Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520
- 539)
TUESDAY 17 JUNE 2003
THE RT
HON OLIVER
LETWIN MP
Q520 Miss Widdecombe: Thank you,
Mr Winnick. Successive Governments have identified the problem
not as the use of our system but as the widespread abuse of our
system, and therefore the formula that everybody has sought is
one which enables us to deter abuse while at the same time discharging
our obligations under the 1951 Convention. It seems to me that
your proposal of automatically sending people offshore for processing,
and they do not come back at all if they do not satisfy the criteria,
is in itself a very considerable deterrent. Why, therefore, not
have your offshore processing centres which act as a deterrent,
which weed out the abusive application, but not exercise a quota
in respect of those who are genuine? Because I have yet to hear
anybody say that our problem is with the genuine refugee. It is
with the abusive claimant, is it not?
Mr Letwin: The problem about coming
to a committee of this sort is that it prompts you, the night
before, to think. I did have a dreadful thought last night that
that line of inquiry might come and that I was not completely
clear why I objected to the very suggestion you make, and I think
it needs more thought. Is the quota really adding very much to
the offshore processing? My intention in suggesting the quota
was to allow for more generosity of spirit than the offshore processing,
in my view, is likely to generate. Whether that is right in an
empirical sense, whether it is proved to be right empirically
in terms of the numbers and whether in the light of the numbers
it is really necessary are very good questions. Let me put it
this way: I believe—and I know especially in this country,
where you have investigated these things in very considerable
detail, that you would be as aware as I am that I cannot currently
prove this—that it will turn out that, if there is a system
of offshore processing, the number of people who seek asylum in
this country will drop not just slightly but very dramatically,
more dramatically, I suspect, than the official figures currently
lead us to believe, because I think what is happening in the present
system—I cannot prove this, I may be wrong about it—is
that all those at all levels of decision-making and adjudication
who are responsible are tentative, for understandable reasons,
about making a decision adverse to an individual unfairly. They
are giving, I think, the benefit of the doubt. I understand entirely
why they are doing so: I suspect I would do so myself if I were
in their position. I do not criticise them for it but I suspect
it is what they are doing. If the number of applications dropped
very dramatically because people who were not actually refugees
felt that there was no advantage to being processed offshore,
they might drop so far that we played an embarrassingly small
part in humanitarian effort. That was the idea behind my quota,
to say, even if, for example, only 2,000 or 3,000 people came
to Britain, applying and going to offshore centres and being found
to have well-founded cases, we as a country have an obligation
probably to look after more than 2,000 or 3,000 genuine refugees
a year.
Q521 Miss Widdecombe: So you would
take other people's.
Mr Letwin: So I would take, so
to speak, the quota from, shall we say, the camps in Kenya, where
there clearly are genuine refugees who cannot get here in the
first place. That is the logic. This is a numbers game. If there
were actually—as, I think, when you circulated my paper,
one of the commentaries suggested—20,000 people a year coming
to this country who were found in offshore processing to have
well-founded claims for being refugees, having a quota on top
of 20,000 does not seem to serve very much purpose. I do not think
I can really do justice to your question, except to say I recognise
it as a question. I think my instinct is still to start with the
quota and see how the numbers cash out.
Q522 David Winnick: I suppose, Mr
Letwin, you would be, as a Conservative, Shadow Home Secretary,
Opposition Home Secretary, under a great deal of pressure, would
you, in the country from people who write to you, including of
course Conservatives who feel that a Conservative Government should
be able to be very tough on asylum seekers?
Mr Letwin: I do get a certain
number of letters. As you might imagine, I get letters on a large
range of subjects. Of course, beyond the letters, I am conscious
that there are some of our newspapers in particular that spend
a lot of time discussing this and I am conscious also that repeated
opinion poll surveys show a desire on the part of the general
public that somebody should do something about the situation.
I think it is a point that the Home Secretary has also seized
on.
Q523 David Winnick: Did that prompt
you, therefore, to put forward your policy which we are discussing
now?
