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Mr. Clarke : I have said that we shall serve these notices on people who are detained on manifestly unfounded cases. [Hon. Members :-- "Oh!"] If the hon. Gentleman is trying to persuade himself that this will normally be the case in all port applications, I have to tell him that he is talking total and utter nonsense. I advise him to address himself to the real question. Anybody who turns up at a port and says that he has come from Bosnia, is a Croat nationalist and fought in the Croat army will be admitted. The claim will then be properly looked at. The hon. Gentleman has no answer to the case that I just gave of the Chilean who says that he has come from Germany, whose claim is manifestly unfounded. He would allow more time in those cases ; he would admit more of those cases ; he would allow them through. Frankly, he is letting himself
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down by trying to misrepresent the effects of the rules and to undermine the whole point of the Bill, which is to have an accelerated procedure. The hon. Gentleman is ingeniously, and with many mistakes, trying to argue a case that would prevent us from being able to sift out a very large number of manifestly unfounded cases.Mr. Blair : All that I am trying to do is to understand the basis on which we are legislating. I think that we are entitled to know what the legislation is that we are discussing. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says that he has just told us. What he told us is that only he will be using this procedure in this way. I hope that the Secretary of State does not take this disrespectfully, but the Government's word as to how they will implement certain policies is not the very best guarantee that we can have that everything will operate in a just way. The Secretary of State's own press notice says that two days will be it, but the press notice is wrong now ; it has gone out of the window. I make this challenge, therefore, to the Secretary of State, for it is surely right that we ought to legislate on the basis of the true position. Will he bring forward a provision, either now or in Committee, that means that the accelerated procedure applies only to cases that are manifestly groundless, not to cases where people are served at the ports? Are we to have that, or not? Mr. Clarke rose --
Mr. Blair : Are we to get that undertaking?
Mr. Clarke : I have dealt with those cases where they will be served with a notice. In Committee we shall have a sensible discussion that will illustrate to the hon. Gentleman that his claim--that this will apply to all applications, including those who have well-founded grounds for entry, on the basis of the application--is total nonsense. He really ought to deal with the substance of the Bill rather than seek to obfuscate the issue in this way. The hon. Gentleman and I are similarly qualified and it is unusual for the hon. Gentleman to make a barrack room lawyer's point.
Mr. Blair : This year, 5,000 people applied at the port of entry. I do not think that it is a barrack room lawyer's point to be clear about the rights for which we are legislating. The Secretary of State's casual disregard for his own legislation just will not do. If he would sit back and analyse the provisions for a minute, he would see that the worst point about them is that the 48-hour rule applies to in-port applications--in other words, when they are made at the time of entry--but that they do not apply to the very exceptional leave cases, to which the Secretary of State referred, when people come in on one basis and then make application for asylum.
Mr. Blair : Exactly ; the 10-day rule applies to them. I am glad that the Secretary of State has read that part of the Bill.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes) : Order. I remind the Secretary of State and the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) that we cannot have a semi-public, semi-private exchange. Either one intervenes properly, or seeks to do so, or one remains quiet.
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Mr. Blair : The discussion has taken on the air of a seminar, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I think that it is justified.
The very people who openly admit that they are seeking asylum when they come here will be subject to the 48-hour rule, whereas those who do not do so but who enter the country in the first place on another basis--which may be for pefectly genuine reasons--and then apply for asylum have 10 days. I cannot imagine anything more absurd. Those who come in on the one basis get the fast track procedure, while those who come in on another basis--and therefore have more time--get the other track procedure.
When it comes to an adjudicator hearing an appeal--this is what I think the Secretary of State meant--there is a special procedure for cases where the Secretary of State has certified that the reasons are groundless, not in relation to the lodging of the notice of appeal, to which the 48-hour rule applies, but to the time within which the adjudicator hears the appeal. Normally that should be 42 days, but in circumstances where the Secretary of State deems the application to be groundless, the 42 days are truncated to five days. Again that is a very short period.
This definition of what constitutes a groundless claim is not merely what most lawyers would think when one uses the word "groundless" or the words "without foundation"--in other words, a frivolous or vexatious claim ; it refers also to claims
"which do not raise any issue as to the United Kingdom's obligations under the UN convention."
The second grouping may cover a wide range of cases. It is essential that we realise that the UN convention defines a refugee in strict terms : effectively, those who are likely personally to suffer persecution if returned. The obligation not to return a refugee under article 33 of the convention is limited to where individual persecution is threatened because of race, religion, nationality or politics.
