My day started at 7.30 with a meeting at No. 10 with the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. I am one of the ten or so Conservative MPs who have been meeting together to discuss the challenges and potential solutions to the crisis caused by thousands of illegal immigrants coming across the Channel on dinghies. The Prime Minister had called the meeting to discuss the five-point plan to tackle illegal immigration he and the Home Secretary had developed with our help; one which will be ruthless with criminal gangs, firm with illegal immigrants and compassionate with genuine refugees.
The five-point plan must work. Millions of British people voted for Brexit in 2016 and the Conservative Party in 2019 to re-gain control of our borders. The issue of boats coming across the Channel reared its ugly head during the Covid pandemic shining a light on the long term illegal immigrant crisis. The plan targets Albanians and this is right. Albanians do not need to seek asylum; it is a safe country, part of NATO and is seeking to join the EU. In countries such as France and Germany, it is on a ‘white list’ – a list of countries from which asylum is not given. More than a third of the 44,700 people who crossed the Channel to the UK this year were from Albania, and this has to stop. The five-point pan includes the setting up new small boats operational command, a focus on enforcement, no more hotels being used to accommodate illegal immigrants, more caseworkers in the Home Office (I was shocked to hear that far too many Home Office caseworkers were completing one case per week….targets have now been set) and Albania has been deemed a ‘safe’ country so that the majority of claims will be rejected and thousands returned to Albania. The general feeling from colleagues is positive and the proof will be in the pudding, as it were.
I then had a meeting with Mims Davies, DWP minister and DWP officials regarding the detail of my private member’s bill, the Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Bill, due to go through the process of a Bill Committee the next day. A Bill Committee scrutinises a bill clause by clause, and debate continues over suggested improvements via tabled amendments. As it was a private member’s bill, I was responsible for signing up MPs to join the Bill Committee and the previous three weeks had been rather painful trying to cajole and chase up seven Conservative colleagues, five Labour and two from another party to join my Committee. I did succeed however, and my private members’ bill passed through the Bill Committee without amendment the following day. It now progresses through Parliament to the House of Lords for scrutiny before coming back to the Commons for the Remaining Stages on 3rd March 2023.
Catching up with some emails and office work, I then attended a virtual meeting with my fellow committee members of the Conservative Union Research Unit. CURU is a group of 70 backbench Conservative MPs who are committed to preserving and strengthening our precious Union (https://www.curu.co.uk). The current concern is further devolution and the equalities obsession of Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP. Devolution has proved to be tricky on many levels, but the question of equalities should not be devolved. What Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are doing in Scotland, with their Gender Recognition Bill about to be passed, is alarming and must not be allowed to impact on the rest of the UK. The Bill may well fall within the legal competence of the Scottish Parliament, but it interacts with policies and provisions which do not.
Following this virtual meeting, I went to meet with a colleague, Ruth Edwards, who wanted to talk to me about a campaign to create a legal duty of care in universities after the suicide of the daughter of two of her constituents whilst at Bristol University. A family who are my constituents are part of this campaign. I thought universities had a duty of care to their students, but this is a general duty to deliver a university’s educational and pastoral services to the standard of the ‘ordinarily competent institution’ and in carrying out its services and functions ‘to act reasonably to protect the health, safety and welfare of its students’. The campaign is calling on the government to establish a statutory legal duty of care for students in higher education – a campaign which I believe has merit.
At lunchtime, I went to a carol service in the beautiful and very old St Mary Undercroft, a chapel underneath the Houses of Parliament, completed by King Edward I in 1297, following which I wrote my Observer column for last week’s Hastings, St Leonards and Rye Observer. I later met my Whip to discuss any concerns regarding government business and generally, before popping in to Christmas drinks with the All Party Parliamentary Group for Left Behind Neighbourhoods.
The evening finished with a dinner organised by a new organisation, the Homeownership Funding Association, set up by Wayhome, HomeNow and Primary Finance. This is a new homeownership sector, established this year, to find alternative ways of addressing our housing shortage at no cost to the public purse. They can provide homes for rent-to-own, or gradual ownership, for example. I had met up with Wayhome last year and thought their model of gradual homeownership innovative. Later in the week, I introduced the organisation to minister Mims Davies via email as she is investigating ways to improve social mobility, including homeownership.
All in all, a productive day!