Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall am 11:17 am ar 26 Mawrth 2024.
I appreciate the Minister’s response, and I am not surprised by it. He will know that many of his Conservative colleagues agree with me. To put it bluntly, there is a very good right-wing and left-wing argument for this to happen. First of all, there is absolutely no evidence from any comparable country that employment creates a pull factor. As well as the moral argument that allowing people to work in order to integrate is good for them when they remain as refugees, as most of them will, it also saves the taxpayer a fortune to allow people to earn a living—and my goodness, we have a massive workforce crisis in our neck of the woods, with massively too small a workforce to be able to sustain our economy—because they then have the opportunity to contribute to the cost of the system and to pay for their own. Surely the fiscal Conservative within the Minister should want to say yes to that.