Archbishop of Canterbury’s attack on illegal migration bill ‘wrong on both counts’, says minister – UK politics live

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Disqualification from modern slavery support under the illegal migration bill could have a disproportionate impact on female potential victims, a government impact assessment has concluded.

As PA Media reports, under the illegal immigration bill, which will see people who come to the UK by irregular means face detention and the prospect of being returned to their home country or nations such as Rwanda, the vast majority of people will be disqualified from the modern slavery system. PA says:

The government has previously said there will be “very limited exceptions relating to investigations into exploitation, or where an individual can provide credible evidence that there is a real and imminent risk they would be at risk of serious and irreversible harm in the removal country”.

An equality impact assessment was published by the Home Office today as the bill was debated in the House of Lords.

The impact assessment acknowledged that patterns of modern slavery “are strongly gendered” and that women are “far more likely to be victims of gender-based violence and sexual exploitation”.

But the document also appeared to suggest that not disqualifying women from this support could potentially lead to traffickers targeting them to a greater extent.

It stated: “The disqualification provision could have a disproportionate impact on potential victims of modern slavery who are female. However, were provision to be made that excluded female victims it is not unreasonable to assume that this may result in a change of methodology from people traffickers, targeting vulnerable women to a greater extent.”

The Home Office said it will “continually monitor the impact of the modern slavery measures on people with this protected characteristic to ensure our approach is appropriate for that cohort”.

The document stated that the “net effect” of its measures will be “a reduction in risks of sexual exploitation in the UK, since the individuals will no longer be brought into the UK”.

The assessment also stated that any “differential impact” on children, the disabled, people of different races, religions or sexuality as a result of bill was “justified and proportionate” to control migration and reduce crime”.

The Conservative party has now ruled out doing deals with other parties, the Sun’s Harry Cole reports.

The party clarified its position after a post-PMQs briefing, which implied Rishi Sunak was refusing to rule out doing a deal with other parties in the event of a hung parliament. Labour claimed this meant the Tories could end up in a pact with the SNP. (See 3.34pm.)

The SNP says it would never support a minority Tory government. Responding to Labour urging Rishi Sunak to rule out a pact with the SNP (see 3.34pm), Mhairi Black, the SNP’s deputy leader at Westminster, said:

By talking up the prospect of Tory coalitions, bungling Ian Murray has unwittingly admitted the UK is on course for a hung parliament, contradicting Keir Starmer, and making a spectacular boomerang attack on his own Tory-backing party.

Unlike the pro-Brexit Labour party, the SNP would never prop up a Tory administration. Under Keir Starmer, the Labour party has lurched so far to the right that they’ve got into bed with the Tories in councils across Scotland. These sleazy Tory-Labour pacts must end now.

During PMQs the Labour MP Julie Elliott asked a very short, and specific, question about Teesworks, an industrial zoone that is part of the Teesside freeport. She asked:

Has the prime minister or any of his ministers given commitments to BP, Equinor or any other company about contracts at the Teesworks site?

Rishi Sunak gave a very short answer. He told Elliott:

Contracts at the site will be a commercial matter for the companies involved.

It was not clear what Elliott was suggested, but Ben Houchen, the Conservative Tees Valley mayor and a huge supporter of the Teesside free port, has been tweeting this afternoon defending the project.

Union leaders claim that workers’ rights will be undermined by the package of deregulatory measures announced this afternoon, which the Department for Business and Trade claims will save employers around ?1bn a year.

Paul Nowak, the general secretary of the TUC, said:

People are already working all hours to make ends meet.

Paid holiday and safety measures like rest breaks and limits on excessive hours are all fundamental protections – not a nice-to-have.

This is a recipe for low-paid, burnt-out Britain. Yet this Conservative government was elected on a promise to make this country the best place in the world to work.

Ross Holden, GMB research and policy officer, said:

This is the latest attack on working people by the Tories, who have long wanted to turn the clock back on our hard-fought rights.

This isn’t about removing ‘red-tape’ – it’s about removing our rights to come home from work safe, to go to work rested and to have proper time off to spend with our families.

