Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 419)
THURSDAY 5 JUNE 2003
MS MARGARET
LALLY, MS
ALISON STANLEY,
MS HILARY
LLOYD, MR
KEITH BEST
AND MR
COLIN YEO
Q400 David Winnick: If I could just
interrupt. I may have misunderstood what you have said but you
do say ". . . a department now notorious for its poor administrative
performance."
Mr Best: Yes.
Q401 David Winnick: Ministers carry
out, presumably, the policy, they do not carry out the administration,
so you are saying that the calibre of many of the civil servants
involved in decision making is rather poor.
Mr Best: Yes, indeed. I am saying
the calibre of decision making is poor and that is because insufficient
investment has been put into that. Some of us have been saying
for very many years now that you should front-load the system,
you should put most of your resources into making sure that the
initial decisions are correct—such as in the Canadian system,
where they end up with more or less the same sort of acceptance
rate as we do, the trouble is we put so many people through expensive
hurdles to get there rather than coming to the right decision
at the very beginning. Indeed, it was Ruud Lubbers himself, the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who said to a group
of us not so long ago that where you have a success rate on appeal
of anything between 22 and 24% there is something terribly wrong
with the initial system, and that must be right. It is better
to get the system right to start with. I think the Home Office
is now cautiously moving towards that in ways that we would welcome,
such as making sure that caseworkers become experts in particular
countries and deal with the cases from those countries. We would
like to see caseworkers following particular cases and actually
effectively taking charge of those cases for however long those
individuals remain in the United Kingdom. I think that would build
up a greater sense of personal fulfilment amongst the civil servants
dealing with those things, apart from also giving a greater service
to those who I think have a right to expect that they will be
treated with efficiency. But if you seek to ask me about it later,
Mr Winnick, I have individual testimonies from caseworkers working
on the Harmondsworth pilot project which is in absolute chaos.
People are being expected to be interviewed when they have not
eaten for several hours; they do not know who the people are in
front of them and the whole thing is a complete and utter mess,
yet this is meant to be a pilot with a view to rolling it out
on a wider scale.
Q402 David Winnick: You have made
your views clear to the Home Office have you?
Mr Best: Yes, indeed.
Q403 David Winnick: You have said
on behalf of the Immigration Advisory Service, Mr Best, that you
feel there should be an amnesty for those who have been caught
in the backlog for more than three years.
Mr Best: We are still getting
cases where people have applied for asylum and three to five years
later they have still not had an initial decision. These are clearly
people in the backlog.
Q404 David Winnick: Can they work
in the meantime?
Mr Best: If they come into the
category before the Home Secretary prevented working, then, yes,
they will be able to work; but if they are post that date, then
of course they cannot work.
Q405 Chairman: Remind us what the
date was.
Ms Lally: It was the end of July.
It was 27 July.
Mr Best: That is right, yes, last
year.
Q406 Chairman: So they could all
work.
Mr Best: Yes, that is right. But
the point is, of course, the longer people stay in this country,
if ultimately they are going to be expected to go, you are building
up all kinds of links with this country. This is acknowledged
by the Home Secretary and everybody, I think, that the longer
people are allowed to remain in the country when ultimately they
are going to be told they have got to go, the more unfair it becomes
on those people and, indeed, all sorts of Article 8 implications
start arising about family life and such like. But we are saying
this is in a wider context of trying to bring greater clarity
to how many overstayers, for example, we have got in this country.
You know we have given evidence to you about counting people out
when they leave the country as well as counting them in, so you
know the identity of those who have overstayed. But if you are
going to do that sort of thing, there has to be a clean sheet.
The only way you have a clean sheet, it seems to me—and
you can dress it up in different terminology, you do not have
to call it an amnesty ... Indeed, you know, 30,000 were wiped
off the backlog by what some people were calling an amnesty, and
I think 10,000 got indefinite leave to remain and 20,000 got exceptional
leave to remain on a fairly cursory examination of their claims.
Q407 David Winnick: How many are
we now talking about?
Mr Best: I think it is now about
30,000 in the backlog.
Q408 David Winnick: And you are saying
that that number should be simply allowed to stay here—whatever
word you use, amnesty or otherwise.
Mr Best: I think that the Government
should put those people through the same process they did when
the backlog was up to 100,000, give a quick examination of those
claims and decide whether people are going to be allowed to remain
indefinitely or to be given humanitarian protection. Again, I
come back to the point which I have also put into our evidence,
that it seems strange and I think unwelcome that in this country
we have a fast-track process for identifying those whose claims
are unfounded. We do not have a fast track to identify those who
are likely to be able to remain whereas the Canadians do. It seems
to me that you can be more relaxed in the time you take to determine
somebody's refugee status if you know right from the very beginning
that they cannot be removed for a whole variety reasons, Article
3 or whatever, and it is far better to put those people out of
their misery immediately and say, "Right, you have a status
in this country, you can now go and work. It may take us a little
longer to determine actually whether you are going to be given
full refugee status or not, but in the meantime do not worry about
whether you are suddenly going to be removed from this country
or not because we know we cannot remove you in any event."
I think that would be a much more honest approach.
Chairman: Could you speak a little more
slowly, Mr Best, because the shorthand writer has to keep up with
you.
Q409 David Winnick: May I ask if
the Refugee Council—I saw you nodding your head, Ms Lally—agrees
with that, regardless of the change in circumstances. Because
some of the people presumably have come from countries where circumstances
have changed. Kosovo and now Iraq have been liberated from tyranny.
Would you nevertheless go along with what Mr Best has said?
Ms Lally: Yes, our experience—
Q410 David Winnick: I would be surprised
if you said no.
