Tony Vaughan MP: speeches

Speeches

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered e-petitions 705383 and 718406 relating to support and accommodation for asylum seekers. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Murrison. I lead this debate for the Petitions Committee, and I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests for the support I receive from the Refugee, Asylum, Migration and Policy Project. I start by thanking the petition creators, Robert Barnes and Bob Clements, and all those who have signed the two petitions. Mr Barnes’s petition calls on the Government to “Shut the migrant hotels down now and deport illegal migrants housed there”, and was signed by more than 256,000 people. Mr Clements’s petition calls on the Government to “Stop financial and other support for asylum seekers”, and has more than 427,000 signatures. Mr Barnes, whom I spoke with last week, does not oppose asylum. He believes that we should grant sanctuary to those fleeing persecution at home. He is absolutely right about that fundamental truth. It is who we are. Our British values of fairness and decency explain why, across generations, we have welcomed refugees from the across the globe—those escaping Hitler’s tyranny, Idi Amin’s brutality or Soviet oppression. Each time, some voices demanded closed borders, and each time, Britain chose humanity over heartlessness. Those values were in action when, on 14 October 1914, 16,000 Belgian refugees reached Folkestone harbour in my constituency in one day, fleeing Germany’s invasion. Those arrivals instantly doubled the town’s population, yet locals immediately organised food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Some 250,000 Belgian refugees found sanctuary across Britain during world war one, which reflected the instinctive human compassion for others’ desperation—a compassion built into our British sense of fairness. We see those values enduring in my constituency today, in the activities of the local charity Napier Friends, which supports residents at Napier barracks. The charity has achieved incredible things, running English classes and creating volunteer opportunities to help our local community, including litter picking and organising gleaning, which is essentially collecting extra local produce to donate to food banks for people who need that extra food. My recent Napier visit showed outstanding work both by Napier Friends and current staff, and I thank them for all their work and for the compassion they show in doing it. The key question the petitions ask is simple: how should we treat people while they wait for their asylum decision from the UK Government? It is that waiting time that costs the state money, because asylum applicants cannot work for the first 12 months. There is a strong argument for shortening that period to around six months, as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain have done, to ease pressure on the accommodation system. Mr Barnes told me that he does not want to throw asylum applicants out on to the street. He wants to end hotel use. He wants to speed up asylum processing. He wants us to be quicker at removing people with no right to stay.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I will turn now to the issue of asylum support, and make two key points. First, people claiming asylum cannot access the UK’s mainstream benefits system. They receive initial full-board accommodation for 90 days, plus about £10 weekly. After that they move to longer-term housing and get around £49.18 a week for food, clothing and toiletries, which is much less than universal credit rates. Secondly, the UK’s asylum support system is not a pull factor, as some, including Migration Watch, have claimed. The UK rate of £49.18 weekly barely beats France’s €47.60. Once we add in the costs of making an illegal crossing from France, the UK benefits system does not leave an adult male asylum seeker in a better position than in France. Evidence also shows that family, community and cultural connections matter far more than the benefits system. Picture this, Dr Murrison: imagine that tomorrow we cut all asylum seeker financial support and closed all asylum hotels. What would happen next? Without alternatives, it would increase rough sleeping by over 500%, with over 30,000 more destitute people on our streets. That approach would clearly be immoral, as I trust hon. Members would agree. It would also pile massive pressure on social services, local authorities, NHS emergency services and the police. The petitioners’ alternative to state support in the community is mass detention. Migration Watch also calls for the detention of all asylum claimants, as its director told me in a conversation last week as I prepared for this debate. Let us think that through. It would clearly be unlawful. It would also be inhumane, financially ruinous and completely useless. There are about 102,000 people in UK asylum accommodation, but our immigration detention capacity is only 2,200, so we would need a massive new detention facility expansion for immediate mass detention. What would that expansion cost? Based on Ministry of Justice prison expansion plans, the National Audit Office estimates that a single new prison place would cost at least £470,000, excluding land and other costs. That is £47 billion for 100,000 detention places, which is about a third of the entire NHS budget. On top of that, immigration detention costs are about £122 per day, adding up to around £4.5 billion per year for that number of people. Clearly, detention on that scale would mean massive cuts to public services and huge tax rises.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  From the logic of what the hon. Lady is saying, we would detain everybody—we would put the 102,000 people currently in asylum accommodation in a detention centre. Does she accept that that will cost around £47 billion, which is not credible at all?

