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Mr. David Lidington (Aylesbury): If the faster turnaround time for families with children is maintained, does the Home Secretary intend from 1 April next year to transfer families with children who are currently in the backlog of cases ahead of other applicants away from local authority support or social security benefits towards the new arrangements?
Mr. Straw: The most practical way to proceed is that people whose cases exist before 1 April next year should remain the responsibility of the relevant local authority. That may not last forever, but from our negotiations with local authorities it seems to be the least disruptive arrangement. We may proceed differently in due course, but if someone has waited a year or two years in a particular area, it would be unacceptable to require that person to move in order to meet a national dispersal policy. Typically, such people will have made arrangements for schooling, health care and so on. Financial responsibility will move to the Home Office, but we will not move people who are settled, for the time being, and whose cases have frankly taken too long to be dealt with. I hope that that policy is acceptable across the House.
In discussing our targets for families and others, I am talking about meeting targets for most cases, not all. Some families will inevitably stay longer in the system. In relation to other cases, we have announced that we will make discretionary payments to asylum seekers--families or single people--who stay in the support system through no fault of their own for more than six months, another
point on which concern was raised earlier in the year. There will be a single payment of £50 per person for an asylum seeker and his or her dependants. That would be additional to the normal support, and paid in the form of a cashable voucher. A further payment will be made in cases, hopefully small in number, where a person remains in the support system for more than 12 months.
The arrangements to be established under part VI of the Bill will be fairer than the present system. They will be better than they are for some asylum seekers at the moment, and in all cases, they will certainly be no worse. They make more effective use of available resources, and they will be a disincentive to those who seek to exploit the asylum system for their own ends.
Mr. Martin Linton (Battersea):
Would my right hon. Friend tell me how confident he feels of his ability to meet the targets for single claimants by April 2001? In the Select Committee on Home Affairs, I asked the Lord Chancellor a similar question about the target for appointing adjudicators to enable the targets to be met, and he said that he would be a very brave man if he answered that.
Mr. Straw:
I am a brave man, so I shall answer the question. We aim to meet the target. The target for appeal cases has already been met, although we cannot guarantee that it will continue to be met as the number of asylum claimants increases.
To put the matter in perspective, Ireland, which previously received no asylum claims, has received 1,000 applications in one month. Given the size of the Republic of Ireland, the proportion of claims is significantly higher per head of population there than in the United Kingdom.
The severe pressure on the Immigration and Nationality Directorate has increased. We are working hard to solve the problems that were caused earlier in the year by a combination of the computer system and a change of accommodation. I am happy to debate the terms for the computer system that the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald signed in 1996. She almost signed blind a contract that contained no contingency arrangements. I shall debate the matter with her or her deputy at any time. I shall make the contract available to
her so that she understands what she signed and why the combination of the contract and having to move to different accommodation created severe difficulties.
We have reversed the cuts in staff that the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald planned. We have employed hundreds of new staff; hundreds more are being recruited. I hope that we shall meet the two month plus four month target for new applicants by April 2001, but I cannot guarantee that.
As I have already made clear, if asylum applicants remain in the system for more than six months through no fault of their own, we shall pay them periodic single payments of £50 a head every six months.
Mr. Neil Gerrard (Walthamstow)
rose--
Mr. Straw:
I gave way earlier to my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), but I shall do so again.
Ms Abbott:
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way so gracefully. I am genuinely anxious to clarify the position of those whose cases form part of the black backlog. There are thousands of them in east London and other inner-city areas. My right hon. Friend said that such people would not be subject to dispersal. However, he also seemed to claim that the new support arrangements would apply to them--and they would thus lose their entitlement to benefits. Will my right hon. Friend clarify that point?
Mr. Straw:
On a phased basis, we intend to transfer formal responsibility for those people from local authorities. In many cases, we shall use the same local authorities as agents on behalf of the asylum support system. There is no argument between my hon. Friend and me. If people have waited for some time for the processing of a claim--whether it is genuine or unfounded; the circumstances of the transfer from their country are often traumatic--and have settled in an area, I, my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary and the officials in the Department have no interest in gratuitously disrupting reasonably settled lives. We shall transfer the responsibility for making payments to them, but that responsibility is essentially administrative. In almost every case, the asylum seeker will not notice the change.
Mr. John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington):
I would like clarification on the issue of periodic payments. Will my right hon. Friend advise the House how periodic the payments will be? When will they be reviewed?
Mr. Straw:
They will be paid every six months.
As this is a short debate, I should like to bring my remarks to a close. I shall do that by seeking to draw out from the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington), who is deputising for the shadow Home Secretary, exactly what has happened inside the Conservative party since Conservative peers supported amendment No. 135 in another place just three weeks ago.
In the debate on the timetable motion, the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald sought to suggest that her noble Friend Lord Cope of Berkeley had given
only qualified support to amendment No. 135 when it was debated in the other place as amendment No. 118. However, I have Lord Cope's speech before me and he gave unqualified support to the amendment, which would cost £500 million and would restore cash benefits to those from whom they were taken away as a result of the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996. Lord Cope said:
I understand the truth, and I think that everyone else does. As I warned the right hon. Lady in the debate on 26 October, one of the dangers of the kind of instantaneous opposition that she practises and her willingness to answer every telephone call from a journalist and then to give an instantaneous quotation, is that one ends up speaking before one thinks. That, of course, is exactly what she has done. There was a suggestion that I should not offer that warning to the right hon. Lady, in case she learned the error of her ways. However, she is so incorrigible that there is no danger of that.
The right hon. Lady thought that the amendment was a good ruse, so she got Lord Cope of Berkeley not just to support it sotto voce, but to add his name to it and to whip into the Lobby every Conservative peer, including hereditary peers, who could be found. However, she had not worked out for a second what the amendment would cost, but when I put the cost to her, as I did in a letter that I wrote to her and again on the Floor of the House, she thought that she could brazen it out. What she did not see in the debate on 26 October was the faces of the Conservative Members sitting behind her. Their faces were filled with horror at what she had let them in for--and she has let them in for something.
"Therefore I support amendment No. 118."--[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 October 1999; Vol. 605, c. 1147.]
I wrote to the right hon. Lady, expressing some surprise that she was going to continue to ask for arrangements that she had withdrawn from asylum seekers in 1996 and, more importantly, that she was going to continue to impose a severe burden on her constituents, on those of my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Mr. Prosser) and on those of every Member representing a constituency in Kent or in London. She replied and said that amendment No. 135 was sensible and common sense. I put that point to her in the House and asked her to understand what she had done, but she brushed aside my suggestion that the amendment would--as it is bound to--continue the existing burden on Kent and London local authorities. She said:
"Amendment No. 118"--
as it then was--
"was moved by the Bishop of Southwark . . . and was supported by us".--[Official Report, 26 October 1999; Vol. 336, c. 818.]
She said that without qualification. That was the right hon. Lady's view just two weeks ago, but we are now told that she has changed her mind. Instead, she has tabled an amendment that is, frankly, almost meaningless.
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