Seema Malhotra

Seema Malhotra

Labour (Co-op) — Feltham and Heston

Speaking in the House of Commons on 18 December 2024

Debate

Immigration and Nationality Statistics

Contribution

The hon. Gentleman can come back in a moment. The proposal to send asylum applicants to Rwanda was impractical, costly and would not have worked to reduce irregular migration. We believe in dealing with these issues with common sense in the work we have been undertaking: making sure we have a new Border Security Command and Border Security Commander, working upstream, building new partnerships with other countries and doing that in order to also disrupt the supply chains of criminal gangs, who the hon. Member for West Suffolk knows are undermining our border security and putting lives at risk. We will continue to spend taxpayer money on real solutions such as breaking the business models of those criminal gangs. In fact, when we made it clear that the Rwanda partnership would come to an end, we saw, for example, the repurposing of two flights provisionally booked for Rwanda, which were used to return a number of individuals to their home countries instead.

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