Mr Letwin: It is certainly one
of the considerations. You would not believe me—and you
would be right not to believe me—if I were to tell you that
as a democratic politician I have no interest at all in the views
of the electorate: I clearly do. But I do not think this is just
a case of either the Home Secretary or myself trying to answer
to a very widespread feeling; I think it is also something that
goes deeper into the fabric of our democratic politics. I think
this is a point on which I very much agree with the Home Secretary:
if the mainstream political parties, for whatever good reason,
are seen to be so unresponsive to public opinion on a matter like
this that they are regarded as entirely out of touch, that is
not the only thing, by any means, but one of the things that plays
into the hands of extremists. I believe that it is one of the
responsibilities of the mainstream parties to find humane and
civilised and sensible ways of answering to public concern, particularly
when there are other people who may seek to answer that public
concern with very much less humane, civilised and sensible measures.
I think we stand now at a time when that is particularly true.
One of the purposes behind my proposals, one of the criteria that
would need to be used in judging eventually, if they were to come
into action, whether they had succeeded, is that after they had
been implemented I hope this issue would disappear from the tabloid
press. I hope that people who currently lay at the door of an
ill-defined group of asylum seekers, often confused with immigrants
as a whole, a series of ills which actually do not emanate from
them would desist, and I hope that the degree of disenchantment
with the mainstream parties which currently exists would diminish.
I do not say it is the only thing that would do that, but I think
it could play a role.
Q524 David Winnick: Recognising obviously
that there is abuse—there is no doubt about that: people
who are not genuine asylum seekers, economic migrants who want
a better life and the rest of it—do you feel that the demonising
of asylum seekers has put so much pressure on both yourself and
the Home Secretary that it is a very difficult subject to come
to grips with?
Mr Letwin: Yes, I do. I have incurred
some odium in some quarters as a result of saying what I repeat
now and believe, which is that those who seek to come here who
are actually economic migrants and who seek to use whatever means
to find their way round the rules are not demons. I do not say
that there may not be some who are of evil intent, a few terrorists
or whatever, but the enormous bulk of those who come to this country,
even those who are not in any sense refugees and, indeed, who
are not fleeing any kind of war or other disturbance but who simply,
like relations of my own in the past, want to better themselves,
are people who are doing, as I have put it before, exactly what
I would do in their circumstances. I think one of the most terrible
things about this whole discussion is that it has often turned
into an attack on those people. This is absurd. They are not to
be blamed. But we need a system, alas, if we live in a small and
crowded country and we believe that there has to be immigration
control, which fairly controls immigration. The problem we have
all been facing these past few years is that, I think, until quite
recently—actually this discussion and many others around
it in the last couple of years have shown an improvement—every
time somebody tried to address this quite serious problem, somebody
else was willing to jump up and down and either trade off what
they were saying to demonise a group of people or demonise the
people who were trying to discuss the problem. And both are wrong.
I do welcome the fact that, although the Home Secretary and I
have had differences and debates and no doubt will continue to
do so, actually the general direction of our thinking on this
has been similar and the manner in which it has been debated in
the past couple of years has on the whole been rational and courteous
and I think that is a huge advance.
Q525 Mr Singh: Do you share with
me my concern that there are dangers in what you propose? One
is that the offshore processing centres could become huge sprawling
refugee camps. The second is that what might happen is that people
who seek asylum now, who get here through all kinds of routes,
would not seek asylum, they would just disappear as illegal immigrants.
What do you say to those two possible dangers?
Mr Letwin: Those are both issues
which I have thought about quite a lot and which we are still
thinking about but let me give you my initial response. They are
both clearly very serious questions. First, on the processing
centres, I should make plain that both on legal grounds, because
of principally the ECHR, it seems to me clear that these would
need to be open centres. People would be going to them but they
would be going to them on the basis that if they wished to leave
them they could leave them and their processing would then come
to an end: this is open but compulsory if you want to go on being
processed. As I envisage them—and I think it is important
to avoid the very problem you allude to that this should be the
case—they would contain a complete one-stop shop, right
the way through to the ability to pursue judicial review offshore.
