Examination of Witnesses (Questions 508
- 519)
TUESDAY 17 JUNE 2003
THE RT
HON OLIVER
LETWIN MP
Q508 David Winnick: Mr Letwin, could
I first of all thank you for coming along. I should explain, although
I do not think any explanation is really necessary, that since
Mr Mullin, the former Chairman of the Committee, has gone on to
higher or lower things, whichever explanation one wishes to use—
Mr Letwin: Lower!
David Winnick:—I am temporarily—I
emphasise, temporarily—doing the honours today. It is very
good of you go to come along to explain your policy, if you were
in Government, to deal with asylum seekers. I was wondering whether
it was your wish to make a short statement or answer the questions
straight away. Obviously your views will be known. As you will
obviously know, your memo outlining the policy has been duly circulated
and, moreover, as you will have seen presumably, the responses
from various organisations. I am going first of all to call on
someone you probably know, David Cameron, to ask the first two
questions.
Q509 Mr Cameron: Thank you, Mr Winnick.
I would like to start with the fundamental point. A number of
bodies were sent your proposals. The Refugee Council say they
are just impractical, problematic, unworkable and the Law Society
said, "We do not think the proposals . . . represent a practical
way forward for a civilised country which wishes to treat its
human rights obligations seriously." Is there not a fundamental
objection of principle against a quota system?
Mr Letwin: I think one needs to
distinguish different strains of complaint and objection about
the general idea. There is the question of whether the idea is
in principle workable or unworkable. There is the question of
whether, regardless of its workability, it is in principle desirable
or undesirable. It seems to me important to distinguish between
those two sets of questions. I think both the Home Secretary and
I have been wrestling with the same sets of issues, with some
of the same thoughts in our minds. I think both those questions
have yet finally to be resolved and they are both very serious
ones, but they are very different from one another. Let me address
first the question of whether it is desirable and then no doubt
a very large part of this discussion today will be about the question
in general and in detail of its workability or otherwise. I do
not think the suggestions I have put forward are desirable in
an ideal world. I think in an ideal world none of us would be
having any of these discussions. In an ideal world the number
of people who would be seeking refuge from persecution would be
tiny—indeed, in an ideal world, nil, but even in a moderately
reasonable world, very tiny. It would be well within our capacities
to absorb them and our immigration control system of the ordinary
kind could persist happily alongside the simple admission of those
who were genuinely refugees seeking refuge from persecution. Indeed,
I think for a period in the world's history we probably were close
to that, so far as its effect on this country at any rate was
concerned. I have tried to put forward a solution to a problem
which I take it everybody on all sides of the political spectrum
who is politically involved recognises and which the vast bulk
of our fellow countrymen recognise, which is that at the moment
the system is coming under strains and difficulties which mean
that it is not being used purely for the purposes for which it
was invented. Mine is an attempt, amongst many, to find a way
through which restores some part of the original idea in a form
that is humane and rational but avoids the system being abused
in the way that it has come to be abused. If the attack therefore
is of the form, "This is not the best possible arrangement.
In a civilised society it would not look like this," I suppose
my answer is that, unfortunately, the best possible arrangement
is not available to us. We have to ask for some arrangement that
is a little better than the present arrangements. Then we come
to the question of workability. I do not know whether the system
is workable. I have yet to come to a final view about that myself.
It is clear there is a huge raging debate about workability and
I hope we will discuss the details.
Q510 Mr Cameron: We will.
Mr Letwin: That seems to me a
question of detail, not principle.
Q511 Mr Cameron: Before we get to
workability, what about the quite fundamental question that if
you have a quota, once you fill it, what do you do with your one
extra, incredibly deserving case who turns up at Dover or overstays
on a tourist visa, who is clearly facing a hideous death if they
go back to their country of origin? Under the quota system, you
have to remove them presumably from this country somewhere else.
Is that right?
Mr Letwin: I do not think there
is any question but that we have to retain an arrangement under
which, when someone is, or even arguably is, under threat of dreadful
persecution, we have to be able to provide immediately for that
person a safe place in which the question of whether that threat
is real can be assessed.
Q512 David Winnick: And that would
be above the quota, once the quota is fixed.
