Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500
- 507)
THURSDAY 5 JUNE 2003
MS MARGARET
LALLY, MS
ALISON STANLEY,
MS HILARY
LLOYD, MR
KEITH BEST
AND MR
COLIN YEO
Q500 Mr Clappison: Do you think there
would be a case for more training or getting together of adjudication
cases in a way that happens with judges in the courts?
Mr Best: Yes, I think there is
an attempt to do that. It becomes much more difficult to do it
when you have got 600 people. At the end of the day in order not
to allow the system to fall into disrepute because you are getting
situations which are on all fours being decided in different ways
by different adjudicators because there is insufficient judicial
oversight of that process and guidelines being issued which have
to be applied by adjudicators, the only way you do that is by
making sure there is that extra tier. We are deeply concerned
at the proposal to amalgamate the adjudicator level and the tribunal
level. I have to say in the absence of knowing the details, because
those details have not yet been released and we will have to see
whether there is going to be a way of identifying certain cases
which may have points of law in them which would have to go to
people who have formerly been vice presidents of the tribunal
and therefore are more legally qualified, I do not know, but in
concept we are deeply concerned about that.
Q501 Mr Clappison: Can I move on
to a different subject, the National Asylum Support System which
I know you have had things to say about that in the past. What
is the state of play of that at the moment?
Mr Best: I do not know if it has
been distributed—
Q502 Chairman: You have sent a separate
paper.
Mr Best: When I was told that
there might be a question on the National Asylum Support Service
I sent to you our submission that we put to the Home Office for
the internal review. It documents there some hard cases that are
indicative of a much wider malaise which we are coming across
every single day where people quite wrongly are having support
taken away from them because the process has not been fully taken
through to its determination, where as I mentioned already, the
allocation of accommodation causes confusion on things like that.
I do not want to pre-empt what the review might come up with but
it might well be that the review shows that to have that degree
of over-centralised control in one organisation which allocates
the number of the house to which somebody is being sent but on
the ground that house does not exist because it is already occupied
or somebody else is there, is not an efficient way of doing it.
Certainly I know from the housing providers their complaint is
that they are dealing with some very well meaning civil servants
but people who have never had any experience of operating within
the commercial sector and therefore do not understand the pressures
they are facing.
Q503 Chairman: So rather than sending
people to non-existent houses or rocks in the North Sea you think
there should be more decentralisation of NASS?
Mr Best: Yes, they have promised
this for a long time and they are starting to do it. It was always
an expression of hope over experience to think that at the time
when vouchers were in place that you could run a parallel support
system from one office in Croydon when the Benefits Agency has
got offices all around the country. There has been an unrealistic
expectation all along from Government about what NASS can do and
I think to a certain extent, although it is easy to blame officials
at NASS for the messes that are made, they are acting under enormous
pressures of expected delivery which, frankly, I believe is beyond
them in the way the system is presently constituted. That is a
major problem.
Q504 Mr Clappison: Can I ask you,
and anybody else who wishes to come in, if you think there is
a case for separating NASS from the IND and giving it agency status?
Are there any suggestions that you would make?
Mr Best: Certainly, and I have
made some of those suggestions in the paper that we put to the
review of NASS. We feel that it ought to be a non-departmental
government agency doing that work, which could bring in more commercial
expertise, people from other sectors who have knowledge of how
these things are done. Also in terms of efficiency I know Glasgow
City Council have managed to establish a help line with NASS,
which has proved enormously valuable, why has that not been done
with other providers of accommodation? Some of these things become
almost self-explanatory in a way. The only other thing I would
say is, and I think this exemplifies the point I made earlier,
that sometimes you get policies which seem to be in direct contravention
of other existing ones. The way Section 55 has been applied, and
we have yet to see the further guidelines that will be issued
by the Government in the light of the court case, drives a coach
and horses through the whole policy of dispersal. If you are denying
people support and accommodation because they have not claimed
asylum immediately you cannot disperse then because you are not
providing them with accommodation. What are these people going
to do? They are going to hang round London and the South East,
and what did that give rise to? Precisely the whole origins of
NASS and the dispersal programme in April 2000 in order to relieve
the pressures from London and the South East, and we are going
to go back to it. How can you possibly have two policies which
are alongside one another but both working against each other?
Ms Lally: First of all I would
like to support what Keith has said. We have also put in evidence
to the Independent Review for some time now two particular things
we have asked for, first of all that NASS is decentralised, and
we are very pleased to see they are establishing offices in the
regions, we are disappointed that is not going to be dealing with
some of the more operational things yet but I do think that is
a step in the right direction. The very exposure of NASS to real
people, real asylum seekers will start helping to engage with
the real issues which people facing. We have also argued that
it should be an independent agency, we have been arguing for that
for some time. It would help to recruit better people, particularly
people with good housing experience. One of the real difficulties
that NASS has faced is that it is trying to work at the support
end in an organisation that is dealing with enforcement and it
has not got within it the skills and wherewithal really to address
some of the key issues about engaging with external stakeholders
and developing social exclusion strategies because it is important
that asylum seekers are integrated from day one, not from when
they get status. Many of them will be in the country for a while.
