Reports PM privately thinks Rwanda plan won’t work are why costs must be published, Yvette Cooper says

• Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has said that recent reports saying Rishi Sunak privately does not support the Rwanda policy (see 11.27am) show why the government should publish confidential document about its full costs. She made the argument as she opened a debate on a Labour motion that would force the government to publish those figures. During her speech Cooper also rubbished the policy. She told MPs:

In the end, the only deterrence it appears the prime minister actually believes in is deterring his backbenchers from getting rid of him. It’s weak, weak, weak. And yet the taxpayer is paying the price.

It is a totally farcical situation: a prime minister who doesn’t think it is a deterrent; a home secretary who thinks it’s batshit, a former home secretary [Suella Braverman] who says it won’t work; a former immigration minister [Robert Jenrick] who says it doesn’t do the job; and everyone who thinks what we’ve got is a sham, and it’s an incredibly expensive one, with the taxpayer being conned.

So, if ministers disagree with everything that I just said to describe their plans, what is there to hide? Tell us the facts and show us where all of that is wrong.

• David Cameron, the foreign secretary, has admitted he is “worried” that Israel may have taken action in Gaza that may be in breach of international law. He made the admission during a hearing with the Commons foreign affairs committee where initially he repeatedly refused to say whether Foreign Office lawyers had advised him that Israel had broken international law. (See 3.26pm.)

Pursglove confirms £240m has already been spent on the Rwanda scheme so far. He says future sums will be set out in annual Home Office reports.

Cooper intervenes, and asks why the government has not published the expected costs, as it had done with the deal with France.

Pursglove again says the figures will be published annually in the usual way.

Britain is going backwards on many measures of equality, Labour says. Anneliese Dodds, the shadow secretary for women and equalities, has made the argument in a Fabian Society pamphlet on inequality. In it she says:

Fifty-three years after Labour’s Equal Pay Act, the gender pay gap has now actually increased for a second year in a row, confounding expectations that a slow and steady reduction in the gap would be most likely. More women, old and young, are dropping out of the labour market than before, for a variety of reasons including the impact of the pandemic on women’s working patterns, unaffordable childcare and healthcare problems, such as lack of support with menopause at work.

There has been an explosion in insecure work, with zero-hour contracts and fire and rehire particularly impacting the lowest paid workers, especially Black, Asian and ethnic minority workers.

There are more children, especially Black and working-class children, growing up in poverty, and more disabled people struggling to make ends meet.

For the first time in decades, life expectancy is going backwards within some communities in our country …

The number of women dying in childbirth is rising, and Black women are four times more likely to lose their lives giving birth than white women. Disturbingly, Black children are currently three times more likely to die in infancy than white children, their rates of infant mortality having increased over recent times, rather than continuing to fall as was previously the norm.

And the extent of hate crime has increased over time, with violent hate crime also increasing as a proportion of overall hate crime reports.

And she says “the Conservatives’ commitment to equality extends only as far as they can use equalities issues to stoke political division”. As an example, she cites Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chair, saying his party will fight the next election on “a mix of culture wars and trans debate”.

Cooper interrupts Pursglove and asks him to confirm that the number of asylum seekers in hotels is 20% higher now than a year ago, when Rishi Sunak said they wanted to stop hotels being used by asylum seekers. And she asks Pursglove to confirm that daily costs have risen from £6m to £8m.

Pursglove ignores the question and just says the government is stopping the use of hotels for asylum seekers.

Tom Pursglove, the minister for legal migration, is responding in the debate on behalf of the government.

He claims to be glad Labour called this debate. He says it allows him to explain that the government has a plan to tackle illegal migration. Labour doesn’t have a plan, he says.

Cooper says Labour would set up a new unit to return people who come to the UK and do not qualify for asylum.

But the UK could continue to do its bit for people facing persecution, she says.

She says Labour wants a properly controlled asylum system. Under the Tories there is just chaos, she says.

And five broken promises on asylum from the PM, she says.

She urges Tory MPs to back Labour in wanting to get the truth about the government’s Rwanda policy.

Tim Loughton (Con) asks Cooper what Labour would do about asylum seekers arriving in the UK from countries such as Iran, where returns agreements are not possible.

Cooper says people from countries like that tend to be given asylum anyway.

Cooper says under the Illegal Migration Act people who arrived in the UK after July 2023 should be removed from the country. That provision has not been enacted, but the government says it intends to implement this.

She says there are more than 30,000 people in this category. She says, at the rate deportations are planned, it would take years for these people to be sent to Rwanda. She suggests that, in practice, there will be an amnesty. But the government is not being honest about this with its MPs, he says.

In the Commons James Daly asks Cooper if Labour would allow asylum applications to be processed offshore in Turkey.

Cooper says she is not sure what proposal Daly is referring to. She says currently if someone was in Turkey and applied to come to the UK under the refugee scheme for Ukrainians, their application would be processed offshore.

Cooper says she does not accept the government’s argument that it cannot publish full details of the future costs of the Rwanda plan because they are covered by commercial confidentiality.

She says the government has published the future costs of its deal with France.

In the Commons MPs have just voted on the Labour motion criticising the government’s record on dentistry. It was defeated. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, is opening the next debate on the “humble address” motion that, if passed, would oblige the government to publish confidential documents about the cost of the Rwanda programme.

