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Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe): Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Straw: Of course I shall give way to the right hon. and learned Gentleman. It was none other than he who was responsible for that Act. I am very happy to give way to him.
Mr. Howard: The Home Secretary knows perfectly well that the 1996 Act was working extremely effectively. [Hon. Members: "No."] The figures show that, in 1996, the number of applicants fell by 40 per cent. and that the backlog fell by 12,000. That is what happened under that legislation--until the courts intervened, effectively to subvert the legislation's effect. Why did not the Home Secretary legislate immediately after the general election to give that legislation its true and original meaning, rather than wasting three years in which the problem has spiralled out of all control?
Mr. Straw: I shall deal with each of the right hon. and learned Gentleman's points in turn. I am grateful for his notice of those points, which he gave in a letter to The Daily Telegraph. As I shall show, however, his Act failed.
Back in November 1995, the right hon. and learned Gentleman had the prescience to anticipate the Act's failure. Indeed, he wrote a long article in the Daily Mail, which said in the headline: "The Home Secretary"--the right hon. and learned Gentleman--"warns that if his Bill fails, the number of asylum seekers will double in five years". His Bill did fail. That fact, more than any other, is why the number of asylum seekers has increased.
Mr. Gale: Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Straw: I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment.
Mr. Howard: Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Straw: I am delighted to give way.
Mr. Howard: The Home Secretary knows perfectly well that the point I was making in that article was that, if that legislation did not get through Parliament--it was under the most ferocious attack from none other than the Home Secretary himself--the consequence to which I referred in that article would happen. The Home Secretary had it within his power to give that legislation its original effect. Why did he not do that, instead of wasting three years?
Mr. Straw: The right hon. and learned Gentleman is wrong.
Mr. Gerrard: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Straw: Allow me first to answer the right hon. and learned Gentleman, and then I shall be very happy to give way to my hon. Friend.
May I explain to the right hon. and learned Gentleman what happened after the passage of the 1996 Act? I should be very happy to place in the Library the figures on what happened after introduction of his Act. At first, the numbers did decrease. They decreased also--to 22,370 in 1993--after implementation of the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, which was supposed to solve the problem. However, after two years, the numbers had doubled. In 1995, to justify his proposals, the right hon. and learned Gentleman came to the House to speak of the relentless rise in numbers that had occurred under the 1993 Act--which had been introduced only two years before by the previous Government.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman said that the numbers had decreased by 40 per cent. The numbers did decrease, but--I am delighted to place the figures on the Table and to give him a copy of them--they were increasing before he left office. Moreover, they would have continued to increase.
The whole of the right hon. and learned Gentleman's claim is based on false statistics, showing that the numbers were decreasing, when they were not. The numbers decreased briefly, as they had in 1993, but then they increased. He is now erecting--neither he nor Conservative Front Benchers have ever done it before, at least within my hearing--a whole fabric around the idea that, if only we had appealed the Court of Appeal's decision affecting local authorities, everything else would have worked.
One of the major failings of the right hon. and learned Gentleman's arrangements in the 1996 Act--he cannot complain that he was not warned about it; he was warned not only by Labour Members, but by the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Brooke)--was that social security cash benefits were to be continued for those who applied at the port of entry. That would ensure that they would continue to act as a major incentive for people to come into this country, whereas those who applied in-country, however genuine their application, were simply to be left destitute. That was the point. That was the policy. Those people were to get nothing.
Although the right hon. and learned Gentleman willed that end, he had neither the wit nor the guts to will the means to achieve it. In not one word or line of the 1996 Act did he seek to do what he knew, and was warned, that he would have to do: to amend the National Assistance Act 1948 and the Children Acts, so that local authorities had no responsibility to support those who had been left destitute.
Mr. Gerrard: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Gale: Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Straw: I shall give way in a moment.
What then happened is that some applicants--at least a third of whom were genuine--were left destitute. If civilisation means anything, it means that we do not leave people destitute--unable to eat, with no accommodation whatever--regardless of the foundedness or unfoundedness of their claim. That was the right hon. and learned Gentleman's policy.
