Wales as a Nation of Sanctuary

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:44 pm on 6 December 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:44, 6 December 2022

Can I thank Huw Irranca-Davies for that? He makes a very important point. The Gordon Brown report yesterday does indeed propose a legal duty of co-operation between the four nations of the United Kingdom. That legal duty would be something that would be capable of being tested in a court of law, and it would, I believe, act as a very significant brake on the sorts of actions, I'm afraid, we have seen the Home Office take. The Home Office at one point, and actually for quite a long period, kept to an arrangement whereby refugees would only arrive in a local authority area with the prior consent of that local authority. Well, it's abandoned that principle, and not only has it abandoned the principle, but the practice has far too often—well, has too often—been as the Member for Ogmore just suggested. We have had examples very recently in Wales of large groups of refugees arriving at a hotel, certainly no advance notice to the Welsh Government, but no advance notice to local services on the ground either, and that is absolutely unfair to those people who are being asked to live in that place. They are often people who will have health needs, they will have had traumatic experiences, they need services to be provided to them, and unilateral action, simply to move people to an area without any pre-warning, without any preparation, simply isn't fair, either to those services or to the people concerned. And a duty—a legal duty—of the sort that Huw Irranca-Davies set out, and which is, I think, very cogently described in the Gordon Brown report, would prevent that sort of unilateral action from happening.