Angela Eagle MP: speeches 2025

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Speeches

21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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I think it is perfectly reasonable to point out the chaos that there was in 14 years of Conservative government and the shadow Home Secretary’s record in these areas—
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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Let me finish the sentence. No, I will not give way. I think it is perfectly reasonable to point out what the Conservatives’ record is, when they have come to the Chamber to try to lecture the Government about what to do with our immigration and migration policies, even though we are clearing up their mess. This Government inherited a system in total chaos from the Conservatives, which was partially because of the chaos I have just mentioned—those 20 weeks between the Pincher visit to the Carlton Club and the Budget that was needed to clear up Liz Truss’s mess, when we had three Prime Ministers and four Home Secretaries. Can the Conservatives seriously pretend to the British people that while they were busy doing all that, they had a coherent migration policy that they can lecture us about? I do not think so.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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No. As this Government have made clear consistently, this is just the start. We need to go further, and we will.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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No. Turning to legal migration, through the plans in our immigration White Paper, we will deliver a system that supports our efforts to reduce net migration and backs British talent. As the Home Secretary set out in the House last week, our approach is founded on five core principles: first, that net migration must come down; secondly, that the migration system should be linked to skills and training domestically, so that no industry or sector can rely solely on overseas recruitment—a major failure of the last Government’s 14 years in office; thirdly, that the system must be fair and effective, with clearer rules in areas such as respect for family life and stronger safeguards against perverse outcomes that undermine public confidence; fourthly, that this country’s laws must be respected and enforced, from cracking down on illegal working to deporting foreign criminals; and fifthly, that the system must support integration and community cohesion. This is not a task that can be completed overnight. Clearing up the Opposition’s legacy will not be easy because of the chaos that we inherited from the Conservative party. We saw record net migration, record small boat arrivals and record numbers of asylum hotels, criminal smugglers left to run amok for years, and public confidence shaken by past failures, expensive gimmicks and broken promises. It has been left to this Government to clear up the mess and turn the page on the chaos and failures of the past. That work has begun.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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Collective responsibility apparently never used to matter to the Conservative party, but if we remember some of the history we will know that that was actually true. I want Members to cast their minds back to the summer of 2022, and the 20-week period from Chris Pincher having his night at the Carlton Club all the way through to when the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) had to write an emergency Budget. The Conservative Government descended into utter chaos, with three different Prime Ministers and four different Home Secretaries taking turns in office. What was happening with small boats in the channel during those particular 20 weeks? We had not 12,000 or 13,000 arrivals, but 30,000 arrivals.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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I do not think that the two quotes are incompatible with each other. Our White Paper sets out the route forward. Net migration is coming down. The legacy that we inherited from the Conservative party was the quadrupling of it in four short years. It is also important to remember that when we are talking about legal migration and net migration, we must have integration and the capacity to absorb the people we allow into our country. Crucially, when it comes to small boats, we have to have the capacity to decide who comes into our country. I do not see that those two statements from the Prime Minister, which were years apart, are incompatible.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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No, I have given way enough. I will carry on and make my points, because we do not have much time. Since the general election, we have established the Border Security Command to draw together the work of all relevant agencies, supported by at least an extra £150 million this financial year. We have backed UK law enforcement to play a leading role in major international operations to take out the gangs and their supply chains further up the smuggling route. We have deepened co-operation with key allies, including France. We have struck new agreements with Germany, Iraq, Italy, the Calais Group and the G7. We have hosted a major international summit on border security—the first of its kind, with over 40 countries in attendance. We have also transferred the staff and resources from the failed Rwanda scheme and used them to return more than 24,000 individuals with no right to be in the UK. We increased asylum decision making by 52% in the last three months of 2024, and we have ramped up illegal working enforcement visits and arrests by 40%.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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No. There were 30,000 arrivals in the space of 20 weeks— not 220 or even 500 boats, but 670 boats. How did that happen? The Conservatives were all too busy fighting among themselves and crashing the economy to bother about protecting our borders. Let us not forget the role that the shadow Home Secretary played in that little bit of Conservative party history. In the space of 20 weeks, he went from tech Minister to no ministerial role, to Chief Secretary to the Treasury, to Paymaster General, to police Minister, but none of that was his most important role. We should remember—