There is real work which NASS can be doing with other organisations
to help to develop better facilities for them in the communities
they go. A lot of good examples were missed on that in the early
stages. We certainly want to argue for it being decentralised,
we would prefer it to be run by a separate agency but there does
need to be wider and joined-up thinking between NASS both with
other parts of IND and also other parts of Government. We have
seen a number of examples where that clearly does not work: the
whole business of getting people's National Insurance numbers
issued so they can claim benefit and get status; the whole way
in which people with special needs are dealt with, how they fall
with between the Department of Health and the local authority;
how young unaccompanied minors are dealt with, when there is an
age dispute they are dealt with by NASS or the local authority.
All of those are problems which do not seem to ever get sorted
out. They are easily addressed by joined-up thinking and administrative
solutions. I do want to highlight the situation of Section 55.
We have been very concerned by the large number of people still
in emergency accommodation, particularly in London and the South
East, who are still waiting for decisions. We have over 3,000
people in emergency accommodation, nearly 500 of those are in
a backlog waiting for their decision about whether or not they
can get NASS support benefits. We are now starting to see the
decisions coming through. We have been very concerned, whilst
we were told there was going to be more attention given to individual
cases we have seen information from NASS, and indeed officials
from NASS have told us, they are expecting to turn down 70% to
80% of those applications, which suggests they are not being dealt
with individually, they have already decided a quota. That is
going to be quite a large number of people who will be put on
the street and destitute. We were told, and I think a number of
other organisations and MPs were told, it was going to hit people
who had stayed in the country for more than a couple of weeks
before they put in claims. All of the letters we have seen from
the Home Office accept that people arrive on one day and put their
claim in next day. There has been particular problems with people
coming through the airports, if you come through Heathrow or Gatwick
and you want to claim asylum the notices are difficult to see,
particularly if you are coming through in a fairly harrowing and
disorganised way. Once you get through the barrier you cannot
go back and claim. You are then told you are in contrary and you
have to get yourself to Croydon the next day. You are then told
when you get to Croydon you did not apply immediately so you are
not entitled to benefit. We have seen a number of letters setting
that out. That is not what is intended by the legislation and
indeed what came out of the appeal. Over the next couple of months
we are going to see a lot of people left destitute. The other
thing that we should be concerning this Committee with is that
people who are taken out of the benefit system are then taken
out of a lot of other things, they cannot easily access health
care, they cannot even learn English. People are not going to
stop coming to this country because of that, you are creating
a stream of illegal immigrants that will just go underground.
I would have thought in terms of what we are trying to achieve
in terms of improving processes, making sure you know where people
are and being able to return them if need be actually losing sight
of people before they get into the country is, I think, seriously
going in the wrong direction. It also plays into the hands of
the media and some right-wing groups who talk about lots of illegal
immigrants and we do not know where they are. The way you know
where people are is by having them in the benefit system, they
have to turn up to collect their benefit. We have been very disappointed
and very concerned about that. We are also concerned about the
lack of support from what are called "hard cases", these
are people who have gone through all of the processes, their appeal
has been turned down and they cannot be returned to their own
country, indeed in some cases the Government have said specifically
they are not going to return them. They do not then get benefits
either and many of these people are destitute and over time we
will be creating an under class of people in this country who
will be forced to crime and desperate measures because they cannot
access benefits.
Ms Stanley: Can I just make two
very quick points about Section 55, the first is that there is
no proper appeal system so that these decisions that are being
made now, which are trickling through now, can only be challenged
by way of judicial review. It gets back to the same point I made
earlier about a waste of judicial time, there is a perfectly good
system with the asylum support adjudicators who deal with other
NASS decisions that are appealable and there is no reason at all
why they could not deal with Section 55 decisions as well. The
second point I want to make about Section 55, it really come backs
to joined-up thinking, the Legal Services Commission has a plan
which is to provide legal services to dispersed asylum seekers.
They have this plan on the basis that they know that numbers are
going to certain areas. Law firms and the voluntary sector are
given contracts to carry out a certain number of cases. If people
are falling outside the system and are not being dispersed they
are highly likely to drift back to London, because that is where
the major communities are, and that is where they are going to
be able to get support from friends and colleagues in their community,
and there are just not going to be enough contracted suppliers
in the London region to provide legal services for them. We have
already seen our members having problems applying for new matter
starts, which is effectively new cases, from the Legal Services
Commission and being refused on the basis that there is inadequate
supply in London. That is our experience in the field and it is
highly likely that will get worse when Section 55 starts to bite.
