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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Lady can make a speech of her own on Third Reading. Interventions should be short.
Mr. Howard: I am told that the relevant period referred to by the hon. Lady is nine months, not two years. If she had been paying a modicum of attention, she would have heard what measures we are taking to deal precisely with the problem to which she referred in her intervention.
The output of the appeal system is also increasing dramatically. The number of appeals determined has risen from 2,500 in 1994 to 7,000 last year; but even those substantial improvements are not enough. The number of asylum applications is rising faster still; backlogs are still growing; and we are still having to deal with far too many bogus applications that should never have been made in the first place. That is why we need the asylum and employment provisions in the Bill.
The measures that we are introducing on entitlement to housing assistance are also important. Social housing is a valuable and costly resource. People whose leave to enter the United Kingdom was given on the understanding that they would make no recourse to public funds should not have access to assistance provided by local housing authorities at the taxpayers' expense, nor should those without valid leave. Those groups do not now have entitlement to social security benefits, except if they have claimed asylum on arrival and are awaiting a decision.
The Bill will enable entitlement under homelessness legislation to be brought into line with those changes. It will also enable us to ensure that people in this country with limited leave will not be entitled to council housing, which is intended to meet the long-term needs of people who are entitled to live here. It is also essential that entitlement to child benefit should be brought into line with the new policy. That will reduce public expenditure by £45 million over the next three years.
The Bill also contains substantial new measures to combat the growing problem of immigration racketeers and facilitators. Their pernicious trade undermines the integrity of our immigration control and feeds on often needy and desperate people in pursuit of misbegotten personal profit.
All the proposals in the Bill are grounded in the Government's long-standing commitment to maintaining this country's good race relations. We have consistently taken the view that that requires effective immigration control and a readiness to intervene to deal with abuses.
Mr. Straw:
No one doubts the need to tackle the problem of bogus asylum seekers. That has never been an issue in any of our debates; what is at issue is how we should tackle the problem. The measure is unbalanced and disproportionate to the problem. It will harm race relations. It has already led to the prospect of refugee families being left without any effective support, and it could lead to a number of applicants whose applications are well founded being denied their rights under the United Nations convention on refugees, which this country voluntarily signed.
That is exactly the anxiety of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who said:
Throughout the debate on the Bill, Ministers and Conservative Members have sought to insinuate that only a tiny minority of applicants are genuine and that all the rest are bogus, but the facts tell a different story. Four per cent. of applications are accepted as within the convention and another 19 per cent. are accepted as within the stringent tests for the granting of exceptional leave.
That leaves 77 per cent., but it does not follow for a moment that all those applications are bogus. Many are genuine and fit the Government's test of genuineness on the Scott report--the test by which Ministers who deceive the House may be exempted from responsibility. After all, that test involves a "sincere self-belief" in the genuineness of an application. Many asylum applicants, however, would meet an objective test of the genuineness of their application, as their fear of persecution is high--as I know from a constituency case with which I am dealing--even though it may not fall within the strict tests imposed by Ministers in their interpretation of the convention or in their granting of exceptional leave.
After the Bill was announced in the Queen's Speech, we said that it should be thoroughly examined under Special Standing Committee procedure. No Bill has been more in need of such scrutiny. The motives behind the Bill are open to question, the policy has not been properly settled and the Bill has been poorly drafted--much of it is simply a skeletal enabling measure, which will rely on subordinate regulations for its practical effect.
Ms Jean Corston (Bristol, East):
Is my hon. Friend interested to know that last night I lodged with the House a petition with more than 1,000 signatures, from people who attend churches in the Greater Bristol region? They believe that the Bill
Does my hon. Friend agree that the most amazing thing about the Bill is that the Churches have been unanimous in their hostility and opposition to it?
Mr. Straw:
I accept what my hon. Friend says. Another remarkable thing about the Bill is that, as the debates have progressed, the opposition to it among decent, non-political people has mounted.