Many people flee the troubled parts of this world not because they face persecution individually but because it would be unsafe to return them due to war, civil unrest or disorder. The threat to life or freedom is as real, but the cause may not be directed against them personally. In such cases, the Secretary of State will often exercise his discretion to give exceptional leave to remain. Will such cases, which are not frivolous or vexatious but which may fail to fit within the strict definition of the UN convention, be certified by him as groundless? I think that they will be.
That seems wholly wrong. Someone who enters at a port has two days within which to apply and five days within which to gather and present the evidence necessary for the application to succeed, including medical evidence, making a total of seven days. That cannot be said to be a reasonable application of the rules of natural justice.
The Secretary of State accepted that the issue is whether those rules are fair. I challenge any reasonably minded person to say that, when an applicant may have arrived in a state of desperation, shock or extreme distress, seven days is a truly fair time limit. It is not sensible, even according to the Government's terms. As the noble Lord Ackner said in another place, a host of applications for judicial review will be made because the procedures are so manifestly unfair. I ask the Minister to deal specifically with the concern that has been expressed about fingerprinting. One of those concerns in that information will be given out without the consent of the applicant for asylum. Quite apart from the
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issue of fingerprinting as a matter of principle, that is of deep concern, and there must be specific provision in the Bill preventing information from being given out.Under the Bill, if any accommodation is available, even of a temporary nature, the housing authority has no duty whatever. Many bodies--charities, churches and so on--will provide temporary accommodation until a proper application can be made. They may be prevented from offering that if it will prejudice a proper claim by the applicant. The point that is being made is that the Bill may not deal with the problem.
Many of my hon. Friends will deal with carriers' liability so I shall allow them to do so, but many people find it objectionable that no distinction is drawn between bogus and genuine claims. The liability remains regardless of whether the claim is bogus or genuine.
If the asylum proposals remain unjustified, the removal of the right of appeal to visitors and students refused entry to the United Kingdom appears to be the result of caprice, pure and simple, or something worse. No justification has been advanced for it, other than this, which we heard again from the Secretary of State : the system is overloaded. It is a novel, bizarre and misguided principle of the legal system that if the exercise of legal rights is causing administrative inconvenience, the solution is to remove the right. No doubt that might satisfy bureaucrats and Government administrators in many areas, but it can hardly be a justification for removing rights.
The facts cannot be gainsaid. In the past three years, more than 1, 000 such appeals have been successful. If no right of appeal had existed, none of those people would have been free to enter. As a matter of inexorable logic, since those appeals were successful, they would have been excluded unfairly. We are therefore openly committing ourselves to injustice involving several thousand people over the next few years alone, the vast majority of whom will be relatives of people in Britain who deeply resent such treatment of their relations.
Mr. Winnick : Is my hon. Friend aware that when I used to represent such cases on a full-time basis before returning to the House, I often found that sponsors in this country--parents, mainly from the ethnic minorities--were heartbroken when their daughters, sons or granddaughters were refused permission for a brief visit to Britain? In most cases, the decision of the entry clearance officer was wrong in law. Immigration officers abroad may now be far more careless because they know that their decision cannot be challenged.
Mr. Blair : I was about to make exactly the same point. My hon. Friend is right. When a right of appeal is removed, what is removed is a valuable and necessary constraint on those who exercise original jurisdiction. That is true not merely of immigration officers but of anybody. The immigration officer who knows that his decision may be subject to appeal is likely to be a good deal more circumspect, careful and even- handed than the officer who knows that his power of decision is absolute. That is simply, I fear, a matter of human nature, quite apart from anything else.
Ms. Short : My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In the past six months, decisions at Delhi have become worse and worse and more unfair. A refusal for a family member is
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a life sentence. The Home Secretary should understand that once a family member has been refused, he or she will never be given permission to visit. A granny or auntie who has been refused entry will never be able to visit small children who are born here. It is a very serious matter.Mr. Blair : My hon. Friends are anticipating the points that I am about to make.
The extraordinary comment that the Secretary of State made, in his usual somewhat cavalier fashion, was, "What is the point of a right of appeal? After all, it is only exercised months after the reason for the visit--a wedding or a funeral--has passed". Not everyone applies to enter for those reasons, but that is to ignore the real impact of a refusal. Perhaps the right hon. and learned Gentleman can confirm that a refusal is marked on the passport. The person then has what is called "a bad immigration history". When it was boiled down, the Secretary of State's defence was, "It may be wrong and unfair, but what does it matter? It has no practical consequence attached to it." That is wrong and ignorant, because it has such a consequence.
