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Mr. Straw: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Sir Norman Fowler: Is the Home Secretary intervening on my present point, or the previous one?
Mr. Straw: The previous one. I accept that, as far as possible, we should try to reach an understanding with the Road Haulage Association and the Freight Transport Association, and we have sought to do so. However, is the right hon. Gentleman saying that hauliers should not face the proposed penalties?
Sir Norman Fowler: No, I am saying that the Government would be well advised to try to reach agreement with the Road Haulage Association and the Freight Transport Association, especially as both have stated specifically that they want to prevent the illegal use of transport by asylum seekers. I believe that the Government and the hauliers can reach agreement on the matter, and that there is no need for great dispute. However, if the Home Secretary and the Under-Secretary simply shout at the RHA and the FTA they will find that those organisations will shout back.
I mentioned the Bill's 50 order-making powers. The Home Secretary criticised the 1996 legislation for being a "blank cheque Bill", and he said that it gave the Secretary of State wide and ill-defined powers to use in regulations. The same criticism can be made of this Bill.
A crucial point about the Bill was made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale), who spoke about the need to combat fraudulent asylum seekers. The Bill's main aim is to improve the system of control. The Government want to speed up the flow of cases and to get quicker results: in theory, that will reduce the numbers staying here.
We hope that the measures are successful. If they are not, the words being used by the Government will be hollow and meaningless. We hope that results will come earlier than suggested by the bleak message of years, not months implied by the Home Secretary.
Immigration control is not just about how fast applicants can be processed. It is also about deterring false applicants from coming here in the first place. It is about reducing the flow of people making applications. Under the Government, that flow has reached a record level, and everyone realises that the flow of applicants to the United Kingdom depends heavily on the message that the country is sending out.
The Government are, with two groups, currently sending out a message that could easily be interpreted as meaning that if an applicant manages to stay here for a number of years, he will be able to stay for good. The first group of applicants are the 10,000 from before July 1993 whose cases are currently being processed. The Government say that there is no question of an amnesty for those applicants, but their policy towards those people is as near an amnesty as it is possible to imagine.
Unless those applicants have committed criminal offences with sentences of more than 12 months, or some other offences, they will be allowed indefinite leave to remain. There will be no check on whether they are genuine refugees; time waiting is the only criterion. We may expect that the majority of those 10,000 applicants will remain, irrespective of whether or not they are genuine. There is, I think, no dispute about that.
There is a further group of 20,000 applicants--although the number may be exaggerated--who arrived between July 1993 and the beginning of 1996. The criteria are also being changed and the test reduced, as outlined in the White Paper. The Minister of State says--what else?--that indefinite leave to remain is a policy pursued not only by the Government. He says that the Conservative Government followed it too, and did so in secret. Our policy was a secret only if one believes that what is said on Second Reading of a Bill is secret. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said on the Floor of the House:
Sir Norman Fowler:
I will not give way again.
There was, therefore, a basic reason why we acted as we did, but there is a danger of the Government's policy being interpreted as returning to that kind of policy. The message that we are sending out is that delay can help. The message we should send--not only to the 10,000, but, more crucially, to future applicants--is that such virtual amnesties will not be given on the ground of waiting time. Our responsibility is to genuine refugees.
Even more fundamentally, we must consider other issues affecting illegal immigration and political asylum. The White Paper that goes along with the Bill offers a departmental review. It concentrates on the system, and it is confined by Government policy. That is why I have suggested that we should have an independent review that would not be bound by the confines of Home Office policy and that could go into the many areas not covered by the Bill. A review could give the public an independent assessment of the scale of the problem and the necessary action.
The Government argue that such a review is unnecessary and such information irrelevant--indeed, the Home Secretary has just argued that point--yet in a
debate on 11 December 1995, no less a person than the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) made precisely the opposite argument. He said:
The sort of inquiry I have in mind is not a 12-man team or anything of that sort, but one of the type that was once set up by a Labour Government--albeit by Roy Jenkins, whose name might not help my case with Labour Members. That was the Mountbatten inquiry into prison security, which worked with two assessors and produced its report quickly. It did not delay action, but produced a report that did much to settle the prison security issue for decades to follow. If there was a case to go outside the Home Office on that issue, it is doubly strong on the issue of illegal immigration and the abuse of political asylum.
I should like to suggest four areas in which an independent inquiry would substantially have helped policy and might help in future. First, an inquiry should look at the strength and the management of the immigration service. The number of people its staff deal with has increased and increased again. The more effective the service is in dealing with illegal immigration, the more we save on the welfare bill. It is a crucial subject that would benefit from an independent, rather than a departmental, review.
Secondly, an inquiry should examine more strenuously the scale of the problem. There are disputes about the cost of political asylum and about the numbers involved.
Fiona Mactaggart:
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Sir Norman Fowler:
No, I shall not give way again. In the White Paper, the Government refer to 20,000 waiting political asylum applicants between 1993 and the beginning of 1996, but we learn from an answer to a parliamentary question that I received last week that that estimate is likely to be reduced. There are a whole range of similar issues, such as the number of people who arrive without documents, on which the Home Office says there are no figures.
Thirdly, the inquiry should look at the number of asylum seekers who manage to disappear into this country, even though their application has failed--presumably, no one would defend such actions. The Government estimate that there are 20,000 asylum absconders, but an estimate by the former secretary of the Law Society's immigration sub-committee puts the figure at double that number, and the immigration service union reckons it is treble that number. The public are entitled not only to have the most accurate estimate--it will necessarily be an estimate--but, above all, to know why so many are able to disappear in that way and what action can be taken to prevent it.
"Let me explain carefully this absolutely critical point. Although in recent years we have granted full asylum in only a relatively small number of cases, we have felt obliged, because of the delays, to grant exceptional leave to remain in others. The practice has been to grant such leave in cases where the applicants do not qualify for asylum but where it has been judged that, in all the circumstances--including their circumstances through the years while they have waited for a decision--it would be unreasonable or impracticable to seek to enforce their return to their country of origin. In recent years, as many as 60 per cent. of those who applied for asylum have had that application refused, but have then been granted exceptional leave to remain instead."
My right hon. and learned Friend was absolutely open about the position. Crucially, he went on:
"That is not acceptable and it encourages people to make groundless claims because that will delay the process for so long--or the decisions will be delayed by the inadequacies of the system--to such an extent that they will not eventually be required to leave. I want to reduce that number significantly."--[Official Report,2 November 1992; Vol. 213, c. 27.]
Mr. Gerrard:
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
"We need much better evidence about the scale of the problem, and why enforcement is so poor in so many areas. We need to know whether the proposed offences aimed at racketeering will be effective. We also need an examination of other measures that might be taken".--[Official Report, 11 December 1995; Vol. 268, c. 716.]
The right hon. Gentleman advocated the setting up of a Special Standing Committee. I understand the case for such a Committee and I am sure that it would be useful, but let us be frank: a Special Standing Committee is not an inquiry. The Special Standing Committee that is to be set up will have four sittings; it will take evidence from various groups and individuals, but it will have neither the time nor the backing to dig into the subject as it should.
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