Mr Letwin: Even if the quota were
utterly filled in a year, it seems to me we have a clear obligation
to make sure that someone who applies for asylum here is in a
safe place rather than being returned—this is, after all,
a fundamental proposition of the 1951 Convention—immediately
to the place from which they are fleeing. My proposals allow for
that because all such people would be removed for offshore processing
to a safe place, a safe and dignified place. I think that is crucial.
Whether they then entered a subsequent year's quota because their
claim was found to be well-founded, is of course a matter of whether
their claim was found to be well-founded. If over time we discovered
that the quota was insufficient to deal with all those who were
judged to be genuine refugees, then we would need to adjust the
quota. My system is not intended to limit the number of people
who come here by one means or another and who are planning to
be genuine refugees entering the country in the long run; it is
intended to show, on the contrary, first, that people cannot use
the system as a way round the normal immigration controls, and,
second, to the extent that we have spare room, so to speak, beyond
those who are in that condition and who are found to be genuine
refugees, then we use that to admit those who have the most needy
and well-founded cases in the world from refugee camps.
Q513 Mr Cameron: Let us say the annual
quota is filled rather quickly, that extra person turns up and
is then taken to a processing centre, he could be stuck there
for a very long time conceivably.
Mr Letwin: It depends how long
it takes to process their claim. If their claim is processed within
the year, then I suppose one could guarantee that they would always
be admitted in at least the following year's quotas, so the longest
time one would envisage is a year, unless a claim took more than
a year to process. I hope it would not.
Q514 Mr Cameron: If the suggested
quota is set out, is there a danger that you are going to get
politicians competing with each other to say, "I am going
to set an even lower quota than you." Suddenly we go from
a situation at the moment, where the number of asylum seekers
is determined by forces largely outside our control, into one
where the number of asylum seekers actually acceptable is determined
in advance. Does that concern you?
Mr Letwin: I do not think—though
I accept entirely this is an issue which needs to be thought through—that
the dynamic you are describing is likely to occur and for these
reasons: if the promise, so to speak, the guarantee, built into
the quota system is that anyone who manages to find their way
here, who is subsequently transferred to offshore processing and
is found to have a well-founded claim, will eventually enter this
country in some year's quota, the worst case, so to speak, is
that the entire quota is filled up with such people, and then
clearly the quota would need to be adjusted to the level to accommodate
that—in which case one would effectively be reduced to a
system of offshore processing, if that is the way the numbers
worked, and then it would revert to being effectively a demand-led
system.
Q515 Mr Cameron: With rationing?
Mr Letwin: But with rationing
and, above all, with offshore processing. Hence, with less attraction
for the economic migrant to use it as a system round the immigration
controls. In a world in which I hope one might find oneself where
the quota exceeded the number that needed to be admitted for those
reasons (that is, having been processed and found to have a well-founded
claim offshore), then I doubt that there would be much competition
to reduce the numbers because I do not think the numbers would
be enormously large in the first place and I cannot imagine that
people in Britain would be exerting a huge amount of democratic
pressure to have them reduced. I do not know what members of the
Committee feel. I do not personally feel that there is a large
well-spring of opinion in this country which objects to having
10,000 or 20,000, or even, while we are at it, 30,000 people coming
in an orderly fashion who are genuine refugees. I think the objections
in this country at the moment are to the idea that the system
is being used for other purposes. If people felt—and it
is indeed one of my aims that people should feel—that the
system is a fair-minded attempt to look after people who are in
dire circumstances, then I think most of our fellow countrymen
would willingly accept the numerical result.
Q516 Mr Cameron: In terms of setting
your hoped-for quota, which is a quota of genuine refugees, not
people who have already got here and then have to be processed,
what sort of criteria would you use? Would you do it by country,
by conflict? Would you have to change it if suddenly there was
a war in Uganda or wherever? How would you go about setting the
criteria?
