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Miss Widdecombe: The power that we have taken is clearly restricted in the Bill by the words "prescribed conditions". If the hon. Gentleman cannot understand the words "prescribed conditions", I suggest that he takes a reading course.
Mr. Straw: I am glad that I allowed the Minister to intervene, because she makes my point entirely: Ministers are taking a power to prescribe the condition. Although they now say that they will remove child benefit only from those with limited leave to remain, the Bill empowers them to remove child benefit from people with indefinite leave to remain. If Ministers do not want to use that power, why do they want to take it?
Mr. Kaufman: The Minister's silly and illiterate intervention fails in every way to take account of the Bill. The stupid Minister does not understand her own vicious Bill. It is not a question of "prescribed conditions" letting somebody out; nobody defined as an immigrant under
clause 12 qualifies without having to undergo the prescribed conditions. They make black and brown people separate from white people.
Mr. Straw: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We look forward to the Minister's wind-up speech, when she can explain, after long notice and a bit of thought, why Ministers are taking a power potentially to remove child benefit from a million people who are lawfully resident here, without limited leave to remain, but who do not have EU or UK passports.
The Prime Minister said that he strongly believes in racial tolerance, and I believe him. The problem for him, however, is that his party has long been split on the issue of race. We may trust the Prime Minister, but bitter experience has shown that his party can rarely be trusted to follow his lead.
Recently, Mr. John Taylor, the Conservative candidate for Cheltenham at the last election, complained about the Tories. He said:
The more desperate the Tories get, the more unscrupulous their tactics become. The line between public and party interest breaks down. Last week, we had the extraordinary spectacle of Ms Sheila Gunn, a press officer from Conservative Central Office, touting detailed personal information about asylum seekers to any journalist who would take it. I am not surprised that the Minister is embarrassed by that. It is wholly unprecedented for the Home Office to use Conservative Central Office as a spin doctor for giving out such information.
Mr. Howard:
The Minister of State and I have nothing to be embarrassed about. As the hon. Gentleman knows full well, the information given out by Central Office was already in the public domain. Asylum applications are treated in confidence, unless and until an applicant or his representative chooses to put in the public domain a thoroughly misleading account of the facts. We then reserve the right to tell the truth.
Mr. Straw:
All that I can say is that, if the Secretary of State is not embarrassed about what Conservative Central Office did, he has no shame. It was disgraceful, and it is high time he managed to distinguish between his public duties as holder of his office and the political, partisan interest of Conservative Central Office.
As the Prime Minister said, huge numbers--especially of Asian and Afro-Caribbean British citizens and residents--are bound to feel "unsettled" by this measure--by its gratuitous breadth and by the extravagance of its powers. Like the Churches, community relations organisations and employers, who are all ranged against this Bill, they feel "unsettled" because they doubt the Government's motives for introducing the Bill and then refusing to commit it to proper scrutiny.
Those doubts have been fanned by the now notorious advice from Mr. Andrew Lansley, then head of research in Conservative Central Office but today an official candidate for the Conservative party. He said that immigration was an issue that the Conservatives raised successfully in 1992 and again in 1994. He said:
It is little wonder, therefore, that The Times has condemned the proposals for their "covert racism". The words of Mr. Lansley are not those of a party committed to good race relations and fair and firm immigration controls; they are those of a party ready to stir up racial tension in a desperate effort to garner votes.
The Bill has been rushed before the House less than three years after Ministers told Parliament that they had found the answer to the problem of asylum abuse in the 1993 Act. This enabling, blank-cheque Bill gives the Secretary of State wide and ill-defined powers to use in regulations. It cries out for proper scrutiny and, so long as Ministers resist that, suspicions will be raised about the real motives behind it.
Mr. Peter Brooke (City of London and Westminster, South):
Although I am speaking before seven o'clock, I shall do my best to keep my speech within 10 minutes.
The burning of straw has, latterly and perhaps happily, been outlawed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. After the quietude of my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary, the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) sought to set the House alight. He will forgive me if I remark that what resulted from his endeavour was largely smoke. A casual bystander might wonder why smoke was so important in setting out the Opposition's stance on the Bill.
As I remarked in a previous debate on another subject, we all bring to the House the impedimenta of our pasts, and mine includes having been chairman of the Camden committee of community relations. We were a predictably all-party, multi-ethnic body, yet I do not recall anyone on the committee disagreeing with my view, as chairman, that while such a committee should be concerned with immigrants' rights, good race relations nevertheless require a sense in the host community that the law of reason is being applied to the level of immigration and the degree of assimilation or integration that is thus required. Good race relations will be determined at street level, not by fiat from on high.
I was therefore distressed at the Opposition's reaction to the Prime Minister during the Queen's Speech when they implied that the Bill was racist. The cause of good race relations is not assisted by racist taunts. By their votes in the House, Opposition Members have demonstrated their support for, and sympathy with, immigrant issues, which some Conservative Members might feel is disproportionate but which are just as amenable to the law of reason.
