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5.15 pm
Mr. Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow): I shall speak mainly about amendment No. 1. Over the past few weeks, my hon. Friend the Minister has listened to the concerns that have been expressed and he announced concessions on the support system in a written answer last week. His moves are welcome, but I do not believe that we have gone far enough. Amendment No. 1 would be a reasonable compromise. Many of us have serious
concerns about the proposed voucher-based support system. Those concerns are particularly strong in respect of children. The amendment is a compromise, because it would leave others in a support system that has fundamental flaws.
I shall deal first with the principle of the support system. Over the past few weeks, the Government have changed the way in which they talk about it. They initially talked about it purely as a deterrent. It has gradually become clear that it covers more than 70 per cent. of income support, and they have softened their approach. I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) that the support system was designed with the express aim of deterring abusive applicants. That is also true of other aspects of the Bill. There is a moral problem with a scheme that is designed to do that in the knowledge that it will inevitably also penalise the genuine. When some of those genuine applicants have young children, we should be concerned.
There are also practical issues. Is the proposed system better than the alternatives? Will it work? The Government are still saying that they believe that genuine applicants will not mind whether they are helped in cash or in kind, or what their location is. I seriously question that, particularly for families with children. I am sure that some of my hon. Friends will have comments to make about the effects of a voucher system on children. Location certainly matters. It matters whether young children are in the same area as others with the same ethnic background--children they can form relationships with, play with and go to school with.
We all agree that delivering the system with the concession that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced last week in a written answer depends on speed. At Question Time this afternoon, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister talked about targets, saying that an average decision time would be two months, or six months including an appeal. I am still confused about the meaning of the time scales. I have heard that the average length will be two months and that most cases will be dealt with within two months. That is confusing. Whether we are talking about an average or about most cases, it is not a norm that will apply to everyone. Some people will inevitably be in the system for significantly longer. That is important, particularly where children are concerned.
I am wary of suggestions that everything will be all right if we delay the introduction of the system. Let us say that the Home Office does not meet the targets by next April and there is a delay. Some of us have doubts about the ability of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to plan for the new support system in any case, but the worst that we could do to it is ask it to plan for that system to be introduced at some unknown future date.
One cannot expect any organisation to deliver efficiently on that basis, let alone one that has experienced serious problems--even if we are told that they are being tackled--over the past year or two. If the targets are to be met, why do families with children have to be put through the bureaucracy and complexity of the support scheme, with all the decisions about whether they will be supported, at what level and where, and all the administrative costs of the voucher system?
The key argument, which I have heard frequently and which the Home Secretary has used again today, is that cash benefits would act as a draw. Some of the evidence in support of that has been anecdotal, such as that we all know that lots of Poles or Chinese turn up, get their benefit book at the port and go off to work illegally. The only hard evidence that I have seen in any of the Home Office documents is the statement that the claim is justified by what happened following the 1996 Act.
That Act took away cash benefits from in-country applicants. I recall that the then Government argued that any genuine applicants would claim asylum the moment they stepped off the aircraft or boat. We pointed out that 36 per cent. of the asylum claims granted by that same Government in 1994, and 27 per cent. in 1995, were to people who had applied at port; they had recognised many in-country applicants.
The argument that any genuine applicant would apply at port was a load of rubbish; but now we are hearing almost the opposite: that a fraudulent applicant will apply at port, because that is how to get benefits. That is the logic of the argument that cash benefits are a draw. Let us examine the evidence to support that claim. It is true that after 1996 the proportion of applications at port and in country changed. Before, about a third had been at port; in 1996, that went up to 40 per cent.; in 1997-98 to 51 per cent.; and this year, so far, it has gone back down to 40 per cent.
One might have expected that trend to develop, but one would also have expected it to be reflected in the figures for acceptance for asylum or for exceptional leave to remain. If there were real evidence that the availability of cash benefits to port applicants was a draw, one would have expected the percentage of people who were being granted asylum or exceptional leave as port applicants to start to drop away; but that simply has not happened.
