Joe Robertson MP: speeches

Speeches

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q The Bill claims that it will have a deterrent effect on people coming to the UK illegally, but no matter how robust it might be, can it really have a deterrent effect when it seems so easy to set people off in boats from the north of France? Helen Rance: Its deterrent effect would be the toughening up of the environment. The specifics of this Bill and the launching of boats from France are not specifically linked. This is the deterrent effect of making the UK less attractive in general. From this Bill alone, I cannot comment on the launching of boats.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Do you see it having any effect on where migrants might enter the UK and be received and intercepted by law enforcement? I ask because we see boat crossings now stretching as far down as Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. From your position, does anything in the Bill address the expanded geography of where organisations such as yours have to operate? Helen Rance: There is nothing in this Bill that addresses the geography of where crossings leave from or arrive to.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q If I understand this correctly, the central point that you are making, Eleanor Lyons and Will Prescott, is that the issues that the Bill seeks to address are with not, in your view, so much the law as it stands, but the administration of that law—training, interpretation and the exercise of functions by all sorts of officials. If there are any issues, that is where they lie, rather than the substance of the law as it stands. Is that a fair summary of what you are saying? Dr Prescott: We have talked about this in our report. You have to be very careful about the sequence in which you do this. At the moment, there are all sorts of gaps in identifying modern slavery victims. A lot of people in first responder organisations—as Eleanor mentioned, you cannot refer yourself into the NRM—are not aware of their responsibilities. There is no dedicated modern slavery lead and, because there is no dedicated lead, everyone is responsible, which in practice means that no one is responsible. A lot of victims also do not necessarily realise that they are a victim of modern slavery. They obviously do not understand what their rights are. In particular, if they are in an unfamiliar environment and speaking to unfamiliar officials, they will not necessarily be comfortable discussing certain practices that have happened to them. If you are going to tighten the criteria, you really need to fix the gaps in the existing system first, before you look to a much tougher approach.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Does the Bill address the gaps you have just identified? Dr Prescott: It does not really. There are some bits of the Bill that are quite welcome, such as requiring firms to outline the steps they need to take to reduce modern slavery in their supply chains. That is helpful to an extent, but it does not really address the issue of the lack of dedicated first responders in organisations, for example, and it does not deal with fixing the identification problem within the system that we were quite concerned about. I do not think it is quite there yet. Eleanor Lyons: I do not think the Bill addresses the fundamental issues, because I do not think you need legislation for that. There is a challenge at the moment with the process, because we do not have that training consistently across first responder organisations. I do not think we have the substantial evidence we need to underpin a lot of the changes that the Bill is proposing. It undercuts a lot of work that has been done over the years to recognise that victims of all crime groups and of exploitation take a long time to feel comfortable speaking, and they may be scared to come forward. We are creating exceptional rules for victims of modern slavery that I think are fundamentally unfair. I would say that the issue with tackling modern slavery in this country is that we do not have dedicated funding for police teams any more, and we have a modern slavery strategy that is over 10 years out of date. If we really want to tackle the issue, we need to look at those big picture things. The Bill is making it harder for victims to come forward, and it does not address the problem of the perpetrators of the crime. Actually, a lot of those things were introduced under previous bits of legislation, and there is already a struggle to enact them at the moment.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Saudi East-West Oil Pipeline · Hansard source

