May I associate myself with the Minister’s comments about PC Keith Palmer, who died in the line of duty and whose tragic passing this House will never forget?
The Bill has been introduced against the backdrop of an asylum and immigration system that is simply not fit for purpose. The British people want and deserve a system that is fair, compassionate and orderly, as has been made abundantly clear by the fact that more than 150,000 households have signed up to house refugees fleeing the horrors of Putin’s barbaric war. But from the Windrush scandal to the botched Afghan resettlement scheme and the shambolic response on Ukraine, the Home Office has consistently failed to live up to the standards that the public rightly expect from their Government, so we should not really be surprised that the Bill not only fails to meet any of the challenges that our migration system faces, but actively makes the situation worse. That is why the Opposition rejected the Bill in its entirety on Second Reading; it is why we support every one of the Lords amendments, each of which seeks to mitigate the worst excesses of this dreadful legislation. The fact that the Government were defeated fully 19 times in the other place is proof positive that this appalling legislation is not fit for the statute book.
I turn to the specific reasons that our asylum and immigration system is so comprehensively broken. Let us start with the most visible example: the small boats crisis in the English channel. The number of desperate asylum seekers risking their lives by crossing the channel on small boats has increased from 299 in 2018 to an eye-watering 28,526 in 2021, of whom more than 3,000 were children. Yet Conservative Ministers have failed to engage constructively with their French counterparts to tackle the people traffickers, so the Home Secretary has now resorted to criminalising vulnerable refugees who are fleeing war-torn countries such as Ukraine.