Stuart McDonald – 2022 Speech on Asylum Seekers Accommodation and Safeguarding
The speech made by Stuart McDonald, the SNP Spokesperson on Immigration and the MP for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, in the House of Commons on 7 November 2022.
I, too, congratulate the right hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) on securing this urgent question and on his persistent scrutiny of these issues. Surely we have now reached the point where the Home Office can no longer be left responsible for the safety of those children. Hundreds are missing and thousands more are stuck in hotels outside the child protection system. Children are reportedly pressurised to claim to be adults and are increasingly misidentified as adults. There have been harrowing accounts of assault and rape; there is general evidence of fear and depression; and adults are not even being properly disclosure checked. Can we have a cross-Government taskforce, headed by the Prime Minister, to get children into local authority care instead of into more hotels?
Progress in moving people out of Manston is welcome, but it massively begs the question why that was not possible last month. To help the Minister to free up accommodation, will he prioritise the outstanding claims of the 15,000 or so Syrians and Afghans, who should be comparatively easy to identify as refugees and to award their status? Will he suspend the pointless process that saw staff identify just 83 inadmissible claims out of 16,000 cases? For goodness’ sake, instead of wasting their time on that, they should be looking at asylum claims and the backlog.
Robert Jenrick
The hon. Gentleman is wrong to suggest that the UK Government pressurise any individual to falsely identify as a child. It is the people smugglers who do that; we are doing everything we can to clamp down on it. I have been to Western Jet Foil at Dover to meet the Border Force staff who try to make those assessments. At times, up to 20% of the adult males who arrive at Western Jet Foil claim to be under 18, when clearly the number is substantially less than that. We have already changed the law, which I think the SNP voted against, to change the way in which those tests are administered, and if we need to make further legal changes, we will.
The hon. Gentleman is right to say that it is wrong that many children, in particular unaccompanied children, are in hotel accommodation. I want to change that. The way to do that is to encourage more local authorities throughout the United Kingdom to accept those individuals and to help them into private or state foster parenting arrangements. We have put in place a significant financial package of about £52,000 a year per foster carer per child to ensure that can happen, plus a £6,000 up-front payment to the local authority to help to accommodate that. The financing is available, so I want to ensure that more local authorities step up. If he can encourage those run by his SNP colleagues in Scotland to do so, I would be happy to support him.