Within the limits of the existing Standing Committee procedure, my hon. Friends have done an excellent job in exposing the Bill's inadequacy. Ministers have had to back down on some of its least defensible parts, but much of it remains offensive. There will still be a white list, from which it will be assumed that applications are unfounded. In addition, there will still be the whitewash of so-called "country assessments". Such an assessment gave the Nigerian Government a clean bill of health even as that odious regime was preparing judicially to murder Ken Saro-Wiwa.
The Secretary of State and Ministers say that race relations will not be damaged by the Bill. They should reflect on why no one with any knowledge of race relations shares their complacency. For the first time, under the Bill, some people who happen to have black or brown skin, who do not have a United Kingdom passport, but who have made this country their home with the full approval of the Home Office, and who may have been here for years paying taxes, are to be classified as "immigrants". Ministers are taking a power to withdraw their child benefit. Ministers say that they will not use the power in that way, so why put it in such an offensive way in the Bill in the first place? In many circumstances, benefits for genuine applicants and housing assistance are to be withdrawn, placing those people at risk of destitution and increasing the burden on local authorities.
As we heard in the debate on amendment No. 57, because of the lack of security on birth certificates and national insurance documents, employee checks are unlikely to be effective in stopping the employment of workers here illegally, but they will almost certainly be effective in limiting further the employment of Asian or black people who are lawfully here, and in damaging race relations. In September, that was the view of the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, who said:
Her hostility to the Bill has been echoed by the Commission for Racial Equality and the Federation of Small Businesses.
The Government and the Secretary of State never cease to complain about burdening small firms and the labour market
to quote from a little-noticed 1993 speech by the Secretary of State for the Home Department--but, against the wishes of many representative business organisations, the Government are doing just that: regulating ineffectively where they should not, but refusing to regulate where they should.
Everyone knows that many bogus applications for asylum and for settlement generally are manufactured by unofficial profit-making immigration advisers operating at the margin of criminality. At every stage, we have pushed
the case for effective regulation--with criminal sanctions--of those so-called advisers. We did so again last night, but received the usual complacent "do nothing for the moment" response from the Minister. What a bizarre spectacle the Government's position is. Ministers refuse to regulate the crooked advisers, to stop their rackets and to end the burden that those advisers place on the Home Office, but the Bill imposes a new burden of regulation on decent, hard-working small business people and the threat of criminal sanctions.
No wonder so many people have doubted the motives behind the Bill. After all, it was introduced less than three years after the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993. On that occasion, Ministers not only predicted that applications would rise--that was one of their reasons for introducing that measure--but promised that the Act would cut delays to three months and increase efficiency. As the Secretary of State has just admitted and as we predicted, far from increasing efficiency and cutting delays, the Act has increased delays and decreased efficiency.
Although Ministers have always been coy about their motives, we have never had to look far for a motive, not least as the present Conservative candidate for South Cambridgeshire let the cat out of the bag in his notorious article in The Observer last September. We know that Conservatives wish to keep their motives quiet. They may be ungrateful to Mr. Andrew Lansley. On this occasion, Labour Members are grateful to him and we shall continue to repeat what he said in that article, because nothing has more graphically illustrated the real motives behind the Bill. He said:
Few measures have received such excoriation as the Bill from people who, whatever their wider political beliefs, care about justice and decent race relations in this country. For example, The Economist said that
"UNHCR is concerned that the proposals currently before Parliament focus on restricting access to asylum procedures in a way that may make it just as difficult for genuine refugees to enter the process as it would for fraudulent applicants."
"will lead to refusals and deportations of legitimate asylum seekers and that the introduction of sanctions on employers will increase race discrimination in employment and lead to a worsening of race relations in this country."
22 Feb 1996 : Column 546
"There is a danger that employers will concentrate checks on prospective employees whom they see as a risk, if not simply exclude them from consideration for the job. Either way there could be racial discrimination".
"with bureaucratic and inflexible rules, regulations, and practices"--
"Immigration, an issue which we raised successfully in 1992 and again in the 1994 Euro-elections campaign, played particularly well in the tabloids and has more potential to hurt."
"by promoting anti-immigrant policies the government risks encouraging racism and undermining liberty. It deserves contempt, not votes, for proposing this nasty little bill."
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