Lord Empey (UUP)

My Lords, I have considerable sympathy with the Ministers of this Government and previous Governments with regard to hotels. However, the Minister answered a Question last week and I got a sense of complete complacency, not only in Parliament but in government, about the position that all this immigration is leading us to. The truth is that the system is completely out of control and has been for some considerable time. We talk about dispersed accommodation and integration, which I fully support, but if you have 20,000 people per week coming into the country, how do you disperse and integrate them? The numbers are just uncontrollable, given the shortages of accommodation that we already have. Then we say, “Well, we’ve got waiting lists in the health service”. Of course we have waiting lists in the health service. If you are increasing your population at that rate, how could it be anything else? The question is a basic one and it goes back to the fact that it is gangsters who are running these people, taking money off them and putting them into harm’s way in the channel in the hope that they will get to the other side, although they have already pocketed the money. Although the Government have made a commitment that they are going to tackle that as their number one priority—the Prime Minister has been very explicit about it—I would like to hear from the Minister what progress has been made. We have a long tradition, of course, of opening our doors—it goes back to the Kinder trains in the 1930s and 1940s; of course, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, is one of the shining examples of the success of that—but as a country, we just do not have the capability or capacity to deal with the numbers and we are just not facing up to it. Look at what is happening around the world; look at what is happening today in the United States and why it is happening. Look at what has happened in other countries in Europe and look, in a few weeks’ time, at what might happen in Germany. We cannot just keep sweeping this under the carpet. Part of the problem goes back, I think, to the good will that was genuinely expressed over 70 years ago when we were dealing with the 1951 refugee convention. On 30 July last year, I asked the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, a Written Question: “To ask his Majesty’s Government whether they are discussing with other countries amendments to the 1951 Refugee Convention to take into account the changed world circumstances”. The Answer was: “The Government is not discussing amendments to the Refugee Convention with other countries”. Why not? It was done with good will and the right intentions quite a number of years ago, but it is out of date and we need to address it. I hope the Minister can give us some comfort on that. We are under international obligations, and that is why we need an international solution, but we also have national obligations. We have just taken a heating allowance of £200 a year off pensioners who are earning just over £12,500 a year, yet it costs £145 a night to house anybody who comes in on a boat, and they also have access to our health service and so on, while other people in our own community do not. We have to be compassionate on one side, but we also have to be realistic on the other.