It is very important that the people there should not by being
removed be removed from the scope of all the protections that
British justice affords. I do not think the judiciary would wear
anything else. I think we would find that it was inoperable on
legal grounds were that not the case. Having one-stop shops—and
one of your Committee members and I have at various times proposed
things of exactly this sort—should I believe dramatically
speed up the degree of processing. I think a great part of the
practical problem of processing applications at the moment is
due to a geographical dispersion of the various elements of it:
lawyers in one place, adjudicators in another, judges in a third
place and so on. Having everybody on site, in a place, I think
will speed things up. That will tend to diminish the likelihood
that people are there for a very long while. Third, it is absolutely
critical—I am very conscious that of all the attacks which
are likely to be levelled at my proposals, this is probably the
most lurid and sexy that could be used—that these do not
descend into being a blot on Britain. They will have to be well-founded
places in which you or I would be happy to spend a period of time—and
when I say happy, I do not mean that we would like to leave our
families in Britain and go off to them but, if we found ourselves
in persecution and ended up in one of these places, it is imperative
that they should not be places that we would feel are disgusting,
horrible, dirty. That is not the aim. I know that there have been
real problems—real alleged problems—with the Australian
processing and I believe it is absolutely critical that that not
be replicated. The biggest difficulty, I suspect, in terms of
people being there a long time, would be if there were a large
number of people who, not withstanding the purpose of this, which
is to deter the false claim, did actually make a claim and were
adjudicated as not being refugees and then could not be returned
because of ECHR considerations or because of document considerations
(failure of documents or whatever). The Committee will have to
take its own view. My instinct is that that problem numerically
is likely to be small because I cannot see—and it comes
back to a point Miss Widdecombe was making a moment ago—why
someone who is not a genuine refugee, knowing that only if they
are found to be a genuine refugee will they get through offshore
processing, would go to the trouble, so to speak, of making a
claim if they knew they were going to be processed in a place
which was of no economic interest to them, even if it is a comfortable
and pleasant place to be. That is something which a genuine refugee
welcomes because it is a route out of hell. But for somebody who
is seeking economic migration, if they know it is one-stop processing
that works, that they are extremely likely therefore to be found
not to have a genuine claim, and that they are meanwhile not going
to be engaged in any economic activity—which they can once
they disappear into the woodwork in this country—I think
the numbers will be small, and therefore the number of non-returnables
would be small because the number who need to be returned anywhere
would be small because all of them, to speak of, would be admitted
to this country. That is the logic. Whether you think that logic
is likely to prove true in practice is of course a guess that
we all have to make one way or the other. Which brings me to your
second question about the people who simply enter the country,
do not seek asylum and disappear into the woodwork.
Q526 Mr Singh: Well, there would
be an incentive for them not to seek asylum.
Mr Letwin: There would be an incentive
for them, indeed, not to seek asylum. I think we can begin to
grasp, incidentally, the scale of that very problem, which is
real not imaginary, just in the last few months. At the end of
January the Home Office, or the Home Office and DWP between them,
changed the rules on benefits. This led, I believe, to the very
severe drop, the apparently welcome drop, in the number of people
claiming asylum in February as compared with January by almost
3,000. We are asked to believe that what happened was that those
people did not come to Britain in the first place. I do not believe
it. There may have been some, but I doubt it is very many. I think
what happened is exactly what you are describing, that a largish
number of people who found it previously convenient to claim asylum
because they received benefits, now found it inconvenient to claim
asylum because there was a chance that they would be removed if
they entered the official system. In the meanwhile, they are in
some way surviving, working in the black-market or being helped
by relatives or whatever. If they were not going to get benefits,
they decided they might as well not claim asylum. That explains,
I think, in great part, the drop. That indicates that there are
perhaps as many as 2,000 or 3,000 people a month who were, and
probably still are, entering the country, who on the current social
security arrangements and my system might continue to seek to
do so and not claim asylum. And I agree with you that that number
could even slightly rise, because the disincentive to claim asylum,
if you have an ill-founded claim, is greater under my system than
under the current system, even with social security and other
changes. Therefore, I agree with you that the problem you raise
is a serious one. My answer to it is this—again, the Committee
will have to take a view, and you will have investigated things
on which I am not nearly as expert as I ought to be—having
trailed around a number of ports and talked to a number of people
in the immigration service—and I am sure that when I say
this I am going to be accused of being unfair but nevertheless
I will say it because I think it is true—my instinct is
that a very large number of people in the IND, at all levels,
have grown so accustomed to the fact that the asylum system can
be used as a way round the immigration system that they are reluctant
to pursue with energy the question of closing our borders to all
except those who are permitted to enter. I think that is true
of the rest of the agencies of the state. The fact that many of
our ports remain entirely unprotected for large parts of the day
strikes me as a powerful testimony not just to the costs of border
protection but also to the fact that actually the agencies have
all said to themselves, consciously or unconsciously: "Is
it really worth the bother of trying to apprehend another 10 people
in another van when we know that the only real result is that
they will go through a system, get lost in the woodwork, and never
be removed in the end?" I believe—I may be wrong, but
it is certainly my hope—that by instituting a system that
makes a reality of the distinction between asylum and immigration
we can create or lay the foundations for creating a different
culture in which the immigration control system can then be operated
genuinely. We can genuinely protect the ports and airports, and
genuinely and immediately remove clandestines unless they claim
asylum, in which case they will be removed to the offshore processing.
