This time two years ago, my team and I were flat out helping families across Faversham and Mid Kent process their Homes for Ukraine applications.
Nearly 200,000 Ukrainians were matched in those few months, and it was a wonderful display of British generosity and kindness. Just like in those early weeks of the pandemic, we saw the true nature of people in a crisis – willing to come together and help each other out.
Asylum and immigration are two of those touchpaper issues that we tend to avoid talking about. But I think that we should. Often, when we do, we find that we have far more that unites us than divides us.
Almost everyone I speak to agrees that as a rich and safe country we have a duty to help people in need around the world. People also agree that the UK benefits from having some people come and live and work here from other countries.
But the fact is there are always going to be more people who want to come and live in Britain than we can realistically make a home for. For every family who comes to live here, we need to build a new house, add another car to our roads and find them dentist appointments – all things that I know people feel keenly here in Kent.
That means we have to make decisions about who comes, and I think we can all agree that this should be a fair system, and one which people in this country have some control over.
When it comes to asylum it should be those in the greatest danger, or those to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. It shouldn’t be those young, fit, and rich enough to skip the queue by getting on a boat.
I think a lot of people mistake the recently passed Small Boats legislation as the government wanting to send people to Rwanda – when in fact the opposite is true. Once the scheme is up and running, people simply aren’t going to risk their life crossing the channel any more.
That will give us the breathing space to create a much fairer asylum system – taking people directly from conflict zones instead of processing a backlog of people coming from safe countries like Albania.
It’s important to recognise that these people aren’t inherently bad or doing anything other than what’s best for them or their family. The evil is in a system which incentives them to risk their life in the hope of skipping the queue – and that’s what we’re putting an end to.
When it comes to legal migration, our decision should be based on what skills we need.
Wherever you look in this country – whether that’s in our health service, in pubs and restaurants, or on our fruit farms, there are people who have come to the UK to work without whom we simply wouldn’t be able to function.
This is something that I’m acutely aware of as the Health and Care Minister, where I saw first-hand how overseas workers helped our health service get through the winter just been.
In the long-run of course we want our UK workforce to fill these gaps, and last year we published the first ever long-term NHS workforce plan. But training doesn’t happen overnight, and in the meantime we can’t leave people without the care they need.
Ultimately this issue boils down to control. The ability to choose who needs our help, and whose help we need.
If we don’t talk about this issue, or we let it divide us, it makes it far harder to build a system where we have that control.
That is the system we have been trying to build. Passing the Small Boats legislation, changing the rules on dependents for Student Visas, and creating our points-based immigration system.
It hasn’t been easy, but it’s worth it for a system which is fairer than ever before.
