsored refugees are in addition to the 5,000 a year commitment, but I think it should be the basic model by which we receive and welcome refugee families into our country. This is the model; this is the way we will build a more integrated community and fulfil our obligations to the world.

I am extremely grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important debate on covid-19 and its effect on refugee communities, and I would like to place on record my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) on leading the charge. At its core, this is about the injustice of millions being forced from their homes by genocide, hunger and war, and the injustice that 85% of refugees find shelter not in the richest nations but in low and middle-income countries where healthcare systems are already under-resourced and overstretched. It is also about the injustice of the pandemic now threatening the most vulnerable displaced people far from their homes. As David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee, said:

“We know coronavirus doesn’t respect borders and that it hits the vulnerable hardest”.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that there are 86.5 million people today who are refugees—stateless, internally displaced or seeking asylum.

Like many hon. and right hon. Members, I recently had the pleasure of visiting a refugee camp, thanks to the efforts of the Yunus Emre Institute. The camp in Gaziantep, on Turkey’s border with Syria, is home to thousands fleeing the civil war. Turkey has opened up its heart and borders, providing compassion, shelter and food to Syrian refugees. I met refugees learning new skills and heard about their efforts to find work. One thing that stayed with me is its sheer size and scale, and I think that is true for camps across the world. The Kakuma camp in Kenya has roughly the same population as the city of Oxford. The Tindouf camp in Algeria has the population of Lincoln. The Adjumani camp in Uganda has the population of Durham. Bangladesh, which my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow mentioned, hosts almost 1 million Rohingya fleeing genocide, over 600,000 of whom are concentrated in the Kutupalong-Balukhali expansion site—more people than the city of Manchester.

I thank hon. Members for showing great time discipline—I am really grateful for that.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger) for his contribution, which I think reflected a high degree of consensus on many of these issues across the Chamber, and was certainly seeking consensus on those issues where we all very much agree. I would like to spend my time focusing in particular on the impact that covid has had on three groups of vulnerable people for whom we have a particular responsibility. Those are people who have a no recourse to public funds status attached to their presence in the United Kingdom, refugee children and the people who are waiting for the recommencement—or perhaps hoping in the future for the commencement—of the new global resettlement schemes that we know are in progress at the moment.

Starting with those with no recourse to public funds, this has been the subject of a good deal of debate in Westminster recently. While there is a high degree of recognition that the NRPF status is an answer to retaining public confidence that people are not coming to the United Kingdom simply to access benefits and welfare support, in a time when there is a national crisis, as there is at the moment, it presents some particular challenges. When we begin to look beneath the surface of how the policy is operating in practice, we see the suggestion that it may be time for a reconsideration of the way we apply that policy.

We heard from the Minister during a Westminster Hall debate on this topic that, on average, 90% of requests to remove NRPF status are agreed by the Home Office and that they are agreed very quickly—generally, within a period of 28 days. I recognise that the NRPF status is complicated. For example, many people come to the UK on working visas with NRPF as a part of that. People who come as investors can be very wealthy individuals who are unlikely to face destitution, but the fact is that in the event that people face destitution, local authorities have a duty to step in and to provide financial support. Clearly, we are kidding ourselves in this place if we think that NRPF status means that there is no cost to the British taxpayer in providing that support, and we need to consider whether it is in the interests of the welfare of families who may be facing destitution as a result of that status to allow time for a reconsideration in line with what the day-to-day real practice of the Home Office has been in supporting this particular group.

The point the hon. Gentleman makes about taking children from one care system to another seems slightly inappropriate—more than slightly inappropriate—given that we are talking about countries, by and large, that are war-torn and do not even have the basic structures of health and social care, never mind a childcare system. I think it is important that we focus on the reality of the many families who are displaced and what they are leaving, and the fact that they are not necessarily coming to the UK or other western countries out of choice, but out of desperation.

The hon. Member makes a very good point about the context of many refugee children who come to the United Kingdom, but of course it is not a point that is relevant in the context of Dubs, which is what I was speaking about. The point of the Dubs amendment is that it committed the Government of the UK to go to other countries in Europe and identify children in those countries who are unaccompanied and bring them into our care. They were already, in the terms of the Dublin agreement, in a country that was defined as safe, whatever the circumstances that may have pertained before they left the country that they had been in before that had led to their becoming a refugee.

I would like, however, to highlight a particular concern. The UK’s response in respect of refugee children, commendably, has been the national transfer scheme. We recognise that, under the Children Act 1989, a child who is unaccompanied in the UK, by operation of law, becomes the responsibility of the local authority where they are. Local authorities such as Kent, my local authority of Hillingdon and Harrow next door have taken in significant numbers of children, and other local authorities around the country have stepped up to say that they would be willing to offer places to support those young people as well.

There has been a good deal of debate about the remarks made by some concerning activist lawyers, but it has been brought to my attention that a number of those young people awaiting transfer to other local authorities that are willing to take them in order to create more capacity for the United Kingdom to support refugee children are being advised—legally speaking this is absolutely correct—that they are within their rights to refuse to move. It would be really helpful if Ministers gave some attention to how we can ensure that the national transfer scheme can do its job effectively.

Additional funding has been provided so that young people can be supported by local authorities that are not the ports of entry, but if young people are being told that they should refuse to co-operate with the process, the system will gum up and we will lose the capacity we have to provide that support. That is a genuine concern. Those lawyers are acting entirely within their rights, but none the less it calls into question our ability to provide the most effective support we can and increase our capacity to take in more refugee children.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) on securing this important debate. As she said at the outset, we are united in our common humanity in terms of how we treat refugees and asylum seekers, and we should always remember that refugees are people first. That should be the context for our policies and how we behave towards refugees. They are people who have lived through unimaginable horrors—stuff that many of us have absolutely no comprehension or understanding of. Quite frankly, who would uproot themselves, their lives and often their families and make perilous journeys across land and sea unless they had no other choice?

I have listened to some of my constituents, and quite frankly I do not know how they have survived what they have been through. When I hear some of the less positive things said about refugees and asylum seekers, it really strikes home how important it is that we all stand up, make these points and put them on the record. Among the Government’s catalogue of cock-ups this year, their response to the refugee crisis, particularly with respect to those involved in the channel crossings, was one of their finest. Not only was it wholly incompetent, but it was devoid of compassion. I repeat what I have just said: I ask all of us to try to put ourselves in the shoes of a refugee or asylum seeker before passing judgment.

UNHCR estimates that there are nearly 80 million people displaced across the world, as my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) has already mentioned. The key drivers of displacement—conflict, famine and climate change—have continued during the pandemic. The importance of the international community, including the UK, working together to tackle these drivers cannot be understated. I hope that the Minister can provide reassurances that the assimilation of the Department for International Development into the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office will not lead, now or in the future, to international development and peace making being less of a priority than they need to be. Again, my hon. Friend also mentioned that.

The hon. Lady cites a figure of 80 million refugees. Having dealt with refugees and worked for the UNHCR myself, I know that there is a difference between a refugee and a displaced person. Does that 80 million include the category of displaced persons, which by definition means people who have been chucked out of their home or village but remain in the country? That is quite an important distinction. I wonder whether the 80 million includes displaced persons. If it does not, there are a damn sight more than 80 million.