I believe that that would lay the foundation for a rational national
debate about something which at the moment is hardly worth debating;
namely, at what level should we set immigration controls of various
kinds? Here there are very importantly conflicting and rational
arguments. If we wanted simply to benefit the economy, it seems
to me we would have a larger number of immigrants. If we recognise
the environmental and social constraints, we might want to have
a lower level of immigration. These are the things which could
then be rationally debated in an atmosphere which would permit
them to be debated because we would know that the debate was real.
At the moment it is unreal because actually we do not control
immigration. At the moment we have some controls which affect
some people and a large number of other people are not affected
by them. That is a situation which is fundamentally unsatisfactory.
Q527 Mr Watson: May I get a point
of clarification on quotas. I think I heard you say in answer
to Miss Widdecombe that you do not have a particularly valid argument
for your quota system. I want to press you a bit on that. Is that
your view, that you are not sure whether—
Mr Letwin: I am saying that the
aim of the whole system, the principal underlying aim, is to restore
order to the asylum arrangements. It is the deterrent and efficiency
of the offshore processing which principally achieves, in my arrangement,
I hope, that aim. The point of the quota is to persist in making
a proper humanitarian contribution, notwithstanding what I imagine,
perhaps wrongly, would be the enormously dramatic effects of actually
having an effective asylum system. I was saying that if my numerical
guess is wrong, then there is not much point in adding a quota.
If there are already 20,000 people coming in each year, because
they have been offshore processed and they have turned out to
be refugees, saying that there is a quota of 20,000 does not help
much, I accept. If, on the contrary, there are only 2,000 or 3,000
people a year coming in, once we have a system of offshore processing
of claims made in this country, then I think the quota would be
indispensable, because it would be wrong, in my view, for Britain
only to be admitting 3,000 genuine refugees a year.
Q528 Mr Watson: You have put some
thought into the kind of figures you are talking about.
Mr Letwin: Yes.
Q529 Mr Watson: So your quota could
be 40,000, for example. Would that be too much?
Mr Letwin: I do not believe that
there is, so to speak, a truth about life, about the numbers of
this quota. It is inevitably a judgment.
Q530 Mr Watson: It is your judgment
I am trying to get at.
Mr Letwin: The 20,000, though
inevitably somewhat arbitrary, seems to me a sensible sort of
number. You will have to take your own view; the Committee will
have to take its own view. I think it is sensible in the following
terms. Incidentally, I do not lay it down forever: these moods,
so to speak, these national moods, may change. I think it is the
sort of number that most people in this country will not be frightened
by. I attach great importance to that. I think it is very important
that people should not be frightened by immigration. It is important
for community relations and it is important to taking this item
off the political agenda, which it is one of my dearest wishes
to do. On the other hand, if we were to take 20,000 a year of
genuine refugees, and if each other well-heeled country were to
do the same pro-rata to its population, then a very large number
of people collectively each year would be accommodated—whether
exactly the right number in global terms is a matter for very
deep investigation, but it seems to me of the order of magnitude
to be right. So it seems to me small enough to answer to public
concern and large enough so that, in combination with other countries,
it might come near to doing the trick. I cannot therefore say
20,000 and not 19,900 or not 20,100, but I suspect that 200,000
would not answer to the first concern—people would be frightened
by it—and 2,000 would not answer to the second. I am trying
to choose a number between the two.