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  The reality is that, if we do not have a mechanism in place—and it was essentially jettisoned by the Conservative party—there is no way of creating either a deterrent or a way of working with our colleagues in Europe to address these problems upstream. If we took the position of the Conservative party, which is to withdraw from the European convention and other international instruments, who would work with us upstream? France would not have signed that UK-France deal—signed in the summer by the Prime Minister—if we had been outside of the European convention on human rights. It is Brexit 2.0 from the Opposition. The Government are offering serious alternatives that simply are not being offered by anyone else. What would mass detention actually achieve? The answer is nothing at all. It would not make it easier to carry out removals, because detention is already used for people who are ready for removal. Somebody with an outstanding asylum claim or who has no travel documents cannot be removed anyway. Would mass detentions stop people from coming? That is highly doubtful. It is easy to underestimate how incredibly desperate many of the people who are arriving on small boats are. We assume that deterrents will defeat desperation, but both the Rwanda gimmick and other populist plans assume too much about the psychology of the people making these dangerous journeys. Mass detention is easy to say, but it is just another gimmick—inhumane, extortionate and, I am afraid, completely pointless. During my recent visit to Napier barracks, I met an Iranian teacher who said simply, “I just want to live safely.” I believe that we can show the compassion to give him that chance, while keeping order and control in our asylum system. The Government’s current path of clearing the backlog, cutting hotel use, and increasing removals where claims have been refused deserves our full support. Most people simply want a fair, competent asylum system that commands both our conscience and our confidence.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  The logic of that is that every country neighbouring a conflict zone should take all the refugees. That is an absurd proposition. We have to take our fair share of refugees. We take fewer than other European countries, and a responsible approach to this issue accepts that there is not an obligation to claim asylum in any particular country. The question is whether we are taking our fair share and complying with our international obligations—which, as I have said, the UK-France deal will achieve if it can be scaled up. Most people want a fair, competent asylum system that processes claims in months rather than years, with a sustainable asylum support system that ultimately upholds the values that make us who we are as a nation.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for his response, and I thank all Members who have taken part in the debate. It is extremely important for everyone who signed the petitions to see that we are listening, and that we are considering and debating these very important issues. I am not sure I heard anyone dispute the proposition that asylum hotels need to close. They are inappropriate for people seeking asylum, as was said by my hon. Friends the Members for York Outer (Mr Charters) and for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy). They are extortionate, as we have all heard, and they contribute to the sense of unfairness in our communities, as my hon. Friends the Members for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) and for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh (Chris Murray) said; the latter pointed out that an accommodation provider appeared on the Sunday Times rich list thanks to public funds. The current situation is utterly acceptable. I am happy to be corrected, but I also did not hear anyone specifically argue that support should be removed from people seeking asylum. However, I did hear some hon. Members—the hon. Members for Runcorn and Helsby (Sarah Pochin) and for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford)—arguing against the very principle of an asylum system. That is not actually what the creators of these two petitions believe. I spoke to one of them and received quite a detailed briefing note from the other, and the way they talked to me about their concerns very much chimed with what my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool said earlier. There are concerns here, and they need to be listened to very carefully. Ultimately, they are about the communities that the petitioners live in. They have the compassion to accept that we should grant sanctuary to those fleeing persecution—I genuinely think that that is where the vast majority of British people are on this issue—but the question, of course, is how we have compassion and how we have control over our asylum system. As the Minister said, Labour is getting on with the job of closing hotels, speeding up decision making and removing those who have no right to be here. I fully accept the challenges, but it does not lie in the mouth of the Conservative party to criticise the measures that this Government are taking to clear up the mess that the Conservatives helped to create. Brexit caused us to lose our returns agreement with the EU—I accept that it was underutilised, but nevertheless it was an agreement—the pausing of asylum decisions massively increased the application backlog, and the pressure on the asylum and accommodation system then increased massively. The idea that we could just junk our international obligations and deport everyone if we withdrew from the treaties is complete fantasy. As I said, we need the ECHR to solve the irregular migration issue. Had we not been in the convention, the UK-France deal would not have been signed, nor would we have had the credibility to work with international partners such as Bulgaria, Germany and France on the upstream issues. We would also jeopardise peace in Northern Ireland without those measures. The truth is that the common law has set its face against torture for centuries, so I am afraid the idea that without the refugee convention and the ECHR we would be free to send a person back to torture is legal nonsense and morally repugnant, and it would make the UK an international pariah. It would also run contrary to our British values of fairness and decency. We do need to consider innovative solutions to address the asylum support and accommodation challenges: increasing asylum decision-making capacity; providing early access to legal aid and identifying claims as early as possible; deciding appeals more quickly; expanding our housing stock and applying break clauses to accommodation contracts. We must do all those things, and we must do them more quickly. I support the Government’s approach, which the Minister set out. He knows better than anyone that winning back public confidence in our asylum system is essential. I wish him luck in that. Question put and agreed to . Resolved , That this House has considered e-petitions 705383 and 718406 relating to support and accommodation for asylum seekers.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Member accept that under the Conservative Government asylum applications were essentially paused, which had a huge knock-on effect on accommodation costs and the number of people who had to be accommodated, and that that caused the crisis that we are in?

