Examination of Witnesses (Questions 880-899)
BEVERLEY HUGHES
MP, MR BILL
JEFFREY AND
MR KEN
SUTTON
19 NOVEMBER 2003
Q880 Mr Clappison: I put that second
question to you because the Mayor of London has called for more
consultation on the details to ensure that legitimate refugee
groups are not discouraged from offering advice. But you feel
confident that groups who give good advice will not be affected?
Beverley Hughes: I think that
is true.
Q881 Mr Singh: I want to raise the
issue of the new criminal offence that you are proposing if people
advertise or offer immigration advice when they are not qualified
to do so. What is the definition of being qualified to provide
advice in the immigration field?
Beverley Hughes: I will have to
pass on that.
Mr Jeffrey: I think it is essentially
something that the Commissioner himself makes the judgment on,
but it might be sensible if we ask the Minister to write to you
about it afterwards.[3]
Q882 Mr Singh: I think there should
be some criteria.
Beverley Hughes: There are criteria,
but I cannot give you them at this point.
Chairman: I hope it does not apply to
Members of Parliament giving immigration advice in their surgeries!
Minister, since you last came to see us, there have been two or
three other government announcements that are relevant to our
inquiry.
Q883 Janet Anderson: Minister, I
know that you have been taking increased measures recently to
crack down on illegal working. I wonder if you could perhaps tell
us a bit about that. Also, the Home Secretary is on the record
as saying he would like to work to build tolerance and enthusiasm
for legal migration. Will it be possible to persuade the general
public of the benefits of managed immigration, when there is still
widespread concern about the scale of illegal immigration? It
is about getting the balance right.
Beverley Hughes: I think that
is absolutely right, and that is what the Home Secretary was saying
in his speech and in the follow-on to the speech last week. We
have taken the view—and it is why we have started off so
strongly on tackling the problems of asylum and illegal migration,
of which asylum claims are but a symptom—that we believe
profoundly that the public will not feel confident both about
legal migration, better integration and resettlement of genuine
refugees unless we can demonstrate that we have a system that
is controlling illegal immigration and clamping down on illegal
working that follows from that. That has been a core strand of
what we have been trying to do. We have to demonstrate that. We
have to do better on that side in order to argue the case for
managed migration and for tolerance and acceptance of newcomers
who come here either legally or because we do think they are refugees.
Q884 Janet Anderson: Do you think
identity cards would help?
Beverley Hughes: We do think identity
cards not only will help but with some parts of those problems
they are actually essential. I know we have been criticised for
not being able to say who is in the country at any one time and
so on, but you cannot do that unless you have got some means of
identifying people coming in but also going out. You cannot check
people going out of the country unless you have got electronic
means of doing so. Just on that point alone I think identity cards
are a very important step we have got to take if we want to have
embarkation controls and back again and the Home Secretary has
said he is looking at that. I have been working with a group from
across the industry for the last 12 months to see if we can strengthen
Section 8 of the previous Act and it is very difficult because
there is no single document that employers can ask to see that
establishes whether somebody has got the right to work. It is
very difficult in that situation, as I have said to the Committee
before, to bring prosecutions against employers if the statutory
defence that they have got is just so loose that it makes conviction
very difficult, whereas establishing the right to work very clearly
would enable us to crack down much more forcibly on the employers'
side of that. Having said that, although the conviction of employers
is difficult at the moment for reasons I have outlined, on the
enforcement side we have improved dramatically the activity that
is going on there, and I wrote to the Chairman with an account
of the various operations that have taken place, the number of
disruptions, of gangmasters and the number of removals of people
immediately following some of those higher level operations (and
by higher level I mean those who only think we are going to find
a significant number of illegal workers) and something like 50%
this quarter compared to last quarter and substantial numbers
of people were removed immediately after the operation.
Q885 Miss Widdecombe: Minister, shortly
after this Government took power it announced an amnesty for 23,000
asylum seekers who have not had their cases examined. The Home
Secretary has recently announced an amnesty for 15,000 asylum
seekers whose cases have been refused, which together with their
dependents is likely to be anything up to 50,000 asylum seekers.
It was described as a one-off administrative convenience to clear
the backlog. There are now reports, which I would be grateful
for confirmation of denial of, that the Home Secretary is proposing
to legalise people who are now working in the black economy and
so long as they declare themselves they will be legalised, which
is another name for an amnesty. Do you accept that the message
that you are sending out is if you come to Britain and you can
delay things for long enough or you can disappear for long enough
it is okay, old chap, because in the end there will be a one-off
administrative action to clear the backlog?