And Christina McAnea, the Unison general secretary, said:

Ditching measures that keep workplaces safe and ensure staff are treated fairly is not a recipe to grow the economy, nor level up disadvantaged communities.

Workers were promised a better deal following Brexit. This is anything but. It’s nothing less than an open invitation to underhand employers to exploit and mistreat as they see fit.

Labour has described the announcement about the retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill (see 4.15pm) as a “humiliating U-turn”. This is from Jenny Chapman, a shadow Cabinet Office minister in the Lords.

This is a humiliating u-turn from a weak and divided government with no clue how to grow our economy, protect workers, support business or build a better Britain outside the EU.

After wasting months of parliamentary time, the Tories have conceded that this universally unpopular bill will damage the economy, at a time when businesses and families are already struggling with the Tory cost of living crisis. They are now trying to adopt some of Labour’s amendments to try and rescue this sinking ship of a bill.

The government has confirmed that it has abandoned the plan in the retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill for all EU law still on the statute book to lapse at the end of 2023.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was business secretary when the bill was introduced, included the deadline even though most experts thought it was totally unrealistic to expect officials to review around 4,000 laws by the end of this year. The bill said EU regulations would no longer apply unless ministers took a deliberate decision to retain or revise them.

Last month it emerged that Kemi Badenoch, who is now business and trade secretary, was abandoning the Rees-Mogg deadline. This afternoon that has been been confirmed. In a news release the Department for Trade and Business says:

Our retained EU law bill, which is currently passing through parliament, will end the special status of retained EU law (REUL) by the end of 2023 ensuring that, for the first time in a generation, the UK’s statute book will not include reference to the supremacy of EU law or EU legal principles.

We have the unique opportunity to look again at these regulations and decide if they’re right for our economy, if we can scrap them, or if we can reform and improve them and help spur economic growth.

To ensure that government can focus on delivering more reform of REUL, to a faster timetable, we are amending the REUL bill to be clear which laws we intend to revoke at the end of this year. This will also provide certainty to business by making clear which regulations will be removed from our statute book.

The department confirmed the climbdown as part of an announcement about a series of deregulatory measures that it says could save employers around ?1bn a year.

Adam Price, the leader of Plaid Cymru, is understood to be considering his future after a damning review found his party had failed to “detoxify” its culture, Aletha Adu reports.

In the Lords the debate on the illegal migration bill has just resumed. Norman Lamont, the Conservative former chancellor, is speaking now. He is supporting the legislation.

At the post-PMQs lobby briefing Rishi Sunak’s press secretary refused to rule out a post-election pact with with DUP, or any other party. (See 2.45pm.) In a press release drafted as an audacious parody, Labour is now attacking Sunak for refusing to rule out a deal with the SNP.

Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish secretary, said:

Rishi Sunak’s refusal to rule out a grubby deal with the SNP is a sign of his desperation to cling to power. A repeat of the Tory-Nat coalition previously seen in Scotland would wreck the UK, putting the very foundations of our country at risk.

Under Keir Starmer and Anas Sarwar’s leadership, Labour has said repeatedly we wouldn’t do any deal with those who want to break up our country. The Tories must now urgently follow Labour’s example.

In one respect, this is pure tosh. As Alex Salmond might have put it, rocks will probably melt in the sun before the SNP forms a coalition with the Tories.

(That said, the SNP did vote against Labour in the 1979 no confidence vote that led to the election that put Margaret Thatcher in to power, and there might the odd English nationalist in the Conservative party who would be happy to see Scotland go independent, so that Tories can dominate what remains of the UK. But the idea of Sunak pushing that is so improbable as to be fantasy.)

And yet this line of attack is also clever, because it turns what in 2015 was an effective argument against Ed Miliband (that he would be reliant on the support of SNP MPs, creating a “coalition of chaos”) into something that is now material for a Westminster joke.

And it highlights the fact that Starmer actually has, repeatedly, ruled out a deal with the SNP.

In the House of Lords peers have just resumed proceedings after a break for lunch. They are taking questions, and then the debate on the illegal migration bill will resume.

Here are extracts from some of the speeches in the debate before the lunch break.