The text of the motion is here.

Cooper says it is particularly important for these papers to be published given the reports saying Rishi Sunak never backed the plan in the first place. She is referring to the recent leaks.

“You can see it in his face that he does not support it,” she says. (See 11.27am.)

She says the only deterrent Sunak is interested in is deterring his backbenchers from getting rid of him.

Brendan O’Hara asks Cameron about this line in the report on China published by the intelligence and security committee last year. The ISC said:

We know that China invests in political influence, and we question whether – with high-profile cases such as David Cameron (UK–China Fund), Sir Danny Alexander (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), Lord Heseltine (The 48 Group Club) and HMG’s former chief information officer, John Suffolk (Huawei) – a similar situation might be arising in relation to China …

Targets are not necessarily limited to serving politicians either. They can include former political figures, if they are sufficiently high profile. For example, it is possible that David Cameron’s role as vice-president of a £1bn China–UK investment fund (itself an initiative of Lord Chadlington), and Sir Danny Alexander’s February 2016 appointment as vice-president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), were in some part engineered by the Chinese state to lend credibility to Chinese investment, as well as to the broader China brand.

Q: Do you agree with that?

Cameron say he might have done if the UK-China fund had ever got off the ground. But it didn’t.

Alicia Kearns, the committee chair, asks Cameron about his support for a Chinese-backed development in Sri Lanka.

Cameron says he was doing this to help Sri Lanka.

The hearing has now finished.

Back at the foreign affairs committee, David Cameron is being asked about China, and his hopes when he was prime minister to improve relations between China and UK.

Cameron says “a lot has changed” since then. He cites developments in Hong Kong, and the persecution of Uyghurs.

But he says the UK still needs to engage with China.

Graham Stringer (Lab) says the Foreign Office was resistant to the government’s new, firmer approach to China.

Cameron says he is not sure the Foreign Office ever fully believed in the policy he and George Osborne were adopting.

On Huawei, he says this was one issue where he asked for a proper briefing to explain why the government reversed its policy after he left. (When he was PM, the government was encouraging Huawei to invest in the UK’s 5G network. Then the government decided the firm’s technology must be taken out of that network.) Cameron suggests he cannot discuss all the details in public. But he says he was persuaded the situation had changed.

The Scottish government is looking at “the idea of a pardon scheme” for sub-post office operators affected by the Horizon scandal, Angela Constance, the justice secretary has said. PA Media says:

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) – the body tasked with assessing possible miscarriages of justice – has already sent seven such cases to the appeal court, two of which have resulted in overturned convictions, Constance said in Holyrood today.

But she added: “We are, however, looking at what more can be done. We are looking at the idea of a pardon scheme.”

In answer to Fergus Ewing, an SNP MSP, Constance said the government had “an open mind to the best way forward”, adding that the SCCRC had proactively sought out those who may have been wrongfully convicted in 2020.

Constance added that she is aware of the UK-wide compensation scheme which requires an appeal court to overturn a conviction before money can be paid out, and that she has written to UK justice secretary, Alex Chalk, to see “how best we can work together”.

Scottish Tory MSP Russell Findlay told MSPs that the first minister, Humza Yousaf, had not had any meetings relating to the Horizon scandal during his time as justice secretary.

Constance said she would work “collaboratively to ensure that everyone effected in Scotland can access justice and right a wrong where that has (been) done”.

But she went on to accuse Findlay of seeking to “overly politicise this matter when this problem has been in the making since 1999”.

Cameron praises Gordon Brown’s “brilliant” article in the Guardian today about the need to restart the Middle East peace process.

Here is the article.

And here is an extract. Brown says:

Recent events have also made it clear that the west – in particular the US – cannot now succeed in any peace initiative by acting on its own. It needs to work with the rest of the world, building the widest possible global coalition designed to isolate those most opposed today to a two-state solution: the murderous Hamas and the reactionary clique surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu.

The consequences of doing nothing are too painful to contemplate, not just for Gaza but for the peace of the entire region. One year from now, ceasefire or not, hundreds of thousands of displaced, starving and sick Palestinians could be stranded in overcrowded refugee camps besides rubble-strewn alleyways, hollowed-out buildings and bombed-out infrastructure with no end in sight, and the cycle of violence will threaten to escalate yet again to engulf the region, entrapping a new generation of disaffected young people, who will be easy fodder for recruitment into a Hamas 2.0.

Breakthroughs in geopolitics are rare, but in the least propitious of circumstances – as I argued to the Saudis and Israelis in 2008 – Kennedy and Khrushchev delivered the first ever nuclear test ban treaty, and Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated the biggest reduction of nuclear weapons in history. The year 2024 starts in deep gloom – but with visionary leadership, building upon the 2007-08 plan, there could be light at the end of a very dark tunnel that still threatens, unless we act, to turn pitch black.

As Patrick Wintour reports, David Cameron told the foreign affairs committee he thought South Africa was wrong to bring a case againt Israel at the international court of justice alleging genocide in Gaza.

David Cameron on South Africa genocide case at ICJ: “I don’t think it is helpful. I don’t agree with it. I don’t think it is right. I don’t think we should bandy around terms like genocide. It is for the courts to define genocide not states. Our view is that Israel has a right to defend itself.”