Beverley Hughes: No, I do not
accept that at all. Firstly, there are absolutely no plans at
all to allow illegal workers to somehow regularise their position
in this country.
Q886 Miss Widdecombe: So the reports
are false?
Beverley Hughes: What the Home
Secretary was speculating on then was actually in the context
of a discussion around ID cards. The point he was making is that
thinking ten years ahead, when the whole population is registered
on the national database and has an ID card, the government of
the day at that point, whoever that might be, will have to answer
the question what do we do about the people who are here illegally
who cannot, unless we do something, come forward and register.
Q887 Miss Widdecombe: Is not the
whole purpose of ID cards to discover those people?
Beverley Hughes: Exactly, but
the government of the day will then have to answer the question
what do we do about them because they will not be able to apply
for an identity card. So it is not a policy or an intention he
was posing in that discussion and I was there, he was simply saying
when we get to that point in time the government of the day will
have to address that issue and it may be at that point that the
government of the day might take the view that one of the options
is to invite people who have been here contributing and working
and are not causing a problem to come forward to be regularised.
Q888 Miss Widdecombe: Contributing
tax and national insurance.
Beverley Hughes: Exactly.
Q889 Miss Widdecombe: In the black
economy.
Beverley Hughes: That would be
one option but it is not the only option and that was the point
he was making. As I have just said in reply to Mrs Anderson, it
is absolutely imperative that we continue with the policy that
we have had over the past few years of making it the number one
priority to bear down on the issue of immigration and illegal
working and we will not reduce the pressure on that at all, we
think it is absolutely fundamental to doing what we also want
to do, which is argue a case for managed migration where the economy
needs it, and secondly, having better solutions for genuine refugees
worldwide and it is an essential part of that three strand policy.
On the ILR exercise, the previous exercise of this Government
in 1998 was a completely different exercise and it was the clearing
of a backlog of people who for reasons we have discussed before
at this Committee had been in the system for a very long time.
This particular exercise was very targeted, it was for a particular
reason, it was to regularise the position of people who had arrived
here before the implementation on 2 October 2000 of the new legislation
that we have talked about today, the one-stop appeal. Whilst these
people—I do not know if it is all, certainly many of them—will
have had their claim refused, they have not exhausted all the
rights of appeals that they had under the previous Conservative
Government's arrangements, they can still appeal again and again
on human rights grounds and it was as much a cost-benefit analysis
of what we do about those families, do we continue supporting
them at a cost on average of £15,000 a year, add to that
the cost of their continued process through the courts and successive
appeals that your Government allowed people to have, or do we
say from 2 October onwards those families arriving after that
have not got those rights, they are in a different position, we
want to introduce more legislation to simplify further the rights
of appeal of families. It makes sense and it is in the interests
of the British taxpayer to regularise the position of families
who have been here before that date and that is the main reason
we took that step. The other reason is one that I am often reminded
of by Members of Parliament, including most members of this Committee
at one point or another, which is the situation of families with
children who have been here for some time making a contribution,
settled in schools, many of whom came as a result of disruptions
in Kosova and elsewhere and the question also arises is it right,
in the light of the cost-benefit analysis, to try and send those
families back and give those children a further disruptive experience.
We took the view that in this particular targeted and focused
way, concentrating on a group of people for whom those criteria
exist, it was in everybody's interests to draw a line before we
go on to bring in new simplifications to the appeals process.
Miss Widdecombe forgot to mention the clearing out exercise that
took place before 1998 under her administration, which was not
announced and which only came to light when the huge rise in the
number of people given exceptional leave to remain on an administrative
basis had to be produced in the statistics and it was only at
that point, some time after all those administrative decisions
were taken, we found that what the Tory ministers had been doing
was quietly granting thousands and thousands of families the right
to stay but not telling anybody about it.
Q890 Miss Widdecombe: And, of course,
since we are in this sort of territory and it is unusual in a
Select Committee, doubtless the Minister will recall that one
of my first statements as Shadow Home Secretary was to say that
I thought that was a mistake and that there would be no further
amnesties and that has always been my policy. I am now asking
you to account for your amnesties and I am going to ask you this
very simple question: do you agree with that statement I made
when I said that every time you grant an amnesty to people who
have not got permission to stay here in the normal way you create
an incentive for people to play the system in the hope of a future
amnesty? Could you just tell me whether you agree with that statement
or not?