Mr Best: I endorse all of that.
Q505 Mr Prosser: Finally, briefly
to Ms Lally, as you know the right to work for asylum seekers
was removed last year, what are the concerns and consequences
of that?
Ms Lally: There are a number of
consequences, first of all it means that people who submit an
application to work after 27 July have not been able to get that.
That has not just hit new asylum seekers. We and other organisations
run training schemes for people, we work for a long time with
them to try and get them to a situation where they are able to
work. One of the saddest cases I know is of a doctor from Zimbabwe,
he spent years trying to get his qualifications transferred and
accepted so that he could work. He had not put in an application
to work because it was quite difficult to work and do his training
at the same time. He gets his qualifications sorted out and two
months ago the law changed and now he cannot do that. That is
just a nonsense. We have always argued that it is wrong that asylum
seekers are not able to work when they get here, it pushes them
into the benefit system, which means they are dependent on handouts,
which is bad for them and also creates tension within the country,
you are constantly reading about scroungers and people coming
in for benefit, but we do not allow them to work. We are opposed
to that. Whilst I appreciate that it is anticipated that the swift
turnaround in a positive decision means that most people should
get a decision within six months and therefore will not be any
worse off we have heard about the backlog and the fact that some
cases will go to appeal. Even being out of work for six months,
particularly for highly trained people, I speak as somebody who
used to work in the Health Service, if you are a doctor or a nurse
you very quickly lose those skills and you certainly lose confidence
and if they are older it is harder to get back into the work place.
The thing we found particularly frustrating, which I am pleased
to say there has been some slight movement on it, has been by
taking away the right to work it has meant that some of the funding
we were able to access before for training of asylum seekers,
particularly European funding, is now no longer available. It
has even had the perverse effect of some Learning & Skills
Councils saying they are no longer able to give us money to train
asylum seekers to speak English either because they were confused
by the change in regulations or because some of that money is
deemed to be European money (because of the matching arrangement),
which can only be used for people who are going to go into work.
I am pleased to say that the Government is now starting to have
a re-think on that and I hope it will change. It has caused enormous
difficulty for my organisations and other organisations trying
to provide training and it has also sent out the wrong messages
to asylum seekers and to the country at large that we do not want
asylum seekers to learn how to support themselves and we are putting
perverse barriers in their way of actually doing simple things
like learning English. It is quite crazy.
Mr Best: If there was persuasive
evidence to show that people were coming here so that they could
work and claim asylum then it might be valid to include that as
part of a deterrent programme. Although I would personally disagree
with it I can see there would be an argument for putting that
in as part of the deterrence. There is no persuasive evidence
to show that that is the case. What you do end up with is, as
Margaret Lally was saying, a large number of people, incomprehensibly
to the British people, who wish to work and maintain themselves
but who are not allowed by the Government to do so and therefore
fall as a burden on the taxpayer. One of the more bizarre things
that might be found by the British public—after all this
is a very arcane area, and it is very difficult for people to
have all of the knowledge to be able to make proper, valued judgments
on it, why should people not look after themselves if they have
the capacity to do so? That is an economic argument in the interests
of the country, before you even begin to address the question
of rehabilitation, of personal pride, of being able to fend for
your family, all of that motivation actually trying to get yourself
started again after the trauma of having to leave your country.
Put all that on one side from the straight point of view of what
is in the best economic interests of the country, let these people
work and support themselves.
Q506 Chairman: What do other countries
do?
Ms Lally: It varies considerably.
One of the sad things is in some ways we are now leading the race
in terms of trying to get European policy pushed down to a common
denominator. As part of the European Directive now it is agreed
that asylum seekers should be able to work after they have been
in the country for about a year. Many countries, particularly
Denmark and some of the Scandinavian countries, are much more
supportive about enabling asylum seekers to have training and
to access work at an earlier stage and work very closely with
businesses and trade unions so that is not seen as a threat to
the indigenous labour force but is managed in a way which does
not create those sort of tensions. The other thing I wanted to
mention was, we are not allowing people to work and not easily
allowing them to access training, what are they going to do? What
are we expecting these young men to do if they are not allowed
to train or work? That I think is another thing that then feeds
in to some of the issue of social tension, which is of concern
to us.
Q507 Chairman: Ladies and gentlemen,
I think that concludes today's session. You have been extremely
helpful, you have given us plenty to think about. Thank you very
much indeed for coming.
Mr Best: Thank you, Chairman,
and thank you to your colleagues as well.
|
