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Summer Adjournment

I endorse the final comments of the hon. Member for Glasgow, North-West (John Robertson). Like him, I would welcome an announcement on the seven and eight Type 45 destroyers. Both of our constituencies would benefit enormously from the shipbuilding capacity alone. Let me deal with yesterday’s welcome announcement not only of the two aircraft carriers, but of the retention of the three naval base solution. It is the only option that does real credit to the Royal Navy and great service to the country. From Portsmouth’s point of view, I was particularly pleased at the Minister’s statement about what would happen in the future and about the need for the three communities—in Scotland, the west country and south Hampshire—to work together to find a system from which we can all benefit while the Royal Navy maintains its ships and looks after those craft. Further opportunities will undoubtedly come through the shipbuilding programme. I would like to thank the team from Portsmouth for its magnificent efforts. There are far too many people to be thanked individually, but I would mention the local authority and Portsmouth city council’s lead officer, Barbara Thompson and her team; the team from the South East England Development Agency; and the Royal Navy base commander, David Steel, who did a magnificent job. He made a determined effort to stress to his senior officer colleagues the importance of Portsmouth in the overall concept of the Navy. That message was put out to the local media, including radio, television and the Portsmouth News, which led a great campaign to save the base. All those people really need to be congratulated. I hope that we can now all work together to make the building of the aircraft carriers successful while retaining the three bases. That really means something for our nation. My next topic also relates to defence. Several Members have raised the matter of the reformed constitutional treaty, particularly aspects connected with defence. There are worrying consequences arising from it. The proposals on defence are extremely alarming because they give no indication of how European defence will be properly scrutinised in future. It is rightly suggested that national parliaments should have a major role, but the unified Europe approach to scrutiny is not at all clear. One suspects that most of the decisions will be taken in Lisbon towards the end of September—it could turn out to be a black day, because we will not have had an opportunity to debate them before they are signed up to. I regret that. I am with other Members who believe that we should have an opportunity to debate first what our position should be at Lisbon in September, but more importantly, whether or not we are going to trust the British people to take the decision. I, for one, wholeheartedly support the idea of having a referendum. I did at the outset of the process and I retain that view today. Together with Labour and Conservative colleagues, I have already had a meeting with the Minister for Europe on the issue of how to deal with defence scrutiny through an amendment to existing treaties that would allow the current structure of the Western European Union to be broadened out to include all member states of the EU. In our case the delegation comprises 36 members—18 full and 18 substitute members. I believe that delegations should be responsible for national scrutiny—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Jones) shakes his head, but had he been a member, it might be different. The current chair of the parliamentary Labour party is an enthusiastic member. The former Deputy Prime Minister is about to lead the British delegation to the Council of Europe—[Interruption.] That is a very interesting point. Perhaps we will know where he stands in the future. Undoubtedly, those Members are big supporters of that platform, as am I. I would hope that we could sensibly look to that as an alternative that would not require a major treaty to be put in place. Anything else will need a new treaty, as it will not be compatible with the treaties of Rome, Maastricht or Amsterdam. I urge Ministers to look carefully at what I have outlined as a viable alternative option. My next point relates to the ongoing problem faced by women who marry UK citizens from abroad. They sometimes come to this country on a spousal, fiancée or visitor visa, believing that once they are married— this is what their partner has told them—they will automatically become British citizens. They get married and have children here. However, if for one reason or another the marriage breaks down, they can find that the partner who promised to ““do everything”” has done nothing. They may suddenly be confronted with a difficult situation. Two of my constituents—one a lady from Russia, the other from the Gambia, both with children—are in that position at the moment. They have been told that they now have to leave the UK, but that they can leave their children behind—not with their husbands, but in the care of the state. They cannot take the children with them because they are British citizens and their British fathers are refusing permission for the children to be taken out of the country. Those ladies cannot have legal aid for legal support to fight appeals. They came here with a status that did not allow them to claim benefits, and they have been totally abandoned by society and their partners. The Government must recognise that there is a real issue. I must have had at least a dozen similar cases in my constituency—the two that I have quoted are the ones with which I am currently dealing. I went to the immigration court of appeal with one of those constituents, only to be told by the judge that, as a Member of Parliament, I had no right to be there. The judge all but ordered me from the court. My constituent, a Russian citizen, had no legal representation and no one to present her case or speak up for her. Of course, her case failed, because she had been seen not to have done the things that we demanded of her. Her husband will be in court in the near future on a case of domestic violence against the woman, but she had no help whatever from anyone—no lawyer or immigration adviser would touch her. It was news to me that Members of Parliament were prohibited from representing our constituents in immigration courts, and it must have been news as well to part of the immigration service, because when it asked whom the lady’s representative was and I was identified—and I wrote to the court to ask for the date to be changed so that I could attend in the afternoon, not the morning—it readily agreed. It was only the judge who suddenly presented us with the fact that Members of Parliament are particularly excluded from representing constituents in such immigration cases, which is an absolute nonsense. We must do something about the rights of such women. It is simply ridiculous to say to them that they cannot stay in a women’s refuge for more than three weeks because no local authority will fund them, but that they can have their children taken into care, and they can go on the street, or they can go home and leave their children here at a cost of probably £1,000 a month. I urge the Government quickly to consider the case of ladies who, in one way or another, have been misled by their British citizen husbands who bring them into the country and then all but abandon them. Those men should be made to support them. My final point is on housing, which many Members have said is important, and it certainly is in my constituency. I cannot wait for us to have the courage again to say that we are proud to build council houses, to call them council houses, and to say that they should be available to people who would not get on to the housing ladder otherwise. Portsmouth has more people waiting to be re-housed now than it did just after the second world war, when nearly 50 per cent. of all properties in the city were either damaged or completely destroyed by the effects of the blitz. The current situation will not easily be remedied. If the Prime Minister is as good as his word and genuinely wants housing back on the agenda—housing that local authorities can control and build according to need, rather than according to a developer’s requirement—we might be in for a surprise, and many more people might live in houses that are fit for them to live in.