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Gentleman believe that withdrawing from those conventions will actually make those things easier? There is no basis for saying so. The truth is that we need those agreements to solve the problem—the deal with France is the start of this process of having a returns agreement again.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  I agree with the hon. Member that we absolutely must ensure that those seeking asylum have proper access to legal aid. It is much quicker and cheaper in the long run if we can flush out all the claims at the outset, so that we do not have them raised at the last minute, when perhaps costs are higher. I am absolutely behind the hon. Member on that. On the points that Mr Barnes made to me, I agree with him, and I imagine that the Government do too. Labour’s manifesto promised to end hotel use by the end of this Parliament, and we are already well ahead of schedule. Hotel use peaked in August 2023 at £9 million spent every day across 400 facilities; since taking power, Labour has already cut hotel numbers in half and slashed £500 million yearly from asylum hotel costs, closing 23 asylum hotels.

• 20 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: Support and Accommodation · Hansard source

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  I want to underline the point I made in my speech, which is that France has a six-month period before work is permitted, so there is not that pull factor, or certainly not at that point.

• 16 Oct 2025 · Official Secrets Act Case: Witness Statements · Hansard source

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  rose—

• 16 Oct 2025 · Official Secrets Act Case: Witness Statements · Hansard source

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  No.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Criminal Courts: Independent Review · Hansard source

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  As the hon. Lady seems to oppose a lot of the meat of the reforms, is there one that she can support to reduce the pressures on the system? That is a fundamental task that we all agree needs to be addressed.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Criminal Courts: Independent Review · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford. I thank the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) for securing this important debate. As he said, we have serious and fundamental challenges in our criminal court system, and it is clear that only bold, radical action will overcome them. There are lots of areas of the public realm on which the last 14 years of austerity had devastating impacts—the NHS, the police, our schools, and our asylum system—but I saw the impact of austerity on our court system most tangibly. As a barrister for 18 years before being elected last July, I saw the bruises inflicted by the wholesale neglect of our court system: leaking roofs, crumbling buildings and demoralised staff. I know many criminal barristers and solicitors who have walked away from criminal law because the failing and poorly resourced system was making them feel they could no longer deliver justice, which was what they went into the profession to do. The Government inherited a record Crown court backlog. As of June 2025, the outstanding caseload stood at 78,329, as the Chair of the Justice Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), has said. That is 78,329 individual injustices caused by the failure of the state to ensure that justice is done. I know that the Government are taking real practical steps to deal with that, and I strongly welcome the improved resourcing of criminal legal aid, with £92 million more per year for criminal legal aid solicitors, and the funding of a record-high allocation of 111,250 Crown court judicial sitting days this financial year. It is obvious, however, that the demand in our criminal courts is still so high that the steps already taken by the Government will not be enough to address the outstanding backlog. That is why it is important that the Government asked Sir Brian Leveson to propose reforms to ensure that our court system can be fair, timely and efficient. This Government should not tolerate a situation—nor should any of us—where justice is delayed and denied to thousands of people every year. I acknowledge the concerns that have been raised about Sir Brian Leveson’s proposal to restrict jury trials for certain either-way offences. Some have worried that removing a defendant’s right to elect trial by jury appears to diminish fundamental constitutional protections. I have sympathy for the point, raised by a colleague, that there is a need to maintain public trust in the judicial system, which could be undermined in the eyes of certain marginalised groups if this is not done correctly. But at present we have thousands of people who are being denied justice. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) just told us in tragic detail, there are people who are being completely failed by our system, and we cannot stand by and let that happen. As the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam said, this is about changing the threshold for jury trial, not removing it. I agree with his analysis that the availability of jury trial, given the situation we find ourselves in, must be balanced against the challenges that the system is facing as a whole. The proposed Crown court bench division represents reform that appears to preserve the fundamental standards of justice that we expect, while addressing the crisis threatening to collapse our entire court system. Cases will still be tried by the same professional judges who currently oversee jury trials, sitting with two experienced magistrates. That maintains judicial independence and legal expertise, while the magistrates add lay participation. Importantly, the new division remains within the Crown court structure, ensuring that defendants retain access to the same qualified advocates, fee structures and procedural protections they would receive in a jury trial. It is important that we maintain the standards of fairness that our judicial system has long guaranteed. I can see the time, and will end there.