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  The Saudi closure of the east-west oil pipeline and the continuing disruption in the strait of Hormuz demonstrate how important it is that the UK Government issue new licences to drill in the North sea—in our own British oil and gas reserves—in order to provide national security and job security, and, most importantly, to reduce energy bills for hard-working families. Surely the Minister can understand that.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I get that the system we have is not good enough, but that does not mean that what you are proposing is. We have heard lots of evidence in this session that the problems lie not necessarily with the law, but with the way the Home Office deals with applications. Are you absolutely sure that this is the best Bill you can introduce? I think we can agree that the public are tired of Governments saying, “A system is not good enough; let’s have a trial and experiment with this idea.” Anna Turley: I take the challenge about the quality of decision making in the Home Office, but I think 95% of decisions are appealed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool flagged earlier, we are in a situation where people know that by appealing they can lengthen their stay and draw out the process. Of course, we are always looking to improve the quality of initial decision making—we will look to do that—but we are in a world where we are going from the decision making to a hugely bureaucratic, expensive, slow, burdensome system that is just not working. Introducing the appeals tier is about getting a better quality of decision making at a swifter rate, although it is always incumbent on us to improve the quality of decision making at the Home Office. We have invested a lot in the judicial capacity. We have increased the amount that we spend by 21%. The number of sitting days is up 19%. We have done a lot to try to tackle that, but the number of appeals is still going up. The outcome of appeals has stayed constant, but the number of appeals is going up. That says to me that people are recognising that this is a way to thwart and draw out the system. Dan Hobbs: As the Minister said, we are tackling a number of issues. Some of this is groundbreaking, in terms of asylum cost recovery. We are defining article 8 and bringing it back much closer to the Strasbourg jurisprudence, in terms of qualifying family members and setting out clear stipulations for both decision makers and the courts as regards the definition around family life. Again, that is a big area of attrition. As the Minister set out, 77% of people using article 8 had either arrived illegally or overstayed. A large number of foreign national offenders use article 8 as a means to either delay or avoid removal from the country. The Bill seeks to ensure that that is interpreted in line with how ECHR article 8 is due to be interpreted. With the appeals authority, it is about having all the safeguards—the regulatory training, the procedural training and the professional ability to deal with these cases, backed by senior adjudicators who have legal training. It is also about having a fair and efficient system, because part of the challenge we see at appeal now is that there is a long gap between someone’s initial decision by the Home Office and when that comes before a judge. During that time, a whole series of events can happen, which means the case before a judge is often different from the one the Home Office made its initial decision on.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q From a pretty bad place. That is factually the case, isn’t it? Dan Hobbs: Broadly, about 50% of the refusals are then overturned. That is coming down, but equally the refusal rate has gone up. As the Minister said, we are refusing more cases, but the overturn rate is broadly similar.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q As we have just heard, you were director general of Border Force. You talk about the importance of stopping people coming in the first place. But Border Force has only five ocean-going cutters and six coastal patrol vessels. Is there a fundamental issue here of not having the assets for agencies of the state to do their job? Is that something that is not addressed in the Bill, but that would make a meaningful difference? Tony Smith: The Border Force will enact whatever its operational instructions are, and its operational instructions are drawn from legislation, powers and authorities, so it does not matter how many boats you have out there in the channel. Currently, if someone comes within the 12-mile zone, under the law of the sea you are obliged—quite rightly, because saving lives is paramount—to bring them on board your vessel. The problem is that once they are within the jurisdiction, they accrue all of these rights to asylum applications, ECHR and modern slavery applications. I do not think it is a question of resource. I am a bit worried about resources, given what we saw in Portsmouth last week, because I do not think we have the bandwidth to cover the entire coastline any more. We have been focusing what resources we have on the short straits. Clearly, the smugglers are moving along the coast, so we need to be adaptable to be able to deal with that. They would always take more resources if they were on offer, but for me it is more about how you get the people coming off the boats properly screened, not cleared within 24 or 48 hours—that is not long enough. Whatever your views on immigration, you have to properly and thoroughly screen people. A passport tells a story—it will tell you all sorts of things. We do not know their dates of birth or their nationalities; the biometric checks are pretty useless. All I am saying is that I think we need to be detaining people for at least longer than 24 hours at Manston if we are going to reduce the risk in any case.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Does the witness agree with me that the Bill does not do enough to tackle the fundamental issues of illegal migration and processing and deportation? Tony Smith: Yes, I agree with you.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q It is right, is it not, that the Home Office has a pretty poor record of success? When its initial decisions are tested on appeal, it loses at an incredibly high rate, suggesting there is something wrong with the original decision making at the Home Office. That has nothing to do with replacing the judicial system in the Bill. Dan Hobbs: I think the overturn rate is actually declining, so the Home Office is getting more successful overall with those decisions that go before a judge. But, to my point earlier, what the judge decides can often be very different on the facts, compared with what was presented to the Home Office at the beginning, because of the passage of time. The Minister talked about upwards of 68 weeks between someone’s appeal being lodged and concluded, which means that a whole different series of facts come before the judge. So the evidence can change in that time, but our overturn rate is broadly coming down.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  My wider critique is that the Bill does not do enough.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I will address my question to Professor Singer. We heard in previous evidence about some of the novel or unusual drafting and wording in the Bill. For example clause 19(4) says: “No weight should be given to a private or family life”, rather than that those issues should be “disregarded”, which I think is the normal phrase you would find in law, rather than “no weight”—it is hard to understand what “no weight” means. Also, the ouster provision in clause 1(8) seeking to try to oust the jurisdiction of the court in certain circumstances is drafted in a very loose way, when we know from case law that courts want very specific ousters if they are going to accept them. Does that not run the risk that this entire Bill is actually going to increase litigation just so that the courts can try to define and understand what some of this novel and peculiar wording actually means? Professor Singer: I have to say that I have questions about the drafting of the Bill in its entirety. I do not think that the Committee can appropriately scrutinise the Bill, because there is a significant lack of detail in so many of the provisions, in addition to very odd drafting. With due respect, a lot of it is back-of-the-envelope-type stuff, which has clearly been rushed through the legislative drafting process. For example, in the previous panel, I heard the Committee questioning the clause on the introduction of a core protection status. The clause does not actually set out the eligibility or content, in terms of what a core protection status is; it gives the Secretary of State significant powers to make regulations in respect of what eligibility for a protection status would be and what the content of that status would be. Similarly, in the provision on asylum support, we do not have any details about the actual operation or functioning of that system. The provision gives the Secretary of State power to make regulations in respect of this scheme. In relation to the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority, we do not have the rules of procedure to scrutinise, to be able to ascertain whether there will be due process, which will be appropriately followed, and fairness. I agree with you that there are strange inconsistencies in the drafting, but, additionally, I think the whole content of the Bill is quite lacking in many respects.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Ms Jardine. I have taken the opportunity while the ex-director general of Border Force is in front of us. The wider point made by the Government is that the Bill has a deterrent effect, but there have been crossings without any Border Force personnel or boats being in the vicinity. A lifesaving charity, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, is being relied on to provide a quasi-policing collection service. How does the Bill help with any of that?