From Labour’s Lord Dubs, who was brought to the UK as a child refugee on the Kindertransport in 1939:

It is fundamental to the reputation of this country that indeed we take a clear stand on human rights, we set standards – and for a long time, the world has followed us …

[If the UK does not uphold refugee law] notorious abusers of human rights will simply say: ‘Well, if the United Kingdom doesn’t do it, why should we?’

From the Right Rev Paul Butler, the bishop of Durham:

The state will view a child or a pregnant woman first and foremost as individuals subject to immigration control, not as an innocent child or a vulnerable mother due to give birth.

We need to ask: what about the government’s duty to protect?

I am reminded of Jesus’s words: it would be better to have a millstone around the neck and be cast into the sea than to cause a little one to stumble. This responsibility needs to bear upon us heavily.

Michael Howard, the former Conservative party leader, backed the bill, saying the European coourt of human rights (ECHR) ruling that grounded flights to Rwanda was “contrary to all the rules of natural justice”, adding that the bill was a “commendably moderate” response to it.

From Michael Dobbs, the writer and Tory peer:

It is our moral obligation to stop them, to bring an end to the unimaginable pain of mothers and fathers watching their children drowning off our shores in the Channel. No amount of hand-wringing or bell-ringing is going to do that …

I can’t quite get my mind around the ethical nature of this bizarre proposition that unelected parliamentarians should without any real discussion destroy a bill that has been passed by our elected House of Commons.

Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, has said that Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, was “wrong on both counts” in what he said about the illegal immigration bill in his speech in the Lords. (See 12pm and 1.18pm.)

Welby made many critcisms of the bill, but Jenrick was referring to the claim it was “morally unacceptable and politically impractical”. Asked to respond, he told the World at One:

Well, he’s wrong on both counts.

Firstly there’s nothing moral about allowing the pernicious trade of people smugglers to continue … I disagree with him respectfully.

By bringing forward this proposal we make it clear that if you come across illegally on a small boat you will not find a route to life in the UK. That will have a serious deterrent effect.

The full text of Welby’s speech to the Lords is now available on his website.

The Tories have been trying to attack Keir Starmer on the basis that, if he does not win an outright majority at the next election, he might have to form a pact with the Liberal Democrats. But at the post-PMQs lobby briefing Rishi Sunak’s press secretary refused to rule out a coalition with the DUP, or other parties, after the election. She said:

I don’t think anyone at this stage is going to speculate on the results of the next election. The prime minister is fully committed to and focused on delivering his five priorities and that’s what we’re going to do to get a Conservative majority.

Asked if Sunak accepted responsibility for the Tory losses in the local elections, she replied:

What the prime minister does accept responsibility for is delivering his five priorities.

At the post-PMQs lobby briefing Downing Street refused to endorse a tweet from Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chair, at the weekend suggesting people opposed to the monarchy should leave the country.

It was hardly a slap-down, or even a proper rebuke, but at least No 10 said Rishi Sunak did not think the same way. Asked if Sunak agreed with Anderson, the PM’s press secretary said:

It’s not something that the prime minister has expressed.

I think all members of the Conservative party believe in the right to protest.

UPDATE: Adam Bienkov from Byline Times has the transcript of the full exchange.

At PMQs Rishi Sunak claimed at one point that there was a ?90bn black hole in Labour’s financial plans. Full Fact, the factchecking organisation, has looked at this Tory claim in the past, and it says it is not reliable.

Indian students in the UK are increasingly facing labour exploitation in the care sector, MPs have been warned.

Elysia McCaffrey, chief executive of the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority which has a remit to protect vulnerable and exploited workers, has told MPs on the Commons home affairs committee today that her organisation is seeing an increase in reports of abuse and exploitation of migrant care home workers, particularly female students from India. She said:

Workers come from India, women are coming on student visas. They’re recruited by care agencies who are forcing them to work longer hours and to stay in really squalid conditions. It’s becoming a growing issue.

People who are in the UK on student visas are allowed to work for a maximum of 20 hours but if they work for longer than that they are in breach of their visa conditions and could be deported so are reluctant to report this exploitation. GLAA is conducting a joint operation with the Care Quality Commission to bring prosecutions in this area.