• 14 Oct 2025 · International Rail Services: Ashford · Hansard source

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  It is a privilege to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) for securing this debate, which is of huge importance to Kent, Sussex and the country as a whole, and I agree with everything that she has said today. For years, the departure gate at Ashford International has sat abandoned. Coastal communities such as mine, of Folkestone, Hythe and Romney Marsh, have been left wondering why such huge potential has been left gathering dust. As my hon. Friend said, businesses want it open. Businesses in my constituency have told me that tourists from Europe used to come, and that footfall in Folkestone and Hythe has massively reduced since then and not recovered. However, we are a coastal destination, crowned the best place to live in the south-east of England. We host an internationally renowned art festival, the Triennial, which ran for three months this summer. We have miles of beautiful coastline. We are a destination that people want to visit—if only we could create the avenues for them to do so. The station in the 1990s saw 30 international trips a day, dropping to 12 by 2019, and now sees zero. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) said, the UK did have a 40% stake in Eurostar, which was sold in 2015. The UK thereby lost its seat on the Eurostar board and the ability to influence decisions such as where trains stop. Surprise, surprise: following that, the numbers decreased. It was 12 trips by 2019, so it was not a case of covid being the problem. At the moment, hundreds of millions of pounds a year could be brought back into the local economy by bringing Ashford International and Ebbsfleet back into service. Journeys that once took under two hours from my constituency of Folkestone and Hythe now take at least double that. Kent’s connection to our European neighbours has been dealt a hammer blow from which we have not recovered. Ashford International has the potential no longer to be a relic of decline. It can become a symbol of national renewal—a tangible example of new and improved relationships with Europe, driving greater productivity and connectivity for the south-east. Earlier this year, the Labour Government rightly announced their desire to pioneer a new era of European rail connectivity, with the determination to put Britain at the heart of a better-connected continent. That includes the Government’s exciting plans to establish a direct rail link between London and Berlin, and between the UK and Switzerland. Reopening Ashford is the first step towards that vision of a Britain with world-leading infrastructure and improved connections to our largest trading partner. The report from the Good Growth Foundation clearly explains the enormous economic benefits that reopening international rail services at Ashford would bring to the wider area. The case for doing so is quite clearly, as this debate has shown, unanswerable. The issue is how we get there, which is the matter to which I will now turn. International trains need to be maintained, and the only place they can currently be maintained is the Temple Mills depot in London. Currently, Eurostar is the only operator allowed to use that depot, but this month the Office of Rail and Road will decide whether to require Eurostar to allow other providers to use it. As others have said, just this week the Italian state-owned Ferrovie dello Stato confirmed its intent to invest £1 billion in our international rail services and to reopen Ashford International if it gets the green light to rival Eurostar. We also know that Virgin Trains is interested in running international rail services to compete with Eurostar. While the decision on Temple Mills is yet to be made, an independent report commissioned by the ORR this year found that the depot would be able to accommodate additional trains for alternative providers, so we have both the space and the providers who want to use Temple Mills. The next challenge is who will be the provider with a fleet of trains compatible with the systems used on HS1 and the channel tunnel. Just yesterday, FS announced its intention to use its fleet of Frecciarossa 1000 trains if given the green light to operate there. Those trains are compliant with the signalling systems used on HS1 and the channel tunnel, which trainspotters here may note is called the TVM-430 system. Similarly, FS already holds the necessary accreditations for operating on the European continent. Its appetite to serve Ashford is matched by its ability to deliver. The debate about Ashford International also raises the wider issue of how we can maximise the benefits of high-speed international rail beyond passenger travel. With the channel tunnel operating well below capacity, I am convinced that there must be an increased role for freight alongside increased passenger services. Residents of Folkestone, Hythe, Dover, Ashford and beyond will be acutely aware of the frustrations caused by Operation Brock—a traffic management scheme that too often converts the M20 motorway into a slow-moving, heavy-goods-vehicle lorry park—which increases delays and journey times. Logistics UK has estimated that Brock costs the UK up to “£250 million a day”. A single freight train on HS1 could replace 70 of those HGVs, greatly reducing air pollution and the amount of traffic on the M20. Let us imagine the tangible effect scaling that up could have on the experiences of road users in east Kent. I will continue to press to shift international freight from road to rail, which is another no-brainer that industry and Government should grasp. As a country, we must prove to ourselves that we are once more able to deliver large-scale infrastructure projects efficiently and effectively. Recently, rail projects in particular have come to symbolise a state that struggles to deliver bold, radical infrastructure. However, what we are calling for today is neither bold nor radical; the infrastructure already exists and the providers are willing and able to start running international rail services from Ashford. Local public opinion is clear that Ashford International must be international, and there is strong political support from local MPs and Government. I pay tribute to Lord Hendy, the Minister for Rail, for his steadfast support for restoring international rail services to Ashford and his constant engagement with me and fellow Labour MPs in Kent and Sussex. Finally, I urge the Office of Rail and Road to make the right decision for the people of Kent and the country, so that we can start to maximise the benefits of this incredible infrastructure, which is just waiting for the political will to bring it back to life.