Mr Letwin: There are three answers
to that. One is that I do not know, and that is one of the things
that we are currently investigating. Indeed, I think the result
of this Committee would very likely influence that. Secondly,
I have a predisposition in favour of a dynamic rather than a static
set of criteria. I do not imagine that any of us, however wise,
could sit here today and guess what would be the appropriate criteria
10 years hence. Third—and this is purely a first shot—my
instinct is that there are three sorts of things that would have
to be taken into account. One is the extent of the need. There
are some people in some parts of the world at any given moment
who are subject to particularly vile forms of persecution. That
ought to be a consideration. Second, there is the extent of the
moral obligation of this country. It seems to be one of the bizarre
features of our present scene that there are parts of the world
for which we are much more responsible and parts of the world
for which we are much less responsible because of our historical
connections with them. It seems to me right that, given the choice,
we should prefer to look after those who are persecuted in countries
where we bear some of the responsibility. Third, there is the
question of duration, longevity. There are some people in the
Kenyan camps at the moment who have been there for 10 years. It
seems to me there is more of a humanitarian argument for the world
trying to do something about those people than in the case of
people who have been persecuted but have only been so for a few
months and where one might hope that within a few more months
things went right. How you take those three ideas and, perhaps,
some more and turn them into a set of rigorous, transparent, justiciable
criteria is of course a very big issue, and, as I say, I do not
know the answer to that yet and it is something we will need to
work on very carefully.
Q517 Mr Cameron: Do you think the
quota will be restricted to those who qualify as refugees under
the 1951 Convention or will it also include people who are fleeing
civil war or natural disaster?
Mr Letwin: This is a very big
issue. It is one of the issues we have most been considering in
the past couple of months—which I have certainly by no means
got to the end of considering—and one which I suspect the
Home Secretary may have equal difficulty with—indeed, previous
occupants of the Home Office have had difficulty with it. This
is the question of those for whom humanitarian protection—
Q518 Mr Cameron: ELR.
Mr Letwin: Exactly, ELR or whatever—temporary
rights of abode, in effect, are currently provided. I do not see
the system that I am proposing as appropriate for dealing with
those circumstances. Those circumstances are not covered, as you
say, by the 1951 Convention. Where there is, for example, a civil
war in a particular country, one hopes that it is a temporary
phenomenon. The foreign policy that the present Prime Minister
and Government have been following has been specifically designed
to try to intervene and to minimise such occurrences, and, whether
the details of his policy have been right or wrong, the general
proposition that the civilised world should spend a certain amount
of effort to try to minimise such occurrences seems to me generally
accepted and right. Within that there will continue to be such
events, no doubt. One hopes that they will be temporary. One hopes
that the actions of the civilised world to restore stability where
it has come unstuck will be relatively rapid and effective. Therefore,
it seems to me, in the case of those who are fleeing not persecution
but, shall we say, civil war, we need a system which responds
to the temporariness of the events that relate to it. At the moment
it happens, of course, that in very, very many cases the exceptional
leave to remain turns into an indefinite leave to remain—in
part because of Article 8 of ECHR, the family rights, in part
because of Article 3 of ECHR in the way it has been interpreted
since the Chahal and Soering cases—and that
is another set of problems which seems to me importantly different
from the problems about refugees in the 191951 Convention meaning
of the term. So mine is strictly a proposal about refugees and
distinguishing between them and economic migrants. There is this
third class, and it is a very complicated question. I do not think
either the Home Secretary or I have yet got to the bottom of that.
Q519 Mr Cameron: The Immigration
Advisory Service made the point when they came to see us that,
if Britain followed your quota, you are effectively saying you
can no longer apply for asylum in country and have it carried
out in country, what message does that send to those countries
like, say, Pakistan, who take a great mass of people fleeing torture
and persecution and claiming asylum? They might say, "We
would like to follow that route and give up some of our international
obligations as well." What is your response to that?
Mr Letwin: That is a very difficult
question. My response is that if we were to give the answer that
I suspect everybody on the Committee shares with me in feeling
that it would be nice to give: "Let us not worry about all
of this stuff, let us be generous hearted, let us open the doors,
let us recognise that we have to play a full role and let us not
worry if there are some problems at the edges"—if we
were to give such an answer, which actually some years ago, consciously
or unconsciously, as a state we set out to give—we would
have to accept that the corollary, because we have seen it before
our eyes, is that it would make it virtually impossible to operate
a controlled system of immigration. I think the corollary, which
people who advocate an open door system on the very noble grounds
which you describe must be prepared to accept, is an argument
against the entirety of immigration control. It cannot be right
that we should pretend to operate a system of immigration control,
then vitiate it, and then spend a large amount of time trying
to cure the vitiation with sticking plasters which do not work
and which are generating serious disenchantment, serious problems
for race and community relations in this country and a whole number
of other things we really cannot tolerate. We either have to say
"an end to immigration control" or we have to have a
system which works, even if it does not accord to some instincts
which I recognise as noble.
David Winnick: I think someone you know
is going to ask one or two questions.
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