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Mr. Lidington: I give way to the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes), and then I will make some progress.
Mr. Simon Hughes (Southwark, North and Bermondsey): I am grateful. The hon. Gentleman repeated again a moment
ago the argument that the vast majority--those were his words--of those who came were bogus asylum seekers. How then does he explain the fact that of the decisions made last year, according to the official figures, 36 per cent. were recognised as refugees and granted asylum, and 11 per cent. were granted exceptional leave to remain, so that even before appeals were turned down, 47 per cent. were accepted?How does the hon. Gentleman justify the fact that the cost per household suggested in the Tory local election manifesto is £160, whereas the accurate answer is £24? Is that not just exaggeration to pander to prejudice, as Tories regularly do?
Mr. Lidington: I shall try to be generous to the hon. Gentleman. I shall deal first with his point about the figures for last year. If he looks more closely at the statistics for 1999 published by the Home Office monthly, he will see that between April and July 1999, when the Kosovo crisis was at its height, and before the United Nations suspended its evacuation programme in July and it became safe for people to begin to return home, there was indeed a very large influx to Britain and other western European countries of people from Kosovo who were fleeing ethnic cleansing there. That accounts for the statistic that he gave for the year.
If the hon. Gentleman looks at the subsequent months of 1999, he will find that the pattern that I described, where the overwhelming majority of applications for asylum in this country were found to be without foundation, was resumed. In fact, for the last month for which the Home Office has published figures, the refusal rate was back up to 90 per cent. of the total.
I am trying to be fair to the hon. Gentleman. There was a particular reason in three or four months in 1999 why a greater than usual number of applicants were accepted as genuine, but there has now been a reversion to the pattern that has been maintained over many years.
Let me deal with the hon. Gentleman's other point. I am quite happy to give him detailed accounts of the costs to local taxpayers of support for asylum seekers, but it comes pretty rich from the Liberal Democrats to start denouncing members of other political parties for exploiting the race issue. It is only few years hence, as I recall, that leaflets were distributed by the Tower Hamlets Liberal Democrats which were deliberately designed to exploit that issue. We read in this morning's newspapers that in Islington they have been up to their old tricks again.
With due respect to the hon. Gentleman, he should go and preach his sermons to his own party members before he comes and preaches them to us.
The present state of affairs is unfair to genuine refugees, and it is unfair to British taxpayers and British local authorities. They are bearing the costs of supporting claimants and their families. I am not talking just about Kent or the London boroughs, although they have borne the brunt; complaints have been received from Liverpool and Glasgow city councils, and Northamptonshire county council has unearthed £425,000 of alleged fraud on the part of people involved in housing asylum seekers under the dispersal scheme.
When confronted with what is going on and with public anger, the Government have two main excuses, both of which we have heard from Labour Members today. The first consists of blaming their predecessors. We expect that from the Government, because it is the most convenient substitute for a good argument and sound evidence, but after three years it has begun to wear thin. Let us look at the Government's own targets. Let us consult, for example, their 1998 White Paper entitled, somewhat humorously, "Fairer, Faster and Firmer". If we turn not to the headline but to the annexe--the bit that we are not meant to read in any detail--we find their targets for future years.
Let us look at the Government's published target for asylum decisions during 1999-2000: it is 59,000. When we look at the number of decisions that have actually been made, add up the monthly decision totals from the Home Office's bulletin, and add to that the total of 9,000 which the Home Secretary gave us in answer to oral questions on Monday, we find that the Government are going to undershoot their published target by some 9,000 or 10,000. That is not successful or responsible stewardship of asylum policy.
Let us now look at the published target for asylum seeker support. The target for expenditure in 1999-2000 is £350 million. What was the outcome? Well, asylum seeker support has gradually become more expensive as the financial year has progressed. In a written answer on 2 November last year, the Minister of State predicted that the £350 million figure would rise to between £450 million and £490 million; but today, in a written answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald the Government published a figure revised upwards yet again, to no less than £597 million. When we add that projected figure for the current year to the expenditure that the Government have undertaken since coming to office, we find that, in the three years of their stewardship, no less than £1.5 billion of public money has had to be spent on asylum seeker support.