In 1998, 39 per cent. of all grants of asylum were to port applicants; that is the highest figure in the past five years. In the same year, 64 per cent. of all grants of exceptional leave went to port applicants; again, the highest figure in the past five years. The majority of the people accepted, according to Home Office statistics, had applied since 1996.
Let us consider some of the individual countries, as the Home Secretary did earlier. It was suggested that everyone from Afghanistan is genuine; 80 per cent. of applicants from there, in each of the past four years, have applied at port. For those from Yugoslavia--also genuine applicants--the highest figure for applications at port in the past four years was 54 per cent., and this past year it was only 40 per cent. The figure for Somalia has hardly ever gone over 50 per cent.
We are told that China generates all these fraudulent applicants. In fact, before the benefit changes, 71 per cent. of Chinese asylum applicants in 1995 were at port, declining to 60 per cent. in 1996. In 1997 and 1998, the figures were down to 26 and 25 per cent. The trend has gone the opposite way. It becomes absolutely clear when one examines the figures that there is no hard evidence to back up the simplistic claim that cash benefits act as a draw.
The fact is that the statistics have never been analysed. I have not seen the slightest analysis of the figures from the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to back up the claim. One can play with statistics in various ways.
For instance, there has been an increase in applications at port over the past few years from people from Pakistan. The best that can be said for the statistics is that they are not very clear. We should not base a significant change in policy--it is completely different from what we said in 1996, before the general election--on such dubious evidence.
A big mistake in discussing the asylum support system is to talk about it as if it were a right, which it is not. There is a gateway, and people have to prove that they are destitute to go through it. They will not all get accommodation and support in the form of cash and vouchers. The Home Office estimates in its asylum support manual that only 70 per cent. of families will get the full package of accommodation and support.
What happens to the other 30 per cent? It certainly cannot be pretended that they are getting more than 70 per cent. of income support to live on, because they will be getting only the cash and the vouchers and not, for example, payments for heating, light and electricity. There is no reason to suppose that they will all be abusive claimants. Where will they be? They will be living with other members of their family, with friends or with other members of their community, who will very often themselves be on low incomes. We are expecting the deprived to support the even more deprived.
I was amazed that the Home Office asylum seekers support document said that one of the reasons for setting up the system was
I seriously believe that we are in danger of hurting families with children. That is the reason for amendment No. 1. I am concerned about the whole principle. We are in danger of setting up a system which is wrong in principle, which will hurt some of the most vulnerable people and, what is probably even worse, will not work in practice and will end in a shambles.
Mr. Allan:
I give a small cheer for new clause 6. The Home Secretary said that he wished to see some recognition of the fact that the Government have, to an extent, taken into account hon. Members' concerns, and new clause 6 seems to go some way in the direction that we wanted. I would have given two cheers had the Government stuck simply to supporting amendment No. 3, which seeks to remove clause 108, exempting asylum-seeking children from the Children Act 1989, without then introducing the additional limited powers relating to section 80 support in new clause 6.
I would have given at least two and a half cheers had the Government accepted amendment No. 1, tabled by the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) and his hon. Friends, which is a much better solution to the problem of families with children. I shall reserve three cheers for
when the Government scrap the entire support system and revert to the more sensible and cost-effective benefit-based system, for which the Government argued at the time of the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996, but on which they seem to have changed their mind.
The time that people, particularly families, will be on the support systems is important. The Home Secretary reached for his pen and calculator as the hon. Member for Walthamstow referred to mean and average times. I am sure that the Home Secretary could build the d'Hondt divisor in there somewhere, as he calculates whether a significant number of people will be dealt with within two months.
As the hon. Member for Walthamstow said, if we are talking about averages, a two-month average could mean that a significant number of people were on the system for four months if another group of people were dealt with almost immediately. A six-month average would be even more worrying. If a number are dealt with at the beginning of that period, some will be on the system for 10 months, if we are talking about four months beyond the four-month average period for the appeal. Therefore, even under the Government's formula and even assuming that they meet the targets that they have set themselves we are talking about potentially considerable periods. There is widespread concern on both sides of the House, including on the Labour Back Benches, about whether they will meet those targets under current arrangements.
