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8.38 pm
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough): The Bill is designed to deliver Labour's commitment to a firmer, faster and fairer immigration system. If one examines the Government's record so far, it is clear that there has been progress in making the immigration system fairer, with the abolition of the primary purpose rule, the introduction of the right of appeal for people facing deportation on national security grounds, the current commitment to radical action to settle the status of people whose asylum claims have been in limbo for more than seven years, and the opening up of the instructions to immigration officers, which for years before had been secret.
I urge my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary not to rest on those laurels. The system is still extremely unfair. It is so concerned to exclude the unqualified that the rights of those who are qualified to remain can be sacrificed. In common humanity, we should accept a fundamental truth--that it is worse wrongly to refuse a genuine applicant than to admit one who is not entitled to enter under the rules.
What is the consequence of pretending that the opposite is true? It is to say to the racists who have constantly clamoured for new restrictions that their demands were justified. It implies that the public interest rests only in restricting access to Britain.
The Bill aims to be fairer by being faster. That is a concept to which I could sign up. I have always believed that the delays that have characterised the system for more than 30 years are oppressive to the genuine applicants who want to join their family or who are frightened victims of oppression overseas.
Delays create cynicism and unscrupulous advice. Government sound and fury, which we have heard for so many years, rings hollow when it has been blunted by delays that advantage only the person whose desire is to string out his or her stay in Britain.
If my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary examines previous reforms, he will find that it was claimed that they would lead to speedier decisions. In fact, they did not. Despite the claims of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) that the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993 would lead to decisions being made within three months, by 1996, the delay had reached 19 months. Now, asylum claims made before 1993 have taken an average of about seven years to decide. More recent applications have been taking 20 months. That was the position in December.
These delays are coupled with delays overseas. I saw recently one of my constituents who had applied for her husband to join her in July 1996. There has still not been a decision.
A crucial way in which the Bill is designed to speed up the process is by consolidating appeal rights. There is now a consensus that it is time to end duplicate appeals. I am concerned that the consolidation may not deliver what my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary promised us in a letter of 9 February, which was
I am concerned, however, that people who currently have the appeal that I have described available to them will have it taken from them in the interests of speeding up the system. That seems utterly illogical. This particular right of appeal was exercised by fewer than 900 people in 1997--some successfully. That is a small number of people when set against the 35,000 who exercised the right generally.
When the previous Government limited the right of appeal to those who had been in the United Kingdom for seven years, my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Mr. Michael), now Secretary of State for Wales, said:
There are other provisions in the Bill that might speed things up. For example, there are proposed new powers to give leave overseas. I am concerned that the 58 separate powers that the Home Secretary reserves to himself, or the Lord Chancellor, may not always be used as fairly as I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary would wish. It is the job of Back-Bench Members to ensure that there is legislation that is proof against any Home Secretary. It is important that we know exactly how it is intended to implement the provisions.
The key to speeding things up is the administration of control. I have said in interventions that I believe that the previous Government were grotesquely negligent in the way that they allowed the computerisation of the administration of control to develop. The aim was to create a paperless system, to start in September 1997. In desperation, the Home Office has, without fully evaluating its pilot scheme, rolled out the new paperless system--using paper.
The staff have moved to new offices, there are not enough chairs for everyone employed there to sit down, the people who were employed to carry the paper around are no longer employed and about 16,000 pieces of mail are unopened. Some of that mail is trapped in a basement, which people cannot get into because of fumes, and the whole system is grinding to a halt.
I went to Croydon on Friday to speak not to the managers of the system, but to the people who work in it day to day. Their accounts of how the present system is working are hair raising and their morale is as low as it possibly can be. I accept that the future plans, using a flatter structure, could, in the end, produce better administration, but it is clear that, at present, the information technology is unable to support them. What seems to be a deliberate strategy of not enabling people to focus on their areas of expertise will, in the short term, produce greater delays in decision making. An asylum worker who, perhaps, has experience of handling claims from the Indian sub-continent, and who is now working on claims from former Yugoslavia, will take longer to decide those cases than he would to decide others.
There is chaos and, in anticipation of the brave new computerised world, during the period of growing queues, there have been staff cuts. The 1997 annual report of the immigration and nationality directorate said that the increase in the delay in decisions about after-entry cases had gone up to 99 days, on average, from 88 days in 1995 because of the reductions in caseworking staff. Now we have the cheek to propose charges for that standard of administration.
I am afraid that I do not accept the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz) that charges would deliver a more efficient system. We currently charge for the administration of nationality,but it takes 21 months to decide a naturalisation
application--applications on which the Home Office nationality directorate made about £1.8 million in profit in 1997.
Faster administration is essential if the provisions are not to be draconian. Expecting an asylum seeker to live in a cashless society may be humane for a short time, but it cannot be reasonable if that is extended, even to the 20-month delay that current applications are experiencing.
Many of my hon. Friends have referred to ways in which the Bill will make the system fairer. Some ways will not achieve enough. For example, the provision creating a bail hearing for those who are detained sounds positive, but it is less stringent than bail provisions in criminal law, where people may pose a real threat to others if they reoffend. That provision is coupled with the new power, in clause 116, for immigration officers to detain someone whom they suspect may have removal directions made against him.
Already, this is the only area of law where people who are not suspected of a criminal offence, or of being a threat to others, can be detained. There is no provision, for example, to prevent the detention of children. Again, the interests of the state in detaining people--usually, I am afraid, for the unacceptable reason of a desire to deter others--are taking precedence over the concerns for the liberty of the person.
I welcome some of the bits of the Bill that are designed to make provisions firmer--for example, action against lorry drivers--but the scale of the new powers for immigration officers is perturbing, including powers to enter and search premises, and to arrest people without a warrant. An immigration officer exercising any of his powers may, if necessary, use reasonable force.
Those powers are potentially dangerous in a service without the extensive training of the police and without the experience, which the police have, of the consequences in other areas of policy of racially administered justice. The immigration service, unlike the police, is not overseen by an independent complaints body. I hope that that will be considered in Committee.
"a single, comprehensive appeal which would ensure that all the factors in a case are considered fairly and quickly."
The White Paper points out that in many cases, compassionate circumstances, especially those concerning children, come to the fore only at too late a stage. I suggest that those circumstances should be able to be considered at an earlier stage, and should be considered in all appeals. Under paragraph 364 of the present immigration rules, the Secretary of State must take into account on deportation all relevant factors known to him, including age, length of residence in the United Kingdom, strength of connections with the UK, personal history including character, conduct and employment record, domestic circumstances, criminal record, compassionate circumstances and any representations received on a person's behalf. It seems that if a comprehensive appeal was available, much of the business that we as Members are constantly asked to undertake would be unnecessary and that the real circumstances of the whole of a person's life could be taken into account on appeal.
"The decision to take away the right of an intended deportee to challenge the decision to deport him or her puts limitless power into the hands of the Executive. It poses such a serious threat to fair and just immigration control, a claimed objective of the Government in the implementation of their policy in this regard, that the whole clause should be removed.--[Official Report, Standing Committee D, 12 January 1988; c. 529.]
I am not in the habit of quoting Ministers and setting history against them because often it is not exactly relevant to do so. However, in this instance it isabsolutely relevant. We are doing what we condemned the Opposition for doing when they were in power--and
we are doing it worse. I believe that this will have the unintended consequence of causing people to make a claim for asylum to which they are not entitled because that is the only way of their having any prospect of getting the circumstances of their case considered. As a result of clause 16, those people will face an extra risk of criminal prosecution. When my hon. Friend the Minister replies, I shall be grateful if he is able to assure me that it is not intended to use clause16 routinely in that way.
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