The asylum system certainly is broken, and this is not the Bill to fix it. On the Afghan resettlement scheme, where is it? How can we trust the Government to deliver any of these programmes, or anything to fix our asylum scheme, if we cannot even come up with that scheme, after many months, and after all of us in the House having received desperate emails from people in Afghanistan who were under threat? I agree with new clause 52, which would waiver visa fees for Commonwealth veterans. We ask them to put their life on the line as members of our country, yet we do not pay their pensions, and we do not allow them and their families visas to say that they are citizens of this country. What more can we ask?
I really want to focus on family reunion. I have stood in the camps of Calais and seen people smugglers wandering around, very maliciously. I have seen the people smugglers about whom so much is made, but it will not be measures in this Bill that sort them out. One missing area is that of family reunion. One of those 27 men, women and children who tragically died in the channel was Harem Pirot. He was fleeing for his life from Iraq, to reach his brother, Anwar, a Sheffield graduate living in Cambridge, who then had to go to Calais to identify his brother’s body. We could cut so many smuggling routes if we were to allow family reunion, yet there is nothing in the Bill about that. Such a measure was
promised after the EU Withdrawal Bill, and I talked about it in my maiden speech. It was promised when we discussed the Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020, and it was promised in the new plan for immigration that there would be a safe and legal route for refugees, and for people fleeing for their lives to whom we can offer safe harbour. Family reunion needs to be put back into the Bill for it to work in the way it is intended.