00:00Let's cross to Westminster and speak to the Shadow Chancellor, Mel Stride.
00:03Good morning to you. 0.7% not to be sniffed at.
00:11So, look, any growth, Stephen, is welcome, particularly from a government that's been so hopeless at delivering it.
00:18But let me just make a few points on this.
00:20The first one is if you look at the monthly breakdown of that quarterly figure,
00:24in fact, growth was half the level in March as it was in February.
00:28So, it could be that there's an issue there.
00:31The second thing is that the national insurance increases on employers that's slowing down business.
00:36The increase in business rates has not yet, well, has kicked in now, but is not captured by those numbers directly.
00:44And, of course, we've got the employment legislation coming down the line that the Treasury suggests is going to cost £5 billion to businesses.
00:51And you've still got all these forecasters, the IMF, the Bank of England, the OBR, downgrading growth forecasts for our country.
00:59And in the case of the OBR, halving their forecast recently for growth this year.
01:05So, whilst, of course, any increase in growth is welcome, we should not be popping the champagne corks yet, I'm afraid.
01:13Do you welcome this meeting today between Sakhir Starmer and Albania's Prime Minister?
01:18They're talking about these returns hubs, which could see failed asylum seekers be returned to the Western Balkans.
01:25I mean, it sounds as though, I mean, being backed by the UN, it's not going to be wrapped up in the courts, as we saw with the Rwanda deal.
01:33This sounds like this could be a really good thing for Britain.
01:35I think this is going to be far less substantial than Labour are making out, I'm afraid.
01:42Look, at the core of any policy that's going to work to stop illegal migrants coming across here has got to be significant deterrence.
01:49And we had that in the form of Rwanda, which meant if you came here illegally, you would have been removed to Rwanda promptly.
01:57And we had flights ready to go, actually, at the end of July last year, just after the general election.
02:04What you're looking at here in the case of Albania is something different.
02:07Those are asylum claims that have been processed and offshoring those people further on down the line.
02:13That's very different from removing them promptly and taking them somewhere else to actually assess those claims,
02:19as we would have had with Rwanda.
02:21Now, Labour chose to cancel that programme.
02:23We know it would have worked.
02:24We already saw the effect that it was having.
02:26Just the fact we had the flights lined up on illegal migrants going from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland.
02:32We saw migrants stopping coming across the Channel and waiting for a Labour government to scrap Rwanda before they came.
02:38Deterrence works.
02:39But I'm afraid what this government is doing does not amount to that.
02:44We're very keen to talk about Brexit benefits.
02:46We did it all with the Trump tariff deal and all the rest of it.
02:49Everyone's going on about whether it's a Brexit benefit that we're doing better than the EU.
02:53Is the situation we're in now a Brexit deficit?
02:57I mean, if we still have the Dublin Accords, we could send people back, couldn't we?
03:03I mean, is the situation we're in now as a direct result of Brexit?
03:08Well, of course, Dublin 3, which we were a part of when we were members of the European Union,
03:17allowed those effects to happen between us sending people to other countries,
03:23but other countries indeed being able to send migrants to us in turn.
03:28The reality is we've left the European Union.
03:30But the keys to controlling migration are on the legal migration side, as I say, is to have a clear deterrent.
03:36Rwanda would have delivered that.
03:38Labour scrapped it, wasted all the money and the effort that was put in to put that into place.
03:43And we're now seeing record numbers, 12,000 illegal migrants coming across the Channel this year.
03:49That's a record this year under this government that said it was going to be reversing that.
03:53And on net migration, we need to see the government go much further.
03:57We put in place this week some amendments to legislation that Labour voted down
04:03that would have given Parliament control of setting a clear cap on migration
04:07as an important part of controlling that aspect as well.
04:12Can I ask you about the Justice Secretary announcing plans yesterday?
04:16Jail time for recalled offenders to be limited.
04:19So if you are recalled to prison for breaching your licence conditions,
04:24you would go back to prison for just 28 days.
04:28And that is because we are, of course, seeing a shortage of prison spaces in this country.
04:32We're all aware of that.
04:34Talk of there being no spaces left by November.
04:37So something has to be done.
04:38Is this something that you welcome?
04:43No, I'm very concerned about it.
04:45Look, there's a very clear solution which this government's failed to grasp
04:49in terms of freeing up places in prison.
04:53That is, we have 10,000 foreign offenders in our jails
04:58and what we should be doing is removing them and deporting them back to their countries.
05:04And that would free up a lot of space.
05:06And we actually tabled an amendment to some legislation on Monday
05:10which would have said that we would have exempted in deportation cases
05:14the Human Rights Act and the provisions that it brings into UK law
05:20through the ECHR around Article 8 and Article 3,
05:23which would have made that process so much easier.
05:26That's what this government should have been doing,
05:28is freeing up those places and getting foreign national criminals in our prisons,
05:33out of our prisons, but out of our country as well.
05:35Is it legal to do that though?
05:37I mean, the problem we seem to have when trying to deport anyone
05:41is getting wrapped up in all this red tape.
05:44I mean, is that quite a simple legal thing to do?
05:50Well, the change that we put forward that I referred to,
05:53this amendment around taking the Human Rights Act
05:57out of the process of deporting somebody, is absolutely critical.
06:01We had an example recently where somebody couldn't be deported back to Albania
06:08because the court determined that under the auspices of the ECHR
06:12and the Human Rights Act, that person's child would be disadvantaged
06:17because the kind of chicken nuggets that were available there
06:20would not be appropriate for them.
06:22I mean, this is where it ends up when you have that kind of,
06:26those kind of loopholes in the process.
06:27They need to be closed.
06:29I mean, gave the government the opportunity to do that on Monday
06:31and they turned it down.
06:34Look, talking about the prisons crisis,
06:35I'm sure you've seen and heard these very alarming reports this week
06:40of a number of prison officers who have been injured in separate attacks.
06:44One officer slashed with an improvised weapon in one of those attacks.
06:48Another officer suffering a broken arm in a separate assault.
06:53I mean, action needs to be taken, doesn't it,
06:55to protect our prison officers before there's a fatality.
07:00Yeah, absolutely.
07:01The government's got to get a grip.
07:02I mean, how do you have a situation where people who are capable of being
07:06that violent have access to boiling water and implements to attack
07:12police officers, sorry, prison officers,
07:14and that's why these situations actually occur.
07:18So this needs to be absolutely dealt with promptly and effectively.
07:22But look, the underlying cause of overcrowding in prisons,
07:25which we recognise, as I say,
07:28is part of a contributing factor to those kind of problems.
07:31And the government really needs to get a grip of this,
07:33particularly around foreign national offenders
07:36and removing them from our prisons
07:37and sending them back to the countries that they've come from.
07:40OK. Mel Stride, appreciate your time this morning.
07:43Thanks very much indeed.
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