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Extract
from House of Commons Hansard, Debates for 26th February 2003
Westminster Hall
Asylum
Seekers and Benefits
Mr.
Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow):
The
debate so far has taken the course that I expected. There has been a lot of
rehashing of history from six or seven years ago. I noted that the title of the
debate was "Government policy on refugee benefits", but we have heard precious
little about refugees and everything has been about asylum seekers.
I am
often struck by something when I attend such debates as this. At an event last
Saturday, it was put to me that some of my colleagues in this place are not
terribly knowledgeable about asylum. I said that we all have to specialise to a
degree and that if I were asked about the Government's policy on agriculture, I
would be found to be woefully ignorant. The person to whom I was speaking
responded—at the time I thought that it was flattering, but I now realise that
it was true—by saying, "At least you wouldn't talk about agriculture policy, but
people who know very little about asylum feel perfectly able to get up and make
speeches about it." That has been amply proved this morning.
May I
go back over the history of how we got here today? I do not want to dwell too
much on 1996 but there has been some rewriting of history this morning. What
happened in 1996 was very simple: there was an attempt to deny asylum seekers
inside the country from applying for mainstream benefits. The right hon. Member
for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) was the architect of that policy. At the
time, it was predicted that the policy would cause destitution and lead to
people living on the streets, and I am confident that it would have done if
there had not been two court decisions. One decision said that the measure could
not be introduced using secondary legislation, which led to changes to the
Asylum and Immigration Act 1996—the primary legislation. After that, a court
decision in February 1997 said that local authorities would have to use the
National Assistance Act 1948 to support asylum seekers who were otherwise
destitute. If that had not happened, we would have seen people on the streets,
just as people are now on the streets as a direct result of the policy that the
present Government have implemented, which I shall talk about in a moment.
The
result of the events of 1996 was a complete shambles in the asylum system. Some
people were supported on benefits while some went to local authorities and local
authorities incurred expense. Pressures were placed on local authorities in
London and the south-east, and we still have to live with some of those. The
right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden was the architect of that shambles,
which we inherited when we came into government in 1997. If he had been so keen
on introducing primary legislation to deal with the Court of Appeal decision in
February 1997, there would have been ample time to pass a simple one-clause Bill
before the general election in 1997. The incoming Labour Government in 1997 were
right not to try simply to reverse existing legislation, but to try to find an
alternative mechanism meaning that asylum seekers would not be supported by
local authorities, but by the Home Office through the National Asylum Support
Service. Whether we got that right is another matter, but it was a perfectly
legitimate and correct decision.
Mr.
Oliver Heald (North-East Hertfordshire): Is it not true that the major problem
was that the then shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for
Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith), was in an impossible position? He
believed that to reverse the decision of the courts would lead to people
starving on the streets; he was totally wrong in that.
Mr.
Gerrard : I do not think that my right hon. Friend was wrong about what would
have happened. There is already evidence that the implementation of section 55
of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 is leading to people being
destitute and living on the streets.
Lynne
Jones (Birmingham, Selly Oak): Indeed, did Mr. Justice Collins not describe such
situations in the decision on 19 February?
Mr.
Gerrard : Absolutely. Those situations were the foundation of the case heard by
the judge. If the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) examines
the evidence for the court judgment earlier this month, he will see that
evidence spelt out.
In
1999, the system changed and vouchers were introduced, against the advice of
many Labour Back Benchers. The system proved to be the disaster that some of us
predicted and was removed in the 2002 Act. Unfortunately, it has been replaced
with something that will be even worse.
The
issues raised by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden are frequently
mentioned in debates such as this one—specifically, how the benefits and support
given to asylum seekers affect the number of claimants. The rationale presented
for each of the past four Acts—the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, the
Asylum and Immigration Act 1996, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, and the
Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002—is that benefit support acts as a
draw and that cash in asylum seekers' hands leads to more applications. It is
assumed that genuine asylum applicants would apply at the port of entry the
minute that they stepped off the boat or plane and would not apply in-country.
No hard evidence has ever been produced that backs up those claims.
