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Mr. Lidington: I would have had rather more regard for the Home Secretary's final tirade had he not been the then Opposition spokesman who fought tooth and nail against the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 and every measure taken by Conservative Governments to enforce stricter laws against illegal immigration and the abuse of the asylum system.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) explained fully during her remarks on the timetable motion that Conservative peers joined Cross Benchers, Labour peers and Liberal Democrat peers to support the Bishop of Southwark's amendment as the best vehicle for getting a further debate in this House about the way in which the Government's voucher scheme, which we have said repeatedly that we support, risks being destabilised by inadequate preparation and forethought on the part of Home Office Ministers.
The reason for the Home Secretary's patent embarrassment tonight has been the faces and expressions of his right hon. and hon. Friends on the Benches behind him. The last thing that he wanted, particularly this evening after proceedings on a different Bill, was a debate on an issue that arouses disquiet not just among members of opposition parties, but among many long-standing and loyal members of his own party.
We are entitled to be sceptical about the Government's reassurances, not simply because of their record in opposing Conservative measures to restrict the abuse of asylum, but because of their record during their two and a half years in office. There have been record queues, record asylum applications and record backlogs building up at the Croydon headquarters of the immigration and nationality directorate.
Mr. Straw:
The hon. Gentleman is surely not leaving the Opposition's support for amendment No. 135 there. Is that all that he intends to say about it?
What the hon. Gentleman claims about the position taken in the other place is simply untrue. Lord Cope said none of the things that the hon. Gentleman suggests he said. He said nothing about the amendment being a vehicle for debate. There are many other vehicles for debate. He said that he supported it. That is what the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald said. When she wrote back to me, she was trying to justify the content of amendment No. 135. Why has the hon. Gentleman changed his tune and backed off?
Mr. Lidington:
The Home Secretary fails to point out that when my right hon. Friend wrote to him, she made it clear that she was not prepared to take any lessons on the issue of asylum seekers from a Government who had presided over record numbers of applications, the vast majority of them bogus, and who had presided over the grinding to a halt of the processing system because of the mismanagement within the Home Office, presided over by Ministers.
It is no good the Home Secretary seeking to attribute all blame for delay and difficulties in administration on the situation that he inherited. His Department's annual
report a year ago, which I assume he read before putting his name to it, stated with regard to the immigration and nationality directorate:
The impact of that is seen in the additional expenditure that the Government have to find. According to a recent written answer from the Minister of State, Home Office, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Mrs. Roche), the budget for asylum seekers support, for which they had set a target of £350 million for the current financial year, will be between £450 million and £490 million,
Not only the Opposition but the Government themselves have linked delays and backlogs to the effectiveness of the new support arrangements which they plan to introduce under part VI. On page 40 of the White Paper, the Government said that they could not establish the new, faster asylum process, to which they were committed, without first tackling the backlogs. They also said, on page 36, that delays send a clear message to abusive applicants that the system cannot cope and is ripe for exploitation.
Earlier this year during proceedings on the Bill, the Government repeatedly made a virtue of their intention that the new system of support should be short term. In the asylum support information document published by the Government in March 1999, the arrangements embodied in part VI are described as:
Some Liberal Democrats may have strong objections in principle to the voucher scheme, while other Conservative Members support the measure in principle but are gravely worried about the difficulties that the Government face in implementing the scheme. However, there are real concerns about the gap that is opening up between the Government's stated objectives and the practical challenge that the Government face in implementing these complex new arrangements in the short time scale that Ministers have set themselves.
Mr. Marsha Singh (Bradford, West):
In 1996, the Conservative Government's removal of cash benefits
Mr. Lidington:
I am not sure what point the hon. Gentleman is making, but what I find extraordinary, and what I suspect he finds somewhat embarrassing, is the way in which Ministers, having denounced the measures introduced by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), now seem to be inching towards something which they believe follows in his footsteps even if they do not wish to alert their own Back Benchers to that fact.
The Government have set themselves a tight timetable for introducing the part VI measures. The voucher administration contract is due to be let at the end of this year. That contract will presumably have to arrange for the printing and distribution of the vouchers, for retailers to accept them and for a proper audit system to avoid fraud. All those systems must be put in place within three months flat.
The contract for the supply of Home Office-funded accommodation faces an even tighter time scale. That is intended to be awarded at the end of January 2000, leaving just 44 working days between the award of the contract and the new system coming into operation.
The sort of problems that the Government may face can be seen from their recent statements on the asylum seekers support agency. As recently as June, Ministers predicted that they would need between 100 and 200 additional staff to ensure that that agency operated efficiently; but less than five months later, the figure has risen to 512. That is between two and a half and five times the Government's original estimate of the number of staff that would be needed.
We have heard a lot from Ministers about the importance of the interim measures. There is broad agreement across the House that they are necessary to alleviate the burden on local authorities as quickly as possible but we are still waiting for the details, and we read in the newspapers of protests by local authorities about underfunding from the Home Office underthe current arrangements and under the proposed arrangements in the Bill. The failure to clear the backlogs means that the Government will have to operate a multi-tier system of support from April 2000. There will be no simple transfer from the arrangements they inherited to a brand new, sparkling, hunky-dory system of asylum seeker support.
I understood the Home Secretary to say that somebody who had claimed at a port before April 2000 would continue to receive social security benefits after 1 April 2000 until either there had been an adverse decision on the case and the applicant was awaiting appeal or until some unspecified future date at which an unspecified transfer arrangement would come into force to take that asylum seeker on to the new part VI arrangements.
"The situation has now settled, and the majority of problems have been resolved."
However, if we examine the check list of the targets that the Government set for themselves in the White Paper on asylum and immigration published in July 1998, we find that they are failing dismally to achieve the objectives that they had set, taking into account the situation that existed.
"a short-term, basic safety-net arrangement".
The then Minister with responsibility for immigration told the Special Standing Committee on 4 May that, in considering the accommodation needs of asylum seekers, it must be remembered that they are likely to be here for only a short time.
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