TORY Home Secretary Suella Braverman was accused in the House of Commons yesterday of ‘repeatedly breaking the law’ over her treatment of asylum seekers at the Manston Centre in Kent and the illegal use of a personal email account.
Braverman made a statement to the House of Commons at 5pm, saying: ‘I am committed to making the Rwanda partnership work – Labour means to abolish it.
‘Taxpayers are paying a bill of £6.8 million a day to house migrants in hotels. There are 35,000 migrants staying in hotels around the country at exhorbitant cost to the taxpayer.
‘Like the majority of British people I am concerned about people in hotels. The government is resolute in its determination to make illegal entry into the UK unviable.’
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper responded: ‘4,000 people are now at the Manston Centre, a site designed to accommodate 1,600 people. Some families have been there for weeks in conditions which have been described as inhumane, with risk of fire, disorder and infection. There are confirmed diphtheria outbreaks, reports of scabies and MRSA outbreaks.
‘Decision-making has collapsed. The Home Office took just 14,000 initial asylum decisions in the last 12 months compared to 28,000 six years ago. 96% of the small boat arrivals last year have still not had a decision and initial decisions alone are taking more than 400 days on this government’s watch.
‘The Nationalities and Borders bill and changes to immigration rules have added further bureaucracy and delays, leading to tens of thousands more people waiting in asylum accommodation and more than £100 million extra spent on asylum accommodation because their policy is pushing up the use of hotels and the increase in delays…
‘And let me ask her about her own decisions. There are very serious allegations now being reported, that the Home Secretary was warned by officials and other ministers that she was acting outside the law by failing to provide alternative accommodation. Can she confirm that she was advised repeatedly that she was breaching the law. Can she confirm that she turned down contingency plans as reports said. Can she confirm that she was warned repeatedly that she breached the ministerial code three times in a day?’
Cooper also asked Braverman to confirm whether she has spent an extra £200m on the Rwanda plan, on top of the already-spent £120m, ‘on a policy she has herself described as failing? Isn’t it time to drop this unethical and unworkable scheme?’
A few weeks ago, Braverman told a Telegraph podcast that it was her ‘dream’ to see a flight of refugees sent to Rwanda.
Over 100 refugee defence groups and charities, wrote to Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Sunday, calling on him to sack Braverman.
The open letter read: ‘It is shocking that your Home Secretary stoked xenophobia and anti-immigrant hatred to the point of blocking human beings from being transferred out of a disease-ridden, overcrowded camp.
‘Her dreams of planes to Rwanda are real-life nightmares for desperate refugees.
‘After the arson attack at Dover, 700 more asylum seekers have been transferred to Manston, causing worsening overcrowding.
‘This is a reminder that hate rhetoric by ministers can have deadly consequences. The Home Secretary’s decisions to block transfers and hate speech led in no small way to this.
‘You said you want your government to have “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level,” yet you have just appointed Suella Braverman to be Home Secretary again, a week after she resigned for breaches of the ministerial code and security lapses.
‘Now is the time to act. As Prime Minister and Minister for the Union, we call on you to stop pandering to the far right, sack Suella Braverman and put in place someone who can do the job of Home Secretary with a shred of humanity and decency.’
Veteran Tory MP for North Thanet, Sir Roger Gale, who visited Manston last week, called it ‘a breach of humane conditions’, said ‘someone needs to be held to account’ and warned of outbreaks of MRSA and diphtheria at the facility, where overcrowding is ‘wholly unacceptable’.
Hundreds more people were moved to the Manston facility on Sunday, following a petrol bomb attack at the nearby Border Force migrant centre in Dover.
Gale visited the site last Thursday and said things are ‘much worse’ than before ‘when there were two and a half thousand people’.
He said: ‘These circumstances, I believe now, were a problem made in the Home Office.’
Daniel Sohege, Director of Stand for All, said: ‘It’s utterly abhorent. Last year only four per cent of asylum claims were processed. It really comes down to applications being processed.
‘We’ve just paid £120 million to Rwanda to fund a project that is probably illegal, and not a single asylum seeker has been sent there. Just reallocate that money to help to process asylum claims.’
Sabir Zazai, CE of the Scottish Refugee Agency, said: ‘The Refugees and Borders Act sadly criminalises people arriving here, via whichever route you possibly can take to seek asylum.
‘People in that centre but also widely within the UK’s asylum system have been waiting for months and years and we want some sort of an amnesty for people fleeing conflict.’