Q531 Mr Watson: Does your quota system
replace your existing policy to detain people on the UK mainland?
Mr Letwin: Yes, of course. I am
sorry, I thought that was already evident. I do apologise, I should
have made that clear in the paper. The idea of the system of offshore
processing and of the quota is that the entire current system
of asylum application disappears. The idea that anyone would be
here and have their application processed here as opposed to offshore
goes. Therefore no question of detention arises, except for the
24 hours or whatever it takes to get them into the offshore processing
centre.
Q532 Mr Watson: So within 24 hours
you will get them off the UK mainland. No secure detention centre
for any asylum seeker here.
Mr Letwin: Yes.
Q533 Mrs Dean: Would it be better
to encourage economic migrants to choose a lawful route of entry?
If so, do you propose to have a separate quota for economic migrants?
Mr Letwin: There is of course
currently—and I do not wish to teach grandmother to suck
eggs!—an elaborate system of economic migration to the UK:
multi-tiered with special provisions for those who have particular
skills, for those who are coming as holiday workers, for others
who are coming for various reasons and so on. My proposals do
not in any way seek to abolish or change that. Indeed, as I was
saying in answer to the previous question, part of the purpose
of my proposals is to clear away the question of asylum in order
to reduce the temperature and get to the point where we can have
a rational debate about whether the current system of economic
immigration is at the right level or not. In the outline of the
way it works, I do not have any particular concerns about it at
the moment, except to the extent that I think one or two of the
aspects of it, like the accelerated scheme, may be having rather
odd effects. But the general principle that people who wish to
come here to work, seek permission, via an entry clearance officer
in an embassy abroad under one of the categories which are provided
or through the in-country work permit team when it comes to renewal,
to work in this country, seems to me the kind of system we ought
to operate. I do not seek to use this system for that at all.
There is a system already. As I say, then we come to the question:
What should be the number in these various categories? and I start
with the current starting point? And there I am arguing that we
should enter into a national debate about whether it is too high
or too low, which seem to me very interesting and important issues
but at the moment hardly worth addressing, because actually there
is another group of people, a quite large other group of people,
who by one means or another are coming here, who are not coming
here under the ordinary immigration control system. That seems
to be the first problem.
Q534 Mrs Dean: You would accept that
those coming here as economic migrants can and do contribute to
the national economy.
Mr Letwin: Enormously.
Q535 Mrs Dean: If we take the view
that the asylum system should favour those who are most disadvantaged,
they may not be the people who would contribute most to the national
economy. Do you think, therefore, there should be an increase
in the number of people who can come here legitimately to work?
Mr Letwin: The asylum system I
see as a system for refugees, nothing to do with economic migration.
There is, as I mentioned earlier, the separate question of temporary
refuge for people who are not refugees under the 1951 Convention
but where there is a civil war or other disturbance going on and
it is unsafe for them to be where they are. Then there is a group
of people who are economic migrants, and they contribute in total
enormously to our economy. Indeed, as a lifelong free trader I
have always subscribed to the proposition that, economically speaking,
open borders are superior. It is because we are a small and crowded
island with environmental and social concerns as well as economic
ones that I believe, nevertheless, it is worth operating a system
of immigration control. My view is that there is a quite difficult
trade-off here between the economic advantage of having more people
come here as economic migrants and the environmental and social
constraints which argue for smaller numbers. About how that is
traded off, I do not yet have a view. I have very carefully avoided
entering that debate—and I think it is true that the Home
Secretary has to a considerable degree participated in the same
tacit agreement—because under current circumstances, where
there is so great a national concern about asylum, it is the very
worst set of circumstances in which to be discussing the question
of the levels of economic immigration. I would like to have that
discussion in the calm of the well-ordered system, where we know
that if we decide x is the number of highly skilled migrants,
for example, that were to enter in a particular year then x
will be the number that come, because the system is working and
there are not by-routes.
