Home Secretary Suella Braverman has insisted that the Government’s Illegal Migration Bill is “robust and humane”.
She told GB news: “We disagree with the assessment put out by the equalities watchdog. We consider our proposals to be a combination of being robust and humane.”
The Minister added: “It’s important that we design a scheme whereby if you arrive here illegally, you will be detained and swiftly removed and we have to also be honest about some of the facts of the people coming here. The vast majority are adult young men.
“The vast majority of people, a large proportion of people coming here are not coming here for humanitarian reasons. They’re coming here for economic reasons.
“And in many instances, we see some of these adults purporting to be children when actually they’re not children. So we need to have a scheme which is robust and insulated against those who might want to game our system.”
In a discussion during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, she said: “We’ve included a clause in our bill which sets out our commitment to roll-out broader, safe and legal routes. It’s an important element of our programme.
“But we have engaged in lots of discussions with colleagues and I consider that the commitment that we’ve made is a good one. It has to be read in conjunction with the pressing and immediate problem that we’re facing right now, being 45,000 people crossing the Channel illegally, sometimes fatally.
“So, £6 million a day being spent on hotel accommodation, £3 billion, being spent a year to service our asylum costs. So we need to stop the boats, first and foremost, that’s why the Prime Minister made that one of his five key pledges at the beginning of the year.”
Asked about the evacuation from Sudan, she said: “It is a very complex situation, a very sensitive situation there, it’s very fast moving as well.
“The Prime Minister’s been leading the operation, working with the Foreign Office, working with the Ministry of Defence, and the Home Office and other departments to ensure that we’ve got an operation in place and what we’ve seen is an evacuation operation taking place.
“We’ve got over 1,000 military personnel out in Sudan. I’ve sent Border Force officers out to Sudan to help with the processing and checking of passports and we’re ensuring that there’s a very strong diplomatic effort from the Foreign Office, who will be contacting directly those British nationals who may be affected.
“But the operation that we’ve got going is a good one and we now advise those British nationals to be in touch with the Foreign Office and to ensure that they can be removed from Sudan in a safe way.”
Source: GB News
