Yvette Cooper

I gently point out to the shadow Home Secretary that his party left us with the highest ever level of small boat crossings in the first half of a year—the highest level on record. If we had carried on with small boat crossings at the same level as in the first half of the year, when he was in the Home Office, we would have had to deal with thousands more arrivals over the last few months. When he was the Immigration Minister, small boat crossings increased about tenfold because he let criminal gangs take hold along the channel. They built an entire criminal industry on his watch that he did nothing to stop, which is why we now have to deal with those criminal gangs. On returns, I gently point out to the shadow Home Secretary that by the time the Conservatives left office, returns were down by more than a quarter compared with under the last Labour Government because of the Conservatives’ continued failure to even get the system working. That is why we have put substantial additional resources into returns and into making sure that the rules are enforced, which they simply have not been for far too long. On the asylum backlog, perhaps the shadow Home Secretary will take responsibility for the total crashing of the asylum system in the last few months before the general election, when the Conservative party and the Home Office of which he was a part ended up cutting asylum decisions by more than 70% compared with the beginning of the year. That shocking dereliction of duty means that we have had to deal with the increased backlog that his party left behind over the summer, and we are getting it back under control. There are some important issues on asylum decisions involving Syrians. Let us be clear: many claims for asylum relate to the Assad regime, which is clearly not in place now. It would therefore not be appropriate to grant asylum decisions on those cases in the current circumstances. We need to monitor the evolving situation so that we can get new country guidance in place and take those decisions, but we will do that in a sensible and serious way, which is about getting the asylum and immigration systems back under control. By contrast, the shadow Home Secretary and the Conservative party seem simply to want to go back to the Rwanda scheme. Once again, I point out to them that it cost the taxpayer £700 million and sent just four volunteers to Kigali—the most shocking waste of public money, over two years, on a failing scheme. All they delivered were gimmicks, instead of ever getting a grip, and all the shadow Home Secretary wants to do is turn the clock back to failure again.