Ms Lally: Yes, I am sure. I was
going to say that our experience of working with refugees is that
most of them want to go home when it is safe for them to do that.
People do not choose to live away from their home and their family
and friends unless they are forced to. If it is safe for people
to go back—and it varies enormously when it is safe for
people to go back—most of them do want to be able to go
back. I would certainly agree with Keith that it would be good
if in the interim people were given the right to stay in this
country, because what you have at the moment is a large number
of people who are left in limbo. It is an ageing group of people.
Because there has been quite a lot of effort to try to make sure
that applications are going through faster and quite a lot of
focus on new applicants, of course the people left at the end
are just left at the end for longer and longer. Some of them have
now been there for quite a long time and it does mean they build
up links with this country. Also—and I would have thought
this was a concern to this Committee—increasingly people
get lost in the system but also it reduces the credibility of
the system if people are left with the perception that it will
take for ever and ever and ever and by the time they have sorted
it out they will be somewhere else. I think that is what reduces
the credibility of the system. I would certainly endorse what
Keith has said in terms of the Canadian model where the proportion
with status is no higher than ours but there are far fewer appeals.
They do not seem to spend as much resource as we do, but they
manage to get things through in a more credible way and they get
it right the first time.
Q411 David Winnick: In a nutshell,
you are really saying that these people should benefit—the
30,000, I think you said—-
Mr Best: I said it was round about
that figure.
Q412 David Winnick: Yes—should
benefit because of the inability of the Home Office to deal with
their cases within a reasonable period of time. This is really
what it will amount to.
Ms Lally: I think we need to think
about just where they are at the moment and what they are doing.
Many of them have settled in this country. They will have got
families, up until recently they would have been able to work,
they would have got themselves employment. They may not be particularly
distinguishable from the indigenous population. It is hard now
to see what are the real gains about going back to people being
here for three to five years and putting them through a process
where it now becomes actually quite difficult to assess the validity
of their claim, bearing in mind, as I said, that for refugees
who are able to go home many of them do that. I think that is
one of the pieces of information which we do not always get: the
people who voluntarily return when the situation in their country
changes.
Q413 Mr Cameron: A question, perhaps,
for Keith Best first of all: why do you think the proportion of
asylum seekers that the UK receives in terms of applications—our
proportion of the European total—has gone up so much. In
1992 it was something like 5%. Last year it was something like
25 to 28% of the total claims coming to Europe came to the UK.
Why do you think that is the case?
Mr Best: I think there are many
answers to that, none of which are necessarily the main determinant.
One is that I think you have to look at what is happening in other
countries as well, but I think the other reason is that you look
at the profile of where those people are coming from, and I go
back to my original point about the links with Britain. Until
the visa regime was imposed upon them, we had quite a large number
of people coming from Zimbabwe. Traditionally, over not just the
last months but the years, we have had people from Sri Lanka,
from Iraq, from Afghanistan coming to this country, all countries
with historic links with this country, all countries where there
are existing communities from those countries in this country,
far more so than in other European countries, and I think that
is one of the reasons.
Q414 Mr Cameron: We do not have any
particular links with Kosovo or Albania.
Mr Best: No, but, remember, we
brought people in on the humanitarian evacuation programme from
those countries. As far as Eastern Europe is concerned, again
there is no indication, I think, that we are bearing a higher
proportion of people from those Eastern European countries than
other countries, but of course one of the reasons I think we have
seen a diminution in the number of applicants from the 10 accession
States, for example—although of course one cannot prove
this one way or the other, and the Government no doubt would say
that is as a result of the imposition of non-suspensive appeals—is
a recognition from these people that in less than 12 months they
will be able to exercise treaty rights and be able to walk into
this country without let or hindrance.
Q415 Mr Cameron: That does not really
answer the question. In 1992, 5%. For the people coming in 1992,
presumably there were as many countries that had links with the
UK then as now. Margaret Lally, can you add anything on the rise
in our proportion?
Ms Lally: I think I would generally
endorse some of the things that Keith said, but also I would come
back to what we were saying earlier and I think there have been
a number of changes in the European systems over the last couple
of years.
Q416 Mr Cameron: They have become
less attractive, do you mean?
Ms Lally: I do no think I would
say less attractive; I think in some ways they have become less
fair and less sensible in how they deal with claims and in some
ways they have shifted—
Q417 Mr Cameron: If it is less fair,
it is less attractive to applicants, is it not?
Ms Lally: Yes, but I would not
use that term.
Q418 Mr Cameron: Just to be clear,
you would say there have been some changes in other European countries
that have made it more fair, more attractive for someone to come
to settle here.
Ms Lally: I think it is a complex
situation and I think I would go back, as people have been earlier
on, to look at some of the research which the Home Office and
other organisations have done about why people come here. There
is not one particular factor. I think the things to which Keith
referred are quite major factors, but I also think we do need
to look at what some of the other countries have done which has
reduced the number of people claiming asylum but probably not
reduced the number of illegal immigrants. Sometimes—particularly
if you look at France and Germany—whilst their numbers of
asylum claims have gone down, I think they are experiencing increases
in the number of people who are there illegally who feel that
they cannot claim asylum.
Q419 Mr Cameron: The figures are:
the UK last year took 109,000, compared with 71,000 for Germany
and 50,000 for France. Do you think that Germany and France effectively
are not taking their fair share of asylum seekers?
Ms Lally: I think, as we were
saying earlier, there needs to be greater responsibility sharing
across Europe. There needs to be a harmonisation of processes,
so that people who do not have compelling reasons to go to one
country rather than another because of family and community links
are assured of having fair and equable treatment wherever they
go to.
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