• 11 months ago
Jess Phillips asks why the government is spending more on the Rwanda Bill than on child victims of sex abuse.
Transcript
00:00 I want everybody in here to know that they are about to vote for a bill that they have absolutely no idea how much it's going to cost.
00:08 Like, we haven't been given that information.
00:11 I was in for the committee stage of the debate. I was in for the committee stage of the debate earlier,
00:17 and the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee said that there was a view that each person that was sent to Rwanda would cost £169,000.
00:28 And it piqued my anger so greatly, because I had just come from an event with the Home Secretary
00:34 around it being a year on from the independent child sexual abuse inquiry, and what progress we have made since then.
00:42 And I was holding in my hand a piece of paper that said that in 2022, 100,000 children were sexually abused, and came forward and said it.
00:52 And then I looked up how much money the Home Office was allocating for their sexual abuse against children fund in 2022,
01:00 and it was £4.5 million, which I worked out was £42 for every child who'd been raped in that year.
01:08 And I thought, what political capital of walking round and round and round and round for now the third bill, for something that won't work.
01:23 People who think that the amount of time spent on wasting taxpayers' money on something that hasn't worked the last two times we tried it,
01:34 and will not work this time, frankly, Mr Speaker, should be ashamed of themselves for voting for something when they don't have any idea how much it's going to cost the people in their constituencies.
01:46 I was in a British court with a victim of human trafficking. She'd been trafficked twice.
01:50 We deported her once already as a trafficking victim, and she was re-trafficked back to this country.
01:55 When we pick up, scoop up all these people without any appeal, what happens to the victims of human trafficking?
02:02 What happens to them? Because currently, I've sat in courtrooms where this government is abusing them.
02:11 I would never vote for this. Not today, and neither should anybody else.
02:16 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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