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Mr. Gerrard: Lords amendment No. 17 is, in my view, extremely mean and miserable. Removing the requirement for people to pay at the point at which they are given refugee status—given the costs to the national budget about which we have just heard—will hardly break the Chancellor's bank. I suspect that the loan scheme will result in no great savings and will be messy to administer. Moreover, I do not know how some of the regulations will work. Clause 18 suggests that the regulations
"may make provision about steps to be taken by the Secretary of State in establishing an applicant's likely ability to repay a loan".
The applicant may have been in National Asylum Support Service accommodation for several months. He or she may have just been granted refugee status, and may not have been given permission to work. How on earth can such an assessment be made? It is beyond me.
I have encountered a number of cases in which people have been in financial difficulties when they have been granted refugee status, because they have been living on 70 per cent. of the rate of income support. They have not been able to manage on that. They have had to borrow money, formally or informally—often informally, from friends and relatives who have kept them afloat. Receiving money on obtaining refugee status has enabled them to survive and repay some of the debts that have accumulated—rent arrears, for example—and to make a fresh start. I really do think that this is a miserable, mean-minded change.
As for Lords amendment No. 16, I understand the arguments about local connections. The intention is to reverse the effect of a court decision made a few months ago. I do not think, however, that people will remain in the areas to which they have been dispersed. People who have been moved out of London will return because they have friends and relatives there, and they will not be able to secure social housing. Some pressure may be removed from individual local authority housing departments that will not be rehousing such people on the grounds that they are homeless, but housing
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pressures in general will not be dealt with. Those people will be back in London staying with family or friends, or struggling to find private rented accommodation.
Mr. Browne: Amendment (a) seeks to make it mandatory for the Secretary of State to make regulations enabling him to make loans to refugees. As Lord Rooker said in another place, the Government are committed to ensuring that there is a seamless transition between the ending of back-payments and the introduction of a refugee integration loan. I repeat that commitment; indeed, I have already done so. There will be no gap between the ending of back-payments and the introduction of a refugee integration loan.
I hope that that commitment is sufficient to reassure the House that there is no need to oblige the Secretary of State to make regulations enabling the making of loans to refugees. He has every intention of introducing the scheme as soon as the necessary practical arrangements have been made.
Amendment (b) seeks to make Lords amendment No. 18 read:
"A person is a refugee for the purpose of subsection (1) if the Secretary of State has within six weeks of his application . . . recorded him as a refugee".
One aspect of the proposal that I welcome is the implicit recognition of the major improvements that we have secured in reducing decision-making times. In 1997, the suggestion that all decisions must be taken within six weeks would have been so far divorced from reality as to have been laughable. By 2002, however, that figure, including decisions on backlog cases, was provisionally down to six months.
8.45 pm
We fully recognise the importance of quick decision making; it is good administrative practice and good news for asylum seekers, who will have less time to worry about the outcome of their claim. The importance that we attach to that is reflected in the published targets that we have set ourselves. For the previous financial year, there was a target to decide 75 per cent. of new asylum applications within two months—a target that we are provisionally on course to beat. Indeed, we have recently decided about 80 per cent. of new cases within two months. In addition, we have made massive inroads into the backlog.
We have no difficulty in being open to public scrutiny of our ability to turn cases round quickly, and we will continue to take steps to improve our current performance. Having said that, I see no merit in a rigid requirement in primary legislation stipulating that a decision must be taken within a specified time, whatever that period may be. In the majority of cases, it is possible to decide claims quickly and fairly. However, there will always be some cases that cannot be decided quickly if they are also to be decided fairly. Under the constraints imposed by subsection (1), we would be forced to take decisions without having the necessary facts at our disposal. I do not consider that an acceptable outcome.
Amendment (c) to amendment No. 18 seeks to remove the Secretary of State's power to make regulations that enable him to charge interest on an integration loan. It is the Government's current intention that this loan to refugees should be interest-free. Should a decision be taken to charge interest on the
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loan in future, I would expect comparisons to be drawn with other loan schemes in operation across government, such as the student loan system. I reassure the House that any future interest rate would be dealt with in regulations, subject to the affirmative procedure.
Taken together, amendments (d) and (e) seek to remove the power for regulations to confer discretion on the Secretary of State. The intention behind Lords amendment No. 18 is to enable the Secretary of State to ensure that in all cases a loan is made to a deserving case. We do not believe that such discretion would allow the Secretary of State to ignore all other provisions in the amendment, or to act in an unreasonable way. For those reasons—
It being after three and a half hours after the commencement of proceedings, Mr. Deputy Speaker proceeded to put the Questions necessary to dispose of the business to be concluded at that hour, pursuant to Order [this day].
Lords amendment No. 17 agreed to.
Lords amendments Nos. 18, 14 and 16 agreed to.
Lords amendment: No. 21.
Mr. Malins: I beg to move amendment (a) to Lords amendment No. 21.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: amendment (c) thereto; Lords amendments Nos. 22 to 27; Lords amendments Nos. 19, 20, 32, 40, 41, 33, 34; Lords amendments Nos. 1 to 13; Lords amendments Nos. 35 to 39; and Lords amendments Nos. 63 to 69.
Mr. Malins: Lords amendment No. 21 and the new clause on marriage could, so far as I can see, be re-titled "Procedure for marriage: the need to ask the Home Secretary personally for permission in each case, save where it is in a Church of England church". It is a most interesting provision.
The proposed new clause is important, following as it does much discussion in the past few months about so-called bogus and sham marriages. On 22 June 2004, I asked the Minister a written question about the number of alleged sham marriages reported to his Department by marriage registrars, and in how many such cases enforcement action was taken by his Department. The answer was surprising and rather troubling. In 2001 there were 756 notifications from 126 registrar districts; in 2002, there were 1,205 notifications; and in 2003 there were 2,712 notifications. Indeed, I understand that in 2004, there have been some 2,500 notifications of alleged sham marriages to date. In every case of a sham marriage there are likely to be two persons behaving fraudulently, so it seems that an awful lot of people are getting involved in some form of criminal activity at our registry offices—possibly up to 10,000, on these figures alone, in the past four years.
I was surprised, then, to read that in the last financial year enforcement teams in London were responsible for the arrest of only 110 individuals, only 37 of whom were charged with criminal offences. One begins to think that the Government were far too slow in finding out about the problem and certainly in doing anything about it. Is that a reasonable view for me to hold? I had a long interview with a senior registrar, whose comments I shall set forth.
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The senior registrar—there are about 300 in the country—talked about the problems that he had faced in the past few years in relation to sham marriages. He said that it was virtually impossible to stop people getting married even if he was suspicious, and he went on to deal with section 24 reports—the reports that registrars are obliged to make to the Home Office when they suspect a marriage of being a sham. There is a prescribed form for submitting such reports. He told me that it was customary to send them in by email, letter or fax.
Here is the rub. The registrar told me—I admit that this is anecdotal—that it was the experience of registrars throughout the country that although very many reports were sent in, there was "virtually no reaction" from the Home Office until a couple of months ago.
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