On the
question of genuine applicants claiming at the port, over the past 10 years the
difference between the success rates of asylum claimants in-country and at the
port of entry has not significantly changed; any change has been negligible. In
fact, for a considerable number of years, the rate of success for in-country
applicants has been higher. No hard evidence supports the assertion that a port
claimant is more likely to be a genuine applicant than an in-country one. The
figures vary from year to year, but no significant patterns back up that
assertion.
On the
suggestion that people come to the UK because they know about the benefits
system and the cash, I am sure that many hon. Members will have had the same
experience as me of sitting in constituency advice surgeries and dealing with
people who were born in the UK and have never stepped outside the country. They
come along with the type of problem that arises from a failure to understand the
benefits system, such as failing to claim for a benefit for which they are
eligible, failing to know when they should have claimed something or failing to
understand the consequences of a late claim for benefit.
We see
such problems all the time involving people who have lived in the UK all their
lives. The idea that someone sitting in the middle of another country 1,000
miles away will do a detailed calculation and say to themselves, "If I make an
asylum claim in Germany, I'll get this amount, if I make one in France I'll get
this and if I make one in the UK I'll get this" is ludicrous.
Mr.
Lilley : Can the hon. Gentleman explain why Italy, which alone in Europe has no
benefits for asylum seekers, also has the lowest number of claims, even though
it is one of the main sources of entry of asylum seekers?
Mr.
Gerrard : I suspect that for some years there have been very large numbers of
people working illegally and living on the streets in Italy. The claim that the
Italians have somehow solved the problem cannot be justified. That raises the
question of why people go to particular countries.
There
is a variety of reasons why people come here. People come to a country because
they know someone who lives there; or there may be long-standing connections
with that country. Some Commonwealth countries have been the source of
significant numbers of asylum applications to this country when there have been
problems there. The civil war in Sri Lanka led to significant numbers of Tamil
asylum seekers coming to the UK.
People
go to a country where they can speak the language, and English is probably the
commonest second language in the world. I am sure that I will never be in the
position where I have to flee this country because I am being persecuted—
Mr.
Lilley : Wait until the Whips get at you.
Mr.
Gerrard : I am not worried about that. I would not want to go to France,
which is the nearest safe country. It is not that I have anything against the
French, but I would be looking for a country where I know people, or where I can
speak the language. Those are the factors that have an impact on where people go
to try to claim asylum.
Ms Buck : Will my hon. Friend accept that a criticism can be made of the system in
this country regarding processing times? Historically, decisions have taken so
long both to complete, and then to exercise if there is a deportation consequent
upon them, that this has a become a pull for asylum seekers. Does he accept that
in 1997, and even today, the processing time for appeals is up to two years? For
the first six months of my time as a Member of Parliament the system was clogged
up with cases of applicants who had submitted their asylum application in 1992
or 1993, and who by 1997 had not heard a word from the immigration and
nationality directorate.
Mr.
Gerrard : That is absolutely right. If we want a system that will deter
people who are not genuine applicants, we will not achieve that by fiddling
around with the benefit system, or by policies of deterrence in legislation. If
we want a policy of deterrence for a fraudulent applicant, a decision must be
made quickly and efficiently, and subsequently enforced: that is something that
we have singularly failed to do over 10 years.
The
Government inherited a huge backlog in 1997, which then got worse. As an
incoming Government we accepted the Siemens computer system that had been
ordered for the Home Office. It was claimed that it would solve all the problems
and reduce staffing levels. That was built into the Home Office budget of 1997.
Unfortunately we went along with that, and the result was that the backlog
increased, rather than decreased. It is only now that we are starting to get on
top of it and turn it round.
If we
want to deter people from making fraudulent applications, the knowledge that
they will not buy two, three or four years in the country by making that
application—the knowledge that a decision will be made quickly and efficiently
and will be enforced—is the most powerful deterrent. We would have done far
better if we had not bothered with any of the last three Acts, and had simply
got the systems within the Home Office working properly and efficiently.
I want
to say something about the serious position that we are currently in, and which
we got ourselves into by aping what was done in 1996. The Home Office's
justification for where we are, which was given to the court recently, is that
there is widespread abuse of the system because, for example, some people enter
to work illegally and claim asylum when they are found out, while others run
multiple claims, or have already claimed in safe countries, or have to wait for
weeks and months before they make a claim.