• 14 Oct 2025 · International Rail Services: Ashford · Hansard source

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  On competition, why did it take a Labour Government to press the Office of Rail and Road to revisit the question of access to Temple Mills, which is key to unlocking competition? Unless other operators use Temple Mills, there is no competition. Why did it take this Government to do that? The hon. Member referred to a debate some years ago after which nothing seemed to happen.

• 16 Sept 2025 · Sentencing Bill · Hansard source

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  I do not think anyone is suggesting that people are going to leave their sentences early from the UK and walk free in their country of origin. There is a range of existing rules relating to prisoner transfer agreements and so forth, which will apply in any event. This may be a matter that the right hon. Member will be able to raise in Committee, but I have no doubt whatsoever that this measure—which will still be subject to the safeguards that are already in existence, whether in the deportation process or the justice process—will ensure that justice is done, which is the whole point of the Bill. There is much in the Bill that I welcome, but let me ask the Minister a few questions. How can we keep the strongest possible safeguards in place for victims during the transition to more community sentences, how can we ensure that our Probation Service is well resourced and able to support the expansion of such sentences, and what additional measures are Ministers considering to support more effective rehabilitation of prisoners who have addiction and mental health conditions? The Bill is a serious and radical response to our prisons crisis and our reoffending crisis, which are costing our society more and more every day in every way, and I invite Members to vote for it today.