David Winnick: Mr Letwin, you will realise,
of course, that the position of UNHCR and the International Organisation
of Migration come very much into the picture arising from what
you have proposed and there have been some diverse comments. But
I am going to ask Miss Widdecombe to ask a number of questions
on the role of those organisations.
Q536 Miss Widdecombe: Mr Letwin,
may I press you a little on how those processing centres are going
to be organised and who is going to be responsible for what. I
think we can all imagine if they were here in this country, were
we British immigration officials we would know exactly how it
would be done. But, as I understand your proposals, UNHCR and
IOM are going to be crucial in actually running these offshore
centres. Are they going to be involved in the initial assessment?
Are they going to be involved in the appeal process? Are they
going to be applying particularly British criteria? How is it
going to work?
Mr Letwin: The first thing I should
say is that it is, indeed, the IOM and not the IMO. I do not envisage
the International Maritime Organisation being involved. I apologise
for the typographical mistake in my memorandum. It is, of course,
a possible arrangement that the offshore processing should be
done, as the onshore processing currently is, entirely by British
officials. I do not say that that is in any way impossible. Moreover,
some elements of the processing will clearly have to be done by
British . . . "officials" is the wrong word, but employees
of the British Crown, because the adjudicators and of course,
if there were also a capacity for judicial review in the courts',
so to speak, on-tour judges, would be British. So there are elements
of Britishness there, inevitably. Moreover, I suspect—I
have not thought through this in any detail yet, it is one of
the things I have asked Timothy Kirkhope's group to look at—it
would have to be the case that, as with the Australian system,
the person or even the top few people responsible for any of the
offshore processing centres would be British officials who were
answerable to British ministers to be accountable to Parliament.
So the question is: Who does the work with the individuals there?
Who is doing the business of decision-making? That is the fundamental
question. The proposition that I am putting forward, which is
certainly a proposition for debate and it may be that the Kirkhope
group will take a different view about it, is that once the criteria
have been established for a given year, which I take it is entirely
a British concern, the application of those criteria to individuals,
in the sense of choosing . . . Let us imagine, for example, there
were 5,000 people who were being processed offshore in a given
year and there were a quota of 20,000—so there were 15,000
for that year available to be brought to this country from somewhere
as part of the quota, not having applied in country but being
chosen on top—the way I envisage it is that we would work
with the UNHCR in some form that would involve regular discussion
to identify the place or places from which such people could best
be drawn under the criteria which we were discussing earlier set
by the British state.
Q537 Miss Widdecombe: Have you actually
talked to UNHCR on this?
Mr Letwin: No, I have not. I have
rather carefully not because I did not want to involve them in
discussions about it until I had a much clearer idea of what I
was exactly asking, but that is broadly the system that the Australians,
to whom I have talked, operate. They set out the criteria, they
discuss with the two organisations I have mentioned how they get
applied in practice, and it is with the help of those organisations
that they are then applied in practice. Part of the purpose of
my further discussions with the Australians will be to see how
those things operate. Of course at a later stage, it will then
be necessary to discuss it with UNHCR. We then turn to the separate
question, which is how the decision-making is done for the offshore
processing—which may have been your gist. I have an open
mind about that, whether the offshore processing centre should
be dealt with by British decision-makers or by decision-makers
from one of those two organisations. I have an instinct that it
would be better if we could subcontract that, because I have the
impression that the expertise in dealing with the question of
who is and who is not, under the 1951 Convention, a refugee that
lies in those organisation may be greater.
Q538 Miss Widdecombe: Your preference
is that those organisations rather than our officials should be
making the assessment.
Mr Letwin: Yes, on individual
cases. May I just add that one of my reasons for that is that
when it gets to the individual cases I would like the decision-making
to be as removed from domestic political pressure as possible.
Q539 Miss Widdecombe: These centres,
will they be secure?
Mr Letwin: No. I envisage that
they would be, as I mentioned in response to an earlier question,
open, and open in the proper sense, that people—we are now
on the offshore processing centres—who had made an application
in the UK for asylum and had hence been removed to an offshore
processing centre would be able to leave them at any moment. That
is one of the things we would need to negotiate with the country
that was the host, but, as soon as they left, they would lose
the right to have their claim further processed. So processing
would be available only in the centres.
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