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Mr. Gale: I am grateful to the Home Secretary. I understand his desire to put some verbal distance between my request that he give way and his assertion that tonight was the first time that he knew of the recommendations by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard). Is he willing to place in the Library the record of the meeting held between my right hon. and learned Friend, myself and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien) in October 1997, in which every single remedy recommended this evening by my right hon. and learned Friend was mentioned? Unless the Government have a dishonest record of that meeting, he will find that all those recommendations and warnings were made then, but the Government took no action whatever.
Mr. Straw: That was certainly worth waiting for. I am delighted to place the minutes of that meeting in the Library. I am sure that there will be a queue a mile long of hon. Members waiting to read them.
Mr. Gale: They may be in for a surprise.
Mr. Straw: If the hon. Gentleman asserts that we should have put more than 14,000 people on the streets with nowhere to live, nothing to eat and no warmth, I am happy to give way to him again.
Mr. Gale: I am simply saying that the problems that were arising in October 1997, with the flood of immigrants from the Czech and Slovak Republics, had been drawn to the Government's attention by my right hon. and learned Friend and myself. The remedies suggested by my right hon. and learned Friend tonight were mentioned at that meeting. It is a matter of record and I am delighted that the Home Secretary has agreed to place the minutes in the Library. The record, if it is honest, will show what was said at that meeting, and the Home Secretary should have known about it then.
Mr. Straw: There was not quite a yes or a no in that. I do not remember the hon. Gentleman mentioning Slovakia and the Czech Republic earlier. I took early action on Slovakia by the imposition of a visa regime. We have always made our position clear, as we have in respect of Ecuador, Colombia and several other countries, and we shall continue to do so.
This is a short debate, thanks to the fact that the Conservatives decided to shorten it by voting twice on their own motion, but I want to set out the actions that we are taking to tackle the problems. We are strengthening our immigration control the better to tackle those who abuse the system. The immigration service is recruiting at least 700 operational staff this calendar year--a 25 per cent. increase--and a further expansion is planned for early next year.
We are also giving immigration officers new powers. The hon. Member for Aylesbury spoke about what I think he called a removal service, and suggested that we should give the officers powers of arrest. But for a new label on the door, we have done that: it is called the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. The Act contains all the additional powers of arrest that any officers require to secure the better removal of those who are here unlawfully.
A crucial part of strengthening control is something that the hon. Gentleman was eloquent about in his silence. Not once did we hear anything either for or against the imposition, which came into force at the beginning of April, of a civil penalty of £2,000 on hauliers who are found unreasonably to have clandestine illegal immigrants in the backs of their lorries.
Miss Ann Widdecombe (Maidstone and The Weald): We are against it.
Mr. Straw: The right hon. Lady, who has miraculously found her voice--I am very glad that I have been able to find a cure for her--and the hon. Member for Aylesbury owe it to the country, when they are setting out their plan for the immigration service and for tackling the problems, to say whether they will remove the penalty on hauliers who knowingly, recklessly or negligently have clandestine illegals in the back of their trucks.
Prior to implementation of the penalty 10 days ago, 2,000 or so people were being caught every month coming to the United Kingdom in that way. I am pleased to tell the House that the penalty is being used. Up to yesterday afternoon, notices of penalty under the legislation had been served in respect of 30 vehicles, three of which were dealt with in Coquelles in France, where the 12 clandestine entrants were returned to the French authorities. The right hon. Lady now says that we should not have that effective control, even operating in France. That is saying one thing and doing exactly the opposite.
Two vehicles have been detained, one pending payment in respect of 50 clandestines found in the back. No one is telling me that one can drive a lorry containing 50 clandestines and not know that they are there. That lorry has been detained pending payment of a charge of £100,000. The whole country will be delighted and interested to know that the right hon. Lady is on the side of the truck driver with 50 clandestines in the back, and not on the side of the rule of law.
Mr. Simon Hughes: I share the Home Secretary's view that there needs to be control of vehicles so that people do not seek to come in in the back of lorries or hanging on to the undercarriage, but by what legal method can an asylum seeker from Sri Lanka, Slovakia or Afghanistan, say, with family here get to Britain to make a claim?
Mr. Straw: Those who come through another European country--all those who arrive by road or sea must do that, unless my geography is completely inaccurate--should have applied in that country. Those who arrive by air, if they have not come from a safe third country, are our responsibility, regardless of whether they have broken immigration rules. That is how the system works.
Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury): The Home Secretary has been generous in giving way. While he is talking
about whose responsibility the asylum seekers are, will he answer the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury, as well as in an early-day motion signed by several Labour Members who are now in the Chamber, that secure race relations in this country must be on the basis of central Government taking full financial responsibility for asylum seekers rather than leaving it to a few local authorities?
Mr. Straw: That is exactly the purpose of our national asylum support system. We did not believe that it was fair on a few local authorities, such as the London boroughs, Kent and the Medway unitary authority, to have those responsibilities, and that is why we are relieving them of them.
