Paul Foster MP: speeches

Speeches

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

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  Q Would you both concede, though, that there is an issue, because the claims are not being dealt with quickly enough and there are a number of appeals, and that it is only right and proper that the Government try to do something about it, and so they have introduced the Bill? Jacqui McKenzie: I do not know that the Bill does that. That is the point I am making. I think Professor Singer is making the same point, and others are also making it: the networks, the immigration organisations and associations, a lot of academics, immigration judges and a lot of people up and down the country in organisations representing children and representing refugees. There is no end of evidence of people saying it is not going to achieve that. I accept that there is an issue: even if the Home Office was to get every application right—and that will never be possible, because nobody gets everything right—there are still large numbers of people in a system that is not designed well. It needs to be better designed. The Home Office probably needs more resources. When I sat on the Windrush lessons learned review independent advisory group, one thing that came out—you are hearing evidence from Daniel Hobbs later—was that the Home Office is a large organisation that is very unwieldy. It deals with the nice things, such as granting visas and so on, but also with law and order and so forth. Maybe it needs breaking up. Maybe it needs more resources. Overall, my view, and you may not agree with me, is that the UK gets very few people coming here, and certainly very few people coming in small boats. It gets very few people coming as asylum seekers. One of the witnesses earlier talked about 118 million people being displaced, but we have the data—I do not need to keep repeating it, but we see that very poor countries have the burden of asylum seekers and refugees. There are 1 million Rohingyas in Bangladesh and 2 million Venezuelans in Colombia. A small Caribbean island next door to an island where my parents were from, which has a population of just over 1 million, has 200,000 refugees in it. We really do not get that many people coming here, either through legal routes or in small boats. Because those numbers are static—in fact, they are declining—we need to resource the Home Office properly with more skilled or highly skilled people. I am not having a go at the people who are there, but something is very wrong there. That is what is causing the major problems that we see at the higher levels, such as the appellate courts. Professor Singer: Even aside from questions surrounding the number of arrivals that we have, setting up an entirely new body would be a huge waste of public resources. The Home Office’s own impact assessment for the Bill states: “The set up of the IIAA will require the recruitment and/or redeployment of an executive board, adjudicators, and supporting staff. This represents a significant operational undertaking and is expected to incur substantial recruitment and onboarding costs.” It then states that the recruitment will be “challenging and may not be achievable, increasing the likelihood of operational pressure and higher than expected costs.” There is the additional factor of transitioning the first-tier tribunal judges over to the new board and/or the financial costs of the obligations that are owed to judges if they are retired. It is a huge waste of public resources to set up an entirely new board. Those resources would be much better spent on properly staffing and resourcing the Home Office and the first-tier tribunal system that we currently have. There is a lot that can be done within the structure of the existing system to make it better. That would be a much more effective use of public funds.