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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I am talking about 20-week periods, which feature in the Opposition’s motion. I am talking about what happened in a 20-week period, when—just to go back over it—the shadow Home Secretary went from tech Minister to not having a job, to being Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Paymaster General, and then police Minister. The Conservatives brought the same chaos to government as they did to their immigration policy, over which they had control for 14 years.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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No. There are two main factors that make today’s challenges different from the past. The first is technology. The physical distances between nations and continents may not have changed, but the near universality of smartphones and internet access has made the world feel a lot smaller. The gangs can organise journeys more quickly and easily than ever before. For the people they prey on, the promise of a different future is right there on the screen of a mobile device. The second factor is the emergence of a ruthless criminal industry worth billions of pounds, stretching across borders and continents. On illegal migration and border security, we are acting to get a grip on issues that have gone unchecked for far too long. For years, the ringleaders and facilitators of this trade have been able to evade justice by ensuring that they are not present when money changes hands or the boats set off. To shift the dial, we need action to be taken earlier and faster. We need a response that fits the scale and urgency of the threat, and to mount such a response we need to legislate. Having intensified activity across policy, operational and international arenas since the general election, we have moved to strengthen the law by bringing forward the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill. The House is well acquainted with the Bill, but its core aims and measures bear repeating. The Bill puts an end to the failed gimmicks of the past. It furnishes law enforcement with counter-terrorism-style tactics to strike against smuggling gangs earlier and faster—long before they get within striking distance of our shores. The National Crime Agency and its associates who help us with this work asked us to change the law to provide them with those tactics. The Bill introduces new powers to seize electronic devices, and new offences covering the sale and handling of small boat parts for use in illegal activities. It upgrades serious crime prevention orders to target individuals involved in organised immigration crime. It creates a new offence of endangering life at sea to act as a deterrent against small boat overcrowding. It also sends an unambiguous message that we are ready to take action against those who are complicit in fatalities in the channel. [ Interruption. ] I talk about fatalities in the channel; Opposition Members laugh and joke among themselves.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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I thank the hon. Gentleman. It is very important to remember that we thrive—as we always have in our history—with a tolerant, multicultural society in which we strive to understand each other and get on with each other, rather than to divide and seek to cause resentments, which some people with their own political narratives do, and that is regrettable.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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I give way to my hon. Friend.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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When we came into office, we ended the Rwanda scheme. The scheme was about deporting people, processing their asylum in another country and never letting them back here. [ Interruption. ] But it did not work— [ Interruption. ]
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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No. [ Interruption. ]
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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Let me finish the sentence. Too often, the Opposition parties—some of the Opposition parties; not all of them—perpetuate a narrative that is increasingly dangerous. Let us not dehumanise fellow human beings.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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No. They can sit there after all this effort and all these gimmicks and pretend to the British people and Members of this House that the Rwanda scheme was ready to go and would have worked perfectly if only their Government had staggered on until 24 June, but nobody believes them, because it was a flawed scheme from the start. It was not a deterrent, it did not work, and it was massively expensive.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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The National Crime Agency has not said that about the Bill. In fact, if the right hon. Gentleman had listened to the evidence sessions at the beginning of our consideration of the Bill, he would have heard good evidence from the NCA supporting the parts of the Bill that provide counter-terrorism and prevention powers, and being enthusiastic about the increased opportunities that the Bill will give for successful enforcement.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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No; I am going to make some of these points. We should all remember that the shadow Home Secretary was once credited as being the economic guru behind Liz Truss’s premiership. This is the man who helped Liz Truss to write her catastrophic mini-Budget, drive the country off a cliff and scupper her own premiership.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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I agree. Of course, the Conservative party also oppose all of the Bill, despite— [ Interruption. ] Well, Conservative Members say it is not true, but they voted against it. I do not know why the Opposition should have voted against a Bill that provides more powers to deal with organised immigration crime internationally.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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When we discuss migration policy, net migration and legal or illegal immigration, it is really important to remember that we are talking about human beings, that we should treat them as human beings and that all human beings have human rights. We should not perpetuate narratives that dehumanise people. Too often—
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to en and insert “notes that 127,896 people crossed the Channel while the previous Government was in office, as a criminal smuggling industry took hold on the French coast; further notes that 84,151 of those people arrived while the previous Government’s £700 million Rwanda scheme was in force, with only four volunteers travelling to Kigali during that time; welcomes the fact that the current Government deployed the 1,000 staff working on that scheme to process asylum decisions and deportations instead, resulting in 24,000 people with no right to be in the UK being removed in just nine months; further welcome the progress made since July 2024 in establishing the Border Security Command, cracking down on illegal working, and increasing the resources allocated to identifying, disrupting and dismantling smuggling gangs; and looks forward to the crucial agreements reached with France, Germany, Italy, and Iraq to increase enforcement cooperation taking full effect, and the counter-terror powers introduced in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill becoming law.” I note that the motion begins by regretting the fact that we are 20 weeks into this year and more than 12,000 people have crossed the channel by small boat. Let me start on a note of consensus: I agree with the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) that numbers are too high and I agree that they must come down. I will come on to the action we are taking to achieve that aim. But first, I must address what we on Merseyside would call the shadow Home Secretary’s brass neck. What he did not say in his speech was that in the last 20 weeks when he was immigration Minister, it was not 12,000 people who crossed the channel, but 13,000. It was not 230 small boats that made the crossing, as we have had so far this year; during his last 20 weeks in charge, it was almost 500. Where was his motion of regret then? Where were his expressions of outrage then? In fact, let me tell the House just how bad it was in his last 20 weeks in charge, from the end of April to the middle of September 2021. More people crossed the channel by small boats in those 20 weeks than in the previous 40 months put together, all the way back to the start of the crossings in 2018: 173 weeks-worth of crossings and he managed to get them to exceed that total in his last 20 weeks in charge. That was not the right hon. Gentleman’s only claim to fame during his period in office, because he was the Minister in charge when net migration started to run completely out of control. In the 19 months he was in charge, net migration rose from 170,000 to 470,000, a 300,000 increase in less than two years.