The figures show that we have reimbursed Kent every penny of the expenditure that is the responsibility of the Home Office. I accept, as I said on Monday, that there is £700,000 in dispute for unaccompanied minors, who are at present the responsibility of the Department of Health. I cannot make an absolute promise, but I hope that it will be possible properly to resolve that dispute. I accept that, subject to the issue of unit costs, which will always have to be a matter for examination, central Government should of course accept responsibility for what is a national, not a local problem.
When we came to office, an asylum decision took 20 months and the number of staff was going down, not up. By contrast, we are investing heavily in the casework system, and 300 caseworkers have been recruited, doubling the number. Altogether, there has been a 27 per cent. increase and 1,400 more staff have been taken on in the immigration and nationality directorate. In March, more than 10,000 asylum decisions were made--another record, and four times the monthly average for the last three months of last year.
The problem of multiple appeals was left completely untouched by the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe. People could appeal against a decision, go to the tribunal and go to judicial review, and the moment a removal direction was issued they could appeal against it--three more stages--and then they could appeal against a deportation action. There was not a line in either the 1993 or the 1996 Act to deal with that.
Under the 1999 Act, under provisions coming into force on 2 October, there will be one-stop appeals. In the recent Ben James decision, the chief adjudicator said:
- This case underlines in a very acute way the necessity for the implementation at the first possible opportunity of the provisions contained in the Immigration and Asylum Act . . . in relation to one stop appeals.
- it is very unlikely that--
- this claim for asylum, which took many years to investigate and try, would ever have got off the ground at all.
Mr. Straw: Yes. Not only have we taken on more staff, but at Croydon and the other offices a huge effort is being
devoted to ensuring greater consistency of decisions. In addition, the immigration appeal tribunal has been upgraded. It is now presided over by Mr. Justice Collins, a High Court judge of considerable experience. I commend him and all the adjudicators and staff in the Lord Chancellor's Department, as well as in the Home Office, for all the work that is being undertaken to ensure that the system is properly joined up and that higher-quality decisions are made than in the past.Of course, we also have to remove people from this country as quickly as possible. Removals have not been as fast as they should be, not least because of the huge delays that have taken place. It is the delays in the system, more even than the total number waiting in the queue, that fundamentally lie behind the problems of removals. That said, 7,100 failed asylum seekers were removed in 1997 and, despite the difficulty of Dublin, that has been increased to 7,650 last year. Much better regional enforcement capacity is being established. An increase in the use of charter flights is being developed. The Oakington processing centre is operational and detention space is being expanded.
One of the issues raised by the hon. Member for Aylesbury and which has been a theme of this debate is the new system of asylum support. We had to introduce a new system, not least to remove the burden on authorities such as Kent and those in London. The national asylum support system started its work on 3 April. All new port applicants are now on the system. As I told the House on Monday, it will apply to all new in-country applicants in Kent from next Monday and will be rolled out to the rest of the country soon.
The new system replaces cash social security benefits and local authority provision with an offer of vouchers for food, clothing and essentials with a small cash top-up and one offer of accommodation outside the south-east. The package of support will ensure that no asylum seeker is left destitute, and will relieve the unfair burden that has fallen on councils in the south-east of England.
Somewhat defensively, the hon. Member for Aylesbury said that there was no place for racism or xenophobia in the discussion of asylum and immigration. I take him at his word, but I have to say that it is impossible to read some of the documents that the Conservatives have produced, including their manifesto and a press release from the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin), without forming the view that they have an agenda other than that of solving the problem of asylum in this country.
In a news report in the Colchester Evening Gazette, the hon. Gentleman claimed that Essex taxpayers were having to pick up a bill for nearly £700,000 thanks to bogus claims, which equated to 90 new police officers locally. That report was based on a press release that the hon. Gentleman had issued, which claimed that asylum now cost London taxpayers £180 million a year, which was £63 per household and the equivalent of 5,000 new police officers. Throughout, it implied that local taxpayers were having to pay that amount, when the truth is--it is even half-admitted in the small print of the press release--that every penny is reimbursed by the Government wherever the unit costs are being met. Even if there is some argument about the unit costs, the difference on the most generous estimates costs £1 per local taxpayer per year.
Will we hear an apology for such propaganda, which is peddling a big lie? Given the signature that the Leader of the Opposition appended to the statement by the
Commission for Racial Equality about the need for everybody to avoid inflammatory language and inflammatory actions, I say to the Conservatives that such stuff as that press release is reminiscent of the big lie. It is put out not because it is true, but because it is untrue and designed for one purpose only--to stir up anxieties where none should exist.I am sorry to say that we have heard all this before. It is not as if the Tory party has an unblemished record on the issue of race and immigration. The hon. Member for Aylesbury mentioned the Ugandan Asians and some of us are old enough to remember the sort of stuff that emanated from the Tory Opposition in the 1960s, time and again. We do not have to look in the crystal ball, because we can see it in the book. In 1995, the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) said--[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Worthing, West (Mr. Bottomley) looks perplexed by the reference to the Ugandan Asians, but that subject was raised by the hon. Member for Aylesbury.
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