Unfortunately, I am unaware of the Home Office ever having produced evidence to
back up the assertion that many people wait weeks and months before they make
their claim. I tabled parliamentary questions about how many people apply for
asylum within a week and a month and three months and six months of being in the
country, and about the relative rates of success of applicants, and I was told
that the Home Office did not have that information—that it was not kept.
However, the bald assertion is made that many people wait for weeks and months
before applying so we must do something about that.
Simon
Hughes : No answer was given to the question that I asked about the
impact of the 8 January legislation. No figures have yet been forthcoming from
the Government. No adequate monitoring is going on, even at this stage.
Mr.
Gerrard : That is correct.
There
is another crucial point about how this new legislation will be applied. There
was a very short debate—only 15 minutes long—in which several hon. Members
wished to speak but were unable to do so, and during which a question was asked
about how reasonable we would be with regard to people who did not claim asylum
at the port of entry. The Home Secretary said:
"We need to be reasonable and to
take into account the trauma that people experience. We need therefore to
allow a reasonable period before we presume that people have come into the
country for another reason and have been sustaining themselves, and that when
they could no longer do so they decided that the asylum system would sustain
them". —[Official Report, 5 November 2002; Vol. 392, c. 199.]
The
Home Secretary dwelt on the need to be reasonable, and in meetings with hon.
Members, Ministers went further than that. They said, "We are not in the
business of penalising people who have been in the country a few days: you need
not worry that we are going to behave unreasonably and penalise people who have
only been in the country a few days or a week or two. We want to catch people
who have been here three, four, five or six months before they make an asylum
claim. They ought to be able to justify why they now need support." If the
regulations had been interpreted in that way—the way that we were told they
would be—the Government might well not have lost the court case this month; they
would have found it much easier to persuade the court that they were behaving
reasonably.
However, what is actually happening is that people are being refused the day
after they arrive in the UK—and, in some cases, on the day on which they arrive
in the country—because instead of claiming at the port of entry they made their
way to Croydon to make a claim.
The
regulations are being applied in a totally unreasonable way. By losing the case
now we have created a far worse problem. It must be dealt with. I am unsure how
we are going to extricate ourselves from this; that depends on what the Court of
Appeal decides. However, we have certainly created a problem, and it is of the
Home Office's making because it has applied the regulations not in the way that
we were told that it would, but differently.
This
discussion has illustrated that the debate about asylum support is based on the
premise of deterrence—that being tough through legislation will deter people
from coming here and applying for asylum.
The
Prime Minister said that he wants to see a 50 per cent. cut in the number of
applications by September. That target is ludicrous. It is something over which
we have no control. We should be able to control the rate at which we make
decisions. We should be able to control the rate at which we remove those whose
applications have been rejected. We should be able to control the rate at which
we deal with applications, but controlling the rate at which applications are
made is a completely different matter.
The
approach taken by Governments of both parties over the past 10 years, before and
after 1997, has been based on the premise that we can deter applications through
legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North
(Ms Buck) is absolutely right to say that if we want to deter fraudulent
applications, we must look at the mechanisms, not the legislation. Decisions
must be taken quickly, and they must be enforced.
Mr.
Mark Francois (Rayleigh): To pursue the hon. Gentleman's argument that
mechanisms are important, does he not accept that one of the great failures of
the system is that, because people know that the appeals process can take up to
two years and that most appeals are likely to fail, they can effectively
disappear? There is no real deterrent because when the time comes to deport
those people, they have flown the nest.
Mr.
Gerrard : There is no doubt that people can disappear, but they could do
so whatever system we had in place if they were determined enough. Time and
again, people turn up in my constituency surgeries five years after I first saw
them—they have not disappeared—because nothing has been done to deal with their
applications. That is the real problem, and it could be dealt with far more
effectively than we are doing through the recent legislation. Even the
legislation brought in by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden was a
failure; it was in force until 1999, and applications went up significantly
during that period.
I
suggest that hon. Members look at the pattern of the figures from the past 10
years. If they were put on a graph and plotted against each piece of legislation
that was supposed to make it more difficult to apply, we may see a temporary
drop before the figures go up again. The pattern of figures can be related much
more closely to external events such as those in Afghanistan or Kosovo than to
any legislation.
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