Gregory Stafford

I think that everybody across the House wants to see small boat crossings diminish and hopefully conclude entirely. Likewise, I think that most people across the House feel that we need to have a fair, robust and effective way to deal with illegal immigration. This, as I have said previously in the House, is a moral issue. We do not want to see any more women, children or men dying in the channel. When I raised that with the Home Secretary on 22 July, she seemed to agree with me, but thus far agreement does not seem to have matured into action. Indeed, when the Minister of State responded to me on a similar point on 6 November, she was much more equivocal about how the Government were going to deal with this really serious issue. That is no surprise when we come to the Bill, which has ripped the heart out of the previous Government’s Illegal Migration Act. All the deterrence put into that Act has been pulled out. That is important for two reasons. First, this Bill will clearly not stop the small boat crossings. Secondly, it sends a message to those traffickers who want to exploit people and bring them across the channel that the Government are not serious about stopping the problem. We can see that from the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) mentioned, the X-raying and medical checks of migrants have been ripped out. That is something that EU countries do on a routine basis.