APPENDIX 15
Memorandum submitted by Neil Gerrard MP
There are a number of issues on which I believe
it would be valuable for the Committee to question the Home Office.
There is clearly a case for a policy of swifter
removal for those whose asylum claims have failed and have no
further appeal rights outstanding. The Home Office is now making
much quicker decisions on asylum claims. However it appears that
the policy of making swifter decisions has actually been applied
to those who have arrived in the UK in the last year or so. There
is a backlog of older claims. There is also a very substantial
backlog of cases where an asylum claim was rejected some time
ago (in some cases years ago) but where no removal action has
been instigated. Little progress seems to be being made on this
backlog, and in many cases the people concerned have effectively
become settled in the UK. The longer people have been here the
more problematic removal becomes. It would be worth asking the
Home Office what progress is being made on this backlog of older
cases (not just what the overall figures are for cases awaiting
decisions).
The changes which have occurred leading to faster
decisions on initial claims do not appear so far to have been
matched by an equal speeding up of the appeals process. Making
an initial decision quickly does not mean that the whole process
is finished quickly, and no removal action can take place while
appeals are outstanding. What is being done to speed up the appeal
process? (Some of this may be Lord Chancellor's responsibility,
but I believe some of the delays are failures in the Home Office
to process papers for appeals).
A major gap in the system at present is the
complete lack of co-ordination between decision making and enforcement.
It is quite common for asylum claimants to exhaust their rights
of appeal and therefore reach the point at which support is cut
off (if they have no children) but for nothing to then happen
in terms of removal. Someone who is destitute, and surviving either
on the charity of friends or by illegal working, is not going
to make their own arrangements to leave. Indeed they may well
be financially incapable of doing so even if they want to. In
many cases they remain here for months or even years without any
action being taken by the Home Office. (I saw two cases recently
of people whose cases had reached the end of the line five years
ago, including last ditch representations to Ministers by MPs
which had been rejected, but nothing whatsoever had happened in
the five years since). The lack of co-ordination between decision
making and enforcement is a fundamental flaw in the whole system,
and one on which the Home Office should be pressed.
We should not be in a situation where we allow
children to grow up in this country, with the family making community
ties, in many cases making positive contributions to society through
work, only to remove them to countries the children cannot even
remember. The current Home Office concession generally allows
families who have children who have lived here seven years or
more to remain. I am not convinced that this is a reasonable rule.
Any time limit will of course be arbitrary, but for young children
even four or five years can be a very long time to be here. It
is certainly long enough for families to see the potential for
their children to have a much better education and long term future
than they may face if returned to their country of origin. All
the inefficiencies in the Home Office systems contribute to people
quite genuinely becoming settled. Will the Home Office look again
at this concession?
The current incentives for voluntary return
are minimal. There are welcome proposals to assist people who
wish to return, and if these were developed (and better known)
there might be more people willing to take the offers up. The
Home Office should be pressed not just on the development of better
voluntary return processes, but on how they will make these known
to people who are affected and might take them up.
Constraints do exist on removals to certain
countries, either because the country concerned is still in a
state of upheaval, or because the very fact that someone has left
the country and claimed asylum could put them in danger if they
are returned. It is often difficult to see what the timescales
might be before it could be considered safe to resume returns.
What is very unsatisfactory at present is the way in which people
whose asylum claims have been refused are left in limbo. They
are not told the reason no removal action is being taken, and
simply receive a succession of temporary permissions to stay.
In many cases they will then assume this means no action is ever
going to be taken to remove them, but at the same time they are
unable to obtain legal work or do anything useful with their time.
There should be some sort of limit as to how long anyone is left
in this situation. I can think of cases where someone has been
in this position for two or three years, has in the meantime married
and had a child, but as far as the Home Office in concerned is
still just a failed asylum seeker awaiting removal at some unspecified
time.
Serving an appeal determination notice to someone
at their home and expecting them to travel to a removal centre
immediately, without giving them time to arrange their possessions,
is certainly not humane and should only be used in cases where
someone is failing to keep to reporting restrictions and prevents
as an absconder.
Generally however, applicants should only be
detained at removal centres, in the days immediately prior to
their removal. However, if a person is provided with removal directions
and fails to attend, action should be taken to ensure that they
are removed at the earliest opportunity. It does seem that at
present, due to the huge concentration on issuing initial removal
directions, such cases are not picked up for many weeks, often
months. What procedures does the Home Office have to deal with
people who fail to comply with directives to report for removal,
and how many people do actually co-operate with such directives?
October 2002
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