What happened next? Applicants--in the case of R v. Westminster city council and others ex parte M, P, A and X--appealed. The court at first instance, Mr. Justice Collins, said that Parliament had never, ever changed either the National Assistance Act or the Children Acts, and that, therefore, those duties plainly continued. That was followed by an appeal to the Court of Appeal, which said exactly the same thing.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman now asks why we did not appeal. As a matter of fact, the Department of Health, which took the lead on this, and local authorities--Hammersmith and Fulham, which is a Labour authority, and the City of Westminster, which is a Conservative authority--did appeal. They dropped their appeal only with the prospect of the new national asylum support system. It may have been three years later, but the consequence of rushing through legislation then, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman now suggests we should have done, would have been that 14,000 people who were receiving support from local authorities would have been literally--I am not exaggerating--thrown on to the street and left destitute without food, housing or warmth. So horrible was that prospect that, in my recollection, not once during the passage of what became the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, did any Conservative Member move amendments to that effect, although they had every opportunity to do so. I do not recall the right hon. and learned Gentleman himself proposing that until now.
Mr. Gale: Will the Home Secretary give way?
Mr. Straw: I shall give way in a moment, as I always do, but first let me deal with the canard about the numbers rising.
The second factor connected to the rise in numbers is Dublin--not the city but the Dublin convention on sharing responsibility for asylum seekers across the EU. I was made sublimely aware of that convention when I took office in May 1997. It turned out that it had been signed seven years earlier by Mr. David Waddington, the then Home Secretary. It was extremely convenient to the previous Administration that it did not come into force until October 1997. However, it is law and it is binding on us.
Before the Dublin convention came into force, effective gentlemen's agreements with France and Belgium enabled us to return within days applicants who could and should have applied in those countries. We are constantly asked why we cannot send back people who are the responsibility of another EU country. I wish that we could, but the Conservative Government stopped us doing that when they scrapped the gentlemen's agreements and instead imposed the Dublin convention, which has led to huge bureaucratic delays and the right of appeal for those who should have been transferred to third countries. As the right hon. and learned Gentleman knows, that is the truth.
Mr. Howard: The Home Secretary knows perfectly well, as he wrote to me about it only a few days ago, that the purpose of the Dublin convention was to facilitate the extent to which people could be returned to safe third countries within the European Union. The Home Secretary shares that objective. He has acknowledged that the Dublin convention is not working as it was intended.
His Government have had more than two years, with all the goodwill that they claim to have won within the EU, to get the Dublin convention to work as it was originally intended.
Mr. Straw: That is the weakest of many weak points that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has made so far. Of course he is right to say that the intention of the Dublin convention was to facilitate transfers between different EU countries. Not even I would have assumed that the Conservative Government were so daft as to sign a convention with the intention of making it more difficult, but as often happened under the previous Administration, there was a huge gap between intention and reality. I was complaining not about the intention, but about the reality and the fact that they did not think it through, just as they did not think through the 1993 Act. They certainly did not think through the 1996 Act. The right hon. and learned Gentleman asked me why we sought to amend it. I shall tell him. The gentlemen's agreements were bilateral agreements, which could easily be changed and they had to be scrapped under the Dublin convention.
I have often wondered whether we should simply scrap the Dublin convention, as it is mind bending in its bureaucracy and the difficulty that it imposes on good immigration staff sending people back. However, unless and until we had the agreement of the other 14 EU member states, we would have nothing at all in its place. So we have to continue with the Dublin convention. I have chaired article 18 committees of amazing tedium because of the structure that the right hon. and learned Gentleman established in order to try to get changes under the Dublin convention. We continue in our attempts.
The third factor was the previous Government's decision to downsize the operation of the immigration and nationality directorate and to impose a freeze on recruitment, all in the vain hope that the binding contract with Siemens would produce early and beneficial results. Staff numbers were cut by more than 500 at a time when applications were rising. By the time the Conservatives left office, the delay of which they are so proud was 20 months.
The previous Government were warned about that, and not by us. I know that, these days, he is certainly not regarded as a hero in the Conservative ranks, but the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Mr. Wardle) was once an immigration Minister. On 11 December 1995, at column 748, he warned that the investment that the previous Government intended to put into the new system simply was not enough to ensure that they could process the applications.
Fourthly, on why the number of applications have risen, I was glad to hear the hon. Member for Aylesbury say that no one should be so silly as to blame the Government for the civil wars in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq and a whole list of other countries. I am glad that the hon. Gentleman spotted that, but I might have been forgiven for thinking that I was to blame, even during Home Office questions on Monday. The hon. Gentleman was complaining about the rise in the number of applications. Four countries--Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Kosovo--account for 31,000 of the 70,000 applications for asylum that we received in 1999. Applications from those countries have increased by more than 12,000.
This time last year, the Government were under pressure not to take fewer refugees, but to take more refugees. As the hon. Member for Aylesbury mentioned my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister's role in the Kosovo war, I might add that, had my right hon. Friend not shown the statesmanship that he did in leading the intervention against the Serbians, Europe would be facing not thousands but millions of refugees.
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