Mr. Kenneth Clarke : The hon. Gentleman is paraphrasing me to make my argument seem more extreme. I acknowledged that it was deeply disappointing if people were turned down, but they applied not for settlement here but to make a visit lasting less than six months. To be turned down for a short visit is a disappointment, but against the background of the huge arrears in more important cases, we cannot justify 11,000 such cases a year being given the full judicial treatment. That is not cavalier. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman should try to elevate this to a great principle by giving broad-brush parodies of the way in which I put the case.
Mr. Blair : With all due respect, the right hon. and learned Gentleman has just confirmed the case that I am making against him. He says that it is not a matter of life and death. How would he feel if a relative of his who was living abroad were refused entry to attend a wedding, a funeral or just to visit? We all have constituents in that situation. To say that it is not a matter of any huge significance is nonsense : it is a matter of enormous significance.
The Home Secretary talked about the backlog of appeals. The Select Committee on Home Affairs expressly said that that should not be used to deny people their rights.
The change of law is not even sensible in its own terms. Two things are bound to happen. First, Members of Parliament will be far more involved in the representations. Secondly, there will be a vast increase in the number of applications for judicial review, which is a longer, more complex and more costly process.
People may be separated for ever from their relatives. They will not be able to return to the United Kingdom if they have a refusal on their passports. They may find that they have difficulty in gaining entry to other European countries, so there will be applications for judicial review. Even on the Home Secretary's terms, which are inadequate, we are likely not to save money by that means but merely to transfer the cost burden from the Home Office to the Lord Chancellor's Department. The proposal
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is, therefore, unfair and arbitrary, and is likely to be administratively incompetent. That is the true character of the Bill.The Bill is presented in lurid terms as cracking down on bogus asylum and immigration claims. In reality, it is not the fraudulent, but the genuine who will suffer. People fleeing from the war-torn areas of Yugoslavia with nowhere else to go will suffer, as will Tamils and Kurdish refugees who are in fear of their lives and who are seeking protection. Refugees from Africa with whose plight we are happy to sympathise in general terms will, under the legislation, in particular cases be passed by on the other side.
The Bill is deceptive in its presentation, arbitrary in its justice, and shabby and mean in its implementation. It should not be given a Second Reading and we will oppose it.
5.1 pm
Mr. John Ward (Poole) : I welcome the Bill because it is necessary if we are to improve the position for those seeking entry at our airports and ports. The Bill is also necessary to help the officials who operate our immigration controls. They now find, as we have heard this afternoon, that the system is overloaded and that the problem shows every sign of getting worse. Many people use a claim for asylum as a means of evading immigration controls.
Ease of travel, combined with economic and political upheavals in many areas, means that, if we do not act, the support services for those in difficulties in the United Kingdom will be overwhelmed. In fairness to our resident population who over the years have paid their taxes to provide the services, we must ensure that those who seek asylum here are genuinely in need of it and are not people who simply find this country a more attractive place in which to live. We are often reminded of how crowded our country is. An unrestricted influx of additional people would not only overload our social system but cause resentment among the population, with results that, tragically, we have seen elsewhere, especially in western Europe.
This country has had a good record over the centuries of providing sanctuary for those in danger of political or physical persecution, and that must continue. However, we cannot ignore events, nor can we ignore the ease with which many people are now able to move round the world. We are entitled to ask whether people are genuine refugees or whether they are seeking to move to areas that will give them a standard of living better than that in their own countries. I do not blame people for wishing to improve their standard of living or for taking advantage of shortcomings in our law to move to what they see as a more attractive area. Indeed, the courage and enterprise of some of the would-be immigrants, who are prepared to move away from familiar surroundings, to leave behind their own culture, to move to a new land and to learn a new way of life and language, are to be admired.
We are entitled, however, to maintain the way of life which people already living in this country want and to provide the social and welfare services for which they have paid and which they expect to receive. We should be failing in our duty if we allowed an overload of new people to destroy that way of life.