Mrs. Roche: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his courtesy in giving way to me again.
If the House had been ill advised enough to accept the amendment to the Asylum and Immigration Act 1999 that was backed by the hon. Gentleman and the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe), it would have cost £500 million a year to restore income support, in addition to what we are spending already. What does the hon. Gentleman have to say about that?
Mr. Lidington: I say that the hon. Lady should look at the record again. She will find that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald said repeatedly that we were prepared to support a voucher scheme in principle, but that we lacked confidence in the Government's capacity to deliver a scheme that was capable of working effectively in the way the Government had promised. [Interruption.] We tabled our amendment when the Asylum and Immigration Bill came before the House. The Government did what they usually do when confronted with an uncomfortable debate: they introduced a timetable motion. As a result, not only our amendment
on asylum seeker support, but 365 of 367 amendments that had been passed in the other place were not debated. [Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I think we have had enough sedentary interventions from both Back Benchers and Front Benchers.
Mr. Lidington: As I was saying, 365 of 367 amendments tabled in the other place--mostly Government amendments, such was the chaotic nature of the drafting--were not debated at all by the House of Commons.
The Government's second excuse--here I come to the point made by the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott)--is that this is not their fault, because international crises have taken events beyond Ministers' control. Of course no Conservative Member would be silly enough to blame the British Government for the crisis in Kosovo, the actions of President Milosevic or the chaos in Somalia--although I find it interesting that, when an international crisis reaches a form of resolution, the Prime Minister usually tries to find some way of claiming credit for that success.
The question that I must throw back to the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington is this: how did countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, which were exposed to exactly the same international pressures as the United Kingdom, manage to reduce the number of applications during 1999, while--according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees--applications to the United Kingdom during that year rose by no less than 53 per cent.? Why has the United Kingdom now overtaken Germany as the country that receives more applications every month than any other nation in Europe?
Mr. Tony Baldry (Banbury): Is this not one of the reasons? In our newspapers we see photographs of camps near Calais, for instance, housing hundreds of economic migrants who are waiting to get into the United Kingdom. How can it be possible, under the United Nations convention, for a country such as France to allow that to happen? Surely, under the convention, people should claim asylum in the first country that they reach. How can the spread of such camps be justified--camps for economic migrants seeking to come to the United Kingdom simply because they think that our benefit regime is more generous?
Mr. Lidington: My hon. Friend makes his point well. I hope that the Home Secretary will give us an account of the representations that he has no doubt made to his French counterparts, and of the pressure that he has put on them to deal with those camps.
Many local authorities in London and elsewhere in the south-east are bearing tremendous burdens, despite the Home Secretary's recent and welcome move to extend the new support arrangements to Kent. Notwithstanding categorical assurances that the Government would be ready to introduce new voucher and dispersal arrangements from 1 April, the scheme seems to be hitting exactly the kind of trouble that Opposition Members predicted when the Asylum and Immigration Bill was before Parliament.
Last year, the Home Secretary told the House:
- New support arrangements have always been due to come into force in April 2000.--[Official Report, 9 November 1999; Vol. 337, c. 982.]
- The full scheme will come into force from April 2000 . . . Dispersal will be on a no-choice basis as regards location.--[Official Report, 2 February 2000; Vol. 343, c. 1065.]
May I put a couple of particular points to the Home Secretary? I hope that either he or the Minister of State, Home Office, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Mrs. Roche), will be able to respond to them later in the debate. First, are Ministers prepared yet to use the powers that they have under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 to designate reception zones in particular parts of the country and to take central control of the dispersal programme, which appears at the moment to be incoherent and ineffective and which has aroused considerable mistrust among local authorities--by no means just Conservative local authorities--in many different areas?
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