• 16 Sept 2025 · Sentencing Bill · Hansard source

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  I am glad to support a Bill put forward by the only party serious about reforming our criminal justice system. I say that as a barrister with 19 years’ experience, and I draw the House’s attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Having been in full-time practice right up until last July’s elections, I saw at first hand the chaos in our prisons, the leaking and inadequate court buildings, and the overstretched probation officers, criminal barristers and others who were doing more for less in increasingly challenging circumstances. This Bill is critical to delivering meaningful justice for victims, protecting them more effectively, punishing perpetrators and rehabilitating offenders so that they become better citizens, not better criminals. We often talk about the Government’s inheritance from the Conservatives, but I argue that the prison and probation system is the area of the public realm that is most affected by the Tories—where they did most damage. They had 14 years, and they created 500 prison places, as the Lord Chancellor said. The number of frontline prison officers fell by 31% and the Conservatives decimated the Probation Service. Their so-called transforming rehabilitation reforms, which privatised part of the Probation Service, resulted in taxpayers bailing out failing private companies with £467 million of public money. There is nothing more serious than ensuring law and order, and the Conservatives became the party of lawlessness and disorder. It will take time to fix our prison and probation system, and this Bill begins that vital work. There is much I strongly support in this Bill. I particularly welcome the commitment to transition to an earned progression model for standard determinate sentences, inspired by reforms in Texas. There, as we heard, crime is at record lows, and it is important to stress that the behaviour of prisoners will impact their release. The principle on which this reform is based—that offender risk is relevant to how long they will stay in prison—is sound. If they reoffend and breach the terms of release under this system, the system will come down on them like a ton of bricks. The inescapable fact is that we send too many people to prison who then become better criminals. The point of prison is to face punishment as part of taking personal responsibility for their actions, but most people in prison can be rehabilitated. People must be accountable for their actions without us becoming cynical about human nature. I also strongly support other measures in this Bill, such as the expansion of tagging to monitor offenders in the community, which, as the Lord Chancellor said, has been shown to cut crime. I also strongly support the streamlining of deportation for foreign national offenders, on which I have a recent constituency example. In June, three men from Folkestone and Dover were convicted of raping a child and committing related sexual offences. They were together sentenced to around 54 years’ imprisonment. It was an utterly horrendous case. They were foreign nationals. Under existing laws, they can only be deported after serving the minimum term of their custodial sentence, which is often between a third and a half of it. Why should the British taxpayer foot the bill for their incarceration here for the next seven, eight or nine years while our prisons are at capacity? Clause 32 of the Bill answers that question by allowing the Home Office to remove the offender from prison at any time and subject them to deportation action, irrespective of how long they have spent in prison here. I support that common-sense measure, which is yet another example of a measure that could have been enacted by the Conservatives, yet was not.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Human Rights Act 1998: Immigration · Hansard source

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  By leaving the EU, the Tories tore up our returns agreement with the EU, and they completely failed to negotiate a new one, but this Government have now rectified that. Does the Home Secretary agree that the Tories and Reform are in cloud cuckoo land if they think that the French would have signed a returns deal with us if we had left the European convention on human rights?

• 10 Sept 2025 · Occupied Palestinian Territories: Humanitarian Access · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward) for her tireless activism on this issue. Twenty months ago, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches Palestinians in Gaza, to protect what the Court found to be Palestinians’ “plausible” right to be protected from acts of genocide. Today, humanitarian reality speaks for itself, as other hon. Members have set out: 470,000 Palestinians face catastrophic food insecurity, and nearly 900 people have been killed while queuing for aid since May—shot by Israeli forces as they waited for food and water. Last month, alongside 27 other countries, the UK rightly condemned Israel’s aid distribution system as “dangerous” and “inhumane”—my hon. Friend rightly described it as a disgrace. It is clear that humanitarian access has worsened and that the Court’s orders are still being systematically ignored. We must see full compliance with the ICJ’s provisional measures, all border crossings reopened, all restrictions lifted and humanitarian operations restored to pre-conflict levels. Under the genocide convention, the UK has obligations to ensure Israel’s compliance with international law, regardless of whether the UK has reached its own conclusions about genocide itself. The ICJ has made enough rulings. The time for action is now.

• 10 Jul 2025 · Relations with the European Union · Hansard source

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  4. What steps he is taking to improve relations with the EU.

• 10 Jul 2025 · Relations with the European Union · Hansard source

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  I thank my right hon. Friend the Minister for his answer. Given that he leads on UK-EU relations, will he outline how the Cabinet Office will ensure that the new sanitary and phytosanitary agreement will reduce the level of checks on goods at both the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkstone, in my constituency, and the Port of Dover, and improve the flow of trade? What steps are being taken to further break down barriers to trade in goods with the EU?

• 7 Jul 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T4. I echo the Home Secretary’s remarks about the 7/7 attacks. Alcaline Transport in my constituency was fined £10,000 after it reported that a clandestine migrant was found in one of its vehicles. When will improvements to the clandestine entrant civil penalty scheme be fully implemented, so that hauliers who report issues responsibly are supported, not penalised?