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We have been reminded by the Home Secretary of the scale of the problem, with asylum applications increasing more than tenfold in three years. In spite of increased staff and improved screening at the point of entry, which was introduced in 1991, there is still a backlog of 64,000 cases. At the same time, the proportion of genuine applications for entry has decreased steadily. Last year, only one in 10 of the applications was found to be genuine.If we are to be fair and compassionate to genuine applicants, we must speed up the application and appeals procedure while retaining adequate safeguards for genuine applicants. Under the Bill, the improved procedures will include measures to deal swiftly with people who clearly have no hope of gaining permission to settle in this country. Too often, such applicants have been allowed in temporarily and have promptly disappeared.
There are two major loopholes in the present regulations which the Bill will go some way towards addressing. The majority of applicants arriving in the United Kingdom are found to have either forged documents or no documents. Fingerprinting will establish clearly the identity of those people. There is already a requirement for airlines and other carriers to check that passengers have entry documents, yet many arrivals claiming asylum have either damaged or no documents when they arrive in the United Kingdom. Surely that should be a ground for immediate refusal of entry to this country. In any event, people should not just be allowed to disappear into the community ; they should be kept in secure accommodation until their cases are decided.
The second and largest category consists of applications by people who already live here. We have been told that they represent three quarters of the total applications for asylum. Surely it is stretching our capacity for tolerance to suggest that it is only coincidence that so many of those people become concerned for their safety only towards the end of the period of temporary residence which they have been granted. All too often, short- term students become long-term residents.
I welcome the speeding up of appeals procedures under the Bill and I welcome the proposal to introduce the fingerprinting of asylum seekers, which will help not only in identifying people making multiple applications for asylum but in dealing with the multiple social security applications which have been so well publicised. I hope that our proposals for fingerprinting will also close another loophole whereby people with passports stamped for limited entry at the place of arrival conveniently lose them and have them replaced with new and, therefore, unrestricted passports by an embassy or high commission as a matter of routine.
The new immigration appeals procedure will also be an improvement. We have been told of a backlog of 23,000 undecided immigration cases. It is right to tighten the appeals procedure so that those with no hope of eventual admission cannot use that procedure to prolong their stay here. The new procedure will close a number of well-known and well-used loopholes in the present system. I hope that the knowledge that only those who are considered to be genuine applicants will gain entry will reduce the number of bogus applicants and will enable the cases of genuine applicants to be processed far more speedily. I also welcome the changes to the housing rules under the Bill. Time after time we have heard of local authorities being completely overloaded because of the unfairness of
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a system that gives priority to asylum seekers and enables them to go to the top of local authority waiting lists for permanent accommodation. That must be an especially hard burden for local authorities near major airports when there is a mass influx of would- be residents, many of whom are fully conversant with their rights under existing law, who demand and get accommodation that is badly needed to deal with the waiting lists of the local population, who in part, through their taxes and community charge, have paid for the accommodation that they are prevented from occupying. It is also right that if applicants are prepared to lodge with relatives when they arrive here, they should not be allowed to use that fact to leapfrog up the queue of people who may be in a worse housing position.Other hon. Members have referred this afternoon to racketeers who prey on the ignorance of would-be immigrants. People with no hope of asylum arrive here having parted with their life savings to make the journey. I hope that when the Bill is enacted, my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary will seek the co-operation of other Governments in publicising the new rules. That will not stop the disgusting trade in human misery, but it may help to reduce the number of people suffering.
It is ironic that increased freedom in eastern and central Europe has made the problem of mass migration worse. That, added to the apparent impossibility of obtaining co-operation from Governments in parts of Africa to transport relief supplies and to stop the hijacking of relief food for the black market, means that all our efforts to help people prosper in their own countries will succeed only partly.
The problem of population movements is therefore likely to become more pressing. If we in this crowded island are to play our part in helping genuine asylum seekers, we must restrict the arrival of those whom we are not prepared to take. We must deal quickly and effectively with people who try to circumvent the rules and have no hope of being allowed to settle here. If we do not do that, we will simply add to our present financial and housing problems in a way that is likely to build up resentment among the people already living in this country. That can only harm the cause of the genuine asylum seeker.
Our main concern must be for the genuine asylum seeker who has real fears and nowhere else to turn. Unfortunately, in recent years, our system for dealing with applications from those seeking asylum in the United Kingdom has become totally discredited by the number of people abusing the system. The Bill will go a long way towards controlling a potentially dangerous situation and restoring confidence in the system.
The Bill is fair and reasonable and attempts to deal with the biggest problem--the time taken to deal with asylum applications. It provides relief for the hard-pressed local authorities near our major airports. I welcome the Bill. The sooner it is on the statute book, the sooner we can deal with a major problem in our society which cannot be allowed to continue.
