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Mr. Shaun Woodward (Witney): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Hughes: No, I have already taken two interventions.
Dr. Turner: Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman must calm himself.
Mr. Hughes: Liberal Democrat Members will show leadership. I am concerned tonight with establishing facts and how to proceed, but I also want to deal in particular with the leadership of the Conservative party. The hon. Members involved are behaving disgracefully, and they deserve to be condemned. As the Home Secretary rightly said, they do not merely seek to pander to prejudice, they positively misrepresent facts in order to do so.
Mr. Woodward: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. It is necessary to correct the language used by the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) and his grotesque distortion of statistics. He said that the vast majority of asylum seekers last year were bogus. The fact is--
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman must know that interventions have to be brief. It sounds to me that he is making a speech.
Fiona Mactaggart: He is only giving the numbers.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. We need only one Deputy Speaker in the Chamber at a time--and this is a good Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Woodward: The hon. Member for Aylesbury will know that, in 1999, 54 per cent. of asylum seekers were given protection, so is not what he said a grotesque distortion that will incite racism in this country?
Mr. Hughes: I believe that it was. The hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Woodward) is right about the figures,
but--despite all the variations in the world situation--the average over the past decade is that about 40 per cent. of applicants each year have succeeded at point of application. It is absolutely untrue to pretend that the vast majority of asylum seekers, either last year or over the past decade, have been "bogus"--to use a word that we prefer not to use.In tabling our amendment, we wanted to express how we see the issue in the world context. This country is worried about the numbers of people applying to come here, of whom there are between 20,000 and 70,000 a year. About 1 per cent. of all the people in the world who apply for asylum come to this country. Although many of the very poorest countries put up with huge numbers of people coming to their borders, there are those in Britain--one of the richest countries in the world--who seem to believe that we cannot manage to deal with the applications that come our way. Given the hugely greater challenges in central Africa and elsewhere, that attitude undermines our belief in ourselves and our obligations to others.
In Europe, we consider that the best solution is for the European Union to deal with the challenges at its borders. I hope that member states will work much more effectively to achieve a pan-European solution. For example, some EU countries positively want more people to go and live in them because of their employment prospects and age profiles.
Will the Home Secretary say how people can come here legitimately to seek asylum? I hope that he will accept that that is a proper question. If they cannot come by lorry--or even by aeroplane, in many cases--how can we fulfil our international obligations? There must be a legitimate way in which people can come here. If such a way exists and is known to exist, those who come here can be dealt with appropriately--more appropriately than those who scramble here illegally, or who are carried here illegally in vehicles that belong to other people.
The Tory election manifesto said that racketeers are flooding Britain with asylum seekers. We reject that, and do not believe that that is happening at all. We are not being flooded, in general or in particular, and it is not right to describe most of the people who come here as bogus. I say that because, until people have their case determined, it is not possible to know whether they are valid applicants. We cannot pre-judge applications. Each case must be judged on its merits. Some people who may have their cases turned down have come here because their life chance in their home country is hugely worse than it would be here.
Of course, some people may try it on; there are people who want to abuse and exploit the system. However, many people come here because they think that Britain is a good place to come to and they can succeed here. They want to follow in the tradition of hundreds of thousands of people who have, over the years, been received in this country, made their home here and made a huge contribution.
Many of us across the House are representative of families who have come from many parts of the world because of persecution or economic reasons. If we believe that we do not benefit from such an addition to our original native culture, we are doing ourselves and our international community a grave disservice.
Ms Abbott: Members of Parliament on both sides of the House have fallen into the habit of talking about
economic migrants in negative terms. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that economic migrants are the engine of great cities such as London and New York? Economic migrants, whether they are from Ireland, the Caribbean, Pakistan or West Africa, have helped to build London.
Mr. Hughes: I agree entirely with the hon. Lady. If those who think that it is wrong for people to seek to come here and better themselves thought about the number who leave this country every year to better themselves somewhere else, they would realise the hypocrisy of that position. The world benefits from people being able to move to where there are greater opportunities.
Mr. Iain Coleman (Hammersmith and Fulham): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Hughes: Let me press on for a moment.
There is another valid point that the Home Secretary made about the Conservative party with which I agree. I say this not just to the leader of the Conservative party and the shadow Home Secretary but to the shadow Minister for London as well. It concerns inaccurate figures. A press release set out, borough by borough, the alleged cost to people.
Mr. Coleman: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Hughes: I have said no. It has been suggested that the annual cost per household of so-called bogus asylum seekers is £160. I have the manifesto here. The figures are not only wrong for the reason given by the Home Secretary, because most of the money is reimbursed, but because figures, confirmed by the Treasury, and given in answers to me and the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) by the Minister of State, Home Office, the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Mrs. Roche), show that the cost per household is about £24. That is the cost of the system per year, but it has been exaggerated sevenfold.
Mr. Coleman: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Hughes: Not for the moment.
We have to address the way forward, given these challenges. We must address whether it is right to keep the voucher system, which my colleagues who dealt with the relevant measure consistently opposed. The test of the system is whether it is cheaper or more expensive as well as whether it is right. We have seen no figures showing that the voucher system will be cheaper. If it is not cheaper, the case for a segregating system cannot even be made on economic let alone moral grounds.
