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Mr. Alton: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
8 pm
Mr. Smith: I will not give way, I am afraid, because I am trying to conclude and other hon. Members wish to speak.
The Government claim that they are seeking to ensure that Britain is a safe haven and not a soft touch. No one is arguing for a soft touch. We all want to root out bogus claims, and to do it much more quickly, but we do not want to deny legitimate, genuine applicants the means of life while we are doing it. For many entirely legitimate applicants fleeing from real persecution, Britain will become not a safe haven but, if the Government have their way, a place of wretched destitution. The Government should think again.
Sir Patrick Cormack:
I do not wish to detain the House long, but I cannot pretend that I am not extremely troubled by this series of amendments. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, with whom I have spoken, knows well that I am concerned.
There were three letters in The Times this morning. I shall briefly draw the attention of the House to them. One, from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of Westminster, is carefully and persuasively worded. One is from our colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir J. Critchley). The one that is really important, in my view, is from Dr. Perutz. I will not read it to the House, but I shall quote one paragraph:
I was taught to love Shakespeare by a German refugee who was not a Jew but had some Jewish blood. If he had stayed in Nazi Germany, he would doubtless have suffered, as so many others did. He came to this country and was given succour. He more than repaid the refuge that was given to him.
Sir Ivan Lawrence (Burton):
Is my hon. Friend suggesting that any of the people whose names were set out in that letter were claiming benefit? It was all
Sir Patrick Cormack:
I am tempted to stray, but I will not. The debate is about more than that. It is about Britain's reputation as a safe haven. I do not for a moment impugn the sincerity of my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench. I am sure that they share my view and that of Dr. Perutz, as expressed in his letter. However, I am clear that if the Lords amendment is resisted, we shall have made life more difficult for some people--I do not know how many, but obviously some. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Social Security has admitted that with his statement about retrospective payments. The very fact that he makes that statement makes it plain that he accepts that some people will be refused and will later receive benefit. That concerns me.
It concerns me that some people persecuted by evil regimes will come into Britain in a state of shock, bewilderment and dismay and will not in the first three days necessarily fully comprehend the circumstances. It is a modest amendment that their lordships have inserted into the Bill. All that it says is that three days' grace should be granted to such people. It was not proposed by outlandish people. Nor is it supported by such people. The Refugee Council is an extremely responsible body. The National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux is an extremely responsible organisation. Those bodies have to deal at the sharp end with the problems of refugees. They believe that the amendment to allow three days, modest as it is, will help.
It is important that my right hon. Friends do everything that they possibly can to separate the bogus from the genuine. I hope that not one Member of the House would want a bogus person to benefit. But I am afraid that I have to say that, if faced with the choice, I would rather that a bogus person benefited than that a genuine refugee was sent back to an evil regime. That is the way in which we have conducted our policy over the centuries. It is a policy that has benefited Britain considerably.
I do not see why it is not possible to insist on proof that the person came into the country within three days of the application. I do not see the amendment as opening the floodgates, so that every illegal immigrant could present himself or herself at a benefit office. That is not a valid argument against the amendment. I am prepared to accept that it may be technically flawed. I would not want to argue with that. I should be happy if my right hon. and hon. Friends came up with a series of proposals and formulae that would meet the point. No hon. Member would refuse to listen carefully to such a series of proposals. However, we do not have such a series of proposals. We are urged to reject the Lords amendment, with nothing administrative or otherwise to put in its place.
The reputation of this country is priceless. One of the things that has made Britain a great country--I believe that it is a great country--is the fact that it has been through the centuries a safe haven for those who have fled from desperate regimes and terrible conditions. Whether one talks about Louis XIV revoking the edict of Nantes, or those who came over in the 19th century fleeing pogroms, or those who came during the evil years of the 1930s from Nazi Germany, or those who are here now,
having fled the evil of Bosnia in the past two or three years, one is talking of people who have suffered desperately, for whom Britain is a beacon. Why is it a beacon? It is because of the standards and values that they believe that we encapsulate and personify. At our best we do. The Government would take a little step in the wrong direction and, unless my right hon. Friends can convince me by good administrative proposals or some other means, I cannot take part in voting against the Lords amendment.
Miss Emma Nicholson:
It is a pleasure to speak to amendment (d) to Lords amendment No. 24, to which my hon. Friends the Members for Rochdale (Ms Lynne) and for Liverpool, Mossley Hill (Mr. Alton) have also put their names. It is a simple amendment that would make means-tested benefits available to asylum seekers if the decisions on their cases took longer than 28 days. It would, we believe, mean that asylum seekers would not become victims of bureaucracy and would not be kept waiting too long for their decisions. Given the attitude of the present Government, it would certainly have that effect.
The strength of the Government's case for turning down last-ditch amendments such as amendment (d), which is backed by all the Church leaders, rests on two arguments. The first is the problem of drafting minutiae, which suggests that the Clerks of the House of Lords cannot do their job. I find that difficult to believe. The second has comprised a series of elastic personal guarantees from the Minister of State, which stretched and contracted according to the notes that she received from the Home Office civil servants in the Box. The Secretary of State for Social Security added his guarantees later. Those guarantees are worthless. Perhaps the latest ones from the Secretary of State are as invalid as the selective unemployment figures that he used recently in Southwark cathedral. While we have listened to those worthless guarantees, the moral minority on the Conservative Benches has sat on its hands when Divisions were called.
Why do I say that the guarantees are worthless? I must be the only person on Opposition Benches who voted in favour of the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993. I reread a little of the debate this evening to discover why, unwillingly, I supported the Act. The then Home Secretary, a man I trusted--now the Chancellor of the Exchequer--said in the Second Reading debate:
We should not confuse decisions and applications. The total of 4,170 decisions taken in 1994 on cases lodged in 1994, made up only 13 per cent. of the total number of applications in that year. How, therefore, can I believe the assurances given by Ministers tonight when the assurances given by a previous Home Secretary have proved so swiftly to have been invalid? The figures also show that applicants wait far more than three months for initial decisions to be made, and cases take years to
resolve. The decision may take only three to six months, but files sit in backlogs waiting to be considered. That may be the result of a lack of resources, poor planning or inefficiency. Current delays are impossible to justify now, but they would be completely unacceptable if applicants were to be excluded from benefits as the Government desire.
"Beginning with the Huguenots, asylum-seekers and their descendants have brought fame, health, wealth and even victory to this country."
He cites a number of eminent men and women who have come to this country fleeing persecution, have made it their home and have brought great honour upon it, and great wealth, too, in many cases.
"The Bill will achieve a better system for making prompt and fair decisions when we receive applications to settle in this country . . . That in itself will ease the pressures on all our public services."--[Official Report, 2 November 1992; Vol. 213, c. 22.]
Yet recent Home Office statistics show that, in 1994, 4,170 decisions were made on the cases of applicants who applied in that year, as opposed to 11,390 decisions made on cases lodged in previous years. The higher figure for previous years even excludes an additional 5,435 decisions for which no year of application was recorded.
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