From Hansard:
"I do not know whether the right hon. Member has been to any of the facilities, but we provide very high-quality facilities for families and children upon immediate arrival in the UK. I have made it a particular focus to ensure that we support those individuals appropriately, ensuring that conditions in those places are decent and compassionate at all times. The cohort of unaccompanied children who passed through the location that he describes last year was largely teenagers. We did not feel that the site was age-appropriate, but it contains a range of support for children and infants, including all the things that he has described. Nothing about the decoration of sites changes the fundamentals: if someone comes to the United Kingdom, we will treat them with decency and compassion at all times."
Yvette Cooper:
The Minister is being pressed on the nature of accommodation or detention that children and young people will be held in. The spirit behind the Minister’s intention matters. Therefore, will he tell us if is it true that he gave orders to the asylum reception centre to paint over children’s cartoons? If so, why? Nobody believes that Mickey Mouse cartoons encourage or deter boats from arriving; they simply think that the Minister is not showing common decency towards vulnerable children.
"I have been clear in answer to the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) that we provide very high quality care at all the centres in which we support unaccompanied children. We did not think that the set-up in that particular unit was
age-appropriate, because the majority of the individuals who passed through it unaccompanied last year were teenagers. That does not change the fundamentals that we support with decency and compassion anyone who comes to this country."
Later on:
Stephen Kinnock
I think he genuinely believes the Government’s rhetoric: that this country is being invaded, that people who come here fleeing war, persecution and famine are actually economic migrants on the make, and that outright hostility and denial of their basic human rights is the only way to dissuade them from coming here. So hostile does he want the environment to be, he will not even allow a splash of colour and cartoons on the walls of the family reception centres. It is more than disappointing. It is worrying that the Government’s attitude seems to be that the way to stop people coming here from countries where they are at risk of oppression and human rights abuses is to create an environment that is at least as hostile as the place from which they are fleeing.