In the general debate about the support system, the Government seem to want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they say that the system is expected to be a deterrent, that they have the problem of people being drawn in by an over-generous system, so they have to reduce the generosity in order to deter people. At the same time, they seem to be arguing that it is a fair and humane system. Those two arguments are fundamentally incompatible. Either it is a harsh system which will act as a deterrent, or it is a humane system which, at best, will have a neutral effect in terms of whether people will choose the UK over any other country in which to apply to claim their rights under the 1951 convention.
Many of the arguments used by the Home Secretary when describing the support system could be applied elsewhere in the benefit system if he chose to do so. It is very much the Victorian poor law attitude; that the system must be harsh so that only those who genuinely need it will stick the rigours of the system. It is indistinguishable from the philosophy of the workhouse to argue that people who genuinely flee persecution will put up with hardship here, so it is all right to impose such hardship and it is a way of sorting out the sheep from the goats. That is an unacceptable approach to the delivery of a support system. We should be separating the sheep from the goats by processing their claims and dealing with them effectively.
I think that I share with many hon. Members the view that the most effective way to deter people from making unfounded applications is to deal with them quickly, to demonstrate that they are unfounded and then to send the individuals back to their country of origin. It is the time factor that is critical, not whether someone is receiving 70 or 100 per cent. of income support. The difference between 70 and 100 per cent. of income support is hardship for those individuals. It makes no fundamental difference to whether they apply in the first place. It
makes a difference only to their standard of living during the intervening period and, in particular, in the context of the amendments that we are discussing, the standard of living of their children. There are deep concerns about what that may imply.
The issue of principle is important when one considers the Children Act 1989. That Act was intended to be a principled piece of legislation. As has been said, it was intended to be applied to all children, placing children's rights at the forefront of any decision about their future and their support. It was not intended to be selected from at will. It was intended as a platform on which children's rights could be appropriately judged by the courts against any other legislation in respect of their welfare.
As a matter of principle, it is disturbing to see any diminution of a significant and landmark Act. The fact that we are prepared to enact such fundamental standards demonstrates the paramount importance of children's rights. The Children Act has worked well. It is depressing that we should tinker around or muck about to remove a particular category of children and deal with them differently.
We must recognise that the level of support proposed is inadequate. There will be problems. In many other areas, when considering levels of support and definitions of poverty the Government have never decided that people are adequately supported on 70 per cent. of income support. Even when one factors in additional fuel costs, and so on, nothing like an adequate level of support will be provided for families under these proposals.
We shall discuss the actual level in detail later, but, in the context of families, there is a particular issue, which is that when calculating support payments we can already come up with a formula that discounts the cost of utilities. For families, it is about £12 a week. That factor is built in, but it does not significantly increase according to the number of children. The amount of income support does increase quite properly, because children create extra expenses, but the utilities costs do not increase incrementally.
If we have a system as proposed here, where we end up with a proportion of income support being paid for each individual, we find that, relative to those on a regular income support system as proposed in amendment No. 1, the larger the family, the more disadvantaged they will be relatively. Each member of that family will have a proportion deducted for utilities costs in a way that would not happen for a family on standard income support.
Liberal Democrats' preference for the Home Secretary's system of support, if it is to come into effect under section 80, is to allow it to be tested against the Children Act. That is what we argued in Committee. If, as the Home Secretary said, the system can genuinely support individuals, why not allow that to be tested? Why does not the Home Secretary have the confidence that, an asylum seeker having been offered his package of support, the courts would reject any claim for support under section 17? We do not expect people in the UK on housing benefit or income support to go the courts and say that they want section 17 support under the Children Act instead, because the court would properly rule that individuals are supported, that children are not in need, because they have a means of support through the benefit system.
If the Home Secretary is confident that his support system for asylum-seeking children under section 80 is genuinely good enough for those individual asylum-seeking children and their families, I do not see why it would ever be successfully challenged in court, and why any court would decide that somebody had to have section 17 Children Act support.
"to contain costs through incentives to asylum seekers to look first to their own means or those of their communities for support."
I have searched in vain through all the details of the proposed support system for what the incentive for that might be--in fact, I can think of one very good one: it will keep people out of this rotten voucher-based system.
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