I would never dream of applying the word "racist" to the Opposition or to individual members of it because they had adopted that stance, but they can readily see how ill the cause of race relations would be served if the charge were thrown at them.
Anyone opposing the Bill must demonstrate that it is unnecessary. Simple but sheer statistics, as quoted
by my right hon. and learned Friend, demonstrate that new legislation is required, and I support my right hon. and learned Friend in introducing the Bill.
Mr. Nigel Spearing (Newham, South):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Brooke:
Of course, but I did say that I would take 10 minutes, so the hon. Gentleman must be quick.
Mr. Spearing:
Some amendment to the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993 may be necessary--the right hon. Gentleman has said that it may be, and it may be--but the key thing about the debate and everything that has happened is that the Home Secretary is insisting on this solution, whereas Opposition Members say that there might be other solutions, especially if evidence from committees, such as that of which the right hon. Gentleman was a member, is able to be fed into the legislative process. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman agrees with what I have just said.
Mr. Brooke:
The question came rather late in the statement that the hon. Gentleman--who is an old friend--made. I support the principle of the Bill that my right hon. and learned Friend has introduced.
To be charitable, perhaps the reaction to the Bill is coloured by the parallel regulations of which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Security has published a draft. Some of the people who have written to me have perhaps not been aware that "draft" means draft, that my right hon. Friend has consulted the Social Security Advisory Committee and that the committee's consultation period ended a month ago, although of course that date does not represent the conclusion of the committee's recommendations.
The fact that the recommendations are not public, and that my right hon. Friend has not yet laid the final regulations, are testimony to the seriousness of the consultation. It would be a mistake to allow the shadow of the regulations to colour today's debate before the regulations have finally been laid.
That said, even a charitable bystander might say that there appears to be evidence of inadequate interdepartmental consultation before the original announcements. We are now potentially in the Lewis Carroll position that local authorities, under other legislation, will have to provide, at a heavy and sometimes interim cost, the services that the regulations threaten to deny to a majority of asylum seekers. I acknowledge, as do the Government, that that is primarily a Greater London problem, but that simply exacerbates the problem for the local authorities concerned.
The issues, as Ministers would be the first to agree, are very complex because of the way in which people present themselves. As 70 per cent. of the cases in an average surgery of mine, in an inner-city seat, are asylum seekers or other immigrants, I can endorse that. However, whether a person is genuine or not genuine, the duties placed on local authorities by other statutes oblige them to pick up the burden as long as other legislation remains unamended.
It is difficult to quantify the financial effects on a central London authority, not least because those who have placed themselves in accommodation are a relatively unquantifiable variable, but present best estimates,
conservatively stated, are that, especially before enactment of the Bill, the cost to Westminster city council might run at £8 million a year.
There was already some backlash in Westminster before the 1993 Act, when 220 asylum families a year were being afforded permanent housing, with a necessary effect on home housing cases. The House can imagine the effect on race relations in the indigenous community if that extra charge of £8 million fell on council tax payers. I fear that, in purely practical terms, local services may prove unable to cope.
I would add, at the level of a footnote, outside the issue of interdepartmental consultation, that the Home Office would make it much easier for local authorities to stay on top of some of those subjects if it kept local authorities better informed on the progress of individual asylum seekers' cases.
I want to illustrate the mild incoherence of government, in the proper sense of that word, by the case of unaccompanied refugee children, who are not covered by the Bill but who, ironically, by local authority action, illustrate my support for the Bill.
Half a dozen central London authorities are especially affected by unaccompanied refugee children. Once those children have passed through immigration controls, they throw themselves on local authorities, under section 20 of the Children Act 1989. The Bill will not affect them or that.
The number of such children in Westminster has jumped from 44 to 71 in the past six months. They frequently come in family groups and are thus not suitable for fostering. In residential care, they now cost £2.5 million a year, which is in addition to the £8 million that I earlier quoted, and it is a long-term cost. There was a special Government grant when the numbers were smaller, in 1993-94, but none in either of the two successive years.
The Home Office is responsible for control of entry, the Department of Health for the administration of the 1989 Act, the Overseas Development Administration for relations with some of the countries from which the children come and the Department of the Environment for grant settlement.
I realise that there is strength in numbers, but central Government should take a concerted lead in deciding how the problem should be solved, as its council tax implications, with their consequences for race relations, are clear. Obviously, the children have no prior connection with the local authorities to which they go.
I said that treatment of that issue by local authorities reflects back to the Bill and its origins. I understand that Camden borough council, of whose committee of community relations I was chairman, now takes a much tougher line in the interpretation of its duties under the 1989 Act, with consequences of the children then presenting themselves elsewhere.
"They alienate ethnic minorities by pandering to xenophobic voters with promises of crack-downs on immigration."
"It played particularly well in the tabloids, where it has more potential to hurt."
The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary have been asked three times to repudiate those chilling words; they have refused three times to do so.
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