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Minister, I am sure you want to tackle the immigration issues and asylum problem that we have. However, are you concerned that the provisions in the Bill, to the extent that they are beneficial at all, could be quite limited, as balanced against the potential upheaval of institutional changes in the way that asylum applications are dealt with, or that they have the potential to create all sorts of unintended consequences and issues due to the way the Bill is drafted? Given the evidence you have heard in this session, does any of that cause you concern? Anna Turley: I think my biggest cause of concern is that things cannot go on the way that they are. We want to make sure that we introduce legislation that deals with that. Of course there will be things that we will, with the due process of Parliament, continue to work on as the Bill progresses. But the reality, particularly when it comes to the appeals process, is that the system as it stands is falling over and not serving anyone. It is important that we build a new structure, which I believe is more flexible and swift, and which has all the right safeguards. We have not had a chance to discuss some of those safeguards. Some of the witnesses were critical of the process, but we are talking about building into the system a high degree of training and legal support, high professional standards, numerous levels of oversight, and the opportunity to go on to a tribunal appeal. We have great civil servants, who are not legally trained, but who manage the process. We want to build a body, and do it carefully and do it right, in a way that means that we no longer rely on the judicial capacity, which is falling over. We can then make those decisions swiftly, but with a properly, professionally trained body. That will enable us to make good, swift decisions on those appeals and then refer to tribunals as and when that is needed.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am just asking whether the Bill could help with any of that, given that the witness in front of us notes on his CV, in the formal papers, that he used to be in charge of Border Force.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Thank you.

• 15 Sept 2026 · Tourism: Overnight Visitor Levy · Hansard source

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  I think the Government’s plans for a tourist tax will be terrible for the visitor economy, terrible for jobs and terrible for spend on the high street. The Minister thinks it will be great. We can clear this up if the Minister will include in his visitor economy growth strategy a full analysis of his plans and publish it before he brings in his detrimental tourist tax.

• 10 Sept 2026 · Infected Blood Compensation Scheme · Hansard source

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  I recently met my constituent Stan, whose father died as a result of contaminated blood. Like many families, he is facing an endless delay through poor administration of the scheme. It feels as though a scandal within a scandal is unfolding as mistakes are made and further stress is caused to families. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure that the scheme is administered properly and mistakes are cut out, and would she consider meeting me to explore the issues raised by my constituent’s case?

• 7 Sept 2026 · Local Government Reorganisation · Hansard source

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  When the Secretary of State embarked on local government reorganisation for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, her Department accepted the principle that the Isle of Wight council should remain a stand-alone unitary authority. Now that she is reviewing local government reorganisation, will she reconfirm that the Isle of Wight council will remain a stand-alone unitary authority and that it is not, and will not be, at risk of merging with a part of the mainland?