5.11 pm
Mr. Roy Hattersley (Birmingham, Sparkbrook) : This wretched little Bill thoroughly deserved the comprehensive demolition performed with such skill by my hon. Friend
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the Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair). The demonstration of how bad the Bill is was made most effectively by the Home Secretary, who was at his worst today. We all know that the Home Secretary believes that aggression can make up for ignorance. However, he exceeded even his own standards in that particular today. He made a speech which might have been made by his predecessor--I can offer no more savage criticism than that.I wish that the Home Secretary were present to listen to the debate. However, we all know that he has his mind set on higher things these days. However, I hope that he reads the contributions to the debate and learns what his Bill contains and, more importantly, its implications.
I want to deal specifically with three points made by the Home Secretary which demonstrate how truly wretched the Bill is. It seems hardly credible, but the Home Secretary said that two thirds of all asylum applicants had intentionally destroyed their documents. That is what is known as "pub talk". That is what people say when they spread damaging rumours about minorities in this country. We know that a large number of asylum applicants arrive at our ports with inadequate documentation. The Under- Secretary of State should know the parody of that situation because it occurred under the aegis of his right hon. and noble Friend the Minister for Overseas Development who generously and rightly arranged for a large number of Kurds to come to Great Britain. Having made the arrangements, she discovered that they could not come here in conformity with the Immigration (Carriers' Liability) Act 1987 and had to promise indemnity to British Airways. After that, she discovered that they had inadequate documents.
The Kurds came here because they were under the protection of a Minister. From that, the Government should have understood the nature of the asylum seeker who is likely to have inadequate documents. If one is a Kurd on the borders of a desperately tyrannised country, one is unlikely to queue at the foreign office to ask Saddam Hussein for a passport. It is the nature of the asylum seeker that he or she arrives here inadequately prepared. It was disreputable of the Home Secretary to trot out such a story to justify the Bill.
The Home Secretary was hideously confused about the Bill in so far as it applies to the 48-hour appeal system. My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield was quite right. The Home Office handout and, I believe, the Bill make it clear that those who arrive at the ports--many of whom, although not all, will be in detention because they will be arrested as soon as they arrive--are subject to the 48-hour provision. The extraordinary thing is that it is the people who arrive at the ports who are most likely to be the genuine asylum seekers and refugees.
Those people are not the students who have been here for seven years and then suddenly changed their applications. They are not the failed applicants for matrimonial status. They are not the people who claimed last week that they were dependent relatives and have now become refugees. Those people are fleeing tyranny. The idea that they should be subject to the 48- hour rule makes the claim for universal appeal hollow. The appeal is there in theory, but not in practice. I want to say one more thing about the asylum proposals in the Bill because in my brief speech I want to
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deal almost exclusively with clause 9 and the removal of the protection of the appeal system from the temporary visitor. It is utterly intolerable that a man or woman who is legitimately in this country as an immigrant under the legislation should risk sacrificing residence here by applying for immigrant status. I assume that the Under- Secretary of State is going to reply to the debate, so I shall give him an instance from my constituency and ask how he can justify such a case.A medical student in my constituency in his fifth year of study believed that because of his family's association with a political group in India he would be under threat if he returned to the Punjab. That was immediately after the assassination of Mr. Gandhi. I have no way of knowing whether he was under threat, but I have no doubt that he believed himself to be in political danger and there was certainly evidence that members of his family had been arrested. How can the Minister justify that young man having to choose between risking the last year of his medical degree in case his application for asylum was turned down and risking returning home to persecution and death in order to complete his final year?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Charles Wardle) : I shall not go into a lengthy explanation nowand I shall address that point when I reply to the debate. However, the right hon. Gentleman will wish to know that curtailment is not automatic. Individual factors are considered.
Mr. Hattersley : I was going to ask the Minister not to tell me that Ministers will use their discretion, but he has just told me that. Those of us who deal with ministerial discretion day in, day out and week in, week out have no faith in that discretion. It is an affront to the House to come here and say, "Don't bother about the legislation. Don't worry about what the words say. Rely on Ministers to take you around it when the situation warrants that." If there is to be the kind of consideration that I have described, it must be written into the legislation. Having dealt with Conservative Ministers in constituency terms for the past 13 years, I do not have the slightest belief in the compassion, understanding or discretion that Ministers use.