Oxfam has severely criticised the voucher system and the argument has been made in reverse by others. Not only do people have vouchers which distinguish them from the rest of us by not allowing them the same facility to buy food or clothes, they cannot even get change, in many cases, when they hand in the voucher. Oxfam says that it will not take the vouchers because it is degrading to contemplate accepting a voucher that is worth
more than what it pays for. Some of the commercial organisations that take vouchers regard the system as a revenue-making exercise.If the voucher system is to stay, will the Home Secretary and his Ministers kindly revise it so that change can be given? In that way, the system might at least have the confidence of organisations such as Oxfam.
Dr. George Turner: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
The Home Secretary asked how we would deal with arrangements on arrival. [Interruption.] It is a fair question, and we could have a perfectly proper debate on how to provide adequate accommodation. The Liberal Democrats assume that most asylum seekers are not criminals--[Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. On the Benches furthest from me, the hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) seems to be making an awful lot of noise. We cannot have that when an hon. Gentleman is addressing the Chamber.
Mr. Hughes: The majority of asylum seekers are not criminals, and we cannot assume that people will disappear simply because they have come to the UK. People should be treated decently and humanely when they arrive. Only when there is cause to believe that they will break the law should liberties that they could otherwise expect to enjoy be removed.
We have criticised the Government as well as the Tories, but they are not in the same league. In the run-up to this week, there often seemed to be a danger that Ministers were beginning to adopt the tone or the language of the Conservative party. Our consolation came on Monday when the Prime Minister made it absolutely clear that the race card should never be played. From now on, I hope that the agreement by Ministers that words such as "bogus" will not be used will be adhered to in all circumstances.
Criticisms remain of the system inherited by the Government. That system was not just left, but largely put in place, by the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald, who sought to change the system's administration, introduced an untried computer system and took staff away at the same time. All that led to the problems of 1997. That was the Tory legacy, and the Conservatives have absolutely no reason to be proud of it. They left our immigration arrangements in dire straits.
Since then, the appointment of case workers has been slow. The Public Accounts Committee made it clear that it took a long time before adequate extra funds were put into the kitty. Will the Minister of State tell us what additional resources are now available for case workers? It costs about £400 to process an application, and £1,400 a week to keep a family. What additional resources will be provided so that the backlog of cases, which is adding to resentment, which in turn allows people like the Conservatives to pander to prejudice, can be considerably reduced?
No Minister should suggest that any application will be prejudged. The Home Secretary remembers my criticism of him on that. I understand his response, and, of course,
the hijackers of the Afghan plane had to be dealt with under the criminal law, but there was, to put it gently, at least a hint that he had taken a view, and he cannot do that and simultaneously honour our international obligations.Another unhelpful set of remarks was reported by the press when it picked up on aggressive begging. I asked Westminster city council, which keeps ethnic records, how many beggars arrested last year had come from abroad. The answer was 20 per cent. We must not misrepresent people by suggesting that as they are asylum seekers or immigrants, they must be criminals too. People who have come here as immigrants are probably no more likely to commit crime than any other societal group. A police officer told me the other day that if we put 700 single police officers in such a building on £40 a week with nothing to do, we would have far more trouble out of them than we have from the asylum seekers in a building not far from here on the other side of the river.
The dispersal arrangements still seem to be shadowy, to say the least, and unsatisfactory in almost every respect. The Minister has an obligation to explain how many contracts have been entered into. My hon. Friends and I have consistently made the case that the idea of dispersal and of sharing the burden is reasonable, but only if people are sent to an appropriate place that has services and facilities and that is the sort of community in which they can settle. There is no sign that that has happened, but unless it does, bussing people around the country will have the same unsatisfactory consequences as one of the exercises of sending people to Glasgow so far.
It is a cause of considerable anger and frustration that those who have borne the brunt of the costs to date--the local councils--are still significantly under-resourced and have not had their full costs met. The figure for unmet costs is about £17 million. The local authority associations are still making the case. The Home Secretary made a comment about Kent on Monday. I understand the system, and that a tariff was set. However, as long as local councils are asked to pay bills for something that at all times should have been a national responsibility, there will always be the possibility of irresponsible people making mischief and causing trouble.
We hope that in the days to come and especially in the run-up to the local elections, the Conservative party will back off its dangerous approach. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in her criticism in particular of the Conservatives and less so of the Government last week, has suggested that it would be helpful if a meeting was held with her in the near future. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Inverness, West (Mr. Kennedy), the leader of our party, and I have accepted that we should have such a meeting, and we informed her representative today. I hope that Ministers will be willing to meet her representative again and that the Conservative leader and the shadow Home Secretary will do so too. I hope that they will go soon to see the people who are criticising them.
I hope that the Conservatives will realise that it does their party no credit to present our country as one that, when it deals with asylum seekers and refugees, in large measure deals with people who have no case and no claim to be here. Our country can afford to give our people good health, good education, a good police service and good pensions, but we can also afford to look after those who come to seek our help. Of course we must have a
fair system, but we must also have a system that lives up to our best aspirations and traditions. We have been in danger of going far away from that in recent months.
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