NO APARTHEID IN EDUCATION              

If there is one proposal in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill which symbolises the Home Office attitude towards asylum seekers it is that children placed in the proposed accommodation centres will be excluded from mainstream schools. Of course it is not easy for schools to deal with significant numbers of children coming and going during the school year, especially children who may have suffered traumatic experiences. But those schools, and there are many, which have recognised the stimulus which highly motivated asylum seeker children can bring, have learnt not just how to cope, but how to offer the support which such children need.

Exclusion from mainstream education does not sit comfortably with Government proposals, which were welcomed, to encourage the integration of refugees. The core of the contradiction is the refusal to contemplate anything which can be seen as moves to integration until after an asylum seeker has actually been given refugee status.

The Bill finished its Committee stage on 21st May, and will be back in the Commons in early June. Sitting on the Committee was a strange experience, with both Liberal and Tory MPs using briefings from refugee organisations and lawyers to attack Labour Ministers from the left.

The education exclusion is just one consequence of the proposals to build accommodation centres holding up to 750 asylum seekers. All the sites so far identified for the proposed pilots are outside urban areas. Some of the opposition in the areas proposed may well be fuelled by racist attitudes, but there are very good reasons to oppose the plans. They will isolate asylum seekers from existing communities where family and friends might be found. They will be very expensive to run. They will do nothing to improve the lot of the majority of asylum seekers in the dispersal system. The vision of the Home Office is clearly that in the future asylum seekers will pass seamlessly from accommodation centres to removal centres (the new name for detention centres). The number of detention places will expand significantly.

The Bill has other worrying elements, some of which have hardly been debated at all. The system of timetabling all legislation has meant that some very important clauses of the Bill were never reached by the Committee. At its last session the Committee reached Clause 76 of the Bill before the timetable guillotine fell. A further 17 clauses were not debated at all. These included proposals to remove the right to challenge decisions of Immigration Tribunals in the High Court by applying for a judicial review. Instead it will only be possible to apply for a review on papers only, with no oral hearing, on a point of law.

There are some welcome proposals in the Bill. Steps to deal with trafficking of women and children for prostitution, which is a growing and lucrative trade, are a positive move. Opening up the work permit scheme and the promise to look at more ways for people to come to the UK legitimately to work are generally welcome. So also are plans to open up routes for asylum seekers to make applications via the United Nations while in other countries.

There is, however, too much which is punitive, which continues to regard all asylum claims as at best dubious. What the Bill does not do, and will not be done by any legislation, is to tackle the failings in the Home Office systems. Until decisions are made fairly and efficiently, until the huge backlogs of cases are cleared, asylum seekers will continue to be blamed for problems which are not of their making

JUNE 2002

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