Mr. Wardle : Although the right hon. Gentleman is in full flight, I want to clarify one point. I was not talking about ministerial discretion. I was talking about the oral hearing.
Mr. Hattersley : If that can be written into the legislation, I should be not only delighted but extremely surprised. I wonder why it was not the intention to do that when the Bill was originally published.
I have no faith in the Government who introduce clause 9 when they seem to do so from the basis of absolute ignorance. I heard the Home Secretary say on the "Today" programme three weeks ago what he has said in the House today--that it did not matter because only visitors coming to this country were involved. Let me tell him why it matters passionately.
The clause to restrict visitors coming into this country and the clause to prevent appeals when visits are turned down are direct attacks not simply on men and women who want to come into Britain but on British citizens who already live here. They happen to be the black and Asian
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British, because clause 9 will not apply, for example, to American citizens living in the United Kingdom who have visa restrictions. It will apply to the two minority communities whom I know best--the Muslim and the Sikh communities. They will be cruelly affected by the simple fact that many of their relations who legitimately want and need to come to this country will not be allowed to do that. Such an action will have an horrific effect on community relations. We will be telling Sikhs and Muslims that applicants from their families abroad are automatically treated with suspicion and that it is somehow detrimental to life in this country to have a few more people like them here. I do not believe that that is true, and it is a disastrous message for the Government to send out.An immense backlog of visitors want to appeal against refusals, but that is not because their applications are bogus. The hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Ward) mentioned people disappearing into the community, but there are far more stories than there are people disappearing. The reasons why there are so many appeals against refusal to allow a visitor entry were largely documented in the Government's evidence to the Select Committee on Home Affairs : the introduction of visas for people from India and Pakistan and the limitation on visits to six months. When the issue was studied in detail, there were some special cases--there were legitimate raids on bogus language schools. No one told the Select Committee that we had to be careful about the number of visa applications and appeals because so many were bogus. The increase in the backlog is a result of administrative matters and decisions taken by the Government. I echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield--the idea that justice should be withdrawn because there are not enough men and women to deal with cases is an affront to the liberties of this country. I do not believe that we would treat any other group in that way.
When the queue for passport applications grew intolerably long, the Government drafted more civil servants into the passport office because that affected all British citizens. Now that the queue for applications to visit is growing unacceptably long, it is not tolerable for the Government to abandon the appeal system because only black and Asian British are affected. Let me remind the Under-Secretary that they are affected in the most material ways. I am sure that almost all of my hon. Friends who represent constituencies similar to mine have fought for the man who wants to come here because his father or mother is terminally ill. We have faced appeals and arguments with Ministers, hoping that they would be won before the parent died. We all know of people who desperately need to be here to solve family problems and are prevented from coming. They are not simple holidaymakers, although a family has a right to be reunited for a holiday when it is spread across two continents. It is equally absurd for the Home Secretary to ask what is the point of an appeal when someone wants to come here for a wedding as it is over by the time they get here.
What distresses me is that that approach shows ignorance of ethnic minorities. People who represent them and work with them know that they will save for years so that a cousin, parent or brother can come from the Indian sub-continent, and they will wait for years while the appeal takes place, because they have a more active sense of family values and unity than is common in other
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communities in the United Kingdom. The idea that that should be denied and broken down for administrative convenience is intolerable.I remind the Under-Secretary of what the Home Secretary clearly did not understand--the stigma automatically attached to a man or women whose application to come here has been turned down. At my constituency surgery this week, I learnt of an example. A woman of 60 wanted to come to the wedding of a member of her family. The Home Office believed that it was unreasonable for the payment for her visit to be made from such a small income and felt that there must be some ulterior motive. I have no doubt that there was none ; the mores of that community mean that they spend money on attending a family wedding. Having been turned down at the age of 60, if that woman has a legitimate claim to be a dependent relative at the age of 70 or 76, her application to come to this country will certainly be prejudiced and will probably be refused. This is not a frivolous matter. It is crucial for thousands of families who happen to be Asian British or black British. They are all British families living with their rights curtailed if their families are not allowed to visit them. Clause 9 demonstrates all that is wrong with the spirit of the Bill. Although there is a technical concession of appeal for all asylum seekers, I am not much comforted by that because it exists more in theory than in practice.