Beverley Hughes: I do not agree
with that statement in its entirety because I think it depends
on how you do it, it depends what you say and how rigidly you
enforce the conditions that you apply, but I think that quietly
granting thousands of people permission to stay is something that
clearly got round into those communities of people wanting to
come here and had a very insidious effect on the subsequent intake
of people from certain countries. I do not think that is the way
to do it. I do not know, Miss Widdecombe, whether you were a minister
in the Government or in the Home Office at the time those decisions
were being taken, but whatever you may then have said subsequently
and retrospectively as Shadow Minister—
Q891 Miss Widdecombe: The Committee
is asking you to qualify your decisions, Minister.
Beverley Hughes: I have justified
it.
Q892 Miss Widdecombe: I am asking
you if you agree—and if not why not—that every time
you create an amnesty, never mind which government does it, you
create an incentive to come here in the hope of a future amnesty
and that when you describe one as a one-off administrative convenience
and then a few years later you come along and do another and describe
it as a one-off administrative convenience nobody is going to
take that terribly seriously, are they?
Beverley Hughes: I have answered
that question, Chairman. I have said I think it depends exactly
what you do, what conditions you attach, how you do it and how
strictly you enforce them. I think the worst thing you could possibly
do is insidiously be seen to grant thousands of people permission
to stay without saying any of those things to Parliament or the
general public.
Q893 David Winnick: By the present
Leader of the Opposition.
Beverley Hughes: That is what
undermines confidence in the system, when the public cannot see
clearly what is being done and they feel they have been deluded
by the administration and see a system that is not working.
Chairman: We have all enjoyed that exchange
but I think we need to make some progress.
Q894 Mr Clappison: We do not want
to go back over the arguments of the 1990s because I think we
could find things that were said on all sides which have now been
contradicted quite thoroughly. Can you answer this question specifically
which this was part of Ann Widdecombe's original questions to
you. The option which you described the Home Secretary might be
looking at in the future, what message do you think that is giving
to people who are now illegally working in this country or are
thinking of coming to this country to work illegally? What message
do you think they will receive from what you have said about this
as a possibility for the future?
Beverley Hughes: Mr Clappison,
I did not say—in fact I said the opposite—that this
Home Secretary is saying that that is an option for the future.
I outlined the circumstances in which he was asked a question
and in a reflective mode, because that is the situation he was
in, he looked ten years ahead and said that a future government
would have to address this question, if we have ID cards, that
is the situation in which he was conjecturing.
Q895 Mr Clappison: Can you say how
he would interpret what you have just described?
Beverley Hughes: One thing I think
I can say for certain is that wherever David Blunkett is in ten
years' time, he will not be Home Secretary and we may well still
have a Labour Government, but it will be for a future government
and Home Secretary to decide what to do in the situation in which
we have all population ID cards and what then is done by the people
who by definition cannot register.
Q896 Mr Clappison: Can I take at
face value your own words on that? How do you think people who
are illegally working in this country or are thinking of coming
here to work illegally will interpret what the Home Secretary
said?
Beverley Hughes: He has not made
any position on that particular question. He knows he will not
be the one having to answer that question ten years down the road,
but somebody will. He is not posing that as his belief, he is
simply saying that will be a problem, it will be a situation that
the government of the day will have to consider and it will come
forward with its own policies on that. He was asked a specific
question about possible regularisation by the questioner. He did
not raise that himself, he was asked it.
Q897 Mr Singh: I have asylum seekers
in my constituency who are nationals of accession states to the
EU, I do not know how many there are in the country, but what
happens to their asylum applications for their position vis-a"-vis
this country and their immigration status when those countries
accede next May to the European Union?
Beverley Hughes: If their claims
are still in process at that point then their claims will fall.
We will have to work through those people and write and advise
them of their changed status.[4]
Q898 Janet Anderson: You have mentioned
a cost-benefit analysis. What is the impact of the amnesty going
to be on public spending?
Mr Sutton: We have calculated
that for every thousand of the population affected by the exercise
that would move from benefits as a result of this change there
will be a saving of £15 million to the taxpayer as a whole.
Q899 Janet Anderson: So a considerable
saving to the public purse.
Mr Sutton: That is a considerable
saving. The exact translation of that will depend on the process
that we now have under way to look at how best these individuals
can be aided from the benefits system into employment.
3 See Ev 18. Back
4
See Ev 18. Back
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