Mr Will Forster

My hon. Friend is a passionate advocate not just for his West Dorest constituency but for the refugees who have made it home. The previous Conservative Government deliberately ran up a huge asylum backlog of 90,000 cases, which now results in £2 million a day being spent on asylum hotels. They did that because they wanted to put asylum seekers off. That failed, it has cost the taxpayer dear, and it is showing that the UK is not as welcoming as we should be. I worry that the new Government are making not the same mistakes but different mistakes in the same vein, by saying that refugees’ cases have to be reviewed every two and a half years or so. That will put unbelievable strain on the Home Office, and it worries my constituents who are refugees, as well as those who are compassionate and care about refugees. As a country, we should be building on our proud success of supporting refugees. We should not be placing new barriers in front of people who are already vulnerable. If I may conclude with a football analogy, the Government plan to move the goalposts and change the rules for those with humanitarian visas after the match has kicked off. That is fundamentally unfair and un-British, and Parliament must not allow the Government to do it.