The Bill is even more wretched than the legislation that we debated a year ago, when the then Home Secretary chose to make our flesh creep with predictions about how many asylum seekers were likely to flood into this country. Instead of that figure exceeding 50,000, as he predicted and as reported in Hansard, the total number was barely more than half what it was last year. That happened because the flow of asylum seekers in the continent of Europe is different from the flow into this country, and it will remain so. We have a special obligation which is different from that of the rest of the Community.
I deeply resent the idea that our immigration regulations should be determined by secret meetings of the Trevi group, where the Home Secretary commits himself--without any publicity, notability, acceptability or accountability--to a course of action which he then agrees to impose on Parliament. If some of the Euro-sceptics in the Tory party were more perceptive, they would have asked the Home Secretary why, having promised them that immigration should not be part of common competence, he has chosen to prejudice our immigration regulations to make it a part. If ever there were a case for individual rather than collective decision-making, it is on immigration policy.
Our immigration relationship is different from that of the rest of Europe as we have an imperial inheritance, the responsibility of empire and a duty to Commonwealth citizens who came to this country 30 or 40 years ago, at the invitation of the Government, and who are denied the right for their families to visit them. That is a disgrace and I shall vote against the Bill with as much enthusiasm as I have voted against any Bill, because it is one of the most squalid measures ever to be put before the House.
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5.26 pmMr. Ian Duncan-Smith (Chingford) : I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for bringing this legislation back before the House so promptly. The Opposition charged us with backsliding on the issue before the summer break. We have managed to demonstrate that it is not the case. Asylum and immigration are part of a greater problem, and I am glad that the Government are making it a priority. They should be warmly applauded for doing so. The figures for this year do not matter. What is relevant is that there is a strong backdrop of economic migration, which could turn into an asylum problem if we are not careful. The general trend is likely to be upwards, no matter what the figures have been, and this is an important factor to take into consideration.
My constituents in Chingford have been desperately concerned about this legislation, and have written to me to ask why the Government have not brought it before the House again. I shall be glad to write back to tell them that they now have.
It is important to consider the national picture. Some of the figures are worrying. The rise in the number of applicants since 1988--from 4,000 to 45,000--has been so dramatic that in any other area it would be considered a near crisis. It is important to note that genuine applications have fallen from about 60 per cent. in the early 1980s, to 25 per cent. in 1990, and down to as low as 10 per cent. in 1991. The most important fact is that the picture shows that the number of genuine applicants has stayed about the same, but many people have found loopholes in immigration procedures and so the number of bogus applicants has increased dramatically.
There are huge pressures on the Home Office, which has been left with a backlog of about 64,000 applications. I note what my right hon. and learned Friend said about extra staff being employed, but it is still difficult to clear the backlog and hon. Members on both sides of the House would do well to take note of that.
The important point to be gained from my right hon. and learned Friend's speech is that the Government, despite what the Opposition say, have committed themselves in the Bill to the 1951 UN convention. In that respect the Government have set a precedent because that commitment lies at the core of the Bill and has primacy . To claim that we have departed from our international obligations is wholly unfounded. My right hon. and learned Friend and his team should be especially contratulated on that commitment.
The Bill does not leave any doubt about the United Kingdom's commitment. Historically, we stand head and shoulders above almost any other nation in our reception of genuine asylum seekers. It is clear that that commitment will not be altered. All that will happen is that the procedures will be streamlined.
Historically, the United Kingdom has been tolerant of asylum seekers. The public have always felt that they should tolerate those who have faced harder circumstances than their own and who have been forced to leave their country of origin. We should applaud such tolerance, which has always been a fact of life. However, it has been subject to enormous strain in the past seven years because of the number of asylum seekers who have been proven bogus. Many would-be immigrants have seen asylum as another way around the system. The number of those who
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have a genuine claim to be here, whether on the grounds of asylum or the other immigration rules, has been distorted by the number of bogus asylum seekers. It is they who have put such a strain on our traditional tolerance.The Bill is important because it streamlines and accelerates the asylum procedures. It is also important to stress that all those rejected as asylum seekers have the right to an oral hearing at least at their appeal. One may disagree about the nature or its timing, but at least it is an improvement on current practices. The timetable of 12 weeks in which determination and procedure objectives are to be completed is important because it will focus the mind of officials. Cases will not be allowed to drift because officials will have to get on with them. That is only fair to those who need to know the outcome of their case quickly for a variety of reasons.
The hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) referred to clause 3(6)(a) and (b) which relate to fingerprints. I am pleased to note that the Bill makes it clear that those fingerprints will be destroyed at the end of 10 years or, if not sooner, one month after the person concerned has been granted indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom. That commitment was rather glossed over by the hon. Gentleman and it is worth specifying what the Bill makes clear. My borough of Waltham Forest has had to face certain housing problems because of the current rules on immigration and asylum, which I believe will, in part, be alleviated by the Bill. The ethnic population of Waltham Forest, which is the fifth highest in London, has put pressure on housing demand--15 per cent. of the borough's population, about 33,000 people, come from ethnic minority groupings.
Asylum seekers tend to move into communities such as Waltham Forest for the obvious reason that it is home to people from similar backgrounds and countries. I receive a huge amount of letters from families seeking accommodation from the council list when there is a limited amount of such accommodation available. It is important to note that there are 15,000 people on the waiting list in Waltham Forest and that, in the past year, homeless applicants accounted for 3,400 of those on that list. It is also important to note that most asylum seekers will end up in the homeless category and they go to the top of the list, thus distorting the size of the homeless problem. I have some sympathy with the borough in its attempts to deal with that. In any 12 months between 300 and 400 asylum seekers will go through the borough's books. It is important to note that, in the past 12 months, 858 homeless applicants were rehoused. Problems connected with housing also put a strain on efforts to maintain racial equality and test people's tolerance. I am sure that the Bill will help to overcome some of those problems, although I accept that there is a lot to be done.
Clause 4 will help to get rid of the obligation on councils to house asylum seekers irrespective of whether the council believes that the existing accommodation is good enough or temporary. The clause will empower the council to make a decision at the point of application rather than go through the previous lengthy procedure. I believe that SHAC--Shelter Housing Aid Centre--has offered some support for the idea of spreading the homeless load across other boroughs, which should help to alleviate the problems faced by boroughs such as Waltham Forest. It is most important that other boroughs should take some of the applicants on to their housing lists.
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I congratulate the Secretary of State and his team on the Bill and I urge the House to get it on the statute book as quickly as possible.5.35 pm
Mr. Robert Maclennan (Caithness and Sutherland) : The whole country is perhaps more conscious of the problems aroused by the migration of peoples and refugees fleeing from places of civil war and oppression than at any time in the post-war period. And yet the Bill seems strangely irrelevant to those massive difficulties that face not only this country, but other European countries with whom we are in partnership, allegedly, in the European Community.
The scale of the problem in this country is not even a tenth of that faced by the German Government and I found the Home Secretary's insularity of approach extremely depressing although, it must be said, not entirely surprising. The one thing that is perhaps to be welcomed about his approach to the Bill is that it does not follow the example of his predecessor in seeking to stimulate in the press a wholly bogus campaign against alleged unlawful asylum seekers. When the previous Bill, which this one follows in most part, was introduced we had several days of popular press agitation about a few alleged bogus asylum seekers which amounted to a thinly disguised campaign of racism. I am glad that the present Home Secretary has not followed that discreditable route in commending the Bill to the House.
The difficulties of which the right hon. and learned Gentleman has spoken seem far removed from the real problem. The desire on his part to reduce the numbers of those who are given extended leave to remain is very worrying. The reason that those applications have, ultimately, in the past been accepted has not been the bureaucratic incompetencies of the Home Office, though those undoubtedly exist. In most cases the reason for the granting of extended leave to remain is that it would have been unconscionable to return to their own countries those who did not strictly qualify as refugees under the 1951 UN convention. It would have been unconscionable to require them to go back.
The reality is that, if some arbitrary decision is taken in the Home Office to reduce the numbers of those who are granted exceptional leave to remain, it is bound to result in action that we would hitherto have regarded as unconscionable. That is the dangerous penumbra of the Bill. I hope that during the Bill's passage through the House we can address the matters raised by the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) on the 48-hour rule, and perhaps prevail upon the Government to think again about some of its provisions. During the Second Reading debate we are entitled to have a slightly more frank explanation from the Home Secretary. What is the Government's approach to the problem of those who do not strictly qualify as refugees under the 1951 convention? Those who qualify as refugees are by far the smallest part of the difficulty.
What the Home Secretary said had been agreed in the European Community group of Home Office Ministers was a revelation--the Home Secretary said that it was not a leak, but it certainly was not presented in the press notice that accompanied the publication of the Bill. The group described how the Home Office Ministers proposed to deal with the problem at European level.
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