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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I am happy to give way to the hon. Gentleman now, because he stood up when I got to the end of a sentence.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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It is important that all of us acknowledge the humanity of people who come to our country to work, and the contribution that they make. But we also have to have rules: we have to decide who comes to our country and why, and we have to explain those rules to the electorate. That is what I shall go on to try and do. We inherited a system in total chaos. The Conservatives allowed criminal gangs to take hold across the channel, which saw the numbers arriving rocket from 300 in 2018 to more 30,000 in a few years. They crashed the asylum system, with a 70% drop in monthly decision making and an 80% drop in asylum interviews in the run-up to the election. There was a 34% drop in returns compared with the last Labour Government, and they spent £700 million sending four volunteers to Rwanda. Their handling of legal immigration was no better. Net migration quadrupled in the space of just four years to nearly a million—that is their record. Those numbers tell a wretched story of a system spiralling out of control; an entire criminal industry building up along our borders with terrible consequences; ruthless smugglers sending desperate people on dangerous, sometimes deadly, journeys and making a fortune in the process; basic rules not being enforced; and a collapse of trust and confidence in the state’s ability to perform one of its most fundamental functions: keeping our borders safe and secure. So bad was the Conservatives’ record that the public simply stopped believing anything they said—and who can blame them? For all the talk about stopping the boats and stopping this crisis, the crisis carried on. Unsurprisingly, strong words and grotesquely expensive gimmicks make little impact against sophisticated smuggling networks. The task of ending this chaos falls to this Government.
21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source
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Would the right hon. Member take a moment just to reflect on and remember the woman and small child who lost their lives today in an incident in French territorial waters?
12 May 2025 · Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill · Hansard source
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I am sorry, but I need to get on, because we do not have a lot of time and I think I have been generous. The Government have tabled further amendments, to which I now wish to turn, to strengthen the Bill. First, new clause 5 extends right-to-work checks. Preventing illegal working forms a critical part of the Government’s plan to strengthen the immigration system and restore tough enforcement of the rules, undermining the proposition sold by unscrupulous criminal gangs that individuals can work in the UK. In reality, such work is illegal and puts individuals in a vulnerable position and at risk of exploitation. Legitimate businesses are undercut and the wages of lawful workers are negatively impacted, with links to other labour market abuse such as tax evasion, breach of the national minimum wage and exploitative working conditions. Those working illegally in the UK are exploiting a loophole in the existing right-to-work scheme, whereby only those organisations that engage individuals under a contract of employment are required to carry out right-to-work checks. Government new clause 5 means that those who engage individuals to work as casual or temporary workers under a worker’s contract, individual subcontractors, and online matching services that provide details of service providers to carry out work or services for potential clients or customers for remuneration, will be legally required to check a person’s right to work. Individuals who are self-employed in the traditional sense, and who contract directly with clients, will not be in scope of new clause 5, ensuring that a member of the public directly engaging a tradesperson or business will not have to carry out a right-to-work check. That is a long overdue extension of right-to-work checks to include sectors that were previously out of scope and to crack down on the unscrupulous exploitation of employment law loopholes. I note new clause 2 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) and new clause 21 in the name of the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Lisa Smart) on the Government’s policy on the right to work for asylum seekers, but it is important, as I said earlier, to distinguish between those who need protection and those seeking to come here to work. Although pull factors to the UK are complex, the perception of easy access to the labour market is among the reasons that people undertake dangerous journeys to the UK. I turn to Government new clauses 6 and 7. First, asylum appeals in the first-tier tribunal of the immigration and asylum chamber currently take an average of nearly 50 weeks, according to the latest published statistics. That is because of the huge backlogs we inherited when we came into government. Government new clauses 6 and 7 seek to set a 24-week statutory timeframe, requiring the first-tier tribunal of the immigration and asylum chamber to decide supported accommodation cases and non-detained foreign national offender cases within 24 weeks from the date the appeal is lodged, as far as is reasonably practicable. There are no easy or perfect choices here, but the Government have to take action, and we are focusing in the first instance on measures that will allow us to get people out of costly hotels and to facilitate the swift deportation of non-detained foreign national offenders, where that is in the public interest. While implementing the 24-week timeframe for supported asylum appeals and appeals from non-detained foreign national offenders, it is our expectation that the judiciary will continue to prioritise appeals lodged by detained foreign national offenders and the most vulnerable. We are working at pace in the Home Office and with the Ministry of Justice and His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service to look at all possible improvements to the end-to-end immigration and appeals system and to the speed and efficiency of decision making and appeals, while continuing to guarantee access to justice. We will set out further reforms to the asylum system later this summer.

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