• 7 Sept 2026 · Dover and Portsmouth: Protests · Hansard source

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  May I pay tribute to the brave lifeboat volunteers from Bembridge, on the Isle of Wight, who responded to the migrant crossing yesterday? The Isle of Wight is more than just a little bit west of Kent. This is a really concerning development, a potential failure to contain the geography of small boat crossings. The Minister likes to talk about the reduction in numbers, but what assessment has she made of this potential new development in where people smugglers are willing to operate from? In this case, they travelled across 80 miles of open water. What is she doing to ensure that resources are targeted properly not only in France, but on the south coast, so that local communities like those on the Isle of Wight and in Hampshire can respond to this, which is something that they have not seen at scale before?

• 3 Sept 2026 · Tourism Industry · Hansard source

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  8. What steps her Department is taking to support the tourism industry.

• 3 Sept 2026 · Tourism Industry · Hansard source

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  Growth in tourism requires an increase in visitor numbers so that more money is spent on the high street, not a new tax. Oxford Economics says that the cost of the overnight visitor levy will be around £1.8 billion in reduced spending, and a decrease in tax receipts, not an increase. Will the Minister confirm that the visitor economy growth strategy will consider the harm caused by the new tourism tax, and say when it will be published?

• 1 Sept 2026 · Direction of Government · Hansard source

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  I am glad that the Prime Minister had a nice tour of the UK over the summer. Had he come to the Isle of Wight, he would have heard about our No. 1 cost of living issue, which is the price of travelling to and from the Isle of Wight. It is astronomical, and it is harming our tourism economy and restricting access to health and education. If he stands by his comments about people power and putting power back into communities, will he at least be open to creating regulatory powers so that we can control the prices levied by private equity companies, put passengers first, and ensure that the Isle of Wight is treated fairly, just like every other community in the UK?

• 16 Jul 2026 · Maritime Sector · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for pausing the MCA’s brutal decision about coastguard rescue officers, and for convening meetings on cross-Solent ferry transport to the Isle of Wight, which will start next month. It is of some concern, however, that I have received a letter—not from him—telling me certain things that I was not allowed to discuss, including evidence of ticketing and reliability going back more than 10 years. I am sure he understands that the world did not start in 2016, and I will not be told by anyone how to best represent my constituents, or what I can or cannot say.

• 16 Jul 2026 · Health Bill (Seventeenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. These two new clauses, the latter of which is in my name, deal with the publication of an annual report detailing NHS and social care provision for dementia care and how the Government are performing against targets, standards and outcome measures set out in national guidance and frameworks relating to dementia services. I would like to thank three important charities working in this area: the Alzheimer’s Society, Alzheimer’s Research UK and Dementia UK. All three back the two new clauses. The data requested is imperative to ensuring that the Government can measure and monitor progress against relevant national targets, standards and guidance, including the new modern service framework on dementia, the forthcoming Care Quality Commission statutory guidance and outcome measures that may be set in future NHS operational planning guidance. That is crucial to improving transparency and accountability, allowing systems to see the full picture of dementia provision in England and highlighting challenge areas or inequalities. The Bill makes provision for the establishment of information systems to collect, analyse and publish health and care data that is in the interest of the health service in England. The clause fits into that and would require the collection of data on the provision of dementia services in health and social care. I do not propose to speak too long, but I do want to make a couple of remarks on the current situation, which sets these new clauses in context. Dementia data is not currently comprehensively or consistently collected, analysed and published. That means that we cannot fully understand the provision of NHS care or social care for dementia, which is the biggest cause of death in the UK; how national targets, guidance or frameworks are being met; and where inequalities and challenges lie. As well as being the leading cause of death, dementia is a disease that around 1 million people live with. That number is expected to rise to 1.4 million by 2040. That will, of course, impact many more friends, families and carers who support those living with dementia. More than a third of people living with dementia in England do not have a formal diagnosis. Those who do receive a diagnosis live with the condition for an average of three and a half years before that diagnosis. Post-diagnostic care and support is often fragmented, leaving people affected by dementia without a clear point of contact, co-ordinated care, or access to specialist support for those with complex needs. Recent findings show that only 14% of people with dementia have an advanced care plan in place. That is not good enough for a disease that affects so many people and is the leading cause of death in England. Dementia puts immense pressure on our healthcare system: one in six hospital beds is occupied by someone living with the condition. Lord Darzi’s investigation into NHS performance highlighted how “there is an important challenge to improve both the quality and quantity of care for people with dementia.” The new clauses would go some way to addressing that, and I urge the Government to support them.